"Google+ Is Google Itself"

If you thought that Google+ is just a divide service you can effortlessly disregard if you don't want to use it, you were wrong. In an interview with Steven Levy, Bradley Horowitz - Google's VP of products - says that Google+ is really Google itself.

Until now, every single Google property acted like a split company. Due to the way we grew, through various acquisitions and the fierce independence of each separation within Google, each product sort of veered off in its own direction. That was dizzying. But Google+ is Google itself. We're extending it across all that we do — search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube — so that each of those services contributes to our accepting of who you are.

Redesigning all Google services to match the Google+ interface is not just about constancy, it's also a way to show that they're part of the same super-service, an surrounding layer that makes them work together.

Google+ made Android's camera app put together with Picasa Web Albums, Google Talk put together with YouTube and Google Docs. It's probable that Google+ will make Google services more useful by combining their strengths. That's almost certainly the reason why you'll use Google+ even when you're not going it to Google+ and you'll end up joining Google+ even if you don't like communal networks.

A New Look for Google Translate

Google Translate is the newest Google service with a new plan based on Google+. Since Google Translate's interface is simple, there aren't many changes: a new grey header, updated buttons and drop-downs.

"We're working on a project to bring you a new and enhanced Google experience, and over the next few months, you'll carry on to see more updates to our look and feel. The way people use and experience the web is developing, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and reliable online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you're using or what device you're using it on," explained Google last month.

After launching a new border for Google Search, Google created two themes that preview Gmail's new design and ongoing to test Google Calendar's new UI and Blogger's new UI. Up next: Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader and almost certainly other services.

No More Offline Gmail in Google Chrome

Chrome 12, the upcoming version of Google's browser which is likely to be free today, removes a useful feature: the built-in Gears plugin. While most Google services dropped support for Gears and detached offline way in, Gears is still being used in Gmail. Google no longer maintains Gears, which is now legacy software, and focuses on implementing offline hold up using HTML5.

But why remove Gears hold up without implementing the features using HTML5 first? Google says that you'll only need to wait for a few weeks or you can still older versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and mail client such as Thunderbird or Outlook.

"The new Gmail Offline ability is targeted for delivery as a Chrome browser web app this summer. As we move the Gmail Offline capability to a Chrome web app, we will denounce the Google Gears-based Gmail Offline. This coincides with the version 12 release of the Google Chrome browser which no longer supports Gears. As a result, Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will no longer work with the Chrome browser as of Tuesday May 24, 2011. Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will carry on to work in Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.6," explains Google.

It's not the best thing to do after believable users to switch to Chrome and use Web apps, but it's just a temporary issue. If the HTML5 offline Gmail wasn't ready to be free, removing Gears from Chrome could have been delayed.

Google Promotes Google Accounts

Google created a new Web page that explains users why it's a good quality idea to create a Google account. "One name, one password. That's all you need. Its free. Take a look at how you can personalize and optimize your knowledge across all Google products and services."

Using a Google account, you can share photos, track your favorite stocks, get more storage for your email, share your schedule, create web pages and work together on documents, make free phone calls and chat face to face, get modified search results and personalized news, create custom maps and get the same experience on multiple devices. There's a lot you can do if you have a Google account.

While most of the new Google services and skin require an account, back in January 2005 Google didn't have many services that necessary authentication. As the Wayback Machine shows, the initial services obtainable with a Google account were Google Groups, Google Alerts, Google Answers and Google Web APIs, but Google promised that "in the future, your Google account will give access to all Google programs requiring sign in including: Google AdWords, Google Store and more." One year later, Google previously offered Froogle, Personalized Search and a Personalized Homepage and it was preparing to launch Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Writely and to obtain YouTube.

Google Tests a Navigation Bar Integrated with Google Profiles

Google has been testing different versions of a new steering bar that removes link underlining and adds a menu for the features that now mess the bar.

The latest iteration of Google's experiment replaces your email address with your name and shows the photo from your Google Profile. Right now, creating a Google Profile is elective, but I wouldn't be astonished to see that this will change. If there's one thing that unifies almost all Google services, that's the navigation bar and it makes sense to add social features to the persistent bar.

Our big gift for small businesses

To kick off 2011, we wanted to thank a few small businesses for taking the first step toward enhancing their online presence—and to provide additional resources for achieving this goal. So over the holiday season, we paid a surprise visit to five small businesses who recently started advertising their businesses online: Create A Cook and Twinkle Star in Massachusetts, Ramy’s Garage and Atlas Flooring in Texas, and Cloud 9 Frozen Yogurt in Georgia. These small businesses span several industries, but their founders share one common goal: to expand beyond their brick-and-mortar storefronts and into the world of e-commerce.

To help, we gave them each of them $100,000 in AdWords spend for 2011 as well as free consultations with AdWords representatives. Because we know online presence means more than just AdWords, we’ll also be providing them with web consultations, wireless service for the year as well as a few other little surprises. See footage from our surprise visit below:

We’re looking forward to making big investments in small businesses far beyond these lucky five. Small businesses have long benefited from Google products and services; now our hope is that all small business owners can have greater access to the tools and training they need to develop a cohesive strategy for doing more business online. We started last year by creating the Google Small Business Center and asking small business owners about their biggest wishes for 2011. We received an overwhelming response from business owners who, like the owners of these shops, want to do more business in the clouds in 2011.

In the meantime, check the Google Small Business Blog for updates, and if you’re a business owner, visit the Google Small Business Center for information on how you can bring your business online in 2011.

Picasa Web Albums Wish List

Picasa Web Albums is one of the Google services that has been unjustly abandoned by Google, even if it has a lot of flaws and many missing features. Probably the main flaw was the goal of the service: to be an online addition of Picasa, a popular photo management software. Picasa Web Albums innate Picasa's limitations and didn't add many useful features since they were obtainable in Picasa. Instead of focusing on civilizing the web app, Google developed Picasa for Mac, extra new features to Picasa and acquired Picnik, an online image editor.

Picasa Web Albums is somewhat comparable to Microsoft's Office Live, an online addition of a popular software, which is astonishing, allowing for that Google is a big proponent of cloud computing.

If you try to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, you'll see that Google recommends to install Picasa. That's because you can only upload up to 5 photos at a time using the web app (unless you're using Internet Explorer: Google urbanized an ActiveX control for uploading photos).
Try to download an album and you won't be able to do that with no installing Picasa or using some workarounds.

To edit a photo, you require to use Picasa or Picnik, a unhurried Flash image editor. It would be much more helpful to have some basic editing options within Picasa Web Albums, so you can quickly touch up your photos.

Andrew Maxwell and François Beaufort shaped a long wish list for Picasa Web Albums (categorization albums by name, sub-albums, upload by drag and drop, multiple sign-in, offline mode) and many of their issues can be easily address by storing photos in Google Docs and transform Picasa Web Albums into a Google Docs app. This way, you'll use a single file storage space service, uploading and downloading multiple photos will be much easier, photos could be communal privately without revealing all the photos from an album, you might add photos to multiple folders and even create subfolders. Another advantage is that you'll be able to use a syncing software for all your files if Google decides to discharge a software like Dropbox or Windows Live Mesh.

Use Google Services from the Command Line

Not every one likes beautiful interfaces with big buttons, controls for entering text and uploading files. Sometimes it's faster to type commands in a terminal.

GoogleCL is a project that makes it easy to use Google services like Blogger, Picasa Web, YouTube, Google Docs ans Google Calendar from the command-line. It's a wrapper for the Google Data APIs, so you first need to install Python 2.6 (or 2.5) and Google Data APIs Python Client Library.

It's not very difficult to install a Python package. For example, in Windows you need to extract the archive, open the folder in Windows Explorer, shift + right-click in a blank space, select "Open command window here" and type: python setup.py install.

After installing Python, Google Data APIs Python Client Library and Google CL, you can type commands that let you upload photos to Picasa Web, upload videos to YouTube, publish Blogger posts, add events to Google Calendar, find Gmail contacts and more.

Here are some of my favorite commands:

google calendar add "Meet Mary tomorrow at 10am"
(add an event to Google Calendar)

google picasa get "Album Title" c:\files\picasa\
(download the files from one of your albums)

google picasa create --title "Miami Beach" c:\files\photos\miami\*.jpg
(upload photos to a new Picasa Web album)

google youtube post --title "Summer in Rome" c:\videos\rome.avi
(upload a video to YouTube)

google docs get --title "Reports .*"
(download documents that have titles starting with "Reports" as text files)

google docs upload c:\files\*.doc
(upload the *.doc files from a folder to Google Docs)

For a more comprehensive list of commands, type google --help or read the manual.