As promised, Google+ is now obtainable for Google Apps users. Administrators can allow the new service from the control panel, as explained here. Google+ requires that Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk are enabled and that the organization uses the new accounts infrastructure. If the two services are enabled and the choice to automatically add new services is selected, Google+ is routinely enabled.
After the enabling the service, you require to wait a few minutes until you can use it. Obviously, users have to physically join Google+ by visiting plus.google.com. "Google Apps users will have access to the same set of features that are obtainable to every Google+ user, and more. In addition to sharing publicly or with your circles, you'll also have the alternative to share with everyone in your organization, even if you haven't additional all of those people to a circle," explains Google.
It's interesting that Google+ is obtainable for higher education institutions, but not for other education institutions because users have to be at least 18 years old to use Google+.
You almost certainly noticed that Google+ evolves incredibly fast, faster than any other Google service. The support for Google Apps is not the only new quality: there's Hot on Google+ (a section that highlights popular posts), Ripples (a visualization tool for public shares and comments) and a Creative Kit for photo editing powered by Picnik.
How large is one billion? One billion hours ago modern humans were living in the Stone Age. One billion minutes ago, the Roman Empire was affluent. If you traveled from Earth to the Moon three times, your journey would gauge one billion meters.
Today, we’ve reached our own one billion mark: Google Earth has been downloaded more than one billion times since it was initial introduced in 2005. That’s more than one billion downloads of the Google Earth desktop client, mobile apps and the Google Earth plug-in—all enabling you to discover the world in seconds, from Earth to Mars to the ocean floor.
We’re proud of our one billion mile stone, but we’re even more astonished at the way people have used Google Earth to travel around the world. When we founded Keyhole, Inc. back in 2001 (the company was acquired by Google in 2004), we never probable our geospatial technology would be used by people in so many unforeseen ways. At www.OneWorldManyStories.com, we’ve collected stories from people all over the world who use Google Earth to go after their dreams, discover new and distant places, or make the world a better place.
Visit www.OneWorldManyStories.com to learn concerning people like Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia, who’s used Google Earth to scan thousands of square kilometers in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Professor Kennedy has exposed ancient tombs and geoglyphs dating back at least 2,000 years, all without leaving his desk in Perth. Architect Barnaby Gunning, after the April 6, 2009 earthquake near L’Aquila Italy, encouraged his fellow citizens to start rebuilding the city almost in 3D. Their online urban planning will aid city planners and architects. Retired English teacher Jerome Burg created Google Lit Trips, which uses Google Earth to match places in famous books to their geographical locations, encouraging students to generate connections between the stories they read in school and the world they live in.
We hope you enjoy the site, and that it illustrates how some of those one billion downloads of Google Earth have been making a difference. You can discover these stories right in your browser with the Google Earth plug-in or download the KML files to vision in Google Earth.
If you have a Google Earth story you’d similar to share, we’d love to hear from you. If you don’t have Google Earth, download it now and be part of the next billion stories. While it’s inspiring to see how Google Earth has touched the lives of so many, we know the best is yet to come.
When CaféPress first started printing shirts in 1999, online retail was still a budding industry and Google had yet to sell its first ad. Soon CaféPress started selling products throughout search ads on Google, and their business took off. Today, CaféPress hosts millions of shops online where customers can choose from more than 325 million products on almost any topic, from wall art to phone cases.
Just as CafePress has broadened its offerings over time, we've also worked to get better and expand our search advertising products. What started as three lines of simple text has evolved into ads that are multimedia-rich, location-aware and socially-amplified.
Today CafePress uses Site links to straight people to specific pages of their website, helping customers find what they’re looking for faster. On average, ads with three rows of links, or three-line Site links, are additional than 50 percent likely to get clicked on than ads without Site links. More than 200,000 advertisers have connected CafePress in using Site links in at least one campaign.
Monday at Advertising Week in New York City, I’ll be talking about how advertisers have been quick to accept these new formats since we first began experimenting nearly two years ago. Businesses from the smallest retailer in Idaho to the largest chance 500 companies in New York have seen how these innovations in search advertising can help grow successful businesses. In fact, roughly one-third of searches with ads show an improved ad format.
Here are a little ways these new ad formats are helping people find important information faster:
Visual. Not only can you discover theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad. Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is frequently so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.
Local: More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are connected to location. On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you’re looking for more effortlessly by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is situated and view a map with directions.
Social: With the +1 button people are able to find and advise businesses with their friends. Since introducing the +1 button earlier this year, we now have more than 5 billion impressions on publisher sites a day. If you’re a business owner, the +1 button enables your customers to share your products and particular offers easily with their network of friends, amplifying your existing marketing campaigns.
We're enduring to experiment with search ads to help businesses like CafePress grow by connecting with the right customers. Starting today, you can drop by our site to check out what’s new with search ads and learn about all the improvements we’ve been working on freshly.
We’re developing ads that provide richer information to you because we believe that search ads ought to be both beautiful and informative, and as useful to you as an answer.
These days, we rely on the Internet to keep us knowledgeable and in touch, yet our experience of the web is filtered through the tools we use to access it. The devices and technologies we choose, and our decisions about when we improve those tools, can affect how we interrelate with the web and with whom we are able to communicate.
In July, I attended the yearly conference held by the American Council of the Blind (ACB). I was struck by something I heard from people there: their experience using the web was very dissimilar from mine not because they were blind, but because the technology and web tools obtainable to them were unlike the ones available to me, as a sighted person. While the Internet provides many benefits to modern society, it has also created a exclusive set of challenges for blind and low-vision users who rely on assistive technologies to use the web. We’re committed to making Google’s products more accessible, and we believe the best way to understand the convenience needs of our users is to listen to them.
This week, we’re announcing a review that will help us better understand computer usage and assistive technology patterns in the blind community. Over the past three months, we’ve worked intimately with the ACB to develop a survey that would give us a greater understanding of how people choose and learn about the assistive technologies they use. This survey will help us design products and tools that interact more efficiently with assistive technologies currently available to the blind community, as well as improve our aptitude to educate users about new features in our own assistive technologies, such as ChromeVox and TalkBack.
The survey will be obtainable through mid-September on the ACB's website and by phone. We encourage anyone with a visual impairment who relies on assistive technologies to participate; your input will help us offer products that can enhanced suit your needs. For details, visit www.acb.org/googlesurvey.
