1000 @Google Talks videos now on YouTube

Last week, the @Google Talks team uploaded its 1000th video to YouTube. If you’re not recognizable with this series, we host talks by authors and commentators at Google, and post videos of their readings and talks on a devoted YouTube channel.

Authors@Google began in the fall of 2005 when we noticed that some astonishing people were passing through the Google hallways. A few scrappy Googlers galvanized to create a more reliable pipeline of requests and a dignified program that kicked off with Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki. As Google and our technology grew, so did the program. “Authors@Google” has blossomed into @Google Talks, a full-fledged speaker series, prolonged across distributed offices and found a home on YouTube, so that we can share these conversations outside of the Googleplex.

The @Google Talks series aims to detain the popular and intellectual zeitgeist, as well as ideas that deserve a deeper focus an expert can give in more than a five-minute soundbite. From the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates to Alice Walker to Michael Pollan to Raphael Saadiq, the program has grown to encompass not just authors, but musicians, innovators, notable women, chefs and more. The team that hosts these events is made up of devoted and passionate volunteers from all across the company.

Our most viral video was of Conan O'Brien, who stopped by during his "Legally forbidden from Being Funny on Television" tour for a hilarious hour involving bagpipes, Andy Richter and one lucky Googler who got to touch his hair. We've featured master and apprentice—from Thomas Keller of The French Laundry to Keller protege Corey Lee on the process of gap his new restaurant Benu—and varying viewpoints, exemplified by Christopher Hitchens on "God Is Not Great" and Tim Keller on "The Reason for God." And that’s just the beginning. Other popular visitors comprise Congressman Ron Paul, President Barack Obama, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, presentation designer Garr Reynolds, author Elizabeth Gilbert, Randall Munroe of XKCD and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

We’re excited for what lies ahead, and we hope you'll tune in and join us.

Google Chrome's Experimental New Tab Page for Touch Screens

A recent Chromium build added a new alternative to the about:flags page: an experimental new tab page. The efficient new tab page is a work in progress and it's optimized for touch screens. Right now, it only includes the web apps you've before installed, which can be prearranged in multiple home screens.

"The idea with this touch NTP is to focus (for now) on apps, and make it easy

to position them into pages. You can swipe/drag to switch pages, and press

and hold to lift an app and rearrange it," explains Google.

I found an attractive comment in one of Google's JavaScript files: "Note that, while the creation portion of the touch NTP is intended to work just in the latest version of Chrome, this hack attempts to add some support for working in older browsers to enable testing and expression on existing tablet platforms. In particular, this code has been tested to work on Mobile Safari in iOS 4.2. The goal is that the need to support any other browser ought to not leak out of this file - and so we will hack global JS objects as essential here to present the delusion of running on the latest account of Chrome."

Coming soon: The YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 Grand Finale live

What began with auditions from approximately the world uploaded to YouTube, millions of video views, and hours of rehearsals, finally comes to life this Sunday, March 20. It has been an strange experience for the 101 winning musicians of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, and in just a pair of days their joint experience will come to life at Sydney Opera House.

Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

The week-long YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 festival includes melodic collaboration between orchestra members and world-class mentors, outdoor performances, local Aussie experiences, band concerts and more. In just a few days, the creativity and technology that have motorized this journey will literally light up Sydney Opera House—with animated visuals on the interior and exterior projections on the iconic sails, all synchronized to the music of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011’s performance.

You’re invited to skill this wonderful event, whether you’re inside Sydney Opera House, out around Sydney Harbour, or watching from your computer elsewhere in the world. The Grand Finale will be live-streamed on youtube.com/symphony beginning at 8:00pm Australian Eastern Standard time, and rebroadcast until the concert presentation is uploaded in full, so tune in on Sunday, March 20.

Google Docs Discussions

Google Docs enhanced the commenting system, by addition support for conversations.

"To start, we've enhanced the discussion flow by adding ownership and edit rights to personality comments. Each observation now has a timestamp and profile picture. Google Docs doesn't force you to delete comments. Instead, you can resolve comments to remove them from the visible text and view them later by clicking the deliberations button at the top of any document," mentions Google.

One of the most useful new features is the support for notifications, which works just like in Google Buzz. Reply to a comment and the author of that comment will get an email announcement. He'll be able to answer to your reply from the email interface, without having to visit Google Docs. Google also sends notifications if you're mentioned in a thread.

Unfortunately, deliberations are only available for new documents. Google says that the explanation is that the new feature includes "a number of important improvements".

No More Starred outcome in Google Search

Last year, Google replaced SearchWiki with starred consequences. You only had to click on a star to bookmark a search result and to rapidly find it later.

Unfortunately, this feature is no longer available and you have to find other ways to bookmark hunt results: bookmarklets, Google Toolbar and other extensions.

A Google employee established this change. "The Star feature no longer exists on Google. The Star function continues to exist throughout google.com/bookmarks though. Anything you formerly starred will show up when you visit bookmarks."

Starred results and SearchWiki were really useful for refinding web pages, but most likely not many people used them. These features were a lot more helpful than Instant Preview, which is still available.

WebM Plugin for Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 will be free later today and one of the many new skin is the inhabitant support for videos. Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft determined to only support H.264 videos by default, so you can't watch WebM videos without installing added software.

To solve this problem, Google urbanized a WebM plugin for IE9. "They said elephants couldn't ride flying dolphins. They said that one of the world's most accepted browsers couldn't play WebM video in HTML5. They were wrong," mentions Google half-jokingly.

The plugin only works on Windows 7 and Windows Vista, the two operating systems supported by IE9. Google suggests to search for WebM videos on YouTube, but I'm not sure if the plugin was really essential since YouTube's HTML5 player also works with H.264 videos.

Last month, Microsoft unconfined a plugin for watching H.264 videos in Google Chrome that will be useful when Google drops support for the accepted codec.

Chrome 12 Will Drop Support for Google Gears

While the majority Chrome users have been upgraded to Chrome 10, Google is fitting the bugs from Chrome 11 and working on Chrome 12. A recent Chromium build made a significant change: Gears is no longer incorporated in Google Chrome.

Gears is a browser plugin free by Google back in 2007, The initial goal was to add hold up for offline web apps, but the plugin added many other HTML5 features at a time when HTML5 wasn't a main concern for most browsers. Google discontinued Gears last year to center on "bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5" and to apply them in Google Chrome. Features like geolocation, notifications, web workers, application caches are previously available in Google Chrome, so it's almost certainly the right time to stop bundling the Gears plugin.

"With all this now available in HTML5, it's lastly time to say goodbye to Gears. There will be no new Gears releases, and newer browsers such as Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 will not be supported. We will also be removing Gears from Chrome in Chrome 12," informs Google.

What's astonishing is that important services like Gmail and Google Calendar still use Gears to work offline. Other services like Google Docs and Google Reader dropped offline support last year. Google promised that they will use HTML5 features implemented in browsers like Chrome or Firefox, but that hasn't materialized yet.