Top Google Apps in 2010

Here's a subjective list of Google services that were launched or were significantly improved in 2010:

10. Google Scribe - a examine that shows auto complete suggestions as you type. It will almost certainly become as accepted as Google Suggest and Google Translate once its included with other services.

9. Voice Actions for Android - an submission that lets you control your phone using your voice. You can call your contacts, send email, get instructions, listen to music, write notes and go to a website.

8. Gmail added lots of business-related features (Priority Inbox, email delegation, turning off conversation view), better Gmail Chat (calling phones, video chat for Linux), added a new contact manager, more ways to join files, Gmail for iPad, Buzz integration, search auto complete, You Tube previews and rich text signatures.

7. Google Buzz - in spite of the initial privacy brouhaha, Google Buzz is the most excellent Google service released in 2010. Even if it's less than one year old, Buzz already has an imposing set of features, a powerful API, it's included with many services and has a cool factor that's lost from other Google social products. unluckily for Google, Buzz is not yet very popular.

6. Blogger additional a lot of significant missing features: comment management, comment spam filtering, dynamic templates, a new post editor, better post preview, real-time stats, static pages and much more.

5. Google Docs - a new document editor, earlier Google Spreadsheets, a collaborative drawing editor, a new equation editor, mobile editing, a more consistent interface, uploading any kind of files.

4. Google Maps - vector-based maps for Android, Google Latitude for iPhone, a new local look for service (Google Places), social local business reccomendations, biking directions, walking navigation, Google Earth as a tab in Google Maps, search suggestions.

3. Chrome - 5 major versions released, support for Mac and Linux, a basic interface, faster browsing, autofill, sync, Google Translate integration, bundled sandboxed plugins for Flash and PDF files, Chrome Web Store.

2. Google Search has changed a lot this year and there were loads of user interface changes: from Google Instant to Instant Previews, from interactive doodles to custom backgrounds for the homepage, from perpendicular navigation menus to a consistent interface for most Google search services. Google also launched a completely new border for image search that lets you explore more images and a new search index with real-time updates.

1. Android - two significant releases (Froyo, Gingerbread), huge growth (from 1.4 million smartphones sold in the third quarter of 2009 to 20.5 million phones one year later - according to Gartner) and a lot of original devices, including tablets, TVs, consoles, media players and e-book readers. It's almost certainly the fastest growing product released by Google.

Picasa Web's New Zoom Viewer

Picasa Web Albums has a new zoom spectator that uses Flash. If you click on the magnifying glass icon next to a photo, you can select a rectangular area from the image and zoom in or zoom out. The quality is called "microscope zoom" and it doesn't fall back to the old account for users who haven't installed Adobe's Flash plugin.

Another new characteristic lets you view all the EXIF tags that are available by clicking on "full details page". You'll find a lot of tags that offer more information about white balance, orientation, exposure, color space, brightness, light source and more.

Battle of the Demos: Musical Holiday Edition

Nothing brings out holiday spirit like caroling around town or distribution a good time with friends. But when you unite both of those fun behavior with Google technology, Weezer, Greyson Chance, and Demo Slam, you get fight of the Demos: Musical festival Edition.

This chill season, Weezer and Greyson Chance stepped to into the Demo Slam arena to show the world their most imaginative tech demos. We know they both can sing, but who will win in a fight of technology?

Spending his Christmas home in Oklahoma City, Greyson Chance figured he might unite Google Local Search and caroling to increase some musical cheer approximately town:

Weezer is recognized for their adoring fans (well, at least one affectionate fan authoring this post). Check out this slam that gets the entire crowd involved:

Head over to demoslam.com to vote and help settle on whether a voice search performed by 3,000 people or crooning from side to side the streets of Oklahoma City will reign supreme.

Dashing through the snow... with NORAD and Google

Every Christmas Eve, children all over the world ask themselves—and their parents—questions about Santa’s magical journey. How does Santa visit so many children in one night? Will he eat the cookies I left out? How does he fit all those presents into his sleigh? These childhood mysteries are part of what makes the Santa tradition so special.

There’s one timeless question that we’re proud to say we can help answer: Where in the world is Santa at this very moment? Thanks in part to recent advances in warp-speed GPS technology and some very clever elves (elveneering?) NORAD Tracks Santa is once again prepped and ready to go.

Starting tomorrow, December 24 at 2:00am EST, visit www.noradsanta.org to follow Santa as he journeys around the world delivering presents to children in more than 200 countries and territories. There are a few different ways to find the jolly old man in his unmistakable red suit over the course of the day, so feel free to track him using any of the following methods:

* See Santa on a Google Map: On your home computer or laptop, visit www.noradsanta.org and choose your preferred language. You’ll see a large Google Map on the page displaying Santa’s current location and his next stop. Click the video icons to watch “Santa Cam” videos, and click the gift icons to learn more about each city.

* Watch Santa fly with the Google Earth Plug-in: From www.noradsanta.org, click on the link Track Santa in Google Earth. You'll see Santa steering his sleigh right on the webpage. If you don't have the Google Earth plug-in, you can get ready by downloading it ahead of time.

* Follow Santa on your phone: Track Santa from your mobile phone by opening Google Maps for mobile and searching for [santa]. Or, visit m.noradsanta.org on your phone’s browser.

* Subscribe to his YouTube channel: Santa’s home on YouTube is at http://www.youtube.com/noradtrackssanta. That’s where you can find videos from his journey throughout the night.

* Get real-time information about Santa’s location: Use Google’s Realtime Search to get updates from social networks, news and micro-blogs like Twitter at @noradsanta, and keep up with news about his journey on this Facebook page.

For any techie questions you might have, we’ve also put together some helpful tips and tricks about all the cool ways you can experience Santa’s journey. Now that you know how to follow Saint Nick on Christmas Eve, it’s our tradition to tell the story of how this all started...

NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) first began to track Santa in 1955 when a misprinted advertisement in a Sears & Roebuck catalogue mistakenly led callers expecting a Santa-hotline to the NORAD commander-in-chief's telephone. Embracing the spirit of the season, NORAD used its satellite and radar capabilities to offer callers sleigh-location updates, and has tracked Santa's whereabouts on Christmas Eve ever since. Then in 2004, Google started tracking Santa on Google Earth as a 20% project, which in 2007 grew into a partnership with NORAD, adding the mapping technology of Google Maps and Google Earth to the NORAD experience. Over the years, other Google teams have also joined in the holiday fun (YouTube, Google Voice’s www.SendACallFromSanta.com and Google SketchUp).

As we approach this year’s Christmas Eve adventure, Santa was able to take a break from the preparations to visit the New York Stock Exchange this past Monday. His helpful elves kept everything at the North Pole on schedule while folks from Google and NORAD attended the Closing Bell ceremony, and stood alongside Santa from Macy’s going over last minute details about tomorrow’s big ride.

So don’t forget to visit www.noradsanta.org tomorrow morning starting at 2:00am EST when Santa embarks on his flight. From all of us here at Google, happy holidays and here’s to a very happy New Year!

Investing in New York

Google New York started in a Starbucks on 86th lane with one person in 2000—a fragmentary, highly-caffeinated sales “team.” After moving to a larger office in Times Square, in 2006 we relocated to our current home in Chelsea, at 111 Eighth Avenue—a former Port ability building. In June of 2008, we took additional space in the Chelsea Market building at 75 Ninth Avenue. Now we have more than 2,000 Googlers operational on a variety of projects in both sales and engineering—and we’re hiring across the board.

Today, we’re pleased to proclaim that we’ve closed a deal with the partnership of Taconic Investment associates, Jamestown Properties and the New York State Common departure Fund to purchase 111 Eighth Avenue (also known as 76 Ninth Avenue). As part of the deal, we’ve retain Taconic Management Company to continue the leasing oversight services and organization of the building on our behalf, as long as the same level of customer service the building’s tenants have come to be expecting. We believe that this is a great real estate speculation in a thriving neighborhood and a incredible city.

Like the city, our New York office is a melting pot of cultures and thoughts—it’s home to Googlers from more than 35 countries who speak extra than 40 languages. They live in the five boroughs and extend across the tri-state area. We’re excited to carry on to build our presence there.

Trip report: Google and YouTube in Pakistan 2010

Earlier this month, a squad from Google and YouTube went to Pakistan to explore business and content opportunities, following up on Google’s Clinton Global proposal commitment to Pakistan and to sponsor and contribute in Pakistan’s first International Youth Conference and Festival. It’s hard to envisage a country more at the nexus of geo-politics today than Pakistan, and our team educated a lot about the state of the Pakistani technology, media and non-profit sectors.

Internet connectivity in Pakistan is quite low—estimates put diffusion at around 10%—but opportunities for growth are evident. For one thing, broadband costs are quite cheap compared to other parts of the world—around $13/month. Smartphone usage is also on the rise, and there are a rising number of Pakistani developers who are creating mobile applications for sale both in Pakistan and overseas. Around 60% of Pakistanis have a mobile phone, and their standard bill is around $3/month. Not surprisingly, SMS is one of the main means of communication in Pakistan.

One of the keys to bringing more Pakistanis online is the quantity of local Pakistani content obtainable on the Internet. There are some enormous examples so far: for instance, Coke Studio, a “fusion” music project sponsored by Coke that features well-liked Pakistani musicians, grew so popular on YouTube last summer that it was the 11th-most viewed channel on the site. Dozens of news organizations have begun to use YouTube as a global allocation platform as well, reaching not only Pakistanis online but the diaspora abroad. The Pakistani media is young and greedy—it was just eight years ago that the government opened up the airwaves to permit non-state media channels to exist, and in that short time the media has full-grown to become an important player in the public conversation in Pakistan, despite infrequent crackdowns from authorities. Citizen media has also played an ever more big role in Pakistan: for example many Pakistanis used cellphone cameras to document the destruction wrought by the floods in Pakistan last summer.

Google.org granted $1 million to Pakistani flood release in September, contained crisis response tools, and launched a flood relief landing page. On our trip we met with quite a few non-profits who are doing incredible work to help the exaggerated citizens get back on their feet. Our products, in particular Google MapMaker, proved to be of use to flood relief agencies for tracking expansion in the wake of the tragedy. Over innumerable cups of hot chai and mixed grilled barbecues, we heard stories of normal Pakistanis using Google technology to article the flood and attach with one another during the crisis.

Pakistan’s future no doubt lies with its youth—an unbelievable 62% of Pakistanis are under the age of 25. Perhaps the highlight of our trip was the International Youth Conference we participated in, which was run by an association called Khudi. Khudi was founded by the dynamic Maajid Nawaz, a former extremist who distorted his views towards moderate Islam and has since devoted his life to educating young people on freedom of appearance and anti-extremism (Nawaz also beam at Google Zeitgeist this year). It was inspirational to meet leaders like Nawaz who are committed to emboldening Pakistan’s younger generations to use the web to transport Pakistan to the rest of the world, and to give the rest of the world a more absolute picture of Pakistan. In this way we saw an chance for technology to not only foster economic development, but also to break down borders in the region. We asked a few of the Pakistani leaders we met with to converse about Pakistan’s future, and here’s what they had to say.

This was the largest allocation of Googlers ever to visit Pakistan, and we’re looking forward to continued engagement in the region.

Google Chrome's Bundled Games

The first Chrome 10 Dev Channel build bundle two HTML5 games: Poppit and embarrassing situation. The two games are additional to the new tab page even if you've before installed other apps.

Some users will almost certainly be surprised to see two games they didn't install, so Google should inform users that the games were routinely installed. Chrome's source code makes it clear that Poppit and Entanglement are installed for all operating systems, except for Chrome OS. Almost certainly a better idea would be to suggest some apps based on the browsing history.