all about google

When we introduced the Following feature for Blogger last fall, we wanted to help you connect with fans of your own blog and discover communities of people who share your interests. It has been exciting to see Following grow over the past few months, to say the least. With nearly three million communities of followers on Blogger blogs, and with one person following a blog every second, we’ve been looking for ways to help these communities continue to thrive.

As a first step toward that goal, today we are integrating the Blogger Following feature with Google Friend Connect. Not only does this make it easier for anyone to follow a Blogger blog, but also it gives your blog expanded visibility across the web as your followers join other sites and share their activities with their friends.

Blogger joins an open network of websites already using Friend Connect and visitors can now follow any Blogger blog by signing in with their Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID credentials. The blogs that readers start to follow will appear alongside the other Friend Connect sites they’ve already joined. Additionally, you can find some new blogs and websites to join by checking out the profiles of other followers.

If you have a Blogger blog and you’re already using the Followers gadget, you don’t need to do anything to get these new features up and running — we’ve already migrated all of the existing Followers gadgets to the new version with Friend Connect. To learn more, visit our blog post on Blogger Buzz.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect Permalink

A few months back, we announced some pretty big upgrades to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums for English-speaking users in the U.S. On the PC side, we rolled out a brand-new version of Picasa, with a slew of new tools like effortless web sync, movie editing, and photo-retouching capabilities. On the web, we launched “name tags,” a new feature that automatically helps organize your photo collection based on who’s in each of your pictures.

Today, just in time for your holiday snapshots, these changes (and more!) are available in all of the 38 languages we currently support. If you’ve been waiting to try the new photo-collage feature in Picasa, or been curious to see how clustering technology can automatically find similar faces across your photo collection, now’s the time to download Picasa 3.1 or opt in to name tags on Picasa Web Albums.

Of course, having a truly global audience sharing and commenting on photos is one of the things that makes Picasa special. The people and places you’ll spot on our Explore page attest to this, as do the multilingual comments users receive on their most popular public albums. That’s why we just launched automatic comment translation on Picasa Web Albums, which harnesses Google Translate to make sure you know that “美麗的落日” means “Beautiful sunset!”

In fact, if you look closely, you’ll see that we’ve recently rolled out a number of other small but meaningful changes across Picasa Web Albums, in all 38 languages — ranging from improved sharing to better video playback. Swing by the Google Photos blog to learn more about what’s new.

(Or, if you speak British or American English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian or European Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Danish , Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Tagolog, Thai, Vietnamese, or Ukrainian, just visit Picasa Web Albums and see for yourself!)

Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager Permalink Links to this post

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done. We’re releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We’ll post an update here as soon as it’s ready.

Update @ 3:30 PM: We’ve added a link to our comic book explaining Google Chrome.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

The O’Reilly Media Where 2.0 2008 conference is being held this year at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. This conference is all about Web 2.0 mapping technologies like Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and many other mapping technologies for the developing GeoWeb. This has been one of my favorite conferences during the last two years for meeting up with the folks behind the developing Internet-based mapping technologies. To make sure I would like it this year, they invited me to be on the Program Committee.

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Have you ever wanted to keep track of the newest Google Desktop gadgets right from your sidebar? With our brand new XML feed, that’s now as easy as adding it to your favorite RSS gadget.

If you don’t already have the Google Web Clips gadget in your sidebar, here’s how to add it:

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Getting directions online is part of our everyday rituals now, so why not do it in style? Google Earth lets you play god satellite and lets you zoom from seeing the whole earth to the roof of your house/apartment/underpass. You can get directions and not only will Google Earth map it out for you backwards and forwards, but you can “drive” the route via digital car. I’m not sure if this will help you or not, but it makes my top googolplex of cool features. My favorite thing to do is to check out other places in the world like Rome or Japan. The satellite photos of the world are updated about once a month, so you can’t really spy on anyone if that’s what your evil little mind was thinking. Here are some other cool features of Google Earth.

1. Keeps track of your favorite places
2. Option for weather information
3. Option for 3D Buildings
4. Option for traffic information
5. View the sky and get directions to the moon (please don’t try this)

Get Google Earth here

In the Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click) program, which Google Adwords can pay the most money to Adsense publishers for Adsense clicks?

Markus F. $901000 Adsense Check

He runs a dating site plentyoffish.com and I understand that this is the main income for this check, the 901 000 $ check represents income for more than one month, around 3 months.

Jeremy S. $132000 Adsense Check

Jeremy owns shoemoney.com where the comunity usually discuss online business and advertising, marketing, income strategies, ’skills to pay the bills’ as they say.

This coming weekend the 2008 Formula One season gets under way in Melbourne, Australia. Last year the driver’s championship went down to the wire, with Kimi Räikkönen just pipping a young Lewis Hamilton to the Formula One Championship in the last race of the season. Can Hamilton go one better this year or can Räikkönen hold onto his crown?

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We are approaching three months now since Google added support for Google’s Moon, Mars and Sky imagery to the Google Maps API. Unfortunately we have not been inundated with Google Maps mash-ups that have taken advantage of these new astronomical features.

Michael Kosowsky of HeyWhatsThat.com was quick off the mark with his Cosmic Visibility Map. This map is a great tool for astronomers as it shows where all the planets are in the night sky and the horizon is custom-drawn on the map depending on what the time is and where you are located. Michael has also produced two maps showing the phases of the Moon and Mars.

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