API for Google's URL Shortener

Google's URL Shortener has many advantages: it's fast (probably the fastest URL Shortener), it rarely goes down, it's integrated with Google Safe Browsing, it shows neat stats and it automatically generates QR codes. Unfortunately, Goo.gl didn't offer an official API and many application didn't support it.

Services like Goo.gl, Bit.ly or TinyURL are rarely used directly: Twitter clients automatically shorten links, browser extensions create short links, while content management systems convert the links so that people can share them. For example, Google Maps, Google Reader and Google News use Goo.gl to create short links for all their content.

Now other applications can use Goo.gl because there's an official API that's quite easy to use and has a generous limit of 1,000,000 queries/day. "You can use the Google URL Shortener API to programmatically interact with this service and to develop applications that use simple HTTP methods to store, share, and manage goo.gl short URLs from anywhere on the Internet," explains Google. The API lets you create short links, decrypt Goo.gl links, read stats and look up a user's history.


Google's new API can be used inside the new Dev Console that lets you manage multiple APIs, add traffic filters and get traffic reports.

{ via Google Code Blog }

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Google Transcoder's Zooming Feature

If you're trying to load a web page using your mobile phone's browser, but the Internet connection is slow and you can't install Opera Mini, there's always Google Transcoder. Google's service shows a simplified version of the page that hides navigation links, removes scripts and compresses images.

Google Transcoder also has a "zoom out" feature that shows a screenshot of the page and lets you select the section you want to read. This means that Google has at least two databases of screenshots for all the indexed pages and Google knows a lot of about the structure of a web page.

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Google Can't Find Paris

If you use Google to search for [Paris], the top search result is a Wikipedia page for PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space), "a privately-organised endeavour undertaken by various staff members of the information technology web site The Register to design, build, test, and launch a lightweight aerospace vehicle, constructed mostly of paper and similar structural materials, into the mid-stratosphere and recover it intact".

Most likely, the top search result should have been the Wikipedia page for the capital of France, but a bug replaced it with a page about a curious project.


Search for [the capital of France], and the second search result is the same page about the space project. It's as if someone performed a search and replace in Google's index.


Update (a couple of days later): It has been fixed.

{ a faux pas spotted by Jérôme Flipo }

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Google Goggles Solves Sudoku Puzzles

Google's visual search tool has a new trick up its sleeve: solving Sudoku puzzles. Google Goggles 1.3 for Android scans barcodes much faster, recognizes print ads from the major U.S. magazines and newspapers, but most people will probably ignore those useful features and will try to see if Goggles can actually solve Sudoku puzzles. The nice thing is that this feature also works in the latest version of Google Mobile App for iPhone, along with print ads recognition.

"Now, Goggles on Android and iPhone can recognize puzzles and provide answers to help make you faster than a Sudoku champ. So if you ever get stuck, take a clear picture of the entire puzzle with Goggles and we'll tell you the correct solution," explains Google.

Maybe providing a hint would also be useful, especially if you want to solve the puzzle.




The new features show that Google Goggles has a lot of potential, but it's still not useful enough in the real world. An interesting article from Xconomy quotes Hartmut Neven, Google's technical lead manager for image recognition, who says that Goggles is not yet an universal visual search tool. "What keeps me awake at night is, 'What are the honest-to-God use cases that we can deliver,' where it's not just an 'Oh, wow.' We call it the bar of daily engagement. Can we make it useful enough that every day you will take out Goggles and do something with it?"

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Android Addresses UI Shortcomings

It's amazing to see how much Android's user interface has changed ever since Matias Duarte was hired by Google to improve Android. Matias has previously worked on Sidekick, Helio and Palm's WebOS, so Android is a perfect fit for him. In only 9 months, Matias Duarte and his team managed to address a lot of Android's UI shortcomings: a virtual keyboard that wasn't good enough, an uninspired interface for multitasking, the hidden menus that required to click on a soft key to display them, inflexible soft keys that were restricted to a single orientation.

Here's, for example, the navigation bar that replaces the hidden menu for common actions in Android Honeycomb:


The Gmail app currently available in the Android Market requires to use a hidden menu to perform common actions like composing mail or going back to the inbox:


Here's a comparison between the Froyo keyboard and the Gingerbread keyboard. According to Google, "the Android soft keyboard is redesigned and optimized for faster text input and editing. The keys themselves are reshaped and repositioned for improved targeting, making them easier to see and press accurately, even at high speeds."


In an interview with Joshua Topolsky from Engadget, Matias says that Honeycomb is the future of Android in terms of user experience. His job is to make Android's interface so good that companies like HTC or Samsung don't have to spend so much time improving it. The stock user interface will raise the bar high enough to be more than a solid foundation.

You're not working on one product, you're not saying "we're one company, vertically integrating and making one product and we're going to focus on one market and we're going to try and meet that particularly need." But instead, the idea is that there's a common problem that every company that wants to succeed in making computing better, making computing mobile has and that's the fundamental platform problem. We're not only going to try to find a way to get everybody to benefit from it, we're going to do it for free. We're going to work on building this common tide that rises all boats.

It's interesting to think of Android as "the tide that rises all boats", a platform that accelerates mobile development not just for smartphones, but also for tablets, media players, digital cameras, TVs, cars, appliances and much more.

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Drag and Drop Uploading for YouTube Videos

Why download YouTube videos when it's so easy to upload videos? Now you can drag and drop multiple videos on YouTube's upload page instead of using the operating system's file open dialog. The new feature requires a recent version of Google Chrome and Firefox because it uses HTML5 APIs.

Two other Google services that support drag and drop uploading are Gmail and Google Docs, but other services will probably follow suit.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

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YouTube's HTML5 Rickrolling

YouTube's HTML5 interface has a very cool feature: if you right-click on a video, you'll no longer see the boring contextual menu displayed by the browser that added uninteresting features like downloading videos. Instead, you'll get a much more useful menu that sends you to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" video.

Some would say that this trick reminds them of the sites that annoyed users by disabling browser features like the contextual menu so that people can't save an image or copy some text. But that's not what happens here: YouTube's terms of use forbid users from downloading videos and the new menu solves this issue by offering a better option. After all, why download a video when you can listen to Rick Astley's fabulous song?


There are at least two uncivil browsers (Firefox and Opera) that treat videos just like images and allow users to right-click on a video and download it. Firefox even lets you disable custom contextual menus for all sites, while Opera provides more granular options. There's even a developer that breached YouTube's terms of use by creating a Greasemonkey script with a strange name: Youtube HTML5 Beta "Save Video As" Unrickroller. Apparently, he lost his sense of humor or he's not a Rick Astley fan.

I'm not going to use any of these features and I'll switch to Internet Explorer, a browser that doesn't offer a download option for videos (mostly because it doesn't support HTML5 videos). Whenever I want to download a YouTube video, I'll ignore all those scripts and tricks and I'll read YouTube's terms of use, while listening to Rick Astley's song. They're a perfect match.

"... You know the rules and so do I ..."

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Google Docs Plays Videos

Google Docs lets you upload any kind of files, but not many of them can be previewed in Google Docs. You can open Microsoft Office documents and presentations, PDF files and some images. Now you can also play videos.

Uploaded video files can be up to 1 GB. These are the most common video formats that you can upload and play:

* WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
* .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
* .AVI (many cameras use this format - typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
* .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
* .WMV
* .FLV (Adobe - FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

Since Google uses YouTube's player, it's obvious that these are the formats supported by YouTube. After uploading a video to Google Docs, you'll have to wait until it's processed.

Why would someone upload videos to Google Docs instead of using YouTube? When Google adds more free storage to Google Docs and makes it easy to sync all your files, you'll upload documents, photos, music files and videos. Google Docs lets you organize files into folders, share multiple files with your friends and even keep old versions of your files.


Tip. To find all the videos uploaded to your Google Docs account, use this URL: https://docs.google.com/#videos.

{ Thanks, Cougar Abogado. }

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Picasa Web Adds HTTPS Support

Picasa Web Albums was one of the few Google apps that didn't support encrypted connections. Now you can go to the secure version at https://picasaweb.google.com to make sure that no one can intercept your requests. This is especially helpful if you use an unsecured WiFi connection.

Google Chrome says that Picasa Web Albums includes some resources that are sent via HTTP, but these aren't the usual suspects: images, CSS and JavaScript files. The culprit is an iframe used for loading ads. Internet Explorer shows a mixed content warning every time you visit a Picasa Web Albums page, which is really annoying. (Update: this was a quickly fixed.)


Many Google services support HTTPS connections: Gmail (enabled by default), Google Reader, Google Groups, Picasa Web Albums, Google Search, Google Finance, YouTube (partially encrypted). Other services only support encrypted connections: Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Health, Google Analytics, Google AdSense and AdWords, Google Web History, Google Bookmarks, Google Voice, Google Latitude, Google Checkout. It's probably easier to list the services that don't support HTTPS.

{ via Brian Rose }

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Honeycomb: Android for Tablets

Google has accidentally made public a YouTube video that shows Android 3.0 in action. It's a completely new interface for tablets that borrows a lot of ideas from BumpTop, the 3D desktop software acquired by Google last year.


Engadget says that the new interface "looks more or less nothing like Android". You might think it's a new operating system. The video mentions that this is "the next generation of Android" and that's built entirely for tablets.

Google has focused on improving the user interface and Android 3.0 comes with fluid home screens, better app switching, browser tabs, video chat, dynamic app shortcuts and new versions of Google's Android applications that take advantage of the bigger screen.

It seems that the Android tablets that will be launched in the coming months will have impressive hardware and an updated operating system that looks stunning, so they're poised for success.



Update: Google confirms the release of Android Honeycomb.

Honeycomb is the next version of the Android platform, designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. We’ve spent a lot of time refining the user experience in Honeycomb, and we’ve developed a brand new, truly virtual and holographic user interface. Many of Android’s existing features will really shine on Honeycomb: refined multi-tasking, elegant notifications, access to over 100,000 apps on Android Market, home screen customization with a new 3D experience and redesigned widgets that are richer and more interactive. We’ve also made some powerful upgrades to the web browser, including tabbed browsing, form auto-fill, syncing with your Google Chrome bookmarks, and incognito mode for private browsing.

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Google Docs Viewer for Spreadsheets

Google Docs Viewer now works for spreadsheets too. Even if Google informs that the service can be used to preview "PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, and TIFF files", you can also try Adobe Postscript files, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.


The viewer is not optimized for spreadsheets, so Google has to convert them to documents. That's probably the reason why they don't look very well, they're not always readable and some of the characters are missing.


Unfortunately, if you click "Save in Google Docs", Google saves the spreadsheet as a regular non-editable file. To open the file in Google Spreadsheets, you need to right-click, select "Make a Google Docs copy", wait a few seconds and open the new file.

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Google Bookmarks Import Without Using Google Toolbar

I really don't understand why Google didn't add a feature that lets you upload a bookmarks file exported by your browser to Google Bookmarks. Google still recommends to install Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer or Firefox to upload bookmarks, but this shouldn't be necessary. That's like installing Picasa to upload your photos to Picasa Web Albums.

Fortunately, Mihai Parparita built a tool for exporting your Delicious bookmarks to Google Bookmarks and it can be used to upload any bookmarks file to Google Bookmarks. Here's how to do that:

1. Go to delicious.com and sign in. If you haven't used Delicious before, you'll sign in using a Yahoo account. If you've previously bookmarked web pages using Delicious, it's probably a good idea to create a new account.

2. Unlike Google Bookmarks, Delicious has a bookmark importing feature. Upload the HTML file exported by your browser and wait until all your bookmarks are imported.


3. Use Delicious to Google Bookmarks to import your bookmarks to Google Bookmarks. You'll end up with two new labels added by the importing/exporting tools: imported and delicious-export.


The nice thing about Mihai Parparita's tool is that it's open source and it can be modified to import HTML bookmarks file.

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Top 10 Google Labs Projects From 2010

Google Labs is the place where you can find a lot of experimental services that are developed by Google engineers in their "20 percent time". As Jeffrey Ressner points out, "Labs began [back in 2002] when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to allow engineers and programmers to devote 20 percent of their time, or one day each week, to projects of their own choosing. It was a bold move, but Page and Brin figured the great minds they hired would be even more creative if they were given free rein to unleash their imaginations and cultivate their personal interests instead of spending all their energies on assigned tasks." Aparna Chennapragada, product manager for Google Labs, says that Google tried to "remove all friction between the idea and the experiment".

Features like Google Suggest or Social Search and services like iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Local or Google Docs started as Labs projects. Here are some of the best services and features released in Google Labs, Gmail Labs, TestTube and other similar places in 2010:

1. Google Scribe is a powerful tool that uses aggregated data from Web pages to provide suggestions as you type. It could become an useful Google Docs feature and it could improve the suggestions provided by the default Android keyboard.


2. Body Browser, a WebGL application developed by the Google Health team that shows a detailed 3D model of the human body. Try it in Chrome 9 beta or Firefox 4 beta.

3. YouTube Leanback - a YouTube interface designed for Google TV or any other big screen. The great thing about YouTube Leanback is that it doesn't require interaction, so you can quickly watch the videos added to the queue or the latest videos from your subscribed channels.

4. Apps Search - a Gmail Labs feature that lets you search your Gmail messages, Google Docs files and Google Sites pages from a single search box. If Google shows results from other services and improves the interface, this feature could become very useful. Imagine searching your contacts, calendars, bookmarks, files and your browsing history from a single search box.

5. YouTube's HTML5 player has improved a lot ever since it was launched, back in January 2010. It now supports WebM videos and it works in most browsers: Chrome, Opera, Safari and the latest beta versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. YouTube even offers a new embedding code that triggers the HTML5 player if your browser supports it and Adobe Flash is not installed.


6. Aardvark, a social Q&A service acquired by Google last year, hasn't improved since its acquisition, but it has a lot of potential to make search more social. Google Spreadsheets also started as a Google Labs project, even though it was the result of an acquisition.

7. Public Data Explorer "makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate". This could be a great way to make Google Search more visual and more interactive.

8. Google Books Ngram Viewer is a Google Trends for books. It's useful if you want to see how often certain words or phrases have been used in books over time.


9. Google Reader Play - a new way to view your feeds and the most popular blog posts on the Web. The interface works well for photo blogs, comics and videos.

10. Google Calendar's Gentle Reminders replaces annoying pop-ups with a blinking tab and a notification sound. If you use Google Chrome, you'll also see desktop notifications.

It's interesting to see that most of the services are related to data visualization, cutting-edge browser features and productivity.

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Voice Search for Google Chrome

Voice Search is a Google Chrome extension that lets you search using your voice. It's not developed by Google, but it uses an experimental Chrome feature called form speech input. The feature is enabled by default in the dev channel builds, but it can be manually enabled by adding a command-line flag.

"Voice Search comes pre-loaded with the following default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha. You can also add your own user-defined search engines. It also integrates a speech input button for all websites using HTML5 search boxes. This extension requires a microphone. Speech input is very experimental, so don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Also, try to speak clearly for best speech recognition results," suggests the author.


Speech recognition is limited to English and it doesn't work very well, but this extension is a good way to test a feature that will be enabled in the future Chrome releases. If you have a website, it's quite easy to add support for speech input, but it may take a while until Google's Speech Input API specification becomes a standard and all browsers implement it.

{ Thanks, Silviu. }

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Picasa Web Albums Wish List

Picasa Web Albums is one of the Google services that has been unfairly neglected by Google, even if it has a lot of flaws and many missing features. Probably the biggest flaw was the goal of the service: to be an online extension of Picasa, a popular photo management software. Picasa Web Albums inherited Picasa's limitations and didn't add many useful features because they were available in Picasa. Instead of focusing on improving the web app, Google developed Picasa for Mac, added new features to Picasa and acquired Picnik, an online image editor.

Picasa Web Albums is somewhat similar to Microsoft's Office Live, an online extension of a popular software, which is surprising, considering that Google is a big proponent of cloud computing.

If you try to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, you'll notice 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 developed an ActiveX control for uploading photos).


Try to download an album and you won't be able to do that without installing Picasa or using some workarounds.

To edit a photo, you need to use Picasa or Picnik, a slow Flash image editor. It would be much more useful to have some basic editing options inside Picasa Web Albums, so you can quickly retouch your photos.

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

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