Google News Badges

Google News added a feature that could encourage users to read more: collectible badges. "The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends," informs Google.


Google created more than 500 badges, so it's very likely that you'll collect at least one of them if you visit Google News frequently. Badges reward people that constantly read articles on a certain topic, so you're more likely to receive a badge if you read 3-4 articles a day about Google than if you read 10 articles about Google every 3-4 days.

While this feature could encourage users to visit Google News more often, the main purpose is to find people that know a lot of things about certain topics. "Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are," suggests Google.

Instead of manually adding your favorite topics to your profile, you could add Google News badges. It's one way to show your expertise and it could be useful if Google plans to integrate Aardvark with Google+ and launch a social Q&A service.

Badges also help you find your favorite Google News topics and add customized sections to the homepage. Google News now uses sliders to let you fine tune your personalized hompepage.

If you don't like badges, there's an option in the Google News settings page that lets you disable this feature.

{ Thanks, Jason. }

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Google Tests an Interface Optimized for Infinite Scrolling

Alon Laudon spotted a new experimental interface for Google's results pages. The most important change is that most navigation elements continue to be visible even when you scroll down. The navigation bar, the search box and the search options sidebar have a fixed position, which means that you no longer have scroll to the top of the page to edit the query or switch to a specialized search engine.


The new interface seems to set the stage for a fluid design that removes pagination and replaces it with infinite scrolling. In fact, most the changes are already available in Google Image Search, which uses infinite scrolling.

Alon also noticed a new UI for Instant Preview. "Page preview is a little different - the button appears to the side of the result text preview instead of to the side of the result webpage name. The site also doesn't pop up the preview when you simply click something inside the text, you have to hover over the magnifying glass icon."


{ Thanks, Alon. }

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I'm Feeling Lucky, the Book

You must have seen this message when installing Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer: "Please read this carefully. It's not the usual Yada Yada."


If you've ever used orkut, you probably remember the famous error message: "Bad, bad server. No donut for you."


Remember Mentalplex, Google's first April Fools' Day joke?


What about the "10 things Google has found to be true"?


All of these were written by Doug Edwards, Google's director of consumer marketing and brand management from November 1999 to March 2005. Doug was "the voice of Google", the one who wrote the text for Google's corporate pages and FAQs. He's now the author of the book "I'm Feeling Lucky" (Google Books, Amazon), which tells the story of the five years he spent at Google.


"Google was becoming my own personal publishing platform. (...) We had built a global bully pulpit and my voice rolled forth from it, My thoughts, my ideas, my imprecations would be seen by more people than read the New York Times or watched a network newscast. I was the man behind the curtain giving voice to the all-knowing Oz, and I tried not to let it go to my head," remembers Doug.

He came up with the name "AdWords", a cross between "AdsDirect" and "BuyWords", two other names suggested for Google's online ad service.

Doug was the marketing directer of a company whose founders didn't want to spend too much money on marketing. "Efficiency. Frugality. Integrity." These were Google's most important principles. "Growing by word of mouth suited Larry and Sergey's animosity toward advertising. They scoffed at profligate startups and their Superbowl spots, because TV ads lacked accountability. (...) 'If we can't win on quality', [Larry] said quietly, 'we shouldn't win at all.' In his view, winning by marketing alone would be deceitful, because it would mean people had been tricked into using an inferior service against their own best interests."

Actually, Google created a marketing department because "a board member or a friend from Stanford had insisted the founders needed people to do staff that wasn't engineering."

Douglas shares a lot of interesting things about the early days of Google, when the company struggled to rewrite Google's original code, build a scalable infrastructure, convince major portals like Yahoo and AOL to use Google's search technology and find a way to monetize search. Google started with a great idea, but turning a research project into a successful company wasn't easy. Hiring smart people and creating a flat organization that replaced bureaucracy with meritocracy helped a lot. "Great things would come from packing [engineers] tightly together so that ideas bounced into one another, colliding and recombining in new, more patent ways," remembers Douglas.

Google has always been the anti-corporation, where you could question authority and where engineers were in the driving seat. That's probably the reason why "don't be evil" became Google's mantra. As Google became a bigger company, "don't be evil" helped Google stay true to itself. Even when Google did evil things, like testing ads mixed with search results, the mantra was always there to show the right path.

Douglas had an increasingly important role: from a marketing director that tried to promote Google without spending too much money to the voice of Google, the one who wrote or adjusted most of the text from Google's pages. He questioned many decisions of Google's co-founders, from adding daily doodles to creating an ad service that didn't require moderation, but he later realized that they were great ideas. A former marketing manager at Mercury News, Douglas had to change a lot of habits at Google, while learning a lot in the process.

His decision to leave the company came after he realized that a major Google reorganization made his role unnecessary. "I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy." Douglas thinks that Google's main flaw is the "impatience with those not quick enough to grasp the obvious truth of Google's vision." After leaving the company, he found himself "impatient with the way the world works" and discovered a lot of problems in everyday life. "Smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything."

That's one of the most important things about Google: the motivation to make things better at a global scale. Creating a better browser, a better mail service, an ad service built around relevant ads, a translation service that constantly improves shows that Google cares a lot about finding the right answers to the important problems.

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Gmail's Friend Suggest Algorithm

A recent Google paper [PDF] offers a lot of interesting information about an algorithm used by Gmail to suggest friends and to create contact groups.

Analyzing the outgoing and incoming messages, Gmail creates a social graph for each user. "We call the hypergraph composed of all of the edges leading into or out of a single user node that user's egocentric network. (...) Edges in the implicit social graph have both direction and weight. The direction of an edge is determined by whether it was formed by an outgoing email sent by the user, or an incoming email received by the user. There may be both outgoing and incoming edges joining a user and an implicit group, if the user has both sent and received email from the group. We consider a user to have received mail from a group by joining the sender of the mail and the other co-recipients into an implicit group. (...) The weight of an edge is determined by the recency and frequency of email interactions between the user and the group."

The social graph exists, even if it's not very obvious and not many Gmail features use it. The Friend Suggest algorithm uses the implicit groups to suggest contacts when you send a message to multiple recipients ("Don't forget Bob!") and to find contacts that are added by mistake to a list of recipients ("Got the wrong Bob?"). The two features have recently graduated from Gmail Labs.


"Our algorithm is inspired by the observation that, although users are reluctant to expend the eff ort to create explicit contact groups, they nonetheless implicitly cluster their contacts into groups via their interactions with them."

According to Google, more than 10% of the Gmail messages are sent to more than one recipient and more than 4% of the messages are sent to 5 or more recipients. All of these messages allow Google to automatically cluster contacts into groups that change dynamically.

Google says that Friend Suggest could have many other uses, "such as identifying trusted recommenders for online recommendation systems, or improving content sharing between users in various online contents."

{ via Greg Linden }

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An Easy Way to Find Chrome Web Apps

Mihai Parparita, who is now a Chrome engineer, wrote a Chrome extension that lets you find apps from the Chrome Web Store without visiting the store. The extension simply adds a plus icon to the address bar when you visit a site that has a corresponding app in the Chrome Web Store.


"Discovery (i.e., how a user finds apps to install) is an interesting aspect of app stores. In some ways, discovery is not necessary: a significant appeal of the store is that it catalogs all the apps, so if the user is looking for a todo list or Twitter client, it's pretty obvious what to search for. However, that assumes that the user has a specific need in mind already, and is aware that that class of application exists," explains Mihai.

For now, Mihai's extension is just an experiment. The list of supported apps is included in a text file, which is incomplete and has to be updated. One of the advantages of using a static list is that the extension doesn't send your browsing history to a server. Another advantage is that it's much easier to find matches for the sites you've already visited. After installing the extension, a page titled "there's a Web app for that" will suggest some apps for the sites you're visiting frequently.


It's important to mention that the Chrome Web Store only lists official hosted apps. "If your hosted app is listed in the Chrome Web Store, you must prove that you control each domain specified in [the app field]," informs Google. There's a workaround for this, as the unofficial Google Music app shows: linking to a local HTML file that redirects to the app's URL. The Google Music app is a packaged app, not a hosted app, so Mihai's extension doesn't include it.

Right now, most of the apps are just shortcuts and the main benefit is that they're easily accessible from the new tab page. Some apps offer additional features and a small number of apps are actually full-fledged extensions (packaged apps). Google doesn't categorize apps and doesn't inform users if an app works offline.

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YouTube Cosmic Panda

YouTube tests a new interface code-named Cosmic Panda. There are many cosmetic changes: videos are centered, player's controls are now black, video thumbnails are a lot bigger, suggestions are displayed below the video, profile photos are displayed next to the comments, channels and playlists have a completely new layout.




Probably the most interesting thing about the new interface is a Chrome-only feature that lets you play a video in the background while you visit a channel. YouTube is more fluid and I expect to see a similar feature when you perform a search and when you click "view all comments".

The new interface can be enabled and disabled at youtube.com/cosmicpanda.

{ Thanks, Jason and Greg. }

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Try Blogger's New Interface

Google promised a new Blogger interface back in March and started a limited test in April. "The new design is not only cleaner and more modern, but it also uses Google Web Toolkit, delivering the latest in web technology."

The new interface is now available in Blogger in Draft, but it looks quite different. "Over the last couple of months, we've made significant improvements to our new user interface. First and foremost, we've incorporated your feedback and made numerous fixes based on that feedback. Also, we've updated the look and feel of our new design, inspired by Google's newest design evolutions," explains Google. Blogger uses Ajax, so all the pages load a lot faster, including the post editor. Unfortunately, Blogger is still very slow when you perform a search and try to display posts or comments.


Blogger's new UI is cleaner and it offers additional information about your posts: the number of pageviews. Tabs have been replaced by a vertical menu and the list of labels is now a drop-down. The post editor is much better, especially if you use the default view. Blogger's new editor takes up most of the page and post settings are now included in a sidebar.


There's a lot of white space in the new interface, buttons aren't big enough to be readable and Blogger includes too much information that's not very useful: the total number of published comments and the total number of pageviews. The new interface is a mixed bag: it's modern, clean, faster and more powerful, but there are many things that need to be changed before replacing the existing interface.

You can try the new UI at draft.blogger.com and you also have the option to make it the default interface.

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Quickly Add a YouTube Video to a Playlist

YouTube's embeddable player added a new feature that lets you quickly update your playlists with new videos. Click the arrow next to the "plus" button and you can add the video to one of your playlists. You can't create new playlists from the player and you can only see the first 10-15 playlists, depending on the player's height. I couldn't find a way to scroll the list.


Here's a video you're probably anxious to add to your playlists (there's no "remove" button in the player, sorry about that!):

It's surprising that the embeddable player doesn't have like/dislike buttons and you have to go to YouTube's video page for such a simple action. There's also a contextual menu that lets you copy the video's URL and the embedding code, but YouTube uses the old Flash-only code.

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Offline Maps and Transit Navigation in Google Maps for Android

The Google Maps app is a good reason to buy an Android phone. No other Google Maps version offers 3D maps, free turn-by-turn navigation, voice-guided navigation for walking directions or offline caching. No other Google Maps app is updated so frequently with cool features.

For instance, Google Maps 5.7 for Android combined Google Maps Navigation with transit directions and introduced an innovative feature called Transit Navigation. "Now, GPS turn-by-turn (or in this case, stop-by-stop) navigation is available for public transit directions in 400+ cities around the globe with Transit Navigation. Transit Navigation uses GPS to determine your current location along your route and alerts you when it's time to get off or make a transfer. This is particularly helpful if you're in a city where you don't speak the language and can't read the route maps or understand the announcements."

It's a really useful feature and the coverage is continually expanding. I suspect that Google Maps will find other clever ways to use notifications: location-based reminders, recommendation alerts ("notify me when I'm near an Italian restaurant"), social alerts ("notify me when I'm near a restaurant recommended by my friends").

Google Maps for Android also added a navigation icon next to the driving and walking directions, a photo viewer for Google Places pages and icons that categorize search suggestions.

Probably the most useful new feature is buried inside Google Maps Labs: on-demand maps caching. Tap the "menu" button, select "More" and then "Labs". Enable "download map area", long press on the map around the area you want save, tap on the bubble and select "Download map area". Google Maps will download the map area within 10 miles (16.09 kilometers) of the selected location and outline it. This feature only saves map tiles, so you won't be able to see satellite imagery, Street View images or get driving directions while offline.

The 10 miles limit can't be changed, but at least you can manage your downloaded maps. Use the "Cache settings" option from the menu and select "Downloaded map areas". You can rename map areas, delete them and quickly visualize them.

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Blogger and Picasa Web Could Be Rebranded

Mashable reports that Blogger and Picasa Web Albums could change their names and become Google Blogs and Google Photos. "Google intends to retire several non-Google name brands and rename them as Google products. The move is part of a larger effort to unify its brand for the public launch of Google+."

While Google Photos makes a lot sense, replacing Blogger with Google Blogs is not a great idea. When people say "Google Blogs", they refer to the long list of Google's corporate blogs. "Google Blogs" is already used for Google Blog Search, but only on the homepage.

On the other hand, Blogger could be redesigned and use interface elements from Google+, Blogger's profiles could be replaced by Google Profiles, the commenting system could be revamped and integrated with Google+.

One of the reasons why Picasa Web Albums didn't improve too much is that it has always been perceived as Picasa's online extension. It wasn't a standalone photo sharing service and many of its features required Picasa. You couldn't upload more than 5 photos, download albums or edit photos without installing Picasa. Google considered changing Picasa Web's name back in 2008.

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Google Tests Google+ for Domains

A reader of this blog spotted some interface elements which show that Google+ will be available in Google Apps.

I discovered it by accident: I was logged into Google+ with my Google Account and into my Google Apps account as secondary, with multiple sign-on. For some reason Google decided to log me off all my Google accounts. At that point, I made the initial login with my Google Apps account and secondary with my Google Account. I was unaware that Google+ was open on another tab. I tried to reshare something publicly, and was confused that it was saying Paralaus where it should be saying Public. Picking that options told me that only "People on Paralaus can find and view" my post. It was then that I realized I was able to use Google+ with my Google Apps account in a hybrid mode where I was not fully logged in but some elements were available; almost as a preview.

Right now, there's no support for Buzz or Profiles in Google Apps, but that should change in the near future. Google's John Costigan confirmed this: "We're actively working on making Profiles (and Google+) available for Google Apps - it should be available in the coming months."

Google+ is a very important project for Google, so it will improve rapidly and it will no longer require invitations. Some speculate that Google+ will be available for everyone at the end of the month.

{ Thanks, Ufuk. }

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Google Multiple Sign-in Supports 10 Accounts

When Google started to support multiple sign-in, many people complained that the feature was limited to 3 Google accounts. Now you can sign in to 10 accounts at the same time and use services like Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Reader.

After signing in to 10 accounts, Google shows this error message: "You are already signed in to the maximum number of accounts. If you want to use another account you must sign out of all Google Accounts then sign in to the account you want."


The percentage of Google users that have so many accounts must be quite small, but this feature would be really useful if it supported more Google services. Some Google users have different accounts for AdSense, AdWords, Blogger, App Engine etc.

{ Thanks, Q B. }

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Google Realtime Search, Temporarily Unavailable

It's not the most popular Google service, but Google Realtime is useful as an alternative to Twitter's search engine. The service is no longer available at the moment, the "Realtime" option disappeared from Google's sidebar and google.com/realtime returns a 404 error. Google says that this is just temporary. "We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We're exploring how to incorporate our recently launched Google+ project into this functionality going forward, so stay tuned."


Google+ doesn't offer a search feature for messages yet, but it should be available soon. It's strange to see that Google had to disable a service to add support for a new site.

Search Engine Land also reports that Google's Wonder Wheel feature is no longer available. "[Google's] spokesperson said that the search tool was removed due to the 'initial stage' of the Google site redesign announced [last] week."

It's likely that both Google Realtime and Wonder Wheel had to be redesigned, but Google didn't want to delay the launch of the new interface until they're ready. When Google Instant was launched, many of the advanced features were not available, but some of them were added after a few weeks.

Update: The real explanation for shutting down Realtime Search is that Google's agreement with Twitter has expired, so Google no longer has access to the Firehose. "While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google," informed Google. That means Twitter will no longer have a privileged status and Realtime Search will become less useful. Microsoft and Yahoo still have access to Twitter's private APIs.

{ Thanks, Christian. }

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How Google+ Transformed Picasa Web

Even though it's not obvious, after you enable Google+ in your Google account, Picasa Web turns into a completely new app with a different set of rules. Some of these rules make Google's photo sharing service unusable for many existing users and it's important to know them in advance.

Picasa Web's face recognition feature helped you organize your photos. The integration between Picasa Web and Google Contacts made it easy to associate your photos with some of your contacts. By the default, the name tags from your public albums were hidden, but you could also hide the name tags from unlisted albums. When you join Google+, all of this changes. Adding a name tag to a photo is no longer a private action: your contact will get a notification that you tagged him. He will get access to your photo and to the entire album that includes the photo.

"You'll receive an email letting you know you've been tagged in a photo. By default, name tags by people in your circles are automatically approved. You can view or remove tags at any time on the photos homepage in Google+ as well as the Photos tab on your Google profile," informs Google. Name tags change their visibility too: if you have access to an album, you can see all the name tags from that album. You're not the only one who can add tags to your photos: anyone in your extended network at Google+ (friends and friends of friends) can add tags.

While these changes could improve Google's face recognition software and allow Google to add new social features, transforming Picasa Web's private tagging into Facebook's photo tagging is a radical shift. Sharing an entire album with someone just because you've added a tag is something that might baffle a lot of Picasa Web users who don't realize that Picasa Web is now Google+ Photos.

The good news is that the existing name tags remain unchanged and your contacts won't be able to see your albums just because you've tagged them at some point. But that's true only for the name tags added before joining Google+.


The new version of Picasa Web for Google+ has another drawback: you can't comment on a photo of a Google+ user if you don't have a Google+ account. Even if the photo is included in a public album, it's still not possible to write a comment without joining Google+. The explanation is that "comments on photos are shared across Picasa Web Albums and Google+".

I suspect that joining Google+ will be required if you want to use Picasa Web Albums. As Alexander Kunz noticed, this is similar to an update that required users to link Picasa Web with Google Profiles to be able to add comments or share photos. "I think it's pretty safe to say that qualifies as blackmailing. In the end, the users won: after a storm of protest in the Picasa help forums, the requirement was taken away," says Alexander. It's clear that it was just a temporary victory.


Now when you share an album with your contacts, they're allowed to reshare it with other people, so you can no longer tightly control the visibility of an album without constantly monitoring the access list. Google Docs has a similar rule, but you can change the sharing settings so that "only the owner can change the permissions." Google has an explanation: "to encourage the natural flow of conversation, once you sign up for Google+, all albums can be reshared by people that have access to the album - those people on the album's 'Shared with' list in Picasa Web Albums."

It's worth pointing out that the new Picasa Web adds some benefits (unlimited free storage for photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels, easier photo sharing) and that you can migrate your photos to a different Google Account, but it's sad to see that Picasa Web is now a Google+ app which no longer works well standalone and that users can no longer use advanced features without sharing their photos.

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Preview Gmail's New Interface

Gmail found an interesting way to test the new Google+ interface: using themes. If you go to the Themes page and select "Preview" or "Preview (dense)", you'll be able to try the upcoming Gmail interface. "Why two themes? Our new interface will eventually expand dynamically to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer," explains Google.


The new interface uses the same color scheme from Google Maps, Google Calendar and Google Search, the same gray header and blue search button. Since Gmail has two search buttons, Google had to use labels to distinguish between the button that lets you search your message and the Google Search button. The interface is cleaner, since it uses a lot of white space to separate the different sections.

Even if you don't enable the new themes, you'll still see some subtle design changes: many links are now buttons (navigation links, "Back to message list"), the "Refresh" button uses a familiar icon, the "More actions" button changed the label to "More" and Gmail's footer is much cleaner. These are just the first UI updates, so we'll see many other changes until "Preview" becomes the default theme.


Gmail is a complex application and it's difficult to simplify the interface and make it more consistent, especially when you consider the numerous Gmail Labs features and themes. "You can expect some updated themes that embody the same design principles but are better suited to working in a dark environment, use a different color palette, or include the illustrations that we know many of you love to see around your inbox," mentions Gmail's blog.

It should be obvious right now that Google+ is more than a social network or a social layer, it's a Google-wide initiative that affects both the form and the functionality of Google's applications. It's actually a new Google, a social Google that tries to offer cutting-edge apps and a cohesive experience.

{ Thanks, Maarten, James, Yasar, סמנה, Mushaf, Kai, Anthony, Jason, Kartik, David and Karol. }

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