Google's Homepage Promotes Gmail

Google's homepage has briefly displayed a promotional message that encouraged visitors to try Gmail: "Switch to Gmail. Free email from Google". The message linked to a page titled "Welcome to Gmail" that shows some of the advantages of using Gmail: lots of space, mobile access, less spam, labels and search.


"Gmail is built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun. Creating an account is quick and free."


The page doesn't include a Gmail screenshot, a video that shows Gmail in action, but it invites visitors to create an account.

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Gmail Smart Labels

Gmail Labs has a new feature for organizing your messages: Smart Labels. Many people create filters that label messages from mailing lists, newsletters, so Google decided to use artificial intelligence algorithms to categorize messages. Right now, there are only three smart labels: bulk (for newsletters), notifications (for confirmation messages, alerts) and forums (for mailing lists). By default, all the messages labeled as "bulk" are automatically archived, but you can change this setting.


"Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you'll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox," explains Google.

In fact, when you create a filter, Google shows an additional option: category. You can choose from: bulk, forums, notifications, personal, promotions. The first three categories already have corresponding smart labels and all the messages classified as "promotions" are labeled "bulk". The "personal" category includes the rest of your messages.


Google's categorization algorithms aren't perfect, so you may find messages that don't belong to one of three categories, but they're labeled as "notifications" or "bulk". Use the "labels" drop-down to remove the labels that are incorrectly added and help Google improve its algorithms.

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Google Docs Brings Back Details View

The latest design refresh of the Google Docs homepage added many useful features, but also made some controversial changes. Google decided to hide useful information like the last modified date and the list of collaborators from the list view because it was available in the sidebar.

If you missed the old interface, you can now switch to the details view and see some additional information next to the filename.


There's also a small icon that lets you temporarily hide the sidebar. For some reason, Google Docs doesn't permanently hide the sidebar when you click on the arrows.

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What's New in Chrome 10?

Google Chrome 10 is ready for primetime and it comes with a surprising number of new features. Here are some of them:

1. The Options dialog is now a web page that opens in a new tab. Chrome has one less modal dialog and the new Options page is better suited for netbooks. Another advantage is that each section of the Options page has a permalink that can be bookmarked.

Even if Chrome doesn't have too many customizable settings, there's a search box that lets you quickly find an option. Try searching for "cookies" and you'll notice that Chrome finds settings that aren't immediately obvious.


2. You can now change the default page zoom value. Go to the Options page and select "Under the hood" (or paste chrome://settings/advanced in the address bar) and change the "page zoom" value. The default value is 100%, but you can pick values like 120% or 144%, which are useful if you want to connect your computer to a TV.

3. The same section of the Options page lets you change the minimum font size. Click "customize fonts" and choose one of the values that are available for the minimum font size.

4. Synchronize passwords and use them from any computer, as long as you can install Google Chrome. The new option is not enabled by default and it requires your confirmation before saving your passwords to your Google Account. There's even an extra security feature that lets you choose a custom encryption passphrase, so that your passwords are safe even if someone guesses your Google Account password. For advanced features and cross-browser functionality, try LastPass.


5. Reorder the apps from the new tab page using drag and drop. This option was available for the frequently visited pages and you can now use it to change the order of your favorite apps.


6. A new version of V8, Chrome's JavaScript engine, includes a better compilation infrastructure codenamed Crankshaft. "By using aggressive optimizations, Crankshaft dramatically improves the performance of compute-intensive JavaScript applications - often by more than a factor of two! This will give users a faster and more responsive experience loading web pages and applications built with complex JavaScript."

7. Chrome 10 comes with hardware acceleration for Web videos. "Traditionally, web browsers relied entirely on the CPU to render web page content. With capable GPUs becoming an integral part of even the smallest of devices and with rich media such as video and 3D graphics playing an increasingly important role to the web experience, attention has turned on finding ways to make more effective utilization of the underlying hardware to achieve better performance and power savings. There's clear indication that getting the GPU directly involved with compositing the contents of a web page can result in very significant speedups. The largest gains are to be had from eliminating unecessary (and very slow) copies of large data, especially copies from video memory to system memory. The most obvious candidates for such optimizations are the <video> element and the WebGL canvas, both of which can generate their results in areas of memory that that CPU doesn't have fast access to," explains Google.

Test GPU acceleration for videos at YouTube's HTML5 site. Adobe Flash 10.2 also added full GPU acceleration for videos and YouTube is one of the sites that support this feature, so you can compare Flash 10.2 videos and HTML5 videos to see which version uses less processing power.

8. Chrome 10 for Windows finally sandboxes the built-in Adobe Flash plugin. This is one of the reasons why Google decided to bundle the plugin with Chrome.

9. If you didn't like Gmail's notification feature because it didn't work when you closed Chrome, you'll find it much more useful when Gmail's app adds support for background pages, a feature that's now available in Chrome. "Apps and extensions that use the new background feature can continue to run in the background — even if the user closes down all of Chrome's windows. Background apps will continue to run until Chrome exits. The next time Chrome starts up, any background windows that were previously running will also be re-launched. These windows are not going to be visible but they will be able to perform tasks like checking for server-side changes and pre-emptively loading content into local storage," explains Google.

When you install the first app or extension that supports backgrounding (like this one), Chrome adds a new icon to the system tray (Windows and Linux) and a new entry in the context menu of the Chrome icon from the Dock (Mac). The new icon and context menu entry let you go to a background app, open the task manger or the options page.



10. Chrome disables certain outdated plugins by default and provides an option to update to the latest version. Popular software like Adobe Reader, Java or Apple QuickTime have many security vulnerabilities that are frequently exploited in the wild because users don't install the versions that fix these issues.

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Google Fast Flip for Mobile Web Search

Google calls it Instant Preview for Mobile Search, but it's actually a new interface based on Google Fast Flip that lets you preview search results. "Starting today, Google Instant Previews is available on mobile for Android (2.2+) and iOS (4.0+) devices across 38 languages. Similar to the desktop version of Instant Previews, you can visually compare search results from webpage snapshots, making it easier to choose the right result faster, especially when you have an idea of the content you'd like to see," explains Google.


Google replaced the stars that allowed you to bookmark results with the new zoom icons for Instant Preview. If you click on a zoom icon, you'll see a completely new interface that lets you preview one search result at a time. It's interesting to see that Google's screenshots show the mobile versions of the web pages.

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Google's New Snippets for Twitter Pages

Google tests a new feature that replaces the snippets for Twitter account pages with the most recent message and a small thumbnail. For some reason, Google doesn't show the most recent tweet from Lady Gaga despite being sent three days ago.



With the advent of rich snippets, Plus Boxes and real-time information that enhances snippets, Google tries to show even more useful information to help you decide if a result is relevant and to quickly answer the most obvious questions.

{ via Tim Cohn. }

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Unedited Google Profile Pictures, Publicly Available

If you want to upload a profile photo to your Google Profile and use the cropping feature to edit the photo, it's important to know that the original version is publicly available. François Beaufort noticed that you can go to http://profiles.google.com/s2/photos/profile/me (replace me with the profile ID) and get the highest resolution of the profile picture as it was uploaded by the user.

When you upload a photo, Google says that "the full photo will be stored in your profile photos album, but we will display just the square crop on your profile page." By default, the profile photos album is not publicly accessible so it was reasonable to assume that the original photos can't be accessed by anyone but you. (Update: As Brian Rose points out, the profile photos album is unlisted if you haven't connected Picasa Web with Google Profiles and it's public otherwise.)


Until Google fixes this issue, it's probably a good idea to use a photo editor to crop and resize the image before uploading it to Google Profiles.

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Add Multiple Google Profile Photos

The new Google Profiles interface lets you upload multiple profile photos and switch between them with a simple click. Visitors can see all the photos you've uploaded, so you must be careful when you replace a profile photo. It's not enough to click "change photo" and upload the new image: you should also click on the image and delete the previous profile photo.


Profile photos are stored in a Picasa Web album, just like the photos from the Scrapbook section. The main difference is that profile photos can be cropped or edited in Picnik.

If you already have a Google Profile, it's a good idea to upload a new profile photo. The new interface uses bigger photos, so your old avatar looks pixelated.

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Google Tests Enhanced Suggestions

Google's search suggestions are useful, but they're only displayed if many people search for them. If you type a "long tail" query, Google doesn't show suggestions and can't even finish the words you type.

Adam Harris, a reader of this blog, noticed that Google tests an enhanced version of Google Suggest that autocompletes words. For example, if you search for [javascript eval] and you add "conca" to your query, Google doesn't normally show suggestions. The new version of Google Suggest autocompletes the word you started to type and guesses that you wanted to use the word "concatenate".



Note: the first screenshot also shows a feature of a Chrome extension for Evernote.

{ Thanks, Adam. }

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Google Profiles Has a New Interface

Google Profiles has a new user interface that emphasizes the profile photo, includes many new sections and uses encrypted connections. You can now click on a section of your profile to edit it, add "10 words that describe you best", bragging rights, relationship information, structured information about your education and employment, a scrapbook with your favorite photos. Another change is that you can now hide the Google Buzz tab from your profile.




The new Google Profiles is closer to a social networking feature, but it's just one piece of the puzzle.

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A New Google Error Page

Google has a new 404 error page that's displayed when you type a Google address that can't be found (for example: google.com/hosting). The new error page is supposed to be funny, but it's not useful. Google's laconic page informs visitors that "the requested URL was not found on this server. That's all we know."


Google actually knows more than that. The previous version of the error page showed a search results page that provided useful suggestions.


{ via Google Blogoscoped Forum }

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Picasa Web's New Homepage

Picasa Web's homepage has been redesigned to emphasize the photos recently uploaded by the people you're following. The homepage no longer displays all your albums, so you'll only be able to see the most recent 8 albums.

"This new design centers around photos that are interesting to you. We wanted to give you faster access to the newest photos from your family and friends along with some great photos from the talented Picasa community. When you log in to Picasa Web Albums, you will not only see your own albums, but albums that have been shared with you, the latest public albums from people you follow, and featured photos from the Picasa community right on your home page," explains Google's Ping Chen.


While "recent activity" has always been a section on the homepage, now you can no ignore it. YouTube's homepage has recently switched to a feed view, a stream of activities popularized by Facebook.

If you don't like the new homepage, bookmark this URL: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos or click "My Photos" when visiting the homepage.

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Many Gmail Users Can't Find Their Messages

Imagine loading Gmail and noticing that all your messages have been deleted. This is a real problem for many Gmail users who thought that they lost all of their messages. Here's one of the many reports from Gmail's forum:

Yes, whatever the error is on Google's end (and it clearly is that, not a hack, unless it's some kind of inside hack) it's basically reset my account so it's like a brand-new Gmail account. My contacts are intact, but nothing else--the folders have reset to default, my signature line is blank, the "theme" is changed back to the default and--of course--every single email from the last 7 years has vanished completely.

The Google Apps Status page mentions that "this issue affects less than 0.08% of the Google Mail userbase" and "Google engineers are working to restore full access". The users that are affected "will be temporarily unable to sign in".


This is a really important problem for Google and one of the biggest Gmail issues ever since Google's email service was released, back in 2004.

Update: A Google engineer says that the "accounts that are affected are currently fully disabled. We're in the process of changing this to be a Gmail only disable so you should regain access to other Google services soon. This will also mean email to these accounts stops bouncing and gets queued up for later delivery instead."

Update 2: Google says that only 0.02% of the Gmail users were affected. "In some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That's what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we've been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue. To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they're protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it's taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds."

{ via Engadget }

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Google and the Value of Social Networking (Part 3)

Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler behind Gmail and a former Facebook employee, answered a question about the rivalry between Google and Facebook.

There is an interesting competitive element there because Facebook is growing very fast, and obviously, Google would like to compete in the social-networking space. They have finally realized its importance, and they are finding themselves, maybe for the first time, with the realization that there is someone who is way, way ahead of them.

There was a moment with Microsoft that they assumed that Google was like, "Well, yeah, search isn't that important. And if it does become important, we'll just hire some people and we'll take over." They kind of thought it was something they could win really easily, and they underestimated the difficulty of it. I kind of feel like Google may have reached that same moment with social networking, where they realized, A, it's important, and B, it's really hard to win.

Paul is not the first ex-Googler who thinks that Google didn't understand the importance of social networking. Another former Googler said that "there is some belief at Google that their DNA is not perfectly suited to build social products", while Aaron Iba, who worked on the Orkut team, noticed that "social networking [was viewed] as a frivolous form of entertainment rather than a real utility".

{ via Avinash }

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Videos From the Old Googleplex

In February 1999, Google moved from Susan Wojcicki's garage to "new digs at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just eight employees" and in August 1999, Google relocated to Mountain View: 2400 E. Bayshore. Five years later, Google moved to "the new Googleplex at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, giving 800+ employees a campus environment."

Former Google employee Doug Edwards posted some videos from November 1999 of the old Googleplex. At that time, Google's search engine was only available in English, it didn't include ads or image search results and it was the only Google service.

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