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January 28 2012
Google+ and the Post-Web Google
There are still people that visit those outdated sites and many are coming from search engines like Google. Despite Google's efforts to have a comprehensive index, there's a growing subset of the Web it can't properly index and that's Facebook. Sure, Google indexes a lot of Facebook pages, but that's like trying to find your keys in a dark room. Google needs Facebook's map to index all the pages and find the connections between pages and between users, but Facebook is not willing to license this valuable data to the most important competitor. Google tried to make the web social and failed, so now the only option to stay relevant is to build an alternative to Facebook's walled garden and that's Google+.
+1s are the new links, authors have profiles, companies have social pages and this new universe will try to coexist with the old Web in Google's search results. Google tried to focus on the users and find ways to make the social Web more open, but now it has to focus on itself and do everything it can to stay alive and maybe even save the Web. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but that's impossible if it can't access, understand and rank that information.
Back in 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin used links to determine the importance of a Web page. Now links and pages are no longer that important and the old rule of trying to send people to other sites as quickly as possible is difficult to apply. Showing personalized results requires understanding users better, encouraging them to share more content and create connections. In many ways, Google+ is the anti-Google and that's why it's difficult to understand some of the new features.
January 27 2012
[WinRumors] Asus working on prototype Kinect-equipped Windows 8 laptops?
We know Microsoft will launch Kinect for Windows hardware next month, but a new report claims that the software giant could be working with Asus to build that support directly into laptops. The Daily says it has "checked out" a pair of official prototype Asus laptops that include a Kinect sensor built-in. The sensor, running on a Windows 8 laptop, reportedly stretches across the top of the screen, and includes a set of LEDs at the bottom of the display.Asus released its own WAVI Xtion hardware last year, based on the same PrimeSense technology used in Kinect, so it's clear the company has experience with motion-controlled devices. Microsoft has not officially detailed its support for Kinect in Windows 8, but leaked OEM documents...
Continue reading…
Source
An amazing 3D tour of the Costa Concordia
Last week we showed you the fresh satellite imagery and tour of the wreck of the Costa Concordia. It was a great file that helped to show what happened, but now Peter Olsen (who just days ago unveiled the excellent Terra Nova models) has built an incredible 3D tour of the wreck, with the entire journey animated!
The speed has been increased to save time, so you don't have to wait 2-1/2 hours for it to finish, but it's otherwise as accurate as possible. To see it for yourself, simply visit the Costa Concordia Disaster Animation page in the Google 3D Warehouse and choose the "View in Google Earth" link.
If you're not familiar with using Tour files in Google Earth, simply click the "Double-click me!" text on the left to get it started, then click the play button at the bottom to step through the introductory slides, as seen here:
Fully animated tours like this are a great way to recreate events, and Peter is one of the best around at creating them. A similar example you might want to check out is his recreation of the 1977 Tenerife Airport disaster from a few years ago. Great job, Peter!
Google Music Allows Downloads, YouTube Videos
Google is providing two new perks for Google Music users, including the ability to shuttle their tracks from the music locker and share YouTube videos.
Users have been able to upload up to 20,000 songs to the Google Music locker and play them on their Android smartphone or tablet since the full, non-beta service launched last November.
However, once the music was there, that's it. Users could simply stream tracks. Until today -- now users have another way to back up their music.
Going forward, users can download all songs from Google Music, including songs they uploaded themselves to those purchased in the Music store (up to two downloads per song for Music store tunes). Downloads will be formatted as MP3 files at 320kbps.
Google provided instructions for downloading Music store cuts and their uploaded tracks from its cloud.
The other cool feature is the ability to share YouTube videos along with songs users uploaded and chose to share with their Circles on Google+.
Just click the dropdown menu next to the song title to share the video, which will look like this:
It's not clear how many Google users are using Google Music, but I've uploaded a few free albums and shared some tracks from them via Google+.
The problem is that anything I wish to listen to I can stream right from YouTube, I often do so right from Google+ as a matter of fact. So it seems like a waste of money for me to buy versions of songs I can listen to whenever I want.
Of course, anti-piracy advocates are appalled, but most of the rightholders are simply combating copyrighted videos on YouTube, not studio cuts of songs. Like Billy Joel says, Don't ask me why:
Google+ Now Open for Teens
Google's VP Bradley Horowitz mentioned that there are a few tweaks and new default settings for teens. By default, only the people from teens' circles can trigger notifications and comment on their public posts. If someone outside a teen's circles joins a hangout, Google+ temporarily removes the teen from the hangout and gives him a chance to rejoin.
Teens and young adults are the most active Internet users on the planet. And surprise, surprise: they're also human beings who enjoy spending time with friends and family. Put these two things together and it's clear that teens will increasingly connect online. Unfortunately, online sharing is still second-rate for this age group.
In life, for instance, teens can share the right things with just the right people (like classmates, parents or close ties). Over time, the nuance and richness of selective sharing even promotes authenticity and accountability. Sadly, today's most popular online tools are rigid and brittle by comparison, so teens end up over-sharing with all of their so-called "friends."
With Google+, we want to help teens build meaningful connections online. We also want to provide features that foster safety alongside self-expression. Today we're doing both, for everyone who's old enough for a Google Account.
It's interesting that the updated form for creating a Google Account doesn't automatically create a profile and doesn't add the user to Google+ if he's not at least 18 years old.
{ Thanks, Oskar. }
January 26 2012
Resources to support a new and open world for learning
Recently, we decided to gather our resources and lessons learned into one place for educators everywhere. “Google in Education: A New and Open World for Learning” highlights how people are using Google resources to enhance teaching and learning. This booklet isn’t your typical annual report; it’s a living document for educators to use year-round. We’ve also revamped our website, google.com/edu, to be a one-stop shop for teachers, students, parents and organizations to explore all of our offerings. We’ve launched a Google+ page, where everyone can stay updated on our educational tools, products and programs, and join the conversation.
To develop all of these new materials, we went straight to the source, relying on dozens of educators to provide stories and feedback. We hope these resources will inspire and enable teachers, while affirming our commitment to increasing access to an excellent education for all.
Thanks to educators, students and supporters everywhere for helping to extend our spirit of lifelong learning into classrooms around the globe.
For more information about Google in Education, visit www.google.com/edu/about, and to stay updated on the world of education at Google and connect with fellow educators, follow us on Google+.
Making the web speedier and safer with SPDY
Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google's servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.
We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we're actively working on a full featured mod-spdy for Apache. In addition, Strangeloop, Amazon, and Cotendo have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.
Given SPDY's rapid adoption rate, we’re working hard on acceptance tests to help validate new implementations. Our best practices document can also help website operators make their sites as speedy as possible.
With the help of Mozilla and other contributors, we’re pushing hard to finalize and implement SPDY draft-3 in early 2012, as standardization discussions for SPDY will start at the next meeting of the IETF.
We look forward to working even closer with the community to improve SPDY and make the Web faster!
To learn more about SPDY, see the link to a Tech Talk here, with slides here.
Google Earth 6.2 Released with Google+
Google not only released all new more beautiful imagery of the Earth today, but they also released a whole new version of Google Earth - version 6.2. You can download it here. The biggest news is the integration with Google+:
Here is a quick list of the new features:
- Integration with Google+ - you can now sign into your Google+ account and you can Share your current view with Google+. This feature could have meant that your "My Places" content would be shared on different machines, but apparently they have not implemented that capability yet.
- New Search Interface - Google has made substantial changes to the way searching is done in Google Earth. The results look more like Google Maps. You can also now get walking and biking directions just like in Google Maps. Search results also happen dynamically. They have put a lot of effort to updating the search capabilities in Google Earth to bring it in line with Google Maps. The font is much bigger - actually, it seems a bit too big. You may need to increase the width of your sidebar to be able to read the results better. See screenshot below.
- New graphic rendering - Google has made changes including turning on anisotropic filtering by default.
- New Imagery in Google Earth Mobile version - The new version of the imagery of the Earth also appears in the mobile version of Google Earth.
- Improvements to Network Links - better handling of parallel loading of network links.
We will keep adding to this list as we find significant new features. More details from Google are available in the release notes.
Here is a screenshot of the new search results:
Google Earth 6.2: It’s a beautiful world
A seamless globe
The Google Earth globe is made from a mosaic of satellite and aerial photographs taken on different dates and under different lighting and weather conditions. Because of this variance, views of the Earth from high altitude can sometimes appear patchy.
Today, we’re introducing a new way of rendering imagery that smoothes out this quilt of images. The end result is a beautiful new Earth-viewing experience that preserves the unique textures of the world’s most defining geographic landscapes—without the quilt effect. This change is being made on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Earth. While this change will appear on all versions of Google Earth, the 6.2 release provides the best viewing experience for this new data.
Share your explorations with Google+
Google Earth is a great way to virtually explore the globe, whether revisiting old haunts or checking out a future vacation spot. With the Google Earth 6.2 update, we’ve added the option to share a screenshot of your current view in Google Earth through Google+. If you’ve already upgraded to Google+, you can share images of the places you’ve virtually traveled to with your Circles, such as family, friends or your local hiking club. To try this new feature, simply sign in to your Google Account in the upper right hand corner of Google Earth and click “Share.” Images of mountains, oceans, deserts, 3D cities, your favorite pizza shop on Street View—you can now experience all these amazing places around the world with people on Google+.
Search improvements
We’ve also made some updates to the search feature in Google Earth. Aside from streamlining the visual design of the search panel, we’ve enabled the same Autocomplete feature that’s available on Google Maps. We’ve also introduced search layers, which will show all the relevant search results (not just the top ten), so now, when looking for gelato in Milano, you can see all the tasty possibilities. Finally, we’ve added biking, transit and walking directions, so if you’re itching for a change of scenery or looking for a new route for your regular commute, you can now use Google Earth to generate and visualize all your options.
Download Google Earth 6.2 and start exploring and sharing today!
(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)
Google Releases Pretty Earth
Google has just this morning released a new, prettier, version of the Earth for Google Earth. The short version is that it now looks much more Earth-like and less like a bunch of satellite and aerial photos patched onto a sphere. And, it really does look MUCH better!
Since Google Earth was first released in 2005, Google has made thousands of changes to their imagery. Changes to how the imagery looks (colors, contrast, lighting) when combined so it has a more pleasant look from space. One of the most frequent comments about Google Earth is "why are these ugly patches of rectangular images on the Earth?". Well, Google has released today a new attempt to address the problem.
Some of the changes Google has attempted to its imagery were not successful. For example when they attempted to cut images that showed away from the coastlines which removed a lot of valuable information. Google later provided access to that valuable imagery in in the historical imagery layer. Or the time they tried changing the colors in a detrimental way, which they quickly removed a few days later.
Today, Google has finally combined many different attempts, and suggestions from the Google Earth user community, and implemented a major change to the imagery that greatly improves the look of Google Earth. The most obvious change is that the "patchwork" of random-looking rectangles of imagery from different sources is no longer obvious. But, Google's new imagery is much more dramatic than is obvious. They have altered nearly all the imagery of the Earth and made major improvements to the contrast, lighting, and consistency of the imagery at all levels. And, they have used features inherent to Google Earth's abilities to transition at different zoom levels to smoothly move between imagery that is very pleasing to the eye.
These changes are subtle if you don't have access to the way things looked before.
Here are some comparison shots showing the dramatic change before and after in just a few places:
Before/After USA
Before/After Africa
Before/After China
As you can see, the improvement is dramatic when you compare the old to the new. But, once most people start using this, they'll probably quickly forget how it used to be and just accept the new look. However, we should really appreciate the huge effort Google has made to pretty up the Earth, and thank them for a job well done!
How Many Android Gadgets Do We Wish?
The Verge founder Josh Topolsky both marveled at and lamented the sheer volume of smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices trotted out at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show.
Topolsky hosted a panel where he pressed Samsung and HTC marketing executives on "whether or not technology manufacturers were simply producing too many gadgets, outpacing real consumer demand with iterative, insubstantial changes."
Complaining that there are too many mobile devices at CES is like complaining there there is a choir singing in a Christian church, but he's entitled to his opinion. More to the point, he's right.
I've made this complaint before vis-a-vis Android gadgets.
As someone who has tested literally dozens of Android smartphones and tablets since November 2009 (along with some Windows Phones, iPads and Research In Motion's Blackberry PlayBook, I can vouch for the oversaturation of gadgets based on that OS.
The problem I've come up against occurs on a personal level. My Motorola Droid X is under contract with Verizon Wireless until November 2012, though I can upgrade my hardware this August.
Every few months, I test a new Android handset and think 'This will be my next phone." The first time this happened with Samsung's Droid Charge, which blew me away by dint of its muscular feel and 4G LTE power:
I was hung up on that phone for months until the Motorola Droid Razr hit my hand last November. What a sweet freakin phone! Thin, strong, with Kevlar and 4G LTE speedy.
Who needs a Motorola Droid Bionic, essentially a faster Droid X, when you can get a Razr?
Alas, later today I will receive from Motorola its Droid Razr Maxx, the Razr with double the battery life, capable of lasting 21 hours. That's right up my alley.
And yet I fear something better will come along between now and August, when it's hardware-upgrade time.
This has happened in tablets, too. I've loved my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 ever so much until the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus stole my heart by being speedy and portable.
You see my dilemma? Maybe you think it's a nice one to have.
Google, Android OEMs and carriers like to tout the choice before consumers in the market,
Personally, I think 30 different phones are enough to choose from, but there are more than 300 Android handsets available today. That's insane to me, and many of them aren't getting bought.
Maybe 100 is more reasonable. OEMs have to make money somehow and tens of millions of people are buying smartphones each year. Is variety the spice of demand in consumer electronics? Perhaps.
I used to scoff at Apple's boring, one-phone-a-year release rate. Now it's not looking so silly, especially after the company just sold 37 million iPhones in the last quarter alone.
You'd have to tap Samsung's whole Galaxy S and S II lines, which span a dozen phones, plus throw in some others, to equal that.
On the other hand, more Android phone means more devices to review for readers to get a handle on, which is good for me and eWEEK. So I won't complain, even if consumers do.
January 25 2012
Making form-filling faster, easier and smarter
We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we released last summer.
For more information, you can read the full text of the proposed specification, ask questions on the Webmaster help forum, or you can share your feedback in the standardization discussion!
Google Keeps Mum on Don't Be Evil Bookmarklet
Ever since Facebook Product Director Blake Ross unveiled his Don't Be Evil bookmarklet, which uses Google's search indexes to show what Google Search, plus your world would look like if it included results from Facebook, Twitter and other sources, the tech world has been waiting for Google to respond.
There will be no response, at least not publicly, not now.
As I understand it from speaking with sources familiar with Google's thinking, Google isn't convinced the bookmarkelt, which works in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, is the smoking gun Ross and others make it out to be.
Ross positioned the tool as a way to show how Google can include data from rival sources despite the fact that Google claimed it couldn't do so because Facebook and Twitter wall off their meaningful data. See his demo video here:
For Twitter, that's the firehose API, granting Google access to the company's real-time datastream and tweets. Twitter shut off this hose last July, forcing Google to close its real-time search service.
Google can crawl Facebook profile pictures and other limited profile data, but not posts and photos and Likes, the way Microsoft's Bing currently can. So for Search, plus your world, Google claimed it was hamstrung.
The bookmarklet shows a different side -- namely Google+ results and Facebook and Twitter links. However, while it does show disparate data sources, you can make the case they're not necessarily as relevant as Google intended the SPYW personal results to be.
For example, search WWE in Google search, with SPYW activated:
Now Click the Don't Be Evil bookmarklet on the same WWE results page:
Note the arrows I used to highlight the first obvious differences in the results. SPYW points to a recent post from 5 hours ago. Don't Be Evil takes you to the Twitter homepage.
What is more relevant? Who decides that? Google would argue its result is fresher, though you can't escape the fact that in the screenshot, Google+ content reigns supreme.
Facebook's Ross would argue that Don't Be Evil offers more disparate choices, which is better for users.
In other words, subjectivity reigns here. If you're an avid Google user, you may love the new, personal Googley experience. If you're a Google user who loves to have other Web services aggregated in results, you'll appreciate what Don't Be Evil does.
Make no mistake, Google is creating something of its own, mini Internet experience here, without the walled garden approach Facebook has. Google+ results are positively dominating the search experience when SPYW is on.
Of course, users can click the button in the upper right-hand corner of SPYW to hide personal results. With Facebook, what you see is what you and others put there, and it stays like that.
Google felt pushed to do this by Facebook and Twitter, who declined to give it the data it asked for to create a meaningful social search experience. Some people will like or love it. Others will hate it. Google is getting raked over the coals and scrutinized.
What Google won't do is engage Facebook and Twitter in a he said, she said of what is better for the user, mostly because it's moot. And here's why: Google is all in on Google+ and SPYW.
Sarah Lacy over at her new PandoDaily blog (hate the name, love the content), noted that Google CEO Larry Page essentially told employees:
"This is the path we're headed down - a single unified, 'beautiful' product across everything. If you don't get that, then you should probably work somewhere else."
Now I can totally believe that -- it's a very Page-like thing to say. But I also believe several Googlers who do believe Page and his team dashed apart Google's unbiased search principles on the rocks of competition at all cost will leave the company over this.
Two Ways to Export Your Google Docs
I tried both Google Takeout and the built-in feature from Google Docs that lets you download your documents. Even if they have the same purpose, they're quite different. The Google Docs feature is more flexible: you can choose to download only spreadsheets or presentations and skip all the other documents. You can also skip the files uploaded to Google Docs and not converted to a Google Docs format (for example: PDF files, archives and video files). Google Takeout has a "configure" feature, but you can't skip one or more document types. Another subtle difference is that Google Takeout lets you export only the files that you own, while Google Docs exports all the files from your account.
How to export all your files from Google Docs? Just go to the Google Docs homepage, select one or more documents, click "More" and then "Download", click the "All items" tab, pick your favorite formats and click "Download". The process is not that intuitive and you shouldn't have to select a file to see the download option.
{ via Data Liberation Blog }
Google Earth 6 now required for Street View
When Google Earth 6.0 was released, it completely changed the way that Street View worked. However, Google kept the older layer active for previous versions of Google Earth so that those users could continue to use Street View. Not anymore.
Sometime in the past few weeks, Google has turned off that old layer. If you're wanting to use Street View in Google Earth, you're now required to be using version 6.0 or higher.
Here's a quick look at how to use Street View in Google Earth 6:
In addition to that video, I've built a few other Google Earth tutorials to help explain some features, including how to use historical imagery, elevation profiles and a few more.
Beyond that, Google has just released Street View imagery in South Korea, primarily in Seoul and Busan. As you can see from the screen shot below, the imagery in those is very sharp.
You can read more about the new South Korean Street View imagery on the Google Lat Long Blog.
If you still need to upgrade to Google Earth 6 to get the new Street View features, you can always download it (for free!) from earth.google.com.
Confessions of a Google junkie (or, Privacy? What privacy?)
A lot has been made of Google’s new privacy policy and terms of use. I say bring it on.
The Self-Serving Google+ Results
Google's special section that shows people and pages from Google+ doesn't look like a regular Google OneBox. It's placed in the right sidebar, where Google used to display ads. It shows up for general queries like [music], [sports], [math], that aren't typically associated with social search results. It only shows results from Google+, not from other social services like Twitter or Facebook. It's there even if you're not logged in using your Google account or you're not using Google+.
If Google+ wasn't a Google product, would it make sense to show a similar OneBox with profiles from social sites? Normally, Google would have created a profile search engine and showed a group of relevant results somewhere in the list of search results. Like this:
Google already indexes profiles from different sites and even shows special snippets with structured data. Why not create a special search engine for profiles like the one that lets you search recipes or the search engine for applications?
When Google released Knol, many people wondered if Google could boost the rankings for Knol articles or create a special OneBox with Knol results. "Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google's rankings," replied Matt Cutts and he was right. Now what if Google displayed a Knol OneBox at the top of the search results for queries that returned relevant Knol articles? Maybe Knol would've become more popular and it wouldn't have been discontinued.
Is it fair to promote results from a single service, especially when you own that service? Even if those results are comprehensive, relevant and useful, it's always a good idea to also show results from other services.
Some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace developed a site called Focus on the User that lets you replace the Google+ results with other social profiles from the web. From:
... to:
The results are better simply because you can check the accounts from other social services. Maybe an artist shares more information on Twitter or maybe the Facebook account is more important. "When you search for 'cooking' today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie's Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago," noticed the authors of the Focus on the User site. I still don't think that the social search box should be placed next to the results, but at least the tweak made it more useful.
"Focus on the user and all else will follow. Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line." (Google's philosophy)
{ via waxy.org }
January 24 2012
"Streamlined" Google privacy policy and terms of service coming March 1st
The new, streamlined Google privacy policy and terms of service arrive on March 1st, bringing with them a slew of new questions over Google’s customer data collection practices.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
