Google.com is now launching a donation drive to help the cyclone victims in Burma. As a person from Burma, I'm really glad that Google is helping my country.
If you would like to participate, you can either go to Google homepage or this direct page and donate using Google Checkout.
Thanks Google!
Google Search is now starting to show the not-so-live soccer results from the English Premier League and other major European tournaments. A search for Chelsea give me the result as shown in the screenshot below:
By the time when I did the search, the game was already 54 minutes but Google could only show result until 50 minutes. (A better update can be found at livescore.) And, Google's engineers do not seem to respect (do they even know?) the Home Away conventions in showing the results. It should have been Newcastle 0 - 0 Chelsea. Also, Google doesn't recognize "manutd" for Manchester United; only "manchester united" or "man utd" works.
By the way, I'm waiting for the time the score for Newcastle to turn into a natural number while Chelsea's remains zero. :D
Google introduced new artist themes for the iGoogle home page. You can browse through them at this page and when you like it, just click on the Make this my iGoogle theme. It's good to be able to see the various preview before applying a theme rather than to have to apply the theme to see how it looks.
Below is a promo video from Google channel on YouTube.
One major difference between reading books digitally and on paper is the touch and smell of the paper which is totally absent in the digital versions of the books. There are other shortcomings of digital books too, such as the ability to quickly flip pages to refer back to some chapters behind.
Today, Google announced that they have made a breakthrough in bringing the smell of the books they scanned for Google Book Search. They somehow managed to capture the smell and through tricky JavaScript, allow users to smell the books once they view the titles in Google Book Search.
Here's what the official blog says:
Using special equipment and tricky JavaScript, we're now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process and then embed them in your web browser when you preview these titles in Google Book Search.
Are you ready to smell the books? Try some of these books that now come with smells.
You will see a picture like the one below on the top right corner and if you click on it, Google will load the odor and you can start smelling the book. Cool? Try it. =D
Enjoy the fun.
Google stocks aren't doing well lately. They have been falling and now the below-expectation Q4 earnings and the Microsoft-Yahoo merger seem to make the situation even worse for Google. Now the stock has fallen below 500 for the first time in nearly six months.
Meanwhile, Google released a very harsh article about Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. In the blog post, Google referred to the bid as hostile and accused Microsoft of trying to monopolize the internet. Of course the internet is what keeps Google going and they wouldn't want it to be monopolized by their biggest opponent. However, if we look at the Search market, we wouldn't disagree that Google itself is creating a monopoly-like situation (you don't have to think hard; just think about when you say your friend, "Google it.") and is aggressively fighting against anyone who wants some share of the market.
Whether Google really doesn't want Microsoft to acquire Yahoo or Google is just playing a game to force Microsoft to spend more on Yahoo and make them have a hard time financially, we will have to wait and see.
Google wants your Gmail to be colorful. Just a few days ago, Google added colorful smiley to Gmail Chat. Now Google again added a new feature to make your label world colorful. As usual, this new feature is only available in the new Gmail which only works with IE7 and Firefox2 yet.
The pace at which Google added new features into the new Gmail is amazing if you think about how long the old Gmail has been running with very few new features. If you think the new features currently available are not many yet, wait until some time later when Google announces the hierarchical labeling. (I just can't wait until that day. I have too many labels and an hierarchy is the best way to clean them up.)
{Official Announcement}
Blogger Draft has added OpenID commenting for BlogSpot. Now if someone is using LiveJournal or Wordpress, she is allowed to comment using her identity from these publishing services.
After a stoop last week, Google Stock is once again heading its way to $700. :)
Google Map for the mobile phone now has a new feature called My Location where Google Map will try to detect your location using your mobile tower location when you press "zero" on your phone. It works on phones with or without GPS, but Google says that the approximation can be as much as 1000m and it may sometimes not work (it means John will sometimes faint during the beta testing; watch video below for more info).
When you activate My Location, you will see a blue dot on the map showing the approximate location of you and all you need is type what you want and get the direction there from your current location. It does save you time when you need to find direction to somewhere and you don't know where you are now.
Gmail chat now has colorful emoticons and group chat like in Google Talk Gadget. These features are only available in the new version of Gmail though. That's because the new features require the new JavaScript and modularity of the new version of Gmail.
If you are still in old version of Gmail or are using Chat Client, you cannot be invited to a group chat session.
It's interesting why there has been no update to the Desktop client version of Google Talk. It has been stationary for quite a long time. But, it's true that the Chat Client is a pretty mature application itself.
Offical Post: Gmail Blog
After a steep drop from its one time high, Google stock seems to be recovering.
iGoogle now has five more themes to decorate your Google Homepage. Google didn't make it explicitly known on the page though. But they are in the list when you choose Select Theme on your page.
My favorite is Autumn :) The raccoons are busy cleaning up the leaves.
Will there be any easter egg in these five new themes as well?
Justin
I just got my new Gmail 2.0. It improved the loading of messages, as promised. There was not drastic UI changes though. 
One subtle change was done to the Quick Contact which is now renamed as Chat. And there is no setting to change the size of the then-Quick Contact; instead the size setting of the Chat is found in the Option menu at the bottom of the Chat list. And, instead of saying in terms of numbers, it uses descriptive qualifiers: Tiny, Small, etc.
Although there was a general improvement to the loading of messages, it still takes quite some time to load the All Mail and some messages that you haven't opened before. 
Also, there is now a quick way to "Filter messages like these" which automatically fills in the From field of the filter. There is also a Mute option under the More Action menu; before, Mute was accessed by the key "M" and many people didn't know that.
The new redesigned Contacts is not impressive enough, considering that it sometimes breaks the whole Gmail application (I needed to restart Gmail). One good feature of new Contacts is Instant Search; you'll see the contacts as you search. The new design puts more emphasis on the Groups of contacts instead of showing all of them in one go. From each group, you select one contact and it will be shown on the right-hand side of the screen where you can edit or remove the contact and view Recent Conversations with that contact; but there's no way to come back to the contact once you view the recent conversation with him/her. Also, the new UI lacks any option to change the view of the Contacts: nothing like Outlook contact views and all you get is a single flat view of a list of contacts represented by the names.
I hope there will be more new features (actaully there are) coming soon.
Google released a new Beta of Google Desktop (5.5) with some improvements. The first and most obvious feature is to allow you to add the Google Desktop gadgets onto your iGoogle homepage in the expense of slow loading time for your iGoogle. I don't know why I should add the desktop gadgets like Music Player onto my iGoogle (so that I can play my music from an internet cafe?)
The second improvement seems necessary: it now allows you to add more than one instance of a gadget, so now you can have two weather gadgets (if you have plenty of screen estate) for two locations instead of having to toggle between the two locations in one gadget.
The third new feature is the re-designed quick search box which is highly inspired by Vista. It doesn't make any difference whatsoever though.
Justin
Google Image Search now includes an option to select only the very high resolution images. The parameter for imgsz to search for Extra Large Images (as Google calls this option) is huge as compared to xxlarge which was the largest image size option.
In the screen shot above, you can see the search results contain images of really huge resolutions.
Justin
Type "Time your location" into Google Search and you will get the current time of that place. For example, if you wanna know what time it is now in Singapore, type Time Singapore and you will see an analog clock showing the current time with a verbose display on its right side.
A related query is asking Google about the weather of a location by typing "Weather your location" as in Weather Singapore.
Microsoft is testing Live Translator which can be accessed through: translate.live.com or translator.live.com. The interface is clean and maintain the consistent looks of Windows Live services—Live Spaces and Live Mail, for example. (Side note: I hate that looks! It doesn't make sense to put a large banner above the Windows Live navigation bar. The banner takes a lot of space and it doesn't serve the users. Something without a use should disappear; it does in evolution though.)
Below I did a simple translation and compared the results with those from Google Translate. It seems like Google's translation is better but to confirm it needs a lot more testings of course.
1) How are you, without ?
2) How are you?
Until then...
Justin
Google Reader, the most powerful feed-reader, also got the most important update. For quite some time after graduating from Google Labs, the Reader remained the strange Google Application without the famous Google Search! Now, there is a search box at the top of the page and you can now search all the feed items or the posts inside a feed.
The search is very good but it is the slowest search provided by Google. Sooner or later, Google will hopefully improve the performance of Google Reader Search.
As you can see from the screen shot above, the Google Reader icon has not detached the Google Lab icon yet. But, they removed the lab icon from the "Loading" message.
The Reader also got a minor update: it can now count toward 1000. Before that, it only show 100+ for any feed with more than 99 unread items. I think 1000 should be very enough for feed item count since any number larger than that will not be useful to the user anymore.
Until then...
Justin
