- Page II -

Monday, June 30, 2008

Fred, YouTube Sensation

This video has over 2.7 million views on YouTube. And over 23.000 comments. It’s by YouTube sensation Fred, 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank’s fictional 6-year old with “anger management issues”, as his channel explains – and this is by far not his most popular video. Some of his other videos, done in a high-pitched voice, fast cuts, and about lots of teen problems, are titled “Fred Gets Bullied”, “Fred Loses His Meds”, “Fred Goes to the Dentist”, and “Fred on Christmas”. Adding up the views of his 17 videos, I’m getting the result 45,012,257. The LA Times covers Fred, writing:

That an act with millions of fans could escape the popular attention is more evidence of the digital fissuring of our culture. As we ensconce ourselves ever further in our respective demographics, personal and professional, we continue to drift apart from the people right next to us, until even an iceberg holding 4 million tweens can float by unnoticed.

Not that we should’ve noticed. If you’re past a certain age, Fred’s appeal is essentially inscrutable. (...)

“They just think he’s the funniest thing ever,” said Valerie Moizel of the L.A.-based WOO ad agency, which found out about Fred after it conducted kid-centered focus groups for its ZipIt instant messaging product – which later showed up in Fred’s videos. “We watched them watch him – they fall on the floor hysterically laughing. They’re just mesmerized.”

[Via Waxy.]

Fred, YouTube Sensation by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

More on Google and "Family Guy" Creator Teaming Up For Cartoon Ads

The New York Times reports Google will be teaming up with the creator of the US cartoon series “Family Guy” to distribute short original episodes of a show called “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy."* The first news of this came in last year already. Instead of creating a new microsite where people can view these episodes, in this model the new cartoons will be shown in AdSense spots, those automated Google ads third-party webmasters include on their sites. From the NYT:

Advertising will be incorporated into the clips in varying ways. In some cases, there will be “preroll” ads, which ask viewers to sit through a TV-style commercial before getting to the video. Some advertisers may opt for a banner to be placed at the bottom of the video clip or a simple “brought to you by” note at the beginning.

The NYT later says:

Each installment is different, but a typical one is titled “Mad Cow Disease.” The clip, which is 38 seconds long, opens with a news anchor reporting on an outbreak of mad cow disease in a dry fashion, detailing the debilitating effects of eating tainted beef. The clip cuts to a shocked male and female cow seated in a tidy kitchen with giant steaks on their plates.

Revenue from these ads will then be shared among the webmaster, the cartoon creator Seth MacFarlance (pictured above), the production company Media Rights Capital, and Google. A spokesperson from Google, the company who once said they don’t pre-announce products and whose self-proclaimed core values include “Think and act like an underdog”, is quoted with the majestic statement “We feel that we have recreated the mass media”... but I suppose we’ll first have to see how well this model works.

[Thanks Colin! Photo by Eric Appel with some rights reserved.]

*"Cavalcade” means “A ceremonial procession or display” or “A succession or series,” Answers.com says. It also means “A procession of riders or horse-drawn carriages,” from the Italian “cavalcare,” to ride on horseback.

More on Google and "Famil ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+2)

Google China’s Universities Overview Tool

The Chinese Google Rebang site – a listing of hot searches as well as a general info directory – provides a new research tool for prospective university students in China. The tool is called Gaokao Zhuanti, which can be roughly translated to “Special Subject: College Entrance Examinations.” I asked native speaker Aaron Liang from Canada to provide more background info about this, and he says:

When the high school students in China graduate, they need to take a national exam (GaoKao) in June in order to go to college or university. After the exam, they get an answer sheet and start to evaluate their scores. Then they compare their scores with the requirement of each institution in the past and choose which one they want to go. Basically, better institutions require higher scores. This is brutal because first, the grads don’t know their true scores; second, the requirement of each institution remains unclear till they know how many students are applying and what their scores are.

Now, Aaron continues to explain, Google introduced this new service as part of Google Rebang to help “the grads to choose the institutions.” He says:

I remember that after I took the GaoKao, I got a thick book which contains information of every single college and university in this country, such as their names and locations, introductions, programs they offer, score requirements in the past few years, number of students they want from each province, etc. This service is somewhat like an electronic or online version of it. This is a really cool concept and I found that it was actually pretty easy to use.

I asked Google China to tell us more about how this new tool came about. Google China’s Jia gives more details:

... the idea came out during one of the team meetings of Rebang project. We wanted to do something for the millions of students who prepare for Gaokao. We did not crawl the data because there is no good sources on the web – they are either incomplete or incorrect sometimes. So we licensed data from Gaokao China, a partner who focused on offline gaokao service. In the future, it would be great if we could cooperate with universities so that they could feed us the data, or even with education departments so that students could search their scores directly at Google.

The details page for a university when you click on it from the overview. Here, Tsinghua University and its academies are presented, with links including pointers to related Google China image, video, map, and partner searches (Google-partnered social site Tianya Laiba).

[Via Google China blog.]

Google China’s Universiti ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Google Euro Championship Doodle

Tonight, Spain will be playing against Germany in the European foot(as-in-soccer)ball championships final. For this special event – people in Europe are often found partying on the streets when their team wins – Google launched a logo doodle contest a while ago, and today presents the winner on the homepage of Google homepages of Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The logo was selected from 3,800 competitors and received over 300,000 votes, Google says, and is drawn by 17-year old Mai Dao Ngoc from Germany. Additionally to having her logo showcased on the homepage, Mai Dao Ngoc was given a computer by Google employee and original logo artist Dennis Hwang during the ceremony.

As for the winning doodle itself, it shows a crowded and colorful cartoon style rendering of all kinds of football-related things. While some in the forum thought it was ugly, I think it looks neat, though it doesn’t work well at all in the small size shown on the homepage... and Google missed the chance to link it to a zoom version on the details page when you click it.

Additional to the desktop homepage, Google also had one winner be selected for a special mobile doodle.

[Thanks Hebbet! Photo courtesy of Google.]

Google Euro Championship ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (9+7)

Friday, June 27, 2008

Pomoc Google: Google Answers for Poland
By Tony Ruscoe

In much the same way that Google launched the Russian-only Knowledge Search almost exactly a year ago, a new Google Help site has now been launched by Google Poland.

The site’s FAQ page (available in English) explains:

Google Help is a place where you can ask questions about Google services and give answers to questions posted by other users looking for help.

Google Help is an unmoderated forum for users wanting to discuss Google Products. We encourage you to ask questions, answer questions from others and exchange experience. A Google employee will pop in from time to time and post and their message will appear with a badge. Note: only posts marked with a Google badge are approved by Google.

It then goes on to list the rules of the new site:

1. Keep it safe. Remember, your posts can be read by users around the world. Don’t make the mistake of posting personal information of any kind, especially your passwords, your phone number, or your credit card number. No Google representative will ever ask for this information on Google Help.
2. Keep it clean. The forum are for users of all ages, so do your part to keep a lid on foul language and grouchy attitudes.
3. Keep it on topic. We reserve the right to delete messages that are intentionally off-topic – like commercial advertisements or other promotional material, spamming/excessive multi-posting, chain letters, and binary (non-text) postings.
4. Be nice to beginners. A lot of users look here for help and advice. Being courteous and patient won’t hurt, and will definitely help in keeping a good atmosphere, especially for those, who are making their first steps online.

Given the much more English-looking URL – google.com/support/forum vs. otvety.google.ru/otvety – perhaps Google plans to make this an international service that will eventually replace Google Answers, which was shut down in November 2006.

Despite the official Google Poland blog saying that the “Poland version of Google Help is the premiere of this service in its current format - Poles can benefit from it as the first in the world” (via Google’s machine translation) it looks like the Polish “Pomoc Google” site uses exactly the same layout and technology as the Russian “Otvety” site, although they both use different service names* and require the user to signup for each one separately.

[Thanks Rafal Mateja!]

*The Russian site uses the Knowledge Search service and the new Polish one uses Google Help.

Pomoc Google: Google Answ ... by Tony Ruscoe | Comments (1+11)

Plenty New Features for Google’s Blogger

Embedded comments, and star ratings

Google’s Blogger has a couple of new features available at the special Blogger Draft site. Among these changes are:

• Star ratings: Let your visitors vote from one to five stars. You will then be able to see the average rating for a particular post. You can find this feature at your Layouts page; click Edit at your Blog Posts element, and check the Show Star Ratings box.
• The ability to put the comments form embedded below the post. Blogger’s old comments functionality had very low usability for a couple of reasons; one of them was that it took you to a separate layout when you wanted to comment. To enable this change bringing better integration, switch to Settings -> Comments, and in the Comment Form Placement segment check the “Embedded below post” box. Click Save Settings to approve. Who would’ve thought the day would come...
• Integration into Google Webmaster tools. You can now follow a dashboard link reading Webmaster Tools. Automatically, all your Blogspot blogs will be added to the tools suite, though they still remain to be verified. With Google webmaster tools, you can utilize statistic information and diagnostics, for instance.
• Exporting and importing your blog. Google announced you can now export all of your blog posts into a single (Atom-formatted) XML file to allow for a backup... or perhaps, to allow to move to another blogging system, or do something else with the data. Reversely, you can also import that file back into your system. To give this a try switch to the Settings page for your blog; you’ll find the links “Import blog” and “Export blog” on top. Exporting will trigger a download named e.g. “blog-06-27-2008.xml” (this might fare better with the ISO date format yyyy-mm-dd).
• A new post editor. The new post editor has a different image handling. Google says, “When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.” Also, the HTML editing mode saw a couple of improvements; <br>eaks won’t be added automatically, and there will be a clearer formatting with new lines for generated HTML.

These features are also further detailed in the Blogger in Draft blog. If you don’t want to always visit the special draft.blogger.com URL, you can now also make the Draft mode your default mode; look for the checkbox reading “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” at the top of your dashboard.

[Thanks DPic and Mrrix32!]

Plenty New Features for G ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3+1)

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Google Calendar Phishing

A couple of minutes ago an interesting attempt to phish for Google account credentials made it to my inbox. It had me blink my eyes because while I suspected phishing there were some things with this one that had me check twice to see how it’s done, as things looked quite official on the surface. As you may know, phishing emails are sent out by abusers to make the recipient in some way reply with their password or click through to enter their password, but the more official looking they are, the more easily they’re believed. This particular mail, shown in the screenshot, had the following attributes:

• It was sent by “customer care”. OK, could be a lie.
• It got my name right... might be just luck, as my name is included in my mail address.
• It was sent with a layout that looked very official, and it even had an actual event from my calendar listed in the information (grayed out in the screenshot in the top right). Now this one was a bit more peculiar, because who else but Google would know my private calendar events?

The subject of the mail read “[Invitation] VERIFY YOUR ACCOUNT”, and the main content included this bit:

Philipp Lenssen, you are invited to
VERIFY YOUR ACCOUNT (...)

This Email is from Gmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Gmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Gmail accounts so we are shutting down some Gmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.We are sending you this email to so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. (...)

You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.

* Username:

* Password:

It’s quite obvious Google’s not likely to send out such mails for real. You might have guessed by now how this was done, though: someone apparently set up a Google account with the first name “customer” and the surname “care” (the actual email address was customerservices[some-number]@googlemail.com). They then created an event in their calendar titled “VERIFY YOUR ACCOUNT” – instead of say, “BBQ at Susan’s place” – with the event description being the text printed above! Finally, they added me as guest to that event, which caused Google to prepare and send the event invitation mail!

Looking for traces of this phishing attempt online, I can see it’s not completely new, with people asking about this mail in e.g. May this year... and even receiving an official answer from Google, though this type of phishing remains. If you too ever receive a mail like this, here’s something you can do instead of actually replying: click the blue arrow to the top right of the Gmail message and pick “Report phishing”. A dialog will pop up explaining what phishing is, and it then says: “If you believe this message is a phishing attack, you can report it to our abuse team and help us thwart this attack and others like it.” Google notes though, “Reporting this message as an attack will send the entire message to our team for review.”

Google Calendar Phishing by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (12)

Google Advertising in China

Google used to pride themselves about how word-of-mouth spread popularity of their search engine, and to this day they’re doing remarkably little traditional advertising. However, after their ad campaign in Russia now another ad campaign in China has been spotted. Xujie in the forum posted photos from a DWGoogle.cn article, with one pic shown above which includes Google’s super-short “g.cn” domain. From an automated translation: “Google China in Guangzhou Subway advertising is to promote Google’s mobile search services.”

At the moment, purely relying on word-of-mouth in China would be a tough challenge, too, as the business environment isn’t completely fair. For instance, according to a source accessing the web from China I talked to recently, Google competitor Baidu is often shown when you enter otherwise unrelated domains... like cnn.com, or bbc.co.uk. Beyond that, access to foreign servers is also reportedly often throttled, which caused a tough start for Google in the early years before their decision to move into China with a self-censored engine.

Beyond traditional advertising – on- or offline – and relying on word-of-mouth, there is of course a large array of other means to promote a product, such as contests; official product blogs; giving special exclusive information to journalists; product placement (for instance, Google got a product placement deal in the third installment of the Bourne Ultimatum movie series); partnerships causing pre-installed software (I had a whole bunch of annoying Google software come pre-installed with this laptop, not sure if that was an official Google partnership); cross-promotion of Google products in their product line (say, you can open a Word attachment in Google Docs when you’re using Gmail), and more.

[Thanks Xujie!]

Google Advertising in Chi ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+5)

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Grassroots Movement to Elect...

Grassroots Movement to El ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (8)

Making Google More Open

Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe has a long article about how Google managed to remain “fundamentally likable”, as he says, while today being “a behemoth, with more than 15,000 employees and a market value as big as Coca-Cola and Boeing combined”. He mentions concerns that even provided Google sticks to its privacy policy and handles the sensitive information we feed it sensibly indeed, “government might compel it to turn over search information.” Drake argues “Google has so outpaced its rivals that it has begun to look like a monopoly” and goes through various different suggestions to make Google more open. Like having them make their search algorithms public. Or (my emphasis):

... an idea put forward by Pasquale of Seton Hall. In a few recent papers, he has proposed what he calls a “right of reply” to search results. If, for example, the top results to a query about an individual are slanderous or otherwise damaging to his reputation, that person, Pasquale argues, should have the right to put an asterisk by the findings that links to a rebuttal. (...)

Still, to other Google watchers, such measures would ultimately end up backfiring. A “right of reply” would be difficult to put into practice, and could end up being used by companies to ensure that their links show up on all Web searches that highlighted their competitors. (...)

To Pasquale and others, search engines, like the railroads and the telephone, are technologies that, because of their great importance, demand a level of public control and accountability, Google most especially.

In Google News, by the way, Google already allows people being talked about in news to add their own views. Another approach in action right now is that many results will be relatively diverse, showing say a more neutral Wikipedia entry right below the official homepage to a famous person. But it doesn’t always work like that. Search for google, for instance, and the top 10 (at this time, checked from my computer) does not yield any third-party result at all. You will have to click through to the second result page to see the first Wikipedia article, and even further ahead to find Google-Watch.org, for instance.

[Thanks Ianf!]

Making Google More Open by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+4)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Slow Growth for Google News?

The New York Times says that Google News, Google’s semi-automated mainstream and blog news indexing service, is experiencing slow growth:

... traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online.

Its growth rate of 10 percent over the last two years is far slower than those of most other large news Web sites. In the last two years, second-ranked MSNBC.com grew by 42 percent, adding 10.4 million users. Traffic at CNN.com and nytimes.com grew even faster.

If being among the top 10 news sites in the world is considered low, I suppose you’re in good shape. But I’m not sure exactly how these stats are created in any case; for instance, as the NYT article briefly mentions, Google News also appears as a “onebox” in normal Google web search results. And then there are Google News alerts, which will reach people via email. All of that is a lot of exposure, even when you don’t actively visit the Google News homepage. NYT quotes Google’s Marissa Mayer: “It directly feeds the main business.”

As far as Google News being ad-free to this day (at least when you visit the main Google News homepage and results), the NYT quotes anonymous Google employees suggesting that “concerns about antagonizing news publishers have guided some decisions at Google News, most notably the decision not to place ads”.

[Thanks Miss Universe!]

Slow Growth for Google Ne ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+4)

Google Sued Over Email Tool

Reuters today writes:

Google Inc was named on Monday in a trade secrets lawsuit alleging that the company’s business software unit copied a tiny start-up’s tool for moving customers off of Microsoft software onto Google’s.

LimitNone LLC filed a complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google at first began promoting the smaller firm’s tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, then copied the idea and went into competition with it.

[Via Google Watch Blog.]

Google Sued Over Email To ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (8)

Google Map Maker Released

Google just went live with Map Maker, a program that makes certain regions around the world – like Jamaica, Iceland, Bahamas, Grenada and more – editable by everyone (everyone with a Google account, that is). “Map Maker allows you and your peers to add, edit and moderate most features you see on maps including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities,” Google writes in their blog post.

I find the interface for this tool somewhat non-intuitive in parts (for instance, a button in the explanatory legend looks just as clickable as an actually clickable button). But perhaps Map Maker is not intended for casual use in any case, and there’s a help wiki near-by too. For the future, I wonder about all the ways Google intends to share the mapping data people generate for them voluntarily. Wikipedia for instance gives away its content under a GNU license. Will Google’s Maps API and their embedding features be enough?

[Via Ionut at Friendfeed.]

Google Map Maker Released by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (16)

How to Add Your Business to Google Maps
By Brian Ussery

Google “Universal” includes results from Google Maps as well as other verticals. In addition to relevancy, Google Maps includes geographic factors in determining ranking order in search engine results pages.

Google Universal search engine results page including Google Maps results.

By creating their own business listing, business owners are helping drive traffic to their site as well as customers through their front door. Millions use Google Maps each day and business listings are free through Google Local Business Center. Local Business Center is available to business owners with locations in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Japan, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, the UK, and the U. S.

Languages available in Google Local Business Center listings for Google Maps.

Before creating a new listing, it’s important to verify businesses aren’t already listed. One way of avoiding duplicate listings is to search for [your business name in your city, zip code] before submitting new listings. If a business is already listed, select “Claim your business” and if not continue to signup with Google Local Business Center.

Example of information required.

In addition to general contact information, Google Local Business Center allows owners to specify hours of operation and accepted forms of payment. They can also provide up to 10 photos, 5 videos, offer coupons and more. The entire process is easy. Business owners have two options for receiving their personal identification number, either phone or mail. This PIN must be entered in the account before listings are activated. After the PIN is submitted, listings usually become active within a month.

Verification options in Google Local Business Center.

So no matter how large or small your business, inclusion in Google Maps can be a nice way of helping your business grow. In fact, even if you don’t have a “shop” it’s possible to create individual Google Maps listings like the listing I created in 2005 before phone verification was offered, using my own address at the time. At minimum, a name and phone number are required, though including more information may increase visibility in search results. Google suggests registering a physical address as well as including meta data along with categories, phone numbers, pictures, video and other details. They also suggest encouraging customers to leave honest comments and ratings in the Google Maps “Review” tab for business listings.

After all that, don’t forget to also include contact information in your site.

How to Add Your Business ... by Brian Ussery | Comments (6)

Monday, June 23, 2008

From Google Docs to InDesign

Brian Jepson is the editor who worked with me on the book Google Apps Hacks, and I asked him to describe the technical process of what it took to convert the book from Google Documents – in which the book was written – to the InDesign format. Here's his explanation.

One of the tricky parts for us was getting the chapters into InDesign, the book layout program we use for our books and magazines. I know where we were coming from – Google Docs' HTML format – and where we were going to – InDesign's tagged text format. For example, here's what one of the Google Docs documents looked like:

<div>
 <h1>
   #"Google Docs light" for Web Research: Google
   Notebook
 </h1>
 <i>Set up your Google Notebook to copy snippets
 and jot down thoughts while
 surfing the web.</i><br>

In InDesign's tagged text format, it needed to look like this:

<ParaStyle:Heading 1>#"Google Docs light" for Web
  Research: Google Notebook
<ParaStyle:Synopsis>Set up your Google Notebook
  to copy snippets and jot down thoughts while
  surfing the web.

Most of my XML programming knowledge is frozen in time, so I turned to a couple of trusty tools that I was familiar with: tidy, for making sure that the HTML I got out of Google was proper HTML, and Perl's XML::SAX module, which I used to traverse the document and crank out the InDesign Tagged Text format as I went. I'm sure there are dozens of better ways to do it, but this had the advantage of being quick and familiar for me to work with.

The first trick was getting the HTML files out of Google Docs. For this, I wrote a simple module (GDoc.pm) that could authenticate itself to Google and request a zipped Google document, which includes the HTML file and images. GDoc.pm is pretty simple to use. Just authenticate with a Google login (it prompts the user interactively for the password) and specify a DocId (which you can find in the URL of the Google document):

use GDoc;
my $gdoc = GDoc->new;
if ( !$authenticated ) {
 $authenticated = $gdoc->authenticate('bjepson@gmail.com');
}
$gdoc->download( $docId, $filename );

After that, I fed the document into the tidy processor and stored the text in a Perl variable. That was the easy part. Without going into the gory details, the hard part was to set up a SAX parser whose events were triggered as bits of the HTML document were encountered. The program had to keep track of figures, number them as it went, and rename the files to something that Make's production crew would find easier to work with than the defaults. Something like Figure-01-01.png is much more pleasant than GOHacks___Documents___Linked_ ToC_images/ajfjf92tmnhd_6124cj36bd5.png!

In this way, I turned each chapter into a text file that could be easily placed into an InDesign file. After that, I handed it off to the design team, who made it look beautiful!

From Google Docs to InDes ... by Brian Jepson | Comments (11)

Google Japan One Green Project

Google Japan* launched a microsite titled One Green Project to help prevent global warming, and promote some ways of using Google’s tools like iGoogle. The page seems to contain tips for reducing CO₂ emissions. Can anyone who speaks Japanese explain more?
[Via the Google Japan blog. The screenshot shows a bug I’m seeing on Google Maps.]

*I’m not sure if this is also rolled out for other countries?

Google Japan One Green Pr ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

If Google Ruled the World (Pics)

Worth1000 started a little photoshopping contest to show what things would look like if Google ruled the world (arguably, they already rule quite a bit of it, at least online). I like the One Google dollar bill...

[Via Google Watch Blog. Image by Hbales.]

Update: Oops, this contest is old... it’s from 2006, F.O.R. in the comments says. [Thanks F.O.R.!]

If Google Ruled the World ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Google Site Traffic Trends

You can now enter a domain into Google Trends and switch to the Websites tab to get traffic information. Use a comma between domains to see comparative stats, as in mashable.com, techcrunch.com. Note Google’s guess of the daily unique visitors only works for some websites, and you also won’t get absolute numbers. Google on their help page explains:

Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users, powered by computer algorithms, and doesn’t contain personally identifiable information. Additionally, Google Trends for Websites only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool.

As usual with such stats, best take them with a grain of salt – because while Google may be able to get rather accurate data on any site using their Google Analytics or AdSense programs (at least theoretically, and partly you need to opt-in to some of the aggregated sharing options, too), they have less accurate data on websites which don’t use such Google tools.

[Thanks Kirby Witmer!]

Google Site Traffic Trend ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (14)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

A Kidnapped AdWords Account

This is the story of Russell, whose AdWords campaigns fell prey to a phishing scam.

Russell advertises one of his websites (WorldLabel.com) using AdWords, Google’s program that will launch advertisements on search results and third-party websites using AdSense. Russell is not a large-scale advertiser, so he only had a single campaign has six campaigns set up, he tells me.

Seemingly out of the blue, Russell one day noticed how a lot of odd, likely spammy campaigns had been set up in his account though. Take a look at the screenshot:

The keywords targeted for this campaign are all variations on “loans”, “fast cash” and so on. The maximum cost per click was set to $6.25.

Now apparently, Russell suggests that Google may have had some kind of “spam flag” raised, because these campaigns were immediately stopped. All Google would tell Russell, he says, “is they have several systems in place which Flags any ’unusual account activity’ which immediately stops all ads running until they have the time to check into it.” (Otherwise, Russell tells me Google wasn’t always that responsive throughout this incident.)

What’s LastMinuteSite.com, the site being advertised? Well, here’s a screenshot – the site claims to offer you a loan for $1,500 instantly with “all applications accepted” (it seems to be an affiliate program using SourceOnePayday.com). Note the site may or may not be the true origin site of the attack, as it may make sense for a malicious attacker to hide their tracks, camouflage style, by pointing to innocent sites as well:

Russell didn’t know what happened but with a little research we found out that prior to this AdWords kidnapping incident, he received an odd mail in his Hotmail account, apparently from the AdWords team. If you know about online security you will know what this means: it’s a phishing email, a seemingly legit official email asking you to e.g. log-in to your account to adjust some settings. Here’s a screenshot:

While the email may look official at first glance to those who don’t know about the concept of phishing – Russell didn’t – those who do know about it will have a symphony of alarm bells ringing by now. In this email, it is not important what the mail claims to be; it claims that it’s an “official notification from Google AdWords that the service(s) listed below will be deactivated” unless the person renews them “immediately.” The email also claims to be sent from the address customersolutions--ysm@google.com. But these things can be faked; what is more important is the URL that shows when you hover over the link in question that will take you to the login form. In this case, Russell tells me the URL reads:

yms-words.com/adwords/select/Login.htm

When visiting above URL – I logged out of my Google account first and disabled JavaScript – I can see it brings up a “Reported Web Forgery” alert thanks to my Firefox browser, and if I ignore that alert, it’s now a deserted, parked domain. But before, it was well possible that it displayed something that looked like an official Google AdWords log-in box. But when you enter your user account and password, those credentials will actually be submitted to the phishing attempt owner, who can then use it to log-in to someone else’s AdWords account to set up campaigns.

And indeed, Russell logged in to “his account” on that page, or so he figured, but actually that was the moment someone else likely fished for his password (or “phished”, in hack slang – the “ph” spelling was originally used in the context of phone system hacking, “phreaking”). Russell says after clicking through he went to his account “but could not find anything about renewing my Adwords.” Indeed, after the credentials are kidnapped, the phishing site can forward one to any other site – including the official AdWords site. It doesn’t matter at that point, and will make the incident look more innocent.

The best suggestion if you’re getting an email asking you to log-in somewhere is to either ignore it, or to not click any link in that email but instead open a new browser window and enter the URL (like “amazon.com”, “google.com” or whichever) manually. Hovering over the link in the email is also often a good first give-away, as the domain may not be the official one; still, there are some automatic forwarding schemes which may even make the domain look official, so it’s best not to click on such links at all. It’s too late for Russell, who by now changed his Google account password... though in this case he was apparently saved by Google’s AdWords abuse filter.

[Thanks Russell!]

A Kidnapped AdWords Accou ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (19)

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Google’s Rainbow-colored Results for "Gay"

When you search Google for gay, you will see special rainbow colors next to the AdWords ads to the right side. Rainbow colors are a globally recognized gay symbol and there’s Pride Week coming up.

On a related note, Google also sometimes dresses up AdWords for holidays, and they’ve also had their own wagons at gay parades before. Within Google, gay employees call themselves “gayglers.”

[Thanks Michelle L.!]

Google’s Rainbow-colored ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (29)

Google Daily Tips Gadget

Google provides a daily Google tips gadget for iGoogle. Here’s a sample tip of the day:

If you use Gmail, you may have noticed the headlines that appear at the top of your inbox. These web clips show news, blog posts and other information available from web feeds.

You can customize what web clips are shown by clicking Settings, then the “Web Clips” tab. Choose from a directory of sources, or provide your own feed.

Note you can’t just click “Next” on this gadget to get a new tip, as is common with other program’s tips windows – this is literally just an archive of tips, so the Prev and Next buttons are used to navigate that archive.

If you’re curious about the data behind this gadget, Tony Ruscoe points out the following XML files, each containing a tip:

...
google.com/ig/modules/google_tips/content/en/us/2008-06-17.xml
google.com/ig/modules/google_tips/content/en/us/2008-06-18.xml
google.com/ig/modules/google_tips/content/en/us/2008-06-19.xml
...

Google Daily Tips Gadget by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

Google Translator and Barack Obama...

Vittorio sent in this Google translator finding:

If you type “simpaticone” (very funny person) in Google Translate and choose Ita-Eng, the result is “Barack Obama”.

The ways of the Google are long and complicated...

[Thanks Vittorio!]

Google Translator and Bar ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (12)

Redesigning the Google Favicon

The designers at TurboMilk didn’t like the new Google favicon – the icon displayed in the address bar and elsewhere on Google’s sites – so they decided to take the design job in their own hands. Four designers each had a try at a redesign, and came up with different reasoning and different end results. Here’s one of their results:

As the official Google blog told a while ago, Google’s new favicon too was the result of different explorations of the Google design team, as Google’s image shows....

(I actually didn’t think Google’s new favicon was all that bad. It’s more humble and open than the old one, it’s a little underdesigned – merely reusing something that looks similar to the lower-case Google “g”, instead of introducing yet another “iconic image” – while still not being too playful, as Google is delving into a more serious “office suite” territory with Google Docs. It also doesn’t repeat all the colorfulness of the main Google logo in yet another place, the address bar, which might be good as it does not draw too much attention to the favicon. On the other hand, some of you complained how it was harder now to quickly find the Google tab when using multiple browser tabs... and perhaps that’s a case where more colors and more “attention” to the icon would make sense.)

[Thanks Denis!]

Redesigning the Google Fa ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (17)

Monday, June 16, 2008

Totlol: YouTube Videos for Toddlers

Totlol is a community-moderated video site for “those between the ages of 6 months and 6 years.” Its video embeddings – like the Googleheads song – are based on the YouTube API, making for a customized, integrated look*. Totlol’s About page explains, “Online video is a great new experience, and new parents discovered that showing their tots videos on the computer screen is a great way to spend time together. So they head to the leading video websites.” Totlol steps in, the explanation reads, because some of the bigger video sites “provide no way to filter anything that may be inappropriate and they provide very limited tools to find what is appropriate and relevant.”

Site owner Ron told me what inspired him to create Totlol: “I’m a web developer and a dad to a Toddler boy (2.5y) and an Infant girl (1y). Both are avid fans of online videos.”

[Thanks Ron!]

*An interesting concept, it could probably be adapted for all kinds of topic areas to create a new site.

Totlol: YouTube Videos fo ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (8)

Google Toolbar Available for Firefox 3

Are you using a Firefox 3 release candidate but you miss the Google Toolbar? Well, it’s now working and available. [Thanks Hebbet!]

Google Toolbar Available ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (11+5)

Nokia Helper Templates

When preparing a new text message to someone on the mobile phone I use, you’re offered to pick from ready-made text templates like “I am late. I will be there at ___” or “I’m busy right now. I’ll call you later.” Another template Nokia decided to include reads:

I love you too

Thank you Nokia developers of the world for making our busy lives a bit simpler!

Nokia Helper Templates by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (14)

Googolopoly Game

Googolopoly by Box.net is a game of Monopoly where the goal is to “organize all of the world’s information.” To achieve this, you can buy or build internet properties. The board includes fields like “Go” (“collect 200 shares of VC funding as you pass”) or a “deadpool” jail (“404 error file not found”), and properties you can buy range from Jotspot, YouTube, SketchUp, over to PayPal, eBay, Yahoo and Microsoft...

[Via Spreeblick. Thanks Ionut!]

Googolopoly Game by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (14)

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The Growing List of Things You Can Do With Google Maps

Brian Ussery is director of SEO at Search Discovery in Atlanta, Georgia, and develops using Google’s tools and APIs.

The Google Maps team has been hard at work launching a number of new features in recent months. In case you’ve missed them, here are a few of the features available in Google Maps these days.

“Get directions” with Google Maps Street View

Google’s Street View was released a year ago and includes imagery for 37 major metropolitan areas in the US. In addition to the stand-alone version, Street View is now included in Google Maps directions. Street View directions make it possible for users to virtually tour new destinations before their arrival. Using Google Maps Street View in directions is simple: click on the “Get directions” tab and if Street View imagery is available it will be indicated by a camera icon and outlined in blue.

Google Maps StreetView “Get directions” feature

“Get directions" for Public Transportation in Google Maps

The Google Maps “Public Transit” feature allows users to map entire trips using public transportation and all within Google Maps. To use this feature, search for directions in Google Maps and if transit information is available it will be indicated by a “Public Transit” option in the directions tab. With this option users can get step-by-step transit directions in addition to transit stop locations, station information, schedules and more.

Google Maps Public Transit “Get directions” feature

Find Future Traffic Conditions with Google Maps

Most folks know about the “Traffic” feature in Google Maps but, now users can use Google Maps for information about future traffic conditions. To use the feature, click on “change” in the “Live Traffic” box near the upper right hand corner of your traffic map. Google Maps “Traffic” uses traffic data from 30 major US metropolitan areas to map traffic flow in real-time so drivers know what areas to avoid. Traffic conditions in Google Maps are denoted by color. Green means traffic is moving at an average speed of more than 50mph, yellow 25-50mph, red indicates traffic is moving at less than 25mph and gray indicates that data is not available.

Google Maps Traffic prediction feature in action

More “Photos” in Google Maps

Google Maps Photo results in Google Maps

More “Wikipedia” Map Results

Thanks to Wikipedia’s Geographical coordinates Google Maps now includes Wikipedia articles in Maps results relevant to user queries and based on the geographical location of results. According to Wikipedia, “Any Wikipedian may participate in this project to better organize information in articles containing geographical coordinates.” The example below shows a search for “Atlanta” and includes a Wikipedia icon for the Georgia Aquarium at “Coordinates 33.76250, -84.39400” top right in the page.

Wikipedia results in Google Maps

Google Maps Video

Google Video and YouTube users have the option of providing geographic information when entering descriptions for their videos. Google Maps uses this information to map videos and make them available in Google Maps based on geographic location.

Video results in Google Maps

Google Maps Edits

When users find an error in a Google Maps locations or details, they can correct it using the “Edit” feature. By using the edit feature users can remove a place, add new places, flag inappropriate content and even view the edit history for locations in Google Maps. Google’s “Recent Edits” shows edits by other users in real-time.

In addition to all of the above, user can create their own maps in Google Maps: Customizing Google Maps is easy! Google Maps allows users to overlay weather, photos, public transit maps and original content. In addition, Google Maps allows users to interact with Google Maps tools and maps created by Google developers. Google Maps users can share, personalize, track and save maps all by setting up a Google Maps account. You might want to check out some of these features next time you pay a visit to Google’s mapping program.

Example “My map" for Georgia Tech’s Conference on RSS

The Growing List of Thing ... by Brian Ussery | Comments (6)

Google Code Search Shows Function Outline

Now when you look for bits and pieces at Google Code Search, you can switch to an Outline view additional to the existing Files view. In the (presumably) new Outline view, you will see a linked list of functions and their parameters. This does not work with all kinds of programming languages yet (like Visual Basic), but it worked in some when I tried (like JavaScript).

Google Code Search was released in 2006 and allows you to search all kinds of publicly available source code, including code contained in zipped files. You can use the “lang” operator, as in lang:javascript, to restrict your search to specific languages. As of around March this year, Google also sometimes shows Google Code Search results directly in their main web results.

[Thanks TomHTML!]

Google Code Search Shows ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

Gmail.com Domain Made Disfunctional In Germany

Surprise... I usually enter “gmail.com” to jump to my email inbox, but today I’m greeted with the following message after doing so (the message sits at mail.google.com/gmail/):

We can’t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we’re called Google Mail here instead.

If you’re traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com.

Oh, and we’d like to link the URL above, but we’re not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

Why does this happen? The reason is likely Google’s lost trademark battle with German Daniel Giersch, who owns “G-mail”. Already since some time, German Gmail users will not see a Gmail logo on top – rather, the logo says “Google Mail” – and upon registering, they receive john.doe@googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com. (However, my old email address, @gmail.com, still receives messages alright.)

So for German users, the only change as far as I can tell is they now have to enter mail.google.com instead of gmail.com to get to their inbox. As you can see in Google’s message above, Google isn’t even allowed to link to mail.google.com when you enter the gmail.com domain...

Update: Odd, now it works as usual again from Germany... loading up Gmail instead of bringing up a “sorry” message as above. [Thanks Knospe and Michael!]

Gmail.com Domain Made Dis ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (32)

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Google Maps Driving Simulator

Geoquake released a bird’s view driving simulator... based on the Google Maps Flash API. Well, perhaps “simulation” is a bit far-fetched, as you can pass through any object, like houses. (Ironically, this works better for me than maps.google.com, where I mostly see gray tiles.) [Via Waxy.]

Google Maps Driving Simul ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

TinEye Image Comparison Search

TinEye is an impressively fast, and well-working image comparison search engine – you provide either an image URL or an image on your hard disk, and then they will show similar images. While they don’t yet have enough images indexed to show a lot of results – and often, there won’t be any result at all even when you know the image exists online – this is still a very interesting engine, and already useful for certain types research. (It’s also the kind of product where you wonder, “Why doesn’t Google release this?”)

Searching for the Google logo...

I’ve asked Idée Inc, the company behind this, what people might want to use their search for, and here’s what they say:

• Research: searching for an image that you don’t know the origin of, or have limited information about. Being able to review pages where an image appears often yields information about the image. (...)

• Education: searching for high resolution images to illustrate an essay when all you have is a low resolution image

• Vanity searches: tracking where your images are appearing online

• Professional photographers and illustrators: finding out where their images are appearing online not for copyright infringement but to find how their images are being used. As you probably know, photographers very rarely get tearsheets that show them how their images ended up being used and where

• Copyright infringement monitoring: this is straight forward, where are my images, and are they being used in compliance with their license terms

• Product searches: I have a photograph of a product and I need to find out more about it (we have indexed all of Amazon’s CD and book covers and we are in the process of indexing the entire set of Amazon product images)

• Brand monitoring: finding out where your brand images are online and how used they are

• Mobile applications that we will release in fall but are not currently prepared to discuss.

Idée Inc say they basically see their engine as answering the “where” and “how” of image search – where is a particular image appearing, and how is it being used.

The TinEye creators also write that they currently crawl up to 200 million images per month. At the core of their site is a so-called image fingerprinting algorithm. It works not only with identical images, but also pics that contain just a part of another image. TinEye thinks their technology is “a major breakthrough and also quite secret. We believe we are the only firm able to do this at the scale that we do.” TinEye expect to go open for everyone in the third quarter this year; right now, you can request an invite at their site.

[Via Google OS.]

TinEye Image Comparison S ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

Expanded Google Street View Imagery

Google announced they about doubled the scope of their Google Maps Street View imagery, bringing it to many new locations including Springfield, Atlanta, Knoxville, Reno and others. Also, some old imagery has been expanded or updated, and Google also says they’ve rolled out their face blurring technology to all pics*. You can also now look upwards in all of their images, Google says, and looking down also won’t result in you seeing their Street View car or other obstacles.

At the moment, the Google Maps panorama photos are still only available for the US, but Street View cars were spotted in several other locations – like in Italy or France – so we may expect to find new countries added one of these days.

[Thanks Mbegin!]

*Unfortunately I can’t see Google Maps correctly on this computer so I can’t test this.

Update: Keir comments, “Google have also replaced the higher resolution imagery in San Francisco with lower resolution imagery and cheekily announced it as an improvement in image quality.” I asked Google whether they lowered their quality, but while they don’t give a specific answer they say “there are several factors that contribute to quality” and that they improved things “such as lighting, color, and presence of artifacts.” I’m currently seeing 3 zoom levels for San Francisco, when there were 4 in the past, judging from older screenshots. [Thans Keir, Mapper and Tom!]

Update 2: While some in the comments speculate there might also have been privacy pressures involved which caused the lower amount of zoom levels in some locations (I don’t know either way), Google follows up with this statement: “The imagery of San Francisco ... is updated, containing more recent imagery, and addressing issues such as geometric artifacts, image stitching, lighting, and discoloration. To gather this new, high-quality imagery, we deployed a new camera system which provides lower resolution but ultimately allows for a high-quality, realistic experience and new features, such as being able to both pan up and pan down.”

Expanded Google Street Vi ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+20)

Google Result Offers You to "Skip Intro"

Oh, sweet. You know when you look for some company homepage to get their support email address or something, and then the page will start with a super great 3D animation that will take a minute to load... before you can actually find the info you wanted? Well, that’s why many Flash apps have the infamous “Skip Intro” button included, and now*, Google does too. In a search for e.g. yuasa france, the top result – yuasa.fr – is listed as normal. But to the right side of the title, there’s a link reading “Skip Intro”, which will take you straight to yuasa.fr/index.htm. (On the other hand, perhaps for some sites it would also make sense to directly link to the skipped page... and show a link to “See Intro” to the right.) [Thanks TomHTML!]

*I don’t know since when this is live and if it’s very new...

Google Result Offers You ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (45)

Rumor: A WebKit-based GBrowser?

In the post The Google Browser from earlier this year, someone going by the name “the Lizard” says that Google is developing its own, WebKit-based browser. Lizard argues that it is strategically dangerous to bet too much on just Firefox, which sends a lot of paid search traffic to Google, and that this made Google start an internal project in mid-2006 titled “GBrowser.”

According to the Lizard, GBrowser is built on top of the open source WebKit browser framework, which was also used by Apple to create Safari, and is also used for the browser of Google-initiated mobile platform Android. “More than that,” the Lizard writes, GBrowser “will offer integration with many Google services, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Blogger, and likely Google Talk.” Lizard continues:

Rumblings of a Google browser have been carpeting the web for years, but it wasn’t until 2006 that an entire team was actually committed to working on what will become GBrowser.

Google, always known for iterating slowly on most of its projects, has taken its time on GBrowser for a very good reason: it only has one chance to get it right. Failing to succeed in its browser move means rocky negotiations with a core partner, Mozilla, and could negatively impact its financials in a significant manner. A move into the browser market requires perfection, and GBrowser has undergone at least one substantial rewrite and many major user-interface iterations.

Lizard adds, “Mozilla knows GBrowser is coming and discusses it at length internally.” And then, I heard another rumor that Google will be creating a standard which allows the toolbar of GBrowser to change when visiting certain sites – say, when you visit Google Docs you get a special Docs toolbar. Now, I don’t know if there’s indeed such a browser in the works, and have to file all of this under rumor until further details are known... but thought it’s an interesting rumor nevertheless. Once in May 2006, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in a Q&A whether Google would consider building their own browser, he replied “We would only do so...if we thought there was a real user benefit.”

[Thanks Anonymous! Illustration based on WebKit homepage logo. Hat tip to Tony!]

Rumor: A WebKit-based GBr ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (24)

Monday, June 9, 2008

Google Reader’s Easter Egg

up up down down left right left right b a :)

Tags: google reader, konami code, ninja

[Thanks anonymous!]

Google Reader’s Easter Eg ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (43)

A Google News Fantasy

In 2004, David McCandless produced a “good news"-only Google News (see image). Now there’s a new “personal version of good news"-only fiction of Google News around. [Via Reddit.]

A Google News Fantasy by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

Google’s Russian Ad Campaign

Yakov at the Quintura blog reports of a Googe outdoor advertisement campaign in Russa. The tag line of the campaign – reportedly titled “Moscow 2.0” – is “Know more on Google.ru”, and according to Yakov, it includes “information messages about the city of Moscow on 5.5 thousand ad places in Moscow, including on 24 billboards, 58 benches and 4.5 thousand stickers in the city underground.” As part of the campaign, Yakov writes, “users are invited to embed their own city images and videos onto a virtual map of Moscow on Google Maps.”

Google often relies on word of mouth rather than ad campaigns, but in Russia (where Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born) they struggled more than in some other markets, being less popular than local search engine Yandex. Yakov tells me that he doesn’t think Google’s ads will help much, though. “They will need TV ad campaign to break through, that’s what Yandex did several years ago and only then it became a national brand,” he says.

[Thanks Yakov! Photo by CNet Russia.]

Google’s Russian Ad Campa ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

Friday, June 6, 2008

Gmail Labs: Experimental Opt-In Features

Google went live with Gmail Labs, experimental features for web mail client Gmail which you can choose to enable one by one. Note this may still be rolled out for you; if you have it, you can log-in to Gmail, click Settings, and switch to the right-most tab, titled Labs. You will then see an explanation that this is an experimental testing ground where Google engineers can try out new ideas, with a warning that any feature may “change, break or disappear” in the future (but that you can temporarily disable the Labs via a special URL).

Here are some of the features currently available – note whenever you pick one, you are not only required to hit Save Changes, but sometimes also to enable other settings (like keyboard short-cuts) for this to work:

• Quick links box: This will add a box to the left side to which you can add any Gmail URL... like, for instance, a Gmail search for in:inbox is:unread to see all your unread messages of your inbox. This could come in very handy.
• Different stars icons: Lets you define a couple of different star icons. Traditionally you can only either add or remove a yellow star to a mail. With this feature you can click the star several times to rotate its image. (Google names this feature “Superstars”, which is a bit of a pun that might make some mistake it for a “automated icons for VIP friends” feature at first.)
• Fixed width font: Enabling this will trigger a new entry in the “Reply” menu that lets you switch to a non-proportional font.
• A Snakes game: Well, perhaps something to surprise your friend, though not useful (or a terrific novel game) in itself; enable this, then enable shortcuts, and press “&” to bring up a game of snakes.
• Mouse gestures: When you enable this feature you can hold the right mouse button and then move the mouse upwards to jump to the inbox, from any place. Moving left-ways goes to a previous conversation, moving to the right goes to the next.
• Random signature: This will load one of several signatures available in an RSS feed file.

Other Labs features are profile pictures in chat, custom keyboard shortcuts, the ability to place your signature above the quoted message, custom date formats, hiding your friends’ status to save screen space, an anti-email addiction tool that will block the screen for 15 minutes and makes you invisible in chat, as well as an experiment that hides the “unread” count for the inbox, labels and so on. Google in a blog post on the subject says more features are “on the way.” (And then there’s also still the general Google Labs, with non-Gmail related experiments.)

All in all the new Gmail Labs are fun and useful, I think. While users were able to use the Firefox Greasemonkey plug-in for homemade features, this will be more intuitive for many. Though perhaps not that many either, as some people won’t delve that far into their program settings, which means a Labs section won’t be a good excuse to not roll out meaningful features for all users in the long run. But as I mentioned before a features directory makes sense for many programs (including Google Docs), as it can cater to all kinds of needs and use cases. With Gmail Labs, Google couples each feature with a help group where you can post feedback, making it both an opt-in feature directory as well as a way to test Alpha-ish ideas. There’s a caveat with “Alpha” though: even when it’s disclaimed as a Labs feature, if it ever breaks in a way that compromises your email message data or your Google account, it would turn from playfulness to a serious problem with angered users (but perhaps that isn’t likely to happen with any of the current features).

[Hat tip to Miss Universe, TechCrunch, everyone in the thread!]

Gmail Labs: Experimental ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (44+36)

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Disney World in 3D in Google Earth

Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog has news that Disney World of Orlando, Florida, is now available in 3D in Google Earth. To view this, enter disney world in the Google Earth search box – you might want to download the latest version, but note when I tried it always crashes Firefox 3 – and tick the “3D Buildings” box in the bottom left. Here are some screenshots, and Frank also put up a video:

On Disney, Wikipedia writes, “Disney is one among several American companies lobbying for harsher enforcement of intellectual property around the world and continued copyright term extensions, posing a perceived threat to the existence of the public domain”. Chris Sprigman has more in an article titled The Mouse That Ate the Public Domain.

Disney World in 3D in Goo ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (9)

Google Gadgets for Linux: One Step closer to Open Source
By Yannick Stucki

Google has always been a friend of open source. First, when they were “only” a search engine as a user with their Linux based servers or their GIMP drawn Google logo, but later also as a contributor. Nowadays, the involvement is too broad to be fully covered here, but to mention a few they submitted countless fixes to WINE, have the Google Summer of Code program, an open source project hosting page and last not least full projects that were or are yet to be open sourced like Google Web Toolkit or Android.

Recently, Google took another step towards open source: Google Gadgets for Linux. Google Gadgets come in two flavors; the ones that are desktop based and the ones that are website (iGoogle) based. For desktop gadgets one needed Google Desktop for Windows or later also for the Mac, a free but closed software. Now the user can also install the gadgets on Linux, however, there is a big difference in how the project has been approached. Google Gadgets for Linux is open sourced under the Apache License 2.0. This is nothing new for Google, as they have many open source projects, but this time they started being fully open from the first day on. They are already encouraging users to become contributors and on the project homepage there is an outlook on what is planned like a KDE4 Plasma integration, a FreeBSD and Solaris port and a developer documentation.

It’s interesting to see Google shifting more and more into the open source space and despite already having open projects, this is maybe Google’s “most open” so far. Jim Zhuang phrased it fittingly on the Google Open Source Blog:

For Gadgets for Linux, we don’t just want to simply release the final offering, but we also want to give everyone a chance to tinker with the code powering the gadgets. For this project, fostering a transparent and lively developer community is just as important as serving our users.

You can run the gadgets using either GTK or QT, but you still have to compile the project from scratch. As Jim said it hasn’t reached 1.0 yet and there are a few things to be polished, but it’s already stable and can run a lot of gadgets with full features. However, the stage of the project won’t be a problem for the Linux users out there, since they are used to compile themselves and dive into a project which is still in development.

Google Gadgets for Linux: ... by Yannick Stucki | Comments (1+8)

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Bomomo...

... is a new site. Unfortunately, Firefox-only (plus perhaps Safari)... I did this with Canvas. Feedback welcome. [Thanks to all who gave early feedback, including Tony, Jess and Dominik! Hat tip to Pixelwit. My friend Dominik contemplates a Flash port to make this IE-ready, please contact me if you want to help.]

Bomomo... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (57)

YouTube Adds Video Interaction, Annotations (While Google Video Upload Is Broken)

YouTube now offers video annotations, text bubbles created by the video owner which are overlaid on the video at specific times. To add an annotation to one of your own videos, check your videos listing and hit the “Edit Annotations” button next to one. You will be able to insert three types of annotations; “speech bubbles,” “notes,” and “spotlights.”

Also, you can add a link with each annotation. Those URLs may only point to YouTube though (I wonder if that’s greedy or if there’s a good reason for this). This feature also allows you to create interactive videos – like a video ending with a multiple choice question, leading to different other videos depending on where you click. Combining several of these videos, it would be possible to create a full-featured choose-your-own-adventure game... neat! (Be aware if you want to offer unique options, the work behind such an adventure will grow exponentially – having multiple paths merge again can help here.)

As a visitor, to turn off annotations in a given video like the Magic Card Trick video, click the bottom right arrow and hit the mysterious icon above it. Note that only video owners can add annotations; looking at the annoying results of other video sites which allow anyone to add annotations to a given clip, we might say luckily so.

Google Video upload is broken in the meantime

While Google-owned YouTube is adding features, Google-Video-as-video-host brings new troubles. Ever since the acquisition of YouTube, Google refocused their own old site to be a video search engine, not as much the place to upload your own things... this can be seen, for one thing, by the fact that almost all official Google blogs now post videos to YouTube instead of Google Video, and the closing down of their “best of Google Video” section as part of their Google Video blog. Google likes to promote to “eat your own dog food” in internal campaigns, but having two services in a competing area lets them now choose between different dog food brands.

For instance, just recently I tried to upload something to Google Video because while YouTube has better social features, I kind of prefer the Google Video player for technical reasons. After the video was uploaded using the web interface, I was waiting for it to go live. And waited. And waited. After a while, seeing the video was still not live, I switched to YouTube, and after the upload there, the video was then quickly showing live... whereas Google Video was still working on it, for some reasons (do they have human moderators checking each and every video, and if so, is the same true for YouTube?).

Now, news comes in via blogger Andy Baio that the upload is completely broken. I was able to reproduce this with an MPG video I uploaded (I recently spotted a cat across the street, which made for a good sample video). After the upload, Google’s video status nearly immediately said the video status was Live. Checking the live URL they link to, though, just results in this message: “We’re sorry, but this video may not be available. ... If this video was recently uploaded, it may still be processing. If this video is yours, you can check its status.” And that message won’t go away even after many hours, and that message is also appearing for other users of the service.

Looking at a Google Video Help thread (one of many), people are experiencing the upload problem since the middle of last month. In one thread, a Google support person has now chimed in saying “Our team is looking in to this and we’re hoping to get it fixed soon.”

The Google Video homepage itself also feels kind of deserted – even when there’s clearly developer activity on it, as the constant redesigns show. However, the video picks are sub-optimal. Just recently, the page was filled with Ultimate Fighting Championship videos including the fighter Kimbo... not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that lacked a bit of content diversity (and it was also not triggered by my own searches, as others saw the same). Today, there’s still two Kimbo videos up. And there is not a single video in the “hot videos” section which is hosted by Google Video; in fact, all but one are by Google-owned YouTube.
Below the hot videos is a “Featured on AOL” section which is nothing more but a partner section, and such partner sections don’t necessarily have the interests of the end user in mind... but the interest of the partner. An agreement Google once made with AOL as part of what Google called a “strategic alliance” included “showcasing AOL’s premium video service within Google Video.” Being in Germany, this also means I will get the message “The requested video cannot be displayed in your region" for many of those videos.

Once, Google Video was a destination to find captions of TV shows. Later, it became an opportunity to buy “Digital Rights Managed” videos in the US (and a good example of what may happen to your DRM content when such a service is canceled: the content ceases to exist). Both programs are ended by now, but the video hosting feature – which doubles Google’s efforts in this area if you consider YouTube – still seems to officially persist... even if it’s not working right now.

[Via Waxy.]

YouTube Adds Video Intera ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (16)

Monday, June 2, 2008

Kevin Fox of Gmail & FriendFeed on User Experience Design

From 2003 to January 2008, Kevin Fox worked as a user experience designer at Google, designing such products as Gmail, Google Calendar, and the second version of Google Reader. He’s currently working at FriendFeed. I met Kevin for a three-session instant messenger chat interview (edited for clarity, and both parties had the chance to make minor rewordings later on; see more about the process. Please note this is almost exclusively a foray into design & usability; topics like Google censorship, privacy and more are discussed elsewhere on the site).

Can you tell us, what do you do at the moment, what is your job at FriendFeed?

My official job title is “FriendFeeder”. At the moment that’s everyone’s job title. The idea being that we shouldn’t feel limited in how we contribute based on a job title or a set of responsibilities. In practice, I think a lot about the user experience and visual design a lot.

Do you also do programming? I noticed you seem to be both a developer and a designer, is that right?

In the past I’ve done both. I used to be a web developer and technical lead for a few different companies like Levi-Strauss. Back then I would do a lot of front-end engineering and database integration.

Nowadays I do a lot less of that. It’s mostly about letting people focus on the areas that they excel at. I’m not a pro at Ajax implementation, but I have a firm grasp of its capabilities, so I design toward that. That said, I’m learning Python (I’ve been more of a LAMP [Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/ Python/ PHP] engineer in the past) so I can contribute directly to the codebase rather than rely on someone else coding my smaller ideas just to see how they work in practice.

The ability to touch the code is especially important here at FriendFeed, because while the visual experience is currently pretty simple, the important interactions are very subtle, so being able to play with small functional changes in a working environment is vital.

So you add something to try it, and then roll back the change if you don’t like it?

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