Googland |
- [G] Collaborating with Google Apps and Socialwok
- [G] Webinar: Google Analytics' Newest Features
- [G] Now you see it, now you don't
- [G] Friend Connect: Birds of a Feather Tweet Together
- [G] Etherboot Project GSoC 2009 Report
- [G] More Street View updates: See the sea, see the world
- [G] Climate Action - Let Gov. Schwarzenegger be your guide!
- [G] Spread some holiday cheer, one card at a time
- [G] Category filtering for French, German, and Spanish ads
- [G] Same Protocol, More Options for News Publishers
- [G] Spread some holiday cheer, one card at a time
- [G] Learn how to be a tech reviewer
- [G] Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps
- [G] Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps
| [G] Collaborating with Google Apps and Socialwok Posted: 02 Dec 2009 05:26 PM PST Official Google Enterprise Blog: Collaborating with Google Apps and SocialwokEditor's Note: Ming Yong is co-founder of Socialwok, a a feed-based group collaboration application for enterprises that integrates with Google Apps. With Socialwok, Google Apps users can create their own private social network to share Google Docs, Calendars and Spreadsheets in feeds for their domains. Ming and his team built Socialwok on Google App Engine for Java, Google Web Toolkit and Google GData APIs.James Hollow is President of Alien-Eye, a rapidly growing creative marketing agency based in Tokyo and a Socialwok customer. Depending on the project, Alien-Eye works with a network of production partners outside the company and thus a lot of Alien-Eye projects depend on successful collaboration between different distributed small teams. Thanks to Ming and James for sharing their story. Ming Yong: My colleagues and I are big fans of social networking sites and of Google Apps – we use the social feed to keep connected with all our friends around the world and Google Apps as our messaging and collaboration platform. However, we wanted to be able to share information across Google Apps in a more detailed way. So we created Socialwok (http://socialwok.com) to bring enterprise feed-based sharing to the Google Apps platform. We launched Socialwok for Google Apps in September 2009 at Techcrunch 50, where we won the Techcrunch demopit award. Since then, more than 4,000 organizations have signed up for Socialwok. We would like to share with you the story of one such organization, Alien-Eye. Alien-Eye staff in Tokyo, using Socialwok James Hollow: Socialwok has really helped our teams collaborate on projects. Its feed-based group collaboration format is really intuitive, and is a great way to keep track of the conversations around any project or initiative. We create feeds to keep track of all our projects. Members of the Alien-Eye team working on different aspects of the project can post status updates on what they have done, share media files and different Google Apps like Google Docs and Google Calendar. Given the large number of projects at Alien-Eye, we have many Google Docs as well as media files. Often, it can be very difficult to stay organized and get access to the necessary information. Socialwok's consolidated enterprise keyword search is incredibly handy; all the content on our Alien-Eye social network is indexed and the results are presented split by category. Socialwok even indexes across the different Google Apps file types like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Presentations. We also really like the mobility Socialwok affords us. Our strategists and producers spend a large portion of their time meeting our clients and partners in downtown Tokyo. With Socialwok's mobile web version, we have an intuitive interface to pick up project threads and feedback, and make decisions on the move. You just hop into the feed, post a comment, and the system syndicates it for you using email notifications and Gmail instant messages. This can save up to half a day on a single project timeline. Given the large number of projects that are running at Alien-Eye, we get significant productivity benefits from using Socialwok as our de facto project management system. Socialwok also allows you to invite external collaborators to any feed. All communications on a project are then archived in a single location and can be referenced easily using keyword search or feed directory browsing. Some of our more progressive clients have already started using this functionality, with great results. Ming Yong: While Socialwok has become Alien-Eye's hub for internal communications and communication with some collaborators, most of their clients still have email-based work flows. The Socialwok Gmail gadget integrates the Socialwok user's home feed into the Gmail interface. In addition, you can post to the project feed via keyword-based email addresses, and Socialwok will automatically post the message to the right place. To try out Socialwok, go to http://www.socialwok.com and log in using your Google Apps or Google account info. Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps team  URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/12/editors-note-ming-yong-is-co-founder-of.html      |
| [G] Webinar: Google Analytics' Newest Features Posted: 02 Dec 2009 05:26 PM PST Google Analytics Blog: Webinar: Google Analytics' Newest FeaturesAs of this week, all the new Google Analytics features we recently announced should be available in all accounts! (And just yesterday, we announced one more - a new, asynchronous tracking code snippet.)If you missed the announcements or are curious about the features you're now seeing, join us in this upcoming webinar, happening next week on Wednesday. We'll provide an overview and demonstration of the features and provide tips on some best practices and uses. You'll learn how the following features have added more power, flexibility and intelligence to Google Analytics' enterprise class capabilities:
Time: 10 - 11 am, PST Register here. There will also be an opportunity for Q&A so please ask your questions beforehand through Google Moderator. We hope you'll come learn more about the latest features .... and we may even have a few extra surprises to share then, too! Hope to see you there. Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team  URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/webinar-google-analytics-newest.html     |
| [G] Now you see it, now you don't Posted: 02 Dec 2009 05:26 PM PST Official Google Blog: Now you see it, now you don'tYou may have noticed that our homepage is sporting a new look. Today we're excited to be releasing a new version of our classic homepage. The main feature of the new homepage is that it "fades in" — when the page first loads, it shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons. For the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage, they are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost. For those users who are interested in using a different application like Gmail, Google Image Search or our advertising programs, the additional links on the homepage only reveal themselves when the user moves the mouse. Since most users who are interested in clicking over to a different application generally do move the mouse when they arrive, the "fade in" is an elegant solution that provides options to those who want them, but removes distractions for the user intent on searching. Left: Before the fade. Right: After the fade. Click the image for a closer view. For the past few months, we've been experimenting with homepage designs like this and have run several live tests on the site. We do these live tests when we are making a change that we think may fundamentally affect how people use the site. Initially, some of the experiment findings had us concerned, but one thing we have learned through our tests is not to judge the outcome too quickly. All in all, we ran approximately 10 variants of the fade-in. Some of the experiments hindered the user experience: for example, the variants of the homepage that hid the search buttons until after the fade performed the worst in terms of user happiness metrics. Other variants of the experiment produced humorous outcomes when combined with our doodles — the barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism. However, in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change... and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed. Internally, a large number of Google employees have been using the new homepage. They have come to really like it — it represents our focus on great search yet helps searchers efficiently access all of Google's products. Like the new supersized search box we launched several months ago, this change is one that is very noticeable at first, and then quickly becomes second nature. We hope you like it! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, Kris Hom, Software Engineer, and Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer  URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/now-you-see-it-now-you-dont.html     |
| [G] Friend Connect: Birds of a Feather Tweet Together Posted: 02 Dec 2009 05:26 PM PST Social Web Blog: Friend Connect: Birds of a Feather Tweet TogetherToday, we're bringing Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together. Now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login. Once signed in, your Twitter profile will be automatically linked and you can tweet your new site membership, share discussions from the comments gadget, and invite your friends via Twitter.Already using Google Friend Connect on your site? These features are live and users can start signing in and posting via Twitter today. If you have a website and are interested in using Google Friend Connect, learn more at www.google.com/friendconnect. Posted by James Reilly, Google Friend Connect Team  URL: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/12/friend-connect-birds-of-feather-tweet.html     |
| [G] Etherboot Project GSoC 2009 Report Posted: 02 Dec 2009 03:48 PM PST Google Open Source Blog: Etherboot Project GSoC 2009 ReportThe Etherboot Project is very pleased to have participated in Google Summer of Code™ 2009. This summer marks our fourth consecutive annual participation in this excellent mentoring program.Google generously sponsored five students to work with us, and four of our five students (80%) successfully completed their projects. We would like to thank Google, our mentors, and our students for making this a pleasant, productive, and memorable summer. We particularly wish thank one of our mentors, Stefan Hajnoczi, who was a GSoC student with us last year. His insights and diligence are extremely helpful and enlightening. Although all of our GSoC projects were not successfully completed, our students' work was generally of excellent quality, and we sincerely thank them all for their diligence. Our participation in GSoC has strengthened our project by encouraging us to create additional technical and social infrastructure. These improved facilities make it easier for new people to become involved with our project and also help us better support and communicate with our existing community. We look forward to giving future GSoC students and other interested and motivated people a positive introduction to FOSS development. What follows is a brief summary of our 2009 students' work with links to their full project pages. We conclude with a brief outline of our mentoring system that we hope may be helpful to other projects. Student Project Summaries Daniel Verkamp Daniel implemented an automated regression testing framework to help us consistently deliver high-quality releases. Joshua Oreman Joshua extended gPXE, our network bootloader, with an 802.11 wireless stack, and added drivers for two wireless cards. Lynus Vaz Lynus extended gPXE scripting with a more powerful language that is capable of expressing advanced boot policies. Pravin Shinde Pravin created a central resource to network boot operating systems, diagnostic tools, and utilities at http://boot.kernel.org/. Chris Kluka Chris worked on adding a network driver DLink DGE-530T ethernet cards. Though unable to complete his project, he compiled and created useful information which will facilitate future work on this driver. Our Mentoring System Over our years of GSoC participation we have developed and refined a system for mentoring that works quite well for us. One of the most important attributes of our system is that we break the twelve week GSoC coding period into twelve one week evaluation periods. By doing this we ensure that we always have recent information on how each of our students is doing, which allows us to intervene in a timely fashion when needed. Techniques Here are some of the other ways we structure our GSoC participation: * We mentor as a team. We have a mailing list and private IRC channel specifically for mentors. * Our mentoring team interviews all qualified applicants in a private IRC channel. Multiple perspectives have proven very helpful in identifying excellent candidates. Mentors communicate among themselves during interviews in a second private IRC channel. * We request code samples from all of our applicants to get a sense of their proficiency and coding style. * We present real-time coding exercises during our IRC interviews with applicants, and ask them questions about their proposed solutions, and also about their code samples. * We inform our students of our team mentoring approach and encourage them to send general questions to the mentors mailing list. * We require our selected students to have IRC access and to define "work hours" where they will be online and available on our main project IRC channel (#etherboot on irc.freenode.net). We have found that this requirement encourages them to interact with our project community as well as their primary mentor. * We use any and all available means to communicate directly with our students, including IRC, email, phone, VOIP, and IM. It is important to discover what works best to promote effective, open communication between students and mentors. * We require our students to maintain a set of project pages, which include their: -Project Plan -Journal (broken into twelve weeks) -Notes -git repository link * Our mentors meet weekly with each student in a private IRC channel to review their project pages and generally discuss their progress. We have found these meetings to be very beneficial to both students and mentors. * We make the steady progress and ultimate success of each of our student projects central to our mentoring goals. We meet as mentors to discuss how we can help each student succeed, and we discuss our formal GSoC evaluations as a team. * We base our project's success on the quality of our code and the health of our community, and we work continuously to improve as programmers and as people. By Marty Connor, Etherboot Project  URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/12/etherboot-project-gsoc-2009-report.html     |
| [G] More Street View updates: See the sea, see the world Posted: 02 Dec 2009 11:44 AM PST Google LatLong: More Street View updates: See the sea, see the worldToday's update to Street View is a whale of a launch -- literally! We've added imagery gathered by our Trike for several special attractions we've partnered with in the United States, including the SeaWorld parks. Of course, that includes photos of SeaWorld's biggest star, Shamu: You can also catch their acrobatic dolphins mid-leap: Along with imagery of all three SeaWorld locations (Orlando, San Diego, and San Antonio), we've also photographed Aquatica and Discovery Cove, through our partnership with SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment. Another theme park addition is Hersheypark in Pennsylvania, where you can see their dozens of rides and, of course, lots of candy. High school seniors around the country know that college application deadlines are fast approaching, so to help them narrow down their choices by getting a better feel for schools, we've worked with Boston University to add their campus to Street View: You can also browse all our new special attractions in the Street View Gallery. And if you work for a theme park, college, race track, or any fun destination that you want to be featured in Street View, be sure to visit our Street View Partner Program site to learn more. To the north, we've expanded our coverage in Canada. Nine new cities can now be explored from the comfort (and warmth!) of your home: Victoria, Nanaimo, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Sudbury, London, Sherbrooke, and St. John's. The historic Victoria Empress hotel looks like it would make a great trip: We're also continuing to provide imagery of entirely new countries. Today Singapore becomes the first country in Southeast Asia included in Street View. You can explore iconic locations like Orchard Road and Clarke Quay; cultural areas like Chinatown and Little India; or the heartland like Jurong and Woodlands. In the UK, earlier this year we let users nominate locations for our Trike to photograph, just as we recently did in the US. After more than 10,000 submissions and 35,000 votes, winners are now online: Millennium Stadium, Angel of the North, Eden Project, Warwick Castle, Bamburgh Castle, and Stonehenge: Stay tuned for the big announcement of the trike contest winners in the United States, and more exciting Street View news that's always on the horizon. Till then, I'll leave you with a challenge: see if you can find another area, photographed by our trike, where a friendly bunch of Googlers stopped by to say hello. Posted by Julie Sohn, Content Partnerships Team  URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-street-view-updates-see-sea-see.html     |
| [G] Climate Action - Let Gov. Schwarzenegger be your guide! Posted: 02 Dec 2009 11:44 AM PST Google LatLong: Climate Action - Let Gov. Schwarzenegger be your guide![Cross-posted from the Official Google.org Blog] And California has the science. The California Climate Change Center is one of the few state-funded climate research programs in the country. The Center has provided critical support for research and collaboration among scientists and resource managers in a series of state-wide climate assessments. Don't miss Gov. Schwarzenegger's narrated Google Earth tour, which shows the risks of continued climate change for Californians and the important actions state and local agencies are taking to address these. See the short video version below (and the longer one here) or download the full tour for Google Earth here. You can learn more about California's response in its Climate Adaptation Strategy, which was also released today. We're pleased to see California's continued leadership in addressing climate change. Posted by Dr. Amy Luers, Senior Manager, Environment, Google.org  URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-action-let-gov-schwarzenegger.html     |
| [G] Spread some holiday cheer, one card at a time Posted: 02 Dec 2009 11:44 AM PST Official Google Blog: Spread some holiday cheer, one card at a time(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)Every year around this time I start thinking about the annual holiday email I send to friends and family members. I usually email my mom, dad, sister, friends and co-workers. But the one person who appreciates my season's greetings the most — my grandma — is stuck in the pre-digital age of snail-mail. Of course, I could go to a store, aimlessly wander through the aisles, choose a card, wait in line to pay for it, go to the post office, pick up some stamps, etc., etc. — but wouldn't it be so much easier just to fill out a form and have Gmail handle the rest? This holiday season, as a token of our appreciation to our most enthusiastic fans, we'll snail-mail a free holiday postcard on your behalf. Yes, through the mail and everything.  To send a card, visit gmail.com/holidaycard. We'll only be able to send cards to U.S. addresses and to a limited number of people (due to limited Gmail elf availability), so be sure to request one soon. And if you're headed home for the holidays, consider spending some "computer time" with loved ones who aren't as up-to-date with technology. With some luck, maybe this time next year you'll be able to email them a holiday card instead! Wishing a happy holiday to you and yours! Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager  URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/spread-some-holiday-cheer-one-card-at.html     |
| [G] Category filtering for French, German, and Spanish ads Posted: 02 Dec 2009 11:44 AM PST Inside AdSense: Category filtering for French, German, and Spanish adsWe recently expanded category filtering to publishers in additional English-speaking countries, and we're happy to announce that the feature is now available for ads in French, German, and Spanish. With category filtering, you can prevent ads from up to 8 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they're in any of the four supported languages, regardless of how they've been targeted to your pages.To set up category filtering, sign in to your AdSense account and visit your Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. Once you click 'change', you'll be able to view the full list of categories you can filter. In addition, we'll show you the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you've been receiving from each category in the last 30 days, which can help you understand the impact that applying filters might have. For more information about category filtering, feel free to visit our Help Center. We're still working towards making this feature available in more languages, and we'll be sure to let you know about any updates. Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team  URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/12/category-filtering-for-french-german.html     |
| [G] Same Protocol, More Options for News Publishers Posted: 02 Dec 2009 11:44 AM PST Google News Blog: Same Protocol, More Options for News PublishersPosted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product ManagerThere are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. That's because Google News is a great source of readers, sending publishers about 1 billion clicks every month. Each of those clicks is an opportunity for publishers, allowing them to show ads, sell subscriptions and introduce readers to the great content they produce every day. While we think this offers a tremendous opportunity for any publisher who wants new readers, publishers are the ones who create the content and they're in control of it. If they decide they don't want to be in Google, it's easy to do. Today, we're making it even easier with a web crawler specifically for Google News. Publishers have always had the ability to block Google from including their content in Google's index. How? With something called Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP) - a web-wide standard supported by all major search engines and any reputable company that crawls the web. When our crawler arrives at any site, it checks to see if there's a robots.txt file to make sure we have permission to crawl the site. With this file, or similar REP directives on specific pages, publishers can block their entire site, certain sections or individual pages. They can also give instructions on how they want us to index their content, such as telling us to exclude images or snippets of text. Furthermore, they can apply different instructions to different crawlers, giving access to some while blocking others. The new Google News web crawler extends these controls to Google News. If they wanted to, it's always been easy for publishers to keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search. They just had to fill out a simple contact form in our Help Center. Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP. Our users shouldn't notice any difference. Google News will keep helping people discover the news they're looking for, different perspectives from across the world and new sources of information they might not otherwise have found. While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting out of News is the same as it's always been. It means that content won't be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News index. For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, but they won't appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the Google News index. Most people put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose to exclude their material from Google. But we respect publishers' wishes. If publishers don't want their websites to appear in web search results or in Google News, we want to give them easy ways to remove it. We're excited about this change and will start rolling it out today. You can learn more about the details of this change on our Webmaster Central blog. If you see any problems or have any questions, please let us know.  URL: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/same-protocol-more-options-for-news.html     |
| [G] Spread some holiday cheer, one card at a time Posted: 02 Dec 2009 10:43 AM PST Official Gmail Blog: Spread some holiday cheer, one card at a timePosted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing ManagerEvery year around this time I start thinking about the annual holiday email I send to friends and family members. I usually email my mom, dad, sister, friends, and co-workers. But the one person who appreciates my season's greetings the most -- my grandma -- is stuck in the pre-digital age of snail mail. Of course, I could go to a store, aimlessly wander through the aisles, choose a card, wait in line to pay for it, go to the post office, pick up some stamps, etc., etc. -- but wouldn't it be so much easier just to fill out a form and have Gmail handle the rest? This holiday season, as a token of our appreciation to our most enthusiastic fans, we'll snail mail a free holiday postcard on your behalf. Yes, through the mail and everything. To send a card, visit gmail.com/holidaycard. We'll only be able to send cards to US addresses and to a limited number of people (due to limited Gmail elf availability), so be sure to request one soon. And if you're headed home for the holidays, consider spending some 'computer time' with loved ones who aren't as up-to-date with technology. With some luck, maybe this time next year you'll be able to email them a holiday card instead! Wishing a happy holiday to you and yours!  URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/spread-some-holiday-cheer-one-card-at.html     |
| [G] Learn how to be a tech reviewer Posted: 02 Dec 2009 10:43 AM PST YouTube Blog: Learn how to be a tech reviewerWith 40,000+ subscribers and a couple of hit videos, the folks behind the phonedog channel know a thing or two about making popular product-review videos (in their case, mobile phone reviews). In the spirit of the holidays, they've kindly agreed to share their secrets with you, to help the next generation of tech reviewers rise up on YouTube.Ask any question you like about how to be an effective gadget reviewer by leaving a comment on -- or uploading a response video to -- this video. phonedog will review your questions and then make a tutorial video, uploaded around December 15, to help give you your start in this field. Take their advice or leave it, but definitely test it out, particularly on any hot new gadgets you or your friends receive this holiday season. We'll be featuring three of the most promising new reviewers, as selected by phonedog, on the YouTube homepage during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January. For more details, Noah from phonedog lays it all out: Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently favorited "The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody."    URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/dHi75pRZiM0/learn-how-to-be-tech-reviewer.html     |
| [G] Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps Posted: 02 Dec 2009 09:36 AM PST Google LatLong: Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps(cross-posted with Google Mobile Blog)Google Maps for mobile has long allowed you to add stars on a map to mark your favorite places. You may have noticed a few months ago that Google Maps for desktop browsers introduced the ability to star places as well. Unfortunately, there was no way to keep these starred places in sync with Google Maps on your phone. With today's release of Google Maps for mobile 3.3 on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, you'll now be able to keep the starred places on your phone and on your computer completely synchronized. It's like magic, but magic that you can use. Let me show you how: My colleague Andy is at his desk right now, and he wants to check out some comedy in London tonight. Google Maps lists the 4th result as Upstairs at the Ritzy -- it sounds like a great spot: cheap, fun and comfortable. With one click, Andy stars the item and he's done. When he walks out of the office and turns on Google Maps on his Nokia phone, Upstairs at the Ritzy will be the top place in his list of Starred Items, and it will show up as a star on his map. From there he can call the theater, get walking directions, or even SMS the address to a friend.   Starring on Google Maps for desktop computers and Google Maps for mobile Starring places also works great when you're out on the town and you find cool spots using your phone. I was in Paris with my wife recently. We visited the obvious tourist spots like la tour Eiffel and le Musée du Louvre, but we also found a few interesting places we hadn't expected. While wandering the streets of Paris, we stumbled upon a cafe...the sort of place you'll remember forever, but immediately forget the name. I started Google Maps on my Nokia phone, searched for the name of the cafe (Les Philosophes) and starred it, knowing that when I come back to Google Maps on my computer at home, it will be starred, right there, on my map. How cool is it to create a trail of interesting places from your phone?! For users upgrading from an older version of Google Maps for mobile, you'll be asked, when you log in, whether you'd like to synchronize your existing starred items with your Google Account. This means you can preserve all the work you've put into customizing your map on your mobile, and have it show up, conveniently, in Google Maps in your desktop browser. To enjoy the benefits of all this mobile synchronization goodness, download Google Maps for mobile for your Symbian or Windows Mobile phone by visiting m.google.com/maps in your mobile browser. And don't worry, we're busy building this same functionality into our other mobile versions of Google Maps -- so sit tight. Posted by Flavio Lerda and Andy McEwan, Software Engineers  URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/keep-your-starred-items-in-sync-with.html     |
| [G] Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps Posted: 02 Dec 2009 09:36 AM PST Official Google Mobile Blog: Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps(cross-posted with Google LatLong Blog)Google Maps for mobile has long allowed you to add stars on a map to mark your favorite places. You may have noticed a few months ago that Google Maps for desktop browsers introduced the ability to star places as well. Unfortunately, there was no way to keep these starred places in sync with Google Maps on your phone. With today's release of Google Maps for mobile 3.3 on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, you'll now be able to keep the starred places on your phone and on your computer completely synchronized. It's like magic, but magic that you can use. Let me show you how: My colleague Andy is at his desk right now, and he wants to check out some comedy in London tonight. Google Maps lists the 4th result as Upstairs at the Ritzy -- it sounds like a great spot: cheap, fun and comfortable. With one click, Andy stars the item and he's done. When he walks out of the office and turns on Google Maps on his Nokia phone, Upstairs at the Ritzy will be the top place in his list of Starred Items, and it will show up as a star on his map. From there he can call the theater, get walking directions, or even SMS the address to a friend. Starring on Google Maps for desktop computers and Google Maps for mobile Starring places also works great when you're out on the town and you find cool spots using your phone. I was in Paris with my wife recently. We visited the obvious tourist spots like la tour Eiffel and le Musée du Louvre, but we also found a few interesting places we hadn't expected. While wandering the streets of Paris, we stumbled upon a cafe...the sort of place you'll remember forever, but immediately forget the name. I started Google Maps on my Nokia phone, searched for the name of the cafe (Les Philosophes) and starred it, knowing that when I come back to Google Maps on my computer at home, it will be starred, right there, on my map. How cool is it to create a trail of interesting places from your phone?! For users upgrading from an older version of Google Maps for mobile, you'll be asked, when you log in, whether you'd like to synchronize your existing starred items with your Google Account. This means you can preserve all the work you've put into customizing your map on your mobile, and have it show up, conveniently, in Google Maps in your desktop browser. To enjoy the benefits of all this mobile synchronization goodness, download Google Maps for mobile for your Symbian or Windows Mobile phone by visiting m.google.com/maps in your mobile browser. And don't worry, we're busy building this same functionality into our other mobile versions of Google Maps -- so sit tight. Posted by Flavio Lerda and Andy McEwan, Software Engineers  URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/12/keep-your-starred-items-in-sync-with.html     |
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