Thursday, May 20, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Google Maps API Premier: Directions for the rest of us

Posted: 19 May 2010 04:03 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Maps API Premier: Directions for the rest of us

Businesses rely on Google's accurate routing engine to bring customers from their homes to company stores, from company headquarters to customer sites, and more. This is important on any platform, including mobile devices, and within increasingly-complex uses of map data.

But sometimes, technology has gotten in the way of the right user experience. No more. With today's announcement, Google is delivering the most requested Maps API feature: a Directions web service. This new addition lets you couple the Static Maps API with the Directions API, letting users both visualize and get route directions through a simple HTTP interface.

Driving, walking, and biking directions are all included so regardless of your mode of transport, Google Maps API Premier has you covered!

Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.

Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-maps-api-premier-directions-for.html

[G] CloudCourse: An Enterprise Application in the Cloud

Posted: 19 May 2010 03:13 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: CloudCourse: An Enterprise Application in the Cloud

At Google we have experts on everything from Python to penguins. However, connecting our expert teachers to eager students around the globe can be a complicated business. To that end, we are excited to release our new internal learning platform, CloudCourse under an open source license. Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. CloudCourse also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.

CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):
  • Sync service - to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
  • Room info service - to schedule classes in your locations
  • User info service - to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)
CloudCourse has been developed in Python, using the Django web application framework and the Closure Javascript library. Deploying CloudCourse on App Engine is a breeze, and should take less than 5 minutes.

We developed CloudCourse to:

• provide a course scheduling system fully integrated with Google services
• demonstrate what it takes to built an application using App Engine

By releasing CloudCourse as open source we hope to help developers who want to port or build enterprise applications on App Engine. Digging into the source code, you will find many examples of how we addressed challenges like long running processes, locking, synchronizing with external systems, high performance transactional workflows, and more.
All the techniques that we used can easily be applied to other applications.

CloudCourse is available for download now. If you would like to discuss the project or if you have any questions, please join the CloudCourse mailing list. Happy hacking!

By Irwin Boutboul & Phaneendhar Vemuru, Software Engineering Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/05/cloudcourse-enterprise-application-in.html

[G] Introducing the Google Buzz API

Posted: 19 May 2010 03:13 PM PDT

Social Web Blog: Introducing the Google Buzz API

(Cross-posted with the Official Google Code Blog)

With Google I/O 2010 finally upon us, what better time to introduce developers to the latest updates to the Google Buzz API?

As announced at the launch of Google Buzz, the Google Buzz API aligns itself with the ever-growing family of freely available and community-developed protocols, formats, and standards for sharing and consuming social content on the web, including ActivityStreams, Atom, AtomPub, JSON, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, MediaRSS, PortableContacts, and more.

The Google Buzz API, a member of the Google Code Labs, is very much a work in progress — we intend to continue to iterate out in the open as we go along — and we hope the features we are making available today will help inspire developers and provide a solid foundation for new applications to be built.

We are already excited to see developers who were helping us test the API deliver terrific applications. Today you'll start seeing the following sites and services integrate with Google Buzz:


End-users opt into using applications built with the Google Buzz API via an interstitial confirmation screen outlining the application's requested access scope (read-only, read/write, etc.). They can see which apps have access to their data and can disable access at any time from the Google Accounts page, the Google Dashboard, the "Buzz" tab in Gmail Settings, or from the app itself.

This initial iteration of the API includes support for fetching public per-user activity feeds, fetching authorized and authenticated per-user activity feeds (both what the user creates, and what they see), searching over public updates (by keyword, by author, and by location), posting new updates (including text, html, images, and more), posting comments, liking updates, retrieving and updating profiles and social graphs, and more. The best way to get started is to dive right in and begin reading the Google Buzz API developer documentation.

There's a lot more to come, and we expect to keep moving quickly from here. But none of this would be possible without the hard work of everyone participating in creating the protocols upon which Google Buzz is built, so we ask and encourage developers to get involved with the communities behind ActivityStreams, OAuth, and the countless others that we depend on.

And as with any young API, there will undoubtedly be bugs and issues and places where we've deviated from what the specifications say, or with what developers may expect. When you see something amiss, get confused by an approach we've taken, or just want to comment on our progress, we invite you to update the Buzz API issue tracker and please join the conversation on the developer forum.

With that, we'd like to welcome everyone to the first version of the Google Buzz API. We can't wait to see what else we can build together.

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Team
URL: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/05/introducing-google-buzz-api.html

[G] Announcing Autocompletions for Google Site Search

Posted: 19 May 2010 02:25 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Announcing Autocompletions for Google Site Search

One of our most popular feature requests has been to add autocompletion of queries to Google Site Search. In recent months, many top websites have begun to provide search suggestions as you type, an innovative feature users are coming to expect as part of a quality search experience. Today, we announced at Google I/O that you can now enable query autocompletions for your search engine.

Travelocity.com is one of the first Google Site Search customers to implement autocompletions on their website. By doing so, they have provided an easy way for Travelocity users to explore and discover new destinations by suggesting the most popular queries based on the first few letters the user inputs.


To turn this feature on, please check the "Enable autocompletions" option in the Basics tab of your search engine. It may take several hours to start seeing autocompletions once you enabled them in the control panel.

For more information about how to turn on autocompletions for your Google Site Search engine, see our autocompletions Help Page.

Autocompletion is compatible with other new Google Site Search features including themes and mobile search capabilities – which can significantly enhance your users' mobile experience. As with all Google Site Search features, every new development is rolled out free of charge for all customers.

You can learn more about these and other exciting new features by joining an upcoming webinar:

Tuesday, June 15, 2010
10:00 a.m. PDT, 1:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 06:00

Posted by Clay Maffett, Enterprise Search team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-autocompletions-for-google.html

[G] It’s now easy to set up new sites with Asynchronous Tracking

Posted: 19 May 2010 01:08 PM PDT

Google Analytics Blog: It's now easy to set up new sites with Asynchronous Tracking

We're happy to announce that the asynchronous tracking tag, which came out of beta last week, is now available in your admin interface when you set up a new profile. This makes it easy for everyone to start off tracking new sites with this very fast, state-of-the-art tag.

Whether you're tracking a single domain, or a more complex site with multiple subdomains or top level domains, there's an option in the interface to give you exactly the code you need.

Simply select the scenario that fits your needs. The admin interface now provides the asynchronous tracking code by default, but if you need the traditional tracking snippet you can find it here.


We also encourage you to upgrade your existing sites to the new tag. To help you, we've created complete instructions and migration examples.

Enjoy your new, faster site!

Posted by Jesse Savage, Google Analytics Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-now-easy-to-set-up-new-sites-with.html

[G] Do More with Google Latitude and Your Location Using the New Latitude API

Posted: 19 May 2010 12:47 PM PDT

Official Google Mobile Blog: Do More with Google Latitude and Your Location Using the New Latitude API

Location, location, location. In case you haven't noticed, we're really excited about all the ways location can make mobile apps and websites more useful. With Google Latitude, we created a simple way for you to own your location and let you easily share it with whomever you like, display it wherever you like, and even keep a history of it if you want. We wanted to give you even more ways to use your location, so today we're announcing the Google Latitude API -- an easy and safe way for you to use and reuse your Latitude location with any apps or services that you can imagine!

Since launching Latitude, our team has been talking about all the cool things you could do with your continuously updated Latitude location. While we've built some of our ideas, there are simply too many exciting ones for us to do alone. Instead, we wanted to let you safely share your Latitude location with third parties who could create apps that do more with your location. Developers could, for example, build apps or services for:
  • Thermostats that turn on and off automatically when you're driving towards or away from home.
  • Traffic that send alerts if there's heavy traffic ahead of you or on a route you usually take based on your location history
  • Your credit card accounts to alert you of potential fraud when a purchase is made far from where you actually are.
  • Photo albums so your vacation photos appear on a map at all the places you visited based on your location history.
We want to help developers build all these applications and more, but our first priority is keeping you, the user, in control over your location. That way, you only use it when, where, and how you choose. Before any application, website, or feature you've chosen to use can access your Latitude data, you must specifically grant access to the developer and will see exactly what access or data they're requesting. This includes whether you share your current best available vs. city-level location or your location history if you've opted in to using Google Location History. If you change your mind, you'll be able to both see which developers have access to your Latitude data and revoke access from any developer at any time from your Google Account's personal settings. Just like with Latitude, you always choose who can see your location.

We've also learned that making your phone's continuous location available in the background is tricky to do accurately and efficiently -- just imagine your phone's battery life if several apps were continuously getting your location in different ways? With this in mind, we built a free and open Latitude API that lets the third-party developers you choose start using your updated location in new ways without reinventing the wheel.

If you're a developer, go to code.google.com/apis/latitude to get started and read our documentation. Join the Latitude API Google Group to ask questions, discuss the API with the community, and give us feedback. The Latitude API is being launched in Labs so we can listen to developer and user feedback before it graduates. We're excited to see what you can do with Latitude and location so please do let us know what you think!

If you're a Latitude user, check out our existing Latitude apps and keep an eye out for future apps and services that you can choose to use and do even more with your Latitude location. If you haven't started using Latitude yet, get started so you too can start using your location in new ways.

Posted by Ana Ulin, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/do-more-with-google-latitude-and-your.html

[G] Recent Accomplishments by Research Award Recipients

Posted: 19 May 2010 12:28 PM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Recent Accomplishments by Research Award Recipients

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Through Google's University Relations program, we maintain strong ties with academic institutions globally, pursuing innovative research in core areas relevant to our mission. It's especially satisfying when our award recipients are honored for the work that we have been fortunate to sponsor. Here are some recent accomplishments:
We're glad to have been a part of making these fantastic accomplishments possible. More information on our research award program can be found on our website.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/05/recent-accomplishments-by-research.html

[G] Manage cloud storage from the command line with GSUtil

Posted: 19 May 2010 12:17 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Manage cloud storage from the command line with GSUtil

GSUtil is a command-line tool that helps developers manage their cloud storage. The tool makes it very easy to explore various features of Google Storage for Developers - in just a few minutes, you can learn how to create a storage bucket, upload objects, and set access controls.

GSUtil is implemented in Python using the popular boto open-source library. We added a new provider-agnostic StorageUri class hierarchy to the library as well as other enhancements that we'll be giving back to the community. The URI abstraction lets developers use the same commands to access different data sources - including Google Storage, other cloud storage providers, and the local disk.

As developers move to the cloud, there's a growing concern about getting locked into particular cloud providers. Google Storage supports Data Liberation, so it's simple to take your data wherever you want with a single GSUtil command:

gsutil cp gs://bucket/* destination

Please sign up for the Google Storage for Developers preview and give GSUtil a try. We'll also be demoing GSUtil in the Developer Sandbox at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. We're looking forward to meeting those of you who are attending.

By Michael Schwartz, Google Storage for Developers Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/05/manage-cloud-storage-from-command-line.html

[G] Introducing WebM, an open web media project

Posted: 19 May 2010 11:55 AM PDT

The WebM project blog: Introducing WebM, an open web media project

A key factor in the web's success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are open and freely implementable. Though video is also now core to the web experience, there is unfortunately no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices. To that end, we are excited to introduce WebM, a broadly-backed community effort to develop a world-class media format for the open web.

WebM includes:
  • VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
  • Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
  • a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container
The team that created VP8 have been pioneers in video codec development for over a decade. VP8 delivers high quality video while efficiently adapting to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on today's broad range of web-connected devices. VP8's efficient bandwidth usage will mean lower serving costs for content publishers and high quality video for end-users. The codec's relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high quality results. These existing attributes and the rapid innovation we expect through the open-development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web.

A developer preview of WebM and VP8, including source code, specs, and encoding tools is available today at www.webmproject.org.

We want to thank the many industry leaders and web community members who are collaborating on the development of WebM and integrating it into their products. Check out what Mozilla, Opera, Google Chrome, Adobe, and many others below have to say about the importance of WebM to the future of web video.

Telestream

Posted by Jeremy Doig, Engineering Director of video and Mike Jazayeri, Group Product Manager, Google
URL: http://webmproject.blogspot.com/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-web-media-project.html

[G] Google I/O 2010 Day 1: A more powerful web in more places

Posted: 19 May 2010 11:55 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Google I/O 2010 Day 1: A more powerful web in more places

Today at Moscone West in San Francisco, we're kicking off our largest developer conference of the year, Google I/O. Over two days, 5,000 people from 66 countries will hear from 200 speakers, see 180+ developer demonstrations and participate in more than 90 technical sessions, breakouts and fireside chats to meet engineers from Google and partner companies.

At last year's I/O, we demonstrated the potential of HTML5. Since then, the web has moved from a promising platform to a compelling setting for developers to build apps. This week we'll celebrate this ongoing evolution of the web and share some of our latest work in moving the web forward and keeping it open.

Today we're announcing Google App Engine for Business, which offers new features that enable companies to build internal applications on the same reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure that we at Google use for our own apps. For greater cloud portability, we're also teaming up with VMware to make it easier for companies to build rich web apps and deploy them to the cloud of their choice or on-premise. In just one click, users of the new versions of SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Web Toolkit can deploy their application to Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment or other infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2.

There are already lots of great apps out on the web, but there hasn't been one destination where you could easily find them. Our new Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace for web apps that helps people find the best web applications across the Internet and allows developers to reach new users. We also joined other web companies in announcing WebM, an open web media format project and open-sourced VP8, a high-quality, web-optimized video codec, that we are contributing to the project under a royalty-free license.

We're pleased to share some updates to our APIs too. Last year, we announced the Google Maps API v3, which was designed to be faster and optimized for mobile devices. Today this API is graduating from Code Labs and is enterprise-ready as part of Google Maps API Premier. We're also announcing new ways for publishers to improve the relevance of their AdSense ads, a brand-new version of the Feed API with push updates that make the latest PubSubHubbub-enabled feed data available without requiring visitors to refresh pages, and a library of high-quality open-source web fonts, accessible to everyone through the new Google Font API.

Finally, last year we introduced a new way to communicate and collaborate called Google Wave. Today we're opening Wave to everyone — no invitation necessary — at wave.google.com, as part of Google Labs. Google Apps administrators can also enable it for their domains and help groups of people work together more productively. To learn more about this, our many new API features and more open-source code for developers, visit the Wave Developer blog.

For lots more about Google I/O 2010, visit http://code.google.com/events/io/ and follow us on the Code Blog, Twitter @googleio (#io2010) and Buzz.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-io-2010-day-1-more-powerful-web.html

[G] New themes in Google forms

Posted: 19 May 2010 11:55 AM PDT

Official Google Docs Blog: New themes in Google forms

Today, I'm happy to announce that we've added 24 new themes to Google forms, which take advantage of the new Google Font API and images from iStockphoto. As a reminder, when you're editing a form, click the Theme button to find the right theme and apply it to your form.

I first got involved with themes at Google when I designed a few templates for the Google Page Creator launch in 2006. Since then, I've worked on a number of theme projects in my 20% time, as they presented a far different design challenge compared to my regular projects as a webmaster at Google. You can see my "Spring/Zen Branches" in a number of products.

When I learned about the Google Font API, I wanted to give it a test drive by creating some new Google forms themes. Forms seemed like a good place to start, since they have a pretty standard structure, which makes them fairly simple to style. Initially I was just playing around with different font combinations, but when we added in imagery from iStockPhoto, things really took off. For example it made sense to create a wedding theme using cake imagery and the script font Tangerine, or a digital theme using binary number imagery and the monospaced font Inconsolata. And what better way to present a stack of old books than a font like Crimson Text, which brings to mind classical serif fonts from print? I had a lot of fun combining imagery, colors and font styles to match each other, and I hope you have fun using these themes on your forms.

Posted by: Melissa Louie, Webmaster
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-themes-in-google-forms.html

[G] Buy or build, with more choice for your business

Posted: 19 May 2010 11:55 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Buy or build, with more choice for your business

Google Apps is built for the web, with open standards and APIs that enable our customers to extend and integrate Google's expanding suite of web-based applications with other services – whether those services are offered by software vendors through the Google Apps Marketplace or built by their own IT departments. Today, we're excited about two important developments: Google App Engine for Business now enables customers to deploy their own internal apps on Google's cloud infrastructure, and our collaboration with VMware on cloud portability gives enterprises the ability to build apps using familiar tools and deploy them to their cloud of choice or to on-premise infrastructure.


With Google App Engine for Business, companies can build and host applications on Google's scalable cloud infrastructure. New enterprise-level capabilities include centralized administration, premium developer support, a 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), simple and predictable monthly pricing, and – coming later this year – access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL. Read our post on the Google Code blog to learn more and sign-up for a preview.

To make it easier for businesses to build cloud-based apps and to give them more deployment choices, we're working with VMware, an industry leader in virtualization. Businesses can now build applications in a familiar development environment that they can easily deploy to Google App Engine, a VMware environment (in-house vSphere infrastructure, a choice of vCloud hosting partners, or VMforce), or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. This development environment also allows developers to more easily create data presentation widgets that run on all devices, from phones to tablets to desktops.

By enabling portability between on-premise and multiple cloud environments – including enterprise-ready App Engine for Business – we're giving our customers more flexibility and making it easier for them to move to the cloud.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/buy-or-build-with-more-choice-for-your.html

[G] Mobile strategy gets better with Google Maps API Premier v3

Posted: 19 May 2010 11:55 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Mobile strategy gets better with Google Maps API Premier v3

I'm delighted to announce the launch of Google Maps API Premier v3 today, which includes the functionality you've put to use in v2 plus new features that Premier partners have requested, including:
  • Support for mobile browsers such as Android and iPhone
  • Optimized routing
  • Support for custom Street View imagery
Support for mobile browsers
We started last year completely rebuilding the Maps API in order to dramatically increase performance, especially on mobile browsers. With the proliferation of mobile platforms and operating systems, it's become more complicated to build web applications and sites that are relatively browser/OS agnostic. Yet the pressure to have apps and sites work on mobile has only grown stronger. Development teams have needed expertise in Java, Objective C, and other languages, and have often needed to retrofit existing code to new standards. No more! With Maps API Premier v3, the same JavaScript that works in Chrome, Firefox, and IE now works in the Android mobile browser and the iPhone mobile browser.

Optimized Routing
With the boom in geolocation and asset and fleet tracking, it's clear that knowing the optimal route – right now – can make a huge difference in your business' costs. Now you can take advantage of Google's always up-to-date map data to find the best routes. Google Maps API Premier now can optimize the waypoints to give you the fastest route, saving you miles, wear and tear, and fuel. This is an easy way to move beyond distance matrices – and to stay a bit greener, too.

Custom Street View Imagery
Street View, one of the most popular and distinctive features of Google Maps, has long been useful for our Maps API Premier customers and partners, giving users the detail and feel of a location that no other type of imagery can. Now Maps API Premier customers can use their own imagery, whether it's of their hotel rooms, houses for sale, or ski slopes, giving users this helpful perspective even in places beyond the Google Maps Street View car or trike routes.

Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O for Maps API Premier. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.

Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/mobile-strategy-gets-better-with-google.html

[G] Two new ways to optimize AdSense on your website

Posted: 19 May 2010 11:55 AM PDT

Inside AdSense: Two new ways to optimize AdSense on your website

Publishers frequently ask for new ways to increase the relevancy of the AdSense ads shown on their sites. Today, we're pleased to announce two features to help you display highly targeted ads to your users in new and exciting ways.

AdSense for Search Ads Only

You may remember that last year, we introduced the Custom Search element to help you easily bring Google search results and ads to your site. More recently, we introduced data rendering to give you even more control over how the results are shown to your users.

We understand that some of you may have your own, non-Google search results that you'd like to monetize. In the past, this typically meant that you weren't able to use AdSense for search ads. Now, with AdSense for search ads only, publishers can now include AdSense for search ads on their pages and pair them with their own, homegrown search results.

By adding just a few lines of JavaScript to your page, you can display AdSense for search ads above, beside, or below your own search results. You can pick the size, shape and number of ads displayed in each block, and you can even adjust the style of the ads to better fit the look and feel of your site. For instance, check out how seamlessly MerchantCircle has integrated AdSense for search ads only above and next to their search results.

AdSense for Ajax

Whether your site offers your own search results or not, if you have dynamic content, you may be interested in delivering your AdSense for content ads with AdSense for Ajax. With traditional AdSense for content, ads refresh only when a page is reloaded. This works great -- but isn't optimal when your site relies heavily on Ajax, which allows visitors to navigate a lot of content without actually leaving a single page. Also, sites that generate a lot of dynamic content that isn't crawlable are difficult to target accurately.

Here's where AdSense for Ajax comes in. With AdSense for Ajax, your AdSense for content ads will refresh whenever there's a context change - regardless of whether the page reloads or not. Travel site trip.com has taken advantage of this by showing relevant ads based on the selected tab. Try clicking on the "Hotels" tab. The page doesn't reload, yet the Ads by Google have refreshed to show ads more relevant to hotels than flights.

In addition to the ads refreshing, you might wonder why the subject of the ads changed since the crawlable content on the page didn't change much when the tab changed. The second benefit of AdSense for Ajax is that it allows you to provide hints about your site's uncrawlable content with each refresh.

Both of these AdSense features can be easily added to most sites by just copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code, which will help you show highly relevant ads to your visitors.

Sound right for your site? Please sign up to try out AdSense for Ajax or AdSense for search ads only today!

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Michael Brandell, Product Specialist
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/two-new-ways-to-optimize-adsense-on.html

[G] A new look for Google Calendar

Posted: 19 May 2010 09:24 AM PDT

Official Gmail Blog: A new look for Google Calendar

Posted by Joe Ashear, User Experience Designer

When I came to Google four years ago, a small group of engineers was putting the finishing touches on a calendar application. A few of us started using it, and I remember thinking, "Wow! It's so fresh and shiny and new!"

But over time the shiny new Calendar started to feel a little bit old, a little out of step with other Google Apps. So we rolled up our sleeves and we tweaked the layout, we twiddled the colors and we tuned the text...and this week we're pleased to show off a fresh new look for Google Calendar.


If you use Tasks in Calendar, you'll discover another change: we've removed the old Tasks link. Now to turn Tasks on and off, just click the Tasks calendar in your calendar list. If you only want to see tasks with due dates — the ones above your calendar — you can hide the task list by clicking the tall blue bar that separates the calendar from the task list.
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-look-for-google-calendar.html

[G] Google Wave (Labs) available today to organizations using Google Apps

Posted: 19 May 2010 09:24 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Wave (Labs) available today to organizations using Google Apps

Google is making familiar tools like email and office applications much more collaborative than traditional software, but with Google Wave, we started with a blank slate to try new approaches to teamwork without the constraints of existing applications. Today – one year after first introducing Wave – we're extending Google Wave in Labs to businesses, schools and organizations to let more people try this tool and to learn how we can improve the Google Apps suite.

Since we began previewing Google Wave last fall, we've consistently heard that Wave shines in small group settings where teams need to discuss and debate as they create content together, like developing an engineering project plan, creating a trip itinerary or building an event invitation list. For example, you can learn how teams at Deloitte use Google Wave to build consensus around technical design documents and other content.



Google Wave has a few characteristics making it uniquely-equipped for these kinds of discussion-heavy, collaborative tasks:

  • Discussion in context with your content – When you have a question or suggestion about something you see in a wave, you can have a conversation right in the wave with other participants. When you reach consensus, you can clean up your wave by finalizing the content and removing the completed discussion.
  • Logical information structure – You can respond anywhere within a wave, not just at the very end, so you end up with an organized record that follows the flow of the conversation.
  • Revision playback – Wave preserves a timeline of how a wave evolved, so when someone adds you to an existing wave, you can play back the history to see how it evolved to its current state. Playback lets you see content in its logical and chronological context.
  • Extensions – Extensions bring rich, dynamic functionality into waves. Google provides a number of useful extensions (like voting gadgets and maps) but there's an ever-growing library of extensions created by third-party developers. Organizations can even create extensions tailored to their own needs.



    Next time you need to create consensus among a small team as you create content together, consider test driving Google Wave. Starting today, Google Apps administrators have the option to let their users try Google Wave. In the administrative control panel, click 'Add more services', then click 'Add it now' to enable Google Wave.

    To learn more about how your organization might find Google Wave useful, we invite you to join our webcast on Wednesday, May 26th at 9:00 am PDT. The Wave team will be on hand to share real world use case from businesses and other organizations, and to answer your questions. Register for the webcast

    Posted by Greg D'Alesandre, Google Wave Product Manager
    • URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-labs-available-today-to.html

    [G] Dictionary, improved comments and more in the new documents

    Posted: 19 May 2010 09:24 AM PDT

    Official Google Docs Blog: Dictionary, improved comments and more in the new documents

    We're working hard to bring features from the old document editor over to the new editor. Today we added a few more, so we wanted to summarize them here.

    Dictionary
    If you select a word in your doc, you can look up the definition for that word by going to Tools -> Define...


    Special Characters
    To insert characters that you can't create with a regular keyboard, we also added a special characters dialog via Insert -> Special characters...

    So if you've been dying to make a maze in the new word processor, then you're in luck:

    Metric Units
    If you've set your language to English US your ruler will be set in inches. But now, all other locales see the ruler with metric units:

    In the future, we'll make this a preference that can be changed, no matter what language you've set for your account.

    Comment Scrolling
    One of the big pieces of feedback we heard is that the new documents didn't handle long comments very well. If comments got too long, it became hard to tell which comments were associated with which text in the document.

    Today we added automatic scrolling for comments, so whenever you click in a comment it will scroll so that it's directly beside the associated text.

    If you have feedback or ideas, let us know on the forums and product ideas page.

    Posted by: Isabella Ip, Software Engineer
    URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/dictionary-improved-comments-and-more.html

    [G] Videos From Master Class In Singapore Now Online

    Posted: 19 May 2010 09:23 AM PDT

    Google Analytics Blog: Videos From Master Class In Singapore Now Online



    Last month we held 3 successful Google Analytics Master Classes in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney. We were pleasantly surprised by the sheer amount of interest in web analytics in this region with close to 1000 advertisers, agencies, bloggers, developers, and technophiles attending the events. For those of you who made it out, we thank you for your participation and interest, and hope you gained valuable insights from our all star team of speakers.

    The videos of all the talks from the Singapore event are now available. Each session was kept deliberately short - no speaker goes on longer than 20 minutes - in order to maintain the audience's interest and to keep the topics flowing at a good pace. Therefore, each video is a good length to watch during work, on break, or at home, enriching your Google Analytics knowledge in convenient bite-sized portions.

    Above is Beth Liebert's (Google Analytics Product Manager, Google) keynote on web analytics. Please surf on over to this post on the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog for the full list of the videos.


    Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, JAPAC Google Analytics Lead, Global Technical Services
    URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/05/videos-from-master-class-in-singapore.html

    [G] Known issues with Socialize service

    Posted: 19 May 2010 09:23 AM PDT

    The FeedBurner Status Blog: Known issues with Socialize service

    Issue: There are currently three known issues with the FeedBurner Socialize service

    1. Duplicate tweets being sent.  As a result of temporarily moving to a new data center, some items generated duplicate tweets.  Status: Issue fixed and being pushed.
    2. No tweets being sent for updated items.  As a result of the Twitter API having the same return code for service de-authorization when Twitter is down, if we attempted to send a tweet while twitter was down, in some cases we would remove the OAuth tie between Google and Twitter.  Workaround: Go into the Publicize -> Socialize screen at http://feedburner.google.com and re-add your Twitter account even if it already appears to be there.  Status: Actively being worked on between Google and Twitter.
    3. 500 Error received when trying to connect Google and Twitter.  Workaround: Please try again.  This is an intermittent error that is being investigated
    URL: http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/05/known-issues-with-socialize-service.html
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