Another feature in Orkut! add images easily in scraps.

Arco Domingues, (orkut operations team) Say's

We're always listening to what users have to say about orkut, and we're constantly working to improve your orkut experience. One of the suggestions we've received many times is to bring back to the ability to add photos to your scraps to the new orkut. We're happy to announce that this feature is now available!

To add images to your scraps, first click the text box to write and edit a message. You'll then see customization options, such as font color and emoticons. Click the image icon to add an image to your your scrap:

You can upload images from your computer, add from your Picasa Web Albums, or search for them in Google Images.

As we like to say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So, hopefully this feature will improve the way you share things with your friends on orkut!

Source / Related / Recent :
http://en.blog.orkut.com/2010/03/now-you-can-easily-add-images-to-your.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/this-week-in-search-32610.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/tomorrow-night-turn-off-your-lights.html
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/google-chrome-developer-update.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/detecting-suspicious-account-activity.html

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Direct import from Picasa for Orkut!

Megha Gupta, (software engineer) Say's

For many of us, the best part about taking photos is sharing them with friends and family online.

That's why we've integrated Picasa Web Albums (Google's free photo hosting and sharing service) with orkut, so that you can directly copy your favorite Picasa photos onto orkut with just a few clicks and easily share them with your orkut friends.

Look for the "import from Picasa" link when you create an orkut album from the orkut photos page or when adding photos within an existing album.

When you click on it, a photo picker will show up where you can access all of your Picasa Web Albums. Choose an album to see all the photos in it:

Next, just select the photos you want to upload to orkut. Be assured, the photos will not be erased from your Picasa account. A copy of the photos will become available on orkut once you complete the upload.

The cool convenience with this feature is that you don't have to download the photos to your computer and then re-upload them to orkut again from your computer.

While the photos you have chosen from your Picasa Web Album are being uploaded to orkut, you can drag and drop the photos to reorder them, caption them, rotate them, select an album cover and also select friends you want to share the photos with. To save your time, we also import all the photo captions from Picasa Web Albums if they already exist.

And to make your life even easier, we've integrated a face detection feature for the photos uploaded from Picasa. You can quickly add names for people whose faces are detected without having to identify them manually.

You can now look forward to many more comments and conversations around your photos on orkut. Wait no more! Head to your orkut photos page, browse through your Picasa Web Albums and exhibit your fabulous photos to your orkut friends. And don't forget to let us know what you think of this feature.

Source / Related / Recent Posts:
http://en.blog.orkut.com/2010/03/import-your-photos-from-picasa-web.html
http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/03/novell-pulse-and-google-wave.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/detecting-suspicious-account-activity.html
http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/03/gwt-community-updates.html
http://googleamericalatinablog.blogspot.com/2010/03/crece-el-e-commerce-en-la-argentina.html
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/03/beta-update-translate-for-mac.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/display-advertising-towards-creativity.html
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/03/introducing-google-books-help-forum.html

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Detecting suspicious account activity : Gmail Blog Update

Pavni Diwanji, (Engineering Director) Say's

A few weeks ago, I got an email presumably from a friend stuck in London asking for some money to help him out. It turned out that the email was sent by a scammer who had hijacked my friend's account. By reading his email, the scammer had figured out my friend's whereabouts and was emailing all of his contacts. Here at Google, we work hard to protect Gmail accounts against this kind of abuse. Today we're introducing a new feature to notify you when we detect suspicious login activity on your account.

You may remember that a while back we launched remote sign out and information about recent account activity to help you understand and manage your account usage. This information is still at the bottom of your inbox. Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, we'll also alert you by posting a warning message saying, "Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…" along with the geographic region that we can best associate with the access.


To determine when to display this message, our automated system matches the relevant IP address, logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location. While we don't have the capability to determine the specific location from which an account is accessed, a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert.

By clicking on the "Details" link next to the message, you'll see the last account activity window that you're used to, along with the most recent access points.


If you think your account has been compromised, you can change your password from the same window. Or, if you know it was legitimate access (e.g. you were traveling, your husband/wife who accesses the account was also traveling, etc.), you can click "Dismiss" to remove the message.

Keep in mind that these notifications are meant to alert you of suspicious activity but are not a replacement for account security best practices. If you'd like more information on account security, read these tips on keeping your information secure or visit the Google Online Security Blog.

Finally, we know that security is also a top priority for businesses and schools, and we look forward to offering this feature to Google Apps customers once we have gathered and incorporated their feedback.

Source / Recent Posts:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/detecting-suspicious-account-activity.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/collaborative-bookmarking-with-lists.html
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/03/detecting-suspicious-account-activity.html

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Smart Rescheduler in Google Calendar Labs in Gmail

David Marmaros, (Software Engineer) Say's

As you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule a lot of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.

If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.

Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":

You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.


This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your ideas and feedback. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them.

Source:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/smart-rescheduler-in-google-calendar.html

Recent posts from google blogs:
Orkut for Android — live folders, photo upload and more! : http://en.blog.orkut.com/2010/03/orkut-for-android-live-folders-photo.html
Smart Rescheduler in Google Calendar Labs: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/looking-for-good-time-new-scheduling.html
At the end of the rainbow, a new pot of Chrome! : http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/03/at-end-of-rainbow-new-pot-of-chrome.html

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Video chat is enabled for Orkut!

Bruce Leban, (software engineer) Say's

Orkut is all about keeping people connected, and a lot of people use orkut's voice and video chat to stay in touch. Lately, we've been hard at work making it work even better, and the reception has been so great that we're giving voice and video chat a new home at the top of the chat window:

If you've never used voice or video chat in orkut, it's easy to get started. You'll just need a webcam and a microphone (if you don't have a webcam, we have some recommendations). If you already have a webcam and a microphone, you'll just need to download a small plugin for video chat, available for free at www.google.com/chat/video

With the plugin installed and your camera enabled, your friends will see a small green camera icon like this next to your name in their chat lists. Then, to start a voice or video chat, simply click either the voice or video icon in the toolbar and talk away to your heart's content - all for free via orkut.

Once you start chatting, if you want a larger view, you can pop out the window and make it bigger. We hope you'll enjoy chatting even more on orkut with this enhanced feature!

Source / Recent Posts:
http://en.blog.orkut.com/2010/03/promoting-voice-and-video-chat.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadband-catapult-for-america.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/better-controls-for-buzz-in-your-inbox.html

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Using Socialize to distribute your feed on social networks

The FeedBurner Socialize service makes it easy to distribute your content to interested subscribers or followers on social networks using any FeedBurner feed you already have. The Socialize service currently supports distribution on Twitter.
The Socialize service offers the following options:

Select Account

At this time, the Socialize service only supports Twitter. You may have one or several Twitter accounts associated with your Google account (which is shared by FeedBurner and other Google products), but each feed may only post to one Twitter account at a time. If for some reason you need the same feed to post to multiple Twitter accounts, you may create a copy of your feed and have that version post to a separate Twitter account.

Formatting Options

You may format your feed for Twitter with a number of options. In all cases, the formatting must fit within the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. If the options you choose create messages longer than 140 characters, FeedBurner will automatically truncate your messages into 140 character tweets.
Post Content
You may post the feed title, title and body, or just the body as the tweet. If you choose to include a link to the feed item, your feed item permalinks will be rewritten as a shortened URL by Google on the goo.gl domain. These links redirect to your normal FeedBurner URLs so that analytics tracking will not be affected. If you select "Leave room for retweets" we will truncate the message to leave room for rewteetingusing the many Twitter clients that support this function.
Hash Tags
Hash tags are the way that Twitter supports tagging or labeling tweets so that they can easily be grouped by Twitter clients that allow sorting and filtering by these tags. By default, the Socialize service does not add any hash tags to your tweets, however if you select "Create hash tags from item categories" we will automatically create hash tags in the tweet according to any <category> elements attached to the feed item. These categories may be added by your blogging platform or CMS publishing system. In Blogger, these are called "Labels" so if you label your posts in Blogger, these labels will get added as hash tags in Twitter.
Additional Text
You may choose to add a custom message preceding or following the message that is created from your feed item to add more context. As an example you may choose to prepend "From my blog:" to the beginning of the tweet so that Twitter followers can see which messages you are tweeting directly versus posting links from your long form blog.

Item Selection

Item Limit
As your feed updates throughout the day, FeedBurner picks up your feed and looks for new items. The Socialize service will detect these new items and post up to 5 of them to twitter at a time. Note that the speed with which feed updates can get to FeedBurner will affect this service. To ensure your feed updates in near real time, make sure you ping us immediately after your feed updates and that your blog platform is configured to use PubSubHubub. If none of these options are used for making your feed near real time, the Socialize service will look for and update with any new feed items every 30 minutes.
Keyword Filter
You may choose to only send certain feed items to Twitter, filtered either by the Category, or text in the title, body, or the entire item. To enable this filter enter text, with terms separated by commas, and then choose where you would like Socialize to look for these keywords. If this service is enabled, an item will only be tweeted if one of the filtered terms is found.

Preview

Preview lets you see how your tweets will look in your feed as you change Socialize options. If your feed content is not available, the preview uses its own sample text. Note that Preview uses the existing items in the feed, but only new feed items published after the service is activated will actually get posted to Twitter.

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More controls for Google Buzz

Bruce DiBello, (Software Engineer) Say's

When you participate in a conversation in Google Buzz, we bring that post to your inbox so it's easy to keep up with the discussion. But we've heard loud and clear that buzz in your inbox can get noisy — we feel it too, so today we're launching two features to help with this: 

1) Settings to control what gets sent to your inbox 
From the Buzz tab of Gmail Settings, you'll be able to choose whether the following buzz items get sent to your inbox: 

• Comments on your posts
• Comments on posts after you comment on them
• Comments on posts after you are @replied on them

2) Explanations for why posts get sent to your inbox and an easy-to-find "Mute" link
You'll see a new message at the top of each post in your inbox that explains why it's there: someone commented on your post, you were @replied, etc. We've also added an easy-to-find "mute" link that will stop subsequent comments from bringing the conversation back to your inbox. 

These are just the first in series of features designed to help control the noise level in Google Buzz, so stay tuned for more. If you have ideas for Google Buzz you'd like to share with the team, you can post your ideas and vote for others on our official product ideas page.

Source : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/better-controls-for-buzz-in-your-inbox.html

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Fun / Useful Extensions for Google Wave

Dan Peterson (Product Manager, Google Wave) Say's

Today, we're adding an "Extensions" link to the Google Wave navigation panel that gives you quick access to a set of fun and functional featured extensions for waves.


The gallery is simply a set of waves containing extension installers (the puzzle pieces). The first wave, "Read me first" contains an introduction to extensions and how to use them.

We released Google Wave to the developer community first back in May 2009. We did this because we wanted them to help complement the product's core features by building rich extensions.

When we launched our preview in September, we featured some great extensions and prototypes, like AccuWeather's forecast gadget, LabPixie's competitive Sudoku game and even built a couple ourselves, like Yes No Maybe and a Google Maps gadget. Since then, many more extensions have been built, and we want to make it easier for everyone to discover them.

Just click the link to browse some featured extension installers. When you find one you like, click the "Install" button to add it to your Google Wave interface (often it will appear as an icon in the editing toolbar) so you can add it to any of your waves. If you decide you no longer want to have an extension installed, you can uninstall it from the "Settings" link in the navigation panel (you can install and uninstall extensions as many times as you want).

For example, say I wanted to arrange dinner for the engineers who built this feature. I could look through the set of extensions and select the Take Out extension:


After installing it, I can start a new wave, add the extension and add the team onto the wave, so we can pick the menu for the evening together:


Then we can wrap up our order, and get on with the feast.

When you explore the extensions, you'll notice a wide variety of new ones including: Waffle, which helps coordinate convenient times to get together; Mind Map, to collaboratively build and visualize workflows or hierarchies; and Napkin, for doodling together. To check out others, sign into your Google Wave account and simply click the "Extensions" link in the navigation panel.

If you watched the Google I/O demo video, you may remember some rich demonstrations of the technology -- things like Bloggy, the blog robot, and Rosy, the translation robot -- that we showed to help encourage developers to build great things, but those particular extensions aren't yet ready for prime time.

We hope you'll enjoy easier access to these extensions, and we'd love your feedback as we continue to improve the gallery experience. In particular, you may notice that the extension gallery waves don't usually remain "read" -- this is a known issue that we're addressing along with some other design improvements. As we find more extensions, we'll be adding them to this gallery as well (if you're a developer with an extension that you'd like featured, please read this post).

Source / Recent posts:
http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/03/finding-fun-and-useful-extensions-for.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/3-new-calendar-labs.html

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Restoring tabs in Google Chrome is activated...

Peter Kasting, (Software Engineer) Say's

When reading the last tip about restoring closed tabs, you might have wondered if you can just get the browser to always start up where you left off. This would save you the trouble of re-opening your windows and tabs manually.

It turns out you can do this easily. Open the Tools menu and select "Options" (or, if you're using a Mac, open "Preferences") and go to the "Basics" tab. The first section on the first page of options is called "On startup:", and in there you'll see an option to "Reopen the pages that were open last". Once you select this, Google Chrome will start up showing the same pages that were open when you shut down.


There is one caveat here. Normally, only the most recent window you were using is restored when you restart. If you have more than one window you want to restore, make sure you use the "Exit" choice in the Tools menu (on Mac: "Chrome" > "Quit Google Chrome") to shut down all your windows at once, instead of closing them one at a time. (Of course, as covered in the last tip, you can always restore the other window(s) manually if you forget to exit!)


Finally, if the browser ever crashes, the next time you start up you'll have the option at the top of your window to restore your previous windows and tabs, even if you haven't changed what appears on startup.



its very cool na :-)

Source / Recent Posts:
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/03/tip-always-restoring-tabs.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/3-new-calendar-labs.html
http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/03/express-yourself-with-blogger-template.html

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This is Indian Premier League

Amit Agarwal (Strategic Partner Development Manager) Say's

When the first ball of this year's Indian Premier League cricket season is bowled, fans across the planet will have a front row seat in the world's biggest online sports stadium. Tonight the Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders will face off in Mumbai at 8pm IST, and the YouTube global community will be able to tune in to the IPL's YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/ipl) for streaming and on-demand access to witness the start of what promises to be one of the most widely-distributed sporting events in history. Fans can watch matches, highlight videos, player interviews and much more all on the IPL's YouTube Channel.


Named by Forbes as the "hottest sports league in the world" with revenues comparable to the world's most popular leagues, the IPL season is a 60-match, 43-day tournament that features some of the best talent in cricket today. You can come to YouTube and keep up with the action any time, anywhere, and connect with fans across the globe. Watch as the match happens, or if you missed a match, tune in later to see what happened. The entire season will be streamed around the world on YouTube, except in the U.S., where matches will be time-delayed and made available 15 minutes after the match ends.

On the IPL Channel, you'll see three tabs:

• Today's Matches: This is where you can watch streamed matches as they happen. (Note that the stream will be delayed by a few minutes.) Click through at any time to see the match scorecard.
• Recent Matches: Catch up any time on the full action of matches that have already happened. Watch Sachin cream the ball through the covers, Warney taking his latest wicket and more.
• Highlights: If you're short on time, check in here for short videos of player interviews, match highlights, greatest plays, and more.

And for all of you who want to cheer or commiserate with others, check out our Twitter gadget on the channel page to be part of the conversation. You can keep up with the discussion on Twitter with the YouTube IPL hashtag (#youtube_ipl). Share, rate and comment on videos throughout the channel, or upload your own video responses to the action. There's also a link so you can join the Official DLF IPL community on Orkut (www.orkut.com/ipl).

We'll be watching the donkey drops, the five-fers, the flippers and floaters, the half-yorkers and slow sweeps — and cheering alongside you!

Source / Related / Recent Posts:
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/indian-premier-league-bowls-wicked.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/indian-premier-league-bowls-wicked.html

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New Blogger Template Designer

Siobhan Quinn, (Blogger Product Manager​) Say's

We’re thrilled to announce that the Blogger Template Designer has launched to Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where users can try out Blogger’s latest features. The Template Designer brings a new level of customization to your blog. Take a look:

In the Template Designer, you’ll find:

• 15 new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of professional background images from iStockphoto
• Customizable colors, fonts, and more!

We have more details and tips in our Blogger Template Designer post on the Blogger in Draft blog.

We worked with iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace, to put together a great collection of beautiful images and patterns to use as backgrounds on your blogs. The photos are stunning, and are free to use on your Blogger blog.

That being said, today’s launch is just the beginning. We’ll add more of our own designs over the coming weeks and months and, through the new Template Design Group, we’ll be working with members of the Blogger design community to bring their templates into the new Template Designer.

Help test drive the Blogger Template Designer by logging into Blogger In Draft, and learn more about the new features in more detail on the Blogger In Draft blog.

Source / Related / Recent :
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/3-new-calendar-labs.html
http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2010/03/blogger-template-designer.html
http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/03/express-yourself-with-blogger-template.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/express-yourself-with-blogger-template.html

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Three new calendar labs for Gmail

Grace Kwak (Product Manager) Say's

Today, we're happy to announce three new features in Calendar Labs. To try them out, just go to the Labs tab under Calendar Settings.

1. Event flair by Dave Marmaros
Want a little airplane icon next to information about your upcoming flight? Or stars next to meetings with your boss? This experiment lets you choose from forty different icons and add one to each Calendar event. Even better, if you invite people to your events, they'll be able to see the icon you added too. After you enable this feature, click on an event and look for the "Event flair" gadget to activate.

2. Gentle reminders by Sorin Mocanu
If you keep Google Calendar open all day long, you probably end up seeing quite a few reminders every day. Browser alerts are okay, but I tried to find a way for Calendar notifications to integrate smoothly with everything else.

Turn on "Gentle Reminders," and when you get a notification, the title of your Calendar window or tab will start blinking and the event details will stay in Calendar.

If you're using this lab in a supported browser (currently Google Chrome for Windows and Google Chrome beta for Linux), you'll also have the option to get your reminders in the next generation of floating desktop notifications:

After you enable this feature, you can configure notification options on the Settings page.

3. Automatically declining events by Lucia Fedorova and Miguel García
Have you ever checked your calendar and noticed that someone scheduled a really important meeting during your vacation or at a time when you're not available? Now there's a way to automatically decline events when you're not around. Turn on "Automatically declining events," block off times when you're unavailable, and event invitations during this period will get automatically declined.

Source : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/3-new-calendar-labs.html

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More Application's [Apps] for Google Apps

Scott McMullan, (Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise team) Say's

This evening, we were joined by more than 50 participating companies to announce the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, a new online storefront that enables millions of Google Apps administrators to discover and purchase integrated third party cloud applications and deploy them to their domains.

Adding an application from the Marketplace to your domain is simple - it only takes four clicks. Applications can then be easily managed from your domain's control panel and accessed by users through the same links as the Google Apps suite.

1) Click "Add it now"
2) Agree to the vendor's Terms of Service
3) Grant access to the data that the app is requesting (ome apps require data access, some don't...so only grant access to apps you trust)
4) Turn it on and start enjoying your increased productivity

Applications listed in the Google Apps Marketplace integrate with Google Apps using open protocols. These integrations improve the efficiency of your businesses by allowing users to share data and collaborate on projects as well as connect to users' daily workflows in apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts.

This integrated app experience is available in the Marketplace today for users of Google Apps Premier, Standard and Education Editions thanks to the efforts of folks like Intuit and Atlassian, and others who are committed to join, including NetSuite and Successfactors. We are honored to work with the more than 50 partners listed below:


The Google Apps Marketplace gives software vendors access to a rapidly growing Google Apps customer base of 25 million users from 2 million businesses and universities. By embracing open standards like OpenID and OAuth, and by giving software vendors freedom of choice for both billing arrangement and hosting platform, Google makes it easy to build apps for the Google Apps Marketplace.

For a lot more detail on what this means for developers and ISVs, check out our posts on the new Google Apps Developer Blog and the Google Code Blog.

We look forward to seeing the ways in which companies leverage the applications currently in the Google Apps Marketplace in addition to the apps to come in the future. In fact, we'll be exploring these topics further at Google I/O on May 19-20 in San Francisco. We hope you'll join us!

Source / Related / Recent Posts :
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-great-apps-for-google-apps.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-in-labs-refresh-pop-accounts.html
http://googleindia.blogspot.com/2010/02/india-site-clinic-part-i.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/open-for-business-google-apps.html
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/03/integrate-publish-sell-google-apps.html

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[Blogger Help] What are backlinks and how do I use them?

Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Now Alice's post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.

The backlinks setting can be found under the Settings | Comments tab, and consists of a single, simple option to turn it on or off:

Our default templates are already set up with the necessary code for backlinks. However, if you have a custom template, or one of our templates from before this feature was launched, you will need to add the code yourself. Instructions for that are here.

Once everything is set up, you'll see a new link marked "Links to this post" next to the comment link for each post:

If you click that link you'll be taken to the post page, where the backlinks are all listed beneath the comments. Clicking the triangles next to each link will display a snippet of text from the page linking to you, as well as some author and date information.

If you want to turn off backlinks for individual posts, you can do so. The process is the same as that for turning off comments. Just edit the post in question and change the options that appear below the posting form:

Notes:

• For the curious, this feature is based on the link: operator of Blog Search. So sites linking to your blog will need to be indexed by Blog Search and there may be a slight delay before the backlinks appear on your blog.
• The comment notification email setting does not apply to backlinks, so you will not be notified of new links when they appear. This is because these links are looked up on-the-fly each time you view an individual post.
• In lieu of comment notification, you can use Blog Search with a query such as link:your-blog-here.blogspot.com, and then subscribe to the results. That will have a similar effect.

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Email notifications enabled for Google Wave!

Ged Ellis, (Software engineer, Google Wave Team) Say's

Now you can receive email notifications about new and updated waves in your inbox! To test it out, just use the dropdown menu by the Inbox link:

Go to your Inbox, drop down the menu - et voila !

How does it work?
From the Notifications menu, you can select the frequency of your email updates. If you are an infrequent Google Wave user we would recommend the "immediately" setting, but you can change it at any time.

When you're added to a new wave, or a wave that you are on changes, we'll send you an email with a short summary of the text and links to go straight to your updated waves. Rest assured, we know waves can change a lot, so we will only send you one notification about a changed wave until you have logged in to look at it (i.e.: if a wave changes 10 times after we send the first notification, we won't send 10 more emails). Waves you have open also won't trigger updates.

I love this! Please switch on email notifications for all of my friends!
We're still refining this feature and part of that includes getting feedback from enthusiastic users like you.

If you want to use Google Wave with your friends, family or colleagues who aren't logging in frequently, help them to turn on notifications. Then, they can get updates on their Google Wave account, even if they mainly stick to checking their email inbox.

Known issues
This is still a work in progress. For example, we're aware that:

• Sometimes the email snippet does not show all participants on the wave
• Under certain conditions you may get an update about a wave even if you were the last person to change it
• To change the notifications setting you have to go back to the menu where you turned it on. (The link at the bottom of the notification emails is not working yet.)

We will resolve these issues over the next few weeks, but wanted to get your early feedback. If you try this feature and would like to report issues to us, please use our help forum.

Source / Recent Posts:
http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/03/help-test-email-notifications.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/over-4000-developers-at-google-io-2010.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/fast-new-windows.html
http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-welcomes-picnik.html

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Its easy to share photos on orkut directly from Picasa

Sandesh Tawari and Arijit De, software engineers Say's

Most people love taking pictures and sharing them with their friends, and Google is always trying to improve the photo managing experience in our products such as Picasa and orkut. (If you haven't heard about Picasa yet, the free photo editing tool by Google, you should definitely give it a try!)

The problem is that, sometimes, the photos we take aren't quite ready for sharing. So we have to transfer them to a computer for editing, and then return later to orkut to upload them to an album. That's too much work! So, we're making life easier by giving you a way to upload photos to orkut directly from Picasa.

To get started, you just have to install an orkut button on your Picasa program by downloading the free 'Share photos on orkut' plugin. This plugin (for Windows or Mac) makes sharing your photos with your friends as easy as clicking a button.

If your Internet browser asks your permission to launch the Picasa software, say "yes." Once Picasa opens, simply add the orkut button. (If you need more help, check our Help Center article). Once you're done, you will see a new button with the familiar orkut logo at the bottom of your Picasa screen. It'll look like this:

Next, just select the photos you want to upload to orkut and click the orkut button you've added to Picasa. You can upload your photos to an an existing orkut album, or create a new one.

The photo uploads will begin, and a slider bar will show the progress of your upload. Once it's complete, you'll be redirected to your orkut album page where you can share your photos with your friends, or set privacy levels for your new album.

So start up Picasa, browse through your pictures and share some of your photographic gems with your friends with just a few clicks. We're betting your photos will start plenty of conversations!

Source : http://en.blog.orkut.com/2010/03/share-photos-on-orkut-directly-from.html

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Yeah. Google Buy's Picnik

Brian Axe, Product Management Director Say's

More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we're excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser.


We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.

We're very impressed with the Picnik team and the product they've created, and we're excited to welcome them to Google. We're looking forward to collaborating closely with them to improve the online photo editing experience on the web. In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud!


Read this also :

Picnik Acquired by Google : http://blog.picnik.com/2010/03/google-acquires-picnik/
Picnik Extension for Chrome : https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hcifofgaphfkfdcjbdogpamghiihilkl
Official Google Blog : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-welcomes-picnik.html

Google welcomes Picnik : http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-welcomes-picnik.html

SXSW 2010: Blogger & Google Reader Party in Austin : http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/03/sxsw-2010-blogger-google-reader-party.html

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Easy & Fast New windows in Gmail

Michael Davidson, Software Engineer Say's

One of the lesser-known features of Gmail is its ability to help with multitasking. Frequently, I find that I need to find an old message while I'm composing an email. When this happens, I click on the "new window" icon to pop my compose area into its own window:


There's only one problem — it's been slow! Today, we're rolling out a change that will fix this (reload your account to make sure you get this change). Now, popping out a window is much, much faster. No more "Loading..." progress bar.

There are a number of places you can pop up new windows in Gmail.

• In chat, there's the little upward arrow in the title bar:
  
  


• When writing a message, hold the "Shift" key while you click on the Compose Mail, Reply, Reply All or Forward links and you'll get a new window for your new message. (Holding the "Shift" key while typing the keyboard shortcut — in other words typing "C" "R" or "F" — has the same effect.)


• When you're reading your mail, hold the "Shift" key while you click on a message to open the conversation in a new window. (Same holds true for the "Shift" key and the "o" or "Enter" shortcuts.)


• If you're reading an email and want to save it for later, you can click the "New window" link in the upper-right hand corner of the conversation view:
  
  

Keep in mind that the popped out window does not outlive the closing of the original Gmail window, although we're working on a way to make that better. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make this work in Internet Explorer, so to see the speed-up, you'll need to be using Mozilla Firefox, Apple's Safari, or Google Chrome.

Source : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/fast-new-windows.html

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