Original post by Ariel, Orkut Marketing Team By popular request, last week we released a set of new music themes on Orkut:Pop, Rap, New Rock and Rock Teen. Here's a preview of New Rock:
Enjoy, and keep your suggestions coming for the kinds of themes you'd like to see!
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Posted by Rob von Behren and Jonathan Wall, Founding Engineers on Google Wallet on 26th May,
Today in our New York City office, along with Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint, we gave a demo of Google Wallet, an app that will make your phone your wallet. You'll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC). We're field testing Google Wallet now and plan to release it soon.
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Y O U H A V E S W I T C H E D T O T H E O T H E R B O X I A M N O T A L O N E L Y T V Y O U H A V E S W I T C H E D T O T H E O T H E R B O X I A M N O T A L O N E L Y T V . O V T O T R N T V . T V O . R N O . T T V . T V O R N O T T V .Original post from google tv official blog If you didn't make it to the Building Android Apps for Google TV session at Google I/O or don't follow our Twitter updates, you may not have seen the puzzle we posted.
We're happy to announce that we have 3 winners, one for each Google TV device, who will be receiving the Honeycomb version of Google TV one week before we send it to all Google TV devices. Congratulations to Benji Hertel, Alecia Householder, and Jan Jorgensen on their quick wit in solving the puzzle! The winners will receive early access to Android 3.1 Honeycomb on Google TV.
We saw a lot of interesting methods being used in an attempt to solve the puzzle and were impressed by the creativity displayed (e.g. http://yfrog.com/z/h2s0sjhj). Our puzzle masters Rich Bragg and Erica Baker even planted a number of signposts with a few subtle hints along the way (http://goo.gl/bgyrygbrg, http://goo.gl/ygbgbrryg, http://goo.gl/ovtotrntv).
Ultimately, they designed the puzzle to be slightly easier to solve if you happen to own a Google TV device. Here's how it worked:
Justin Koh, a Google TV engineer, hid an Easter Egg in the Google TV home screen. If you've ever clicked the white Google TV logo at the top left of the Home screen, you may have noticed that the little boxes change colors. What you may not have realized (unless you already solved the puzzle) is that the boxes flash in a specific timing pattern: Morse code!
The flashing boxes spell out two messages that Google TV fans may recognize:
If you plug those letters into the puzzle, you get something that looks like this:
If you isolate the colored boxes on their own, you see the following:
Do those colors look familiar? They should! The are the colors from our logo, which you can see below.
Make it a bit easier to read and...
TVorNotTV, that is the ques...er..solution. Ok, technically the solution was to visit http://goo.gl/tvornottv but that doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as well.
Now that this cat's out of the bag, we'll be putting on our thinking caps to come up with something even trickier for Honeycomb.
Thanks for your participation!
see also:
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Original post by Zohair Hyder, Software Engineer Email is just as much about the people you communicate with as it is what you communicate about. We think it can be helpful to view relevant information in context, which is why over the next two weeks we're rolling out a new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages. The people widget surfaces content from friends, family and colleagues that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them.
Next to every email message you can now see contextual information about the people in that conversation including recent emails you received from them, relevant Buzz posts, shared documents and calendar events. You also have quick access to a variety of ways to communicate with individuals, start a group chat or schedule a meeting with groups of people.
We hope the people widget will improve your Gmail experience and we're eager for you to try it out.
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Original post by Alireza Ali, Software Engineer
With 40% of Google Maps usage on mobile devices, we want you to have a consistent Google Maps experience wherever you use it. So, today we're announcing our updated Google Maps experience for mobile browsers on Android and iOS.
Now, when you visit maps.google.com on your phone or tablet's browser and opt-in to share your location, you can use many of the same Google Maps features you're used to from the desktop. This will allow you to:
This past weekend, I was at a team off-site at a ropes course and needed to find a good deli spot to grab lunch. I opened Google Maps on my mobile browser and searched to locate a popular deli nearby. A few finger taps later, I had viewed photos and reviews on the deli's Place page and found the quickest way to get there using driving directions- all from my mobile browser.
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From the beginning, we designed Google Talk using open standards so that you could connect to your friends and family using any chat product, making communication as easy as possible. A few years ago, we announced our partnership with AOL which made it possible for people to chat with AIM users right from inside Gmail. Today, we're happy to report that AOL has now made it possible to chat with AOL contacts across a variety of Google services: not just Gmail, but also iGoogle, Orkut, and Google Talk on Android phones.
If you chat with AIM buddies in Gmail, you'll notice a few changes. First, you'll no longer need an AIM account to connect to your friends using AIM. Instead you'll be able to add your AIM buddies just like you add Gmail contacts to your chat list: using their AOL screennames (for example, username@aol.com). AIM users will now also be able to add Google contacts to their AIM chat clients.
Second, you'll no longer be able to sign into your AIM account from within Gmail chat since you can now add AIM contacts directly. And lastly, if you previously had a lot of AIM contacts and don't want to re-add them to your chat list one by one, AOL has created a tool to import your AIM buddies into your Gmail account. See their blog post for more info.
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Original post from Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger Update (5/13 7:46PM PST): Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner.
What a frustrating day. We're very sorry that you've been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We're nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored. Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation. We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we've also felt your pain.
Here's what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger's behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that's why you haven't been able to publish. We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we're in the progress of restoring.
Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers. We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we'll do our best to prevent this from happening again.
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original post by Rounak Jain from watblog.com | source link
Google I/O, the web giant's annual developer conference kicks off today at San Francisco. The company has a history of announcing about 2-3 new products every year at this conference. Android, Google TV and Google Wave were all announced at this conference. Although a lot of products that have been announced at I/O like Google Wave and Google gears haven't turned out to be hits the whole web is abuzz of what will Google offer its consumers this year. The conference tickets sold like hot cakes with developers buying out all the tickets within 58 minutes.
The whole event will mainly be focused on Android and Chrome OS. So here is a round up of all the rumours over the web about Google I/O
Social is expected to take a back seat at I/O. The reason behind this is that Google doesn't want to build up a lot of expectations and hype since it has a very bad history with Social. Buzz hasn't been very successful and was initially caught up in privacy issues. The only social related announcement at I/O will be the already available '+1′ button to promote results in Google searches.
Google has also partnered with a lot of companies like Seesmic, Foursquare, Hashable and many others to demonstrate and show off their use of technologies provided by Google to developers. With these associations Google will also attempt to address the problem of scarcity of tablet optimised apps available on the Android Market.
It will be interesting to see whether Google continues last years trend of taking digs at Apple throughout its keynote even when the open-ness of Android is in a lot of danger.
Like every year, Google will give out a free Android device to every attendee and this year it is rumoured to be the Samsung Galaxy tab. To stay in sync with all the announcements at I/O keep checking Watblog or the event live stream.
see also:
http://www.watblog.com/2011/05/10/android-google-tv-and-google-wave-expected-announcements-at-google-io/
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-io-countdown-to-keynote-kickoff.html
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-io-countdown-to-keynote-kickoff.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/color-code-your-google-calendar-events.html
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Original post by If your calendar ends up full of many different types of events (film nights, lunch dates, and doctor appointments, for example), there's now an easy way to categorize them using colors.
Just click on an event, then click the colored square in the top left of the pop-up bubble and pick a new color. If you don't see this option quite yet, hang tight — it'll be there for everyone within the next day or so.
Only you and anyone else you've given edit access to your calendar will be able to see the colors you choose. This has been a feature request from many of you for some time, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we do.
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