The Google Made :

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

New for your Orkut photos: Popularity counter!

Original post by Maira Nascimento, Software Engineer (from orkut blog)

Ever wonder how popular your photos are? Now you can know!

There's a new feature in Orkut's photo albums that shows you how many times each photo has been viewed. Each and every one of your photos will have a counter, keeping accurate stats on its "popularity level". This number is refreshed every few minutes so you'll always know how many people have checked in on the photos you keep on Orkut.

See a lot of hits? Keep the picture! No views? Maybe it's time for a new photo, or even a new album, to give your friends something new to look at. The Orkut photo album counter is a great new and dynamic way to see how much your friends enjoy you and your photography skills!

see also: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/pasting-images-into-messages-just-got.html

Monday, June 13, 2011

Google’s Guitar Doodle Gets It’s Own Page

Original post by Amit Banerjee from www.techie-buzz.com

All right, all right. Google's famous Les Paul Guitar doodle lives in eternity, just like Google's Pacman doodle.

If you have missed our earlier story, Google's Les Paul Guitar doodle featured a sweet electric guitar with strings and notes that can be played using your computers keyboard and mouse. U.S citizens were also provided an additional option to record songs and share their recordings using a Google Doodle shortlink.

Seeing the immense popularity, Google tweeted that they would be keeping the Les Paul doodle for one more day. Guess, one day was not enough!

Google has now put up a dedicated homepage for the Les Paul Google doodle, which is available and will be available round the clock, till the Internet lives.

Just as the Pacman Google doodle is still available at Google.com/pacman, the Les Paul will continue to operate from it's homepage. The only difference here is that the search box is missing from the Les Paul's homepage which means you can't search and play music at the same time. This is unlike Google's Pacman doodle which lets you search as well as play the game from the same page.

source: http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/google-les-paul-guitar-doodle-homepage.html
see also http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/faces-of-gmail-hareesh-nagarajan.html

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Mobile templates for your blog in blogger

Original post by Jiho Han, Software Engineer (via blogger buzz)

A few months ago we introduced mobile templates to Blogger in Draft. Today, we're excited to announce that not only will these templates be available to everyone, we'll be supporting all 27 Template Designer templates. We invite you to make your blog smartphone-friendly by going to the Dashboard > Settings > Email & Mobile tab and enabling the mobile template option.

Blogger mobile templates are mobile-optimized versions of our Template Designer templates. If you are using one of these templates, when you enable the mobile template option your blog will begin rendering using the mobile version of the same variant. Even if you are not using a Template Designer template, or using a heavily-customized version of one, you can still enable this feature to have your blog start rendering in a generic default mobile template that we have created.

Some of our feature highlights:

Preview: Get a glimpse of how your blog will be displayed by clicking on the Mobile Preview button. You can also see it on your smartphone by scanning the QR-code.
Automatic redirection: Viewers will see the mobile version of your blog when accessing from smartphones*.
Template support: We are now supporting all 27 templates. Some gadgets are also supported**.
Mobile ads: Mobile AdSense ads will be displayed at the top of the post pages and at the bottom of the index page if the blog has an AdSense gadget or in-line blog ads.
Comments and videos: Viewers on smartphone devices will be able to make comments and watch videos.

We hope you enjoy the mobile templates. As always, we would love to hear from you so please let us know what you think through our feedback form, and stay tuned for future improvements.

*WebKit-based mobile browsers are supported for this launch.
**Supported gadgets/elements in this launch: Header, Blog, Profile, AdSense, Attribution.

source link: http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/06/announcing-blogger-mobile-templates.html

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Live transit updates in Google Maps

Original post from Sasha Gontmakher, Software Engineer (from google maps blog)

Often when I’m taking public transit, I arrive at my stop on time only to anxiously check my watch and look down the street for my bus, which is running late once again. Those extra minutes I’m forced to wait seem like an eternity, and the only information I can access on my phone is when the bus was supposed to arrive.

Starting now, Google Maps for mobile and desktop can tell you when your ride is actuallygoing to arrive with new live transit updates. We partnered with transit agencies to integrate live transit data in four U.S. cities and two European cities: Boston, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, Madrid and Turin.

When you click on a transit station or plan a transit route with Google Maps and there are delays or alerts related to your trip, you’ll now see “live departure times” (indicated with a special icon) and service alerts.