Google Buzz : Confirm your buzz settings

Todd Jackson, (Product Manager) Say's

Shortly after launching Google Buzz, we quickly realized we didn't get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience. We made a number of changes to the getting started experience based on your feedback, the most significant of which was replacing auto-following with suggestions for people to follow.

Rather than automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, Google Buzz now suggests people for you to follow instead. This way, Buzz is still simple to set up (no one wants to peck out an entire social network from scratch) but you aren't set up to follow anyone until you choose to do so.

But many of you started using Google Buzz before we made these changes, and we want to help you ensure that Buzz is set up the way you want. Offering everyone who uses our products transparency and control is very important to us, so if you started using Google Buzz before we changed the start-up experience, you'll see the following confirmation page the next time you click into the Buzz tab:

This page highlights your current Buzz settings and makes it easy to change anything you want. You can view and edit the people you're following and the people following you, elect whether you want those lists appearing on your public Google profile, and modify any of the sites you have connected to Google Buzz, like Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter. If everything looks good, you can confirm your Buzz set-up with a single click. And remember, you can always change who you're following by clicking "Following XX people" from the Buzz tab or modify your preferences from the Buzz section of Gmail Settings.

To keep up to date with all of the improvements we're making to Google Buzz and provide your feedback, follow our team's Google Buzz account. For tips and tricks on using Google Buzz, check out the videos on our new YouTube channel: youtube.com/googlebuzz.

Source / Recent Posts:
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http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/04/tweetdeck-and-google-app-engine-match.html

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Now Gmail on iPad

Alex Nicolaou, (Engineering Manager) Say's

When the iPhone and Android devices came out, we started building for advanced mobile browsers and optimizing the Gmail interface for touchscreens, culminating in the Gmail for mobile HTML5 web app. As portable devices continue to evolve, we're excited about the upcoming wave of tablet computers and the possibilities they bring.

With today's release of the iPad, we're launching an experimental two-pane user interface to take advantage of its large touchscreen and tablet form factor. Building upon the Gmail for mobile web app, this new interface displays your conversations on the left and your messages on the right hand side.


All the features of the Gmail web app that you're used to, such as offline access and aggressive caching to reduce latency, are present in the iPad version. Tablet devices are still very new, so expect changes as we continue to optimize for this new format. We'd like to hear any ideas you may have on how we can make Gmail better for the iPad so don't hesitate to let us know.

To try out Gmail out on the iPad, just go to gmail.com in Safari. For quick access, try creating a homescreen link. Please note that the new interface is only available in US English for now. You can always access Gmail through the native Mail application using IMAP as well.

Source / Recent Posts:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/gmail-on-ipad.html
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/04/al-gore-you-earth-days-40th-celebration.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/model-your-town-competition-cast-your.html

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April 1 spl - gmail’s vowel outage

Sam Schillace, (Gmail Engineering Director) Say's

If you logged into Gmail over the last hour (or visited the Gmail homepage), you probably noticed that something looked a bit off: all the vowels are missing. We realize this makes things difficult for all of you who rely on Gmail — whether at home or at work — and we're incredibly sorry. We take morphological issues like this extremely seriously, so we want to let you all know what happened and what we're doing about it.

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter 'a' for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters 'a,' 'e,' 'i,' 'o,' and 'u.' As a result, we're experiencing Gmail's first temporary vowel outage. (We're still investigating whether the letter 'y' is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

Over the last hour we've received numerous reports of this issue via our help forums, from colleagues at Google, and via email you've sent us. Some of you have already found creative workarounds for communicating without vowels, like Aaron, who sent us this:


Having 80.8% of the alphabet available is significantly below the 99.9% full letter uptime reliability we strive for. Since identifying the root case of this issue, we've started bringing vowels back to Gmail, so you should see them back in your account within the next few hours if you don't already. In the meantime, while you may still see this issue in Gmail's web interface, both IMAP and POP access are functioning normally. We'll post an update as soon as things are fully resolved and, again, we're v3ry s0rry.

Source:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-vowel-outage.html
http://blogomaps.blogspot.com/2010/04/google-offre-une-nouvelle-dimension.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/different-kind-of-company-name.html

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File transfers available in Orkut / IGoogle (coming soon in gmail)

Lizhen Wang, (software engineer) Say's

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file to a friend who's online? Now it's easy! We're excited to announce that you can now share pictures, documents, and other files with your friends while chatting in orkut and iGoogle. To give it a try you don't need to install anything, simply start a conversation with a friend and click Send a file... in the 'Actions' menu:

This feature is also compatible with the file transfer functionality in the Google Talk downloadable software, so you can share files directly from the web with folks who use the desktop version.

File transfer is available in orkut and iGoogle only for now. We're working on bringing it to Gmail as well, and we'll keep you posted when that happens!

Source / Recent posts:
http://en.blog.orkut.com/2010/03/file-transfer-in-orkut-and-igoogle-chat.html
http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/03/try-out-new-google-wave-wave.html
http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2010/03/picasa-36-for-mac-now-in-35-languages.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/different-kind-of-company-name.html
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/03/at-end-of-rainbow-new-pot-of-chrome.html

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