Its time to celebrate Blogger's 11th Birthday

Seth Shamban, (Blogger Consumer Operations) Say's

Last year, Blogger turned ten. We were excited to present you with a (small-but-mighty) bounty of gifts, a token to commemorate all of your contributions over the years.

Now we're a year older (and would like to think a bit wiser), have some great features under our belt and are ready for another celebration with you, our closest friends. For Blogger's 11th birthday, we're hosting the first ever Blogger global birthday party!

We'll keep it simple—we set the date, you set the parties and Meetup Everywhere will help facilitate (free of charge!). Through the wonder of Meetup Everywhere, you'll be able to find other bloggers in your area and either join a celebration that has already been set up or start a new party local to you. The goal is to get together in-person, chat about blogging and celebrate with friends you may have otherwise only met online. Meetups can be simple, and no party is too small. Plus, we'll be supplying each party with a download-able pack of party supplies, including makings for party hats, name tags and signs. And who knows, there may even be other treasures and surprises in store.

Your invitation

• What: Blogger's 11th birthday celebration!
• How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
• Where: Anywhere you are.
• Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
• When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
• RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta

How it works

Everything you need is on our BloggerFiesta Meetup site. To find a party near you, do a quick search on the map. To join a scheduled party, click on the I'm Interested button on the party details page. To start a new party, click on Schedule a Meetup near you at the bottom of the BloggerFiesta site.

When you start or join a party, consider volunteering to be the Meetup organizer. Anyone can do it, plus you'll get fame and glory. That gives you the ability to set the venue and time of the party. Also, don't neglect the commenting functionality—you can use it to chat and plan with your fellow attendees prior to the party. What you do at the birthday party is completely up to you.

If you want to get started talking about the meet-ups, you can

• comment on our Facebook page
• Tweet using the hashtag #bloggerfiesta
• Post in our Help Forum

See you on the 31st! We'll have our party hats on.

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"Tools for Online Success" Small Business Partnership from Google and SBA

John Hanke, (Vice President of Product Management) Say's

Google and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recently announced an exciting new partnership aimed at providing resources and tools that can help small businesses learn how to succeed online. "Tools for Online Success" is a website featuring videos and tutorials from small business owners who have used the Internet to grow their businesses, and advice from Google's experts.



You can visit www.google.com/help/sba for the full rundown and tutorials, but here are a few easy tips that all small business owners should be employing:

Establish an online presence: As more and more people get online to find information and local searches grow, an online presence is increasingly important for a small business. Whether it's creating a website or starting a Twitter feed, there are many steps that you can take to enhance your visibility online. For example, Google Places allows you to claim your listing and input specific information about your business. This means that when people look on the Internet to learn more about your business, you are able to build and control the profile they'll view.

Utilize free marketing tools to reach your consumer base: Services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube allow you to communicate with customers and grow your fan base. These tools are great "word-of-mouth" platforms where your customers can tell their friends about your products. Keep customers in-the-loop about new promotions or specials, or exciting events.

Know your customers: Easy-to-use web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can help you better understand how your content is being received by customers. You can analyze what search term brought visitors to your webpage and what content they look at while they are there. This information will help you make more intelligent decisions about what products to feature and what terms your might want to run on to trigger your search engine advertisements.

Stay aware of the latest trends: The recent growing popularity of smart phones has meant that more and more customers search for information on the go. This makes it crucial for your business information to be up-to-date and online. To cater to consumers with smart phones, you can provide driving directions, post digital coupons or link to your menu.

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Slide is joining Google

David Glazer, (Engineering Director) Say's

We're excited to announce we've acquired Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.

For Google, the web is about people, and we're working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them.

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we've already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we'll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.

While we don't have any detailed product plans to share right now, we're thrilled to welcome Max and his very talented team to Google, and we can't wait to work together to give people more and better tools to communicate and connect.

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No need to open a new browser! here is the solution :)

Macduff Hughes, (Engineering Director) Say's

I have a couple different Gmail addresses that I use for different purposes. Historically, Google Accounts – including Gmail accounts — have only let people access one account at a time per browser, so using both accounts has been a bit inconvenient. I've either had to sign out and sign back in, use a second browser for my second account, or use a Chrome incognito window. And I'm not alone; lots of people have asked us for a better way to use multiple accounts at once in the same browser.

Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to "Multiple sign-in." After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.



Please keep in mind that this is a feature for advanced users, and there are a couple things to watch out for:

1) Not all Google services support multiple account sign-in yet. For the services that don't support it (like Blogger and Picasa Web Albums), you'll be defaulted to the first account you signed in with during that browser session. So if you click a link from Gmail to Blogger, for example, you'll be logged into Blogger with the first account you signed in with, even if you clicked the link to Blogger from your second Gmail account.

2) We're still working on making Gmail and Calendar work offline with multiple sign-in. If you rely on offline access, you probably don't want to enable this feature quite yet.

3) Multiple account sign-in only works on desktop browsers for now, so if you use Gmail on your phone's browser you won't see this option yet.

Since Google Apps customers can already sign in to their accounts at the same time as their personal Google Accounts, we won't be adding this new feature to Google Apps until the new infrastructure is in place.

If you use more than one Google Account, we hope this makes you more efficient. If you have any questions, check out our help center.

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