We Welcome @Gmail to Twitter!

Jason Toff, (gmail team) say's

We launch new features in Gmail almost every week, and people learn about these features from different sources -- friends and family, the news, this blog, or our what's new page. But heavy Twitter users like me often have to rely on @google and other users for updates related to Gmail. Starting today, you can now get all your Gmail news, tips and tricks directly from @gmail.

As always, if you encounter any issues with your Gmail account, our Help Center and user forum are your best resources. But if you have feedback or ideas you want to share, feel free to reply @gmail or include #gmail in tweets - we'll be reading your feedback periodically.

We're also giving away 140 snazzy t-shirts:

To get a shirt, tweet your best ode or haiku to Gmail (see some examples). The first 140 people to do so will get a free shirt in the mail (subject to these contest terms).

To follow us, visit http://twitter.com/gmail.

source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/follow-gmail-on-twitter.html

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Introducing GOOGLE TV

Ambarish Kenghe (AK), (Developer Product Manager, Google TV ) Say's

It’s been almost five months since we introduced Google TV to the world at Google I/O, and today we’re happy to give you an update on our progress. For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Google TV is a new way to think about TV: it’s a platform that combines your current TV programming and the open web into a single, seamless entertainment experience.

One of our goals with Google TV is to finally open up the living room and enable new innovation from content creators, programmers, developers and advertisers. By bringing Google Chrome and access to the entire Internet, you can easily navigate to thousands of websites to watch your favorite web videos, play Flash games, view photos, read movie reviews or chat with friends—all on the big screen.

Since our announcement, we’ve been overwhelmed by interest from partners on how they can use the Google TV platform to personalize, monetize and distribute their content in new ways. Most of these partner sites already work with Google TV, but many are choosing to further enhance heir premium web content for viewing on the television. Today, we’re excited to announce several of these content partners.

• Turner Broadcasting has been hard at work optimizing some of their most popular websites for viewing on Google TV, including TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, available anytime through Google TV.
• NBC Universal has collaborated with Google TV to bring CNBC Real-Time, an application that allows you to track your favorite stocks and access news feeds while enjoying the best financial news from CNBC directly on the TV screen.
• HBO will bring access to hundreds of hours of programming to Google TV with HBO GO. Authenticated subscribers will soon be able to access all of their favorite HBO content on-demand in an enhanced website for Google TV.
• NBA has built NBA Game Time, an application that lets you follow game scores in real-time and catch up on the latest highlights from your favorite team in HD.

In addition, we’ve partnered with some of the leading premium content providers to bring thousands of movie and TV titles, on-demand, directly to your television. Amazon Video on Demand offers access to over 75,000 titles for rental or purchase, and Netflix will offer the ability to instantly watch unlimited movies and TV shows, anytime, streaming directly to the TV.

We have also been working with some leading technology and media companies to optimize their content for Google TV, including news sites like The New York Times and USA Today; music sites like VEVO, Pandora and Napster; information networks like Twitter; and online networks like blip.tv. And with YouTube Leanback, we can offer the best experience for you to watch your favorite viral videos and personalized channels on the television.

You can get a sneak peek of some of these apps in the video below:



This is just the beginning. Over the next few weeks, you can expect to hear from more sites that are enhancing their web content for the television. If you’re interested in learning more about how to optimize your website for viewing on Google TV, please visit our developer page. 


Today we also launched a new website that provides more information about these apps and all of the other great features of Google TV.


We’re really excited about the enthusiasm surrounding the platform and can’t wait for it to reach your living room. Devices powered by Google TV will launch this month, so look out for more information in the next few weeks from Sony on its Internet TV and Blu-Ray player, and Logitech on its companion box.

source: http://googletv.blogspot.com/2010/10/here-comes-google-tv_04.html
recent gmail blog update: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html
recent google blog update: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/here-comes-google-tv.html

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Can you live without Google? [WPN Videos]

Original Post from WebProNews.com

About WPN Videos: WebProNews Videos is your home for ebusiness, tech and search video content. We provide exclusive coverage of conferences, compelling interviews with top names in the industry, practical tips, and online news that matters.

Have you ever thought about life without Google? It would be pretty crazy, right? Incidentally, this scenario did actually happen to a region in the United Kingdom. Although it was only temporary, the impact was significant.

The cause of the outage is unknown, but people speculate that it was a network problem and not a problem with Google. It covered areas in both England and Scotland.
During the blackout, people could not access services such as Google Search, YouTube, DoubleClick, AdSense, Google Analytics, and Gmail. One Twitter user, @therealtwin2, tweeted this regarding the outage, "Woah. Google just went down and my whole being felt empty. I didn't know how to use the internet without it. Scary."

According to Edward Cowell, who wrote about the incident on Econsultancy, Google Search, ironically, did not have the greatest impact. Not only were Google's own properties affected, but numerous other websites were also affected.

"The real business risk which became immediately apparent was the huge amount of Google hosted code embedded in websites across the web for ad-serving, tracking and other services," he said.
Cowell also offered advice to webmasters and developers in the event that another outage would occur. He tells webmasters to try using the asynchronous code if they use Google Analytics because this code allows it to "fail gracefully" in service failure circumstances.

For developers, he suggests that they thoroughly test their websites to find out how they react when externally hosted scripts are blocked. Testing is also important if scripts will be embedded into other sites.
Although the outage only lasted for a short time, it is clear that it had a large impact since so many people have grown to depend on Google and its services. How would you survive without Google? Is it possible?
Related Video - Download Video (what would happen if google would break) - Any Comments? post here


Recent Gmail Blog Update: Turn off Gmail's conversation view

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"WWW.GOO.GL" Website Launched!

Muthu Muthusrinivasan, (Software Engineer) Say's

We first introduced the Google URL Shortener (goo.gl) last December as part of Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Since our initial release, we've integrated the technology into many other Google products including News, Blogger, Maps, Picasa Web Albums, and Moderator, but people have been asking for a direct way to use the service. Today we're giving goo.gl its own website (http://goo.gl/, of course!). We don't intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you're protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we've continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

• Stability: We've had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we've worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
• Security: We've added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
• Speed: We've more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.

To access the new website and start taking advantage of these improvements, simply type "goo.gl" in your web browser and hit enter. There you'll find a simple interface where you can quickly shorten a URL.

We've focused on making the service lean, but you will find some helpful features. If you sign-in to your Google Account, you'll see a list of URLs you've shortened in the past. Click the "details" link next to any of shortened URL and you'll find public, real-time analytics data, complete with traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles. This can be a great way to better understand who's interested in your links, how they're finding them and when they're reading.

We also wanted to thank the many application developers out there who took the time to build extensions and other services integrating goo.gl technology. Even without an official API, there are extensions available for browsers like Chrome (eg: goo.gl URL Shortener, Shareaholic for Google Chrome) and Firefox (eg: goo.gl lite). Before people start writing code to incorporate our new features, we wanted to let you know we do plan to release an official API for goo.gl in the future. You'll be able to use the API to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications.

Happy shortening!

source: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html
recent gmail blog update: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html
recent google blog update: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/galaxy-of-your-own.html

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