We've been wondering when Google was going to get into the music game, and it appears as though they're diving in head-first starting today. The only catch is that the service is only available in China. Users outside of China will need to use a China proxy if they want to gain access to the site.
The Olympics are just a few days away and this time more than ever, new media will be playing an important role in helping the World keep-up with all of the events. Google is one source, and Garett Rogers over at ZDNet points out how Google is making quite an effort to immerse themselves in it.
Imagine if you will that you've got an idea for a program/website that you're working on, but you're trying to play around with a bunch of different layouts to see which ones would look the best. What tool do you use to create your mockup? Photoshop? Some expensive program that costs hundreds of dollars? How about a free Firefox extension?
In the past we have said that it would be nice if Gmail offered the option to create a white list for messages from certain email addresses that should never be sent to the spam folder. We can't really complain about Gmail's spam filter because it does a fantastic job catching actual spam, but on occasion it will manage to take a "good" message and put it in the spam folder.
It looks as though Google is looking to enhance YouTube with their latest purchase of Omnisio. Omnisio has allowed users to create compilations and presentations with YouTube videos, among other things.
I know that there are a lot of you out there who are using the Gmail Redesigned skin, and you'll be happy to know that version 2 of the theme was recently released for all Firefox users. This new version includes a few dozen bug fixes, but more importantly they focused on increasing the performance.
Yesterday when I pulled up Google Maps, a site I frequently visit, Ryan looked over and right away noticed that the interface was different. My response was, "it is?" I stared at the sight for a good minute trying to figure out what was different and finally Ryan pointed out the changes. Google did in fact give Maps a makeover, but our guess is that some of you won't even notice.
CalDAV support has come to Google Calendar, but it's still a little rough around the edges. It is nice that it's finally available though, so that iCal users can view and edit their Google Calendar events from iCal, and visa versa. It's a two-way synchronization process that will keep all of your calendars up to date. This synchronization will occur at an interval that you specify.
Every year there are handfuls of new search engines that pop-up trying to compete with the big boys like Google and Yahoo. And every year those same search engine companies realize just how difficult it is to take on such a task.
In the past, both Ryan and I had been a fan of Google Bookmarks, especially because we were able to use the GMarks extension along with it. With the release of Firefox 3 though, we wanted to use the built-in system because we liked the way it handled itself.
Google announced today that their search engine has hit a huge milestone, and it's that they've come across an astounding 1 trillion unique URL's on the web. Don't confuse this with the number of pages that the search engine has indexed, because they flat out said that they are not indexing each of those trillion URL's since many of them have duplicated/useless content:
Anytime you are on a public network, you are more vulnerable to having your data stolen than if you were on your own home private network, unless you take the proper security precautions. If you have a Gmail account, Google would like to help you with those security precautions.
Back in December, we questioned whether Google was hoping to compete with Wikipedia by launching a new service into beta called Knol. Knol stands for a unit of knowledge, and it is a place where experts go to write articles (Knol's) on a subject that they are familiar with.
A few weeks ago we wrote about a new feature, walking directions, that select people were seeing when using Google Maps. The good news is that Google has apparently unleashed the new feature for anyone that wants to use it, and from what I can tell it works pretty darn good.
There are a lot of great applications that are coming through Apple's App Store for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, but one of my new favorites would have to be the 100% free WordPress for iPhone.
In the past, Google has been criticized for offering so many services yet not really integrating them together. iGoogle is the closest thing they have had to meshing services together by offering users the option to add gadgets including those for Gmail, Google Maps, Google Reader and more.
One of the features that Google Docs has been "missing" to make it a complete online office suite is templates. I've used templates in Microsoft Office on multiple occasions whether it be for a resume, a brochure, or a newsletter, and for some, they are a necessity. Google Docs hasn't offered anything like that until now.
Google has done a great job of making Gmail an easy-to-use email service, but one thing that has always bothered me is the fact that they automatically add people you email to your contact list.
With Google's latest project called Lively being released this week, we thought we'd take a look at some of the services that they should introduce. Google seems to want to cover every topic out there, and we're sure eventually they will.
Back in 2005 Google launched a bookmark management service that was designed to privately store links to your favorite sites. A few months after the launch a Firefox extension called gBrain popped up that used Google Bookmarks in a rather unique way. Once installed it would basically bookmark each and every site that you visited creating a searchable history.
