Email Overload? Priority Inbox now in Gmail

Priority Inbox (Beta) is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else”. Messages are automatically categorized as they arrive in your inbox.

Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). You can improve the ranking in Priority Inbox by clicking the plus or minus buttons at the top of the inbox to mark conversations as important or not important.

You can choose to show different types of messages in each section, to set maximum sizes for each section, and to hide or add a section altogether. You can customize your sections from the Priority Inbox tab under Gmail Settings or right from the inline menus dropdown arrow.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government

Languages included:
All languages supported by Gmail

How to access what's new:
- Users can manually opt-in to this new feature by clicking on the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner.
- Users can return to the normal view at any time by clicking on “Inbox” or by disabling Priority Inbox in “Settings”.
- Priority Inbox is not fully available in Gmail for mobile. There is, however, an “Important” label on the mobile web app and in IMAP where you will find your important messages if you have chosen to show Priority Inbox.
- If you only access your Gmail account through POP or IMAP, Priority Inbox won’t be fully available. If you select “Show Priority Inbox” from Gmail Settings in the web interface, you will see an “Important” label which contains your important messages.

Note: This feature is being rolled out gradually this week to Google Apps domains and only to domains whose administrator has enabled the ‘Enable pre-release features’ checkbox in the Google Apps Control Panel under ‘Domain settings’.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html
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Online publishers: growing the display advertising pie

This is the latest post in our series on the future of display advertising. Today, director of product management Jonathan Bellack looks at our efforts to help online publishers generate more advertising revenue - Ed.

For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. But the pace of change in the industry can be intimidating—how can a publisher keep up with what’s new, let alone grow their business?

We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can eke another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.

We’ve previously described our three core display ad products for publishers:

• AdSense, which places the most valuable, relevant ads on our partners’ websites, without the publishers having to sell the ad space themselves;
• DoubleClick for Publishers, our ad serving platform, which maximizes the value of ad space that publishers have directly sold themselves;
• DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time auction marketplace, which maximizes large publishers’ overall returns, by "dynamically allocating" the highest value ad, whether directly sold, or indirectly sold through an ad network.

I wanted to highlight the key principles guiding our future product innovations in this area, as we work to help all publishers maximize their online ad revenues.

1. Making life more efficient
For most large publishers, directly sold ads (ads sold by their own sales force) comprise the vast majority of their ad revenues. But today, selling and managing these ads is frustrating, expensive and often involves tedious manual processes.

Imagine a TV network that receives TV commercials in 100 different formats, languages, lengths and video dimensions, and then has to manually convert, translate and edit them all, then manually count the number of TV sets on which the ad appeared before sending a bill. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that scenario is far less challenging than what most large online publishers face today with display advertising. Today, across the industry, for every dollar spent on display advertising, 28 cents is eaten up in administrative costs. If we can reduce that proportion, it would mean a lot more money going to publishers.

Things like new standards for video ad serving and systems that connect buyers and sellers are helping publishers support the most engaging and creative ads across their sites. But there are quantum leaps to come in this area, for small and large publishers. Think of a political candidate who is seeking donations on his or her website—the candidate can receive money in seconds. Imagine if publishers—even the smallest website—had tools that enabled advertisers to click a button on their site to upload an ad, let them pay for it with a credit card, and then deliver this ad—through the publisher’s ad server—within minutes. This sort of “immediate ad” will become possible as ad serving technology continues to simplify the process of buying and selling ad space.

2. Total revenue management
AdSense selects the most valuable ad for publishers from a large number of ad networks, to maximize ad revenues every time a page loads.

New ad serving and “dynamic allocation” technology, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, is emerging that enables ad revenues to be maximized across both directly and indirectly sold ad space, ad impression by ad impression, using real-time prices. Second by second, across millions of ad impressions, this can meaningfully boost major publishers’ revenues. Using this technology, the average price that a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is more than 130 percent higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks. In fact, without this type of dynamic allocation across sales channels, a publisher’s revenues can never truly be maximized.

In years to come, this true revenue maximization can get even smarter. There’s no question that delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time delivers better results. We have years of experience in doing this with search and text ads; we’re now bringing that experience to the world of display. This means investing in a smarter ad server that can automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response, as well as manage delivery to deliver those improved results for publishers. This new ad server can even anticipate a publisher’s future events and adjust delivery accordingly—for example, if traffic drops off every weekend, the ad server can automatically speed up during the week to keep everything moving smoothly.

3. More insight and control
Our vision is to provide all publishers the smartest possible advertising system that can give them knowledge and control of everything going on with their ad business. The vision is already becoming a reality: the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform offers publishers 4,000 times more data than its predecessor. And in recent years, we’ve been constantly adding new reporting options for our AdSense partners.

By putting publishers in firm control and empowering them with more data, reports and controls (for example, over what advertisers and ad networks they allow), they’ll be able to make fully informed decisions about ad space forecasting, segmentation, targeting, allocation and pricing. This helps them to extract the maximum value from their sites and uncover new advertising opportunities—the gold that’s buried under their own sites.

4. Betting on openness
An open ecosystem drives meaningful results for publishers. When a wide range of buyers can bid for a publisher’s ad space, through an advertising exchange or network, this creates more competition for that ad space, while giving publishers choice over whose ads they want to appear. On the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, an enormous number of advertisers, belonging to over 50 ad networks, compete for publishers’ ad space. Of course, at the same time, we’re also providing publishers robust technologies and controls that can block any unwanted ads or networks.

Similarly, we believe that one of the best ways to encourage innovation is to open code to the web developer community. Look at the incredible mashups that have been created through the Google Maps API, or the range of mobile devices that have been created from our open source Android code.

This same approach can generate significant advantages for publishers. When we rolled out the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, we launched a new public API. This gives publishers and developers the tools to drive innovation and deliver value-adding “advertising apps” for publishers—like inventory analysis, sales workflow tools and more—without having to build an ad server from scratch. This will help drive the next generation of better, more valuable ad innovations.

5. Everything is going to be “display”
Display advertising is about much more than ads in web browsers. People are watching video, reading newspapers, magazines, books and listening to digital music at an ever-increasing rate. They’re turning to a plethora of new devices—smartphones, tablets, e-readers and even video game consoles. We’ve designed our platform, and are continuing to invest in it, to give publishers a single base that can deliver ads into this expanding world—including streaming video, mobile ad delivery and more.

Looking forward, what we call “display” today will just be “advertising”—a single platform that can coordinate an advertiser’s campaign across streaming audio ads in car stereos, interactive mobile experiences on smartphones, and HD video ads on set-top boxes. Imagine if that single platform could optimize the campaign, automatically delivering the best-performing ads, best returns and best mix, across all those platforms. That’s the future we envisage.

An exciting time ahead
We’re unapologetically optimistic about the future of display advertising for online publishers. There’s great innovation taking place in this area that will make the current landscape look primitive within a few years. We’ll keep working hard to help all publishers take advantage of these opportunities.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management

Google Buys SocialDeck

Google acquired yet another social gaming company: SocialDeck. The start-up had an interesting idea: creating a platform for playing games on any device. "SocialDeck was founded in 2008 with the vision of enabling 'anywhere, anytime, anyone' gaming. The company has launched several titles for the iPhone, Facebook, and BlackBerry using its social gaming platform technology, which enables simultaneous game play across multiple mobile devices and social networks," explains SocialDeck's site.

It should be obvious that Google doesn't buy companies like SocialDeck to develop games. Most likely, Google wants to create a platform for social gaming that will enable users to play the same game on an Android device, on an iPhone, on a computer, on a Chrome OS tablet, in Google Me or any other social network that uses Google's platform.

Here's an overview of SocialDeck's gaming platform:



{ via Inside Social Games }

Gmail Priority Inbox

Last year, I posted about a new Gmail feature that will prioritize important messages. This feature will be available soon and it's called Priority Inbox.

"Priority Inbox is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Gmail has always kept spam messages out of your inbox, and now we've improved Gmail's filter to help you see the emails that matter faster without requiring you to set up complex rules. Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else. Messages are automatically categorized as they arrive in your inbox. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over)."



Gmail also adds two buttons that let you classify messages as important or unimportant, just like the "Mark as spam" and "Not spam" buttons. Unlike spam filtering, finding important messages is more difficult because you can't use information from other accounts to classify messages.

Google has to build a personalized classifier for each Gmail user and it needs a lot of messages. "Email importance ranking works best for people who receive a lot of email," explains Google. Google takes into account implicit signals like: the messages from people you frequently email are important, if a message includes words frequently used in other messages you usually read then it's probably important, the messages you star are probably more important than the messages you archive without opening. There are also explicit signals: click on the important/unimportant buttons, create filters to mark messages as important.

Priority Inbox will be available in Gmail and Google Apps over the next week, but you'll only see it in Google Apps if the administrator has enabled "pre-release features".

Tidbit: Gmail uses the "important" label to classify messages, so that's the reason why you can't create a label named "important".


{ Thanks, Niranjan, Tillmann and Nikola. }

Email overload? Try Priority Inbox

(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)

People tell us all the time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.



Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:



As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.

Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

Share your story with the new Google Translate

(Cross-posted from the Google Translate blog)

Today, you may have noticed a brighter looking Google Translate. We’re currently rolling out several changes globally to our look and feel that should make translating text, webpages and documents on Google Translate even easier. These changes will be available globally within a couple of days.

Google Translate’s shiny new coat of paint

With today’s functional and visual changes we wanted to make it simpler for you to discover and make the most of Google Translate’s many features and integrations. For example, did you know that you can search across languages on Google using Google Translate? Or that you can translate incoming email in Gmail or take Google Translate with you on your phone? We’ve added all these tips on the new Do more with Google Translate page. You can also see some of these tips rotating on the new homepage.

We’ve also created an Inside Google Translate page, where you can learn how we create our translations. Is it the work of magic elves or learned linguists? Here Anton Andryeyev, an engineer on our team, gives you the inside scoop:



It’s always inspiring for us to learn how Google Translate enables people to break down communication barriers around the world. Lisa J. recently shared with us how she uses Google Translate to stay in touch with her grandparents. “I moved to the U.S. from China when I was six,” Lisa told us, “so I speak both English and Chinese fluently but I’m not very good at reading the complex Chinese alphabet.” When she gets an email from her grandparents in China, Google Translate helps her understand the sentences she can’t quite read. She also uses Google Translate when she’s writing her response. “I use Google Translate to make sure I’m using the right character in the right place,” she explained.

Do you use Google Translate to stay in touch with distant relatives? Read foreign news? Or make the most of your vacation? We’d love to hear from you, and invite you to share your story with us. Who knows, we might feature your story on the Google Translate blog!

Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager

23 walls of Googley

A couple months ago while visiting our London office, I noticed a really cool Google logo on the wall. It was a mosaic of photos of London that had been created by a product manager named Clay Bavor and a team of Googlers (in fact, Clay wrote about it). As a few of us admired the wall, we thought there must be other Googlers who could create something equally cool and fun. So we cooked up a little contest for the product management team: create your own version of a “Googley Art Wall” and the team with the best entry wins a nice dinner out and a donation to the charity of its choice.

When we announced the contest, we weren’t sure if we’d get enough entries to make it interesting. Within minutes of seeing the announcement, however, Lorraine Twohill (head of marketing) and Claire Hughes Johnson (head of online sales) both asked if it was OK for their teams to enter too. Soon Googlers from offices and teams around the world were doing their best to create beautiful, creative and Googley “art walls,” on small budgets and their own time.

Seven weeks later, 23 teams from 12 offices across eight countries submitted videos and photographs of their work. The entries were so universally good that the judges couldn’t limit themselves to picking just one winner. The grand prize went to “Rubik’s Cubes Galore!”, a giant Google doodle meticulously composed of 850 Rubik’s Cubes, created by practically the entire Taipei office. We also named four runners-up: from Mountain View, a “Periodic Table of Google Elements,” a colorful collection of facts and stats about Google and the Internet arranged as a giant periodic table; the “Google Paris Metro Station,” a Metro stop built right inside the Paris office; the “Shanghai Interactive Wall,” a magnetic wall with 63 moveable tiles; and in Dublin, the “Google FoosWall,” a super-sized foosball table with handmade players that spell Google. Watch the video to see the making of these winning walls, along with the finished products.



People sometimes ask me to define “Googley.” Now I can just tell them to walk by any of the newly decorated walls (you should too, if you happen to visit a Google office). This is what happens when you give Googlers a little space—and paint guns, a wood shop, litter scraps from micro-kitchens, stained glass, LEDs, dried beans, colorful plastic balls, antique furniture—or just about anything else they can get their hands on, apparently. They create incredible things.



Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management

Introducing our new YouTube channel for Google Mobile

By now, some of you may have noticed our new Google Mobile YouTube channel, with a fresh look that includes a video box that rotates along multiple axes (we love the Rubik’s Cube here at Google). As you click on and discover more videos, we hope you’ll have fun checking out all the ways the box can turn.

In our channel’s “featured” section, we highlight some of our mobile search capabilities -- like search by voice, sight, and location -- that really help you take advantage of your phone’s unique technology. Since we understand that these represent new modes of searching for many of you, we’re going to launch some new videos that help illustrate the variety of practical and fun ways that you can use these features. To start with, check out our “Shoot This” series of videos for Google Goggles. Goggles can actually recognize much more than just bar codes and book covers, and these videos really let you take Goggles for a test drive. You can navigate through these videos by clicking on the embedded annotations to fast-forward or rewind.

When looking at “all apps,” you can not only check out any of our latest videos at a glance, but also quickly sort them by mobile platform or by app.
We’ve also made it easier for you to share videos by email or through popular social networking sites.

We hope you enjoy trying out our new Google Mobile YouTube channel. We’ll be adding many more new videos, so please visit youtube.com/googlemobile and subscribe. Also, if you’ve already subscribed to our old channel, note that you need to subscribe to the new one separately.



Posted by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing, Google Mobile

Arcade Fire meets HTML5

What would a music experience designed specifically for the modern web look like? This is a question we've been playing around with for the last few months. Browsers and web technologies have advanced so rapidly in the last few years that powerful experiences tailored to each unique person in real-time are now a reality.

Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser. Called “The Wilderness Downtown”, the project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google. Building this project on the web and for the browser allowed us to craft an experience that is not only personalized, but also deeply personal for each viewer. “The Wilderness Downtown” takes you down memory lane through the streets you grew up in. It’s set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait” off their newly released album The Suburbs (which you may be familiar with, especially if you were one of 3.7 million viewers who live-streamed Arcade Fire's concert on YouTube earlier this month). The project was built with the latest web technologies and includes HTML5, Google Maps, an integrated drawing tool, as well as multiple browser windows that move around the screen.


“The Wilderness Downtown” was inspired by recent developments in modern browsers and was built with Google Chrome in mind. As such, it’s best experienced in Chrome or an up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser. You can launch the project and learn more about it on our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

We hope you enjoy it.

Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab

Google Calendar's Event Scheduling Feature is Back

Last year, Google Calendar tested a feature that made it easier to schedule events with guests. The "sneak preview" was only available for a few months, but now it's back. Google calls it "find a time" and you can use it when you create an event. "If you're able to view your guests' calendars (via sharing, Google Apps shared access, or because they've made their calendars public), you'll be able to compare schedules and pick a time that works for everyone," explains Google.


Google Calendar redesigned the page that lets you create events and added a more intuitive dialog for repeating events. "The old interface for creating recurring events was clumsy and took up too much space on the screen," admits Google. "Now you'll see only a summary of your recurring event on the main event page; if you want to edit it, you can use a window that opens when you select the 'Repeats' checkbox."

Watch a Video in YouTube's HTML5 Player

In January, YouTube launched a player that used the HTML5 video tag. To try this player, you have to go to youtube.com/html5 and enable the player. If you have a browser that supports the video tag and the YouTube video doesn't use captions, annotations and doesn't show ads, you'll be able to watch the video in YouTube's HTML5 player.

What if you want to switch to the HTML5 player for a single video or you want to link to the HTML5 version? YouTube has a special parameter that lets you do that: just append "&html5=True" to the video's address. Here's an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTl3U6aSd2w&html5=True (link)


For now, YouTube's HTML5 player works in Google Chrome (h.264; Chrome 6 adds support for WebM), Opera 10.6+ (WebM), Safari 4+ (h.264) and Firefox 4 (WebM).

This week in search 8/27/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Searches come in many flavors, but it's our job to determine what type of search you're doing once you've clicked your way out of the search box. Whether you're looking for a blog or a business, our goal is to get you the most relevant type of result back to you—fast. Ultimately, it's that combination of relevance and speed that we think will give you the best experience. Here are some of our newest search enhancements:

Improved Blog Search
With the proliferation of specialized blogs all across the web, you'll often find great content on blogs—whether you're planning a trip to Florida, looking to bring home a new golden retriever or learning how to make a delicious Italian dinner. Recently, our blog search team made it much easier to find full blogs about your query, rather than single posts on the topic. This is especially useful if you're looking for bloggers that post on an ongoing basis about the subject of your query. Try it with one of your search queries by clicking "Blogs," then "Homepages," in the left-hand panel of your search results.

Example searches: [tesla car], [google], [android]

A new home for Realtime Search
When we think about relevancy, often what you're looking for may have just happened. It's been more than nine months since we first announced our real-time search features, and this week we gave it a new home at www.google.com/realtime as well as some great new tools to you refine and understand your results. You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news that's happening right near you or in the area of your choice. We also added conversations view, so you can follow a discussion more easily by browsing a full timeline of tweets and seeing how the conversation evolved. And in Google Alerts, you can now create an alert specifically for "updates" to get an email the moment a topic of interest shows up on Twitter or other short-form services.

Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.

Example search: [egg recall]

More local results in maps and clickable markers
We made some changes to local results in web search that will help you learn more about the results and save you time by saving you clicks. Starting this week, when you search for places we'll show you all of the results that match your query on the map. Results after the first seven will be shown with small circle markers. This can be very useful in identifying the density of stores and helping you find the right neighborhood to visit. For example, when you search for [fabric stores nyc], you can now easily identify the Garment District:

When you see a result on the map that you like, you can now click directly on the marker (the pin or the circle) and go to Google Maps with that place selected and the "Info" window open. The other results will still be there if you want to explore more places.

Example searches: [fabric stores nyc], [coffee in seattle], [resort near ko samui, thailand]

We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

Find out what’s hot on search with the Google Beat

Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. Have you ever wondered what those searches are about—or whether what you’re searching for also happens to be on the minds of millions of others across the country? We’re introducing a new way to find out—a regular video series called the Google Beat that highlights some of the hottest searches on Google in the U.S.

Using data from Google Trends, Google Insights for Search and some additional tools, the Google Beat will give you a snapshot of some of the topics that prompted people to turn to the web over the past week. You’ve probably seen our previous deep dives into Google search trends, like our annual year-end Zeitgeist and posts here about search trends related to events like the World Cup, the Oscars® and beyond. Searches can be unexpected, and sometimes what’s popular one week could never have been predicted the week before (think of Falcon Heene, last October’s “balloon boy” or Steven Slater). We’re looking forward to seeing what our data will reveal.

Check out this week’s premier video below, and subscribe to the Google Beat YouTube channel to get regular updates. We hope you enjoy.



Posted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog team

Don't Click this Button in Google Voice!

Warning: This tip is only for Gmail users outside US.

Google says that the latest Gmail feature that allows you to make phone calls is only available in the US, but that's not true. If you set Gmail's interface language to English (US), you should see the "Call phone" option in the chat roster. You can also buy credit using Google Checkout.

If you're not in the US and you want to add credit to your account, make sure that you DON'T CLICK the "Upgrade your account" button from Google Voice. This feature is only useful if you are in the US, since it lets you get a Google Voice number. Unfortunately, if you click on that button and you're not in the US, you'll no longer be able to buy credit.


Here's what you'll see after clicking on "Upgrade your account":


I don't think there's a way to downgrade your account, so the best thing to do is to avoid clicking that button. Google could easily solve this problem by hiding the button for non-US users or by allowing users to stop the upgrade.

Update. You can cancel the upgrade if you use a US proxy (try UltraSurf if you use Windows).

Update 2. A Google spokesperson said: "We're looking into this and will keep you updated."

Google Chrome Labs

Many Google Chrome features aren't enabled by default because they're not ready for primetime or they're too advanced. Unfortunately, you can't enable them from the interface and you have use command-line flags.

A recent Chromium build added a new internal page that lets you enable some advanced features: about:labs about:flags.

"Tabpose is currently the only lab on Mac, tabs-on-left the only lab on Windows. about:labs should not be visible on the stable channel. Labs that were enabled on the dev channel should not be enabled on the stable channel."



Tabs-on-the-left is especially useful on widescreen monitors, while tabposé is a Mac-only feature that adds Exposé for tabs.

Both features can also be enabled by adding command-line flags to a Chrome shortcut: --enable-vertical-tabs for side tabs and --enable-expose-for-tabs for tabposé. After enabling vertical tabs using the command-line flag, right-click on a tab and select "use side tabs".

In-cell dropdown and data validation now in Google Spreadsheets

We’ve introduced in-cell dropdown and validation to spreadsheets. This makes it easy to constrain the values of an individual cell to a specific range or list.

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
1. Enter data into a range of cells. For example, create a list of destinations on your spreadsheet.
2. Select the cell(s) you would like to validate.
3. Under the Tools menu, select Data validation...
4. Change the Criteria to ‘Items from a list.’
5. Click the button next to the ‘Create list from range’ option and select the range of cells you entered data in during Step 1.
6. Click Save and the cell you chose to validate will have a dropdown arrow in it with the data in your cell range as the potential input values. If you want, you can set a cell to allow invalid data.

For more information:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/08/in-cell-dropdown-and-validation-in.html

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Google Realtime Search Has a Homepage

Google Realtime Search was only a section of Google's search sidebar that allows you to restrict the results to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and other sites where you can post public updates. Now it's a full-fledged service that has a homepage, a logo and a name.



Even if Google Realtime's homepage is at google.com/realtime, you'll miss two important new features if you don't go to this special URL: filtering results by location and showing the context of a message using a conversation view.

Restrict search results to a location to find out what people from a certain place think about a topic. "You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you're traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are," suggests Google.


If one of the search results is part of a conversation, Google shows a link to the full conversation. "Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new full conversation feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance."


Google also added a new feature to Google Alerts: updates, which is another name for realtime results. It's not a good idea to choose the "as-it-happens" option because you'll receive a lot of email alerts.

Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools

When we first introduced our real-time search features last December, we focused on bringing relevance to the freshest information on the web. Our goal was to provide real-time content from a comprehensive set of sources, integrated right into your usual search results. Today we’re making our most significant enhancements to date, giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools to help you find what you need. Now you can access Google Realtime Search at its own address, www.google.com/realtime (the page is rolling out now and should be available soon. Use this link if you want to try out the new features right away).

On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are.

In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed.

Finally, we’ve also added updates content to Google Alerts, making it easy to stay informed about a topic of your choosing. Now you can create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment your topic appears on Twitter or other short-form services. Or, if you want to manage your email volume, you can set alerts to email you once per day or week.

Check out our demo video of the new features and quick tips on how to use them:



You can access Realtime Search by typing www.google.com/realtime directly into your browser, or clicking the “Updates” link in the left-hand panel of your search results. Set up your Google Alerts at www.google.com/alerts. Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. The features are rolling out now, but you can use this link to see them right away.

Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager

Easily see all formulas at once in Google Spreadsheets

We’ve now introduced the ability to reveal all formulas with one click

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team, Partner Edition and Google Apps for Government

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
When editing a spreadsheet you can enable this view in three ways: Select the ‘Show All Formulas’ button on the top right; Select ‘Show All Formulas’ in the View menu; Click Ctrl ‘ (Cmd ‘ on a Mac.)

For more information:
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=15115

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Sixth annual Summer of Code flexes some serious geek girl muscle

Our sixth annual Google Summer of Code program has wrapped up and we want to highlight some of this year’s amazing participants and projects. Summer of Code offers students developers all over the world the chance to get paid to write code for open source projects as an alternative to a summer job.

Kicked off in 2005, the Summer of Code has brought together more than 3,400 students with more than 200 open source projects from all over the world to create millions of lines of code. We work with several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects through three months of coding.

There was some really awesome work done by more than 1,000 students from 69 countries in this year’s Summer of Code. Of those students, 6.5 percent were women representing 23 countries—six times higher than the estimated proportion of women in the open source community. Here are just a few of the women:

25 reference manuals in her purse
Ann Marie Horcher, an information systems security Ph.D. candidate at Nova Southeastern University was mentored by Docbook.org. Ann Marie worked over the summer to create an application that transformed a docbook file to epub format used in ebook readers such as the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes and Noble Nook and the iPad. As a result of Ann Marie’s project, it’s now easier to move technical documentation to a portable format so she “can carry my 25 reference manuals for my project with me in my purse.” And now, so can everyone else.

Check out Ann Marie’s YouTube video illustrating her work and its results here.

Geophylogenies now displayed on Google Earth
Kathryn Iverson, a University of Michigan bioinformatics graduate student was mentored by National Evolutionary Biology Synthesis Center and wrote a library implemented in Java with KML to build geophylogenies—geographical evolutionary histories of organisms. She told us: "Since I was starting from scratch it was up to me to decide in what direction I should move the project and make decisions about everything from what input filetypes to support to the color and size of the geophylogenies when they are displayed in Google Earth."


When asked about her key takeaways, she said, "Working remotely required me to be clear and verbose about what I needed because with the time difference (my mentor was on the other side of the globe), I may not get a response until the next day, which can slow down work tremendously if you're not clear in asking your questions."

Bridesmaid brings word tag clouds to biological networks
Layla Oesper, a Brown University computer science Ph.D. candidate mentored by Cytoscape, was attracted to Summer of Code because she was looking for a summer job that would give her the flexibility to work and still participate in two weddings. Layla built a plugin for Cytoscape that would allow people to create word tag clouds from biological networks they’d already created in Cytoscape, giving users a visual semantic summary of a biological network. The final product has all sorts of configurable features, including the ability to cluster together words that appear near each other in the original network in the order in which the words appear.

Check out what Layla learned during her Summer of Code experience on YouTube.

Drupal gets more content management friendly
Emily Brand, a computer science graduate student from Loyola University Chicago, was mentored by Drupal.org, an open source content management platform. During her summer, she worked on QueryPath—an essential part of the Drupal and PHP communities. Her goal was to keep and increase Drupal’s popularity by making it a go-to content management system for websites focused on web services using PHP.

Emily says she learned “how to effectively work on an open source project while keeping and improving the users and developers requirements as well as how to effectively integrate web services in Drupal.”


You can find out more about this year’s program and projects on the Open Source Blog, and if you’re in college looking to write some open source code, we hope we’ll see you next summer.

Posted by Carol Smith, Open Source Programs Manager

Make Free Phone Calls from Gmail

Gmail added a long-awaited feature: making phone calls. If you install the voice and video chat plug-in, you can call phones in the US and Canada for free. You can also call in other countries, but you'll have to pay. Fortunately, Google's rates are really low and the service is cheaper than Skype.

"Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan — and many more countries — for as little as $0.02 per minute," informs Google.



If you have a Google Voice phone number (anyone in the US can get one), you can also receive phone calls in Gmail. Now that Google Voice integrates with Gmail, a lot more people will use it.

To try the new feature, make sure that your Gmail interface language is set to English (US) and that the voice and video chat plug-in is installed. You get an initial calling credit ($0.10), but unfortunately you can only add credit if you're in the US.

Call phones from Gmail

(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.



Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.


We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant, to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.

If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).

We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re not a U.S. based user—or if you’re using Google Apps for your school or business—then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly—so stay tuned!

For more information, visit gmail.com/call.

Update Aug 26: This has now been rolled out to everyone in the U.S. If you don't see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.

Posted by Robin Schriebman, Software Engineer

Android Market and Piracy

Google has recently released a licensing service for Android applications that is supposed to make it more difficult to pirate paid apps. The service is not yet part of the operating system and it works by sending a query to Google's servers in order to determine if the user has bought an application.

Android Police found that it's quite easy to circumvent Google's verification, especially if the application's code is not obfuscated. "Because the License Verification Library is not part of the Android OS, an app developer needs to package it with the app that uses it, making it an easier patch target, without requiring root access. (...) The method is so simple, even a novice programmer could write a script to automatically patch most apps."

Google's Tim Bray responded by saying that "the first release shipped with the simplest, most transparent imaginable sample implementation," which didn't focus on security. He recommends developers to obfuscate the code and to use other implementations. Tim Bray also says that "the best attack on pirates is to make their work more difficult and expensive, while simultaneously making the legal path to products straightforward, easy, and fast. Piracy is a bad business to be in when the user has a choice between easily purchasing the app and visiting an untrustworthy, black-market site."

Tim Bray's answer is ironic, if you think about it. Google's Android Market lets you install paid applications only if you are in one of the 13 supported countries. The "legal path" is neither "straightforward, easy, or fast" if you don't live in one of the 13 countries that are supported. Maybe instead of focusing on developing anti-piracy services, Google should add more locations to the paid Android Market.

Chrome Extensions Can Add New Items to the Context Menu

Chromium's blog announced that extension developers can add custom actions to the context menu, now that this feature is available in Google Chrome 6 Beta.

"The new context menu API allows extension developers to register menu items for all pages or for a subset of pages. Developers can also register menu items for specific operations, like right-clicking on an image or movie. For example, you could create an extension that makes it easy for users to share interesting images from images.google.com with their friends on Google Buzz."

Here are 3 extensions that use the new APIs:

* QR Code Generator, which generates a QR code from a web address (right-click on a link, select "Generate QR code" and use Barcode Scanner for Android or another application to scan the code).


* Imgur Uploader, which uploads images to Imgur.

* TweetRight, an extension that lets you share images, links, webpages and selected text on Twitter.

You can try these extensions if you use Chrome 6 Beta, Chrome 6 Dev Channel, a Canary build or a recent Chromium build.

Chrome 6 supports two other APIs for managing the browser's cookies and detecting when the computer's idle state changes, but there other interesting changes.

{ Thanks, Arpit. }

Google Finance smartens up for your smartphone

(Cross-posted from the Google Finance blog)

Here on the Google Finance team, we’re always looking for new ways to help you access the finance data, charts, and reports that you need in the blink of an eye. But all the data in the world won’t help if you can’t access it when you need it most. Since many of us are on the run throughout the day and don’t always have our computers in front of us, it came as no surprise that one of users’ most frequently requested features was a fast, easy-to-use mobile website for Google Finance.

We heard your feedback and are please to announce we’ve launched the new Android/iPhone edition of Google Finance for mobile! The markets don’t stop when you leave your desk, so we’re bringing the markets to you. Our new design gives you a unified experience across desktop and Android or iPhone phones, offering nearly all the same features and functionality on both. You can easily access the new site when you do a Google search for stock tickers or company names on your mobile device, or when you tap the "Finance" tab on the Google mobile homepage.

Now no matter where you are, you can keep up with your portfolio, the latest market news, and the sectors you care about, with real time quotes and data -- all at a glance.

Prefer it in app form? Android users can also get the Google Finance app in Android Market.

As always, if you have feedback on this or other topics, please share it on our Google Finance survey or visit our Product Ideas site where you can share and vote on ideas.

For more tips and tricks on Google Finance, follow us on Twitter.

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Orkut Lets You Communicate with Groups of Friends

Orkut, Google's social network that has a lot of users in Brazil and India, has received a major update. Groups of friends are more visible and you can send messages to the members of a group directly from Orkut's homepage. Orkut also updated search results pages and application pages, while testing a new platform for communities.


There are a lot of changes and it will be interesting to see if Google tests these features in Orkut before launching Google Me, a social network that will compete with Facebook.

One of the major changes in Orkut is the focus on groups. "You love your grandma and you're friends with your boss, but that doesn't mean you want them both seeing the conversation you're having with your friends the day after a party. With orkut, you can now build separate groups of your friends reflecting how you interact with them in real life." This is one of the ideas from "The Real Life Social Network", a presentation by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher at Google.



Google's Rahul Kulkarni mentioned last year that Orkut will change a lot. "The new Orkut adopts the latest Google Web Toolkit platform and includes features such as built-in simultaneous chat, photo tagging with automatic face detection and private sharing of photo albums including new safety features. This is the beginning of a new direction for Orkut, where users will be able to increasingly share and communicate with groups of friends from their lives."

Google Scholarship program kicks off in China

About a week ago, we hosted more than 130 Google Scholarship recipients in our Beijing office. These outstanding undergraduates and graduate students in computer science and software engineering from more than 20 universities across China were the recipients of the Google Excellence Scholarship and the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship—our first scholarships in China. The students participated in an awards ceremony and toured the Google office.

The Google Excellence Scholarship aims to award the outstanding undergraduates and master degree students from the computer science and software engineering disciplines. It has been set up at 20 top universities in China, with five awardees for each university—three undergraduates and two graduates.

The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship supports outstanding female students in computer science, including undergraduates, master's degree students and Ph.D. students, at five top universities. There are six awardees for each university (three undergrads and three graduate students), as well as three awardees from Taiwan.

Google has been collaborating with Chinese universities for a long time through a variety of programs—ranging from curriculum development, donations, to today’s scholarship program—to support the education of talented students in China. And we'll extend into other university collaboration programs in the future.

Congratulations to all the Google Scholarship recipients! And if you read Chinese, check out our corresponding post on the Google China Blog.

Google Scholarship Universities for 2010:
Beihang University, Beijing Normal University, Fudan University*, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nankai University, Peking University*, Renmin University of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University*, Shandong University, South China University of Technology, Southeastern University, Sun Yat-sen University*, Tianjin University, Tongji University, Tsinghua University*, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, University of Science and Technology of China, Xi’an Jiao Tong University, Wuhan University

*Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship Program universities

Posted by Kathy Deng, Google University Relations

What do you think about human rights (and your rights) online?

Government police shutting down farmer’s protests in China. A tobacco company employing under-age workers in Kazakhstan. Iranian merchants striking to protest tax increases in Tehran. We've seen stories like these on our computers and phones every day, and YouTube has been documenting many of them on our breaking news feed on Citizentube over the past few months. Videos like these are more than just breaking news images; they're often political statements meant to bring about change.

Earlier this summer YouTube started a blog series with WITNESS, a human rights video advocacy and training organization, examining the role of online video in human rights. So far we’ve talked about why video matters to human rights and how you can protect yourself and the people you film when uploading to YouTube.

Now we want to raise some key topics about the future of human rights video online, and to hear your thoughts and ideas in a special Moderator series that we've set up. Read more about this project on the YouTube blog.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, YouTube, and Sameer Padania for WITNESS

Hide Gmail's Links to Contacts and Tasks

Gmail tweaked the interface two weeks ago and many users complained about the links to the contacts manager and to Google Tasks, which are now displayed at the top of the page, above the Compose button. If you rarely use the contact manager and you don't need a task management app inside Gmail, the two links can become annoying.

Google added a small button that lets you collapse the group of links, but the setting wasn't preserved when you reloaded the page because of a bug. Now you can permanently hide the links to "contacts" and "tasks".


If you ignore the blue bar at the top of the page and you don't click on "Mail", you'll no longer see the two links. Gmail could add an option to move the horizontal navigation bar below the list of labels, even as a Gmail Labs experimental feature. I partially solved this problem by enabling "Quick Links" in Gmail Labs and adding links to the contact manager and to a mail view (is:unread).


Another option is to use this userscript that moves the links below the labels. The script should work in Firefox (Greasemonkey is required), Chrome and Opera.


Apparently, Gmail's links bar is quite important and it's likely that Gmail will add links to other services. A Google employee detailed its purpose:

"Gmail is home to a few different apps, including Mail, Contacts, and Tasks. The links on the left below the app navigation change depending which app you're using, while the app navigation links remain consistent so that you can go between apps. If you're in the Contacts app, the big action button becomes the way to add a new contact. We use this button as the way to create things in other products like Google Docs and Google Calendar, too."

New Google Calendar Favicon

You might have noticed that Google Calendar has a new favicon that replaces a monthly calendar with a daily calendar.


Google Calendar is not the only Google services that has recently updated the favicon: Google Sites and Google Translate have new shortcut icons and it's likely that many other Google sites will use the colorful images from this page.


{ Thanks, James, Bastian, Matt, Lasse, Gamer and Neil. }

Dive into the ocean with Google Earth for Android

(Cross-posted from Google LatLong)

Especially during the summer months, staring out into the ocean leads to daydreams of sailing the open water, freedom and exploration. Now you can take three-quarters of this vast planet - the ocean - with you on your mobile device by downloading the new Google Earth 1.1 for Android.

With the release of this feature, escape the hustle and bustle of life on land and discover the marine world using Google Earth on your mobile device. Now, you can check out the landscape and terrain in Monterery Bay Canyon, which is larger than the Grand Canyon, by zooming in on Google Earth below the ocean surface just off the coast. Once underwater, we can use the “look around” button to tilt the view and see the extent of this great undersea canyon.

The latest version of Google Earth for Android also introduces the “Explore the Ocean” layer, which features hundreds of photos and videos from more than 100 contributors who are excited to share their stories of sea. Plan your next vacation during your daily commute by clicking on any of the little blue icons. The gold highlighted icons represent content from the Mission Blue Hope Spot initiative.

For those of you running Android 2.2, there are some more treats in store. Google Earth now supports Flash in balloons, so if you have the Flash player installed on your mobile device, you can watch videos right in the balloon. We’ve also made the program easier to navigate; for most devices, you can now use two fingers to “look around” and change your viewpoint, as an alternate to using the on-screen button. This makes it even easier to tilt your view to see mountainous landscapes or underwater canyons. Rotating your view with a simple twist of your fingers is now available on more devices as well.

Google Earth for Android 1.1 is available in Android Market today for most Android devices running version 2.1 or later. Explore the ocean anywhere.

Posted by Jenifer Austin Foulkes, Product Manager