Googlity.com

Google.com main page customizing

From the Official Google Blog:

From iGoogle’s debut in 2005 to our more recent launch of stars in search in March, we’ve enjoyed making your search experience more relevant, useful and fun through personalization. Today, we’re introducing a new feature that brings a whole new level of personalization to Google by letting you add a favorite photo or image to the background of the Google homepage. You can choose a photo from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos.

An example homepage featuring artwork by Jeff Koons, photographed by Sandy Volz

A second example page, featuring artwork by Tom Otterness, photographed by Cesar Perez

Whether you choose a photo of a loved one, a picture of your favorite vacation destination or even a design you created yourself, Google.com is now yours to customize. For those of you who want to enjoy the clean, simple look of Google as well as your personalized view, we’ve made it easy to switch between your customized search page and classic Google.

We are beginning to roll out this new feature to users in the U.S. over the next few days, so if you don’t see a link in the lower left-hand corner of Google.com now, check back soon. For those of you outside of the U.S., you can expect to see this new feature in the coming days as we roll it out internationally to offer similar, consistent experiences globally.

And if you’ve customized your look with a fun personal photo we’d love to see what your new homepage looks like. Tweet a picture of your page with the hashtag #myGooglepage and share it with us!

We hope you enjoy this fun new feature and that it makes Google search more your own.

Google Introduces Google Reader Play: The Highly Customizable Application

Google, the most popular web – based engine has initiated a web browsing tool called Google Reader Play. It facilitates the reader to browse the content linked with Google Reader News Feed. Google’s management has explained the function of Google Reader Play as a visual way to surf the internet. It is only available in Beta version, for now.

Google Reader works by assembling a slideshow of popular videos, photos and blog posts based on Google’s reader recommended items feature. According to Garrett Wu, software engineer at the firm said, “Google Reader Play is designed to make Reader more accessible and easier to use and try”.

According to Wu, a user does not does not have to establish a catalog of feeds to follow. Google reader play does not follow your list of feeds but rather it learns from your browsing history. The reader play uses the information entered by the user as likeable content and displays the useful content similar to what has been mentioned. It allows the user to choose the preferred categories and the application will itself showcase the material from those categories.

In addition, he commented that Google Reader Play has not been launched to replace Google Reader but it is an extension to it. Both the application serves the same purpose. Google Reader Play gives you the freedom to organize your feeds and get the related stuff presented to you aptly.

Try the google reader play here.

Google Maps Adds Directions for Cyclists

Cycling enthusiasts tend to be a passionate bunch. So it is not surprising that there are lots of questions about biking information on Google Maps forums. One group, called googlemapsbikethere.org, has collected more than 51,000 signatures asking Google to add biking directions to its maps.

On Wednesday, the company is answering the call, offering biking routes in 150 American cities in Google Maps. Google plans to unveil the service during the National Bike Summit in Washington. The event will be followed by a group ride at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex.

Bicycling advocates are, not surprisingly, enthused.

“We think this is fantastic,” said D.L. Byron, publisher of BikeHugger.com, a blog about bike culture based in Seattle. “It will open up reliable transportation options to cyclists.” Mr. Byron said that while plenty of programs allow cyclists to upload their routes to the Web, no other service provides optimal directions for cyclists in urban settings, at least not on a national scale.

Mr. Byron predicted that the Google service would help to promote cycling as an alternative mode of transportation. “A lot of people would love to get on their bike but are afraid they won’t find a safe route,” he said. “If you make these options more available to people, they will do it.”

Much like the driving and walking directions on Google Maps, the service selects a route and calculates estimated cycling times after a user provides start and end points. The routing algorithm attempts to select optimal directions that avoid freeways and busy roads and intersections, and take into account bike paths, bike lanes and bike-friendly streets. They will seek to route around hills, whenever practical. Google Maps will also offer a “view” geared for cyclists that will display bike-friendly routes. A mobile version is likely to follow soon, said Shannon Guymon, a product manager for Google Maps Directions.

“We feel pretty good about our routing model,” Ms. Guymon said. But Google expects to use input from users to help improve suggested routes over time, she said.

Google has teamed up with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit that creates networks of trails from former rail lines, to obtain information on bike trails in more than 150 cities.

As for cycling times, Ms. Guymon said the estimates are “conservative.” “If you are in good shape, you are going to beat these times,” she said.

In San Francisco, the route from Dolores Park to the Golden Gate Bridge, through the Golden Gate Park Panhandle and along Masonic Avenue, suggests about 40 minutes. Any riders who can do better?

by gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com

Google Adds ‘Nearby’ Search Option

Amid growing concern about the privacy implications of location-based services, Google on Friday introduced a way to filter search results based on the user’s location.

Starting today, we’ve added the ability to refine your searches with the ‘Nearby’ tool in the Search Options panel,” explained Google product manager Jackie Bavaro in a blog post. “One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding ‘Minneapolis’ to your query and missing Web pages that only say ‘St. Paul’ or ‘Twin Cities.’

Google’s addition of a location awareness option in searches from desktop computers follows the company’s introduction of a similar service for mobile devices in January.
Google users can try location-aware searches by entering a search query, clicking on the “Show options” disclosure button just below the search box, and selecting “Nearby.”

Users can supply their own location or a different one.

On Wednesday, the Center for Democracy and Technology’s general counsel John Morris testified at a Congressional hearing on “The Collection and Use of Location Information for Commercial Purposes” about the need to extend privacy protections to location data and related services.

Acknowledging that location-based services have real benefits, like saving money for individuals, companies, and organizations — Washington D.C. for example, saved about $3 million in a year by using a customized version of Google Earth to track fire trucks and related assets — Morris also expressed concern that the easy availability of location data could easily lead to abuse.

Location-based data, said Morris, “can reveal visits to potentially sensitive destinations, like medical clinics, courts, political rallies, and union meetings. The ubiquity of location information has also increased the risks of stalking and domestic violence as perpetrators are able to use (or abuse) location-based services to gain access to location information about their victims.”

The CDT argues that location-based services should be exclusively opt-in and that standards for law enforcement use of location data should be clarified.

Italian court convicts Google execs over video

In a case that could have broad implications for Internet use around the world, an Italian court convicted three Google Inc. executives Wednesday of criminal charges for failing to quickly remove an uploaded video.

Legal experts agreed the case raises troubling questions for all U.S. Internet companies that do business globally.

“It absolutely is a threat,” said Danny O’Brien, international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco.

“If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your Web site can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to prescreen everything anyone says on their Web site before putting it online, the tools for free speech that everyone uses on the Net would grind to a halt.”

Judge Oscar Magi found three of Google’s executives – global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, chief legal officer David Drummond and retired Chief Financial Officer George Reyes – guilty of violating Italian privacy laws.

In absentia, the executives were handed six-month suspended sentences, although the judge also cleared them, along with a fourth executive, of defamation charges.

The case revolves around a video uploaded to Google Video in 2006 showing an autistic boy in Turin being pummeled and insulted by teenage bullies at school. The video was uploaded before Google bought the more popular YouTube.

The video drew 5,500 views in the two months before Google Italy pulled it down two hours after being notified by police. The boy’s father and an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome complained the video violated privacy protection laws.

Prosecutor Alfredo Robledo told the Associated Press the verdict upheld privacy principles and put the rights of individuals ahead of those of businesses. He said the case will force Google and other firms to be held accountable for screening videos hosted on their sites.

“This is the big principal affirmed by this verdict,” Robledo said. “It is fundamental, because identity is a primary good. If we give that up, anything can happen, and that is not OK.”

Internet principles

In a company blog post, Google vice president and deputy general counsel Matt Sucherman called the ruling “astonishing” because “none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video.”

The verdict “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built,” he wrote.

The benefits of the Web could disappear if “sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board are held responsible for every single piece of content that is uploaded to them,” he said.

Support for Google

A host of U.S. technology associations jumped to Google’s defense.

“Most troubling, what happens in Italy is unlikely to stay in Italy,” said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “The Italian court’s actions today will surely embolden authoritarian regimes and be used to justify their own efforts to suppress Internet freedom.”

Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer and Communications Industry, said he believes the ruling will be found inconsistent with European Union laws governing Internet content.

But, he added, “this is an example of a bird in the tunnel telling us how easily it could get way out of control. This is not the only instance of countries or governments lashing out rather clumsily with blunt instruments about things they don’t like on the Internet.”

Local distinctions

Indeed, firms large enough to have an Internet presence in other countries have faced numerous skirmishes over local distinctions of laws such as copyright and intellectual property. Recently, Google has become embroiled in a dispute with China, saying it will stop censoring search results in that country after attacks on the Gmail accounts of human rights advocates there.

For those firms, there are no easy answers, said James Burger, an intellectual property attorney with the Washington, D.C., law firm Dow Lohnes.

“I could see Italy arguing we should adopt their law in this instance,” Burger said. “There is a larger problem, which is: How do we deal with U.S. companies being slammed abroad for acts that are legal in the United States?”

Pressure on Italy

Jason Schultz, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, said it’s unclear whether Italian officials will try to apply the ruling more broadly.

“There will be a lot of pressure on the Italian government to rethink this shortsighted approach once the Italian citizenry realizes how limiting it will be to only have access to government-approved media,” Schultz said.

HTC unveils the Legend

The HTC Legend, which runs the latest Android software called Eclair, is made from a single block of aluminium and has a very bright and clear 3.2 inch AMOLED (ultra-bright LED) display. Vodafone has grabbed the handset in Europe, wary of losing out after missing the iPhone in some of the company’s key European markets.

The Legend will come to the UK in April and already analysts are predicting that it will be a design classic following its launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Legend’s clever use of milled aluminium casing could scoop Apple’s direction for the next iPhone design,” said CCS Insight.

Despite its body being engineered from a single piece of aluminium, the HTC Legend has a removable battery – something which the iPhone conspicuously lacks – which slides out from a compartment at the bottom of the phone. The back of the battery casing also contains the phone’s antenna so that its metal body does not hinder signal strength.

HTC has updated the user face – called HTC Sense – that sits atop Android on the device. Alongside refinements to the phone’s address book, so that contacts can be organised into groups such as business contacts and friends, it pulls information from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter into a single Friend Stream of updates.

The Android platform has been the making of HTC. It created the first phone, the G1, using the software, while the Legend is the new version of another successful Android phone, the Hero. The Legend, however, has a rather less intrusive “chin” at the bottom of the device than the Hero.

Alongside it, HTC also unveiled the HTC Desire, which also uses HTC Sense. It had previously been codenamed the HTC Bravo and several UK operators have been vying to get hold of it as it is essentially the same as Google’s own Nexus One device, which HTC also produced. However, it has an optical trackpad rather than a roller ball, and is understood to be cheaper than the Google device.

HTC Unleashes Desire

HTC, maker of Google ’s Nexus One , unveiled a new handset dubbed the Desire — which looks a lot like the Nexus One.

The device, shown Tuesday at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, is, like the Nexus One, an Android smart phone with 3G connectivity. It lacks a trackball, instead using an optical trackpad — a tweak that could make the new phone less tactile when users try to navigate through its menus.

HTC’s Desire is also different in that it will has a “sense ” display, a custom Android user interface sporting a new “leap” function that allows users to view different home screens at the same time by one pinch. The new phone has also a new “friend stream” feature which keeps social-networking updates in one list.

The Desire joins other HTC Android phones, including the myTouch 3G, sold by T-Mobile USA, and the Droid Eris, sold by Verizon Wireless.

In terms of specs, the Desire, like the Nexus One, includes a 3.7-inch multi-touch screen, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and the Android 2.1 operating system . It comes with 512 megabyte ROM and 576 megabyte RAM (the Nexus One has 512 megabyte RAM).

The Desire won’t be available in the U.S. anytime soon. It will, however, be launched through T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, in Europe and Asia in the second quarter.

Gizmodo already made a bold statement about the new phone , calling it “a real iPhone contender in 2010, no matter what Steve Jobs brings out later this year.”

Along with the Desire, HTC launched two other devices — HTC Legend and HTC HD Mini.

Gmail Goes Social With Google Buzz

Google introduced a social networking tool called Google Buzz Tuesday that allows sharing of status updates, images, and videos via a new Gmail tab called Google Buzz. The Google Buzz features will also be available on Android based phones as well as the iPhone (via a Web-based application) allowing for real-time updates to your Google Buzz feed that can show up on a new version of Google’s mobile maps.

Google says the new Google Buzz tab will begin showing up on about 1 percent of Gmail user accounts starting today. Google says the rest of Gmail users will be able to see a new Google Buzz tab in their accounts within a week.

Five Core Features
Google hopes that instead of conversing on Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, you’ll instead turn to Google Buzz for sharing status updates, photos, and videos. How will the search giant convince you to make Google Buzz your social network of choice? Here are four key features revealed today.

1. Blends With Gmail
The main way of accessing Google Buzz will be through Gmail. Below your inbox, there will be a tab for Buzz, allowing you to read status updates, photos, and video. The 40 people you converse with the most in Gmail and Gchat are automatically added as friends. Buzz updates also appear in your inbox if someone comments on your updates or comments, or someone directs a Buzz to your attention by using the familiar “@” symbol.

2. “Page Rank” for Status Updates
Google brought up that familiar criticism of social networks, that no one cares if you ate a bagel or stubbed your toe. To compensate for noise, Google Buzz lets you like and dislike status updates, and learn over time whether to show or collapse status updates from your friends. It also looks for conversations outside your direct group of followers and adds them to your feed as recommendations.

3. Media Gets Pulled In
Photos from Flickr and Picasa and video from YouTube appear as thumbnails in Google Buzz. Click a YouTube thumbnail, and the video will expand to play inline. Click on a photo, and it’ll expand to fill most of the browser window, with the rest of the gallery in a narrow strip along the bottom of the screen.

If you post a link in Buzz, you’ll automatically be able to append images and the headline from that Web page. Finally, you can pull in tweets from Twitter (but no Facebook updates) into Buzz. Unfortunately, you can’t send your Buzz updates out to Twitter or other social networks.

4. Mobile Features
Google Buzz will be available as a mobile Web app, letting you dictate status updates by voice and geotag your posts. When looking on Google Mobile Maps, Buzz updates appear directly on the map, so you can read location-based updates. You can also look for any recent Buzz updates posted near your current location.

5. Private and Public
With each update you send, you’ll have a choice of making it private or public. Private updates can go to all of your Buzz followers, or just a select group. Public updates are posted on your Google Profile page and are immediately indexed for Google Search.

Google will phase out support for IE 6

Google will phase out support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 Web browser starting in March, the company said Friday.

“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote in a blog post Friday.

The announcement comes more than two weeks after Google reported that its servers had been the target of attacks originating in China. Those attacks targeted a vulnerability in IE 6, for which Microsoft has since issued a fix.

Support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites will end March 1, Sheth said in the post. At that point, IE6 users who try to access Docs or Sites may find that “key functionality” won’t work properly, he said.

Sheth suggested that customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 or Safari 3.0, or more recent versions of those browsers.

According to StatCounter, IE6 has 18 percent market share among browsers.

Google upgrading to Ext4, hires former Linux Foundation CTO

Well-known Linux kernel developer Ted Ts’o announced this week that he has joined Google, leaving behind his previous role as CTO of the Linux Foundation. Ts’o, an expert on filesystem development, played a central role in creating Ext4, the latest generation of the dominant Linux filesystem.

In a statement on his blog, Ts’o expressed enthusiasm for his new job and pointed to a recent mailing list post by a Google engineer which reveals that the search giant is in the process of upgrading its storage infrastructure from Ext2 to Ext4. Ts’o says that he will continue working on Ext4 and other parts of the Linux kernel while he is at Google.

His departure from the Linux Foundation is not sudden or unexpected—the organization has an informal policy of rotating people through the CTO position at regular intervals. When Ts’o took the job in 2008, he came from IBM and it was understood that he would serve a two-year term with the foundation. With his term completed, he has decided to join Google instead of going back to Big Blue.

Ext4 faced some criticism during its development following the discovery of possible data loss issues relating to the filesystem’s implementation of delayed allocation. Ts’o created patches that have addressed those issues, minimizing the potential risk. Google’s decision to deploy Ext4 is a strong endorsement of the filesystem’s reliability and affirms its suitability for enterprise adoption.

In a mailing list post, Google engineer Michael Rubin provided more insight into the decision-making process that led the company to adopt Ext4. The filesystem offered significant performance advantages over Ext2 and nearly rivaled the high-performance XFS filesystem during the company’s tests. Ext4 was ultimately chosen over XFS because it would allow Google to do a live in-place upgrade of its existing Ext2 filesystems.

“The driving performance reason to upgrade is that while ext2 had been ‘good enough’ for a very long time the metadata arrangement on a stale file system was leading to what we call ‘read inflation’. This is where we end up doing many seeks to read one block of data. In general latency from poor block allocation was causing performance hiccups,” he wrote. “For our workloads we saw ext4 and xfs as ‘close enough’ in performance in the areas we cared about. The fact that we had a much smoother upgrade path with ext4 clinched the deal.”

The Linux Foundation has not yet announced who will be the organization’s next CTO. It would be fitting for the foundation to use its newly-announced Linux Jobs board to find a worthy candidate, but it’s more likely that the organization will pick someone from their growing roster of member companies.