Get your FREE Gmail stickers until February 14th! That’s right, you’ll get no love after Valentine’s Day if your request for stickers is not sent to Google on or before Valentine’s Day.
If you want to learn how to get your stickers, check out Google’s Official Gmail Blog or send a self-addressed stamped envelope (along with a note or stickers for trade) to:
Send me some Gmail stickers already
PO Bo 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420
The Interwebs can be a funny place. Take for example, the rumored Google GDrive which would essentially be your own hard drive in the sky, umm… cloud. You could store all of your data on Google’s servers and have it accessible anywhere as long as you had a browser (presumably).
So what’s funny about that? Nothing. Sounds amazing really. No, the funny part is that Google hasn’t announced it. It’s just a rumor. However, a blogger called Brian Ussery noticed a comment in some Google code that he downloaded that mentioned it.
Funnier still is that Wikipedia already has an entry for ye ole GDrive. Nice. The Internet – even ahead of itself.
Once again the Geeks must keep an eye on the happenings at MacWorld while at CES as Google announced a Mac version of Picasa.
Previously Google offered only a Windows version of Picasa and placated Mac users with a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin. Picasa and Mac lovers can now rejoice as the Mac release finally provides the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the Mac OS X users and the release provides the “it-slices-and-dices” feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages.
Picasa for the Mac works like other platforms by offering some great trademark features including non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them. This last feature finally tackles an issue I have had with iPhoto!
To run Picasa, you’ll need an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and above.
In a cool use of search data, Google’s philanthropic arm is tracking queries on illness and correlating it with geolocation data to trend flu activity in the US. The idea here is to try to predict flu trends faster than the CDC normally does based on their methodology. Google in turn works with the CDC to make this data available and useful.
You can find out how this all works by visiting Google’s Flu Trends site.
BTW, you can even download the raw data and toy with it yourself if you’d like.
If Hulu isn’t filling your old TV-content needs, then YouTube may be your savior. So far, they’ve only got a few shows on tap, but they’re (were) pretty popular – Star Trek (the original series), Beverly Hills 90210 and MacGyver.
This is part of Google’s attempt to better monetize YouTube with some new video ad formats.
Interestingly enough, they’ve disabled embedding, so we can’t even place the video on our site.
Oh yeah, you read that right. Let’s say you go out one night, and have a really good time, and then decided to come home and oh send some e-mails. I’ll bet you regretted those e-mails the next day. Wouldn’t it be cool if your e-mail client could stop your drunken e-mailing? Well, a Google employee named Jon came up with a little feature that you can find in the Gmail Labs section of Gmail called aptly enough, Mail Goggles. Love it.
It works simply enough – enable it, specify a time window, and then do some simple math problems before Gmail will let you send that e-mail. To enable, just head into your Gmail account and click on the little green beaker icon at the top of the page, and scroll down to Mail Googles.
The Google G1 phone is now available for pre-order on the T-Mobile network for $179.99. You may be able to get your hands on one as early as Oct 22.
So what can you expect in the HTC handset running Android, the Google-sponsored mobile OS? For starters, a touch screen, a slide-out screen that reveals a full QWERTY keyboard, a screen that displays in both landscape and portrait modes, a 3 Megapixel camera, 3G network and Wi-Fi access.
The G1 will come with a number of apps built-in, yes, all centered around Google applications, such as Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk. It will also thankfully have an IM application that is multi-platform.
Google has also already announced the Android Market which is analogous to the iPhone Store, where you can download and/or buy apps for your Android-based phone.
It remains to be seen how successful Google will be with their handsets in terms of open sourcing the whole Android platform. My suspicion is yes they will, and I won’t be surprised if Apple ends up doing something similar with the iPhone OS within a year. After all, if both Google and Nokia/Symbian are running open source systems and have significant market share because of it, well… you can figure out the rest.
Google sure knows how to light up the news sites and blogosphere – release a brand new Web browser! Called Chrome, it’s Google’s foray into a once-crowded market that is now dominated by just 2 players (at least on Windows) – Microsoft and Mozilla.
Everyone else has reported on and given their opinion, so why not another?! I did download and test out Chrome. I would have been disappointed if I was not impressed by at least one feature of a brand new Google product and the big G did not let me down.
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Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is a brand new search engine that claims to have indexed over 121 billion Web pages, and also claims that that’s 3 times as much as any other search engine including Google. Interestingly, just a few days ago, Google laid claim to crawling (although not necessarily indexing) 1 trillion Web pages.
So will Cuil succeed in beating Google at their own game? Well, for starters their executive/technical staff are a bunch of Google expats, so it’s quite possible, but on the other hand, Google has quite an impressive foothold now in the search arena, including mindshare with the public. After all, “google” is now a commonly-used verb. I can’t recall other search engines ever having that claim to fame, even within the geek community. Read on for a mini review.
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Google recently hit a milestone in the quantity of web pages that they process – 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000)! And that # is growing daily by the billions. One trillion isn’t the total # that they index b/c there’s a lot of duplicate content, but still… try to turn that number over in your head. And even more impressive is that they update the linkages several times per day.
