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A friend connected web
Have you ever wished you could share information and interact with friends while visiting some of your favorite websites? There are a number of great social networking sites out there that let you stay connected, but the rest of the web typically hasn't been social. Yet.
Site owners have been saying for a while that they would love to provide this functionality, but, frankly, it's been too hard to add social features. A lot of code has to be written to create a site where visitors can sign up and bring their friends along, form new friendships, and do engaging things together. And not to mention that if you're a site visitor, it's pretty inconvenient to create a new account and try to rebuild a network of friends each time you visit a site.
Enter Google Friend Connect. This new service, announced as a preview release tonight at Campfire One, lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You'll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And quite simply, you'll be able to do things together.
Having faces show up at a site is not enough. Friend Connect lets site owners include OpenSocial apps made by a world of developers. We're providing a few apps, such as posts and ratings, to get the ball rolling. And many more will be provided by the OpenSocial community.With this functionality, there's no end to the possibilities. A small site dedicated to mountain biking in Moab, for example, would be able to have members who could exchange maps, tips, and pictures of their latest rides. A stroke victims support site could help grieving family members assist one another by sharing advice. A politician's site could enable supporters to advocate their viewpoints. A musician's site could give fans the chance to interact full tilt with the band and one another.
Take a look at a few white-listed sites using Google Friend Connect: Ingrid Michaelson's official website, which includes the iLike music application, and Bible Apps, owned by an OpenSocial developer fully dedicated to his "Verses" application -- where people can post prayers and test their knowledge of the Bible as a quiz game with their friends.
If you run a website and would like to add social features, you can now sign up for the wait list and learn more by visiting www.google.com/friendconnect. We're going to keep things pretty limited at first so we can gather feedback from site owners, developers, and users, but, in the weeks ahead, we'll be reaching out to more site owners and adding more social apps to the gallery.
You can also learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at http://code.google.com/events/io/.
Feeds on a plane!
With last week's launch of Google Gears, we're happy to let you know that Google Reader is the first Google web application made for online and offline viewing. If you're not familiar with Google Reader, it's a feed reader for getting updates from your favorite blogs and news sites.
Now, you can read these updates whether you're on or offline. It's easy to read today's financial news from the New York Times on the train, or catch up on your favorite blog while on a plane 35,000 ft. above the Atlantic.
Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an Internet connection.
To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.
Please note, though, that the current version of Google Gears is a developer release, which means you may notice a few kinks here and there. We'll be working hard to iron those out over the coming months, and as always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we look to make Google Reader better every day.
Update: Google Desktop Gadget Contest
Just a quick update to let all you know that, due to popular demand, we've extended the Google Desktop Gadget Contest another two weeks. So if you have a great idea for a gadget, and want to enter it for a chance to prove your brilliance and creativity, you now have until August 14 to do so.
And if you're interested in some tips and tricks on creating Desktop Gadgets, have a look at the Inside Google Desktop blog. Good luck!
Spend your summer with Google Desktop
If you're a Google Desktop fan looking for something to do this summer, it's time to get your creative juices flowing and create a submission for the Google Desktop Gadget Contest. Winning a cool T-shirt almost goes without saying, but you could also win the top prize of $5,000. To help you along, there's the Google Desktop Gadget Designer, a WYSIWYG development environment.
And since Google Desktop 4 is now available in traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovenian, Greek, Slovak, Croatian, Catalan, and Bulgarian, be sure to think globally as you design your gadget. And speaking of version 4, thanks to all the testers who gave us feedback, we're now able to bring the English version out of beta. So if you've been waiting to easily search and personalize your desktop, here's your chance.
Lastly, if you need some inspiration for the contest, check out our list of Google Gadgets. You might be surprised at what you find...
Happy Birthday, Google Earth
We got so excited around here about the first anniversary of Google Earth that we decided to celebrate a bit early. Beginning today, you can download a brand new version, Google Earth 4. Running on OS X? Feel the love. Prefer Linux? Ditto. Yes, we're releasing simultaneously for PC, Mac (universal binary for full performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs) and for the first time ever, native support for popular Linux distributions. And we should say "salut," "ciao," "hallo," and "hola" to our French, Italian, German and Spanish users, because Google Earth is now fully localized for those languages in addition to English. This includes a UI localized to French, Italian, German, and Spanish, as well as local search, driving directions, geo-coding, and unique local information layers for those countries.
Got data?
The streamlined new UI is bound to make you crave new places to explore, so we put together a little update to our database — we increased our global coverage by about 4X. Google Earth now covers more than 20 percent of the landmass of the entire globe with high-resolution satellite imagery (soon Google Maps will too). When we say "high resolution," we mean the good stuff: you can see cars, houses, buildings in more than 200 countries and territories. Not every house is covered, only about two billion of them. That's our best estimate, anyway — that about 1/3 of the population of the Earth can now see their homes in high-resolution. Google Earth has had medium resolution global satellite coverage since the beginning. But that was at 15 meters per pixel. This new global coverage was produced in conjunction with our exclusive satellite partner, Digital Globe, and is at approximately 70 cm per pixel. We have even better data for many countries, up to 10 cm per pixel.
What global insights can this new data produce? Google Earth has already helped save tsunami, hurricane, and earthquake victims, not to mention find a lost Roman villa, track severe storms, discover new meteor craters, track the outbreak of avian flu, visually index magazine articles and photos, host travel videos, redefine the house-shopping process, track airplanes in flight, recognize every Medal of Honor recipient, and many other uses we never expected. Only time will tell what it will bring, and it will only be fully realized when energetic and creative people use powerful tools like KML to exploit the new data and features.
Why not KML in Maps?
We asked that too. KML is such an amazingly flexible way to create and share geographic information - whether it's sharing vacation photos with your friends or publishing important data like the realtime earthquake feed from the U.S. Geological Survey — we thought it would be useful to be able to view KML in Google Maps. So here it is! You can now view KML in Maps by entering the URL for your KML file. To browse hundreds of thousands of interesting KML files, see what the half million members of the Google Earth Community have created.
Feeling inspired?
Google SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse have enabled creative individuals around the world to model their world in 3D. A new version of SketchUp is available today that enables the export of fully-textured 3D models to 3D Warehouse and Google Earth. This will bring even more realism to the collectively-authored 3D world SketchUp users are creating.
Ready to mashup?
Our legion of Maps API developers asked us to support geocoding. So we decided to push that out today too. Street-level geocoding is now available for the U.S., Canada, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. Let the mashing begin.
Correction: Street-level geocoding is not available in Japan.
Are you enterprising?
Finally, now there's Google Maps for Enterprise, offering a fee-based service and support for businesses that want to embed a Google Maps experience in their websites or internal applications. It leverages the Google Maps API to enable businesses to map customer locations, track shipments, manage facilities or view any other data source in a geographic context.
Whew. I'm exhausted from writing all of that. Our first year has been a busy one. We hope you enjoy these latest efforts in our mission to geographically organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
New on your Desktop
In v.1 of Google Desktop, we focused on helping you quickly find existing information on your own computer. In v. 2, it became easier to organize and find new personalized information from all over the web via the Sidebar. Now there's v.3, in which you can also search across multiple computers to find your information. You don't have to worry about where it lives; it's available anywhere you are. If you've ever created a document but forgot whether it's on your laptop or desktop, then you can appreciate why we built this feature.
And if you find something interesting in the Sidebar (an interesting newsbit, weekend weather, a hot stock), now you can right-click on the item and send it directly to your friend's Sidebar. Or hey, just play Tic-Tac-Toe with your pal (another Sidebar newbie). And speaking of pals, we're keen to see what other collaborative panels the developers among us can come up with (I'd love to see a chess game!). Anyone who can write a web page can write a panel, so head to the developer site to try your hand.
The only catch with having desktop tools is that they take up valuable screen real estate. Now you can undock Sidebar panels and keep them floating wherever. Bring panels forward by hitting "Shift" twice, clicking the "Panels" button, or keep them always visible by selecting "Stay on top."
We hope you enjoy all the new features and find them truly useful. Please contribute your ideas via the Google Group for Desktop.
Desktop grows up
We always get a bit misty-eyed when a youngster graduates, so today we're dabbing back a few tears for Google Desktop, which leaves beta status behind with several powerful new features under its belt.
Fans of Google Maps will want to check out Sidebar's new maps panel, which lets you do all the usual cool maps stuff -- local business info, directions, sightseeing -- plus a new one: finding new locations relevant to the web pages and emails you're reading and showing them in your maps panel.
Like this:
Geeks, meanwhile, are invited to pore over our script support for writing plug-ins, which makes it far easier to create home-brewed Sidebar panels. And Sidebar has a bunch of new third- party panels, most notably GDTunes, which cycles through your iTunes collection (and even shows album covers).Finally, let me invite developers and anyone else who's interested to check out our new Google Desktop blog for the latest news and info.
We've worked hard raising Desktop over the past two years. It's great to see it growing up so nicely.