February 9th, 2009
Google now works with Windows Mobile and iPhone
Contacts and calendar events are a couple of the things that people hate trying to keep in sync — it’s also one of the main reasons people still thing Microsoft Exchange is the right solution for them.
Google, just today, announced that you can now truly keep these two things in sync between their services, Windows Mobile and iPhone (2 way!). The service is still in beta, and there are a few things that Google warns new users of:
Known Issues for the iPhone
- Attendee Status for Calendar Events
- Limited to 5 Calendars
- Modified Instances of Recurring Events Not Always Deleted
- Modified Instances of Recurring Events Not Removed When Declined
- Limited Contact Information
Known Issues for Windows Mobile
- Changing Order of Recurring Event May Remove From Device
- Changes to Meeting Attendees on Device Aren’t Synchronized to Server
It’s important to note that these issues are not Google’s, but rather the device’s.
February 7th, 2009
Gmail usage appears to be closing in on Hotmail
Information Week says that if Gmail’s growth continues at the same rate, we could see Gmail’s user share overtake Hotmail by the end of the year — an impressive feat.
Between December 2007 and December 2008, Gmail’s number of unique monthly visitors in the United States grew 43%, from 20.8 million to 29.6 million, according to ComScore. Windows Live Hotmail lost 5% of its unique monthly visitors during this period, falling from 45.7 million to 43.5 million.
Google still has a long way to go to catch up to Yahoo, but it’s realistic to think that it could happen as soon as 2011 if you look at current growth rates. Part of the reason Google’s email service is becoming so popular is their ability to push out updates and useful features extremely quickly.
For example, one of the newest features they added to Gmail Labs is “multiple inboxes”. This feature is extremely useful for me — when I star a message, or save a draft, it always stays on my main page instead of gradually working its way down my inbox, and then inevitably out of sight (and mind). Previously, starred messages were only accessible by clicking the “starred” link in the sidebar.
Which email service do you use? Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo? Have you noticed people around you making the switch to Gmail? Let’s hear what you think in the Talk Back!
February 5th, 2009
Google Latitude lets you publish your real-time location
Google recently launched a new service called “Latitude” which lets you publish your location, and let your friends subscribe to it. You can think of it as Twitter with some pretty tight location integration — you can update your status, and your friends can stalk you.
Click here to see a video about Google Latitude
I believe the most successful applications are ones that step over the line a bit, and make people invest in believing it’s going to make things better rather than worse. A good example of that is when Facebook released their “news feed” in 2006, which at the time seemed like a huge privacy problem, but now is just a fact of life.
It’s going to be interesting if this actually takes off — my gut instinct is telling me that its going to be slow going, but my theory makes me think that something like this could be successful. Since Google isn’t really thought of as a social platform yet, it will be a lot more challenging for Google than if a company like Facebook did the same thing.
Are you going to use the new service? If not, would you use it if it was offered by Facebook instead? Let’s hear what you have to say in the Talk Back!
February 3rd, 2009
Google Earth: Now in 4D
It’s been widely reported that Google Earth now has real oceans — complete with moving water. You can pick any point on Earth, and dive right into the depths, without the scuba gear. It’s still not quite ready to replace the real thing, but it’s definitely a great start.
The new application even has a Mars view — allowing you to browse that planet, just as you would with Earth. Of course, there isn’t much to look at on Mars yet, but it’s still kinda cool.
One piece of the new application that I find quite interesting is how you can turn back time. You can easily scroll back through the years of data available to see how things have changed, cities have grown, or how glaciers have shrunk.
What do you think of the new Google Earth application? Is the new Ocean view everything you were looking for? Let’s hear what you think in the Talk Back!
February 1st, 2009
Google makes mistake, internet goes crazy
It must be tough being Google — everything they do is under 24×7 scrutiny, and any mistake made is jumped on by anyone looking for a story. For example, for twenty minutes yesterday morning, every Google search result said “This site may harm your computer”.
It was a mistake that Google fixed immediately, and they even fessed up directly after it happened in a post on their official blog. While trying to protect the world from the “bad guys”, they made a small error which ultimately made the entire internet look like spam — woops!
“We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.” — Marissa Mayer
January 30th, 2009
More traces of GDrive popping up
Traces of GDrive have been extremely difficult, or impossible, to find in the wild — until recently that is. This higher rate of GDrive related discoveries tells me that the service is sure to be a released as a real product at some point, hopefully soon.
Just today, Philipp Lenssen at Blogoscoped posted a couple new pieces of information that were passed along to him. The first is a reference to GDrive in a Google Pack related javascript file — which may be the preferred way to obtain your copy when it’s launched.
// Localized product category of GDrive
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_CATEGORY = ‘Online file backup and storage’;
// Localized short description of GDrive (1st
// of 2 description lines)
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_DESCRIPTION_1 = ‘GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents’;
// Localized short description of GDrive (2nd
// of 2 description lines)
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_DESCRIPTION_2 = ‘GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone’;
If that isn’t enough for you, how about an internal PDF file that was leaked to the giwy blog. In the document, there is detailed explanations of how tool is installed, workarounds for common issues or unfinished features, and other general information.
It’s clear that the originally leaked “Platypus” is depreciated, and the new “GDrive” application is meant as a replacement for it. Not sure about you, but I’m looking forward to giving it a test drive once it’s released.
January 27th, 2009
Outlook, look out - Gmail goes offline
It’s easy to downplay Gmail as an enterprise email solution — it’s only available as webmail, and if the internet goes down, so does your email.
When Google Gears was launched, people began looking forward to the day when Gmail would become an offline application. Today it happened — Gmail can now be used outside the cloud if you wish.
I still can’t see the feature, but Google announced it today on the Google Enterprise blog. The feature is said to be available immediately in Google Apps, and will be rolling out gradually for all Gmail users.
To enable the new feature, should you have it, follow these steps:
- Sign in to Gmail and click ‘Settings’.
- Click the ‘Labs’ tab and select ‘Enable’ next to ‘Offline Gmail’.
- Click ‘Save Changes.’
- In the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new ‘Offline’ link.
- Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.
What makes this possible is something called Google Gears. Gears is available on all modern browsers as an addon, with the exception of Chrome which has it built right in.
Let’s hear what you think about this new feature — do you think it will it put more pressure on Outlook?
January 25th, 2009
Google to launch next big update to Google Earth
On February 2nd, Google is presenting a new version of Google Earth at the California Academy of Sciences, an aquarium, planetarium and natural history museum in San Francisco. This is the perfect location for them to unveil what I suspect will be what people are calling “Google Ocean”.
If you look at maps in Google Maps, or Google Earth, you can see that they have already updated imagery for the ocean floor — but it could be so much better.
Many suspect that we could be days away from seeing a 3D ocean view — the ability to fly across the ocean floor is something that researchers would absolutely love to be able to do.
It’s very unlikely that we’re going to see much high resolution imagery (but I would be surprised if there was none), because that information simply does not exist yet, and it’s difficult and expensive to obtain. It would take 100 ships a whole year to get the type of information needed.
“We hope that one of the outcomes of Google Ocean will be an understanding of how much remains to be explored,” said Miller of Scripps. “We know far more about the surface of Mars from a few weeks of radar surveying in orbit than we know of the bottom of the ocean after two centuries.” — CNET
Google Earth is becoming an excellent tool for researchers to collaborate on anything from space to the depths of our oceans.
January 21st, 2009
Google helping tourists around New York City
New York City, along with Google, launched a new website that is designed to help tourists and residents find their way around the city, and plan their days out. As a recent first-time visitor to the Big Apple, a site like this would have actually been quite useful.
Mayor Bloomberg says he hopes that “nycgo.com becomes the official online resource for tourists and residents looking for an activity or a place to go”. The site appears to have lots of information, and can definitely direct people in the right direction.
There seems to be a market for specific localized information sites like this one, and it makes sense for companies like Google to try and be a piece of them — what do you think?
January 20th, 2009
Google iPhone interface is history
When it was launched, Google made a big deal about the iPhone interface for their iGoogle — it actually looked really good, and worked just as well.
Search Engine Land reports that Google started redirecting people to the old, and ugly, mobile iGoogle page on Thursday, which immediately sparked a lot of discussion in this thread. Google never made any official announcements about the change, but this is what was said on the support page:
Hey everyone, I have an update for you. We’ve decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We’ve found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones — we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version.
Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren’t compatible with most mobile browsers.
We’ve got several articles in our Help Center about the mobile experience on iGoogle, which you can find in our Help Center (linked below).
It’s too bad that Google is beginning to think their convenience outweighs user experience.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Recent Entries
- Google now works with Windows Mobile and iPhone
- Gmail usage appears to be closing in on Hotmail
- Google Latitude lets you publish your real-time location
- Google Earth: Now in 4D
- Google makes mistake, internet goes crazy
Most Popular Posts
- More traces of GDrive popping up
- Outlook, look out - Gmail goes offline
- Google to launch next big update to Google Earth
- Google makes mistake, internet goes crazy
- Google Earth: Now in 4D
- Google may still be working on GDrive
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- Google to launch next big update to Google Earth+27 votes
- Outlook, look out - Gmail goes offline+27 votes
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- Gmail usage appears to be closing in on Hotmail+15 votes
- Googling will wreck the environment!+7 votes
- Google Earth: Now in 4D+7 votes
- More traces of GDrive popping up+6 votes
- Google Latitude lets you publish your real-time location+5 votes
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