Google

Web companies settle on OpenSocial 0.9 specs

MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and other allies have settled on what they think should be in version 0.9 of OpenSocial, a standard designed to make it easier for programmers to write Web applications that will work on multiple Web sites.

The draft version of OpenSocial includes a number of new features to ease programmers' difficulties, according a blog post by MySpace architect Scott Seely. He describes some changes, though reserving most details for future posts, but here's MySpace's boiled-down list:

• OpenSocial Markup Language--gadget developers can create/modify templates by copying and pasting HTML • API (application programming … Read more

What Gmail does better than its competitors

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time wading through e-mails, finding the best e-mail service is paramount in my life.

Realizing that, I've done my fair share of shuffling from one e-mail program to the next--trying to find the best service that not only offers speed and stability, but also reliability and spam control. And although e-mail services are getting better, it's abundantly clear that few offer the kind of experience I'm really looking for in an e-mail client. But Google's Gmail app is different. It's better than its competition on a number … Read more

Google maps out Chrome's RSS support

My biggest day-to-day gripe about Chrome is its missing support for automatic discovery of Web pages that offer RSS or other subscription services. But Google now has published a document detailing how it plans to address that weakness, though.

"We will autodetect RSS and Atom feeds using the standard autodiscovery tags," according to the developer document about Chrome support for RSS and Atom, a similar technology for letting people sign up for update "feeds" such as new blog postings. "When a feed is available for a page, we will display an RSS icon in the … Read more

'Mystery' Lunar X Prize team unveiled

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--There are now 16 announced teams registered for the Google Lunar X Prize competition, with a so-called "mystery" team unveiling its participants Wednesday.

During a press conference held at NASA Ames Research Center here, the Next Giant Leap team--which had actually been the fifth team to register for the competition--finally pulled the wraps on its team members and the companies or institutions they work for.

The Google Lunar X Prize is a $20 million purse that will be awarded to the first privately-funded team to land a rover on the moon, travel at least 500 … Read more

Google censors political-donation transparency ads

Should members of the public be able to pay for Web advertisements detailing which companies have donated to politicians? While this seems like a great way to promote transparency in politics, Google forbids the practice--we are free to name the politicians who take money but cannot name the companies that give it.

With Google's domination of the search engine market, and the eyeballs that go along with it, the company's AdWords text ads have become a key way for activists, politicians, and corporations to reach the general public. However, over the past year, Google's excessively restrictive policies … Read more

Google Maps now comes with YouTube (officially)

Just a few short months after adding videos as an optional add-on in Google Maps, Google seems pleased enough with the feature to have built it into the popular mapping tool. By choosing the video layer from the "more" menu, which also houses photos and Wikipedia entries, users can now browse and watch YouTube videos that have been geotagged.

The feature is no different from the previous one except in presentation. Instead of pockmarking your map with little red dots, each video appears in thumbnail form. The interface has also been slimmed down to exclude the video information … Read more

Google launches App Engine dashboard

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Google on Tuesday announced a dashboard to detail system status for the Google App Engine.

The move is the latest by a cloud provider to improve transparency in the event of an outage.

On the Google App Engine blog, the company said that it has launched the App Engine system status site and a quota dashboard to detail items like bandwidth usage and CPU. Google said it also plans a billing dashboard to preview what happens if you go beyond those quotas.

Here's a look at the dashboard:

Turn Google, Yahoo search results into tag clouds

Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension from the International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI) that gives users a cloud of tags to help modify and focus searches on Google and Yahoo. Once installed it will show up on top of search results and provides a simple way to tweak the original query by offering up keywords pulled from the results.

Words that appear more often in the results appear as bigger, bolder tags that you can click on to re-start the query with that word tacked on. The creators recommend dialing up the number of default search results to … Read more

Google Suggest gets search ad test

Google has begun testing ads that accompany the suggestions that appear when people begin typing in a search query.

Google Suggest is a feature that provides a drop-down listing possible search terms; I find it handy for completing long queries with the down arrow and the Enter key. With some people, though, Google is testing a green search ad at the top of the list, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land reported.

The text ads that appear above or to the right of search results happen to be Google's massive profit engine, but the company also said its tests … Read more