There's a new flavor of Google Talk: the Labs edition, a desktop client that looks very similar to the Google Talk gadget and has most of its features. The application doesn't support voice chat or file transfer, it's still Windows-only, but it has some new features: it lets you launch Google Calendar and Orkut, while including notifications for Google Calendar events and Orkut scraps. The new Google Talk uses WebKit to render some parts of the interface.

I don't find too many reasons why someone would switch from the full-featured client to the Labs edition: group chats, smilies, tabs, while the missing features are more important. A better decisions would have been to integrate these new features in the desktop client, instead of releasing a separate application. Now we have four different flavors of Google Talk: the original client, Gmail Chat, the gadget and the Labs edition.


{ Thanks, ebass5str . }

Google Email Uploader is a tool created by Google to make the transition to Google Apps easier. The application imports to a Google Apps account the messages and contacts stored locally in Microsoft Outlook 2002+, Outlook Express and Thunderbird. It doesn't modify the sent dates from your messages and it converts the folders into Gmail labels. Google Email Uploader is open source and it works only in Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The uploader works only in the premier edition of Google Apps, even though Google says it should work in the standard edition, as well. If you try to use it with a standard Google Apps account, you'll get this error message: "you are not authorized to use this feature". The most likely reason why the application works only in the paid version of Google Apps is that it uses the email migration API, which "allows administrators and users of Google Apps to migrate mail from legacy email systems into their domain's hosted Gmail accounts". The API is enabled for the paid accounts and it's also used by gMOVE, a tool that migrates Outlook calendars, email, contacts and tasks to Google Apps for $19.

You can also import old mail to a Gmail account using IMAP: simply drag your old messages to Gmail's inbox in an email client, but the new application should be more reliable.

If you ever start to type a comment on a blog and you realize that the textarea is very small and it doesn't have any of the powerful features from your favorite text editor, you should try It's All Text, a Firefox extension that makes the transition between any textarea and your text editor. The extension adds a small Edit button below the textarea that copies the existing text in a temporary file and it launches Notepad or any other text editor installed on your computer. When you save the file, its content is automatically added to the textarea, so you don't have to use copy-paste.


In case you don't need a text editor, but some comment boxes are way too small, this Greasemonkey script lets you resize them, by dragging a small icon. Another good option is to use the Resizeable Textarea Firefox extension. This bookmarklet should work in most browsers, but you need to click on the bookmark before resizing a textarea.


Somebody suggested that every comment box should be a Google Docs-like rich text editor, but until popular blogging engines support tables and image uploading, Flickr Rich Edit adds some simple editing options for those who don't want to type HTML tags. The Greasemonkey script works only for Flickr's comment boxes by default, but you can add the options to any textarea by replacing http://*flickr.com/* with * in the list of included pages.

Google Analytics added a new option for charts: graph data by hour, day, week or month. The hour graphs are only available in some of the visitors reports and they could be helpful to find out the time of the day when most people visit your sites. The graph below shows a strange shift that happened in the past year, even if the regional distribution of this blog's visitors hasn't changed too much.


It would be nice to see aggregated graph for days of the week, for months and for years, enhanced with some possible explanations for the changes, like we can see in Google Trends and Google Finance.

{ Thanks, Fede777. }

One problem with blogs that recommend all kids of tips, software, browser add-ons, web applications is that very few will be actually used by someone. I tried to only link to great software, useful Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts, difficult-to-find Google tips, but quality is subjective.

I still view the latest videos from my YouTube subscriptions inside Google Reader, I log into Google using an alternate username, I upload files using drag and drop and share blog posts from the web to my Google Reader link blog, Google Cache is still useful to navigate inside a web site when it's inaccessible and linking to web pages using Google AJAX Search is very convenient. Gmail's built-in labels are great for creating filters or complex queries, wildcards are one of the ways I extract facts from Google search, while Interclue is a smart and unobtrusive link previewer.

Which tips that you first read here are still valuable for you?

BPWrap found an interesting tidbit in Google's international sites: in some cases, the snippets start with a date that is displayed in the same language as the Google interface. For example, Google France displays "9 juil 2006", even if the page contains an English date: "July 09, 2006".


What's even more interesting is that Google doesn't include any date from the page: it tries to detect the most likely candidate for the published date. This should be more accurate than the date when Google first found a web page. Most news sites and blogs display the date when an article has been published and this is an useful information for people who try to find recent news articles or blog posts written in a certain period.


Example of queries that show the published date in Google's snippets: [extended Google snippets], [Microsoft bid for Yahoo], but I'm sure you can find many others.

The new date could replace Google's current estimation that is used in an advanced search option. For web pages that don't include the date when they were created, Google could try to estimate it, based on its content and the recency of the linked web pages.

This is not the only information automatically detected by Google and displayed as part of a snippet: the map plusbox includes the most relevant address identified on a page, a static map and links to directions.

{ via SE Roundtable }

Google Gears started as an open-source plug-in that enabled web applications to work offline, but its real purpose is to speed up the addition of features to web browsers. Developers are frustrated that it takes too long to create standards and they have to wait until they enter mainstream by being included in web browsers. Brad Neuberg from Google says that it takes 5-8 years for an idea to be included in enough web browsers so that developers can actually use it. "We need a better way to get new features out to the Web. Google Gears is an open-source mechanism for updating the Web", explains Brad the underlying motivation for building Google Gears.

Google's Dion Almaer sees Gears as a "bleeding-edge HTML 5 implementation". "There is a lot in common between Gears and HTML 5. Both are moving the Web forward, something that we really need to accelerate. Both have APIs to make the Web do new tricks. However HTML 5 is a specification, and Gears is an implementation." Some pieces from Google Gears could even become standards and it's likely that they'll be added to web browsers faster.

Find the perfect stocks for your portfolio with the new stock screener from Google Finance. You can use criteria like: market capitalization, the P/E ratio, the most recently reported trade price, gross margin and select the values interactively.

Brain Lint notes that Google uses sparklines, "miniature graphs that go inline with text. In this case the graph is a histogram that indicates how much of the stock market falls into each part of the range - this will give one a quick preview how inclusive their search parameters are."

It looks much better than the stock screener from Yahoo Finance, which is anything but intuitive. Even if it looks outdated, Yahoo Finance has more features and content, so its user base won't migrate to Google Finance for the vivid charts and the clever integration of news headlines.


{ Spotted last month, when it was not functional. }

Last year, YouTube launched a video identification system for detecting copyright infringements. Content providers were supposed to upload their videos and the system would find YouTube videos that use excerpts from their content. "Video Identification goes above and beyond our legal responsibilities. It will help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube, and choose what they want done with their videos: whether to block, promote, or even - if a copyright holder chooses to license their content to appear on the site — monetize their videos," explained Google when the system was launched.

Some YouTube videos include a special label: "contains content from [link to YouTube channel]". Besides the unfortunate combination of words, it's interesting to notice that YouTube starts to fix some of the problems with copyright infringements by being more friendly with those who own the copyrights.


From YouTube's help center: "There are three usage policies -- Block, Track or Monetize. If a rights owner specifies a Block policy, the video will not be viewable on YouTube. If the rights owner specifies a Track policy, the video will continue to be made available on YouTube and the rights owner will receive information about the video, such as how many views it receives. For a Monetize policy, the video will continue to be available on YouTube and ads will appear in conjunction with the video. The policies can be region-specific, so a content owner can allow a particular piece of material in one country and block the material in another"

So what would you choose between the three policies: block (no exposure and no money) or track (exposure, but no money) or monetize (exposure and money)? Obviously, many content providers decided to choose the third option. In addition to the exposure, they could also make money from ads or from links to music stores, such as Amazon MP3.

Google shows results from its code search engine when you search for things related to programming languages: function names, classes, objects, methods so you can see real-life examples of use. For some reason, the snippets are always displayed after the third search result and they include up to four lines of code.

Google Code Search indexes "publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet" and is the only search engine developed by Google that supports regular expressions and case-sensitive searches. It's also the only Google search engine that has keyboard shortcuts: after clicking on a search result, type n and p to go to the next/previous match.


Related:
Google Code Search vs Krugle vs Koders

{ via Google Blogoscoped }