Last time when I wrote about Google Chrome extensions, they were nothing more than repackaged user scripts. Since March, the extension system has been improved by adding new APIs and options to create custom UIs.
If you use a recent version of Chromium or a Google Chrome dev build, you can already install two useful extensions. But first you should find a Chrome shortcut on your desktop, right-click, select "Properties" and append a flag to the target field: --enable-extensions. Restart the browser to use the new option.
The sample extensions are actually enhanced bookmarklets that show the number of unread messages in your Gmail inbox and an option to subscribe to feeds in Google Reader.
For those that want to write similar extensions, there's a tutorial that will walk you through creating a very simple extension.
In other news, Linux and Mac users can try some early builds of Chromium. "The software, available for download from the Chromium Web site, is incomplete and definitely buggy, as one would expect for a developer version that reflects all the latest changes programmers are making with the project," says Stephen Shankland from CNet, who tested the Mac version.
Google Contacts, which is now available at google.com/contacts, has some new fields: website, birthday, date (anniversary), related person (spouse, domestic partners, assistant) and even custom fields. Just click on the "add" button to see some of the other fields that can be used.
For some reason, I can see the changes in the standalone version of Google Contacts, but not yet in Gmail. The most obvious missing feature is the option to create events for birthdays in Google Calendar, but it will probably be added soon.
After years without significant updates, Google's contact manager has been constantly updated in the past year (better contact search, the option to merge duplicate entries, an API, sync options), but there's a lot of room for improvement. What's on your wishlist?
Google first implemented a basic task management service as a Gmail Labs feature, then it developed an iPhone version and an iGoogle gadget. Now you can manage your tasks from Google Calendar. There are two ways to view your tasks in Google Calendar: in the right sidebar, where you can also manage your tasks, and as a built-in calendar.
* Tasks that have due dates will automatically appear on your calendar in the All Day event section. * To create a task with a due date in Calendar, click on an empty space in Month view or in the All Day section and select the Task option.
* To attach a due date to an existing task, click the right arrow next to the task in question in the Task list. Then, click on the calendar icon to select a date. * To modify a task's date, simply drag the task to a new date (as you would with a calendar event). * To mark a task as complete from within Calendar, click on the checkbox next to the task.
Unfortunately, you can't use "quick add" to create tasks, the tasks calendar can't be synchronized with other applications and you still can't receive email or SMS notifications for tasks.
Google's Searchology event was a great opportunity to show that Google's search engine not only indexes and ranks web pages, it also categorizes the content available on the web, it extracts information that can be visualized in new and interesting ways.
The first feature launched today is "search options", a new sidebar that can be expanded right on the search results page and that offers a lot of interesting features. You can restrict the results to videos, forums, reviews or recent pages. While you could already use services like Google Groups, Google Video or Google News to obtain similar results, this feature lets you easily switch between the various types of pages and combine different restrictions.
One of the most impressive option is the restriction to reviews, which shows special snippets obtained using sentiment analysis. You'll be able to find directly from the snippets if the author liked a certain product or service, the main advantages and disadvantages and other opinionated excerpts.
The "search options" sidebar also includes the "wonder wheel", a great visualization feature that lets you improve your query by trying different suggestions successively. For example, I could start by searching for "DVD" and then selecting related searches like "HD DVD", "HD DVD vs Blu-ray", "Blu-ray", while previewing the results and still being able to go to the previous search results.
After enhancing the snippets for discussion boards, scientific papers using metadata extracted automatically, Google looked into using structured data already included in some web pages to surface useful information in the search results. Much like Yahoo Searchmonkey, Google uses RDFa markup and microformats to extract information from sites that show reviews and information about people. You'll only see the enhanced snippets for large sites like CNet, Yelp and LinkedIn, but Google promises to expand the list.
The last search-related announcement was a new service that will be released in Google Labs this month: Google Squared, a dashboard of facts generated automatically. You can search for general things like "small dogs", "vegetables", "US presidents" and Google generates a list of objects that fit into your category, a set of attributes and their values. It looks like a comparison page from Wikipedia, but it's generated automatically.
Google will host a press event called Searchology on Tuesday, two years after launching universal search. According to Google, the event will "offer an insider's perspective on Search including recent search innovations. Speakers will include VP of Search Engineering, Udi Manber, and VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer." Even if you didn't get an invitation, you'll be able to see the presentations through a webcast.
Who: Google Inc. What: Live webcast of Google's upcoming Searchology press event to be held at its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. When: Tuesday, May 12th, 10:00am – 11:30am PDT
Google didn't mention anything about product launches, but I suspect that the search engine will include some new features that have been tested in the past months. Google wants to expose some advanced search options that allow you to refine the results without opening a new page. The options are available in a sidebar that's collapsed by default, but it can be expanded by clicking on "Show options".
You'll be able to restrict the results to forums, videos, reviews and recent pages. There's an option that lets you customize the snippets by making them longer or by showing thumbnails, much like Cuil. Google wants to make the process of refining queries more fun and exploratory by adding a "wonder wheel" of suggestions.
You might remember the strange incident from January that made Google's search results pages almost unusable for 30 minutes by flagging all the search results as malware. The incident is now Google's favorite example to show that its search engine is not a monopoly and competition is one click away: Yahoo's search volume has doubled before Google fixed the error.
A study from 2008 showed that 55% of the US Internet users have more than one regularly used search engine.
A paper published last week titled "Why Silent Updates Boost Security" showed that Google Chrome is the browser that has the most effective updating mechanism. Google Chrome's updater works automatically, it requires no user interaction and it can't be disabled from the interface. The report shows that 97% of the Chrome users had the latest version of the browser 21 days after its release, compared to 85% for Firefox and 53% for Safari.
"Google Chrome checks for updates every five hours. It is using the recently open sourced Google update component code-named Omaha, which keeps polling for updates even when Google Chrome is not running. (...) Once a new update is found to be available on the server, the client automatically downloads and installs it in the background without prompting the user. The new version of Google Chrome gets applied at the next restart of the browser. At the time of this writing, in April 2009, the user was not even prompted to restart the browser after a new update was ready. Given that the whole update process happens without any user interruption, Google Chrome is said to have a "silent update" mechanism. As of April 2009, the user could not disable update checks."
Other browsers don't include auto-updating mechanisms (Opera) or they have updating features that require user's consent (Firefox). Internet Explorer wasn't included in the report because its user-agent omits the minor version number and the results were compiled from Google's traffic logs.
Roger Halbheer, who works for Microsoft, has a more balanced view. "Silently installing components without even giving me the option to choose is not acceptable today for me – but I want to have the option to do it if I want."
Google Updater, the software that automatically updates Google applications like Chrome, Google Earth Plugin or Google Gears, needs to be more transparent and more flexible. Users need to be informed more clearly that the software updates silently and they need to have an option that disables the updater or makes the polling less frequent. What happens if the latest version of Google Chrome constantly crashes on your computer? You could install an older version, but Chrome will automatically update to the most recent version.
Star Trek fans will certainly like this. If you have a recent event in Google Calendar that contains "Star Trek", Google will automatically add a calendar titled "Stardates".
"Our team has been pretty excited about a certain movie premiering today. After yet another discussion of starships, phasers, and warp drives, we decided to put our enthusiasm to work and give Calendar a little boost. The result was the creation of a new calendar, pre-loaded with stardates to help you keep track of time in this universe and beyond," explains Google.
"A stardate is a means of specifying absolute dates in the fictional Star Trek universe. They are decimal numbers, usually rounded to a single decimal place, which replace absolute Gregorian calendar dates," according to Wikipedia.
To see the stardates calendar, create an event that includes "Star Trek" in the title and refresh Google Calendar. You should notice the new calendar in the left sidebar. Another way to take a look at the calendar is to sign out from Google and then visit Google Calendar's homepage.
patrickbeeson: "Saw a monster ad for Google Chrome on the front of nytimes.com this morning."
jlopezvalcarcel: "Google bought a display ad on NYTimes.com for Chrome. Quality content wins the day. Automated algorithms can only take you so far."
sydneyskybetter: "If an ad for Google's Chrome browser is going to take up 80% of NYTimes.com, the least they could do is offer a version for mac."
brooksjordan: "Man, Google has a cool ad/micro-movies abt Chrome on the NYTimes right now. I can't take a screenshot 'cause it only plays on hover."
Google Chrome is the most advertised Google product: you'll often see it promoted on Google's homepage, on YouTube, LinkedIn and other places. Word of mouth worked well for Google's search engine, but it's probably not enough to make you change your browser, especially when you don't even know what a browser is or when you think that the Internet is a blue icon on your desktop.
There's an intense debate in the US about the future of journalism. Some news organizations say that Google News and other news aggregators need to share revenue with publishers. While Google provides an easy way to opt-out from indexing, news sites need Google's traffic to gain new visitors. "We don't want to pull out of the digital ecosystem. We just simply want a fair compensation for the content that we publish," says Jim Moroney, publisher and chief executive of "The Dallas Morning News".
Newspapers can't figure out how to adapt to the online environment and Google is an easy target. News aggregators and search engines are the new destination for news, since users can choose from a lot of different perspectives. Marissa Mayer, Vice President at Google, found an interesting correlation between news articles, songs and short-form videos in her testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet:
The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule. Similarly, the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper's homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.
Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining. These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.
Speaking of innovation and experimentation, Google News has updated the way news clusters are presented and the new design integrates articles, blogs, local sources, images and quotes.
It's not clear whether newspapers will adapted to the changes, but Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, has a good conclusion: "The future of quality journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers".
