Googleholic for February 26, 2008

Filed under: Internet, Google, Googleholic

Googleholic for February 26, 2008

by Romeo Wahed Feb 26th 2008

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

Put Google Talk in your blog - "chatback"
Pakistan's YouTube ban causes two hour downtime
Google helps lay another undersea cable to Japan

Put Google Talk in your blog - "chatback"

Google Talk has announced a new feature called "chatback," which is a way for you to better connect with visitors to your blog or online profile, by allowing them to chat with you directly from your site. The visitors won't need to download anything or sign up for an account - as long as you're online with your Google Talk account, they can message you via the chatback widget you throw up on your site. If this sounds like a good way to add value to your site, grab the widget.

Pakistan's YouTube ban causes two hour downtime

According to BBC News, the recent downtime on YouTube was a result of ISPs in Pakistan attempting to reroute traffic from YouTube after Pakistan wanted the site banned for containing some anti-Islamic content of Dutch origin. Apparently, the ISP shared its Border Gateway Protocol data for blocking YouTube within Pakistan with other ISPs, which passed it on to others. Nice. But things have resolved now, and everyone can get their daily dose of YouTube again without interruption.

Google helps lay another undersea cable to Japan

Google is part of an effort to lay another undersea cable to Japan, together with five other partners, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Singtel, KDDI, and Pacnet. The whole project costs about $300 million and will be done in about 2010, adding about 7.5 tbps of bandwidth.

Other Google related bits we've been covering at Download Squad:

Sign up for Google's Blogger and get a Grand Central invite - If you've been wanting an invite to Grand Central to get one phone number to rule them all, get a Blogger account.
New status: Get invisible on Google's Gmail chat - Want to see who's online without revealing to others that you are online? Yes, invisibility is now an option for Google chat.
Google2Go: Unofficial Windows Mobile app for Google services - Although unofficial, Google2Go is a mobile version of Google's application suite.

Tags: chatback, google, google chat, google talk, GoogleChat, googleholic, GoogleTalk, youtube

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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