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Gmail supports gadgets

This week Gmail Labs added support for Google gadgets to Gmail. To get started, the Gmail team created a new Docs and Calendar gadget that you can add to the left navigation bar, next to Chat and Labels. The Calendar gadget lets you see upcoming events and appointments from your Google Calendars -- you can even receive an alert when you have a meeting. The Docs gadget lets you see recently accessed Google Docs and search through all of your Google Docs. You can also add in any other Google gadget, by pasting the URI into a field located in the Labs section of Gmail. This feature isn't fully developed and is mainly to help developers test compatibility of their gadgets with Gmail, and it will be improved in the future. With Labs and now Gadgets, Google is really going all out to make Gmail more extensible and customizable.

[via Official Gmail Blog]

Link to specific parts of a YouTube video

YouTube has just implemented a pretty fantastic feature: the ability to deep link to a specific part of a video. This way, if the portion of a clip you want to show a friend is 2 minutes into the video, you can link directly to that part and bypass anything else. To add a deep link, just add the following at the end of a YouTube URL: #t=1m15s. The 'm' and 's' stand for minute and second, so if you wanted to link to the 48th second of a video, you would use #t=0m48s to the end of the clip's URL.

As an added bonus, typing in 0:46 or 1:15 in a YouTube comment field will create a hyperlink to that portion of the video, so you can comment on specific parts of the video and make it easier for others to see what you are talking about.

[via YouTube Blog]

Search Google profiles

I wasn't even really aware of Google Account profiles until a few months ago, but they do exist. Google Blogoscoped picked up on the fact that Google published a Sitemap for all Google profiles and you can now search through profiles at the bottom of a profile page. The service is reportedly flaky, and right now there isn't any real indication of what its use might be, though I suspect it might eventually get tied into Open Social.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Google Toolbar turns 8

Wow, I officially feel old. The Official Google Blog announced that in just a few weeks, the Google Toolbar will be turning EIGHT years old. Wow. That takes me back. It's hard to even remember browsing the web without a search engine bar of some sort. I don't use the Google Toolbar anymore, its core functionality is built into Safari, Firefox, Camino and Internet Explorer (not to mention Chrome), but in its heyday, the Google Bar was THE productivity enhancer of the Web 1.0 era.

Google has a great image chronicling the history of the Google Toolbar here

[via Official Google Blog]

Google promotes 'Take a Vote Hour'

Tuesday is the US Presidential Election, and Google is doing its part to encourage voting with its Take a Vote Hour campaign. The campaign is an independent, bipartisan effort amongst American CEOs to encourage and support employees to step away from the office and vote on November 4th.

It's a great message and the campaign's video (featuring Donald Trump and others) is pretty cute.

[via Official Google Blog]

Ghoulishly Google Trick-or-Treats

Today is October 31, which means that many cultures are celebrating Halloween. In honor of this "holiday" - Google has offered up some scary surprises. OK, so the surprises aren't scary. They are cute.

• Wes Craven Hosts YouTube Halloween - Horror maven Wes Craven (he produced the original Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream trilogy). You can view Wes's favorite YouTube Halloween clips here
• Google's Robots.txt file for Halloween - Blogoscoped shared this one with us -- Google's Robots.txt file for today has been taken over by zombies!
• Google Doodle - Today's Google Doodle was designed by Wes Craven. Visit Google.com to see it until November 1 -- after that, you can catch it on the Google Doodle page.

Trick-or-Treat Googleholics!