Filed under: Google

This morning, Google finally pulled back the curtain on its rumored social networking product. It's called Google Buzz, and it's being billed as "a Google approach to sharing," in the same way Gmail was "a Google approach to email." In the 15-minute demo of Buzz, Google hit on 5 key features, plus an overview of the mobile version of Buzz.

Google Buzz will begin rolling out to the general public in just a few minutes, although it might take a few days before it's accessible to all users. Meawhile, you can check out the video announcement of Buzz.

Here are the five main features of the desktop version of Buzz, which will be built right into Gmail:

1. Auto-following

You don't need to build a new social graph from scratch on Buzz. It uses your Gmail social network, and automatically adds the people you email and chat with most often.

2. Rich, fast sharing

Buzz pulls in content your friends share on Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Google Reader and YouTube, even if you don't use those sites. There's a special focus on video and photos, with a custom photo viewer that lets you navigate galleries in full screen. When you share a link, Buzz fetches the headlines and photos from the post you're sharing. The keyboard shortcuts you already use in Gmail all work the same way in your buzz stream.

3. Public and private sharing

Privacy settings allow you to share publicly (quickly indexed by Google, of course), privately, and with custom groups.

4. Inbox Integration

Buzz makes sure you don't miss new comments on the stuff you share. You don't get new email when someone comments, but your Buzz comments show up along with your email in your inbox. The comments show up in real time. Also, Buzz borrows Twitter's convention of @replies. You can type @ and a username and Buzz will autocomplete your contact and deliver your message to that user's Buzz.

5. Just the Good Stuff

Buzz has a recommendation system that brings in shared items from friends of friends, and learns from your feedback. You can collapse the stuff you don't care about, to make the filter better in the future. At the same time, if someone you're following posts something you don't care about, you can collapse that, too. Google says that Buzz will only get better at filtering over time, like Gmail has.

Google is working on something mysterious that has to do with Gmail and social networking, but the details are still under wraps. The new product will be unveiled tomorrow, and it could be anything from integrating Gmail status updates with Twitter and Facebook to launching a full-scale Twitter-like service of its own.

Here's what we're hearing so far:

TechCrunch says the new product will "intregrate with at least two existing Google products. The general consensus in the tech blogosphere is that one of the two is Gmail. The Wall Street Journal says the new product will make it "easier and faster for user of Gmail to view media and status updates." (Media, eh? Is the other Google product YouTube?)

Meanwhile, over at Mashable, they're calling the pending announcement "HUGE" and saying Gmail will offer a Twitter-like timeline of your friends status updates, as well as integration (Twitpic and Yfrog-style, maybe?) of Picasa photos and YouTube videos. We won't find out until 10 AM Tuesday what this new Google hotness is called, but we can start speculating! What do you think, DLS readers?

p.s.: I haven't actually heard anyone call this thing "Google Stream," but don't you think it would make a catchy name?

Google Listen is a podcast application for Google Android. In a nutshell, it allows you to find, download, and listen to podcasts from your Android-powered smartphone. Want to listen to episodes of This American Life on the go? Just search the directory for the show, hit the subscribe button, and Google Listen will download the latest episode for you to listen to.

But Google Listen has another trick up its sleeve. In addition to subscribing to individual podcasts, you can also subscribe to "searches." Say you want information about Barack Obama, Google Android, or Oscar Nominations. Just enter your query in the search box and check the subscribe box on the results page. Now the latest story from any podcast or web audio that Google determines is related to your search will be available in your subscriptions.

Google already offers a tool that lets you translate text from one language to another and technology that can convert spoken language to text. Now it looks like Google is taking the next logical step and creating a Babel Fish which you can stick in your ear to instantly understand any spoken language.

...Only instead of a fish, Google's version will be an app that runs on your smartphone. But you'll still probably hold it up to your ear.

The Times reports that Google hopes to have a working application ready within the next few years. The idea is that your phone would be able to conduct real-time translation for you. So you could be visiting Japan, Hungary, or Iraq and communicate with the locals without taking all that time to actually learn the language and customs. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, anyone that has ever used Google Translate or Google Voice knows that machine-translation and speech to text systems are still prone to errors. You often get clunky sentences that include nonsense words. So I'm not really all that hopeful that cellphones in 2012 will solve all of the world's communication problems. But we're certainly inching closer to the Babel Fish.

[via MobileCrunch]

On a recent Google Chrome post one of our commenters -- MoneyMike -- lamented the apparent passing of one of Chrome's popular UI features in recent nightly builds: pinned tabs.

I, too, noticed the change recently and wondered what was going on. There's been plenty of discussion amongst Chrome developers, and it boils down to an evolutionary step for Chrome and the introduction of app tabs. The arrival of phantom tabs recently is also part of the change.

To clear the air, I pinged Google's Eitan Bencuya to see if he could shed any light on the situation. Here's his response:

"As you know, all of these features are still pretty experimental (they're not even in the dev channel yet) and we're trying out different approaches to see what works. In this case this is part of a larger set of tweaks we are making related to extensions but we haven't yet fleshed out all the details of app tabs specifically."

Right now, changes to the tab strip are a moving target. Developers are also working hard at tweaks for the almost-certainly-coming tablet version of Google Chrome, and the extension API is still evolving as well.

Ultimately, while this kind of change might be frustrating to us it's all part of the thrill of using experimental software. Yes, it comes at the expense of perhaps watching a feature you like fall by the wayside, but you still get to play around with all functionality users of the stable version may never see.

Apparently "Android" is a four-letter word in Cupertino. The flash card app Flash of Genius was a finalist in Google's Android Developer Challenge, and the developers thought that was worth mentioning in the description of the iPhone version of their app. Apple didn't agree, and sent the developers an email asking them to remove the Android line from their app description, under threat of an "interruption" in Flash of Genius' availability on the app store.

I like Apple, but does anyone else think this seems a bit like a movie gangster cliché? It's just shy of showing up in a dark pinstripe suit, carrying a baseball bat and saying "It would be a shame if anything happened to your ... availability in the app store." There's no official ban on mentioning Android, as far as we know, so the email said that the description "contains inappropriate or irrelevant information." Apple mentioned the Android award specifically, though, without referring to Flash of Genius' other boasts about mentions in books and newspapers.

What's the deal, Apple? Is this a one-time fluke that deserves an apology, or are we going to see all Android mentions consistently removed in the future? For Flash of Genius' part, they're contacting Apple to find out if there's any acceptable way to mention their award without getting their app booted from the store.

[via Cult of Mac]

Google's user interface mockups and YouTube video were a hot topic the other day, and that buzz will likely continue until we finally see a tablet device emerge from Mountain View to accompany the Nexus One.

If the images and video weren't enough proof for you, changes are under way in the Chromium source code which certainly make it look like Google is getting serious about a new interface for Chrome OS on touchscreen tablets.

Coming soon to the Chromium nightly builds is an --enable-vertical-tabs command line switch. While the source note clearly states that this does nothing other than toggle a preference right now, there's every reason to believe that it will move the Chrome tabstrip from the top of your browser window to the side -- as shown in one of Google's tablet user experience slides.

It's a starting point -- though I'm more interested to see how the tab switching interface shapes up.

Your world is about to be rocked.

If you're not a hardened, tinfoil hat-wearing the-apocalypse-is-nigh conspiracy theorist, you soon will be. Wired has just published a stunning article detailing a really scary report from computer forensic firm Mandiant. The story brings to light some disturbing truths about the always-connected, always-on world we live in.

As an Internet nerd, I actually found the details numbly humbling. It made me think about a silent war, a cold war that is warming the ground we walk and air we breath -- but has not yet bubbled forth to be joined in the field of war. Reading Wired's story and thinking about the depth and detail and concerted effort required to pull off such a hack scares me.

You should read the full article for complete details, but here's a quick breakdown of the attacks employed against targets such as Google, U.S. oil companies, defense contractors and counter-terrorism departments:

• A new form of attack is being leveraged by hackers, called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) -- think of APT as a 'ticking bomb', an apparently-benign piece of software that can be turned on at any time. These APTs can avoid detection and remain dormant for months or years, only turning on when the 'coast is clear'. In this most recent case, an unpatched zero-day attack on Internet Explorer 6 was the entry point.
• These attacks are theft-oriented -- the sole purpose behind these APT attacks are to get at sensitive data: email, Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets, etc. Corporate secrets, counter-intelligence, you name it.

YouTube began testing the waters with a movie rental service late last month. Starting small, they offered a collection of five films from the Sundance Film Festival. The movies were offered for ten days to see how users would respond to a paid movie rental service.

Charging only $3.99, the films picked up 2,684 views and pulled in only $10,709 total. While the "big guys" in the movie rental business such as NetFlix, Apple and Amazon are certainly not intimidated by such a paltry sum, YouTube says it's happy with the outcome of the test. According to Google, the results "exceeded our expectations given all the barriers" and it looks like we can expect a larger movie rental presence from YouTube in the future.

While nothing is finalized, YouTube says it will be pulling in new video partners and start offering rentals on various sections of their website on a short-term basis. It'll be interesting to see how they fares up against larger companies if their rental service grows.

[via NYTimes.com]

You'd think Google would have had this search thing down by now, but the search functionality within Gmail lacked some much needed (and requested) features. A recent addition to Gmail Labs hopes to fix this and make searching within mail much, much better.

In April, Google announced that you could search the web from Gmail without leaving the page. You could even add the search results you find to a message. The feature was a great addition to the Lab and made life much easier than switching browser windows to find results. The changes made recently add some awesome features such as dictionary definitions, spelling correction, news, weather and even local results.

Google search within Gmail is now also accessible via a icon from the compose window. I never thought I'd need a feature like this, but it's come in handy quite a few times. Even for quick functions like definitions, it's certainly an improvement. If you haven't already, head on over to Gmail to get searching.

Good news, Nexus One users! Owners of Google's flagship Android phone are getting an over-the-air software update today (it may already be installed on your phone) that includes a new version of Google Maps, a fix for some of the phone's 3G problems, and ... multitouch support! Eat your heart out, iPhone. Now Android users can pinch and zoom with the best of them in the browser, gallery, and Google Maps.

There's a demo video of the new touch gestures after the jump, but the Google Maps update is worth talking about, too. Your starred items and search history now sync from the web version of Google Maps, so you can check for directions before you leave the house, and then pop them up quickly on your phone once you're on the road. Google's augmented reality app, Google Goggles, is also part of this software update. Just open it up from All Apps, point your camera at something, and search.

[via Engadget]

Love it or hate it, Blogger was the tool that really brought blogging into the mainstream. Once upon a time, the only way to have your blog hosted on your own domain was to use Blogger as the content management system, but then have it use FTP to push HTML pages to your web host.

Fast forward to 2010, and it turns out that only half of one percent of Blogger's users are using Blogger's FTP upload ability, but maintaining that functionality is consuming considerably more than that percentage of Blogger's engineering resources. Worse, Google is dropping the infrastructure that Blogger uses to push out FTP updates, which would then require a complete rewrite of the code that handles Blogger's FTP processing.

So, Google has decided to drop FTP support from Blogger. Though the numbers clearly show that overall it's not that popular, I think some people still think Blogger's killer feature is the ability to FTP plain HTML files.

The one saving grace is that if you are currently hosting a site that is updated by Blogger with FTP, you're not going to lose anything except the ability to continue to update the site - if it's an old site, it will keep on keepin' on. That's the beauty of HTML files. If you are still actively blogging, however, you'll want to check out the new Blogger FTP blog they've set up to try to help migrate users to their custom domains solution.

If you read your news in feed form, you're likely familiar with Google Reader's "star" feature. You can click a star to save a story for later, and use your star list for quick reference. Google News has finally added something similar for those who read their news the old-fashioned way. Starring a story adds it to your "starred" menu, accessible via the sidebar, and causes any updates to appear in bold.

Users can only star 20 items at a time, which is a bit of a bummer, but it makes sense. Saving stories for posterity is what Google Reader is for. Google News is better-suited for following breaking headlines, and it's tough to follow more than 20 of those at once. It will be interested to see if Google builds more features around saving, organizing and sharing starred items on Google News, though.