After what seems like an eternity in closed private testing, Google is starting to send out beta invitations for Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral). The company also reportedly snagged about a million US phone numbers to use for the service, which lets users give out a single phone number that will ring all their phones and record, transcribe, and email voicemail messages.

Those new phone numbers will come in handy for new customers. But what if you're an existing user looking to change your number? I signed up for GrandCentral when I lived in Brooklyn and got myself a number with a 718 area code. Now I live in Philadelphia and feel silly giving out that number.

Now Google is offering users like me a chance to change our numbers. You'll have to pony up $10 for the change, but since most of Google Voice's features are free, that seems like a pretty reasonable price.

When you change numbers, all calls made to your old number will continue coming to your new number for 90 days.

[via TechCrunch]

When I was looking over my news feeds yesterday morning, I though I had spied some exciting news. A few sites were reporting about a new Delicious extension for Chrome. Some of them trumpeted its arrival as proof that Chrome extensions were real.

I found that statement a little odd, because AdSweep has been around since early April. Didn't that pretty much prove the "reality" of Chrome extensions?

To make things even less exciting, the Delicious extension is about as un-noteworthy as they come. If you've got the 'Bookmark on Delicious' bookmarklet in Chrome already, guess what? The extension does the exact same thing. All it does is create a Delicious icon at the end of your address bar instead of on your bookmark toolbar.

I don't know about you, but that's nothing to get worked up about. Google's three example extensions? Equally yawn-worthy.

Heck, I'm still waiting for integration with Google services. Anyone else wondering where the support for things like Google Bookmarks is? It is their browser, after all.

Don't get me wrong - I love Chrome's speed and minimal UI, but after this long I thought we'd see some much more interesting extensions. If you know one, please share it in the comments. I'd love to see it!

Google is rolling out a handful of changes to the way it handles labels in Gmail. First, labels are moving into the top left-side navigation area, right by your shortcuts for inbox, sent, starred, and other items. You can also choose to hide some labels while showing others.

Probably one of the biggest changes is that users will now be able to drag and drop messages into labels. In other words, you can sort your messages much the same way that you would add them to folders in almost any other webmail system.

Google is also removing the "right-side labels" feature from Gmail labs. The company says the new labels behavior makes it unnecessary. But try telling that to users who have gotten used to their labels hanging out in a sidebar on the right side of their screens.

The new features aren't showing up in my inbox yet, but Google has a way of rolling these kinds of changes out gradually to some groups of users before others. Have you noticed any changes to your Gmail interface? Let us know what you think in the comments.

It's been a while since we first looked at ToodleDo, an excellent web-based task manager. But as cool as ToodleDo is as standalone web page, it's the integration with other services like Google Calendar that make it a task manager like this really useful. Recently ToodleDo launched a gadget for Gmail that makes it easy to view, create, or sort your tasks from Gmail, which is a killer feature for anyone who leaves Gmail open all day as they go about their other tasks.

In order to use the ToodleDo Gmail gadget you'll need to enable the Gadgets feature in your Gmail Labs settings. Google also offers its own Tasks application which you can also view in the Gmail sidebar. But while you can easily create tasks from email messages with Google Tasks, you don't have as many options for sorting and filtering apps as you get with ToodleDo.

[via WebWorkerDaily]

If you have the ability to install software on your work computer, by far the easiest way to move files back and forth between your home and work computer would be a file synchronizing product like DropBox. But if you don't, what's the best way to move a relatively large file between two remote computers? For small files, email is usually the answer, and for users of Gmail that expands to files of up to 25 MB in size. But with what can often be a big catch: Gmail won't allow you to transfer executable files, even if they are inside a zip archive.

However, if you're simply wanting to move a file between computers, you can exploit the fact that Gmail doesn't actually scan a file to see if it is an executable until you actually try to send the email containing the file. This means that you are free to attach any file up to 25 MB in size to an email in Gmail, as long as you don't send it. You can then log into your Gmail on another computer, and download the attached file, without ever running into the executable file restriction.

Of course, the other easy way around Gmail's limitation is to change the file extension of the file you are sending. If you have an executable file inside a Zip archive, and you change the archive's file extension from .zip to .zzz, for example, Gmail doesn't know what a .zzz file is and does not scan it. Voila, you can now easily send executable files through Gmail.

Google is beginning to send out invites to people who signed up to try Google Voice. The service is still in private beta, but this is the first time new users will be able to gain access to the service since Google purchased the technology from GrandCentral. Up until now, only former GrandCentral users have been able to use Google Voice.

Google Voice allows users to route all of their phone calls through a central phone number. For instance, if you have a home phone, cellphone, and work number, you can link them all to Google Voice and just give out a single number to your contacts. When they call your Google Voice number, all of your phones will ring. You can also use the service to check your voicemail online, transcribe voicemails and forward them to your email account, screen calls, or perform a whole slew of other nifty features.

As part of the wider launch, Google will begin sending out invites to users who signed up to request them. New users will be able to choose a new phone number, hopefully in a local area code. Google also has a new tool that will let you try to snag a phone number that matches a word or phrase (see the image above for an example).

If you haven't already requested an invite yet, Google is still accepting requests.

Google wants to help you become a Gmail ninja, and has created a site called Gmail Tips for the purpose. What is a Gmail ninja? It's someone who knows all the ins and outs of the productivity tools that Gmail offers, and can process their email very quickly and efficiently.

Rather than just asking Gmail's team for a list of all of the features Gmail has, the Google Tips page is made up of tips from Google employees working in all different parts of the company. It's a hit list of the best email productivity ideas from the bright minds at Google.

The page is divided up into four sections: White belt, Green belt, Black belt, and Gmail master. Each of these sections describes a level of productivity tip, White belt being the most basic, and Gmail master being the guru-level tips.

Helpfully, the Gmail Tips page also includes a handy printable PDF that gives you one double-sided page full of all of the tips listed on the page.

Now, to be fair, none of the tips are going to be much of a surprise to heavy Gmail users, even the Gmail master level tips. But it's a great resource to point friends and co-workers to if they are struggling to really get the most out of Gmail, or if you're looking for a way to convince someone that Gmail is probably a better solution for them than what they are currently using.

Sometimes developers hit the nail on the head when they name their applications. Make A Celebrity Odd is a pretty much perfect name for what the service does. The entire capability of this site is to take a celebrity's name, look up a headshot of them, and make it look weird by applying a mirror-type effect similar to one of the ones you might use in Photo Booth on a Mac.

The fun of it is that it seems to be able to consistently find head shot photos, and this is done through Microsoft's new Bing search engine's API. According to the site, this API offers a unique way to restrict photos found to just faces without showing shoulders, while Google can return faces but there is no ability to get specific about whether or not shoulders are shown. Interestingly, the site falls back to Google if not enough results are found on Bing, which is probably a wise choice. The example image on this post clearly must have come through the fallback Google search.

I wasn't sure what the copyright issues would be with a service like Make A Celebrity Odd, but given that everything on this site is done on the client-side via JavaScript, there may not be any. This is arguably no different than if I were to grab a photo of a celebrity online and put it in Photoshop, then manipulate it for my own entertainment.

Except, of course, that this is a web service that appears to display modified images that likely have copyrights on them.

So, what do you think? Aside from being a fun little time waster for a few minutes, is this site a legitimate use of search results? Do you think Make A Celebrity Odd is on shaky legal ground?

While it's not active in Chrome yet, Google is playing with a new concept for the browser's new tab page in the latest builds of Chromium.

The number of thumbnails on the page has been reduced to eight and two optional elements have been added. They are the recent activities list, which displays your last three visited pages and downloaded files and suggestions. While it currently reads "What Will We Put Here?" it's safe to assume that this would include recommendations Google makes based on your browsing history.

What's missing? The column that contained recent bookmarks, history search, and recently closed tabs/windows.

Rearranging your thumbnails has also been simplified. You no longer have to enter editing mode, just drag, pin, and remove items to your heart's content. Accidentally delete something? You'll be prompted to undo removals just in case. You can also switch from thumbnail to a two-column list / favicon view.

To try the new page out, you'll need to download the buildbot's latest version of Chromium. Once you've got it installed, add --new-new-tab-page to the target in your shortcut properties. The same switch in the Chrome dev channel build yields a different (and much less pleasant) result: two rows of four thumbnails and a lengthy history list below.

Video after the break!

[via Google OS]

Google's blogging service, Blogger is turning 10 in August. Google published a list of fun facts about Blogger today, including the fact that 2/3rds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America, the most popular sport for bloggers using the service is soccer, and at any given minute, 270,000 words are written on Blogger.

But while Google provides users with tools to publish Adsense ads on Blogspot sites (which can certainly help the company raise a fair bit of cash from all of those words), Google doesn't require users to post ads. And that means some users are basically using the service for free without generating any real revenue for Google.

Now Google Operating System reports that Google appears to be experimenting with another revenue generating opportunity. It's starting to place ads on the page that pops up when bloggers publish a post. These ads will never be seen by the readers of your blog, but there's a chance that some bloggers may click on contextual ads related to the articles they've been writing.

I tried writing a couple of test posts on several sites I've created using Blogger, but I didn't see any ads. If you use Blogger and have started noticing ads in the admin interface, let us know in the comments. It seems like a small price to pay for using a service that lets you host and update a blog for free. But I could certainly see it annoying some long-time users.

Google's contact manager for Gmail has left a lot to be desired for a long time. For once thing, up until recently it didn't have fields for birth dates, web sites, or other information that might be stored in your other address books. But today Google added support for birthday and website information.

Now when you import contacts in CSV format from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, or Yahoo, or vCard format from OS X address book, the additional information should be copied over correctly. Google added these features to its standalone contact manager a while back, but the integration with Gmail is a welcome addition.

Of course, if you've already imported a few thousand contacts from your Outlook Address book, you're out of luck unless you want to delete all of your Gmail contacts and start again from scratch.

Android users can now search Google Maps using voice commands, and access Google Transit info from their mobile devices. To use the voice seach, just speak an address or a search term while you're using Google Maps for Android. Google says it currently understands American, Australian and British accents. They've also added store hours, prices, ratings and reviews to their results.

Google Maps for Android also now includes transit and walking directions for over 250 cities, just like Google Maps on the web does. Although it didn't make the headline of Google's blog post, the are also some improvements to Google Latitude, the new(ish) location-based service. You can now make Latitude update your location continuously as long as your phone is on, and use the new "Updates" feature to leave location-specific comments about the places you go.

There's some speculation over at the Google Operating System that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will work a lot like Google Blog Search does now. gOS found some text on one of Google's help pages describing the format for a microblog search: entering "recent updates about" in front of a search term will search miroblogging services -- Twitter being the most important of the bunch -- for that term.

This hasn't been implemented yet, but the text that gOS found seems to suggest that it will be. Under the heading "recent updates about QUERY," they found this description: "This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format." This is all the evidence we have to go on so far, and it indicates nothing about which non-Twitter services will be included and what a possible Google MicroBlogsearch results page would look like.

Late last year, Google added the ability to customize search results by promoting or removing items. These "SearchWiki" features also let you share, comment on, and add results to a page. Although the promote and remove buttons appear next to every site in a Google search, most of us either ignore them or are a bit annoyed by them. If you're one of those people, you'll be glad to know there's now an item in Google preferences to turn off SearchWiki with one click.

To do it, just go to http://www.google.com/preferences, or click the preferences link on Google.com, and check "Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment or add your own results." One click, no more arrows and X's next to every search result. If this is the first you're hearing of SearchWiki, check out our original post about it before you decide whether to turn it off.

[via Lifehacker]

Google's automated translation service, Google Translate, is one of the most popular language tools on the web, but Google has other ambitions in the translation field. The recently-launched Translator Toolkit is aimed at helping people create better translations of web pages, Wikipedia articles and Google Knol articles. These improved translations feed back into Google Translate, making it more accurate for everyday users.

If you're a translator, you can upload a file or enter a URL, and use the Translation Toolkit to improve on Google's automated translation results. Available tools include dictionaries and previously-saved user translations. Once you're done working on your translation, you can download it, or - for Wikipedia and Knol articles - publish it back to the source page.