Googlified

Both the Official Google Blog and the Official Google Docs Blog announced that they have started rolling out offline Google Docs to “a small percentage of users” and all users should have it in the “next few weeks”. In the short video above, Google Docs product manager Ken Norton briefly demonstrates how Google Docs offline works.

As I (and many others) have predicted, the offline function is backed by Google Gears - “an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.” The only other Google online application that uses Gears right now is Google Reader, but Google Calendar will soon follow, and possibly Gmail as well.

When editing documents offline, the documents will saved locally on your computer, and once you get back online again, the local copy will update the online version by syncing the the copy on your computer to Google Docs.

It’s still a few hours away from April 1st here in the U.S., so I don’t think this is the annual Google April Fool’s prank. :)

This is what happened - someone typed “Google” into Google at Google (New York), caused a worldwide Internet outage. As you can see in the above photo, you can’t even access Google at Google (New York).

“It’s not a laughing matter, you can break the Internet.” #

[photo by Simon Law, used under a CC-license]

If you are in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, the UK, or the US right now, don’t be surprise when you see the home page of Google went dark today, because they are promoting Earth Hour, an effort to “raise awareness of worldwide energy conservation.”

Google invite you (and everyone) to join other people worldwide to turn off your lights “for one hour - from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in [your] local time zone.”

Google had a history of promoting events like this: San Francisco and a couple of German-speaking countries last year, and in Israel a few days ago.

UPDATE: Added Google Ireland. [thanks Tom!]

The following post is totally unrelated to Google, but I think I should show some appreciation to the folks at Automattic who developed the Akismet service (and the great WordPress, despite that I am not very satisfied with, but still great), which had caught over 200,000 spam comments on this blog since I installed it in the late 2006. (200K is about 0.0038% of all spam Akismet ever caught)

The above line chart shows the amount of spam comments accumulated over time. Well, thank you Akismet!

A little bit behind on this one, but for those who haven’t noticed yet, Google Docs‘ document editor now has a new menu, bridging the gap between the online word processor and Microsoft Word, one little step at a time.

The above diagram from Google Blogoscoped shows that the menu of the document editor’s menu over time, since the time of Writely (before relaunching as Google Docs). As you can see, it ran a whole circle for one and a half years and pretty much back to where it started, except that it changed from yellow-green/olive to blue.

Also, you can now apply color to the name of your folders, like in Google Calendar and Gmail, and transfer ownership of documents with people that have the same domain in the email address (i.e. a@example.com can transfer document to b@example.com but cannot transfer to c@domain.com).

UPDATE: Forgot to add that Google Docs is now available in 48 languages.

Blogger Anne Helmond got this t-shirt with “Google knows I blog for Google” on it, (along with another t-shirt that has her personal tag cloud,) which she described as her “best graduation presents ever“.

“Google knows I blog for Google” - whatever that means…

[photo by Anne Helmond, used under a CC-license]

Google Maps today added 13 more cities and a national park to Street View. The new cities are Albuquerque, Anchorage, Austin, Cleveland, Fairbanks, Little Rock, Madison, Nashville, Rockford, Richmond, Spokane, St. Petersburg, Tampa, and the Yosemite National Park. The Google LatLong Blog noted that they have expanded coverage in 6 of their existing cities.

Also, the Google Maps API now has support for Street View. I am sensing a series of games coming out soon based on the Street View API, but I would hate to wait 5 minutes for the Street View images to load (for the game). [ loading scene … 5% - approx. 2 hrs left ]

YouTube just released a new tool called YouTube Insight that let’s users to view “detailed statistics” of the videos that you uploaded. You can see statistics like the number of views per day, and break it down by regions. According to the Official Google Blog post, you can find the tool by “clicking under the ‘About this Video’ button under My Account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage My Videos.” (YouTube won’t let me log into the site right now because they are “performing site maintenance”.)

Sounds pretty cool and Analyticstic!

Googler Ario J. says, “[A]n engineer hands out mint vanilla and cayenne chocolate flavored ice cream that she made in her 20% time!”

I heard that “most people don’t even have a 5% project”, as Hans Cardinal, who claimed to be a ex-Googler, commented on a ValleyWag post titled, “Googlers vent: Working here sucks, too”. Maybe it really depends what project(s) the Googler’s working on (and the Googler’s position in the company).

[photo by Ario J., used under a CC-license]

Google Transit is now available for residents and visitors of Perth, the fourth largest city in Australia. Google Transit also made its way to France, in Maubeuge, a town with a little over 30,000 residents, and Białystok, the largest city in northeastern Poland.

Google Hungary has a special logo on their home page to honor musician Béla Bartók.

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and collector of folk music. He is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and was also one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, through his analytical study and ethnography of folk music. [Wikipedia]

This is the tenth doodle this month, including the Orkut logo for Easter I posted yesterday.

UPDATE: Turns out that there’s another doodle today, on Google Japan, celebrating the invention parametron by Dr. Eiichi Goto at the University of Tokyo in 1954. [via Google Blogoscoped]

A parametron is essentially a resonant circuit with a nonlinear reactive element which oscillates at half the driving frequency. The oscillation can be made to represent a binary digit by the choice between two stationary phases pi radians apart. [USPTO]

So this would be the 11th doodle this month, and sorry guys, I think I just created a rip in the space-time continuum by linking to a Google Blogoscoped post that has a link to this blog. :)

[via the Google Blogoscoped forum]

Mihai Parparita, a developer at Google (mostly on Google Reader) and author of many cool things that you have heard of or used, released a Python program today called Mail Trends that “let’s you analyze and visualize your email.” The program will generate a page like the Trends page in Google Reader or that in Search History, with information such as the trend of the email’s incoming/outgoing traffics and “Top people that I send mail to”.

The program is currently for Gmail only, but it has plans to offer support for other email services (with IMAP). It should take only a few minutes to generate the Mail Trends page, but that really depends on how many emails you have (as well as your computer).

On a related note, Web History Trends haven’t been updated for almost 3 weeks.