Googlified

Google Earth 4.3 was released two days ago on the 15th. The new version includes many updates and new features like Google Street View, new navigation controls, sunlight mode and a lot more. I guess I will let the pro from the GEarthBlog do the speaking.

The thing about Google Earth is that it doesn’t give me as much excitements now as it once did when it first launched in 2005.

In other news, Google announced SketchUp 3D Basecamp 2008 to gather SketchUp enthusiasts for “three days of SketchUp learning, sharing and fun” during June 11th to the 13th. Also, Earth Day 2008 is next Tuesday, on April 22nd.

Google gave out notebooks like the one above at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in Taiwan that was held this weekend. You can see different images (the Earth zooming in and out, and Googleplex) by tilting the notebook at different angles. These things never get old - at least for me. :)

[video by icools, used under a CC-license]

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

Last year, the Sky feature was added to Google Earth, and now, like Google Maps, the Sky data are now accessible via a web browser, with the launch of Google Sky.

You can search for planets, listen to Earth & Sky podcasts, watch some beautiful Hubble telescope images, or explore historical maps of the sky from the comfort of your browser. [Official Google Blog]

The site is really slow on this end of the tube (or bad programming?) and a lot of images aren’t loading. I wonder if this is a response to Microsoft’s announcement of the WorldWide Telescope [pic].

In June 28, 2005, Google launched Google Earth. Two and a half years later, this “satellite imagery-based mapping” software is now available in 13 different languages and has been downloaded for over 350 million times, according to the Google LatLong Blog.

In a related news, Google today launched a new SketchUp contest called the “Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition“. As the name of the contest suggests, the contest requires you to model your college campus. Winners of the contest will receive “an Apple iPod Touch, a Nintendo Wii Console, and a Google t-shirt and hat” as prize.

Yo, a Wii and an iPod Touch, what are you waiting for?

You are not supposed to see this video until the December 24, but I am going to let you have some fun (a bit boring I have to say and yeah, I watched the whole thing) tracking Santa on Google Earth with NORAD before it start! :) Of course, I don’t want to be the person to spoil your Christmas fun, so don’t click the play button if you want to wait till the 24th and watch that on Google Maps/Earth. [Watch the video on Googlified]

Google today released a new version of Google Earth. The latest version includes a new “Weather” layer showing constantly updated weather information like the clouds and radar images overlaying the map (the post on the Google LatLong Blog mentioned that there’s a “Conditions and Forecasts” but I can’t find it. Hmm, I didn’t really try). The imageries of clouds and radar are provided by the Naval Research Laboratory and Weather Channel, respectively.

To enable the layer just check the box next to Weather under “Layers” on your sidebar. Remember that you have to upgrade to the latest version to use the new feature, so if you can’t find it, upgrade to the latest version.

You can download and watch the animation of the last 24 hours of clouds data or the last 6 hours of radar data in the Information layer. It’s pretty cool, but takes ages to load on my antiquated computer (or maybe because I was download the latest episode of Chaser’s War).

I hardly watches the weather report (or check on the weather), so hmm, certainly not for me - putting aside that I don’t know how to interpret the Dopplr radar and clouds imageries. Oh well, Google hopes that “this new feature will be useful to picnic-planners and weather buffs alike!” Hehe, I don’t go picnic either.

[thanks Kate Hurowitz of the Google Earth team]

A while ago YouTube started letting users to geotag their videos. Now, Google Earth has a special layer that allows users to watch YouTube video. To use enable the this layer, just check the “YouTube” option under the Featured Content folder, and you will see the YouTube icons show up when you zoom into a particular location.

Great way to stalk those kids on YouTube, well done Google. :-/

Arizona State University is running a survey asking whether its students would like to test-drive and provide feedback for an “exciting project” by “a major internet company”. Some of the questions kinda revealed that company to be Google (”Do you have a Gmail account?” and “Are you willing to sign a [NDA]?” - a common practice of Google) and this project is likely to be a 3D social network, like Second Life, as many speculated.

I don’t know, it sounds a little creepy to me.

[screenshots by it5five, via Google Blogoscoped]

Fire up your Google Earth (latest version), then press Ctrl + Alt + A for PCs or Cmd + Option + A if you are on a Mac and have fun. :)

WARNING: You may experience nausea, vomiting, headache and blah blah. I wish I have not played with that. (as you can probably tell from the screen shot - 2 seconds before crashing)

note: I am trying to keep this post short because 1) everyone’s talking about it 2) this guy complains about “everyone blogs about the same thing“.

[via Marco's Blog <-Google Operating System]

The new version of Google Earth has added a new feature - Sky - that lets Google Earth users to explore the sky and beyond. To use the Sky feature, you will just need to click on the button on the Google Earth Toolbar and it will change to the Sky mode where you can navigate through the stars the same way you navigate through your neighborhood on Google Earth.

These images were provided by Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Digital Sky Survey Consortium, and NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, as listed on the Partner page.

The search for UFOs is on!

UPDATE: OgleEarth has more on the new Google Earth.

At the beginning of the year, Google announced the “Build Your Campus” competition that’s opened for college students in North America to build their own campus. Google’s LatLong Blog today announced the winners of this contest.

• University of Minnesota - Department of Architecture
  
• Purdue University - Departments of Computer Graphics Technology and Education
  
• Concordia University, Loyola Campus - Department of Civil Engineering
  
• Stanford University - Department of Architectural Design
  
• Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) - Departments of Engineering and Computer Science
  
• Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering - Department of Engineering
  
• Dartmouth College - Departments of Computer Science and Digital Art

The winning prize is a free 3-day visit to Googleplex. :)