Googlified

Google added a new feature to Gmail Chats recently that allows users to change their presence status to “invisible”. When you set your presence status to Invisible, you will be appear as Offline to your contacts but you will still be able to chat with the people you want to chat with.

(At least that’s how it should work, although it never seem to work for me. Whenever I set my status to Invisible, my contacts will still be able to see me and be like, “No, you are ONLINE!”)

If you are using Gmail Chat and a desktop IM client at the same time, you will probably see a warning message when switching to Invisible: “Oops! You are not invisible because you’re also using desktop software that doesn’t support invisibility, such as Google Talk.”

I remember I poked fun at Harry Potter’s invisible cloak last week, can’t remember what it was though. Lulz.

[photo by Phoebe Epstein, used under a CC-license; via Google Blogoscoped forum]

Blogger Buzz today announced that bloggers* can now sign up for GrandCentral - a web-based voice communications platform Google acquired last year - without going through all the hassles of requesting for an invitation. To directly sign up for this service (still in beta), just go to this Blogger Invite page on GrandCentral and register your number.

The service is currently for U.S. users only, or at least, you will need a U.S. phone number to activate it.

GrandCentral is like super awesome because my friends can call me & leave me messages without my phone ringing. Hearing phones ring make my head asplodes.

* I think that anyone can register, not just bloggers. However, they ARE targeting bloggers at this point.

The Google Maps team today released a new API today that doesn’t require scripting. Basically you just have to create a parameterized URL according to the documentation, (or simply copy & paste the URL you created using the wizard), then copy & paste the URL in a HTML <img> tag and off you go. :)

There’s a query limit of “1000 unique image requests per user per day” and a size limit of 512×512 pixels. I created something similar like over a year ago that doesn’t have the query limit (I think) and the size limit is 2000*2000 pixels - about 15x of the official one, but the downside is it doesn’t offer all those fancy markers.

I don’t think it will be that hard to overcome the official limits, by either using CSS or server-side (or whatever you think is a better approach) to combine several images together.

Google recently created a My Maps application that matches Wikipedia articles with places on Google Maps, and shows summary of the Wikipedia in Google Maps. It seems like Google just pulling data out from Wikipedia (or maybe used one of Wikipedia’s database dumps). Similar wiki-mapping services such as Wikimapia and Placeopedia has been around for quite bit of time, but they are more like manually add/edit (the locations & info).

Blogger in Draft recently released two new features, Blog List and Scheduled Posts.

Blog List is a bit more than an ordinary blog roll you see on most blogs. Not only that it can display “a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon,” but it can also “show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post” if the blog you link to has a RSS or Atom feed. You can find this under Add a New Element in Layout.

Another new feature, Scheduled Posts, lets Blogger users to schedule when to publish a saved post in a set future time (that’s before Dec. 31, 9999).

Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.

I played with this feature a little bit and found two minor problems: 1) they only display the year in two digits, which is not a really huge deal today but it could be a bit confusing sometimes (see above, one is 1999 and the other is 2099) and, 2) sort of related to number 1, when you enter the scheduled date, the year is in two digits. If I am to enter “99″ it’s set to 1999, but if I enter “08″ it will be 2008. A date chooser will probably help, a lot.

Y2K called, they want their bugs back. :)

Google is all out today to celebrate Valentine’s Day - the special holiday for your special someone.

Valentine’s Day or Saint Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14. In North America and Europe, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine’s cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery. [Wikipedia]

Other than the logo shown above, Google also changed Google Docs’ theme to pink, matching the holiday’s color, and that the little person in Google Maps is now standing on a heart-shaped thing instead of the green, bubble-shaped thing - too bad, still alone.

And the YouTube logo.

I still prefer to call it Singles Awareness Day, or perhaps, even simpler, February 14th or  the 45th day of the year. :)

I poked around YouTube for a little bit today and I found this image in YouTube’s (way too huge) CSS file. The image contains YouTube’s Valentine’s Day logo and a set of buttons & icons used on the site. Among the set of icons are the newly added icons for iTunes and Amazon MP3 (comparing to the previous version of the image).

But what are they for? I attempted to look for answers in the CSS file, but can’t find anything useful. My best guess is that YouTube’s partnering up with musicians/music studios to put those buttons on the YouTube pages that are featuring the musicians/music studios’ music video, and link those buttons to iTunes Store and/or Amazon MP3 so the viewers can buy the songs.

IFPI’s “Digital Music Report 2007” says that “digital sales … account for around 10% of the music market” in 2006, “an estimated [of] US$2 billion.” Hmm, maybe YouTube’s trying to step into the music market (one step at a time) and get a share of that multi-billion market. :)

I have been saying that Google should hold a Doodle4Google contest in the U.S. since the Jurassic age, and now, haha, there’s finally one. :)

Doodle 4 Google gives U.S. students in grades K-12 the opportunity to design a doodle for the Google homepage. Students will be asked to draw a doodle that best represents the theme “What if…?”

Like previous Doodle4Google contests, winner of this competition will have his/her logo on the Google homepage for one day (in the U.S.). Also, the winner’s school will “receive a $10,000 college scholarship and a technology grant for his or her school.” (Question: What’s the arrangement if the student is home schooled?)

You can find out more about the contest on the Doodle4Google website here.

We already know that Google has a history Lego obsession. And recently, blogger Keso received this neat Google branded Lego calendar from Google China. Now, yes, it’s kawaii, but would seriously be pain in the neck when you have to remodel it at the beginning of the month - every month. :)

[photo by keso, used under a CC-license]

The Google Maps team today added 12 more cities to Google Maps’ Street View, bringing the total number of cities to, ehh, one, two, three … 30! The new cities are:

• Albany/Schenectady, NY
• Boise, ID
• Juneau, AK
• Kansas City, MO
• Manchester, NH
• Milwaukee, WI
• Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC
• San Antonio, TX
• Salt Lake City, UT

I was so expecting to see Columbus up there this time, and now they let me down, once again.

In a related news, you can now view embedded Google Maps/Street View in Google Reader. I find that really annoying actually. Yeah, it’s nice to access more multimedia right from Google Reader, but it FRIES up the little fox, like every single time.

Maybe it’s time for an upgrade. :)

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?

Wired blog Epicenter reports that Google may have bought online address book service Plaxo for around $200 million. From Plaxo’s About Page,

Plaxo provides a free service that securely updates and maintains the information in your address book. Plaxo is the universal digital assistant; available to you wherever and whenever you need it to keep you organized, on top of your life and in touch with those you care about.

Plaxo claimed to have 15 million registered users (as of September 2006), and like Google, the company is based in Mountain View, California. A partner of Google on OpenSocial, Plaxo has a service called Plaxo Pulse which “enables sharing of content from multiple different sources across the social web, including blogs, photos, social networking services, rating services, and others.” [Wikipedia] (Like FriendFeed)

They recently launched a service called Public Profiles employing Google’s Social Graph API.