Google Toolbar 7

Today Google is bringing the speed of Google Instant to the latest version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, with a fresh, clean look that personalizes Toolbar with the tools you use most.

Toolbar Instant
If you’ve used Instant on google.com or in Chrome, you’ll be right at home with Toolbar Instant. Just start typing in the search box and search predictions and results will appear instantly as you type, getting you the results you want faster.



You can also type Alt+G to get to the Toolbar search box more quickly.

To enable Toolbar Instant, visit Toolbar Options and click “Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing.” Toolbar Instant works on IE8 and IE9; if you’re on an older browser, you can either upgrade your Internet Explorer version or try Instant in Chrome, which includes many of the same tools you’re familiar with in Toolbar.


Personalized Toolbar
This new version of Toolbar is simpler, cleaner and emphasizes what’s important to you. The tools that you use most will remain visible on the toolbar, while buttons that you haven’t used recently will be moved to the new “More” button.

From Pawgang's news

As you discover and use particular tools that help your browsing experience, like Share or Translate, they’ll automatically appear on the toolbar, making your most relevant tools easy to access. This personalization is stored only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google unless your usage statistics are enabled. You can learn more about this personalization at the Help Center.


Making Toolbar work for you
Some Google Toolbar features, such as PageRank and spell check, require sharing some information with Google in order to function properly. With Google Toolbar 7, it is easier for you to control your privacy settings. From a single settings menu, you can decide which of these features you'd like to enable and which ones you'd like to stay off.

From Pawgang's news

Google also continued to improve the performance of Toolbar 7 without slowing down your browser, making it one of the fastest add-ons you can use in Internet Explorer.

Google Toolbar 7 is available in English on the download page and will be coming to other supported languages over the next week. If you’re already using Toolbar, you’ll automatically be updated to the new version over the next few weeks. You can also find out more about Toolbar on the features page.

source cited: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/google-toolbar-7cleaner-fresher-and.html

Google Doodle honoring Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin wasn’t just the greatest star of the silent film era; he also wrote, directed and produced more than 80 movies in a career that spanned decades and included such masterpieces as The Kid, The Gold Rush and Modern Times. He scored many of his pictures as well, and on at least one occasion served as an on-set hairdresser.

Chaplin is also one of my creative heroes. Despite being an art-obsessed high schooler preemptively bored by anything in black and white, I borrowed a VHS tape of Chaplin’s work from the library on a lark. It’s not an exaggeration to say watching it changed my life. I laughed, I cried—I cried from laughter. For the first time I realized the power of visual storytelling.

We sometimes tell small stories with Google’s logo, but for Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin’s 122nd birthday tomorrow, April 16, the Doodle team created something extra fun. For the next 36 hours the Google homepage will pay homage to Charlie Chaplin’s creative legacy with our first-ever live action video doodle.

The simple, silent short film stars the entire Doodle team (with fellow doodler Mike Dutton sporting that famous mustache, hat and eyeliner) and was shot on location in Niles, Calif., the setting of several of Chaplin’s early classics including The Tramp. Niles is also home to our advisers for this doodle, the ever-helpful Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

True pieces of art, Chaplin’s films still feel fresh today even though some of them are nearly a century old. We hope that our homage gets people talking about his work and the many virtues of silent film.



As a bonus, check out some of these fun behind-the-scenes shots:


source cited: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/lights-camera-doodle.html

Gmail customized with a background image of your own

Precustomized themes in Gmail are nice to give your inbox a more personalized look and to distinguish the gmail-accounts from each other in case you have more than one gmail.

The more recent option to create your own theme with the colors of your choice I loved even more.

Now it's possible to even add your own background image:

From Pawgang's news

how to?

go to the Themes tab in Settings and choose “Create your own theme.” There, you can select background images for the main area and the footer. You can pick from any of your Picasa images or upload a new one. It's fun, isn't it?

From Pawgang's news

source: Custom background image themes - Official Gmail Blog

Gmail Lets You Disable Auto-Adding Contacts

As previously announced, Gmail added a setting that lets you disable automatically saving email addresses to your contacts. Go to the Settings page, find the section "Create contacts for auto-complete" and you'll notice that the following option is enabled by default: "When I send a message to a new person, add them to Other Contacts so that I can auto-complete to them next time". Now you can disable this feature and select "I'll add contacts myself".



This is one of the features from a long changelog of small improvements. "Refresh" is now a button, the keyboard shortcuts guide is now available even if keyboard shortcuts are disabled (just press Shift+?), Gmail shows more useful warnings when you leave out the "." in ".com" from an email address and there are fewer warnings when you reply to a message in the Trash.

source cited: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/04/gmail-lets-you-disable-auto-adding.html

Comic Sans MS as standard font in Google Chrome

I always was a little bit unhappy, that it was a bit tricky to set Chrome to my preferred reading font "Comic Sans Ms":
goto:
Options > Under the Hood > Web Content > Customize Fonts...
and
at the page Fonts and Encoding set your standard font to Comic Sans MS
and this (on my laptop at least) didn't work out for all pages with a standard font set by the page itself...

BUT a few days ago I stumbled upon this:

Comic Sans for Everyone

"""Here at Google, the Webmaster Team is always running experiments and conducting research to improve user experience and increase conversion rates across our websites.

Following some rigorous user testing of 41 different fonts, investigating how each affected user experience, we discovered one font consistently outperformed all others when it comes to user satisfaction, level of engagement, understanding web content, productivity, click-through rates and conversion rates: Comic Sans.

We’ll therefore be rolling out Comic Sans as our default font across all Google products on April 4, 2011.

For today only, we’re inviting a limited number of lucky Google users to take part in our Google Labs Trusted Tester Beta Preview Sandbox program. To participate, follow these easy steps:

• If you haven’t done already, install Google Chrome.
• Open Google Chrome and install the “Comic Sans for Everyone” extension from the Chrome Web Store.
• Your account will be automatically activated once the extension is installed, allowing you to browse the entire World Wide Web using Comic Sans. In the extremely unlikely event that you decide to opt-out of the preview, you can simply disable or uninstall the extension by visiting your Extensions page.

For the latest news and updates, be sure to follow @GoogleWebTeam on Twitter.""""

worked like a charm and now I'm happy :-)

Chrome Bookmarks Integrate with Google Search

ever wondered, how to search your Chrome-Bookmarks with Google-Search?

it's possible now:
goto https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ and search from there and YES your Chrome Bookmarks are included in the search's results!

and that's the blogpost telling about this new option:

=======================================

Until recently, Google Bookmarks and Chrome Bookmarks were two separate features that didn't speak the same language. Even if you could save your Chrome bookmarks to a Google account, they weren't saved to Google Bookmarks. For some reason, your bookmarks are available in a special Google Docs folder.

Chrome bookmarks have a web interface, but it's likely that the obvious will happen: Chrome bookmarks could be saved to Google Bookmarks. Jérôme Flipo noticed that the Google Bookmarks OneBox already includes Chrome bookmarks. I've tried to find SmallNetBuilder.com and Google's OneBox returned it even if it was starred in Chrome, not in Google Bookmarks.







Related Links by Google
New Chrome Logo
Google Toolbar 8, Powered by Google Chrome
What's New in Chrome 10?
7 Chrome Annoyances and How to Fix Them

source cited: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/03/chrome-bookmarks-integrate-with-google.html

Google search now supports Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ)

source: Official Google Blog 

With the help of Cherokee Nation staff and community members, we’ve added Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ) as an interface language on Google, making a small contribution towards preserving one of the world’s endangered languages.

You can now select Cherokee as your default from the Language Tools page (available from the right of the search box), and the entire Google interface will transform into Cherokee:

We’ve also included an on-screen Cherokee keyboard on the search page through the Google Virtual Keyboard API. This makes it easier for people to search web content in Cherokee without a physical Cherokee keyboard. To access the keyboard, simply click the icon at the right side of the search box.

Cherokee is an Iroquoian language spoken by the Cherokee people. The Cherokee syllabary writing system was developed by Sequoyah in the early 19th century. He realized the power of writing systems, and wanted his people to benefit from that power. Some of the 85 characters he developed for his syllabary were modified from his original handwritten script for a printing press in the 1820s, resulting in characters that resemble Latin and Greek letters. Despite the resemblance, they are pronounced differently. The modified script was quickly adapted for printing Cherokee newspapers, books and pamphlets. The adoption and use of the script enabled the Cherokee people to maintain their language and culture. Today, Cherokee is spoken mostly in the states of Oklahoma and North Carolina. (The Cherokee Nation is the sovereign operating government of the Cherokee people. It is a federally recognized tribe of more than 300,000 Cherokee citizens, with its capital located in Tahlequah, Okla. To learn more, please visit www.cherokee.org.)

We’re honored to have the opportunity to continue this tradition, and we’d like to thank the Cherokee Nation for working with us to translate the interface for Google search into Cherokee.

Search is now available in 146 interface languages—and the list is growing. If you speak an endangered language that you would like us to support, please sign up for Google in Your Language and submit community translations.

Update 10:26 AM: You can find the press release from the Cherokee Nation here.

Posted by ᏇᎩ (Craig Cornelius), Software Engineer, Internationalization

What’s new with Blogger

source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/whats-new-with-blogger.html

3/14/2011 09:22:00 AM

(Cross-posted from Blogger Buzz)

2010 was a big year for Blogger. We cemented ourselves as one of the largest blogging platforms and the sixth largest website in the world, according to Alexa. Blogger users published more than half a billion blog posts, which were read by more than 400 million active readers across the globe. We introduced template designer, real-time stats, comment spam filtering, mobile templates, web fonts and more. And to top it all off, we were dubbed the most reliable blogging service around.

2011 promises to be another exciting year.



To start, we’re kicking things off at SXSW by giving folks a sneak peek at our next-generation user interface. The new design is not only cleaner and more modern, but it also uses Google Web Toolkit, delivering the latest in web technology. 

Current post editor

↓

New post editor

Current dashboard

↓

New dashboard

We’ll also be showcasing our new content discovery feature that lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading. 

These are just a couple of new features we want to share with you. We look forward to unveiling more throughout 2011!

If you’re in Austin for SXSW, be sure to visit us at the Google booth—or come by and enjoy a drink with us tonight at our annual Blogger bash. 

Posted by Chang Kim, Product Manager, Blogger

Chrome 12 Will Drop Support for Google Gears

source: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/03/chrome-12-drops-support-for-google.html

While most Chrome users have been upgraded to Chrome 10, Google is fixing the bugs from Chrome 11 and working on Chrome 12. A recent Chromium build made a significant change: Gears is no longer included in Google Chrome.



Gears is a browser plugin released by Google back in 2007, The initial goal was to add support for offline web apps, but the plugin added many other HTML5 features at a time when HTML5 wasn't a priority for most browsers. Google discontinued Gears last year to focus on "bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5" and to implement them in Google Chrome. Features like geolocation, notifications, web workers, application caches are already available in Google Chrome, so it's probably the right time to stop bundling the Gears plugin.

"With all this now available in HTML5, it's finally time to say goodbye to Gears. There will be no new Gears releases, and newer browsers such as Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 will not be supported. We will also be removing Gears from Chrome in Chrome 12,"informs Google.

What's surprising is that important services like Gmail and Google Calendar still use Gears to work offline. Other services like Google Docs and Google Reader dropped offline support last year. Google promised that they will use HTML5 features implemented in browsers like Chrome or Firefox, but that hasn't materialized yet.





Related Links by Google
What's New in Chrome 10?
7 Chrome Annoyances and How to Fix Them
9 Things to Try in Google Chrome 9
Enable the Default Web Apps in Chrome 8

Posted by Alex Chitu at 3/12/2011 09:52:00 AM

Block Sites from Google's Results

source: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/03/block-sites-from-googles-results.html


You no longer have to use Google's Chrome extension to hide the results from certain domains. The feature is now available at google.com and the best thing is that the list of blocked sites is saved to your Google Account.

To try this feature, make sure that you are using google.com in English. Click on a search result, then go back to the list of results. You'll notice that there's a new link next to the result you've just clicked: "block all [domain.tld] results".



If you block an entire domain, you'll no longer see results from that site. You'll only notice a small box at the bottom of the search results page which informs you that you've blocked certain results.

There's also a page that lets you manage your blacklist and manually block sites. "Sites will be blocked only for you, but Google may use everyone's blocking information to improve the ranking of search results overall. You may block up to 500 sites."




As Barry Schwarz points out, blocking sites is not a novelty: in 2005, Google tested a similar option. "If you're in this experiment, you'll have newfound powers. Click the 'Remove result' link and with one click you can drop that url from your search results. By default, it will only block that url for that particular search. If you're really annoyed, you can click 'More options' and you'll get two more choices: block this url from all future searches and the ability to block the entire host from all future searches," explained Matt Cutts at that time. The experiment wasn't successful, but Google partially resurrected this feature in SearchWiki: you could only hide a search result for a specific query.

I think that blocking an entire site from Google's results is a feature that's way too powerful for a regular user. Some might use it accidentally and find that Google's results are suddenly less relevant. Google could add a link for explicit feedback ("Not useful?") and use that information to personalize search results.

Related Links by Google
Google Translate's Beatbox Easter Egg
Google Body Browser
Google Docs to Add Preview Pane, Music Player, Collections
Email Alerts for Google Scholar

Posted by Alex Chitu at 3/11/2011 10:35:00 AM

Hide sites to find more of what you want

source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html


Over the years we’ve experimented with a number of ways to help you personalize the results you find on Google, from SearchWiki to stars in search to location settings. Now there’s yet another way to find more of what you want on Google by blocking the sites you don’t want to see.

You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve clicked a result and it wasn’t quite what you were looking for. Many times you’ll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn’t quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it’s offensive, pornographic or of generally low quality. For times like these, you’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.”

As always, Matt’s been gracious enough to let us use him as an example. His site is awesome, though, and we doubt many people will want to block it!

Once you click the link to “Block all example.com results” you’ll get a confirmation message, as well as the option to undo your choice. You’ll see the link whether or not you’re signed in, but the domains you block are connected with your Google Account, so you’ll need to sign in before you can confirm a block.

Once you’ve blocked a domain, you won’t see it in your future search results. (Side note: Sometimes you may have to search on a new term, rather than simply refreshing your browser, before you'll notice the domain has been successfully removed.) The next time you’re searching and a blocked page would have appeared, you’ll see a message telling you results have been blocked, making it easy to manage your personal list of blocked sites. This message will appear at the top or bottom of the results page depending on the relevance of the blocked pages.

You can see a list of your blocked sites in a new settings page, which you can access by visiting your Search Settings or clicking on the “Manage blocked sites” link that appears when you block a domain. On the settings page you can find details about the sites you’ve blocked, block new sites, or unblock sites if you’ve changed your mind.

We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google. In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future. The new feature is rolling out today and tomorrow on google.com in English for people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+, and we’ll be expanding to new regions, languages and browsers soon. We hope you find it useful, and we’ll be listening closely to your suggestions.

Posted by Amay Champaneria and Beverly Yang, Search Quality Engineers

Gmail Smart Labels

from Google Operating System by Alex Chitu

Gmail Labs has a new feature for organizing your messages: Smart Labels. Many people create filters that label messages from mailing lists, newsletters, so Google decided to use artificial intelligence algorithms to categorize messages. Right now, there are only three smart labels: bulk (for newsletters), notifications (for confirmation messages, alerts) and forums (for mailing lists). By default, all the messages labeled as "bulk" are automatically archived, but you can change this setting.


"Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you'll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox," explains Google.

In fact, when you create a filter, Google shows an additional option: category. You can choose from: bulk, forums, notifications, personal, promotions. The first three categories already have corresponding smart labels and all the messages classified as "promotions" are labeled "bulk". The "personal" category includes the rest of your messages.


Google's categorization algorithms aren't perfect, so you may find messages that don't belong to one of three categories, but they're labeled as "notifications" or "bulk". Use the "labels" drop-down to remove the labels that are incorrectly added and help Google improve its algorithms.

Google Docs Brings Back Details View

from Google Operating System by Alex Chitu

The latest design refresh of the Google Docs homepage added many useful features, but also made some controversial changes. Google decided to hide useful information like the last modified date and the list of collaborators from the list view because it was available in the sidebar.

If you missed the old interface, you can now switch to the details view and see some additional information next to the filename.


There's also a small icon that lets you temporarily hide the sidebar. For some reason, Google Docs doesn't permanently hide the sidebar when you click on the arrows.

What's New in Chrome 10?

Google Chrome 10 is ready for primetime and it comes with a surprising number of new features. Here are some of them:

1. The Options dialog is now a web page that opens in a new tab. Chrome has one less modal dialog and the new Options page is better suited for netbooks. Another advantage is that each section of the Options page has a permalink that can be bookmarked.

Even if Chrome doesn't have too many customizable settings, there's a search box that lets you quickly find an option. Try searching for "cookies" and you'll notice that Chrome finds settings that aren't immediately obvious.


2. You can now change the default page zoom value. Go to the Options page and select "Under the hood" (or paste chrome://settings/advanced in the address bar) and change the "page zoom" value. The default value is 100%, but you can pick values like120% or 144%, which are useful if you want to connect your computer to a TV.

3. The same section of the Options page lets you change the minimum font size. Click "customize fonts" and choose one of the values that are available for the minimum font size.

4. Synchronize passwords and use them from any computer, as long as you can install Google Chrome. The new option is not enabled by default and it requires your confirmation before saving your passwords to your Google Account. There's even an extra security feature that lets you choose a custom encryption passphrase, so that your passwords are safe even if someone guesses your Google Account password. For advanced features and cross-browser functionality, try LastPass.


5. Reorder the apps from the new tab page using drag and drop. This option was available for the frequently visited pages and you can now use it to change the order of your favorite apps.


6. A new version of V8, Chrome's JavaScript engine, includes a better compilation infrastructure codenamed Crankshaft. "By using aggressive optimizations, Crankshaft dramatically improves the performance of compute-intensive JavaScript applications - often by more than a factor of two! This will give users a faster and more responsive experience loading web pages and applications built with complex JavaScript."

7. Chrome 10 comes with hardware acceleration for Web videos. "Traditionally, web browsers relied entirely on the CPU to render web page content. With capable GPUs becoming an integral part of even the smallest of devices and with rich media such as video and 3D graphics playing an increasingly important role to the web experience, attention has turned on finding ways to make more effective utilization of the underlying hardware to achieve better performance and power savings. There's clear indication that getting the GPU directly involved with compositing the contents of a web page can result in very significant speedups. The largest gains are to be had from eliminating unecessary (and very slow) copies of large data, especially copies from video memory to system memory. The most obvious candidates for such for such optimizations are the "video" element and the WebGL canvas, both of which can generate their results in areas of memory that that CPU doesn't have fast access to," explains Google.

Test GPU acceleration for videos at YouTube's HTML5 site. Adobe Flash 10.2 also added full GPU acceleration for videos and YouTube is one of the sites that support this feature, so you can compare Flash 10.2 videos and HTML5 videos to see which version uses less processing power.

8. Chrome 10 for Windows finally sandboxes the built-in Adobe Flash plugin. This is one of the reasons why Google decided to bundle the plugin with Chrome.

9. If you didn't like Gmail's notification feature because it didn't work when you closed Chrome, you'll find it much more useful when Gmail's app adds support for background pages, a feature that's now available in Chrome. "Apps and extensions that use the new background feature can continue to run in the background — even if the user closes down all of Chrome's windows. Background apps will continue to run until Chrome exits. The next time Chrome starts up, any background windows that were previously running will also be re-launched. These windows are not going to be visible but they will be able to perform tasks like checking for server-side changes and pre-emptively loading content into local storage," explains Google.

When you install the first app or extension that supports backgrounding (like this one), Chrome adds a new icon to the system tray (Windows and Linux) and a new entry in the context menu of the Chrome icon from the Dock (Mac). The new icon and context menu entry let you go to a background app, open the task manger or the options page.



10. Chrome disables certain outdated plugins by default and provides an option to update to the latest version. Popular software like Adobe Reader, Java or Apple QuickTime have many security vulnerabilities that are frequently exploited in the wild because users don't install the versions that fix these issues.

Related Links by Google

Gmail Opens PDF Attachments Using Chrome's Viewer
9 Things to Try in Google Chrome 9
Instant Search in Google Chrome
Google Chrome Canary Build

Speedier, simpler and safer: Chrome’s basics get even better

from Google Chrome Blog by Google Chrome Blog

Just three weeks ago, we kicked off the Year of the Rabbit with a speedy Chrome beta. Today, we’re excited to bring these speed improvements and more to everyone using Chrome. With today’s stable release, even your most complex web apps will run more quickly and responsively in the browser. (For the curious, this boost corresponds to a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance on the V8 benchmark suite.)

We realize that speed isn’t just about pure brawn in the browser—it’s also about saving time with simple interfaces. Chrome’s new settings interface will help you get to the right settings quickly so you don’t have to dig endlessly to find a way to import your bookmarks or change your browser’s homepage. We’ve added a search box that shows you the settings you’re looking for, as you type. On top of that, you can also copy and paste a direct link into Chrome’s address bar to jump to a specific settings page. (No more long, frustrating phone conversations with your dad on where to find that specific setting in the browser!) Here’s the new settings interface in action:



For those of you who save your passwords in the browser, you can now quickly log on to the websites you frequent even when you switch computers, by simply synchronizing those passwords across your computers. You can also encrypt those passwords with your own secret passphrase for extra security. To enable syncon each of your computers, visit the “Personal Stuff” section in Chrome’s settings (or just type “sync” in the settings search box). You can also choose to sync bookmarks, extensions, preferences, themes and more.

Finally, you’ll be even safer as you speed around the web, as we’ve extended Chrome’s sandboxing technology to the integrated Flash Player in Chrome. So if you’re using Windows Vista or newer versions, you’ll benefit from the additional layer of protection against malicious webpages. To learn more about sandboxing, check out this animated video:



We hope that Chrome’s speed, simplicity and security will continue to make your daily life on the web more enjoyable. You can download the browser at google.com/chrome, or if you’re already using Chrome, you’ll be automatically updated to this new version soon!

Posted by Tim Steele, Software Engineer

Google's New Snippets for Twitter Pages

from Google Operating System by Alex Chitu

Google tests a new feature that replaces the snippets for Twitter account pages with the most recent message and a small thumbnail. For some reason, Google doesn't show the most recent tweet from Lady Gaga despite being sent three days ago.



With the advent of rich snippets, Plus Boxes and real-time information that enhances snippets, Google tries to show even more useful information to help you decide if a result is relevant and to quickly answer the most obvious questions.

Picasa Web's New Homepage

Picasa Web's homepage has been redesigned to emphasize the photos recently uploaded by the people you're following. The homepage no longer displays all your albums, so you'll only be able to see the most recent 8 albums.

"This new design centers around photos that are interesting to you. We wanted to give you faster access to the newest photos from your family and friends along with some great photos from the talented Picasa community. When you log in to Picasa Web Albums, you will not only see your own albums, but albums that have been shared with you, the latest public albums from people you follow, and featured photos from the Picasa community right on your home page," explains Google's Ping Chen.


While "recent activity" has always been a section on the homepage, now you can no ignore it. YouTube's homepage has recently switched to a feed view, a stream of activities popularized by Facebook.

If you don't like the new homepage, bookmark this URL:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos or click "My Photos" when visiting the homepage.

Related Links by Google

Picasa - Google Operating System (Unofficial Google Blog)
Store More Photos and Videos in Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web's Multiple File Uploader
Picasa for Mac

Gmail back soon for everyone - Official Gmail Blog

Posted by Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar (24x7) 

Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon. 

I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centers? Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That’s what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue. 

To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds. 

So what caused this problem? We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email. When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.

As always, we’ll post a detailed incident report outlining what happened to the Apps Status Dashboard, as well as the corrective actions we’re taking to help prevent it from occurring again. If you were affected by this issue, it’s important to note that email sent to you between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was likely not delivered to your mailbox, and the senders would have received a notification that their messages weren’t delivered. 

Thanks for bearing with us as we fix this, and sorry again for the scare.

Update (3/1/11, 12:20 PM PST): Data for the remaining 0.012% of affected users has been successfully restored from tapes and is now being processed. We plan to begin moving data into mailboxes in 2 hours, and in the hours that follow users will regain access to their data. Accounts with more mail will take more time. Thanks for bearing with us.

Update (3/2/11, 10:55 PM PST): Gmail should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue. If you are still experiencing issues, please contact us at the temporary alias we've set up for this particular issue, gmail-maintenance@google.com. Thanks again for bearing with us.