http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html

Not something I'd use since I check every e-mail the second it comes in.

9/3/2010 10:55:09 AM

^ was an article earlier this week, I think Mary J Foley, who said that Microsoft Research has tons of patents on this concept and the years of research and tech demos to show it. Likely to result in a patent swap though, not a block/lawsuit. Should also be seen in the next Live/Hotmail release.

[Edited on September 3, 2010 at 3:04 PM. Reason : .]

9/3/2010 3:03:27 PM

anyone getting the new live google search feature yet?

http://gizmodo.com/5632819/google-is-streaming-results-no-search-button-required

9/8/2010 11:40:28 AM

Mine has switched to the new immediate search shit, and its pretty cool.

9/8/2010 12:38:16 PM

i had that a couple weeks ago. it was annoying so i turned it off.

9/8/2010 1:16:26 PM

Quote :

"i had that a couple weeks ago. it was annoying so i turned it off."

How'd you magically get it weeks ahead of everyone else?

9/8/2010 1:21:16 PM

Quote :

"How'd you magically get it weeks ahead of everyone else? "

They test stuff out all the time

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html

9/8/2010 2:23:19 PM

don't know. ask google. it just showed up one day.

i used it a for a few searches then went searching for a greasemonkey script or other way to turn it off. found it buried in some settings. my crappy netbook isn't meant for things like that. my other computers handle it fine though.

[Edited on September 8, 2010 at 3:06 PM. Reason : ]

9/8/2010 3:01:29 PM

ah got it working. had to log into google first. it's pretty fast.

9/8/2010 3:03:28 PM

i don't like it. especially since i can no longer disable the autocomplete nonsense on google searches (turning off instant just reverts to the old google suggest crap).

dammit

9/8/2010 3:40:36 PM

while we're [not] on it, i don't like the way google does image searches now either. stop changing things.

9/8/2010 4:02:05 PM

^ i found a greasemonkey script that forces the "basic" image search.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/82140

9/8/2010 4:20:52 PM

i typically don't like wasting time opening up google.com. I use launchy to google something then click on a result. Seems like this instant feature is for slow typers.

9/8/2010 4:31:25 PM

^^awesome. thank you.

^yeah, this will be perfect for my dad. he sucks at internetting/computering in general.

9/8/2010 4:39:03 PM

Got this earlier this afternoon...

Quote :

"Hello Google Apps administrator, At long last, Google Apps accounts can now function more like full Google Accounts. In addition to current services like Gmail and Google Docs, you are now able to let your users access many more Google applications with their Google Apps accounts, like Blogger, Picasa Web Albums and Reader. This transition will automatically happen for your Google Apps accounts this fall, but we encourage you to begin the transition on your own schedule as soon as possible. Step 1: Review the known issues regarding this change Step 2: Sign into the Google Apps control panel and access the transition dashboard Step 3: Decide which Google services your users should be able to access with their Google Apps accounts Step 4: Contact any users on your domain who have conflicting accounts Step 5: Select specific users to be early adopters or transition your whole domain We hope you and your users enjoy all the new capabilities now available with your Google Apps accounts. For help and answers to frequently asked questions, please visit our Help Center. Sincerely, The Google Apps team"

Done and DONE! So, my account just finished the transition:

Quote :

"Hello Google Apps user, Your Google Apps account has been successfully transitioned to function more like a full Google Account! To get started, please sign out and sign back in after reading this message. What this change means for you: Access to many more Google products. You will now be able to use most Google products with your DOMAIN.COM accounts. For a sample, see our list of products. New sign in option. You can now sign in to Google services from the regular sign-in pages (like http://mail.google.com). Make sure to enter your full DOMAIN.COM email address when signing in. Learn more. Data ownership. All data contained in DOMAIN.COM Google Apps accounts continues to be owned by your organization, and is subject to DOMAIN.COM's terms and conditions. Learn more Common issues: Using multiple accounts. After the conversion, the process to sign in to multiple accounts simultaneously in your browser (What is a browser?) will change. Learn more Offline support for certain Google products aren't currently available. Learn more Still have questions or need more help? If you are an administrator, please visit our Help Center for Admins. If you are an end user, please visit our full Google Accounts Help Center. If you have questions that are not in the Help Center, please contact your administrator for help. Sincerely, The Google Apps Team"

I already checked and it allows me to log in to almost everything Google. I now even have the fancy Dashboard page to summarize all my information: https://www.google.com/dashboard/

By default I can make phone calls now from within the Gmail client and it allows me to create a Google Voice account. But I don't want a new number and I want all my history, so I just submitted the request to have my Google Voice account moved from my Google Account to my Google Apps account: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA

This is great stuff. Thanks Google for finally getting this done.



[Edited on September 9, 2010 at 4:57 PM. Reason : .]

9/9/2010 4:55:54 PM

Gmail will soon allow you to choose an "unthreaded/non-conversation" view. Personally I still love conversation view as much today as I did when Gmail first rolled out. But to each their own, and maybe now they'll be happy.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/29/google_unthreads_gmail/



[Edited on September 29, 2010 at 1:18 PM. Reason : .]

9/29/2010 1:13:48 PM

What do you guys think about this GoogleTV stuff?

9/29/2010 1:35:28 PM

from what i've seen via Google I/O, it's gonna be awesome. i would love to be able to push apps to my TV and to be able to search channels

Google I/O 2010: Google TV Keynote - Introducing Google TV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASZbArr7vdI

Google I/O 2010: Google TV Keynote - Under The Hood
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLwRGQ1okx8

9/29/2010 1:51:43 PM

I'm still a little unclear as to how it works. Say I want to watch an episode of House, does it just search/compile results from Hulu, Netflix, etc and show what's available or can it show what's live on cable at that moment too?

9/29/2010 2:57:01 PM

the search is for live cable or antenna, whatever source you're using. it searches the channel listings.

so if you search House, it will show any channels where House is currently playing, when it will air next, and whether or not you want to record it. presumably, if you have it hooked up to the internet and with Netflix and/or Hulu it would/could search that as well for past episodes.

[Edited on September 29, 2010 at 3:05 PM. Reason : .]

9/29/2010 3:03:57 PM

sooo, the example on the google tv page shows dish. with dish i can already search through channels by show name, genre, actor, etc. i can't search through my recordings but i don't think i need to. so far i'm not really seeing an advantage to having this.

9/29/2010 4:17:37 PM

It's probably less for satellite users and more for people with those horrible TWC cable boxes.

9/29/2010 4:25:01 PM

haha they should have used a cable box in their demo video

9/29/2010 10:57:28 PM

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/09/webp-new-image-format-for-web.html

Quote :

"As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images. Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before. Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today. To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. We applied the techniques from VP8 video intra frame coding to push the envelope in still image coding. We also adapted a very lightweight container based on RIFF. While this container format contributes a minimal overhead of only 20 bytes per image, it is extensible to allow authors to save meta-data they would like to store. While the benefits of a VP8 based image format were clear in theory, we needed to test them in the real world. In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image. To help you assess WebP’s performance with other formats, we have shared a selection of open-source and classic images along with file sizes so you can visually compare them on this site. We are also releasing a conversion tool that you can use to convert images to the WebP format. We’re looking forward to working with the browser and web developer community on the WebP spec and on adding native support for WebP. While WebP images can’t be viewed until browsers support the format, we are developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. We plan to add support for a transparency layer, also known as alpha channel in a future update. We’re excited to hear feedback from the developer community on our discussion group, so download the conversion tool, try it out on your favorite set of images, and let us know what you think."

chances it'll gain any traction??

9/30/2010 5:24:35 PM

If their stats on bandwidth hold true, who wouldn't want to reduce their bandwidth bills by 25%. It looks like it has all the features needed to replace jpeg use for the web.

9/30/2010 5:43:32 PM

i remember when it took FOREVER for png to gain significant browser support

9/30/2010 5:47:05 PM

The big difference now, is that web browser development goes through much faster release cycles. And they all have built in self-updaters.

Still, it does seem unlikely to catch on soon since you would have to have two versions of images to accommodate the IE6 IE9 crowd.

9/30/2010 6:09:03 PM

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&t=h&q=Antarctica&layer=c&cbll=-62.59609,-59.901651&panoid=ZzuMubmHCfCGGo3ePSlpCQ&cbp=12,233.34,,1,0.48&hq=&hnear=Antarctica&ll=-62.59609,-59.901651&spn=0.000514,0.001371&z=19

10/1/2010 3:05:20 PM

So Google Chrome 7 has this neat feature called "Instant" built right in to the URL bar (well, you have to enable it under 'about:labs') ... works great right ... Heh, until you use it too much.

I just got this friendly message:

http://sorry.google.com/sorry/misc/

Quote :

" Google Sorry... We're sorry... ... but it appears your computer is sending automated requests. [-] More Information This page appears when our systems detect procedural requests coming from your IP address in violation of our Terms of Service. This block will expire after the procedural requests have stopped. Automated requests may be sent by malware or a bad browser plugin on your machine. If you are using a shared network connection, the traffic may be coming from a different computer behind the same IP address. It is also possible someone is intentionally sending automated requests using a script. Your proxy administrator may be able to identify the responsible machine. If you are a network administrator and you need help identifying the procedural requests in your logs, more information is available in our Help Center."

Thanks Google, your browser has framed me.

10/2/2010 12:27:15 AM

http://www.google.com/tv/index.html

10/4/2010 1:44:25 PM

Not too excited about this. I've had a dedicated comp hooked up to my tv for over a year and I can send anything on my desktop upstairs to play via my ps3.

10/4/2010 1:54:52 PM

I don't think people really understand what all the Google TV box does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQcaZT1useQ&NR=1

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/google-tv-apps

[Edited on October 4, 2010 at 2:06 PM. Reason : ,]

10/4/2010 1:59:53 PM

Look everyone, google invented self driving cars!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html



there is a new york times piece on the tech as well,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=1



[Edited on October 12, 2010 at 1:55 PM. Reason : :]

10/12/2010 1:49:58 PM

Google TV is the biggest sham ever. It is going to be a monstrous flop, just like all the stupid internet connected TV sets are.

Unless they pair up with the big media companies to deliver content (ala Xbox 360 w/ ESPN, AT&T, SKY TV), it's nothing more than a shitty webtv all over again.

10/12/2010 6:47:50 PM

And it begins:

ABC, CBS And NBC Shut Out Google TV
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/21/abc-cbs-and-nbc-shut-out-google-tv-fox-and-mtv-still-available/

10/22/2010 12:17:47 AM

well that's unfortunate

10/22/2010 6:38:17 AM

Well that stinks.

I might as well take it off my christmas list now.

10/22/2010 8:01:30 AM

i've read some comments that indicate you can change the user-agent on google tv, effectively bypassing the network blockages

10/22/2010 10:11:36 PM

why did i not know about this?

http://www.google.com/landing/music/

10/23/2010 11:44:19 AM

Because you've never searched for a musician? I don't understand the purpose of that page.

10/23/2010 3:30:37 PM

yeah, not like the results show up any different from main search... looks like it was an aborted experiment

10/24/2010 3:34:30 PM

Google TV is the dumbest vaporware product I've ever seen.

Was at bestbuy this weekend and saw the big Sony/Logitech/Google TV booth, with a Sony rep standing there looking like he hated his life. Not one person even looked at the stuff while I was there.

No content, no way to even BUY content, doesn't stream anything live, doesn't integrate with anything else in the living room. At least the Apple TV lets you hook into the iTunes marketplace so you can watching something on it.

At this point, you can get a xbox360 + PlayOn and have everything a GoogleTV device has, plus games, Zune Pass and media center integration. And a better controller.

10/24/2010 6:17:49 PM

So you're saying you prefer a Microsoft implementation? Tell me more.

10/24/2010 9:02:06 PM

No, I'm saying that paying 300 bucks for a netbook in a different box is retarded.

Replace xbox 360 with ps3, generic nettop, apple tv, netbook or iPad and you still have a better, more capable device and experience

10/26/2010 1:33:55 PM

I don't think any settop box is going to get off the ground if networks keep blocking content, which is probably what AppleTV is banking on hence everything is paid content delivery with them.

GoogleTV was really designed to be embedded in TV's, not to act as a settop box. They even said this at Google I/O. The settop box is really just for the early adopters that don't want to go out and buy a newer HDTV.

[Edited on October 26, 2010 at 1:49 PM. Reason : .]

10/26/2010 1:48:42 PM

^If so it's going to be just as big of a flop. "Embedded Apps" on televisions are the biggest marketing gimmick to date. I have a internet connected / applications TV, just because I couldn't get one without it. If you've ever actually tried using ANY of them, you immediately see how shitty the experience is, and never go back.

And given that GoogleTV relies on the ATOM (read: x86) platform, it's going to add significant size and cost to embedded applications. Unless they have an alternative hardware platform for embedded devices, which begs the question why not use that in their standalone product as well. There's no way people are going to pay a 2-300 dollar price premium for a TV with "GoogleTV" on it.

10/26/2010 9:51:30 PM

Quote :

"There's no way people are going to pay a 2-300 dollar price premium for a TV with "GoogleTV" on it."

Who said anything about this

10/26/2010 10:56:04 PM

Prospero, one post above me

10/27/2010 2:27:57 AM

Maybe you could show me the part where he mentioned a $2-300 premium for TVs with GTV

I can't seem to find it

10/27/2010 3:20:06 PM

The product costs 2-300 bucks standalone.

The components cost 60-80 dollars.

App Connected televisions are a premium upsell for manufacturers. If you look at the price of inet/non inet televisions (same base model), they carry a 2-400 dollar price premium today.

It would be reasonable (and correct) to assume that they will continue to be an upsell, and given price difference today, plus the hardware costs, plus the retail standalone price,

you get 2-300 bucks.

Dumbass.

10/27/2010 8:57:17 PM