theGoogleOS

New Book: Conversions For Dummies

MrGoogle — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Are you eager to optimize your conversion rate, but feel a little bit overwhelmed by all of the tools available to help you? Introducing ‘Improving Online Conversions for Dummies’!

We have just released a simple, easy to follow mini book, in conjunction with John Wiley Publications, to help you get a better grasp of the conversion improvement tools offered by Google. Improving Online Conversions for Dummies explains how you can make sure your ads show on searches that are most likely to convert into sales. Understand which ad clicks and impressions lead to conversions, better apportion your marketing…

Simpler sign-ups for Yahoo! users with OpenID

MrGoogle — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:02:00 +0000

How many times have you created a new account at a website and seen a message that said: “Thank you for creating an account. To activate your new account, please access your email and click the verification URL provided.”

Even though you just want to start using the website, this lengthy process requires you to manually perform a whole bunch of steps—including switching to your mailbox, trying to find the message the website sent you (which might be in your Spam folder), opening the message, clicking the link, etc. Until recently, we also required people to follow these steps if…

Easier site organization with drag and drop

MrGoogle — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:41:00 +0000

Page organization is an important part of using Google Sites, especially when you want to make a lot of changes to your Site’s structure. To make it easier and save you time, we just enabled drag and drop functionality in the Pages area of site management. Site owners and collaborators can try it out on via Manage site > Pages in the tree view.

We hope you like this little time-saver.

Posted by: Santos Cordon, Software Engineer

Introducing our most monstrous YouTube interview yet

MrGoogle — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

We’ve had a lot of famous folks sit down for interviews in the past year, like President Obama, Shakira and Katy Perry, but our next subject, with his tony address and instant name recognition, may have celebrity status that tops all the rest.

Through a partnership with Sesame Street, Elmo will answer your burning questions right here on YouTube. So, moms and dads, if your family has ever wondered, “How exactly do you get, do you get, to Sesame Street?” or whether Oscar’s really as grouchy as he seems, here’s your chance to ask. More…

Explore the Life in a Day video gallery

MrGoogle — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 05:26:00 +0000

On July 24, people around the world made history by capturing glimpses of their lives on camera and submitting the videos to Life in a Day, an experiment to create a documentary about a single day on Earth. In total, 80,000 videos were submitted from 197 countries, making this the world’s largest user-generated film. Now, you can explore many of these videos in the gallery on the Life in a Day channel .

To make browsing easy, you can sort videos by geography, time of day, mood and more. The film’s

…

Google Apps highlights – 9/3/2010

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:00:00 +0000

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Recently we introduced powerful, time-saving features in Gmail: Priority Inbox and the ability to call phones right from Gmail. Google spreadsheets added new features, and many more businesses and schools moved to the cloud with Google Apps.

Cut through the clutter with Gmail Priority Inbox
Since its beginning, Gmail has been helping people cope with large amounts of email, whether it’s with more than seven gigabytes of storage,…

Hot off the Satellite: Burning Man 2010

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:30:00 +0000

For all you “Burners” out there (or those of us who wish we could go this weekend), we’ve just published imagery from Burning Man 2010, captured Wednesday, September 1st by GeoEye’s GeoEye-1 satellite. This annual event, taking place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, celebrates both human individuality and togetherness, highlighted by the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy (“The Man”) Saturday evening. You can find the location of the “The Man” in the center of the annually-built tent city, shown below.

Black Rock Desert tent city (left)
Location of “The Man” (right)

To view this great…

Deep Dive Articles For The Data Export API

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:36:00 +0000

On the Google Analytics API Team, we’re fascinated with what people create using the Data Export API. You guys come up with some really amazing stuff! Lately, we’ve also been paying a lot of attention to how people use it. We looked at whether the API has stumbling points (and where they are), what common features every developer wants in their GA applications, and what tricky areas need deeper explanations than we can give by replying to posts in our discussion group.

As a result of identifying these areas, we’ve written a few in-depth articles. Each article is…

Deep Dive Articles For The Data Export API

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:36:00 +0000

As a result of identifying these areas, we’ve written a few in-depth articles. Each article is…

New ways to view Webmaster Tools messages

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:15:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Now there’s a new way to see just the messages for a specific site. A new Messages feature will appear on all site pages. The feature is just like the Message Center on the home page, except it‘ll show only messages for the currently selected site. This gives you more freedom to choose how you want to view your messages: either for all your sites, or for just one site at a time.

Alerts (formally known as SiteNotice messages) will now be more prominent in the Message Center. These messages tell you about significant changes we’ve…

Trimming our privacy policies

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Cross posted on the Gmail Blog and the Official Google Blog

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.

So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:

Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy

…

Trimming our privacy policies

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Posted by Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel

(Cross-posted from the Google Blog)

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.

Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy.

…

Missed call notifications delivered to your inbox

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Google Voice lets you take charge of your telephony experience, giving you one number that rings all your phones. But what if you’re not around to answer any of them?

Starting today, whenever you miss a call, you can see a notification in your Google Voice inbox, or receive an email notification, or both.

This setting can be turned on and off from the Calls tab in the Settings menu.

We’re excited to add this new feature that’s been a common request from Google Voice users. So keep those suggestions coming,

…

Trimming our privacy policies

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a

…

Going Google Across the 50 States: Maryland start-up hopes to level the playing field in education

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:27:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Over the past couple months, thousands of businesses have added their Gone Google story to our community map and even more have used the Go Google cloud calculator to test drive life in the cloud. To highlight some of these companies’ Gone Google stories, we decided to talk to Google Apps customers across the United States. Check back each week to see which state we visit next. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map.

This week we head to Maryland where StraighterLine is trying…

Wave open source next steps

MrGoogle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:24:00 +0000

Today we posted an update about our plans for Wave open source code and the federation protocol on our Google Wave Developer blog. The post includes a description of our planned code contributions over the coming months as well as resources for developers to follow the progress of the project and stay involved.

Wave on!

Posted by Soren Lassen, Google Wave Team

Rich snippets: testing tool improvements, breadcrumbs, and events

MrGoogle — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:57:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Since the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microformats, or RDFa, Google is able to understand the content on web pages and show search result snippets that better convey the information on the page. Thanks to steady adoption by webmasters, we now see more than twice as many searches with rich snippets in the results in the US, and a four-fold increase globally, compared…

5 Tips for campaigns on YouTube

MrGoogle — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:19:00 +0000

This post is part of our “BizBlog Series”, which was formerly its own blog. Check back each week to see articles for partners and advertisers on YouTube, or search under the label, “BizBlog“.

In this election season, we’ve been working with political campaigns to understand how best to take advantage of what YouTube has to offer on a free and paid basis for getting their message out. Recently, we hosted a webcast to provide some tips to candidates running for office and advocacy groups campaigning for ballot issues on ways to present your candidate or your issue and

…

Drawing out ideas in documents

MrGoogle — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Have you recently toiled over instructions to assemble furniture? Now imagine the agony if you had no illustrations to fall back on. What’s the best way to teach kids about nutrition without a food pyramid?

Sometimes when working with text you realize that words can only articulate so much. And that’s why we have drawings in Google documents. Drawings can be useful for things like diagramming processes in a flowchart or clearly articulating the relationship between a groups of ideas.

To get started, select the Drawing option from the Insert menu:

…

Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome

MrGoogle — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:20:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome Blog)

Watching the 1985 classic Back to the Future last night, I was struck by how much things can change with time. The main character Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time, only to find that his house hadn’t been built yet, skateboards hadn’t been invented and nobody had ever heard rock ‘n roll.

Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature…

Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome

MrGoogle — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Simplifying our IT – The Richmond Group goes Google

MrGoogle — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:18:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Mark Burgess, IT Director of The Richmond Group – a UK based finance company with 350 employees and the recipient of numerous awards for growth, innovation and employee workplace. They migrated to Google Apps in January 2010 with the support of Insight, a leading global single source provider of IT products and services. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.

When I look back at the decision we made 12 months ago to migrate away from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange,…

Get more out of calling in Gmail

MrGoogle — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:45:00 +0000

Last week, we launched Google Voice in Gmail to let you make calls right from your computer. The uptake has been amazing and 10,000,000 calls later, we wanted to offer some tips and tricks on how you, as a loyal Google Voice user, can unlock additional features when you setup Gmail to receive calls with your Google Voice number. If you haven’t already hooked it up, go to Google Voice, click on settings and check the box next to Google Chat in your list of forwarding phones.

Now, you’ll be able to make and receive calls to your Google…

Model the world with Google SketchUp 8

MrGoogle — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

In the four years that the SketchUp team has been working at Google, we’ve seen an unprecedented collection of user-generated 3D building models spring up all around the world. It is exciting and gratifying to see what you’ve all been able to do with SketchUp, and we’re always looking for ways to make your work more effective.

For all of you who are in on the 3D modeling action, I’m proud to announce the release of Google SketchUp 8 today. We’ve added loads of new features specifically designed to make it easier for you to build Google Earth-ready models of…

More easily find some of your favorite businesses right on the map

MrGoogle — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Over the years, we’ve made many improvements to Google Maps to make it as useful and relevant as possible. From basics like road and street names, to labels for points of interest and landmarks, to panoramic images on Street View, we’re working hard to make Google Maps as reflective of the real world as possible.

As part of this effort, we include “places” directly on the map by providing clickable icons that link to the Place page for those locations. When you’re on Google Maps on your desktop or on your mobile phone, this makes it easy to explore…

theGoogleOS

New Book: Conversions For Dummies

Simpler sign-ups for Yahoo! users with OpenID

Easier site organization with drag and drop

Related posts... Possibly

Introducing our most monstrous YouTube interview yet

Explore the Life in a Day video gallery

Google Apps highlights – 9/3/2010

Hot off the Satellite: Burning Man 2010

Deep Dive Articles For The Data Export API

Deep Dive Articles For The Data Export API

New ways to view Webmaster Tools messages

Trimming our privacy policies

Trimming our privacy policies

Missed call notifications delivered to your inbox

Trimming our privacy policies

Going Google Across the 50 States: Maryland start-up hopes to level the playing field in education

Wave open source next steps

Related posts... Possibly

Rich snippets: testing tool improvements, breadcrumbs, and events

5 Tips for campaigns on YouTube

Drawing out ideas in documents

Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome

Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome

Simplifying our IT – The Richmond Group goes Google

Get more out of calling in Gmail

Model the world with Google SketchUp 8

More easily find some of your favorite businesses right on the map