• Introducing Google+ When the Search Giant Goes Social

    // Gradly // blog, Featured, google, News, Social Networks, Tech. 2 Responses

    Google, the world’s largest search company, is competing, apparently, with Facebook to become a major force in social networking. Google+ announced today and it looks promising.

    Not to mention, Google+ designed by one of the creators of the original Macintosh. Wired’s Steven Levy is reporting that Andy Hertzfeld, actually, played an essential role in the design of Google+.

    With colorful animations, drag-and-drop magic, and whimsical interface touches, Circles looks more like a classic Apple program than the typically bland Google app. That’s no surprise since the key interface designer was legendary software artist Andy Hertzfeld.

    Google+ design really is excellent, especially for Google. It is invite-only at the moment.

    Update:

    Google has released many videos explaining the new project:

    +Circles:

    +Sparks:

    +Mobile: Instant Upload

    +Hangouts:

    And +Huddle, the Android App:

  • Google Announces Voice Search, Search by Image, and Instant Pages For Desktop Computers

    // Gradly // blog, Featured, google, Mobile, News, Tech. No Responses

    Google announced a bunch of new features at Inside Search press conference, June 14th, 2011, which took place yesterday. The new additions are voice search on desktop computers, Instant Search and Image Search.

    Voice Search on the desktop

    Google Voice Search has been available in phones for years. Both Android handset and iPhone via Google’s search app have that feature for a long time, and now the same capability is brought to the desktop and initially, to the Chrome.

    Search by Image

    With this feature you can now upload images straight to the search engine and Google will search through the image file and attempt to locate any similar images and return you the terms they’re associated with:

    If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks

    Google has released an extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets users identify any picture on the web by simply right-clicking.

    Instant Pages

    Google is bringing Instant Pages to Google Chrome. Available in all of the beta and dev versions of Google Chrome, Instant Pages is Google’s answer to the pre-fetching features built in to Mozilla’s Firefox. Instead of simply scraping basic HTML information ahead of time, however, Google says that their pre-rendering will grab other resources as well such as Javascript for snappy page loading. Instant Pages are only being used for search results (not targeted for ads specifically), but Google did mention they’ll be looking at how to best deliver ads to consumers in the future. Instant Pages allow the most common results to load instantly (in virtually zero seconds) when the user decides to load them:

    Google pointed out that mobile searches on its site have grown and now surpassed desktop searches.

    [via Google’s Blog]

  • Rapportive Takes on Gmail’s People Widget

    // Gradly // blog, Download, Featured, google, News, Rants & Raves, Social Networks, Tech. No Responses

    As you might know Rapportive add-on is one of the must-have Gmail widgets that integrate natively and nicely with the mail dashboard, it shows you more contact details in the inbox for individual email along with its social ties such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. in a nice sidebar.

    Last week Google unveiled The People Widget, which is being gradually rolled out to users over the next few weeks, it looks and functions remarkably similar to Rapportive’s sidebar, yet gives users more features like job titles, calendar availability, recent conversations, shared Google Docs and Buzz updates related to your email contacts in the sidebar with apparent deeper Google integration.

    Now Rapportive, in turn has responded to what many perceived as a direct attack from Google by integrating the People widget. Rapportive CEO and co-founder Rahul Vohra had to say:

    “We’re very flattered by how similar the widget is to Rapportive, In fact, some of the design details have been copied directly, from the new position of the ‘print’ and ‘new window’ icons, through to how the widget remains onscreen as you scroll.”

    “I knew it would happen sometime this year. Google has made acquisitions in this space, and social is their new mantra, I emailed our investors as soon as the news broke — I detailed how we felt, that we planned to integrate, and reminded everybody of our roadmap for the next year or so. Everybody was very positive.”

    Rapportive contact profiles will include the usual features along with the Gmail enhancements and users can get their access to the new Rapportive features as soon as they get the Gmail widget,

    [via mashable]

  • Google’s Eric Schmidt Urging PC Users to Dump Windows and ‘Get A Mac’

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Cloud, Featured, Gadgets, google, Microsoft, News, Rants & Raves No Responses

    Some interesting tidbits from yesterday’s D9 Conference interviewing Google‘s chairman Eric Schmidt. Probably the most interesting one is that Google has “just renewed their Map and Search agreements with Apple”.

    In terms of platform war, Shmidt said there is, primarily, a gang of four that includes Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Microsoft is not included. He explains, Microsoft is not driving the consumer revolution, they are focused on corporate and are doing so successfully, something that will likely continue for decades to come.

    When asked how consumers could be more secure, he claimed that Chrome was a more secure browser, using two factor Gmail authentication is key and users simply “could use a Mac instead of a PC”.

    When Google launched its cloud music offering, many were disappointed, the service was just a locker for music. When asked why Google failed at signing with record labels, Schmidt simply says, “I’ve just not been successful in doing that”.