Google will kill off Google Wave, they told in a blog post. It was a technically very inspiring web app which, however, arrived without any particular and clear use case. This caused not only interface usability problems (Wave was good at allowing you to do a lot of things at once, but it often wasn’t really good at anything in particular, e.g. plain chat when needed). It also caused social frictions as people were using the tool with different, colliding expectations.
Google is always obsessed with speed. Their mantra is faster = better. This is true for their Google Voice mobile apps as well. When you want to make a call, your phone should connect you as quickly as possible, whether you’re calling via Google Voice or not.
Today they are launching an enhancement to the Google Voice mobile app on Android and Blackberry phones, which makes placing calls much faster. They call this feature “direct access numbers.” Here’s how it works:
There’s an old saying that all news is local. But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors. Yesterday Google revamped the Google News homepage with several changes designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you. They also trying to better highlight interesting stories you didn’t know existed and to make it easier for you to share stories through social networks.
From text that is too small to read, to user interfaces that do not offer keyboard navigation options, users with special needs face a lot of challenges when trying to access websites they are interested in. Google Chrome team believe that extensions can complement the work the team is doing to make Google Chrome more accessible and can help users with disabilities turn the web from an often unwelcoming place to an environment they can truly enjoy.
In Google’s most recent stable release of Google Chrome, they talked about beta-testing Adobe Flash Player integration into Chrome. They’ve enable this integration by default in the stable channel of Chrome. To read more about this integration, check out the Chromium blog.
In testing Flash Player integration into Chrome, the Chrome team admittedly spent many, many fun hours with a few of our favorite Flash-based indie games. So as a side project, they teamed up with a few creative folks to build Chrome FastBall, a Flash-based game built on top of the YouTube platform.
Last week, Google announced that the Google Docs viewer supports .doc and .docx attachments. Today they’re also releasing a mobile version of the Google Docs viewer for Android, iPhone and iPad to help you view PDFs, .ppt, .doc and .docx files you’ve uploaded to your documents list, without needing to download the file.
A little over a year ago, Google released an early preview of Google Voice, Google’s web-based platform for managing your communications. Google introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, they are excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.
School is out for the summer, and that means it’s time for some swimsuit shopping, travel purchases and—before we know it—buying back-to-school supplies.
To help retail sites get ready for the summer shopping season, Today Google launched Google Commerce Search 2.0 for retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. The new version of Google Commerce Search provides a better experience online for shoppers and greater control—with immediate ROI—for retailers.
Sore throats from yelling after every goal. Red eyes from waking up too early or staying up too late to watch a game. Sick leaves multiplying during important matches. It’s official: Football fever has spread around the globe, as the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ is already underway.
For those of you who are football fans, kick your game-watching up a notch with the FIFA.com Chrome extension that will help you stay up-to-date with the latest news and scores from South Africa. Most importantly, the extension notifies you when a match is about to begin and displays goal alerts within the browser in real-time for the matches you care about.
With software installations and complicated instructions, editing video can be a hassle—but not with youtube now. Today, Google introducing YouTube’s new online video editor, which makes editing your video a cinch. It’s available in TestTube, where YouTube engineers and developers test out new tools and get feedback on how they’re doing.
With this new editor, you can:
