Google Apologizes for Monday’s FUBAR

Gmail’s product manager pushed an article to the official Gmail blog late on Monday to acknowledge the problems that many GMail users faced trying to access their email on Monday afternoon (PT).

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.

The post does not provide any real detail as to the source of the problem, only an acknowledgment and an apology for the inconvenience.

The outage provided people with extra free time on their hands to try out their artistic abilities in describing the problem. This was my favourite of the GMail Fail Whales:

Image Credit: Todd Garland of HubSpot, this copy from YoavShapira’s photostream.

So yea, apparently email is critical to most people’s regular day. Whoda thunk it?

Picasa for OS X in 2008

It’s been a busy week this week, and there’s some news items that I just didn’t get to yet. This one comes to us courtesey of TechCrunch.

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa. Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto. iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums. One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr. Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

I’ve always been a bit of a stats monkey when it comes to… well pretty much everything. I like to know how many there are, how long it takes, how much it costs. I want the numbers. But more than that, I want accurate numbers and often times in the past trying to get accurate numbers for website traffic has been a real challenge. Google Analytics does a great job of tracking every hit to my blog, but unfortunately it tracks mine too. This conundrum led me to the Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin.

This plugin does a great number of things and has an options screen as long as my arm. Aside from having the ability to ignore administrators, it also has the ability to add in tracking to all of your outgoing links and downloads.

If you use WordPress and you use Google Analytics you need this plugin.

Embedding Google Presentations in your Blog

I took my first stab at Google Presentations today, and was pleasantly surprised. I could certainly lay the ideas for a PowerPoint deck using this setup, or even put together some quick and easy slides.

The real big seller for me was the ability to embed the presentation in your blog or website. Now, admittedly I’m not super-impressed because it’s using an I-Frame instead of a regular Embed tag like a YouTube video… but it’s definitely a start!

Based on the tutorial posted on the site I put together a short slide-deck tutorial of my own both for practice and as a demo!

For the tutorial, I’ll turn you over to my short slide deck.

IMAP Coming to Gmail

Just saw a post from DownloadSquad about the advent of IMAP in GMail. It’s only a few hours old, and by the sounds of things this is a really fresh feature… which probably explains why it hasn’t shown up in my account yet… But the new help docs are there so it’s just a matter of time.

For those who may not know, IMAP is the bi-directional email protocol which makes Outlook so successful in the corporate environment. With this feature enabled, I think it won’t be long until we see an even tighter outlook-like integration of Gmail and Google Calendar.

Google Search Enhancements today and tomorrow

Those clever gals and guys at the Google Labs are at it again. There’s a new enhanced version (the “universal version”) of search which combines results from image, video and text components in a single search result. This began to appear last weekend in search results from most of the major Google localizations…

But that’s not all, folks!

By visiting the Google Labs, you’ll find that there’s an even more enhanced version (the “experimental version”) of search in the pipeline. I’ve got a brief overview of some of the features, and how you can put them to work for you now!

Additional Views: Timeline and Maps

With your Google search, you can choose to have the search return a timeline or a map with the search results. This is a very interesting feature as it can provide some visual aid to help you with your search results.

The timeline is constructed using date/time data extracted from the search result pages. The timeline will allow you to drill-down to a more granular view if the topic has a broad history.

The map search really looks to be nothing more than a new way to search Google Local. Nothing all that groundbreaking here.

You can use this today in your searches very simply by adding: view:timeline or view:map to the end of your search query. Below are a couple of examples:

Star Trek view:timeline

NHL Teams view:map

Keyboard Shortcuts

I’m a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts for very nearly everything. I find that sometimes a mouse is just too clumsy a method for navigating some computer systems, particularly those that require you to type in other things (like search engines!) Google has implemented a few shortcut keys in the experimental version which may just save you those few precious moments of frustration.

Key	Action
J	Selects the next result.
K	Selects the previous result.
O	Opens the selected result.
<Enter>	Opens the selected result.
/	Puts the cursor in the search box.
<Esc>	Removes the cursor from the search box.

The other neat thing about this is that the next and previous buttons will move to the next or last page if you’ve already arrived at the bottom of a page of results.

Hacking this one into your daily life isn’t quite as easy, you must add &esrch=BetaShortcuts to your search URL. You can however use this Google Link as your starting page to incproprate it.

Left and Right hand Search Navigation

In the “Spooky Google” category are the new adaptive left and right hand search bars. These attempt to ascertain other search refinements which may help you find what you’re looking for. I say “spooky” because I assume they’re using your personal search history to decide what to show…

The left-hand bar is much like a drill-down bar. It will show search options which are more specific than what you initially searched for. The example provided is “ipod” will show things like Patents, Products and news, with specific searches for “ipod accessories”, “ipod software”, “ipod reviews” etc… See it in action here or enhance your search URLs by adding: esrch=RefinementBarLhsGradientPreview to your search URL.

The right-hand bar shows similar information in a smaller package. It adds an option to see Blogs which didn’t appear on the left side bar. See it in action here or enhance your search URLs by adding: esrch=RefinementBarRhsPreview to your search URL.

This feature is not as polished as the first two. When I changed the search term from ipod to Macbook, all of the specific searches disappeared. But I guess that’s why they call it experimental.

Final thoughts?

As time moves on Google will continue to provide additional enhancements to its search engine. The most useful feature, for me at leasts, is by far the keyboard shortcuts. The adaptive search navigation has potential, but obviously still needs work. With challengers like Search Wikia on the horizon, things will need to continue to improve to keep searchers coming back.

New look for Google Analytics

Last week Google revamped their web-statistics package Google Analytics. The new look boasts some very web 2.0-ish graphs and provides all the same reports as before.

One of the new features is a drill-down world map, which provides a bit of an easier view of where your visitors are coming from. Some more detail from the “what’s new” email that was sent to analytics subscribers:

Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

This is a great new look for the Analytics tool, which in fine Google tradition has been kept as a free service for everyone in the web community.

You can read more detail in the Google Analytics Blog post by Jeff Gillis from the GA team.

Good on ya, Google. I’ve enjoyed looking through the GA changes over the last week or so and will do so in more detail in the coming days and weeks. Now if you could just fix that pesky 10MB file limit in GMail….

GMail-based File Storage

With the advent of Google’s GMail a few years ago, and their explosive increase to 1GB (and subsequently 2GB) of storage in 2005 it was only a matter of time until they opened up the API to allow people to take advantage of GMail’s features.

Enter a series of add-ons for various operating systems which allow you to use your GMail account as a file storage location. They provide the ability to store files in an Internet accessible location, and retrieve the files from any computer which can access GMail and the internet.

Now, if you’re thinking this sounds like it would be a very slow mechanism to transfer data you’re right. These plugins essentially need to perform all the same functions as any other email client to send and retrieve the files. But it’s a case of accessibility vs. speed. For those files you just can’t live without, this may be the solution for you.

It can also clutter up your account a bit. If you still have a bunch of GMail invites, send one to yourself and set up a separate account to use as your “G Drive”.

For Windows users, download GMail Drive. For Mac OS X users, download gDisk.

Google Analytics

The big G is at it again… one of their new tools: Google Analytics. This is Google’s solution for webmasters that joins together not only site statistics, graphs and reporting but also provides the ability to plan and track milestones relating to traffic and referrals.

Analytics also integrates with Google’s AdWords to provide a method of accurately tracking click-thru’s and other statistics vital to the ad campaigns.

Now for those of you who are saying that this is yet another piece of Google’s ever growing arsenal of world conquering capabilities you’re probably right. But hey, it works well and the code it uses on your website to track the hits doesn’t leave any ugly banners or images. And did I mention that it’s free?

Give it a shot. I did, and it’s here to stay (at least until they decide to charge for it!).

Google Tabs!

Google has been offering a tabbed interface to the customized content of your Google homepage for some time, but as Miss604 cites in her blog, that feature has been seemingly a bit sporadic… To be honest I’d sort of forgotten all about it.

However, after reading her blog last night and giving some thought to the fact that she’d mentioned the tabs don’t show up on the Mac I had to go check it out. I’ve checked it out on several machines now and here’s what I’ve found:

Operating System	Browser	Tabs??
Windows XP (SP2)	Internet Explorer 7	YES
	Internet Explorer 6	YES
	Firefox 2.0	YES
	Internet Explorer 5.5	NO
Mac OS X (Tiger)	Firefox 2.0	YES
Mac OS X (Tiger)	Safari 10.0.4	YES

It looks like they may finally have the bugs out, and are supporting pretty much every mainstream platform available. Kudos Google! (Though I’m not sure my employer will be so ecstatic when I’m spending all of next week tweaking my new Google IG layouts…)

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Tag Archives: Google