Sunday, June 30, 2013

Gay Google (2013)

Gay Google (2013): It's already a tradition at Google: every year in June, search results pages for queries like [gay], [lgbt], [lesbian], [transgender] have some special multicolored decorations to celebrate the Gay & Lesbian Pride Month. Here's this year's decoration: a rainbow search box with a nice 3D effect.


"From Silicon Valley LGBTQ mixers to Hangouts with Google Executives, planning a successful Google Pride is about more than coordinating the colors of the rainbow. Gayglers from all departments of Google formed sub-committees to discuss budget, plan events, order schwag and advertise Pride while keeping an eye on the prize: ensuring the messages of diversity, inclusion and pride are central themes throughout it all," informs a Google+ post about Google's 8th annual Pride Parade: June 30th - San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and Dublin. Here's a post about last year's parade.

You can also check the colorful interfaces from 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

{ Thanks, Camilo. }

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Attach Images in Gmail Using Drag and Drop

Attach Images in Gmail Using Drag and Drop: Do you remember the post about attaching photos using drag and drop in Gmail's new compose interface? At that time, this didn't work because Gmail embedded the images instead of attaching them.

Now you can attach photos even when you use drag and drop: just drag the photos to the small area at the bottom of the compose box that says "Attach files here". If you drag photos to the much bigger "Drop file here" area, Gmail will embed them.


{ Thanks, Pierre Maraninchi. }

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Google Now's Topics Page Is Back

Google Now's Topics Page Is Back: Back in March, I posted about a page that lists the research topics that are displayed by Google Now, but the page stopped working after a few days. Now it works again, has more features and it's no longer limited to Android devices.

Just go to www.google.com/now/topics/ and you'll see a long list of topics related to your recent searches. They're based on your search history and should only show up if you performed multiple related searches about a topic.


Click one of the topics and you'll get a list of search results that are supposed to be helpful. You'll see reviews, forum threads, news articles, videos, web pages and other related topics.


It's interesting to notice that Google uses the Knowledge Graph to generate related people, music, movies, hotels and more. There are publicly available topics pages like this one.


The results aren't always great, as you can see here:


{ Thanks, Anthony Raffini. }

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Experience stunning new heights with Street View in Dubai

Experience stunning new heights with Street View in Dubai: What does it feel like to stand on top of the tallest building in the world? To give you a better sense of how that may feel, we took Street View to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, our first-ever collection in the Arab World. Described as a “vertical city,” the Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest manmade structure, towering over the Dubai skyline at 828 meters (2,717 ft).





This is the first time we’ve captured a skyscraper on Street View—making Google Maps even more comprehensive and useful for you. The imagery was collected over three days using the Street View Trekker and Trolley, capturing high-resolution 360-degree panoramic imagery of several indoor and outdoor locations of the building.



In addition to the breathtaking views from the world’s tallest observation deck on the 124th floor, you can also see what it feels like to hang off one of the building’s maintenance units on the 80th floor, normally used for cleaning windows!







Visit the highest occupied floor in the world on the 163rd floor, experience being in the fastest-moving elevators in the world (at 22 mph) and check out the highest swimming pool in the world on the 76th floor.



Even if you’re afraid of heights, we hope you enjoy the view from the top! To see highlights from the Burj Khalifa Street View collection, visit www.google.ae/streetview.



Posted by Tarek Abdalla, Head of Marketing - Middle East & North Africa, Google

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YouTube And a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

YouTube And a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack: Here's an interesting excerpt from a Google I/O presentation about YouTube's adaptive streaming:

Another surprising thing we learned from this process is that software has bugs. Some bugs are more surprising than others. For instance, if a popular mobile handset manufacturer releases a software update that opens TCP connections and doesn't close them, you get something that looks like this. [The graph shows the number of connections.]


A globally distributed denial of service attack on your servers that lasts for months. And there's basically nothing you can do to avoid this situation except sit and wait and hope they release an update. That means that we have to make the choice between degrading service for all users, or cutting off a large fraction of users. And we never want to make that choice. With application level streaming, we can deliver a fix or a work around in hours, instead of months.


"A popular mobile handset manufacturer"? What are the most popular mobile handset manufacturers? Samsung, Nokia, Apple and a few other companies. It must be a popular smartphones manufacturers which releases software updates and most users install them. Apple?

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Get coding faster thanks to little green buttons

Get coding faster thanks to little green buttons: Author Photo

By Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate



Cross-posted from the Google Cloud Platform Blog



On the Google Cloud Platform team we're always looking for ways to make developers' lives easier, so you can focus on building interesting applications instead of worrying about managing infrastructure.



We also want you to be as productive as possible when you're busy writing code. We provide an SDK which offers access to production APIs, in a way that's compatible with a local development environment.





But sometimes you just want to dip your toes in the water, and the prospect of setting up a local development environment seems daunting. What if you just want to try out some sample code? What if you want to see how the actual production APIs will behave? What if you could share a code snippet with a colleague and your entire environment came along for the ride? What if there was a playground where you could try out APIs, all from within your web browser?



We asked ourselves these same questions and decided to try an experiment: we created a Cloud Playground, a place for you to quickly test production APIs you're interested in using. Note: the Cloud Playground is currently limited to Python 2.7 App Engine apps.



To get you started, we added little green buttons to our getting started documentation, which take you straight to the Cloud Playground where you can edit and run the guestbook sample code as it appears in the documentation.





In addition, the main Cloud Playground page offers easy access to many more samples. There's even an option to clone other open source App Engine Python 2.7 template projects from Github.





How does it work? The Cloud Playground is itself an open source project and consists of two modules:

  • mimic is a regular Python App Engine app, which serves as a development server (similar to the App Engine SDK "dev_appserver"), but which runs in the production App Engine environment, providing you access to the production APIs and environment while still offering a quick and easy way to test out bits of code.
  • bliss is a trivial browser-based code editor which lets you edit code in the mimic virtual file system (backed by the App Engine datastore), providing you with a user interface so you can see what the mimic app can do for you.
We previously blogged about DevTable which also uses mimic to speed up refresh cycles for their App Engine developers.



We look forward to seeing what you're able to build.





Fred Sauer is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform and long-standing member of the Google App Engine team. Fred hacks in a number of open source projects for fun and maintains a particular interest in game and web development.



Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor



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New Google Groups now available to everyone

New Google Groups now available to everyone: Posted by Ryan Falor, Product Manager, Google Groups



With Google Groups, you can manage a mailing list, coordinate with your social club, and find experts who share your interests. Over the last year we have been working on improving the experience and adding new features while keeping our old version running.



Today we’re retiring the old version and excited to be bringing the new Google Groups to everyone. If you haven’t tried Groups in a while you’ll notice improved options for managing your groups and long time users may be surprised by all the features we have added along the way.



One of the recently improved features is the ability to create an inbox that allows you to collaboratively share, distribute and track responsibilities with others. Imagine you and a few friends are organizing an event for your school and want a single email address to coordinate with vendors, parents, and volunteers. Members of the group can work together to manage email, assign items to each other, and mark items resolved. This can be a great feature for teams seeking a really simple way to get things done without sharing passwords or losing track.

Additionally, there are several new moderation tools to make managing your forum easier and faster. For example, you can now use canned responses in forums and use streamlined options to make moderating forum posts easier. And if you are on the go, you can browse and moderate your groups with our mobile website.



You can learn more about the new Google Groups in the help center.





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Evaluate Marketing Spend Efficiency with our Conversion and Attribution Tools

Evaluate Marketing Spend Efficiency with our Conversion and Attribution Tools:
You invest a lot to create your marketing campaigns, and it’s important to see how your spend impacts results. In addition to comparing the conversion performance of your marketing activities, you can now view your imported AdWords cost data directly in the Google Analytics Attribution Model Comparison Tool. By evaluating your AdWords cost data under various lenses offered through Attribution, you’ll get further insight into the effectiveness of your marketing spend. We will gradually roll out this feature out to all of Google Analytics.



Extended Set of conversion data

As previously announced, to make the analysis of your conversion path data even more meaningful, we extended the lookback window within Multi-Channel Funnels to 90 days. This functionality is now available through the standard lookback window selector. Please see our help center for more details.



Explore different attribution models to see revised performance figures

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is one of the strongest indicators for marketers. Our Model Comparison Tool now makes this important metric available to advertisers in Google Analytics. In addition to CPA, we also allow users to look at the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) figure, which compares the value or revenue driven by conversions under different attribution models.



As described in the Customer Journey to Online Purchase, marketing channels influence the customer at multiple touchpoints on the path to conversion. Display touchpoints, in aggregate, appear 3.1 times more often in the upper funnel (awareness, consideration, intent phase) than in the lower part of the funnel (decision phase).*





Selecting Conversion Value & ROAS from the selector in the Attribution Model Comparison Tool allows you to contrast the value driven by your spend. Comparing the performance of a channel by looking at two different attribution models can uncover hidden performance of this channel. In the above example, the Display channel drives 20% more value under a First Interaction model.



Interpret your analysis

The direction of the arrow in the % change column indicates the orientation of the shift. Please note that it matters which model is the reference model, and which model is the comparison model. A positive shift away from the valuation of the reference model will be visualized with an upwards arrow, a negative shift with a downwards arrow. The color of the arrows is used to indicate whether the alternative valuation of the comparison model has caused a favorable shift. Green indicates a significant shift in favor of the comparison model, and red indicates a significant shift in favor of the reference model. A gray dot symbol indicates that there is no relevant change between the reference and comparison model.





Get started today by linking your account to an AdWords cost data source. The more complete your cost data is for a given profile, the more stable and accurate are the insights you can gain from the analysis. Consider using the Cost Data Import service provided through the GA API to add cost data beyond AdWords.



*Source: Google Analytics, Q4 2012. N = US: 130M conversions (12K profiles)



Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics


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YouTube And a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

YouTube And a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack: Here's an interesting excerpt from a Google I/O presentation about YouTube's adaptive streaming:

Another surprising thing we learned from this process is that software has bugs. Some bugs are more surprising than others. For instance, if a popular mobile handset manufacturer releases a software update that opens TCP connections and doesn't close them, you get something that looks like this. [The graph shows the number of connections.]


A globally distributed denial of service attack on your servers that lasts for months. And there's basically nothing you can do to avoid this situation except sit and wait and hope they release an update. That means that we have to make the choice between degrading service for all users, or cutting off a large fraction of users. And we never want to make that choice. With application level streaming, we can deliver a fix or a work around in hours, instead of months.


"A popular mobile handset manufacturer"? What are the most popular mobile handset manufacturers? Samsung, Nokia, Apple and a few other companies. It must be a popular smartphones manufacturers which releases software updates and most users install them. Apple?

DIGITAL JUICE

From Sutton Hoo to the soccer pitch: culture with a click

From Sutton Hoo to the soccer pitch: culture with a click: Museums, libraries and galleries are a tourist staple of the summer holiday season. Often they’re the first place we head to when visiting a new city or town in order to learn about the heritage of that country. Though only a lucky few have the chance to travel to see these treasures first-hand, the Internet is helping to bring access to culture even when you can’t visit in person.



At the Google Cultural Institute, we’ve been busy working with our partners to add a range of new online exhibitions to our existing collection. With more than 6 million photos, videos and documents, the diversity and range of subject matter is large—a reflection of the fact that culture means different things to different people. What the exhibitions have in common is that they tell stories; objects are one thing but it’s the people and places they link to that make them fascinating.



The British Museum is the U.K.’s most popular visitor attraction and the 4th most visited museum in the world. It’s well known for housing one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries ever made—the 1,400 year old Anglo-Saxon burial from Sutton Hoo, untouched until its discovery in 1939. Their online exhibition “Sutton Hoo: Anglo-Saxon ship burial” explores the discovery of the ship, featuring videos of the excavation and photos of the iconic helmet and a solid gold belt buckle. All this tells the story of how the burial and its contents changed our understanding of what Anglo-Saxon society was like.





From archaeology we take you to sport, which is integral to the culture of many nations, including Brazil. In the lead-up to Brazil's hosting of the 2014 World Cup, the Museu do Futebol has told the story of how the “beautiful game” came to Brazil. The photos, videos and posters in “The Game and the People” track the social impact of the sport and its transition from a past time for the wealthy (with their pleated pants and satin belts) to the modern game.



Science remains a perennially fascinating topic and the Museo Galileo in Italy has put together a series of three exhibitions looking at the link between art and science. The Medici Collections, the Lorraine Collections and the Library Collections examine the beginnings of science and technology 500 years ago and chart developments from the discovery of the sun dial to the Google Maps of today. As well as being informative, the exhibitions include beautiful objects such as the Jovilabe, which was used to calculate the periods of Jupiter’s moons.





So if broadening your cultural horizons through travel isn’t in the cards this summer, settle down in your armchair and browse through through some of the world’s heritage and history online. Keep up to date with new material on the Cultural Institute Google+ page.



Posted by James Davis, program manager, Google Cultural Institute

DIGITAL JUICE

YouTube And a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

YouTube And a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack: Here's an interesting excerpt from a Google I/O presentation about YouTube's adaptive streaming:

Another surprising thing we learned from this process is that software has bugs. Some bugs are more surprising than others. For instance, if a popular mobile handset manufacturer releases a software update that opens TCP connections and doesn't close them, you get something that looks like this. [The graph shows the number of connections.]


A globally distributed denial of service attack on your servers that lasts for months. And there's basically nothing you can do to avoid this situation except sit and wait and hope they release an update. That means that we have to make the choice between degrading service for all users, or cutting off a large fraction of users. And we never want to make that choice. With application level streaming, we can deliver a fix or a work around in hours, instead of months.


"A popular mobile handset manufacturer"? What are the most popular mobile handset manufacturers? Samsung, Nokia, Apple and a few other companies. It must be a popular smartphones manufacturers which releases software updates and most users install them. Apple?

DIGITAL JUICE

Google+ Photos App for Chromebooks

Google+ Photos App for Chromebooks: A few months ago, François Beaufort posted some screenshots of a Native Client Chrome app for Google+ Photos. The app is now available, but Google says it's only for the Chromebook Pixel, which is not exactly true.


"When you plug an SD card into your Pixel, the app will back up your new photos to Google+ automatically. (For your eyes only, of course.) And when you're offline, you can still view your most recent photos. The Pixel's high resolution display makes your photos look their best, and browsing via touchscreen is a lot of fun. You can share individual photos, set of photos, or an entire album in just a few seconds. Simply select the images you want, then click 'Share.'"


It's a pretty useful app for Chromebooks and it's not limited to the Pixel. In fact, I don't see why it couldn't work on any desktop computer that runs Chrome. It could even replace Picasa at some point.


You can download the app from the Chrome Web Store. Google engineers "are working to bring the app to other Chromebooks as well", even though the app works on other Chromebooks. The Office Viewer powered by the Google-acquired Quickoffice used to be limited to the Chromebook Pixel and it's now available as a Chrome extension.

Update: I've tried to install the app in Chrome for Windows and it worked:


... but then I got this message:


Then I switched to my Samsung Chromebook Series 5, installed the app and it worked well.




Even the SD card import worked:



So the app should work on any Chromebook. Maybe it's only optimized for the Pixel, maybe there are some bugs that need to be fixed. All I know is that the app worked well on my Chromebook and I don't have a Chromebook Pixel.

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Improving Analytics & AdWords Account Linking

Improving Analytics & AdWords Account Linking:
Many businesses advertise to find new customers, and optimizing advertising campaigns to reach the right people will increase marketing effectiveness and ROI. Google Analytics helps marketers achieve this by offering insights into customer behavior on an advertiser’s websites, apps, and other properties. By linking AdWords and Analytics accounts together, these rich insights from Analytics can flow into AdWords.


Today, we’re happy to announce some useful improvements making it easier for Google Analytics and AdWords account owners to link their accounts.


Here are a few specific benefits of combining AdWords and Analytics data:
All of these features depend on linking AdWords and Analytics accounts, and this process is now easier than ever before. Previously, linking accounts involved multiple steps on many pages spread out between two products, and this process has now been consolidated into just a couple steps all in one linking wizard.





Once the new linking process launches to all Analytics accounts in the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create additional links from the Admin section of your Analytics account. (If you’re logged in to your AdWords account, you can also link accounts by going to Tools and Analysis > Google Analytics and following these same instructions.)  Just click AdWords Linking in the Account column, and then click the New link button to start the linking wizard.

To take advantage of simplified account linking, benefit from combining data in both products, and get more out of your marketing campaigns, follow the steps above to link your accounts or learn more in our help center.

Posted by Chris Morgan and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team


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