Saturday, January 6, 2007
Google Gadgets MiniMessages
Google last month introduced a way for Google personalized homepage module developers to add messages to modules. The Google helper gadget (pictured; you can add it by typing the URL “developer.xml”) itself makes use of these “MiniMessages” to show a kind of gadget developer blog. Basically, every mini message is a line of text with a little X next to it to close it. Google suggests that you can use these to promote something, to display a status (e.g. when something loads in the background, or to show an error message), or just in general to send out notifications every once in a while.
In other somewhat older news, Google suggests that you can host gadgets at the Google Code Project Hosting site, and provides a tutorial for doing so.
[Via Dann.]
Weblog Awards 2007
The Bloggies nominations for 2007 have started. Can’t think of any good URLs? Give the great googlified.com, googlesystem.blogspot.com, google.blognewschannel.com and searchengineland.com a try. [Via Boing Boing.]
Google Invests in Chinese Site
The New York Times reports that Google invested in Chinese Xunlei.com in some kind of partnership. The NYT writes “people close to the companies said Google paid about $5 million for a 4-percent stake in the company” and that Google is now “allowing the Chinese Web site to use Googles search capabilities.” From Germany, I can barely connect to Xunlei.com (and its various blog subdomains) due to timeouts, but according to the NYT the site “allows users to download music and video clips.” [Thanks Manoj Nahar!]
Get More Google Chat Emoticons
You can add a bigger range of graphical emoticons to Gmail Chat (the browser-based variant of Google Talk) using Jim Wilson’s neat Firefox extension. You know, MSN or Yahoo messenger stuff like 
this or 
this or 
this or even 
this and 
this.
[Thanks Jim!]
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