Thursday, November 29, 2007

Thursday Recap: Google Gadgets for Mac, Google Maps Mobile Update and More

• Google Desktop is now available for the Mac too if you have OS X 10.4 or higher. This means Google added another platform to deploy Google Gadgets (after OpenSocial, iGoogle, gadgets in external sites, and Google Desktop for Windows).
• Google released Google Maps My Location, an update to Google Maps for the phone which tries to automatically position the map to your location. Google says, “The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map – it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).” If you do have GPS, that is supported too though for more precision.
  (The update was loading here on a Windows Mobile OS with Midlets support, though I had to uninstall the old version first. My location was also found, but then I received WinInetHttpError 0 12002 and the program closed.)
• Google started an open source contest for pre-university students. “If you’re a student age 13 or older who has not yet begun university studies, we’d love to see you help out these projects,” Google states on the homepage of the “The Google Highly Open Participation Contest.”
• Head of Google webspam team Matt Cutts gives a video explanation of search result snippets; most interesting part might be the explanation of those site navigation links some results show. Matt emphasizes that mostly everything is algorithmical: no one at Google hand picks the kind of site links added to a snippet.
• There are some photos of what seems to be Google Russia offices – St. Petersburg and Moscow – available on Picasa. Watch out for the picture of Google Soap. (A Google office is the McDonald’s of technology: no matter which country you’re in you always know what to expect from it.) [Photos by Aengus’ Scroll via Slav Ben Ari.]
• Gmail received an updated version of their chat client, now allowing group chat and emoticons as well (just like the existing Google Talk gadget; even less reason now to install the desktop client Google Talk). On a side-note, why does Google almost hide the Talk gadget in comparison to the downloadable Talk program on the Google Talk homepage?
• The US Republican debates, moderatd by CNN with help from video questions submitted to Google-owned YouTube, were taking place yesterday, with some heat among the candidates, apparently.

Discussion of specific items is in the forum.

[Thanks to all who submitted pointers!]

Thursday Recap: Google Ga ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6)

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