A happy (belated) Easter to everyone and a rather late round-up of some of the events at Google in the last month (and a little bit of this month).

Google Blogger, their free blogging platform, finally got an update to their templates with Blogger Template Designer. Though Blogger itself has been around for many years, there has been no significant change to the templates available. Currently only available to Blogger in Draft users, the template designer offers 15 new templates (with more promised), custom layouts and hundreds of background images. You can read more about the much needed update at Blogger Buzz here. Blogger Buzz also gave an update on the time saved by the introduction of their Auto Pagination feature which happened in February. The ten percent latency reduction is reported to already be saving users 1 million hours of waiting time a week, read more here.

Gmail introduced a new security feature, remote sign out and recent account activity information. The new feature will alert you if your Gmail account has recently been accessed from a different geographic location and will issue a warning, read more at the Google Online Security Blog here. Once more information has been gathered from usage this feature will be introduced to Google Apps and possibly other Google products.

The revenue generated from advertising is how Google makes most of it’s money and they recently launched Google Ad Innovations which is a place to check out new advertising technologies, watch demos and try out new tools. Find out more at the new Google Ad Innovations page here.

A few other odds and ends - Google Voice celebrated it’s 1st birthday on March 11, there has been further integration of YouTube and Facebook, with your Facebook feed now appearing on your YouTube page, read more here. Also this month the latest stable release of Google Chrome introduced Google Translate integration as well as better privacy controls, read about these new features at the Google Chrome Blog here. There has also been an integration of Google Analytics into the Microsoft Silverlight Framework which you can read more about here and there was also the launch of a new AdWords for mobile interface. Another new Analytics feature is the option to opt-out of Analytics reporting, which will be implemented with a browser based plug-in, read more at the Google Analytics blog here.

And finally, Google’s April Fool’s Joke, the announcement that it would be changing it’s name to Topeka, and vice versa, the town of Topeka would be changing it’s name to Google. Personally I am not sure how many people bought this particular April Fool’s Joke however if you want to read more about it check out the Official Google Blog Post here. And that’s about it for March 2010…

For the second in our new series of what will hopefully be a regular monthly round-up of the more interesting occurrences at Google, we will take a look at a few newsworthy stories doing the rounds this February.
Let’s start with the positives, Google Docs, the online office application suite from Google got a new web […]

There doesn’t seem to a  quiet moment to be had for Google, who had a rather mixed bag this month. The eagerly anticipated ’superphone’ - the Nexus One was launched and despite all the hype surrounding the smartphone, sales figures have reportedly been poor. Comparatively, The iPhone 3GS sold over a million units within 72 […]

The online game is all about rapid change and 2009 was no different, here is a round-up of some of the good stuff from last year and how it affected (or will affect) the search market.
Missing something? Well, that would be Live Search from Microsoft, in it’s place we now have the (rather oddly titled) Bing. […]

 It is amazing how quickly we forget, just over a year ago saw the release of a rather buggy browser named Google Chrome. Our own staff, generally quick to praise Google, even had a few doubts. Today, the beta version of Google Chrome supports extensions and we are now at the point of seeing what […]

If you have every managed a campaign on Google AdWords, you will have come across a little button which asks you whether you would like your ads to display on ‘all devices’ or have the option of deselecting ‘mobile browsers’. Have you ever considered the real implications of choosing yes or no to mobile browsers?
The […]

Just before for the peak shopping days of the year Google released a new feature called Ad parameters. This feature, which was initially know as Live Ads enables advertisers to update numeric fields in their ad copy without actually deleting the existing ad and creating a new one (which is how the standard Adwords ad […]

It has been a very, very busy time for the folks over at Google lately. The much hyped Google Wave is open to a few lucky individuals who got invitations (read more about it at Wikipedia here) and is set to revolutionize the way we communicate online. Not only that, the Google Wave interface is […]

After using Google for so long we have become quite used to an almost ‘psychic’ search. You type in something and Google will return a match, even offering suggestions if you make a spelling mistake, and you generally find what you want quite easily.
This ‘comfort zone’ we have developed can however lead to problems, as […]

We’re all familiar with the concept of user experience and its importance. Personally, I prefer to think more specifically of user expectation. It somehow seems to stir stronger feelings of personal responsibility.
I’d venture that our responsibility for user’s expectations is something the creative department is more aware of than anyone else. The reason: when you […]