Happenings in the Land of Google - March 2010
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…

