Googlisms

Cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog.

Public=Online is the the rallying cry during this year’s Sunshine Week, an annual event to highlight the importance of open government and the freedom of information. The week is sponsored by the American Society of News Editors, and many editorial boards have echoed the thoughts of the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
“...government information ought to be made available to the public as quickly as possible, with a minimum of rigmarole and in the easiest, most accessible way possible--which these days means via the Internet.”We agree--and what better way to celebrate Sunshine Week than with leading thinkers on government, media and citizen engagement on all sides of the political spectrum who feel the same? Yesterday at our Google D.C. office, the Sunlight Foundation announced its Public=Online campaign.

It’s exciting to see growing support for transparency and to see the progress that’s been made in the last year alone. Every day, through sites like Data.gov and projects like Open Congress, OMB Watch and our Public Data Explorer, more data is available online.

But there’s still a gap between having access to government data and easily understanding what it means. To help fill this gap, Google has partnered with the Sunlight Foundation in its Design for America contest to make government data more comprehensible to the public.

You can learn more and get started on the contest homepage. There’s room for all kinds of folks to participate, and we can’t think of a more fun way to keep the spirit of Sunshine Week going.

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Head of Google Public Sector Lab

When we launched our first Subversion-on-Bigtable service in 2006 our goal was to scale to support hundreds of thousands of projects, with the idea that we could continue to improve the service over time. A year ago, however, we realized that we would have to rebuild our Subversion service to make dramatic improvements in performance. So, we did what we had to do: we rebuilt our service from the ground up, focusing on speed and reliability.

We are now happy to announce that we have rolled out our new service to all our Subversion users. As a result, most common Subversion operations are about 3 times faster than they used to be.

One of the features of Subversion's HTTP-based protocol is that anyone can browse repositories through a normal web browser. Many open source projects hosted on Google Code use this feature to host websites for their project or post the latest versions of their software. We didn't anticipate how popular this would be when we designed our first Subversion service, but our new system has special optimizations for browser access. Latency for these pages are much lower and international users will see a dramatic improvement. We also set the appropriate caching headers, which can be manually controlled with the google-cache-control Subversion property.

To improve our reliability, our new service now has a custom replication system based on the Paxos algorithm. Whenever you make a change to your repository, the new data is now copied to several different data centers before our service reports that the commit has succeeded --- so you can code in peace knowing that your data is stored safely in multiple locations.

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to try out our new Subversion service and let us know what you think.

By Jon Trowbridge and Tony Zale, Google Project Hosting

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is even harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone's availability and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to excruciating. We'd rather schedule dental appointments.

On the Google Calendar team, we've noticed that when people talk about scheduling they say things like "I'm trying to find a time" or "let's search for a new date." We wondered what would happen if we treated calendaring more like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most relevant results from the web, we hoped we could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the person scheduling the meeting.


Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you enable the Lab, you can find a new time for an event simply by clicking on a link. Our schedule search algorithm will return a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times based on the calendars others have shared with you. You can read more about it on the Gmail Blog.

So next time your boss says "We need to reschedule," just smile and say "I'm feeling lucky."

Posted by Ken Norton, Product Manager

Ignite will be at this year’s Google I/O! Last year, we had talks on big data, cartography and DIY devices -- a "typical" Ignite line-up. This year, our line-up includes folks like Cheezburger CEO, Ben Huh, and digital artist, Aaron Koblin. However, we also want you! We want to hear your cool ideas, hacks, how-to's, and war stories.

Each Ignite talk is 5 minutes long -- with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide (they auto-advance) -- and I'll be hosting the talk at I/O. If you’re not sure what to talk about, watch Scott Berkun's excellent How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk.

Submit your talk by March 31st, and we’ll announce the selected speakers on April 3rd. Those who are chosen to give an Ignite talk will receive a free ticket to Google I/O.

If you need further inspiration, you can watch any of the hundreds of Ignite videos at Ignite Show.

By Brady Forrest, O'Reilly/Ignite

@brady

Since announcing the latest Google Chrome beta earlier this month, we've been excited to receive feedback from our beta users on the browser's new translation and privacy features. Today, we're introducing these features in the stable channel, so that they're widely available to everyone who uses Google Chrome on Windows.

Google Chrome’s translation feature is the latest step in the evolution of translation tools across Google. Just a few years ago, Google’s translation tools consisted of a site where you had to copy and paste text into a box — and it only worked for a handful of languages. Today, our translation technology works across 52 languages and can automatically detect and translate entire websites in less than a second. Chrome's translation feature automatically detects if the language of the webpage you're on is different from your preferred language setting, The browser will then display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated using Google Translate. With one click, you can instantly translate the page, and all of its text will appear in your preferred language. Here's a demo of Chrome's translation feature:



Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google Translate until you choose to translate a page. You can read more about how this feature works on the Google Translate Blog.

In addition, we've introduced new privacy features in this stable release to give you even greater control of your privacy while helping to protect the information that you do decide to share online. You can now manage Chrome's privacy settings via the browser's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, pop-ups and even JavaScript and plug-ins are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up rules to allow cookies exclusively for sites that you trust, while blocking them from for untrusted sites. For the in-depth scoop, check out google.com/chrome/privacy or watch our video series on privacy and browsers.

For those of you who already use Chrome, go raibh maith agaibh! You'll soon be updated with these new features. And for those of you who haven't yet tried Google Chrome, download it at google.com/chrome.

Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Google Munich

Over the past year, we've highlighted companies around the world who have switched to Google Apps. And that means more than 25 million people have "gone Google", including those at such globe-trotting organizations as Jaguar Land Rover and National Geographic. (You might have seen their Gone Google messages in print.)

Recently we visited one of our newest customers, Konica Minolta, to learn about why they decided to join us. Here's their story:



For those considering a switch to Google Apps, this updated resources page offers a variety of info such as customer testimonials, white papers, links to webcasts and more. Be sure to visit the Google Enterprise Blog and visit google.com/appsatwork, too.

If your company is already using Apps, join the Gone Google community. Put yourself on the map to share your experience and see who else has, yes, gone Google.


After you add yourself to the map, grab a laptop sticker that you can personalize. We're giving them away free for a limited time*. More details here.

*And our lawyers ask us to tell you that the "giveaway offer is void where prohibited and valid only while supplies last" — so hurry!

Posted by Vivian Leung, Google Enterprise Team

How time flies! It was about five years ago that we launched Google Code to the world. When we launched Google Code, we wanted to make code.google.com a great resource where developers could learn about our vision for open source and the open web. We started in 2005 with a handful of our own open source projects, links to just eight APIs and an announcement of the first ever Google Summer of Code, our now-annual program that introduces university students to open source development. By 2006 our API list had grown to 21, in 2007 there were 37, and today our collection of more than 60 APIs receive over four billion hits per day. Check out the changing face of Google Code below -- from 2005, 2007 to the present.



With the meaning of open in mind, Google Code set out to foster best practices in developer documentation, build a community around web and open source development and demonstrate the power of Google technologies. Over the past five years code.google.com has come a long way from eight APIs, maturing into a destination for developers to explore our growing family of APIs and developer products, whether they speed up the web, alleviate cross-browser issues, make hosting web applications easy and scalable or make the web a more social place.

Google Code has also become an interactive place to share ideas. Not only can developers prototype their work in a Code Playground, they can also use Project Hosting on Google Code, a fast, reliable and easy way for developers to host all kinds of open source projects. Today, there are more than 240,000 projects registered, with commits coming in at about 17,000 per day...about 1 every 5 seconds. We also host 800 open source projects of our own, including four projects (Android, Chrome, Chrome OS and GWT) with over a million lines of code each.

It’s been an amazing five years, but there’s still a lot of work ahead. We’re dedicated to helping the developer and open source communities thrive in as many ways as we can. To celebrate our birthday and thank everyone for supporting code.google.com over the years we’re rolling out a new, faster Subversion server, which will double the source code storage for Project Hosting on Google Code from 1GB to 2GB. Happy coding!

By Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

At age five most kids can hop, skip and tie their shoes without help. Google Code turns five this week, and while we’re still working on the shoelaces thing, we’ve grown from a simple site for hosting a couple of APIs into a destination for developers to prototype their ideas in a Code Playground, host all kinds of open source projects and find out about our growing family of APIs and products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Android.

To learn more about how code.google.com has come alive over the past five years, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

At Google I/O (just 2 months away!), we're excited to bring back a series of sessions called fireside chats. Fireside chats are smaller, intimate sessions where Google teams will talk about major developments with their product, what's in store for developers, and spend most of the time answering burning questions from the audience.

I/O will feature the following fireside chats:

• Fireside chat with the Android team
  Speakers: The Android team with Chris DiBona moderating
  Pull up a chair and join the Android team at Google for a fireside chat. It's your opportunity to ask us about the platform and to tell us where you'd like to see it go in the future.
  
  
• Fireside chat with Android handset manufacturers
  Come join us for a fireside chat with the top Android handset manufacturers. Hear about the types of devices being planned for 2010 and get your device-specific questions answered.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the App Engine team
  Speakers: Brett Slatkin, Guido van Rossum, Matt Blain, Max Ross, Don Schwarz, Alfred Fuller, Kevin Gibbs, Sean Lynch
  It's been an busy year for the App Engine team with lots of new features and lots of new developers. Come tell us about what you've loved and what still bugs you. With several members of the App Engine team on deck, you'll get the answers to your questions straight from the source.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Google Chrome and Chrome OS teams
  Speakers: Ian Fette, Brian Rakowski, Linus Upson, Caesar Sengupta, Matt Papakipos
  Curious about what's new in Google Chrome, or what makes Google Chrome OS so exciting? We'll talk briefly about the major developments over the past year, and then field questions from the audience. If you're dying to know something, this is the place to find an answer.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Enterprise team
  Speakers: Chris Vander Mey, Scott McMullan, Ryan Boyd, David Glazer, Ken Lin
  With the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, we've introduced a new way to expose your software to businesses - and a new way to extend Google Apps. If you're interested in building apps, what we're thinking about, or if you have other questions about the Marketplace, pull up a chair.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Geo team
  Speakers: Thor Mitchell, Peter Birch, Matt Holden, Ben Appleton, Bart Locanthi, Thatcher Ulrich
  Here's your opportunity to pick the brains of the people behind the Maps, Earth, and Maps Data APIs! We'll take a quick walk through the milestones of the last year, and then open it up to your questions. Don't miss your opportunity to get the straight scoop on all that's new in the world of Google Geo APIs.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the GWT team
  Speakers: Bruce Johnson, Joel Webber, Ray Ryan, Amit Manjhi, Jaime Yap, Kathrin Probst, Eric Ayers
  If you're interested in what the GWT team has been up to since 2.0, here's your chance. We'll have several of the core engineers available to discuss the new features and frameworks in GWT, as well as to answer any questions that you might have.
  
  
• Fireside chat with the Social Web team
  Speakers: David Glazer, DeWitt Clinton, John Panzer, Joseph Smarr, Sami Shalabi, Todd Jackson
  Social is quickly becoming an integral part of how we experience the web, and this is your chance to pick the brains of the people who are working on Buzz, the Buzz API and the underlying open protocols such as Activity Streams and OAuth which are an essential component of a truly open & social web.

You can check out the fireside chats and other sessions on code.google.com/io. The teams are looking forward to your questions!


Posted by Christine Tsai, Google I/O team

(Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog)
Power. Clean water. The Interstate highway system. It’s easy to forget that the advantages of modern American life result from basic infrastructure investments made by earlier generations.

Tomorrow the FCC will release a national broadband strategy. The plan will set goals for expanding broadband to unserved and under-served areas, promote greater speeds, and drive consumer demand. It will harness this communications technology to urgent national priorities, such as jobs, education, health, energy, and security. In short, the plan will lay the groundwork for investing in America’s future.

Yes, the Internet was invented in the United States. Yes, we once led the world in broadband development. But now, networks in many countries, from Western Europe to East Asia, are faster and more advanced than our own. Long after we recover from this recession, this broadband gap will be a dead weight on American businesses and workers, unless we act now.

As with the space race in the 1960s, America needs a national effort by our scientists, engineers, companies, educational institutions and government agencies. Just like that great national adventure, we need near-term and long-term goals.

Broadband is an essential input to expanding business, education, and healthcare opportunities everywhere. As soon as possible, we need to bring Internet access to every community, from rural America to the inner cities.

But we also need even more ambitious objectives — or “stretch goals” — that test the limits of our ingenuity. When President John F. Kennedy summoned the nation to space exploration, the immediate goal was to send an astronaut in orbit around the earth. But JFK called for “putting a man on the moon” because he knew that dream would inspire Americans to literally reach for the stars.

The private sector has a big job to do, and needs to carry much of the investment. For our part, we plan to build and test an ultra-high-speed broadband network in at least one U.S. community. We are excited by the amount of support our proposed testbed has received from local communities and individuals.

But smart, tailored public policies are critical too. Let’s install broadband fiber as part of every federally-funded infrastructure project, from highways to mass transit. And let’s deploy broadband fiber to every library, school, community health center, and public housing facility in the U.S.

I support a national broadband strategy because ubiquitous broadband connectivity can catapult America into the next level of economic competitiveness, worker productivity, and educational opportunity. But as in the past, we will make this breakthrough by choice, not chance.

Posted by Eric Schmidt, CEO

It's been two years since we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few weeks about our vision for online display advertising in the years ahead. Today, Susan Wojcicki previews the series and looks back at how we've brought Google and DoubleClick technologies together over the past two years. -ed.

The first online display advertisement — a simple, clickable image — appeared online over 16 years ago. Fast forward to 2010. You're likely to see display ads — image, text, video and rich-media formats — on most of the websites that you visit. These ads are crucial to the Internet. They provide information about thousands of products, services and businesses. They help to fund the web content and services that we all use. And they enable large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses.

I've watched display advertising evolve from a series of simple, static images, to the incredible creative units that we see today. The best display ads today are often like mini-websites with complex animations, stunning graphics or videos, interactive and social elements. As technology enables better ways of matching ads, they're becoming more relevant to the audience that views them and the website that hosts them. In addition, they're bought and sold across the web more seamlessly than ever before.

Our belief in the potential of display advertising has spurred our investments in this area. We started investing seriously nearly six years ago, by offering display ad formats on our AdSense partner sites in the Google Content Network (which now comprises over a million online publishers). About three years ago, we acquired YouTube and began to offer various display advertising options.

And two years ago, we acquired DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. Since then, we've been busy integrating the DoubleClick and Google technologies, and unveiling new features to improve display advertising for users, advertisers and online publishers alike. I thought this was a good opportunity to look back on what we've done over the past two years by bringing Google and DoubleClick together.

Helping our advertisers get better results

By combining Google and DoubleClick technologies, we've made significant enhancements to advertising on the Google Content Network. For example, we've offered support for third party vendors, enabled ads to be frequency capped so that users don't see the same ad over and over, introduced view-through conversion reporting and opened a beta of interest-based advertising. Through these enhancements, we believe we can deliver more relevant, measurable ads that create more value for everyone — users get more useful ads, and these ads generate better results for advertisers and higher returns for publishers.

We're also working to provide an integrated solution that enables advertisers and agencies to plan, buy, create, serve and measure display ads across the web, in a single interface. For the longest time, getting a display ad campaign up and running has been inefficient and cumbersome. We've made significant upgrades to DoubleClick's ad serving technology, DoubleClick for Advertisers, adding new measurement and planning technologies, including Ad Planner and Google Analytics. These improvements streamline advertisers' and agencies' online advertising campaigns.

New ways of buying display ads: the Ad Exchange

In September 2009, we launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers, ad networks and agency networks buy and sell display advertising space. The new Ad Exchange is a major step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The technologies in the new Ad Exchange — principally "real-time bidding" and "dynamic allocation" — are already delivering great results for participants. AdWords advertisers can run ads on sites in the Ad Exchange, using their existing AdWords interface. This gives AdWords advertisers more high quality sites to run display ads on. Similarly, our AdSense publishers are benefiting from more high-quality display advertisers coming through the Ad Exchange.

Maximizing revenue for online publishers

A few weeks ago, we launched the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, to help publishers get the most value out of their online content and improve the process of selecting the ads to appear on their websites. In making this upgrade, we've been focused on combining the best of Google's technology and infrastructure with the best of DoubleClick's ad serving expertise to help generate more advertising revenue for major online publishers. For these publishers, managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process that can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content. Ad serving is the core technology that underpins this process.

Unleashing creativity in advertising

There's no shortage of creative marketers with brilliant ideas to engage and reach consumers — from remarkable rollerblading baby videos, to customizable ads featuring interactive Twitter feeds. We launched DoubleClick Studio, a rich media tool that makes it easier for agencies and advertisers to design interactive rich media ads. We've also continued to invest in DoubleClick Rich Media, which enables complex and creative ads to be easily trafficked and served. Ads created with these DoubleClick products are engaging users every day, and frequently appear on the homepage of YouTube, on sites in the Google Content Network and all across the web. To further help marketers run engaging ads across the web, we recently acquired a company called Teracent that developed technology that can tailor literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad, in real-time.

To date, we've put hundreds of thousands of engineering hours into building our display solutions and have partnered closely with advertisers, agencies and online publishers to help them get the best results; and to help users see more engaging and relevant ads. We've also developed controls like the Ads Preferences Manager and a specially-engineered opt-out plugin, so that users have transparency, choice and control over the ads they see.

However, our work in recent years is really only the beginning of what's possible in this area. Across the board, we're building and seeing vast improvements in display advertising technology. These technology improvements will make it far easier to buy ads across the web at scale, create engaging ad formats, measure the impact of ad campaigns in innovative and insightful ways, deliver relevant ads to precisely the right audiences in real-time and maximize the value of publishers' online content. With these advances, we think that display advertising, as a category, can grow dramatically.

Over the next few weeks, we're looking forward to exploring these themes on this blog, and explaining some of the ways that new technologies are helping to move display advertising forward for everyone.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week's enhancements include:

Locking SafeSearch now in 39 languages
Last November, we announced the option to password protect your SafeSearch setting and filter out sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch Lock helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We're pleased to roll this out globally in 39 more languages. It's easy to set your preference, and once you do, you'll see a visible change to your search page. Even from across the room, you'll be able to see bright colored balls on the top of the screen. Check out this video to learn more.

Microdata support for Rich Snippets
HTML (hypertext markup language) is the core language of the web. And since it was created, HTML5 has become the fifth major revision of HTML. What's different about HTML5? The specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages. Paritcularly of interest to webmasters, this week we were excited to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa.

By using microdata markup when web pages are created, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve their presentation in Google search results.

To learn more about rich snippets and microdata support, here are some links:

• Rich snippets documentation
• Overview of microdata
• Official microdata specification
• Rich snippets testing tool

Stay tuned for next week's post on launches, more enhancements and news about search.

Posted by Jen Fitzpatrick, VP, Engineering

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Today’s update includes a handful of experimental features, a bunch from third-party developers and one that lets you build new features yourself. Enjoy!

Fast new windows in Gmail
Working with email in a single window can slow you down, so throughout Gmail there are places where you can launch what you’re doing into a new window and accomplish two things at once. For example, you can search your inbox and compose a new message at the same time. While this has been part of Gmail for a while now, we’ve just made it better by dramatically speeding up how quickly new windows open. No more waiting for the new window “Loading...” bar to finish — now you can do what you do in Gmail faster!


Gmail Labs updates
We’ve made a handful of updates in Gmail Labs, our experimental testing ground where Google engineers can quickly launch new Gmail features and get feedback from users. Based on usage and user feedback, six Labs have graduated to become full-fledged Gmail features: Search Autocomplete, Go To Label, Forgotten Attachment Detector, YouTube Previews, Custom Label Colors and Vacation Dates. We also retired five Labs that weren’t as popular. Finally, we introduced one new Lab: Refresh POP Accounts. If you use Gmail to retrieve messages from another email account with POP, this Lab immediately checks your other account for new mail when you click the “Refresh” link in Gmail.


Calendar Labs updates
We also have Labs in Google Calendar, and we’ve cooked up a few new experiments there as well. Event Flair lets you add custom icons to appointments, Gentle Reminders prevents event reminders from interrupting your flow in the browser and Automatically Declining Events blocks people from double-booking time on your calendar when you’re already busy.


Apps Script Gallery
Google Apps Script is a flexible system that lets you add custom menus, buttons and functions to spreadsheets, as well as make the components of Google Apps work together in new ways. For example, you can trigger a set of automated Gmail messages and add appointments to your calendar based on changes in a spreadsheet. On Wednesday, we made Google Apps Script available to everyone — not just businesses, schools and organizations — and we launched the Apps Script Gallery to share script examples and help you get started scripting.


DocVerse joins Google
We’re always looking for ways to help people transition smoothly to the cloud. With this in mind, last week we acquired DocVerse, a small team that’s built a powerful set of add-ons to help teams work together more efficiently with Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications that they’re familiar with. Stay tuned for more information about our plans with DocVerse.

More apps for Google Apps
Google Apps customers often decide to move even more of their technology into the cloud, but it hasn’t always been easy for them to find good web-based solutions that meet their needs and to integrate those solutions with Google Apps. This Tuesday, we launched the Google Apps Marketplace to help customers find technology from trusted providers and give developers a platform where they can sell their products. When Google Apps administrators find something they like in the Marketplace, it takes just a few clicks to integrate a developer’s application with Google Apps. Authentication to third-party applications can be handled automatically by Google Apps, and developers’ applications can integrate with and securely share data among services like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. There are more than 50 applications available in the Marketplace today, ranging from accounting and project management apps to graphic design and customer relationship management tools.



Who's gone Google?
We’re pleased to welcome another crop of new businesses and schools to Google Apps. More than 11,000 crew members at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines took flight with Google Apps, and the Sports Basement switched teams from Microsoft Exchange. National Geographic is exploring the world of real-time collaboration, and Hamilton College is learning a few new tricks with Google Apps, too.

Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new features, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

At Campfire One this week we announced that we will soon open Gmail contextual gadgets as a new extension point for developers. These gadgets can smartly draw information from the web and let users perform relevant actions based on the content of an email message, all without leaving the Gmail inbox. For instance, contextual gadgets currently available in Gmail can detect links in emails to show previews of documents, videos, photos, and more, right inside the messages.

For businesses, Gmail contextual gadgets can boost employee productivity by complementing email in a context-specific and actionable way. Appirio, a cloud solution provider, provided a demonstration of the potential of Gmail contextual gadgets and other experimental features
with their new product PS Connect:



Soon we’ll be opening Gmail contextual gadgets as an extension for trusted testing by developers. If you have a good idea for this type of gadget today, please fill out this form. And for those of you who will be attending Google I/O in May, be sure to check out our session on building Gmail contextual gadgets.

By Dong Chen, Gmail Contextual Gadgets team

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)
When the first ball of this year’s Indian Premier League cricket season is bowled, fans across the planet will have a front row seat in the world’s biggest online sports stadium. Tonight the Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders will face off in Mumbai at 8pm IST, and the YouTube global community will be able to tune in to the IPL’s YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/ipl) for streaming and on-demand access to witness the start of what promises to be one of the most widely-distributed sporting events in history. Fans can watch matches, highlight videos, player interviews and much more all on the IPL’s YouTube channel.


Named by Forbes as the "hottest sports league in the world" with revenues comparable to the world’s most popular leagues, the IPL season is a 60-match, 43-day tournament that features some of the best talent in cricket today. You can come to YouTube and keep up with the action any time, anywhere and connect with fans across the globe. Watch as the match happens, or if you missed a match, tune in later to see what happened. The entire season will be streamed around the world on YouTube, except in the US, where matches will be time-delayed and made available 15 minutes after the match ends.

On the IPL Channel, you’ll see three tabs:

• Today’s Matches: This is where you can watch streamed matches as they happen. (Note that the stream will be delayed by a few minutes.) Click through at any time to see the match scorecard.
• Recent Matches: Catch up any time on the full action of matches that have already happened. Watch Sachin cream the ball through the covers, Warney taking his latest wicket and more.
• Highlights: If you’re short on time, check in here for short videos of player interviews, match highlights, greatest plays and more.

And for all of you who want to cheer or commiserate with others, check out our Twitter gadget on the channel page to be part of the conversation. You can keep up with the discussion on Twitter with the YouTube IPL hashtag (#youtube_ipl). Share, rate and comment on videos throughout the channel, or upload your own video responses to the action. There's also a link so you can join the Official DLF IPL community on Orkut (www.orkut.com/ipl).

We'll be watching the donkey drops, the five-fers, the flippers and floaters, the half-yorkers and slow sweeps — and cheering alongside you!

* A googly is a kind of pitch similar to a baseball pitch or a bowling throw in the game cricket; a wicked googly would be a really good pitch.
Posted by Amit Agrawal, Strategic Partner Development Manager, YouTube

More than ever, governments around the world are threatening online free expression. Forty countries have taken measures to limit this freedom, up from only a handful a few years ago. Google and YouTube services are or have been blocked in 25 of those nations.

On Thursday night in Paris, we took an important step to highlight this crucial issue by sponsoring the first Netizen Prize (or more elegantly, “Le Prix de Net Citoyen”) awarded by the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. And on Friday, March 12, we’ll be helping highlight the fight for Internet freedom by marking the group’s World Day Against Cyber Censorship on YouTube.

Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders chose to give the first Netizen Prize to the Iranian creators of the website Change for Equality, first established in 2006 to fight for changes in laws in Tehran that discriminate against women. That site has since become a well-known source of information on women’s rights in Iran, documenting arrests of women activists and becoming a rallying point for opponents of the regime.

Over the past year those leaders in Tehran have distinguished themselves — and earned the opprobrium of people all over the world — for their brutal crackdown on the rights of its critics to question their rule. Last year's killing of unarmed Neda Agha-Soltan during post-election protests in Tehran, seen around the world on amateur video, has become a symbol of the regime's ferocity — and the power of the Internet to reveal what governments do not want the world to see.

At the award ceremony in our Paris office, our Senior Vice President David Drummond said that we are at a critical point in the future of the Internet: "All of us have a choice. We can allow repressive policies to take flight and spread across the globe, or we can work together against such challenges and uphold the fundamental human right to free expression.”

David went on to praise the role of NGOs like Reporters Without Borders, the Obama Administration’s commitment to the promotion of Internet freedom and the efforts of all groups that have joined the Global Network Initiative. Under the initiative, major U.S. Internet companies, human rights group, socially responsive investors and academic institutions agreed to guidelines promoting free expression and protecting the privacy of their users around the world. “In the spirit of the undiplomatic American come to European shores," he said, "let me make a plea for European governments, companies and groups to rise to the occasion. Any effort that is limited to the United States is bound to fall far short of its global potential.”

Posted by Robert Boorstin, Director, Public Policy

Like many of you out there, we’re gearing up for the SXSW Interactive Festival, which starts tomorrow, March 12 in Austin, TX. In just a few short hours, dozens of Googlers and YouTubers will be descending on Austin for a packed weekend of panels, demos and parties. Of course, we’ve also got a few fun things up our sleeve:

• Representatives from Google and YouTube will be speaking on more than 20 panels on a variety of subjects, including open source, mobile, real-time communication and user experience design.
• At the Google booth, we’ll be doing demos on a wide range of products, including Google Maps, Blogger, Wave, Reader and YouTube, and sessions on building apps for App Engine, extensions on Chrome and accessibility APIs and hacks for Android.
• On Sunday, our all-day Hackathon will give you the chance to get your hands dirty and build applications using a variety of Google technologies. At the end of the day, we’ll award prizes, including Android phones, for the best apps.
• We’re sponsoring the festival’s first Mothers’ Room, where nursing moms can go for comfort and privacy.

Finally, we’ll be seeing you at as many parties as we can go to at one time, including Bikehugger’s Mobile Social, where representatives from the Google Maps team will be handing out schwag and dishing dirt on how they built bike directions, the Blogger/Reader party, where you’ll have a chance to chat with members of those teams about new features, and (last but not least) the SXSW Film Closing/Music Opening, co-sponsored by YouTube and VH1.

You can read more about all of the Google happenings on our SXSW website, and follow @googlesxsw on Twitter for last-minute updates and news from Austin. We can’t wait to hit the ground running (or biking), and we look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog and Twitter team

In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.

The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
• Customizable colors, fonts and more

Check out this video for a peek at what you can do with the Blogger Template Designer:



For more info, check out our post on the Blogger in draft blog. Give the Blogger Template Designer a test drive, and then let us know what you think!

Posted by Pete Hopkins, Tech Lead, Blogger

The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.

To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.


Google Apps Script has been available to businesses, schools and other organizations using Google Apps since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks.

To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.”

Check out the Google Docs blog for more information about Apps Script, and to learn about writing your own scripts, visit the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.


Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy.

We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer