Googlisms

Sometimes I find it hard to describe Picasa without sounding like a late-night infomercial for a multi-bladed thingamabob: "It's a photo organizer! A photo editor! A web-savvy photo sharing and management system in just one tiny package!"

We try hard to avoid hyperbole around here, but it's true that Picasa software, working together with Picasa Web Albums, can help with nearly every aspect of owning and operating a digital camera. And because many of us take pictures in order to share them, we try to make sure Picasa does a great job of getting your favorite photos online, where friends and family can enjoy them too. In Picasa 3, that means powerful new features like automatically syncing changes between the photos on your computer and what you're sharing online, useful privacy controls integrated into the software on your PC, easier notifications, and more.

And today, we're releasing Picasa for Mac. While we've previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, Picasa for Mac finally brings all of the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the millions of Mac OS X users who use Picasa Web Albums. Not to mention the "it-slices-and-dices" feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages.


Picasa for Mac looks and works much like Picasa on other platforms, and offers trademark Picasa features — such as non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them.

Right now, Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs, but we very much wanted to get an early version out to folks attending Macworld (you can learn more about this beta release at the Google Photos blog). To run Picasa, you'll need an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and above. We hope you'll give it a spin, and give us your feedback in person — members of the Picasa engineering team will be conducting demos at Google's Macworld booth all week (you can also check out the video tour below).



Posted by Susanna Leng, Software Engineer

Every year right about now we round up our blogging activity across Google. Ready? Here goes.

This is our 368th post of the year on the main Google blog, which is 23% more than in 2007. In addition to more posts, we are thrilled to know that we have many more readers now — 78% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 6,738,830 last year to more than 12 million (12,000,723) in 2008. And readers are coming from all over: the UK, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan and beyond. The top non-Google referrers are Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker and Slashdot.

We posted quite a bit about new products (10) and new product features (56), but nothing caused as much excitement as our earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome. This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! There was also the much-anticipated announcement of the first Android-powered phone. And people enjoyed reading about our design philosophies. Who knew a little change to a favicon would generate such interest?

But it wasn't all just product news; there was much else to cover in 2008. To mark Google's 10th birthday, we took a moment to reflect on the enormous impact the Internet has had on people's lives since our founding. Some of our in-house experts shared their thoughts on how various technologies will evolve in the next 10 years.

Like many of you, we were on the edge of seats watching all of the U.S. election action. We posted 27 times about political subjects, providing information about voting tools, how the political process works, and what was top of mind on Election Day. It's clear that technology will be playing an even bigger role in politics in years to come.

Of course, we had some fun too: We kept our long-standing April Fools' Day tradition going with the announcement of Project Virgle; we covered new ways to get around the Googleplex and the masterminding of a giant Ferris wheel; and we raised our glass to a couple who got married with Google.

And the Google blog network keeps on growing: 44 new blogs launched this year, for a total of 127 active company blogs. A few highlights: eight new developer blogs (the Open Source blog is shining star, with 370,000 unique visitors since its start in February), and 22 new ads-related blogs, nearly half of which are in languages other than English (there are AdSense blogs in Traditional Chinese and Russian; and AdWords blogs in Danish, German, Turkish, French, Russian, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Spanish). There's even an Analytics blog in French. And we also welcomed three new regional blogs, for India, Africa, and the Ukraine. Sharing information with people wherever they are in whatever language they speak is a priority for us, and each of these new blogs helps us get a little bit closer to this goal. If the total number of Google blogs makes your head spin, don't worry. We've developed a new blog directory and gadget to help you more easily track news and updates from us.

We're looking forward to another robust year of keeping you informed of all the goings-on at Google. In the meantime, we wish you and yours a very happy New Year.

Posted by Susan Straccia, Google Blog Team

The holidays are a time for giving, and Googlers across the globe have found some creative ways to give back to their communities this season. From raising money and crafting greeting cards to building gingerbread houses and giving blood, Googlers from east to west have been busy spreading good cheer. We've highlighted just a few of these efforts here, and we're looking forward to many more opportunities to give back in the new year.

London
The UK engineering recruitment team started to plan its annual Secret Santa gift exchange. But as they began thinking about last year, they realized that hardly anyone on the team could remember what they'd received, let alone given. Instead of spending 10 pounds on gag gifts, they decided to use the money to make a difference. After discovering that a local children's hospital was in desperate need of gifts, they quickly raised enough money to buy a Nintendo Wii gaming console for one of the wards.


Mexico City
In the past, Google has held a "Doodle 4 Google" contest in the US, the UK, and Australia, inviting kids K-12 to submit a homepage doodle inspired by a particular theme. This year Mexico held its first such contest (theme: "the Mexico we want"). For each doodle submitted, Google donated to a non-profit that works to eradicate childhood malnutrition in Mexico. In total, more than 70,000 kilos (154,000 pounds) of food and aid were donated. Winner, Ana Karen Villagómez, was recently recognized in a ceremony in Mexico City; her doodle (pictured below) will appear on the Google homepage on January 6.


Boston and beyond
Boston Googlers delivered gifts to some very grateful students at a local school and spent the morning reading and playing with the children. The Chicago office held its first-ever holiday blood drive, donating 36 units of blood. And the Ann Arbor office held a "CANstruction" competition, creating sculptures out of canned food, personal items and baby items, which were all later donated.



We hope that your holiday season is filled with plenty of time to slow down and reflect on what's important to you, and that you too feel inspired to find ways to give back to your own community in the new year.

Posted by Eileen Duffy and Sarah Falck, AdWords Account Associates

By Mike Marchak, Google Developer Team

Before looking back on this past year, we'd like to thank the developer community for your involvement and enthusiasm in 2008. Without you none of our accomplishments would've been possible and coming to work would not have been nearly as rewarding or exciting.



In 2008 the developer team at Google made it significantly easier for developers to build increasingly sophisticated web apps. Looking back, some of the most notable events from the last year include the App Engine launch, GWT 1.5 launch, Chrome launch, AJAX Language API launch, AJAX Libraries API launch and the broad adoption of OpenSocial.

We also worked hard to make it simple to integrate and extend Google applications through the launch of the You Tube API, Visualization API, Maps for Flash API, Finance API and Custom Search API.

We were also really happy to participate in the Open Handset Alliance where we saw the announcement of the Android Developer Challenge winners, the Android 1.0 SDK launch, and the first app downloads in the Android Market.

Our favorite part of 2008, however, was interacting with you at Google I/O and at Developer Days. These events allowed us to meet inspirational developers in 15 countries around the world who are building fantastic applications.

In 2009, we look forward to building products to make the web better and that let you, the developer community, build better apps on the web. We are already excited about seeing you at events next year.


Happy Holidays from the Google Developer Team.

By Mike Marchak, Google Developer Team

Before looking back on this past year, we'd like to thank the developer community for your involvement and enthusiasm in 2008. Without you none of our accomplishments would've been possible and coming to work would not have been nearly as rewarding or exciting.



In 2008 the developer team at Google made it significantly easier for developers to build increasingly sophisticated web apps. Looking back, some of the most notable events from the last year include the App Engine launch, GWT 1.5 launch, Chrome launch, AJAX Language API launch, AJAX Libraries API launch and the broad adoption of OpenSocial.

We also worked hard to make it simple to integrate and extend Google applications through the launch of the You Tube API, Visualization API, Maps for Flash API, Finance API and Custom Search API.

We were also really happy to participate in the Open Handset Alliance where we saw the announcement of the Android Developer Challenge winners, the Android 1.0 SDK launch, and the first app downloads in the Android Market.

Our favorite part of 2008, however, was interacting with you at Google I/O and at Developer Days. These events allowed us to meet inspirational developers in 15 countries around the world who are building fantastic applications.

In 2009, we look forward to building products to make the web better and that let you, the developer community, build better apps on the web. We are already excited about seeing you at events next year.


Happy Holidays from the Google Developer Team.

When I look back on four years of tracking Old St. Nick on Christmas Eve, I can't help but smile. The Santa tracker has really come a long way. I always thought NORAD's Santa Tracker was a great holiday tradition, but I felt like it could have been even better if people could visualize exactly where Santa was on Christmas Eve. So in 2004, shortly after Keyhole was acquired by Google, we followed Santa in the "Keyhole Earth Viewer" — Google Earth's original name — and we called it the "Keyhole Santa Radar." The audience was relatively small since Keyhole was still a for-pay service at that point, and we hosted everything on a single machine shared with the Keyhole Community BBS server. We probably should have had three separate servers to host the Santa tracker — that first year, we had only a portion of a single machine. That night, about 25,000 people kept tabs on Santa and, needless to say, wreaked some havoc on our servers!

Over the next two years, our Santa-tracking efforts improved dramatically. By December 2005, Keyhole had become Google Earth and our audience had become much, much larger. Our "Santa Radar" team also grew: we used greatly improved icons from Dennis Hwang, the Google Doodler, and set up 20 machines to serve the tracking information. My colleague Michael Ashbridge took over the software and more than 250,000 people tracked Santa on Google Earth that Christmas Eve. In 2006, Google acquired SketchUp, a 3D modeling software that enabled us to include models of Santa's North Pole workshop and sleigh. We also incorporated a tracking feed directly from NORAD's headquarters, and we were now displaying NORAD's information in Google Earth. That year, more than a million people tracked Santa.

In 2007, Google became NORAD's official Santa Tracking technology partner and hosted www.noradsanta.org. In addition to tracking Santa in Google Earth, we added a Google Maps tracker and integrated YouTube videos into the journey as well. Now, we had Santa on the map and on "Santa Cam" arriving in several different locations around the world, with commentary in six different languages. The heavy traffic — several millions of users — put Google's infrastructure to the test, but with some heroic work by our system reliability engineers, the Santa Tracker worked continuously.

This year, Googler Bruno Bowden is in charge of the Santa software, and we have further upgraded our server capacity. We're hoping this version of the tracker will be the best yet. In addition to our "Santa Cam" footage, geo-located photos from Panoramio will be viewable in Google Maps for each of Santa's stops that don't include video. We've also included a few new ways to track Santa. With Google Maps for mobile, anyone can keep tabs on him from their mobile phones (just activate GMM and search for "norad santa"). You can also receive updates from "Bitz the Elf" on Twitter by following @noradsanta. And of course, be sure to visit www.noradsanta.org tomorrow morning starting at 6:00 am EST when Santa's journey begins. Enjoy, and see you in 2009!

Posted by Brian McClendon, Original Google Engineering Elf

Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren't in a style that's useful to you. So some time ago we launched face search, which lets you limit your search results to only images containing faces (see a search without and with this option). More recently we also rolled out photo search, which limits results to images that contain photographic elements, ignoring many cartoons and drawings which may not be useful to you (see a search without and with this option).

Today we're pleased to extend this capability to clip art and line drawings. To see the effect of these new options, let's take a look at the first few results for "Christmas," one of our most popular queries on Image Search right now.

Photo content

Clip art

Line drawing


All of these options can be selected from the "Any content" drop down in the blue title bar on any search results page, or by selecting one of the "Content types" on the Advanced Image Search page. The good news: no extra typing! In all these examples our query remained exactly the same, we just restricted our results to different visual styles. So whether you're interested holiday wreaths, Celtic patterns, or office clip art, it just became a lot easier to find the images you're looking for.

Posted by Sean O'Malley, Software Engineer, Google Image Search

We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and everyone. And we aspire to be an organization that reflects global diversity, because we know that a world's worth of perspectives, ideas and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We have more than a dozen employee-driven resource groups, from Gayglers to GWE (Google Women Engineers), that actively participate around the world in building community and driving policy at Google. This is the next post in our Interface series, which takes a look at valuing people's similarities and differences in the workplace. For more information on how Google fosters an inclusive work environment, visit Life at Google on our Jobs site. – Ed.

It's been a busy few months for the Black Googlers Network (BGN). One of our group's core goals is to build a community that keeps us connected, facilitates the sharing of ideas, and participates in community outreach. We sponsored a variety of events this fall across many of our offices, giving us the opportunity to give back and have some fun while doing it.

To kick things off, a group of us from the Mountain View, New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago and Atlanta offices, to name a few, rolled up our sleeves for our first annual service trip. We headed to New Orleans in September to aid in the Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts. Undeterred by Hurricane Gustav, which unexpectedly hit the coast the week before we arrived, we managed to make some adjustments to flights and itineraries and were some of the first volunteers back into the city.

We partnered with the St. Bernard Project, learning everything from how to lay flooring to installing drywall as we worked on three homes. Additionally, we joined a strategy session with The Idea Village, helping them kick off their newest initiative, the 504ward Project. The opportunity to serve the community in such a meaningful way while getting to know BGN members was unique. We each put our minds, bodies, and souls into the city and the experience.



Next, BGN participated in the United Negro College Fund's annual Walk-a-thon in Oakland, CA. Our Google-UNCF partnership also includes an annual scholarship for college students pursing a degree in engineering or computer science, and we're continuing to explore different ways to support and encourage underrepresented students.

This month, we're coming together in many of our offices for the holidays, giving ourselves a chance to catch up and take stock of the work we've done over the past year. Not to be slowed down for too long, though, as we will soon begin the exciting process of planning our new initiatives for 2009.

Posted by Alexa Bush, University Programs Team

Back in September we introduced an iGoogle gadget that makes it possible to read recent posts from all of our corporate blogs, right on your dashboard. With the help of developer Ben Lisbakken, we're ready to roll out the next version of the gadget, which translates posts into 34 languages. Using Google Translate, the gadget gives people all over the world access to posts they might otherwise be unable to read. The default setting translates posts into the language in which your browser is set, but you can also choose from any of our supported languages by going into the "Edit" setting (found in the "Menu" arrow in the right-hand corner). If you want to learn more about Google in Latin America or AdWords in Russia, for example, but haven't had the chance to learn Spanish or Russian, give the gadget a spin. While machine translation is not exact, and we're constantly working to improve the quality, hopefully this new feature lets you get the gist of the post.

Here's a list of the supported languages:
Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese


Just choose the category of blogs you would like to read and click the "Translate" button.


The gadget will translate the posts and give you the option to "Revert" back to the original language. And to read the entire blog in translation, just click on the blog title beneath the post.


We hope you have fun exploring the entire Google blogosphere.

Posted by Jordan Newman, Google Blog Team

This guest post was written by Kathy Kleiman, who discovered the ENIAC Programmers 20 years ago and founded the ENIAC Programmers Project to record their stories and produce the first feature documentary about their work. More at www.eniacprogrammers.org. – Ed.

"For many years in the computing industry, the hardware was it, the software was considered an auxiliary thing."
– Jean Bartik

For more than 50 years, the women of Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) were forgotten, and their role in programming the first all-electronic programmable computer and creating the software industry lost. But this fall, old met young, and a great computer pioneer met today's Internet pioneers. It happened in Silicon Valley and it happened at Google.

A little over a month ago, the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View honored Jean Bartik with its Fellows Award. This lifetime achievement award recognized her work as a programmer of the ENIAC and leader of the team to convert ENIAC to a stored program machine.

The Fellows Award was a rousing celebration of Bartik, Bob Metcalfe and Linus Torvalds. The next night, Bartik returned to CHM to discuss her life story in An Evening with Jean Jennings Bartik, ENIAC Pioneer. More than 400 people attended. They laughed at Bartik's descriptions of the ENIAC Programmers' exploits and enjoyed her stories of “Technical Camelot,” Bartik's description of her days at Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation in the 1950s. This video captures the evening:





During the Q&A session, one audience member asked: “If you were working today, where would you want to work?” Without hesitation, Bartik replied “Google!” with a huge smile. Googlers in the audience cheered.

Two days later, Bartik and I went to Google. We were met by our hosts, Ellen Spertus, Robin Jeffries, Peter Toole and Stephanie Williams, and whisked onto the campus past scrolling screens of Google searches and beach volleyball courts.

In the cafeteria, two dozen Google Women Engineers joined us. They pushed their chairs close to Bartik and leaned in to catch every word. Bartik regaled them with stories of computing's pioneers – the genius of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, co-inventors of the computer, and the ingenuity of Betty Holberton and Kay Mauchly Antonelli, fellow programmers and software creators. She shared the joys and struggles of those who created the computer industry.



After lunch we toured the campus. Bartik enjoyed seeing where Googlers program work and the videoconferencing equipment they use to talk with colleagues around the world.

It is a visit we will never forget, and for me, its own moment in history. Twenty years ago, I discovered the ENIAC Programmers and learned their untold story. I founded the ENIAC Programmers Project to record their histories, seek recognition for them and produce the first feature documentary of their story. Our website provides more information about the documentary, WWII-era pictures and an opportunity to help change history. The stories Bartik shared with Googlers that day belong to the world.

Posted by Kathy Kleiman, Founder, ENIAC Programmers Project

A few months back, we announced some pretty big upgrades to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums for English-speaking users in the U.S. On the PC side, we rolled out a brand-new version of Picasa, with a slew of new tools like effortless web sync, movie editing, and photo-retouching capabilities. On the web, we launched "name tags," a new feature that automatically helps organize your photo collection based on who's in each of your pictures.

Today, just in time for your holiday snapshots, these changes (and more!) are available in all of the 38 languages we currently support. If you've been waiting to try the new photo-collage feature in Picasa, or been curious to see how clustering technology can automatically find similar faces across your photo collection, now's the time to download Picasa 3.1 or opt in to name tags on Picasa Web Albums.

Of course, having a truly global audience sharing and commenting on photos is one of the things that makes Picasa special. The people and places you'll spot on our Explore page attest to this, as do the multilingual comments users receive on their most popular public albums. That's why we just launched automatic comment translation on Picasa Web Albums, which harnesses Google Translate to make sure you know that "美麗的落日" means "Beautiful sunset!"

In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that we've recently rolled out a number of other small but meaningful changes across Picasa Web Albums, in all 38 languages -- ranging from improved sharing to better video playback. Swing by the Google Photos blog to learn more about what's new.

(Or, if you speak British or American English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian or European Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Danish , Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Tagolog, Thai, Vietnamese, or Ukrainian, just visit Picasa Web Albums and see for yourself!)



Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

By Tom Stocky, Director, Google Developer Products

We recently announced a System Status Dashboard for Google App Engine. As developers depend on App Engine for important applications, we wanted to provide more visibility into App Engine's availability and performance.

Application development today is pretty different than it was just a few years ago. Most web apps now make use of hosted third-party services for features like search, maps, video, or translation (e.g., our AJAX APIs). These services mean developers don't have to invest in massive computing resources to build these features themselves, and can instead focus on what is exciting and new about their apps.

Building in dependencies to third-party services or moving to a new hosting infrastructure is not something developers take lightly. This new App Engine dashboard provides some of the same monitoring data that we use internally, so you can make informed decisions about your hosting infrastructure.

Learn more (about this and other recent announcements) in the App Engine blog and please let us know what you think.

By Tom Stocky, Director, Google Developer Products

We recently announced a System Status Dashboard for Google App Engine. As developers depend on App Engine for important applications, we wanted to provide more visibility into App Engine's availability and performance.

Application development today is pretty different than it was just a few years ago. Most web apps now make use of hosted third-party services for features like search, maps, video, or translation (e.g., our AJAX APIs). These services mean developers don't have to invest in massive computing resources to build these features themselves, and can instead focus on what is exciting and new about their apps.

Building in dependencies to third-party services or moving to a new hosting infrastructure is not something developers take lightly. This new App Engine dashboard provides some of the same monitoring data that we use internally, so you can make informed decisions about your hosting infrastructure.

Learn more (about this and other recent announcements) in the App Engine blog and please let us know what you think.

(Cross-posted from the Google SketchUp Blog)

Chilly weather, hot chocolate, holiday celebrations... I'm proud to kick off our sweetest SketchUp modeling challenge ever: the first annual Google SketchUp Gingerbread House Design Competition. To make it a little easier to design the gingerbread house of your dreams, I modeled a blank house to get you started. Go ahead and download it from the 3D Warehouse, then follow the instructions in the file.



I also built a selection of decorations (candy canes, gumdrops, wafer roof tiles) that you can use to spiff up your model. Of course, you're welcome to do anything you like; it's your masterpiece. When you're finished, don't forget to label your gingerbread house with the tag "gingerbread2009" and upload it to the 3D Warehouse. The competition deadline is January 4th at midnight, Pacific Standard Time.

This undertaking is all about having fun with SketchUp, so the prizes will be glory based. (What did you expect: a gingerbread flat-screen TV?) We'll award the following prizes, and announce the winners here and on the SketchUpdate about a week after the competition closes on January 4th.

• 1st, 2nd and 3rd place – for the best overall gingerbread houses in the collection
• The 'Sprinkles' Prize – for the best additions to the base model (the crazier, the better)
• The 'Swirl' Prize – for the best use of Dynamic Components in the model
• The 'Sweet-tooth' Prize – for the most creative use of a single candy ingredient in a model

If you're looking for inspiration, take a gander at what folks did with Santa's sleigh last year. Have fun, and happy holidays.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist

(Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog)

One of the first posts I wrote for this blog last summer tried to define what we at Google mean when we talk about the concept of net neutrality.

Broadband providers -- the on-ramps to the Internet -- should not be allowed to prioritize traffic based on the source, ownership or destination of the content. As I noted in that post, broadband providers should have the flexibility to employ network upgrades, such as edge caching. However, they shouldn't be able to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' broadband connections to hamper user choice, competition, and innovation. Our commitment to that principle of net neutrality remains as strong as ever.

Some critics have questioned whether improving Web performance through edge caching -- temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are located close to end users -- violates the concept of network neutrality. As I said last summer, this myth -- which unfortunately underlies a confused story in Monday's Wall Street Journal -- is based on a misunderstanding of the way in which the open Internet works.

Edge caching is a common practice used by ISPs and application and content providers in order to improve the end user experience. Companies like Akamai, Limelight, and Amazon's Cloudfront provide local caching services, and broadband providers typically utilize caching as part of what are known as content distribution networks (CDNs). Google and many other Internet companies also deploy servers of their own around the world.

By bringing YouTube videos and other content physically closer to end users, site operators can improve page load times for videos and Web pages. In addition, these solutions help broadband providers by minimizing the need to send traffic outside of their networks and reducing congestion on the Internet's backbones. In fact, caching represents one type of innovative network practice encouraged by the open Internet.

Google has offered to "colocate" caching servers within broadband providers' own facilities; this reduces the provider's bandwidth costs since the same video wouldn't have to be transmitted multiple times. We've always said that broadband providers can engage in activities like colocation and caching, so long as they do so on a non-discriminatory basis.

All of Google's colocation agreements with ISPs -- which we've done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache -- are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.

Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.

P.S.: The Journal story also quoted me as characterizing President-elect Obama's net neutrality policies as "much less specific than they were before." For what it's worth, I don't recall making such a comment, and it seems especially odd given that President-elect Obama's supportive stance on network neutrality hasn't changed at all.

Update: Larry Lessig, Save the Internet, Public Knowledge, David Isenberg, Wired and others all found fault with today's piece too.

Posted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel

We know many of you enjoy using Twitter to see what people are talking about and to let others know what you've been up to, whether it's sharing a YouTube video or checking in on your friend's tweets. To help you and your Twitter network stay connected no matter where you are on the web, we're excited to announce that Google Friend Connect has integrated with Twitter. This means that when you join a friend connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.



To send a tweet about a site you have joined, click the invite link in the members gadget, then click the Twitter icon on the share tab. The next time your followers sign in to Twitter, they'll see your tweet containing a link to the interesting site you've found.

This integration with Twitter is an example of how we want to continue improving Friend Connect, extending the open social web and bringing social features to more places on the web.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager

By Matt Hansen, Google Developer Programs

At Google Code, we are getting into the holiday spirit early. To thank open source developers for their support, I'm happy to announce that we are giving every project on Google Code a whole lot more quota!

We're increasing the maximum file sizes from 20MB to 40MB, Subversion quotas from 100MB to 1GB, and download quotas from 100MB to 2GB. Happy holidays!
P.S. If you need more space, let us know!

By Matt Hansen, Google Developer Programs

At Google Code, we are getting into the holiday spirit early. To thank open source developers for their support, I'm happy to announce that we are giving every project on Google Code a whole lot more quota!

We're increasing the maximum file sizes from 20MB to 40MB, Subversion quotas from 100MB to 1GB, and download quotas from 100MB to 2GB. Happy holidays!
P.S. If you need more space, let us know!

By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Since Google Web Toolkit (GWT) launched, there have been many rich, robust Ajax applications which developers have told us they wouldn't have been able to build without GWT. We're thrilled to hear that GWT has increased productivity for developers and helped them to improve performance of their AJAX apps. On that note, we'd like to introduce you to 4 developers across a diverse range of web apps -- all of which were built with GWT. Whether you're new to GWT or not, these developers share some great insight into how they used GWT, what they like and would like to see from GWT, and finally their own learnings from building with GWT.

These developer videos, as well as descriptions of other GWT-built apps, are available here: Who's Using GWT. And if you're interested in the latest on GWT, check out the Official Google Web Toolkit Blog.

*Viewing tip: While we've embedded the videos here, we highly recommend watching them directly on YouTube and choosing the "watch in HD" option.

GoGrid is a cloud computing infrastructure service provider which enables you to deploy and scale load-balanced cloud server networks via a multi-server control panel. GoGrid was recently named Best In Show at LinuxWorld 2008. "We wanted to build a thick client inside the browser... GWT is very powerful and has increased our productivity greatly... We're able to build a very complex, rich, UI application quickly and easily." - Justin Kitagawa, GoGrid



Lombardi Blueprint is a business process mapping and diagramming tool. "We don't have to worry about all the browser quirks that you fight with when you're writing in pure javascript. We just write in the language that we like to use and they take care of all the difficult bits for us." - Alex Moffat, Lombardi Blueprint



scenechronize is a production management web application for film, television and commercials. "We chose to use GWT because it allowed us to write in Java which opened up a wide range of tools available for Java-based apps.... Because GWT supports multiple browsers, we're able to write our app so it looks and works the same across 4 major browser types." - Rob Powers, Scenechronize



Whirled is a social virtual world website which includes multi-player games. "We used GWT to build the social networking website part of Whirled, and it's done a lot of the heavy lifting for us... Whirled is now about 60K lines of code just for the client. Being able to enforce the same kind of engineering discipline that we do everywhere else has been a huge help." - Michael Bayne, Whirled

By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Since Google Web Toolkit (GWT) launched, there have been many rich, robust Ajax applications which developers have told us they wouldn't have been able to build without GWT. We're thrilled to hear that GWT has increased productivity for developers and helped them to improve performance of their AJAX apps. On that note, we'd like to introduce you to 4 developers across a diverse range of web apps -- all of which were built with GWT. Whether you're new to GWT or not, these developers share some great insight into how they used GWT, what they like and would like to see from GWT, and finally their own learnings from building with GWT.

These developer videos, as well as descriptions of other GWT-built apps, are available here: Who's Using GWT. And if you're interested in the latest on GWT, check out the Official Google Web Toolkit Blog.

*Viewing tip: While we've embedded the videos here, we highly recommend watching them directly on YouTube and choosing the "watch in HD" option.

GoGrid is a cloud computing infrastructure service provider which enables you to deploy and scale load-balanced cloud server networks via a multi-server control panel. GoGrid was recently named Best In Show at LinuxWorld 2008. "We wanted to build a thick client inside the browser... GWT is very powerful and has increased our productivity greatly... We're able to build a very complex, rich, UI application quickly and easily." - Justin Kitagawa, GoGrid



Lombardi Blueprint is a business process mapping and diagramming tool. "We don't have to worry about all the browser quirks that you fight with when you're writing in pure javascript. We just write in the language that we like to use and they take care of all the difficult bits for us." - Alex Moffat, Lombardi Blueprint



scenechronize is a production management web application for film, television and commercials. "We chose to use GWT because it allowed us to write in Java which opened up a wide range of tools available for Java-based apps.... Because GWT supports multiple browsers, we're able to write our app so it looks and works the same across 4 major browser types." - Rob Powers, Scenechronize



Whirled is a social virtual world website which includes multi-player games. "We used GWT to build the social networking website part of Whirled, and it's done a lot of the heavy lifting for us... Whirled is now about 60K lines of code just for the client. Being able to enforce the same kind of engineering discipline that we do everywhere else has been a huge help." - Michael Bayne, Whirled