Google Wave failure may help Google Me succeed

source:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180191/Google_Wave_failure_may_help_Google_Me_succeed

As Google Wave is tossed aside, analysts say Google has learned important social networking lessons

By Sharon Gaudin

August 5, 2010 11:01 AM ET

Computerworld - Lessons learned from the demise of Google Wave -- Google threw in the towel on its first social networking offering this week -- could provide the company's engineers with a chance to come up with a far more viable service, analysts say.

Google announced on Wednesday that it is killing off its collaboration and communication tool about a year after the Google Wave service was launched.

In a blog post yesterday, Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president for operations, acknowledged that the social networking service was unable to gain any traction with users.

While Google Wave will be just another failed product by the end of the year, pieces of it will live on in other Google projects, the company said.

And that leads some industry watchers to wonder if Google is cutting bait so its developers can dust themselves off, use some lessons learned and some of Google Wave's most interesting features to begin work on new social networking product.

"This is typical Google-like behavior. They aren't shy about killing projects that don't hit their expectations," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. "I don't think that users really got it when it came to Wave. But this was a good learning experience for Google. They now know they need to bring a more fully baked product to the market. They also have to clearly articulate why users should jump on board. I don't think this is Google's last run at social networking. There are rumors about a new product -- Google Me -- that looks to be their next shot at this market."

Talk started circulating around the Internet about Google Me late in June. While Google hasn't confirmed any of the widespread speculation, the reports of efforts to build a Facebook-killer persist.

Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, agreed that if Google can learn from the failure of Google Wave, the company will have a better shot at building and launching a successful social networking service the second time around.

"Social networking is absolutely harder than it looks," added Enderle. "It's not a technical problem as much as a social problem. It's trying to solve a people problem and engineers, by their nature, suck at solving people problems. Google is going to have to address behavioral and social skills to build another service."

Both Enderle and Olds believe that Google is working on another social networking service ... a Facebook-like offering that's more attractive to consumers -- and less about collaboration.

"Why not? Facebook is making itself an easy target," added Enderle. "I think Google will go down this path and it's probably closer to what Google should be doing anyway. It's a Web property. The social networking aspect of the Web is more closely related to search than almost any other successful thing out there."

Olds noted that a new Google social network better have a lot of notable contrasts with Google Wave.

"Social networking is a tough racket," said Olds. "If they come out with a new service, it will have to have a feature-packed tool that is easy to use, secure, and be highly scalable. And then they'll need to attract swarms of users quickly to gain enough momentum to get it off the ground. It isn't easy to pull off. If it were, we'd see a lot more competitors taking a run at Facebook."

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address issgaudin@computerworld.com.

Read more about Web 2.0 and Web Apps in Computerworld's Web 2.0 and Web Apps Topic Center.

Google Multiple Account Sign-In: A Getting Started Guide

source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/202556/google_multiple_account_signin_a_getting_started_guide.html?tk=hp_new


Ian Paul, PC World
Aug 4, 2010 9:45 pm

Google has started rolling out a multiple account sign-in feature that makes it easier for users with more than one Google account to manage their online identities.   The addition of the new feature means you no longer have to constantly log in and out of more than one Google account when using the same browser. The new feature doesn't work with all Google services, however, and there are other restrictions that come with using multiple sign-in. Here's what you need to know to get started.

Can I use multiple sign-in with every Google service?

No. At the moment, you can only use multiple Google account sign-in to use App Engine, Google Code, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Reader, Sites and Voice. Multiple account sign-in for Google Docs is not ready yet, but will be coming soon. As more Google services support multiple sign-in, Google will add them to this list onGoogle's support pages.

Any potential conflicts I should know about?

Yes, multiple sign-in will disable offline access to Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as any bookmark links you have to your offline accounts. Bottom line: if you want to keep offline access to Google services then don't use multiple account sign in.

Also, Google gadgets in Gmail like Google Calendar or Google Docs will not work with the multiple accounts feature.

How many accounts can I be signed in to at once?

Currently, Google only allows you to use three Google accounts at one time with the multiple sign-in feature.

How do I activate multiple account sign in?

First, keep in mind that Google is currently rolling out this feature so you may not have access yet.

The easiest way to get started is to visit Google's multiple account sign-in settings page. The other option is to click on "Settings">"Google Account settings" from Google.com. At the top of your Google Account page under "Personal Settings" you should see a listing for "Multiple sign-in." If you don't see that option then the feature is not yet available for your account.

If the multiple sign-in option is there, just click on "Change" and follow the instructions. Once multiple account sign-in is activated, a triangle will appear next to your e-mail address on the top right corner of the page.

The feature is activated, now what?

It's time to link the other Google accounts you want to use for this session. To sign into a second account, click on your e-mail address in the top right corner. You should now see a drop down menu that will let you sign into another account. Repeat this step if you want to activate a third account.

TIP: To sign into a second or third account from the drop down menu you must be using a Google product that supports multiple account sign-in like Gmail, Calendar or Reader.

How do I switch between accounts?

Let's say you're in Gmail and you want to switch accounts. Click on your e-mail address in the top right corner to activate the drop down menu and select the account you want to switch to next.

What happens when I visit an unsupported Google service with multiple sign-in activated?

The first account you sign into for a multiple account browsing session becomes your default account. Whenever you visit a Google service (such as Google Docs) that currently doesn't support multiple account sign-in, you will only be able to see the information for your default account. To view other accounts, you will have to sign out of Google Docs and sign back in under the other account.

If you don't want to sign in and out, another option is to open up your second Google account in a different Web browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Opera.

You can also use Chrome's Incognito mode instead of opening a new browser, according to Google Operating System. This trick would probably work with the private browsing features in other browsers as well including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Multiple account sign-in is a great way to remove the hassle of dealing with multiple accounts. This is especially true for those of you who have paid Google Apps accounts at the office. With multiple account sign-in, Google Apps enterprise users can easily switch between their professional and personal accounts. It's not clear, however, how soon enterprise users will get access to this feature compared to other Google users. Sometimes, free users get access to new Google features sooner than paying customers do. But considering an enterprise-focused product like Google App Engine is one of the first services to work with multiple account sign-in, it's likely business users will be seeing this feature very soon.

Connect with Ian on Twitter (@ianpaul).

Google Publications

source:http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-publications.html

Friday, July 30, 2010 at 7/30/2010 11:41:00 AM

Posted by Corinna Cortes and Alfred Spector, Google Research

We often get asked if Google scientists and engineers publish technical papers, and the answer is, “Most certainly, yes.” Indeed, we have a formidable research capability, and we encourage publications as well as other forms of technical dissemination--including our contributions to open source and standards and the introduction of new APIs and tools, which have proven to sometimes be foundational.

Needless to say, with our great commitment to technical excellence in computer science and related disciplines, we find it natural and rewarding to contribute to the scientific community and to ongoing technical debates. And we know that it is important for Google to help create the fundamental building blocks upon which continuing advances can occur.

To be specific, Googlers publish hundreds of technical papers that appear in journals, books, and conference and workshop proceedings every year. These deal with specific applications and engineering questions, algorithmic and data structure problems, and important theoretical problems in computer science, mathematics, and other areas, that can guide our algorithmic choices. While the publications are interesting in their own right, they also offer a glance at some of the key problems we face when dealing with very large data sets and demonstrate other questions that arise in our engineering design at Google.

We’d like to highlight a few of the more noteworthy papers from the first trimester of this year. The papers reflect the breadth and depth of the problems on which we work. We find that virtually all aspects of computer science, from systems and programming languages, to algorithms and theory, to security, data mining, and machine learning are relevant to our research landscape. A more complete list of our publications can be found here.

In the coming weeks we will be offering a more in-depth look at these publications, but here are some summaries:

Speech Recognition

"Google Search by Voice: A Case Study," by Johan Schalkwyk, Doug Beeferman, Francoise Beaufays, Bill Byrne, Ciprian Chelba, Mike Cohen, Maryam Garrett, Brian Strope, to appear in Advances in Speech Recognition: Mobile Environments, Call Centers, and Clinics, Amy Neustein (Ed.), Springer-Verlag 2010.

Google Search by Voice is a result of many years of investment in speech at Google. In our book chapter, “Google Search by Voice: A Case Study,” we describe the basic technology, the supporting technologies, and the user interface design behind Google Search by Voice. We describe how we built it and what lessons we have learned. Google search by voice is growing rapidly and being built in many languages. Along the way we constantly encounter new research problems providing the perfect atmosphere for doing research on real world problems.

Computer Architecture & Networks & Distributed Systems

"Energy-proportional Datacenter Networks," by Dennis Abts, Mike Marty, Philip Wells, Peter Klausler, Hong Liu, International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA, June 2010.

Google researchers have called on industry and academia to develop energy-proportional computing systems, where the energy consumed is directly proportional to the utilization of the system. In this work, we focus on the energy usage of high-bandwidth, highly scalable cluster networks. Through a combination of an energy-efficient topology and dynamic fine-grained control of link speeds, our proposed techniques show the potential to significantly reduce both electricity and environmental costs.

Economics & Market Algorithms

"Quasi-Proportional Mechanisms: Prior-free Revenue Maximization," by Vahab S. Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Uri Nadav, Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium, LATIN, April 2010.

Say a seller wishes to sell an item, but the buyers value it vastly differently. What is a suitable auction to sell the item, in terms of efficiency as well as revenue? First and second price auctions will be efficient but will only extract the lower value in equilibrium; if one knows the distributions from which values are drawn, then setting a reserve price will get optimal revenue but will not be efficient. This paper views this problem as prior-free auction and proposes a quasi-proportional allocation in which the probability that an item is allocated to a bidder depends (quasi-proportionally) on their bids. The paper also proves existence of an equilibrium for quasi-proportional auctions and shows how to compute them efficiently. Finally, the paper shows that these auctions have high efficiency and revenue.

"Auctions with Intermediaries," Jon Feldman, Vahab Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Mallesh Pai, ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC, June 2010. 

We study an auction where the bidders are middlemen, looking in turn to auction off the item if they win it. This setting arises naturally in online advertisement exchange systems, where the participants in the exchange are ad networks looking to sell ad impressions to their own advertisers. We present optimal strategies for both the bidders and the auctioneer in this setting. In particular, we show that the optimal strategy for bidders is to choose a randomized reserve price, and the optimal reserve price of the centeral auctioneer may depend on the number of bidders (unlike the case when there are no middlemen).

Computer Vision

"Discontinuous Seam-Carving for Video Retargeting," Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, Mei Han, Irfan Essa, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR, June 2010.

Playing a video on devices with different form factors requires resizing (or retargeting) the video to fit the resolution of the given device. We have developed a content-aware technique for video retargeting based ondiscontinuous seam-carving, which unlike standard methods like uniform scaling and cropping, strives to retain salient content (such as actors, faces and structured objects) while discarding relatively unimportant pixels (such as the sky or a blurry background). The key innovations of our research include: (a) a solution that maintains temporal continuity of the video in addition to preserving its spatial structure, (b) space-time smoothing for automatic as well as interactive (user-guided) salient content selection, and (c) sequential frame-by-frame processing conducive for arbitrary length and streaming video.

Machine Learning

"Random classification noise defeats all convex potential boosters," Philip M. Long, Rocco A. Servedio, Machine Learning, vol. 78 (2010), pp. 287-304.

A popular approach that has been used to tackle many machine learning problems recently is to formulate them as optimization problems in which the goal is to minimize some “convex loss function.” This is an appealing formulation because these optimization problems can be solved in much the same way that a marble rolls to the bottom of a bowl. However, it turns out that there are drawbacks to this formulation. In "Random Classification Noise Defeats All Convex Potential Boosters," we show that any learning algorithm that works in this way can fail badly if there are noisy examples in the training data. This research motivates further study of other approaches to machine learning, for which there are algorithms that are provably more robust in the presence of noise.

IR

"Clustering Query Refinements by User Intent," Eldar Sadikov, Jayant Madhavan, Lu Wang, Alon Halevy,Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, WWW, April 2010.

When users pose a search query, they usually have an underlying intent or information need, and the sequence of queries he or she poses in single search sessions is usually determined by the user's underlying intent. Our research demonstrates that there typically are only a small number of prominent underlying intents for a given user query. Further, these intents can be identified very accurately by an analysis of anonymized search query logs. Our results show that underlying intents almost always correspond to well-understood high-level concepts.

HCI

"How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?", Anne Aula, Rehan Khan, Zhiwei Guan, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI , April 2010.

Seeing that someone is getting frustrated with a difficult search task is easy for another person--just look for the frowns, and listen for the sighs. But could a computer tell that you're getting frustrated from just the limited behavior a search engine can observe? Our study suggests that it can: when getting frustrated, our data shows that users start to formulate question queries, they start to use advanced operators, and they spend a larger proportion of the time on the search results page. Used together, these signals can be used to build a model that can potentially detect user frustration.

Ooh! Ahh! Google Images presents a nicer way to surf the visual web

source:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/ooh-ahh-google-images-presents-nicer.html

7/20/2010 10:30:00 AM

When you think about “information,” what probably comes to mind are streams of words and numbers. Google’s pretty good at organizing these types of information, but consider all the things you can’t express with words: what does it look like in the middle of a sandstorm? What are some great examples of Art Nouveau architecture? Should I consider wedding cupcakes instead of a traditional cake?

This is why we built Google Images in 2001. We realized that for many searches, the best answer wasn’t text—it was an image or a set of images. The service has grown quite a bit since then. In 2001, we indexed around 250 million images. By 2005, we had indexed over 1 billion. And today, we have an index of over 10 billion images.

It’s not just about quantity, though. Over the past decade we’ve been baking deep computer science into Google Images to make it even faster and easier for you to find precisely the right images. We not only find images for pretty much anything you type in; we can also instantly pull out images of clip art, line drawings, faces and even colors.

There’s even more sophisticated computer vision technology powering our “Similar images” tool. For example, did you know there are nine subspecies of leopards, each with a distinct pattern of spots? Google Images can recognize the difference, returning just leopards of a particular subspecies. It can tell you the name of the subspecies in a particular image—even if that image isn’t labeled—because other similar leopard images on the web are labeled with that subspecies’s name.

And our “Similar colors” refinement doesn’t just return images based on the overall color of an image. If it did, lots of images would simply be classified as “white.” If you’re looking for [tulips] and you refine results to “white,” you really want images in which the tulips themselves are white—not the surrounding image. It takes some heavy-duty algorithmic wizardry and processing power for a search engine to understand what the items of interest are in all the images out there.

Those are just a few of the technologies we’ve built to make Google Images more useful. Meanwhile, the quantity and variety of images on the web has ballooned since 2001, and images have become one of the most popular types of content people search for. So over the next few days we’re rolling out an update to Google Images to match the scope and beauty of this fast-growing visual web, and to bring to the surface some of the powerful technology behind Images.

Here’s what’s new in this refreshed design of Google Images:

• Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
• Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
• Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
• A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”
• Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
• Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

And for our advertisers, we’re launching a new ad format called Image Search Ads. These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text. Check out our Help Center for more info on how try them out; we hope they’re a useful way to reach folks who are specifically looking for images.

These upgrades are rolling out in most of our local interfaces worldwide over the next few days. We hope they not only make it easier to search for images, but also contribute to a better aesthetic experience. We see images as a major source of inspiration, a way of connecting the world—and their growth is showing no signs of slowing down. We’ll work to make sure Google Images continues to evolve to keep up.

Posted by Nate Smith, Product Manager, Google Images

Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK

source:http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-mail-is-becoming-gmail-in-uk.html

Monday, May 03, 2010 | 4:52 PM

Posted by Greg Bullock, Software Engineer

As a Brit, my friends and family often tell me they're miffed that they get an @googlemail.com address instead of @gmail.com. Today I have good news for them: Google Mail is soon becoming Gmail again in the UK.

If you already have a Google email account in the UK, you'll soon have the option to switch your existing @googlemail.com address to the matching @gmail.com one, but you're also free to stick with @googlemail.com. And starting later this week, anybody who signs up for a new account in the UK will get an @gmail.com address. Since "gmail" is 50% fewer characters than "googlemail," we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!

We'll be making this transition over the next week, and will update this post as the changes roll out. So to Aunty Pamela, Uncle Maurice, and everyone else in the UK, welcome to Gmail!

Drag and drop attachments onto messages

source:http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/drag-and-drop-attachments-onto-messages.html

Thursday, April 15, 2010 | 11:00 AM

Posted by Adam de Boor, Software Engineer

I'm always looking for ways to save time. Suppose I want to attach some files to an email, and I already have a folder open containing those files.


I used to have to click "Attach a file," find the photos, click them, etc. Starting today, if I'm using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6, I can just drag and drop the files to attach them — easy as pie.



We'll enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature. For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only.