Umair's Blog: 28/03/2010

Saturday 3 April 2010

File transfer in iGoogle and orkut chat

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file to a friend whom you're chatting with online? Starting today, you can share photos, documents, and other files while chatting in iGoogle and orkut. To give it a try, just click Send a file... in the Actions menu while chatting with a friend (no download required):

This feature is also compatible with the file transfer functionality in the Google Talk downloadable software, so you can share files directly from the web with folks who use the desktop version.

File transfer is available in orkut and iGoogle only for now. We're working on bringing it to Gmail as well, and we'll keep you posted when that happens!

Posted by Lizhen Wang, software engineer

Introducing Standard Voicemail Mode

Ah, remember the days when you’d be in the middle of leaving a voicemail and suddenly hear an unexpected beep to indicate you had run out of time for that message? Or when you’d return from vacation only to find your voicemail box was full and friends weren’t able to get through to leave messages for days?

Experiences like these were stripped from voicemail users across the country as a result of Google Voice. And, to be honest, some people on the team have started to miss these rituals of yonder years. Today, we take a first step in restoring people’s right to pager integration, unexpected beeps, caps on the number of messages that can be received, and more, in a feature we are calling Standard Voicemail Mode^TM.

Standard Voicemail Mode^TM brings your voicemail back to something reminiscent of 1997, with features like:

Automatic voicemail deletion: messages will be deleted automatically after 14 days
Numeric keypad access: access to voicemail will only be available via your phone
Beeper interoperability: your beeper will be paged every time a voicemail is left
Message maximums: store a maximum of 10 messages at any given time
Numeric page: people leaving you voicemails will be given the option to send a numeric page

To try Standard Voicemail Mode^TM for yourself, select “Enable Standard Voicemail Mode” under Settings:

And for more information, visit google.com/googlevoice/standard_voicemail.html.

Posted by Jason Toff, Google Voice team

Unmuting the web with Google Chrome

We’ve long felt that not enough people know what a browser is. Too many people just use the browser that comes with their computer. The time has come for browsers to speak up and be heard. Even though we’ve experimented with visual improvements in the way of 3D stereoscopy, we think it’s time for browsers to push the boundaries of what’s possible by using sound to create a magical, immersive experience.

Taking an earful of inspiration from the HTML5 audio tag, we’ve spent the past few months deep in psychoacoustic models, the Whittaker-Nyquist-Kotelnikov-Shannon sampling theorem, Franssen effects, Shepard-Risset Tones, and 11.1 surround sound research to build a cutting-edge audio-driven user interface for our users, available through a new Chrome extension. With this extension, Chrome will provide audio feedback as you browse to web pages and interact with the browser.

To experience the web with auditory feedback, download Google Chrome (if you haven’t already), install the extension, turn up the volume, and enjoy the biggest increase in your browsing productivity since the blink tag. Mundane operations like opening and closing tabs, searching, navigating, even debugging the browser and much more will never be the same.

Now that we’ve nailed sight and sound, we’ll look at bringing olfactory magic to the browsing experience. We hope to deliver that by next year at this time.

Posted by Kay, Rakowski, and Chan from the Psychoacoustics Research Division of the Google Chrome Team

Upload and store anything in the cloud with Google Docs

In January, we added the ability to upload and store any file in Google Docs, and in response to your feedback, we increased the maximum file size to 1 GB a couple weeks later. Based on the overwhelming response to this feature, we're happy to announce a big update. Starting today, you can upload and store anything in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to store items in the cloud and access them from any computer - all you need is an Internet connection and a Google Account.

As with documents, spreadsheets, and files, you also share objects you've uploaded to Google Docs with anyone in the world. For example, do you ever wish you could CTRL+F your house keys or your TV remote? Store your keys, remotes, rail passes, and other objects you commonly lose with Google Docs, and you'll never have to worry about finding them again. Having trouble moving your piano from New York to California? Upload it from your home in New York, then download it once you're in California. Change your mind and want to share it with your friend in England instead? No problem. With one click you can have your piano delivered to anyone you choose, anywhere in the world.

With simple pricing at $0.10 per kg, along with free pickup and delivery from any location on the planet, it’s hard to pass up. To learn more about this new feature and how to join the beta test, head to our informational site. As always let us know what you think on the forums.

Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager, Google Docs

Improved comment collapsing for Google Buzz posts

Posted by Sean McBride, User Experience Designer

Any Google Buzz post can turn into a lively discussion. Sometimes these conversations can gather lots of new comments very quickly, turning them into "skyscraper" posts that can dominate your entire screen, especially if you don't check Buzz for a few days. We've heard from many of you that these big posts can be a lot to skim over.

Today, we’re making some changes to how comments get collapsed in Google Buzz. In the past, old comments were sometimes collapsed, but new comments (posted since your last visit to the Buzz tab) were always expanded. Now, if there are enough of them, new comments may be collapsed as well. Here’s the nitty gritty on how it'll work by the end of the day once we finish rolling out these changes:

If there are 3 or more previous or new comments, we collapse them into a group.

We leave the latest previous comment (from before your last visit) expanded to give you context.

We leave the last two new comments (since your last visit) expanded so you can get a taste of the ongoing conversation and decide if you’re interested.

If there are enough previous and new comments, we collapse them together into a single line to save space.

You'll see the names of some of the people whose comments are collapsed, which can help you decide if you might be interested in diving into the conversation.

These changes will limit how much space any one post can take up in the Buzz tab and prevent the popular posts you’re not interested in from dominating the stream. We hope this helps make Google Buzz a little less noisy so you can focus on conversations you care about.

A new look for Google Transit maps

At the beginning of last year, the Google Maps team launched the Transit Layer, showing the layout of public transportation networks on top of the map in over 50 cities worldwide. Since then, we have grown our coverage to nearly 450 cities and added more information to both the base maps and the transit layer.

We've now released a significant redesign of our transit maps that better highlights the information transit riders are most interested in seeing. Before, the transit map was placed on top of the base road map, obscuring some important information in the base map and competing visually with the complexity of the road network. With this redesign, we're changing the entire base map to put more focus on the transit lines, and lower the prominence of roads. We hope you'll agree that the result is a cleaner, less cluttered map that will make it easier for transit riders to get around.

Looking at the London Underground shows the immediate benefits of removing the clutter of the A-road badges, and the simplified map style which lets the transit lines and roads coexist more elegantly:

In the old transit map of New York, streets such as 8th and 7th Avenue are completely obscured. The new rendering is a cleaner, lighter, and more readable experience:

San Francisco is a great example of the benefits of being able to see important underlying map data in addition to the transit lines. Now the city name, major landmarks and important roads are visible again:

To try this out for yourself, select "Transit" from the "More" drop-down on Google Maps in any city where transit is supported, or simply click on a transit station on the map itself. We hope that you have as much fun using our new transit maps as we did making them!

Posted by Jonah Jones, User Experience Designer, Google Maps

Vote in the Model Your Town competition!

We’ve held past competitions open to students, and last December we announced the Google Model Your Town Competition, open to people from all over the globe. Folks created geo-located 3D models of their towns in stunning detail, and now it’s time for the 5 finalists to go head-to-head and for the public to vote on which one deserves the distinction of being the top winner.

Online voting is open from April 1 through May 1, 2010. Be sure to look at all the entries in detail on the competition website and then cast your vote for the one you deem to have created the best sense of place. We will announce the winner by May 15, 2010. A team from Google will travel to the winning town this Summer to hold an event for the residents and winners, and the local school district will receive US$10,000.

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Google SketchUp Team

The chilling effects of malware

Posted by Neel Mehta, Security Team

In January, we discussed a set of highly sophisticated cyber attacks that originated in China and targeted many corporations around the world. We believe that malware is a general threat to the Internet, but it is especially harmful when it is used to suppress opinions of dissent. In that case, the attacks involved surveillance of email accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are not the only examples of malicious software being used for political ends. We have gathered information about a separate cyber threat that was less sophisticated but that nonetheless was employed against another community.

This particular malware broadly targeted Vietnamese computer users around the world. The malware infected the computers of potentially tens of thousands of users who downloaded Vietnamese keyboard language software and possibly other legitimate software that was altered to infect users. While the malware itself was not especially sophisticated, it has nonetheless been used for damaging purposes. These infected machines have been used both to spy on their owners as well as participate in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against blogs containing messages of political dissent. Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country.

Since some anti-virus vendors have already introduced signatures to help detect this specific malware, we recommend the following actions, particularly if you believe that you may have been exposed to the malware: run regular anti-virus as well as anti-spyware scans from trusted vendors, and be sure to install all web browser and operating system updates to ensure you’re using only the latest versions. New technology like our suspicious account activity alerts in Gmail should also help detect surveillance efforts. At a larger scale, we feel the international community needs to take cybersecurity seriously to help keep free opinion flowing.