Entries from August 2008 ↓
August 28th, 2008 — Reader
Our friends on the Blogger team just launched Following. Blogger users can now “follow” blogs they like, giving them an easy way keep up with their favorite blogs, and allowing authors to see who their readership is.
Better yet, followed blogs also show up in your Reader account, in their own folder. That way you can get the full power of Reader’s tagging, sharing and starring without having to maintain two separate reading lists. Of course, if you’d rather not see followed blogs in Reader, there’s a setting to hide them.
We hope you’ll have fun playing with Blogger’s new social feature. And if following brings you to Reader for the first time, welcome!
August 26th, 2008 — Sites
We recently made it easier to share embedded spreadsheets in Sites. Previously your spreadsheet had to be published to the world (or at least the domain) to be embedded, which gave less control over who could see and edit the document. Being able to control collaborators and viewers in Google spreadsheets can be very handy, so it was important for us to allow these settings to work in embedded spreadsheets on Google Sites.
Posted by Scott Johnston, Sr. Product Manager
August 18th, 2008 — Custom Search
Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer
If you’ve been to the 2008 Summer Games site that we created to help you stay updated on the happenings in Beijing this month, you’ll notice a Custom Search box in the upper right corner that will offer you results from a set of sites that cover the games. This customized search experience is similar to what many of our users have been doing with Custom Search – defining their own slice of the web to search.
Since we launched Custom Search, developers have found interesting ways to use the platform and the API (did you see our new developer guide?). One interesting way to build a customized search experience is by using linked Custom Search Engines (CSEs). With linked CSEs, you can create a dynamically defined search engine that can be updated automatically.
A cool application to create a personalized search over your del.icio.us bookmarks is described in the tutorial Build a Custom Search Engine using your Social Bookmarks. You can export your bookmarks to define a CSE and search across all the stuff you care about.
Many social bookmarking sites make this kind of application easy to build by providing tools for exporting bookmarks or by listing all bookmarks on one webpage. Other services provide similar functionality. Here’s a screenshot from a CSE builder application that does this.
You can create a CSE on the fly using the
MakeCSE tool. Provide the URL of a page that has a bunch of hyperlinks and
MakeCSE will extract the links, construct a CSE, and provide you the search results instantly. As the links on the page change, the CSE is automatically updated.
Here are a couple of other interesting CSEs:
- A CSE for your blog. Try out this Blogger widget that searches your Blogger blog and blogrolls automatically.
- A CSE that uses our XML API within Google App Engine allows you to save search results or email them to friends and manage them in personalized lists. Here’s a screenshot from the UXFind application:
Want to build interesting CSEs? Here are a few ideas:
- CSE for bookmarked URLs that have a particular tag on del.icio.us, for example, http://delicious.com/tag/photography?setcount=100.
- CSE ‘for searching pages with links’. This would be great for webpages that have a lot of links, such as the directory category pages on the Open Directory Project website.
- CSE that searches across URLs that your friends are embedding in their Twitter messages.
Let us know in your feedback if you’ve built interesting tools using the Custom Search platform. We’d also like to hear if there are things we can do to make Custom Search easier to use.
August 18th, 2008 — Reader
The Reader team has always been interested in politics, and we use Reader (of course) to stay current on all the political happenings. As we were reading and sharing amongst ourselves, it got us thinking: what would happen if political newsmakers used Reader too?
Today we’re announcing Google Power Readers in Politics: leading political journalists and both U.S. presidential campaigns using Reader to read and share news. You can read what they read, and see what’s on their minds as they share and discuss news. Each participant has created a reading list with a feed you can subscribe to in Reader (or any other feed reader), and is also publishing shared items. Here’s the list of participants:
Visit http://www.google.com/powerreaders to get an overview, and subscribe to what you’re most interested in using Reader. We’re excited to see what’s newsworthy this election season – we hope you will be too!
August 13th, 2008 — Reader
Today we’re excited to announce several improvements in the way sharing works in Reader. You’ve given us lots of feedback on the way our experimental sharing features work and we heard you loud and clear: you want more control over your sharing. We’ve been working hard to create a more flexible way to let you choose who to share with; you can now manage a Friends list within Reader, separate from your Gmail chat contacts.
To get started, you can choose to either continue sharing with all of your chat buddies or create a custom Friends list with those that you hand-select.
People that you add to the Friends list will be able to automatically see your shared items in Reader (remember, shared items always have a public URL).
We’ve also made it easy to manage who shares with you. When someone decides to share with you, you will get a notification and the ability to preview and subscribe to their shared items. At that time, you can also choose to share your items with them (or not).
We hope that this increases the flexibility and control you have over who you share with. We always love to hear your feedback as we continue to improve the sharing experience in Reader.
August 12th, 2008 — Security
Written by Amanda Kleha, Google Apps Security & Compliance team
The Google Apps Security & Compliance team, which provides email and web security for more than 40,000 companies, regularly tracks trends in spam, viruses, and other threats. Check out some of our latest findings over on the Enterprise blog. Also, on Friday, August 15, at 10:00 am PT, we’ll be hosting a webinar on keeping your business safe from web and email threats — tune in if you’d like to learn more.
August 12th, 2008 — Talk
Have you ever wished that you could chat with your family and friends in your native language? Sometimes there’s just no substitute for expressing a thought in your own language. Google Talk now has transliteration bots that will convert text from English to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu. Think of a bot as an invited guest to your chat session that will transliterate what you type in English to the right local script. For those who are not familiar with transliteration, it is a service provided by Google India that allows you to type in Indian languages using phonetically equivalent English script (it is also available on our labs page, orkut scraps and blogger). If you’re chatting in Hindi, when you type ‘haal kaisa hai janab ka?’ the en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com bot will reply in Hindi as ‘हाल कैसा है जनाब का?’
There are currently 5 transliteration bots – Hindi (en2hi.translit), Kannada (en2kn.translit), Malayalam (en2ml.translit), Tamil (en2ta.translit) and Telugu (en2te.translit), and remember that their names end with “@bot.talk.google.com”. To use one of these bots follow these three steps:
1) First add the bot that you want to your friend’s list. (For example, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi). You just need to do this once.
2) Start a chat session with your friend
3) Convert the chat session to a group chat and invite the bot to it.
तो शुरू हो जाइए…
Kuntal Loya
Software Engineer
August 11th, 2008 — Security
Written by Steve Weis
Cryptography is notoriously hard to get right and if improperly used, can create serious security holes. Common mistakes include using the wrong cipher modes or obsolete algorithms, composing primitives in an unsafe manner, hard-coding keys in source code, or failing to anticipate the need for future key rotation. With these risks in mind, we’re pleased to announce the open-source release of Keyczar.
Keyczar is a cryptographic toolkit that supports encryption and authentication for both symmetric and public-key algorithms. It addresses some of the aforementioned issues by choosing safe defaults, tagging outputs with key version information, and providing a simple application programming interface. Keyczar’s key versioning system makes it easy to rotate and revoke keys, without worrying about backward compatibility or making any changes to source code.
We look forward to working with the open source community and continuing to make cryptography safer and easier to use. To download Keyczar or for more information, please visit our Google Code project and discussion group.
August 6th, 2008 — Sites
Now everyone can use Google Sites on their own domains, using their own URLs. In July we added this popular request for custom domains for sites created in Google Apps, and today we extended the ability to change site URLs for for all users of Google Sites.
To ensure that only proper domain owners can make this change, you must be the owner or administrator of the domain and have access to change the domain CNAME records. More details on how to set this up are in our help center.
Posted by Di Wang, software engineer
August 5th, 2008 — Sites
We have had some questions in our discussion group about why some outgoing links are sent through an extra redirect before getting to their destination URL, and we wanted to explain the benefits of this feature for private sites.
Normally if you have a link on your website to another website, and someone clicks on that link, the URL of your page with that link is passed to that site as referral information (and visible to administrators of that site). For example, let’s say the Google Sites help page (http://sites.google.com/support/) has a link to http://www.example.com/foo. When a user clicks on that link, the owners of www.example.com will be able to see that the user came from http://sites.google.com/support/. This is great information for site owners, and works well for public sites.
While this isn’t a problem for public sites, it can be an issue for private intranets. Let’s say instead of our help site, the link to example.com was from your private intranet, http://sites.google.com/site/intranet/super-secret-project-name. You probably wouldn’t want that link visible to the administrators of example.com, so for Google Sites that are set as private, we automatically perform what is called “referrer scrubbing” by sending outbound links through an anonymous redirector. The result is that anonymous information, not the URL of your intranet, is passed as referral information. We assume your private site is private for a reason and this includes your URLs as well as your content.
Just one of the many features in Google Sites which allow you to focus on your content, not your infrastructure.
Posted by: Scott Johnston, Sr. Product Manager
