http://www.google.com/experimental/

I like the keyboard shortcuts, but the right/left side addons might clutter up your search a bit. The timline and map thing would be great if I went back in time and became a 6th grader again who had to write a paper on a former president.

5/17/2007 10:23:52 AM

Quote :

"Increased attachment limit-- 20 MB! Now you can start sharing more of those home videos, large presentations and files you just can't seem to get smaller. We have doubled the allowable attachment size to 20 MB to make your Gmail space even more useful. "

the only problem is that you can only send 20mb attachments to people with gmail or some other specialized email service, at least for now anyway.

5/23/2007 10:57:43 PM

They also upgraded their mobile maps feature. Now it can be used as a gps mapping system for smartphones that have gps built in. Damm treo for not having built in GPS.

5/24/2007 11:32:08 AM

There's also a new 'avoid highways' feature in googlemaps. Something neat to play around with- might be helpful for avoiding rush hour traffic in certain places.

5/24/2007 8:02:03 PM

my blackberry has built-in GPS, but i think there may be a block on it for programs that aren't Telenav :-\

when i try to use GPS for google maps, it asks for a bluetooth GPS device


telenav is so slow

[Edited on May 24, 2007 at 8:22 PM. Reason : ]

5/24/2007 8:21:37 PM

wow, nice - "Street View" from Google Maps. For some big cities you can get a street-level picture in the map, fully navigatable. videos and demos here
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/launch/google-maps-adds-street-view-264140.php
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/05/google_announced_str.html
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-05-29-n38.html
http://searchengineland.com/070529-114503.php

here's driving down Lombard St in San Francisco, complete with full resolution license plates and people's faces
http://tinyurl.com/38csgv

5/29/2007 2:09:04 PM

Well that's the coolest fucking thing I'll see all week.

5/29/2007 3:08:56 PM

here's google's intro page to Street View, complete with a cheesy video and some featured sites - http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/index.html


And they announced something else too, which i think is better than Street View - Mapplets
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/05/mashup-of-mashups.html
This is really cool - it allows mashup developers to put their mashups straight into GMaps. It works kind of like widgets or gadgets - you add a Mapplet to your account and you can activate and deactivate them. Mapplets like GasBuddy, distance measurer, movie showtimes, real estate, etc. This (along with "My Maps") makes it really easy to keep all your map related information all at Google Maps instead of individual mashup sites
More importantly though, you can activate multiple mapplets at one, and overlay them on top of each other. see their official intro video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFtfxv1JdXI
so for example, you can overlay real estate and public transit mapplets into one view

[Edited on May 29, 2007 at 5:26 PM. Reason : .]

5/29/2007 5:24:15 PM

really cool mashup with google earth/maps - Tagzania (http://www.tagzania.com/)

you can make placemark push-pins with descriptions on a Google Map, so it's available to the community for moderation and editing. then you search the site (tagzania) for a tag and it will find it wherever it was tagged in the world:

demo - http://youtube.com/watch?v=7sK3AqFYAWQ

5/29/2007 5:32:51 PM

lots of discussions going on concerneing privacy and the new Street View.
http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/30/boingboing-reader-demonstrates-misunderstanding-of-privacy/
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/05/request_for_urb.html
http://preview.tinyurl.com/38oov8


also today, they announced Google Gears. An open-source browser extension to give you offline access to webapps, starting with an offline version of Google Reader
http://gears.google.com/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/30/google-brings-developers-offline-with-gears-new-offline-reader/
http://searchengineland.com/070530-190000.php

5/31/2007 12:12:36 AM

5/31/2007 3:10:08 PM

Google just bought Panoramio - http://www.panoramio.com/ - a site for users to upload their own pictures and geotag on a Google Map.
http://searchengineland.com/070531-085302.php

I would expect this to be added as a layer in Google Earth and maybe as a Mapplet on Gmaps, or even as another layer on Gmaps (map, satellite, hybrid, street view, user pictures)

5/31/2007 4:14:37 PM

that panoramio site is pretty sweet. it has some pics from various places that I have been that it is good to see. you can see pics of tikal to praha to guayaquil to pretty much anywhere.

5/31/2007 5:21:59 PM

^^^
that's fucking awesome

5/31/2007 11:22:42 PM

^ yeah.... and fake

in the spirit of the Mapplets, looks like they're making it easier to make mashups. They own googlemashups.com and are rolling out an online mashup editor
http://editor.googlemashups.com/
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-06-01-n84.html

6/1/2007 10:33:21 AM

i found my parent's house on the streetview thing

6/1/2007 10:34:58 AM

http://feeds.downloadsquad.com/~r/weblogsinc/downloadsquad/~3/120899931/

I mean, jesus - it's not like you're seeing anything current. OH NO, you can see into my apartment! In a photo from... who knows when?
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/30/google_maps_is_spyin.html

And oh my god, you can see license plates!

Surely there's no other way to see license plates except in this horribly privacy-invading google website! Nothing like the real world, where the THOUSANDS of license plates you can see are blurred out by magic privacy beams!

And, my god - FACES!

The utter horror!

[Edited on June 1, 2007 at 12:01 PM. Reason : ,]

6/1/2007 12:01:08 PM

Quote :

"Please don't support the paranoid rantings of deluded cat fanciers who want to have public data censored to serve their own psychosis."

10/10

6/1/2007 12:23:47 PM

Quote :

"^ yeah.... and fake"

that's pretty obvious. but so what, photochopped images can't be cool?

6/1/2007 8:13:02 PM

all your blogging tools are belong to google
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/adding-more-flare.html

6/2/2007 11:51:55 AM

i have never heard of this google co-op. it seems cool , and sorry if someone already posted it http://www.google.com/coop/

here is an example of what it does
http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=002222481411752108774

6/18/2007 9:54:13 AM

Google's Solar Panel Project is online and producing power, it looks like they're about to start day 3 if you look at the graph
http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home

6/20/2007 10:26:34 AM

^ it's nice to see Google doing that, and I certainly applaud them or any company that makes significant efforts to use renewable energy, but at least in the case of Google, that is mostly just a slick PR move. I mean, at their design center in Mountain View, they can measuring how much electricity they're saving in terms of coffee machines and hairdryers and such, but I'd like to see it in terms of servers that are running in their massive data centers. That is, it's great that they're doing something, but the amount of power that they consume in their dozens of data centers with up-to-millions of PCs and servers is probably quite staggering.

6/20/2007 10:49:07 AM

a new, revamped, move Explorer-like, start page for Google Spreadsheets and Docs. Very nice and refreshing
http://docs.google.com/
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-06-27-n12.html

6/26/2007 11:25:53 PM

meh. not terribly impressed

6/26/2007 11:30:05 PM

I'm still a bit confused how much storage you get for these various services, and which (if any) are sharing space. Can someone summarize?

6/27/2007 11:14:16 AM

the only related Help question I can find on that is
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603&query=storage&topic=&type=

Quote :

" Docs Each document can be up to 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image. Each user has a limit of 5000 documents and 5000 images. Spreadsheets Each user has a limit of 1000 spreadsheets. "

so on Docs.... if each document can be up to 2.5MB (including a 2MB image), 5000 of those would be ~12.5GB theoretical storage. But it looks like it would in reality be limited by the 500K limit on the text part of the document

6/27/2007 11:41:57 AM

^ yeah that seems kind of misleading, but I went through the help pages for all the Google services (with uploading capability) and summarized the storage you are allowed: (all figures in MB)

Gmail:
Message = 20
Overall = >2500

Groups:
File = 10
Overall = 100

Docs and Spreadsheets (imported items):
Document = 0.5
Embedded images = 2
Spreadsheets = 1

Page creator:
Overall = 100

Picasaweb:
Overall = 1000

Total Google Storage Space (theoretically):
3.7GB (plus whatever they allow for docs/spreadsheets...)


However, I'm still not sure if certain services are sharing space or not...

[Edited on June 27, 2007 at 12:11 PM. Reason : ]

6/27/2007 12:09:32 PM

i don't think they're sharing space.
.... i wish they would go ahead and introduce GDrive or GStore or whatever with unlimited storage and file-system integration

6/27/2007 12:21:58 PM

yeah and i wish you could change the proportions just like NCSU file storage, between all the different services. so if you never use picasaweb or only needed like 1gb in Gmail, you could use the remaining 2-3gb for file storage, etc.

6/27/2007 12:27:20 PM

Quote :

"if each document can be up to 2.5MB (including a 2MB image)"

Quote :

"2MB per embedded image"

so you can have as many 2MB images as you want in a single doc

and what do you mean by shared?

6/27/2007 12:37:09 PM

shared among the various Google Account services. Like if your Docs and Spreadsheets files counted against your gmail quota (they don't).
Some Google Services have very generous limits (Gmail @ 2.8GB), some have relatively paltry limits (Page creator @100MB), and some are ambiguous (Docs and Spreadsheets).

so..... it would be easier for everyone if they announced Google Account-wide quota. Like 5GB for all your services combined - Gmail+Picasa+Docs+PageCreator, etc. Or unlimited, which is what they're headed towards anyway (Yahoo announced unlimited storage for Yahoo Mail last month)

6/27/2007 12:50:15 PM

some nice new features past couple of days.

In Maps you can now grab and drag the route right on the map to change the route or add an intermediate destination, and the route will update itself in real time. Pretty nice - they seem to be rolling in lots of features now that have only been implemented via mashups for the past couple years
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-click-drag-situation.html
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/directions/

and speaking of mashups, in Picasa Web now you can Geotag your photos with an embedded Google Map.
see demo - http://picasaweb.google.com/picasateam/VegasWeekend/photo#map

6/28/2007 5:33:31 PM

Google Maps is now almost perfect with route dragging and the ability to set any point as a destination. Brilliant!

6/28/2007 6:44:51 PM

they're officially rolled out the Maplets feature on Google Maps, that they announced and demoed a couple months ago. very nice
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/07/google-maps-mashups-20.html
they're under the My Maps tab - http://maps.google.com/maps/mm

7/11/2007 10:28:46 AM

you can fully integrate google search results into your site now, isntead of being basically redirected to a Google Search with a site:URL modifier. This will return an XML file based on a search box in your site so you can display and use the XML search results however you want.
$100/year
Google Custom Search Business Edition
http://www.google.com/enterprise/csbe/

7/17/2007 11:18:38 PM

google reader's Home page has been updated. little bit different layout, "see more" links for different folders.

[Edited on July 18, 2007 at 11:06 PM. Reason : at least for me. i haven't seen it reported elsewhere]

7/18/2007 11:03:14 PM

This is not a new feature of Google, but might be an amazing new future for Google.

Google has bid on the the frequency that normal tv stations run on until the 2009 digital deadline. If google were to get this they could be the new and hands-down best cell phone carrier out there and finally make verizon and ATT wake up and catch up with the world.

http://wireless.seekingalpha.com/article/41890

I think that they would use the frequency for VOIP. And old tv's will not pick up any signals not using the digital box after that date.

[Edited on July 23, 2007 at 1:21 PM. Reason : ...]

7/23/2007 1:14:11 PM

^ so old tv's would pick up cell phone signals?

7/23/2007 1:17:35 PM

is there a way in google maps or earth to show real estate for sale? if not, then someone needs to get to work on that.

7/23/2007 1:33:02 PM

google has a real estate site

7/23/2007 1:52:19 PM

Google Base is a poorly utilized and not very popular "web database" application that has a special portal/search for real estate
http://base.google.com/base/s2?a_n0=housing&a_y0=9&hl=en&gl=US

there are dozens/hundreds of mashups for real estate, mostly based on specific markets
http://mapki.com/wiki/Map_Projects:Real_Estate
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/search/label/real%20estate


Incidentally, the very first Google Maps Mashup was a real estate/housing mashup, combining San Francisco Craigslist listings and GMaps, created by Paul Rademacher. It now includes most Craigslist cities in the US - http://www.housingmaps.com/
The interesting thing about this particular application was that the creator built it before the GMaps API was even released! IIRC, GMaps was introduced ~february 2005 [yep, check the very first page of this thread when they released GMaps]. The API for easily creating map mashups wasn't introduced for several months, but Rademacher dug through all the javascript and created the housingmaps mashups within about a month of GMaps being released. This landed him a job at Google.


also, Zillow is a popular real estate/housing price mapping application based on MS Live Maps http://www.zillow.com/

7/23/2007 2:26:29 PM

well, i need something for greenville and rocky mount. i didn't see those cities in those links but maybe i missed it.

7/23/2007 2:33:47 PM

Zillows site is pretty good...

What you are looking for is called "MyMaps" by google... its there on maps.google.com

Go there, and select the realestate listings, and you can basically zoom in to a neighborhood on the map, click the button to show listings (it will recalculate every time you hit it) and it will show you all the listings within your view on the map.... Pretty sweet actually. I think its one of my favorite ways to look at real estate now.

7/23/2007 3:02:01 PM

damn i'm a fucktard. how did i miss that? thank you

7/23/2007 3:17:59 PM

you might have missed it because they only introduced My Maps earlier this month. i was going to include that in my other post, but it slipped my mind until robster mentioned it

7/23/2007 3:51:52 PM

Quote :

"The interesting thing about this particular application was that the creator built it before the GMaps API was even released! IIRC, GMaps was introduced ~february 2005 [yep, check the very first page of this thread when they released GMaps]. The API for easily creating map mashups wasn't introduced for several months, but Rademacher dug through all the javascript and created the housingmaps mashups within about a month of GMaps being released. This landed him a job at Google. "

I did the same thing, based in part off of his work.

Then they came out with the API and broke it all.

Then they came out with the API v2 and broke it all, and I gave up

7/23/2007 4:45:02 PM

^^i tried my maps out like the first or second day it was there but there was no option for real estate or gas buddy or any of that mess then.

7/23/2007 4:56:53 PM

^^ well, i'm pretty sure you can specify which version of the API you want to use.
of course, you don't get any of the new features of the new API.
and i guess they depreciate the old one after a while.

but it seems to me when the moved onto v2 they said something like "ok guys, we're going to maintain backward compatibility from now on. v1 was just a test. for realsies"


^ I think they did a poor job of rolling out My Maps.
When they first introduced it 2-3 months ago, it was just a place to create your own maps with the drawing tools.
Then they introduced all the Mapplets and mashups into the same My Maps tab just a couple weeks ago. But people who had already seen the map-drawing tools and didn't want to use them would have no need to click on My Maps again, only to discover that they silently rolled out a huge new set of features.

[Edited on July 23, 2007 at 5:00 PM. Reason : .]

7/23/2007 4:58:09 PM

yeah that's exactly what i thought. i saw it a couple months ago, okay cool i can bookmark my house, moving on... i had no clue they had added more stuff to it.

7/23/2007 5:24:06 PM