Daily Bits

google

Google Dashboard: how much does your life rely on Google?

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How times have changed since Google was a humble search engine. Today, you can edit office documents, share calendars, manage your address book, blog, receive alerts, synchronise your mobile devices, talk online, watch and upload videos, store your web search history, upload edit and share photos, and more.

How do you keep track of how much information the mighty Google has on you?

Simple: take a look at the new Google Dashboard.

google-dashboard

It’s a fairly simple concept: as any good dashboard application should, it simply displays which of Google’s services you’re using and makes it easy to access settings, such as privacy control.

Google announces:

Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this.

Check it out, particularly if you use a lot of Google services. You might be surprised how much you rely on Google!

Google launches “Similar Images” search

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For some time, Google Labs has been testing search algorithms designed to find similar images, and yesterday announced that the feature is now a permanent fixture on Google Image Search.

find-similar-images-google

As you’d expect, it’s a great way to narrow down images after searching for a broad topic, in much the same way as you’d do with text-based searches. It also helps when a word can have multiple meanings, such as “jaguar” or “keyboard”.

Unfortunately, I’ve only got Google’s word on this at present as I’m not seeing any “find similar images” links, even on the examples Google provided, but it certainly sounds like a really useful addition.

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Google Docs get liberated with mass download capability

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google-docs-exportAs the data you store on Google’s servers is still yours, not theirs, it’s good to see the Internet giant taking seriously your right to easily move it around without being tied to using Google’s services forever once you’ve decided to start.

To that end, “data liberation” (as Google calls it) has extended to Google Docs.

You can now ZIP up and export multiple documents in multiple formats all at once instead of doing it one at a time.

There is a content limit of 500MB on each download, but that’s apparently around 20,000 files so it shouldn’t be an inconvenience.

File export options include (depending on original format) Microsoft Word and Excel, HTML, Open Document and Spreadsheet, PDF, Rich Text Format or plain text.

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Google Reader gets popular and personal features

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If you use Google Reader to mange your web feeds, you might have noticed a couple of additions have appeared. In fact, it’s pushed my feeds to within an inch of the bottom of the left-hand column.

So what’s the big deal that’s relegated my feeds to the bottom left-hand corner of my browser window?

First up, there are new “Popular items” and “Recommended sources” in an “Explore” section, which is supposed to provide interesting content from the web based on your own reading preferences, reader trends and opt-in web history. Presumably, this is something that learns over time — I’m not quite sure how “Bike Commuters” got into my recommended list.

Secondly, there’s a new sort option for subscribed feeds called “magic” that reorders items based on a user’s personal usage and overall activity. Again, this learns over time.

It will be interesting to see whether this improves the Reader experience or not. It will depend on how many feeds you are subscribed to and how you like to organise and read them.

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Android turns one: a few interesting statistics

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android-logoAs Google’s Android mobile operating system turns one year old today, here are a few interesting statistics for you.

According to mobile advertising firm AdMob:

  • Android OS now has seven percent global market share. That puts it well behind Symbian, BlackBerry OS and the iPhone OS, but comparable to Windows Mobile.
  • In the UK, 10% of smartphones run Android OS, with the HTC Dream being the second most popular phone for surfing the mobile web after the iPhone.
  • Android’s key markets are North America and Western Europe, with the HTC Magic in the top 10 of smartphones.
  • The HTC Dream is ranked fourth globally.

A survey of 1,000 mobile phone users found that Android users download about nine applications per month, compared with about 10 for iPhone users and over 18 for iPod Touch users.

Though Microsoft is hoping its latest initiatives will push its flavours of Windows Mobile OS forward, I’m sure Android will continue to flourish as more handsets become available in the coming year.

Google Docs Now Supports Microsoft Word, Excel 2007 Files

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One of Google’s web products that I use most often is Google Docs. This Document processing tool allows me to work/write articles “in the cloud”. For those of you who are hesitant to use Google Docs since its didn’t support uploading of your Excel or Word 97 files, well you would be glad to know that Google Docs has started to do so now. [Read more…] about Google Docs Now Supports Microsoft Word, Excel 2007 Files