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Talking with orkut

Posted by Patrick Barry and Reza Behforooz, Software Engineers You talkin' to me? I sure hope so. At Google, we like it when people talk with each other. So we figured we should make life a little easier for our friends on <a href="http://www.orkut.com">orkut</a>, where getting in touch and staying in touch is the name of the game. We noticed that a lot of orkut users have been using a separate instant messaging program to chat, which just seems like unnecessary work -- clicking around, keeping separate buddy lists, etc. This is why we've built <a href="http://www.google.com/talk/">Google Talk</a> into orkut, so you can see your friends' availability and chat with them more easily. And, as a special Google Talk bonus, if you want to do more than text chat, you can make voice calls, leave voicemail, and transfer files. Here's what to look for. If your friends are online and using Google Talk, you'll see a brightly-colored ball by their name. Green means they're available; orange means they're away from their computer; and red means they're busy. But no matter which color, if you see that ball, it means you can chat with or call your friends in just a couple of clicks. We've put some orkut features into Google Talk too. In addition to chatting, calling, and sending files to your Google Talk buddies, you can also scrap them, receive instant notice when others scrap you, and quickly jump to any of their orkut profiles. It's easy to enable these features -- <a href="http://www.orkut.com/">sign in to talkify your orkut account</a> and we'll get you going. Haven't been invited to join orkut yet? <a href="http://www.orkut.com">No problem.</a>

Talking with orkut

Posted by Patrick Barry and Reza Behforooz, Software Engineers You talkin' to me? I sure hope so. At Google, we like it when people talk...

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Checkout offers free holiday season processing

Checkout offers free holiday season processing

Posted by Gavin Chan, Google Checkout team To celebrate the holidays, we're offering merchants free transaction processing using Google ...

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History is cool for school

Posted by Oliver Rickman, UK Corporate Communications Team, and Kate Hammond, UK Product Marketing Team You might be thinking most kids are only interested in celebrities and the next cool thing -- but not 15,000 British kids. This lot, between the ages of 4 and 18, ditched celebrity-watching in favour of good old-fashioned historical figures when they sent in their drawings to our <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/doodle4google">Doodle 4 Google competition</a>. (You may recall our informal name for this contest was <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/day-off-for-dennis.html">"Day Off for Dennis."</a>) Given the theme of ‘My Britain’ as their inspiration, school children up and down the UK got creative with the Google logo, hoping to see their entry on the Google homepage. Nearly half (45%) of their entries included monuments and historical figures from Big Ben to the Blackpool tower, and from the Queen to Shakespeare. Everyone at the London Googleplex was really impressed with how passionate the kids were about Britain, not to mention their talent. And though some of you may laugh about British food, we were proud to see that a quarter of entries featured <a href="http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=fish+and+chips&btnG=Search+Images">fish and chips</a>, proving what we all already knew – that you can’t beat traditional British grub! On Monday and Tuesday, we met thousands of children whose entries made it into the finals at the Science Museum in London. The wrapup gave them a chance to check out each others' designs and talk about their Doodles -- and of course it gave us the exciting job of announcing and congratulating the fantastic winner, 13-year-old Katherine Chisnall, from the South West of England. Aside from her day of fame on the Google.co.uk homepage, Katherine and her family will be soon be visiting our <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=&btnG=Search+Images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il">world headquarters</a> in Mountain View, California. The whole event was great fun, and who knows? Maybe we've identified some rising stars for Dennis' crew. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7609/900/1600/UK_doodle_winner.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7609/900/320/UK_doodle_winner.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" /></a>

History is cool for school

Posted by Oliver Rickman, UK Corporate Communications Team, and Kate Hammond, UK Product Marketing Team You might be thinking most kids are ...

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Gmail mobile client is live

Posted by Cédric Beust, software engineer, Gmail for mobile devices team The new <a href="http://www.google.com/mobile/gmail/">Gmail for mobile client</a> launching today began life as a challenge: What if we could develop a Gmail application for cell phones that was as powerful and as easy to use as the desktop version? What if it ran on <a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50425">hundreds of different mobile devices</a> -- and made it possible to compose, read, and respond to conversations with a bare minimum of clicking and scrolling? What if it enabled you to do things like search your inbox, view your attachments (including pictures and PDF files), and click to call your Gmail contacts? And what if the app were designed to make the whole experience as fast and as seamless as possible? Team stalwarts Jimmy Shih, Joanne McKinley, Derek Phillips and others worked hard to answer these questions, and the result is Gmail for mobile devices. It's a small download, but one that might make you look at email on your phone in a different way -- maybe like Gmail did for email when that first appeared. Download it now and decide for yourself!

Gmail mobile client is live

Posted by Cédric Beust, software engineer, Gmail for mobile devices team The new Gmail for mobile client launching today began life as a ch...

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Get your people talking in more languages

Posted by Will Smit, Google Apps for Your Domain team Somewhere in the neighborhood of three out of four people on Earth don't speak English, so to better serve more Earthlings, we aim to make our products available and useful in lots of native languages other than English. Recently I've been working with translators and other linguistic experts to support 17 new languages in <a href="http://www.google.com/a">Google Apps for Your Domain</a>. This product is our way of letting entire organizations give their users powerful communication and collaboration tools: private-label versions of Gmail for custom domains, Google Calendar and Google Talk. The service is free, there's no hardware or software required, and organizations can tailor the user interface with custom logos and colors. So now anyone with a domain can provide essential, customized apps to all of their users, without spending a cent. (Or as the case may be, without spending a rupee, a krone, a won, a Eurocent, a yen, a centavo or a kopek.) Here's the full list of languages Google Apps for Your Domain now supports: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, British English, Polish, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean and US English. (Your browser's language preference determines which version of the site you'll see.)

Get your people talking in more languages

Posted by Will Smit, Google Apps for Your Domain team Somewhere in the neighborhood of three out of four people on Earth don't speak Eng...

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What Joe said

Posted by Salar Kamangar, VP Product Management We'd like to <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/spot-on.html">welcome Joe, Graham, and the rest of the JotSpot team</a> to Google. They've truly pioneered do-it-yourself application publishing, enabling anyone from individuals to small businesses and large enterprises to use wikis for online collaboration. Since we're just getting started on a long and exciting road in online collaboration for both consumers and our enterprise customers, joining forces with the JotSpot team comes at a great time. After all, information created by a single user becomes exponentially more valuable when it's shared and combined with information from other people or places. We've been tackling this step by step for awhile now, including enabling people to move their calendars, photos and documents onto the web -- unlocking them from one PC or one piece of paper to open up a wide range of possibilities for working, planning, socializing, organizing, and so on. Please stay tuned, and we'll tell you more as soon as we can.

What Joe said

Posted by Salar Kamangar, VP Product Management We'd like to welcome Joe, Graham, and the rest of the JotSpot team to Google. They'...

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Spot on

Posted by Joe Kraus, JotSpot OK, I can finally blurt it out: <a href="http://www.jot.com">JotSpot is now part of Google</a>, and I couldn't be more excited. Three years ago my friend Graham Spencer and I set out to start a new company. We'd both recently left Excite, which we co-founded, and we had spent a few years starting a nonprofit together. We brainstormed scores of ideas, debated late into the night and ultimately exchanged a mountain of email and documents. We realized we needed a tool to help us organize our thoughts or we'd quickly become overwhelmed. So Graham set up a wiki. I was hooked because it immediately changed the way we worked together. Everything was kept in one place, not locked in email threads or on different computers. We could both make changes to the same document, without having to know HTML (well, without me having to know HTML). After twenty minutes of using a wiki, I was convinced that they were like the Internet in 1993 -- useful, but trapped in the land of the nerds (which both Graham and I proudly inhabit). So we set out to start JotSpot as a way to bring the power of wikis to a much broader audience. As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other's sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google's scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people. Our first order of business is to move JotSpot to Google's software architecture. While we're doing so, we've turned off new registrations. But if you're interested, <a href="http://www.jot.com">sign up for our waitlist</a> and we'll keep you posted. Finally, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the support, feedback, grumbles and praises of our users and customers. Thank you. That's the only way great products are built.

Spot on

Posted by Joe Kraus, JotSpot OK, I can finally blurt it out: JotSpot is now part of Google , and I couldn't be more excited. Three years...

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