Share the love with iGoogle

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Paul Wilcox, iGoogle Support Team</span><br /><br />From time to time, people share stories with us that are too good to keep to ourselves. Here's one that an <a href="http://www.google.com/ig">iGoogle</a><a href="http://www.google.com/ig"> </a>user named Heather recently shared about how Gadget Maker helps her connect with her boyfriend Christopher.<br /><blockquote>"My boyfriend lives in Memphis and I live in Manhattan. We've each created a custom gadget for each other that we update every morning. Generally it's a compliment, or song lyrics, or something related to an inside joke. It takes us 2 minutes to update every morning and helps us to stay connected in a small way every day. We also both have a countdown gadget on our homepage, which counts down the days until our next visit with each other. Thank you for helping 'keep the magic alive' with my boyfriend, even if he's not here in person!"</blockquote>As Valentine's Day approaches, we wish Heather and Christopher the best. May their countdown go extra-fast this week. Heather shared one of her gadgets with us:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFcQw5WE7Swff2u1hXme7USibadRAFrwElQ_5hgqa500H_rk33X2g1wJWx7psIRXemnNK6lX7Kr_LWjAUuQ7C83dUOnoJe2jpUg60IZ9y6RIkT6naJx9awlw1Yz3MeunhI4WubMT2E6RkO/s1600-h/V-gadget.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5165891956085863810" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFcQw5WE7Swff2u1hXme7USibadRAFrwElQ_5hgqa500H_rk33X2g1wJWx7psIRXemnNK6lX7Kr_LWjAUuQ7C83dUOnoJe2jpUg60IZ9y6RIkT6naJx9awlw1Yz3MeunhI4WubMT2E6RkO/s320/V-gadget.gif" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a><br /></div><br />If you're part of our gadget developer community, perhaps hearing about interesting and unique ways people are using gadgets will help spark some creative ideas. But whether you are HTML-savvy or not, and you want to show your sweetie how much you care, it's very easy to be able to create gadgets. Just visit the <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/" id="t6i." title="Google Gadget Center">Google Gadget Center</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/gmchoices?source=gdha" id="ency" title="Gadget Maker">Gadget Maker</a> and give it a try.

Share the love with iGoogle

Posted by Paul Wilcox, iGoogle Support Team From time to time, people share stories with us that are too good to keep to ourselves. Here...

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Survey says: love at first ping

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Jen Grant, Group Product Marketing Manager</span><br /><br />In the spirit of Hallmark and chocolate roses, we recently took a special interest in Valentine's worthy tidbits about how Gmail has helped spur romance -- as it did for Jordan Burleson, who told us:<br /><blockquote>"Gmail is the new Cupid. Gmail's green chat light meant 'go' for love in my life. My girlfriend and I used ... it for projects and homework at first, but then for flirting, pinning down a location for a first date, emoticon hearts and more."</blockquote>In other cases, email has helped maintain long distance relationships, like that of long-time Gmail user Meagan Coleman:<br /><blockquote>"My husband and I met in 2004. He's from Macedonia and I'm from the USA...Since we met, Gmail has been archiving our long-distance relationship from the beginning! It's very sweet to be able to read those messages that we wrote to each other 3 years ago."</blockquote>Curious about how common emailing love letters really is -- and to learn more about how people use email to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers -- we recently worked with Nielsen Online to conduct a national survey examining how people think about and use webmail.* The survey affirmed that email is an increasingly important part of our most intimate and personal interactions, and that younger people are leading the charge: they are more likely to use email for everything from sending love letters to ending relationships.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Love is in the inbox</span><br /><ul><li> 1 in 3 survey respondents noted having emailed a love letter </li><li> Young people indicated they were less averse to showing their affections over email than older adults: only 14% of 18-24 year olds considered email love letters bad behavior, compared to 43% of respondents over the age of 55<br /></li><li> Men were more likely than women to have asked someone out via email (26% versus 16%) </li><li> While 31% of 18-24 year olds thought asking someone out on a date via email was poor form, 42% of respondents aged 55+ felt the same way</li></ul><span style="font-style: italic;">Breaking up is hard to do; some get help from email</span><br /><ul><li> 1 in 3 male respondents considered "break-up emails" neutral to good email etiquette, whereas only 1 in 7 female respondents agreed </li><li> 8% of men and 6% of women said they had broken up with someone over email </li></ul>Whether you're <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/gmail-hearts-you.html" id="sg::" title="send your loved ones some hearts">sending hearts</a> this year or breaking them, we hope you have a happy Valentine's Day.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* The online survey, commissioned by Google, was conducted by Nielsen Online from September 24th to October 15th, 2007, with a sample of 1,713 webmail users over the age of 18. "Webmail user" was defined as someone who uses AOL Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail.</span>

Survey says: love at first ping

Posted by Jen Grant, Group Product Marketing Manager In the spirit of Hallmark and chocolate roses, we recently took a special interest in V...

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Seattle Conference on Scalability 2008

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />We just <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2008/02/this-years-scalability-conference.html">announced</a> on our Research Blog that we're holding the second scalability conference in Seattle on Saturday, June 14. We had a hunch we weren't the only ones who liked to sit around and brainstorm solutions for hard problems, and it turns out we were right. We met so many great people at the 2007 gathering that we've decided to do it again.<br /><br />If you work with scalable systems and would like to give a presentation at this year's conference, we'd love to hear from you. Visit our <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2008/02/this-years-scalability-conference.html">Research blog</a> for more details on how to submit a proposal.

Seattle Conference on Scalability 2008

Posted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer We just announced on our Research Blog that we're holding the second scalability confere...

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Show us your supermodel(ing) talents

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Education Program Development, Google SketchUp</span><br /><br />The Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition is now live! Here's another opportunity for you to show off your 3D modeling skills, and this time students around the world can compete. You can team up with other students, or take the project on yourself. Just model your school's campus buildings in <a href="http://sketchup.google.com/" id="p6yv" title="Google SketchUp">Google SketchUp</a>, geo-reference them in <a href="http://earth.google.com/" id="wwpe" title="Google Earth">Google Earth</a> and submit them by uploading to the <a href="http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse">Google 3D Warehouse</a>. You may enter this competition if you're a student at a higher education institution almost anywhere in the world.<br /><br />Entries are due by June 1st, 2008. Check out what <a href="http://mw1.google.com/mw-buglight/3dbl/en/campuscontest.kmz" id="ebh2" title="last year's winners">last year's winners</a> modeled to get inspired, then visit the <a href="http://contest.sketchup.com/" id="fcaf" target="_blank" title="competition website">competition site</a> to register. Good luck and happy modeling.

Show us your supermodel(ing) talents

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Education Program Development, Google SketchUp The Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition is no...

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orkut going more social

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Amar Gandhi, orkut Group Product Manager</span><br /><br />Starting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We'll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.<br /><br />To prepare for this growth, we're now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we're going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can <a href="http://orkut-app-submission.googlemashups.com/" id="hlvz" title="here">submit</a> their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).<br /><br />To help developers ready their applications, we're offering engineering support and training. We've scheduled <a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/event?eid=MWVtMjFiOWhibTRxMWpuczE4OHBvdjM3MWtfMjAwODAyMDdUMTkwMDAwWiBkZXZlbG9wZXItY2FsZW5kYXJAZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ&ctz=America/Los_Angeles" id="mwu5" title="Orkut Hackathons">orkut hackathons</a> on Feb. 14-15 from 10 am-6 pm at the Googleplex in Mountain View and via videoconference in New York. For more information or to RSVP, please email <a title="hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com" href="mailto:hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com" id="b7en">hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com</a>. If you can't attend, we hope to see you in the <a title="OpenSocial forums" href="http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-api/" id="tvy0">OpenSocial forums</a> or on chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial).

orkut going more social

Posted by Amar Gandhi, orkut Group Product Manager Starting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications avai...

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Grand engineering challenges for the 21st century

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist</span><br /><br />Over the course of centuries, engineering of all kinds has transformed our lives -- and the field continues to have the potential to improve the quality of life for every person on the planet.<br /><br />This coming Friday (February 15), the US National Academy of Engineering will post a list of "grand engineering challenges" for the 21st century on <a href="http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/">a special site</a>, which has already garnered many comments from the public. To create the list, the Academy assembled a special committee that includes some of the most innovative names in engineering, including our own Larry Page.<br /><br />I think we will see on the list such things as renewable, sustainable and affordable energy, reduction of dependence on petroleum, desalinization, vastly improved food production, greenhouse gas reduction, and affordable and sustainable housing -- but these are just my guesses. No matter which challenges are selected, we know that attention to detail and daring goals are the twin drivers of innovation.<br /><br />Please visit the site, <a href="http://www.grandchallenges.dnsalias.net/cms/7187.aspx">contribute your ideas</a> and have a look February 15 to see what the experts have decided are the grandest of the grand challenges for engineering in this century.<br /><br />Of course, I hope "Internet for Everyone" makes it onto the list, but if it doesn't, it's still on mine :-).

Grand engineering challenges for the 21st century

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist Over the course of centuries, engineering of all kinds has transformed our lives -- and the f...

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Google Translation + Gmail help people communicate

<span class="byline-author">Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.</span><br /><br />Language barriers can be a primary source of accessibility problems on the web, and automatic translation, though not perfect, provides a useful solution. <p></p> <p> We recently made our machine translation technology accessible from within <a href="http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2007/12/merry-christmas-god-jul-and.html" target="_blank">Gmail and Google Talk</a>, which gives mail and IM users instant access to translation capabilities at the point where they might most need them, e.g., when communicating with friends and colleagues around the world. If you find yourself wanting to translate a few words or short phrase, you can IM an appropriate chat-bot to obtain an immediate translation. As an example, the Google translation bot for going from English to Chinese is available as <i><a href="mailto:en2zh@bot.talk.google.com" target="_blank">en2zh@bot.talk.google.com</a></i>. In general, translation bots are named using two-letter codes for the source and target language.<br /><br />Surfacing machine translation in this manner is a great example of how Web 2.0 mashups bring together useful services to create solutions that are bigger than the sum of their building blocks. I've blogged here in the past about the<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-apis-web-mashups-and-accessibility.html" target="_blank"> potential presented by web mashups</a> for users with special needs. Using our work on <a href="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/11/introducing-axsjax-access-enabling-ajax.html" target="_blank">AxsJAX</a> to inject accessibility enhancements into Web applications, my officemate <a href="http://clcworld.net/" target="_blank">Charles Chen</a> and I recently augmented Google Talk to produce appropriate spoken feedback when used with adaptive technologies such as self-voicing browsers. </p> <p> The combination of machine translation, instant messaging and AxsJAX-enabled spoken output produces an interesting result that is <i>obvious</i> after the fact: when I use Google IM to message a translation bot, I now <i>hear</i> the result in the target language. This makes for a very interesting chat buddy -- one who can act as my personal interpreter!<br /><br />And let's not forget that little <a href="http://www.google.com/help/faq_translation.html#translink"><b>translate this page</b></a> within Google search results. Next time you find that some of the documents in your search results are non-English, try clicking on that translate link. You'll be able to specify the source and target languages to obtain an automatically generated translation. A nice thing about the translated page is that when you follow any links from that document, the newly retrieved document will be automatically translated. Thus, if you find an article in German that matches your query and you're an English speaker, you can translate from <b>de|en</b> (that's German to English using two letter language codes) and as you read the translated English version, following links from that document will result in their being automatically translated to English. </p>

Google Translation + Gmail help people communicate

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as ...

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