In this video, see baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. speak at Google as part of its Authors@Google series.
Google Earth To Get Google Ocean
Google plans on adding a tool, either within Google Earth or as its own thing, that will allow for users to explore 3D underwater topography. The “tool” being discussed in this article is basically Google adding the sea floor, letting users see the contour of the ocean floor in detail and allow Google to add data above it about the ocean.
Cinco De Mayo Search Logos Ask.com ran a nice homepage design for Cinco De Mayo. Sadly, they misspelled the name of the day:
Here’s the original image, good for a desktop background:
Also, here’s Yahoo’s logo:
Google Shuts Down Hello Google is shuttering Hello, the IM-style photo sharing service it received in the acquisition of Picasa four years ago. Hello was an unsung product with exciting potential, so much so that my article calling it “Google’s Most Underrated Product” in October 2004 was the first ever article on InsideGoogle to get widely noticed, thanks to links from CNet and other major sites. The thing about underrated things is that you’re supposed to realize that you can benefit a lot from recognizing them, and Google never did.
What will happen to hello.com, possibly the best domain name Google owns?
Google Presentations Embeds Change Sizes
Now, if you want to embed a Google Docs presentation in your blog or website, you can change its size to have it match the layout of your site, making it fit in much better.
YouTube Running Playboy Casting Call Playboy magazine is running a contest to give one “lucky” woman a trip to Hollywood and a chance to be featured in Playboy. Just upload a video audition to YouTube, but keep in mind that YouTube won’t let you show all the reasons Playboy should choose you.
Google Docs Gets Lots of Updates Google Docs added lots of new stuff, including saved searches, offline Google Gears access for spreadsheets and presentations, custom document stylesheets (using CSS), speaker notes in presentations, and embedded YouTube videos in presentations.
Move Your Life To Gmail With Gmail Uploader Google released last month the Gmail Uploader, a free application that moves your email and contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird (on Windows XP and Vista only) to a Google Apps Gmail account. Considering the huge number of limitations (only three email programs, two operating systems, and one very specific and less popular edition of Gmail), you may never get the chance to use it, which is a shame, because most new Gmail users would love the easy migration method.
Google Charts Now Does QR Codes
Google has been trying out QR Codes (a type of 2D bar codes) in its print ads, and now they’re making it easier to generate them on the web. Before, you’d have to use a web app or software to create a QR Code, then save the image to use on your website, but now the Google Chart API can be queried to get them automatically. Right now, all you get are website URLs, though hopefully Google will extend the API to handle more complex data.
Here’s an API-generated image for this site, using the URL http://chartserver.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http://google.blognewschannel.com/:
Blogger Adds Future Posts
Google’s Blogger has added the ability to schedule posts to be published in the future by specifying a date yet to come for your post. This feature was tested in Blogger In Draft, and is yet another feature to make its way into the ever improving Blogger.
Google Invests In New Clearwire Google entered into an agreement with Sprint and others (Comcast, Intel Capital, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Trilogy Equity Partners), investing half a billion dollars in a new formation of wireless ISP Clearwire. The new company will be 51% Sprint-owned, taking Sprint’s Xohm WiMax business. Google’s a wireless provider of sorts, now, and will help get open devices, including Android devices, on the network, and provide search and applications for the network.
Google Me - A Documentary About Search
This documentary features a guy searching for others with this same name as him. A concept we’ve heard before, though it seems to have resulted in an interest project.
Google’s Head of PR Goes to Facebook
Elliot Schrage leaves for Facebook, costing Google its vice president of global communications and public affairs. Of course, Google’s corporate PR policies haven’t been that smart the last few years, so maybe this isn’t great news for Facebook.
Google Maps Interface Slimmed Down
Google has finally trimmed some of the cruft building on Google Maps, combining and simplifying an interface that was getting too complicated and cluttered.
Blogger Gets Integrated Analytics
Google has integrated Google Analytics into Blogger for Blogger users that are interested, giving access to stats inside the Blogger Dashboard along with special stats tracking relevant to blogs. They’re also letting Measure Map users roll over their accounts into Google Analytics now.
Google Presentations has finally added a feature that most thought should have been there at launch: You can now save your presentations as PowerPoint files*. Previously, Google’s slideshows were trapped inside Google software, only able to be saved as a mostly useless PDF, but now you can take them and continue editing them in PowerPoint, or in any software compatible with PowerPoint’s PPT files.
* - of course, this being Google, they only let you save as .PPT files, not the newer Office 2007 .PPTX files
Google Docs’ presentation application added some new features yesterday, gaining the ability to output to PDF. Users can save their presentations as PDF files, in order to share the file with others, or print it out for handing to others. Users can even print multiple slides per page, up to 12. What they still can’t do is output to Microsoft Powerpoint’s PPT file format, a glaring omission that is starting to look like an intentional incompatibility.
The other new feature is the ability to insert vector shapes into presentations. You can choose from 12 shapes, or rather eight different arrows and four other shapes (box, circle, talk balloon and star burst) and insert them on your page to jazz it up. Because they are vector shapes, they can be resized at will and still look great, and thusly give you more than just some text and a background in your presentation.
Google finally made embedding Presentations a feature of Google Presentation, the slideshow maker in Google Docs. The slideshows get embedded with a YouTube-style player, called the “Mini Presentation Module” (yeah, Google is just filled with branding geniuses). Here’s a sample Presentation Philipp created:
I’d like to point out that Superman’s powers are actually:
Flight
Invulnerability
Super-strength
Heat vision (shooting lasers from his eyes)
X-ray Vision (seeing through objects)
Telescopic vision (ability to zoom with his eyes and see objects very far away)
Super-hearing (ability to hear sounds far away, even whispers and through walls)
Super-breath (blow air at hurricane-level speeds)
Despite what the movies would have you believe, Superman cannot travel through time under his own power. I liked the movies, but the director seemed to have no interest in consistency or believability with the comics. Going back in time by flying around the earth? Ridiculous! Every Start Trek fan knows you need to fly around the sun to go back in time!
I love the first line of Elinor Mills’ article at CNET linking to my article on the Google Presentations security leak:
Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google sure can write a dramatic blog entry.
That’s gotta be the nicest thing anyone said to me all week. I like.
Elinor’s also got a quote from a Google rep on the story:
A Google representative provided this statement when asked for comment: “We take our users’ privacy and security very seriously. We acted quickly when we discovered this bug and delivered a fix: e-mail addresses are no longer archived during presentation chat sessions.”
What are you looking at? You’re looking at a small selection of the email addresses I harvested from innocent readers of this blog and others, thanks to a security flaw in Google’s new presentation feature in Google Docs. The list that clip was taken from has 450 email addresses in total. Here’s almost the whole list, way too pixelated for anyone to read:
So, how did this happen?
Google Presentations has a chat feature, based on Google Talk technology, that lets people chat while viewing a presentation. I embedded a presentation here, as did Matt Cutts on his blog, and a number of people linked to it. Everyone who went to that Presentation and logged into their Google Account to chat gave their email address to me and to every other visitor to the chat, without even knowing it.
The reason is that Presentations logs your chats, just like Google Talk does, and those logs appear in your Gmail Chat folder. While the chat window in the presentation doesn’t list email addresses, the logs do, and almost everyone gets them automatically.
I used Find and Replace to remove every space, letter, number, symbol and whatever else from the chat log, and these are how many @ symbols were left:
And that’s just one chat log! I have two others. Now, don’t worry about the vulnerability anymore, because my chat logs terminate at 3:44 pm, so it looks like Google turns off the feature after a number of people (including I’m guessing Philipp) noticed this problem. Still, if you’ve already been in a Presentation with a chat feature, even if you didn’t say anything, someone (probably me) might already have your email address.
It’s a pretty scary vulnerability, one that you’d wish Google had caught before someone could have harvested 15 hours worth of email addresses. Google’s been working on Presentations for a lot of months, and something was bound to slip through. Still, many new Google products seems to ship with a vulnerability that exposes email addresses (cough*Pages*cough), so Google should pay better attention next time.
Some of the email addresses I recognized in the list:
The other new feature is the ability to insert vector shapes into presentations. You can choose from 12 shapes, or rather eight different arrows and four other shapes (box, circle, talk balloon and star burst) and insert them on your page to jazz it up. Because they are vector shapes, they can be resized at will and still look great, and thusly give you more than just some text and a background in your presentation.
