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.
Add Images To Gmail’s Interface Xoopit is a Firefox plugin that adds dynamic image preview to Gmail. You see a strip of images above your email, and there’s some sort of social networking theory at work.
H-1B Visa Situation the Usual Giant Disaster
Read at Techdirt about the H-1B (foreign guest worker) visas, which are once again running into problems due to the government not providing enough visas for American tech companies to bring skilled workers to this country. As usual, the visas for the entire year ran out in a single day, and the Department of Homeland Security is doing what it can to keep those jobs in the U.S. by allowing certain industry grads to stay in the country longer on their student visas.
Google Earth Adds Street View Google Earth now has Street View built into it, in order to see street level photos of buildings and pedestrians. Not only that, but you can blow the Street View full screen, in order to gawk at total strangers having their privacy invaded in the utmost fidelity.
Google Most Valuable Brand Again Google has been named the most valuable brand by market research firm Millward Brown Optimor, value at $86 billion and beating out GE and Microsoft ($71 billion apiece). Google’s brand value grew 30% over the last year, though Google has now won three years running.
Earth Day Search Logos
Search Engine Land has a bunch of logos that ran on Earth Day, including this one from Google:
Google Stock Earnings Benefit From Failing Dollar
Google’s earnings report, released last week, showed it beat Wall Street’s expectations by $101 million, sending the stock way up. However, Valleywag explains that, due to the sinking dollar, Google’s earnings were $202 million higher than they would have been if the dollar were stronger, meaning the surprise extra growth didn’t exist almost at all.
Google News Shows Quotes Google News has a new feature that lets you search for people who are quoted in news articles. Just throw a name into Google News and you’ll see a quote from them at the top. Click their name, and you’ll see a page full of quotes in various news stories they’re in.
Google-Monopoly (The Game)
Box HQ has put together a version of the popular Monopoly board game that replaces everything in the game with Google-related items. For example, the properties are all web companies (Microsoft and Yahoo replace Boardwalk and Park Place) and jail is the Deadpool. You can just print out the PDF and get started, or go all out and modify a Monopoly game board to turn it into Google-opoly. One problem: there aren’t enough I’m Feeling Lucky and Google.org cards.
Google Finds New CIO Google has named a new Chief Information Officer, with Benjamin Fried from Morgan Stanley’s Application Infrastructure group taking over next month. Fried worked on Google’s IPO four years ago, giving him some experience with the company. Fried takes over for Douglas Merrill, who left for EMI earlier this month.
If you haven’t used Google Website Optimizer yet, perhaps the benefits of A/B Split & Multivariable Testing and Intuitive Reports will woo you. The goals, of course, are to increase sales, improve landing pages, get more leads, determine cost per acquisition (CPA), increase time spent on site, estimate guesswork from your site design, and more.
Lots of Google Doodles
Zorgloob’s got lots of Google Doodles you may not have noticed over the weeks.
AdWords API Price Dropped Google has droppped the prices on using the AdWords API. Search Engine Roundtable has the chart of revised prices, with the cost per API unit dropping as much as 70% on some services.
AdSense Ad Review Center Available To All Google has released its Ad Review Center for Google AdSense to all publishers. The Ad Review center allows AdSense publishers to control site targeted advertising on their website, including banning and approving targeted ads.
Download YouTube Videos As MP4 Ionut shares the URL parameter that will let you download videos from YouTube as MP4 files, perfect for loading onto a portable media player. Just use a URL like this one, except change the letters “ID” with the video ID code:
A Funny Google Interview Story Read this story about one guy’s experience interviewing for a job at Google. I guarantee you won’t see where it’s going.
(via Digg)
Arrest Caught On Google Maps Street View
One unfortunate fella was being arrested by authorities, and what happened to pass by? The Google Maps Street View van, that’s who! As a result, he wound up with that moment in his life, one he’d probably like to regret, recorded into Google Maps and now pictured on a number of blogs. Whoops.
Ionut notes that Google is already running April Fools “jokes” around the world. In Japan, there’s something about a joke regarding words that are similarly pronounced. In China, the company blog says they’re launching a human-powered search engine (watch out, Mahalo). In Australia, they’re letting you search the future. And in the United States, they’re possibly firing hundreds of hard-working advertising people — wait, that’s not funny!
But seriously, on the one hand, I’m hoping Google’s April Fools joke is good, on the other I’d rather see all those DoubleClickers keep their job. The “other hand” is weighing a lot more on my conscience than the humor hand, but I suspect that among those writing the pink slips, Google “hilarious” joke will be the only thing they really care about tomorrow.
Google Earth Getting Street View? Webware reports that they’re hearing Google will add Street View, its popular novelty feature in Google Maps that lets you see street-level photographs of businesses, making it available in the Google Earth desktop software. Their source is very non-specific, but the rumor does sound very believable, since there’s no good reason for Google Earth users to lag behind Maps users for this long. Webware says the addition could come in the next few weeks.
Barack Obama Rendered in Google SketchUp
Someone used SketchUp, Google’s 3D modeling software, to create this model of Barack Obama’s head. The whole thing is 400 polygons of rendered facial features, and I gotta say, it creeps me out. At least Obama’s a decent looking guy; I can’t imagine how creepy a 3D rendering of Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton (with giant eyes!) would look.
Sync Google Talk With Twitter Timothy Broder wrote a script that takes your latest Twitter message and makes it your Google Talk/Gmail Chat status message. It’s a simple thing, perfectly useful and good, just like a baby angel.
Crack Deal in Google Maps?
Is this really what this Digger thinks it is? Well, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to conduct a business transaction through your car window with a guy standing in the street. I think.
Does Google Chief’s $1 Salary Mean Anything?
For another year, Google’s head honchos will be taking a $1 salary, supposedly putting the interests of the business ahead of money. It’s a simple token gesture, offset by the fact that the guys taking the pledge, founders Page and Brin and CEO Schmidt, are billionaires, though it, in theory, would make them more focused on the health of the stock price. All three lost billions of dollars in the last few months as the once high flying stock tanked, though you won’t see them sweating it.
The salary/publicity stunt has been criticized as meaningless, and Valleywag has pointed out it means the super-rich taking the salary are contributing six cents to help Social Security and one penny for Medicare, meaning that none of their mega-riches are going to help those served by important government programs.
Some people might enjoy this: Gmail.com maps to GoogleMail.com, so every @gmail.com email address also is a @googlemail.com address. In other words, if you’re joeyjoejoejunior@gmail.com, all email to joeyjoejoejunior@googlemail.com also goes to your inbox, due to legal and trademark issues in other countries. If you want a second address, there you go!
Gmail Chat, Google’s instant messaging application inside of Gmail, has added the ability to show your status as Invisible. This way, you can be signed in, see who’s online, and send instant messages, but no one can see you’re online (and interrupt you while you’re trying to get some work done.
As Ionut points out, since Google Talk has been abandoned and ignored, if you use it and Gmail Chat, you lose this feature, since it won’t work in GTalk. How much longer before Google Talk gets an update or an end-of-life announcement?
Getting a lot of reports of people having trouble with their Gmail accounts. In the Gmail Help Discussion Group, I’ve easily seen several hundred users who say they are getting blank white screens, that they can only get in by trying a different browser, that they have to reboot their computer and wait fifteen minutes, dissapeaing label colors, dissapearing menus, dissapearing chat box, unending “Loading” messages, getting the older version of Gmail, and other problems. The “Issues logging in” board has 140 posts since this morning, 154 yesterday, and 54 the day before.
For now, your best advice comes from a poster (non-Google employee) called LMckin:
Whatever the problem is, the solution seems to be to clear your cache, switch browsers, or try those alternate versions of Gmail, at least until Google figures out what the hell went wrong and fixes it. If you’re having a problem, fell free to leave a comment.
Google is losing some highly skilled employees lately, in what they must hope is not the start of a very dangerous trend.
Kevin Fox, former Senior User Experience Design Lead on projects like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader (the newer, successful version), Blogger, Google Groups, Page Creator, and founder of the Search and apps User Experience review committee, has left the company for a startup. Google has clearly lost an important, if not the most important, employee involved with the look and feel of Google products. Losing a guy like Kevin is by far the opposite of a good thing.
In announcing his departure, Kevin points to the good things about Google, that it was the first place he felt like he was part of the company, not just working for it. Still, he says he feels a need for “greater fulfillment” that he apparently can’t get at Google, but can at his new job at FriendFeed. FriendFeed’s founder and the writer of that blog post I linked to is Paul Buchheit. That name may sound familiar, because Paul was the creator and lead developer on Gmail, and he credits Kevin with putting the pieces together, without which, Gmail would never have shipped.
See something going on there? Often, startups will be staffed or even founded by multiple employees who have left a big company. We see it from Microsoft all the time, and Twitter is practically a Google/Blogger step-child as well. Paul, Google’s 23rd employee, left “Big G” (as Kevin calls it) to do something apparently more fullfilling than even Gmail, and he must be happy with it, because he convinced Kevin to follow him. If another Googler leaves for FriendFeed, it won’t shock anyone.
Google isn’t going to all of a sudden lose all its employees, but it just isn’t the utopia the founders would like you to believe it is, and probably never was. As stock option vest and employees hit the Google Ceiling (Google doesn’t have a lot of management layers, which means employees don’t have a lot of room to get promoted), you’ll see some of the best and brightest Googlers leave to join a startup where they can leave their mark, not satisfied with the opportunities offered by Google.
* - not to be confused with my friend Dovid Hersh, who you don’t know and I’m mentioning for no reason
TechCrunch has an overload of charts showing the end-of-the-year numbers for Yahoo and Ask.com.
For Ask, Ask.com’s unique visitors increased for the year by 54%, from 29.8 million in November 2006 to 46 million last month. Ask may still be having market share troubles, but more users means a healthier company that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Ask’s other properties mostly enjoyed decent growth, with search results pages going up from about 20 million to about 30 million, Image Search up 91%, Spain and German up 2063% and 844%, respectively, AskCity up 548%, and the only down properties are Maps (really replaced by AskCity) and Weather (replaced by the same functionality in Ask’s 3D search results). Ask’s new search results are pushing traffic to its search verticals, growing them in a disproportinate way that Google wishes it had.
For Yahoo, TechCrunch had to run two seperate charts, showing the top growing properties and top declining ones, since there are so many. Yahoo’s U.S. properties are mostly on neither list, with small percentage raises (and a few small drops) leaving them stagnant. Yahoo Answers is one major exception, more than doubling its traffic. Yahoo’s biggest success was in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where search was up 7,452% and 6,763%, respectively.
As you can see, Yahoo Mail went slightly up and down, and finished 3.21% up for the year. On that same page, projections show Gmail topping Yahoo Mail at current growth rates by November 2010. However, that projection assumes you are an idiot, because it also shows Yahoo Mail with the same amount of growth.
Yes, growth is common, but Gmail can’t take over the market completely without Yahoo losing users. Plus, growth never continues forever, especially at rates like this. More likely, Gmail will take some users from Yahoo and Microsoft, both of its competitors will grow slightly, and this war will still be going on well past 2010.
As always, Google search is the big boy, with Google Images the only other vertical that performs spectacularly. However, strong growth in Google Maps and Gmail mean that the two have a shot of breaking out of the pack and joining those two.
In the third tier are Google News and Google Video, one growing slightly, one sinking slightly. Guess moving around Video and changing its focus every few months hurt Video, though not as much as you’d expect. The fourth tier has Books, Earth and Groups, which enjoyed moderate growth, Scholar, which sank 32% due to neglect, and iGoogle, which exploded and grew over 250%. iGoogle is Google’s success story for the year, which is great news for the struggling personalized homepage product category and Google’s Gadget developer ecosystem.
There are the also-rans at the bottom, including Blog Search, the Google Directory (shockingly still popular than many of the others), Google Talk (most neglected product of the year), Calendar and Finance. Google Product Search is Google’s biggest failure, losing 73% of its users from when it was Froogle. A year ago, Froogle had a good ten million unique visitors and a nice brand name, now it has maybe two million and two generic names. Google killed Froogle, and hurt itself badly with this one.
Missing from this list is another Google success story, Google Reader. This suggests that Reader, while disrupting the RSS market, is too small to make the list, or that comScore screwed up (since we know Reader had a ton of growth). Also: No Google Apps or Google Docs, no Blogger or YouTube or SketchUp or Desktop.
It’s important to note that, of the 17 Google products listed, the only ones being monetized are Web Search (#1), Gmail (#3), Google Maps (#4) and Product Search (to a very small extent). Not making any money are Images (#2), News (#5), Video (#6), Earth (for the most part), Groups, Books, iGoogle, Scholar, and any of the others. Google would love to monetize Images, News and Video, but the amount of content it doesn’t own in there makes it damn near impossible to do so and not get sued.
Google is slowly and haphazardly integratings the various contact management implementations in its seperate products, now letting you find your Gmail contacts’ Orkut accounts, if they have one. Google’s also building a profile section for your Google Account, though it apparently overlooked privacy in every reasonable way, including leaving you no way to opt-out from profiles and no way to block sharing Reader items with contacts, short of mass-deleting your address book.
It looks like Google is pushing integration of its contact elements too fast and with barely any thought as to the privacy of its users. Google does this every time it launches a new service, and winds up fixing the problem a few days letter. If I worked at Google, I’d send a mass email to the entire company today asking all developers to put a step in the development process that checked for this before any product or feature was released, since they seem to keep screwing this one up every damn time.
UPDATE: Google Maps MyMaps also now has comments and ratings for your custom maps. Google is pushing strong in this area, just missing a lot of details.
Remember all the people who were worried that Gmail’s advertising system would be spying on your email? Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Witness this ad that appeared above a scam spam email:
Gmail has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, none of which I use because I never bothered to learn them. If you’d like to start taking advantage of the convenience of shortcuts, Gmail now has a popup dialog that will remind you of all of them at a glance. In the new Gmail, just hit the question mark key on your keyboard and the popup, pictured above, will appear. Easy, right?
For now, as long as I’m losing out on the great new features, including this popup and AIM integration, I’m sticking with accessing Gmail in Outlook via IMAP. I hope they enable the new Gmail in Opera one day.
Google Trends is getting an API, at least eventually, hopefully letting outsiders creating cool mashups that do more with Trends than Google is doing now. Google obviously doesn’t put a high priority on Trends, evidenced by the multiple fiascos* of not updating for months, so don’t expect the API soon, but when it does come, I’m hoping to get an interactive charting interface more like the one Google Finance uses.
Until then, rejoice in the fact that Google Apps has a new API, one for handling mail migration. With this, corporate email administrators can move email across systems, including in bulk, helping the operation of parallel systems. An app built on it is GMove, which can move everything in Outlook (mail, calendars, contacts and tasks) into Google Apps, or even into Gmail.
* - the plural of fiasco is normally fiascos, but fiascoes is also acceptable
Earlier this year there was some guessing as to when Google would make something of the slice of AOL they purchased. Nathan had a tidbit of news and a realistic idea as to what Google might be working on. The idea was to marry AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, into the same chat interface found in Gmail. That way Gmail users could also chat with their AIM buddies without having to sign into AIM using their external chat client.
Well, nearly a year later, two years after a joint press release said something like this would happen, that idea has become a reailty. First thing this morning when I signed into Gmail and went to set my online status to unavailable, I found a familiar icon in my list of options. The AIM icon shows up near the bottom of the menu, allowing Gmail users to sign into AIM and access their buddy list in the same Chat area of Gmail.
Once you have selected “Sign into AIM”, a small new pop window appears. Simply sign in using your AIM username and password and your buddy list will be imported into your Chat list. When you are all finished or wish to sign out of AIM, click the drop down arrow to change your status and the text changes to “Sign out of AIM”.
If a user in your Chat list is online using AIM, you will see the AIM icon to the right, and if they are using an away message you will see their status color as orange and their away message will display below if applicable. This new addition to Gmail brings Google another step closer to simplifying, yet improving the online user experience. This is useful for the user who is not on their own computer, i.e., at the library, in a computer lab or a friend’s house. It would also not require users to have the AIM client installed on their computer.
Ryan Douglas manages Paid Search and Comparison Shopping Engines for PlumberSurplus.com, an online retailer of home improvement products including Bathtubs, Sump Pumps, and Bathroom Sinks.
New feature in Gmail today: Colored labels. You can now hit the dropdown arrow next to any label in the sidebar to select from 24 color schemes, making it easier for you to identify at a glance the category of any email in your inbox (especially useful if you are automatically labeling incoming mail). The labels show up with their colors in the inbox message list, and on message pages you even get an “X” to remove a label with a single click.
*P.S. We actually kinda like folders. In fact, we’re doing some work to add some folder-y-ish functionality. Stay tuned.
I’m guessing: Hierarchical tagging. Thank god.
Another recently added feature: The info box is back. Back in February 2006 when Gmail Chat first launched, there was this contact card box that appeared when you moused over email messages. It was an annoying amount of user interface bloat, and Google quickly got rid of it, but they’ve now brought it back. The new info box is much smaller, containing the user’s away message, email address, and links to email, chat, recent conversations and full contact details.
Considering that the new label feature uses a dropdown arrow that only appears on mouseover why can’t the info box work the same way? It’s very unmanageable as a floating box, but Google seems to want to do this the wrong way for a second time. Hopefully they’ll improve it soon. Again.
A reminder: These features are only available in the latest version of Gmail. Those stuck with the old version, like Opera users, don’t have it and likely won’t get it for a while.
Jotspot’s former VP of Product Development and current Googler Scott Johnston gave a presentation last week where he revealed much of Google’s plans for JotSpot. Turns out the collaboration software will be the basis for Google Sites, the replacement for Google Page Creator, using powerful collaborative tools to allow businesses to create “intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites”.
Scott also confirmed what most people had been suspecting, that Google Gears support will be built into Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar for offline access. He explained how offline and online collaborative editing of the same document would be reconciled.
What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.
Google is also apparently not yet working on OCR (optical character recognition) for imported files (Microsoft Office’s OneNote does this), but may one day. Integrating GrandCentral into Google Apps is a major priority for Google, he said. And finally, don’t expect video conferencing in Google Talk/Chat, not soon at least, though it may be considered for the long term.
You can see the Android UI as it currently exists (or rather, barely exists). It’s plain, but seems comfortable and stable with room to grow into something nice, support for touchscreens, smartphones, larger VGA screens, a Webkit-based browser, Java virtual machine, threaded (conversational) text messaging, playback of MPEG-4, h.264, MP3, and AAC file formats.
Here’s a video showing Android in action, featuring Sergey Brin’s new “hung over” look and some idea of how the UI isn’t fully realized or much in competition with the iPhone. The Google Maps app has some good ideas, the web browser looks like it can’t do anything, the history app is a nice addition, the spinning globe shows that Android can do 3D pretty cool, and Google Maps Street View is nice.
Scoble isn’t impressed. I’ll say that it has a lot of potential, but they aren’t showing enough to make me believe that any of that potential includes significant success.
Gizmodo has an interesting look at the fonts created by Ascender for Android, the Droid family of fonts (fitting name). They seem pretty clean and well thought out. You’d be surprised how important fonts are in operating system design, but if you think about it, you do spend a huge amount of time staring more at the letters than the pretty boxes, so it makes sense that Microsoft and Apple put a lot of work into getting the best fonts and font rendering techniques.
Looks like there are over 1,000 Google millionaires. Even the ex-masseuse has a million dollars in Google stock. The average employee who joined a year ago is already worth $276,000 and counting.
Larry Page, Google founder and one of the ten richest people in the country, is getting married December 8 to Lucy Southworth, his girlfriend. Richard Branson and SF mayor Gavin Newsom are expected to attend, as well as many former and current Googlers, and, via videoconference, Al Gore.
Google and GoDaddy have teamed up on Google Webmaster Tools. GoDaddy customers will automatically have their sites submitted to Google Sitemaps (and thus rank better and fresher, without any effort) and a customized version of Google’s Webmaster Tools in their control panel.
Google changed the area in AdSense ads that can be clicked by the user, from pretty much the whole ad space to just the title and URL. Publishers are worried that the move, which is really supposed to just decrease accidental clicks, will cost them regular clicks, too. Early feedback is that the effect on earnings is minimal. My clickthrough rate is pretty consistent, though still kind of low.
Google Transit, which lets you get public transportation directions in Google Maps, now shows some European cities. They’ve got southeast of the UK, SBB, Switzerland, VBZ, Zurich, Switzerland, Turin, Italy, and Florence, Italy, but still no New York.
Google has a new widget you can add to your site which users can click on to automatically translate your website into the language of their choice. Microsoft added a similar widget at almost exactly the same time.
You can edit addresses in Google Maps now if they’re inaccurate. Check out the video:
Gmail added permalinks, so you can bookmark stuff and even send links to Gmail search results. Gmail’s also now up to 5 gigabytes of email storage.
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I’ve mentioned this before with regards to phishing, but it bears repeating that the same method applies when faced with threatening or abusing email coming from a Gmail email address.
E*, who is a member of our country’s armed forces, and his wife L*, contacted me that they were receiving some awful messages from a Gmail user, making sexual messages toward L and threatening to kill E when he comes home for Thanksgiving. Even though most internet crazies are just harmless idiots, you should always take the proper steps to protect yourself, as you never know when you are dealing with the genuine sociopath.
Just like last time, the proper way of dealing with this is to contact Google. Go to this page and select “I have received a harassing message from a Gmail account.” Paste the full contents of the harassing email. Google should get back to you and hopefully help you fix the problem. If that doesn’t work, and even if it does, you should your local police department so they can look into it and protect you if it seems like a legitimate threat.
Last night my husband and I both got crazy emails from someone using gmail. The email basically said that they was going to kill my husband when he comes home for thanksgiving and that they have do crazy things with me. I really need to find out who {redacted}@gmail.com is. Please help me with this problem.
There are some scary people you meet on the internet, but the first thing to remember is that they are mostly just idiots with an email address. They usually rely on anonimity to harass, but won’t actual get up and threaten you. In most cases, you have more of a chance of making their life hell than they do of hurting you, and taking the proper steps to protect yourself should make it go away very quickly.
Hope I could help. It’s always worth remembering that I am not Google’s support department. I don’t work for Google, and I can’t fix the problem all the time. I can usually dispense advice, but your best bet is to contact Google directly and hope they can help you. If you contacted Google already and their notoriously lax support didn’t get back to you, then you should contact me and I’ll try to help.
* - obviously, I’m trying to protect their privacy by leaving out their real names
