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Google Lively A new virtual world
Google has launched a new 3D virtual world called Google Lively, similar to Linden Labs' Second Life and Sony's planned 'Home' service for PlayStation 3, in which users create avatars for themselves and interact virtually.
Users can create their own 3D "rooms," and deck them out with furniture and other accoutrements, in addition to being able to add themed music to complete your personalized virtual space in Google Lively.
Users will be able to visit others' rooms, leave items for other Google Lively netizens as well as being able to stream photos and video
Download: Google Lively Installer
View: Google Lively
Source: Techradar
Google sites open for all
Google sites, a service previously only available to google apps users, is now open to all.
Google plans to extend this simple hosting and design solution to those wanting to host simple web-pages. Google Sites offers a variety of themes, and arrangements to help create your website. There is also the ability to integrate your Google Calendars, Mail, and Files with ease.
Google Sites are collaborative, which engineering manager Andrew Zaeske said in the announcement makes them ideal for "team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it."
No HTML knowledge is required, and your website will be hosted for free on the Google domain.
View: Google Sites
Google Health Public Beta
Google Inc. is now offering the general public electronic access to their medical records and other health-related information.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Web search leader announced the public launch of Google Health during a Webcast on Monday. It lets users import records from a variety of care providers and pharmacies.
Google tested the service by storing medical records for a few thousand patient volunteers at the not-for-profit Cleveland Clinic.
"It's a really exciting day for us. We're really happy to be able to offer this service to all our users," Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, said in the Webcast.
View: Google Health
Source: Neowin
FeedBurner Moves to Google Accounts
After Google bought FeedBurner in June 2007, we didn't hear too many new things about FeedBurner. A post from February detailed the benefits of the future Google integration: connecting with other Google services, better performance and new features. "Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? (...) Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you [to] be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you're constantly working on merge problems."
It seems that the Googlizied FeedBurner will be brought to life soon. FeedBurner Blog announces that "in the coming weeks, upon visiting www.feedburner.com, selected publishers will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account". That means you will be offered the option to choose a Google account as a new home for FeedBurner. The posts mentions that the integration with other services will be added gradually and it's easy to anticipate the relaunch of AdSense for feeds or a new tab in AdWords.
The most visible side-effect of the Google ownership is that the premium accounts and MyBrand are free, so you might save at least $96/year. In the past 11 months, FeedBurner doubled the number of users and now has "882,989 publishers who've burned 1,570,012 feeds".
View: Feedburner
Source: Google System
Google Website Optimizer
Today at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco, Google Website Optimizer™ launched out of beta as an independent product. Formerly a feature within the Google AdWords™ advertising service only, this free website-testing tool is now accessible through its own website (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) as well.
Google Website Optimizer helps improve user experience on the Web by showing its users what their visitors want to see. Rather than debating or guessing how a webpage might look best, users can continually test different combinations of website content, such as images and text, to see which one yields the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
Google Website Optimizer provides value "beyond the click" as part of Google’s suite of advertising tools offering heightened precision, accountability and scale. Together with Google AdWords, which drives traffic to your website, and Google Analytics™, which measures that traffic, Google Website Optimizer further helps you convert your traffic into customers.
The product is available in 27 languages worldwide: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia, UK & U.S.), Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil & Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai and Turkish.
View: Google Website Optimizer
Google Calendar Sync for Microsoft Outlook
One of the most popular requests for Google Calendar was synchronization with mobile devices and Outlook. After launching a sync tool for Blackberries, Google Calendar now offers a small utility for synchronizing events with Outlook.
By default the synchronization is bi-directional, but you can change this when you install the utility or from the options dialog. The only significant drawback is that you can only synchronize your main Google Calendar, but a future update should remove this limitation.
Google installs a small program that loads at start-up and sits on your system tray, while waiting for the next synchronization (the default sync interval is 2 hours). After synchronizing your calendar with Outlook, you can access it offline and synchronize it with your mobile phone.
It's worth noting that Google's new tool works with Google Apps accounts and it's another step towards making Google Apps more business-friendly.
View: Google Calendar Sync
Source: GoogleSystem
Google Sites Launched
After more than a year since the JotSpot acquisition, Google finally launched a service that uses JotSpot's technology: Google Sites. The new service is a part of Google Apps and allows you to create web sites collaboratively. "People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization," explains Google.
Google offers templates, a rich-text editor, 10GB of storage for each Google Apps account and integration with other Google services so you can embed gadgets, calendars, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slideshows and videos. You can invite people to collaborate or just view a site and you can also publish the site so that anyone can view it.
View: Google Sites
Google Talk chatback badge
Google Talk's gadget was a nice addition, but you couldn't use it to chat with unknown people or with the visitors of the site, like in Meebo Me. Now you can do that using the new chatback badges. You only need to add some code to your site and anyone could click on the generated badge to chat with you.
A Google Talk chatback badge allows others to chat with you even if they haven't signed up for Google Talk or a Google Account. You can put the badge in your blog or website, and people who visit those pages can chat with you. The badge will display your online status (whether you're available to chat or not) and, optionally, your status message."
If someone clicks on the badge, a special version of the Google Talk gadget will open and he will be able to chat with you.
The conversations are private and only one-to-one, so other visitors won't be able to read them. For some strange reason, they're not even added in Gmail's chat section. Unfortunately, being constantly interrupted by other people is not very pleasant, so you can disable the link from your badge by setting your status to "busy" or by signing out of Google Talk.
View: Google Talk chatback badge
Source: GoogleSystem