Chrome 15

Use your Google+ profile with your Blogger blogs

by A Googler at 5:37 pm

In fewer than 4 months since its launch, more than 40 million people have joined Google+, making it a living, breathing space for social connections and sharing to thrive.

Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ -- by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile.

In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you've shared the post.

Plus, bloggers who switch will automatically get access to the Google+ integrations we’ll be rolling out in the future.

If you blog under a pseudonym and you don’t want to connect your common name with your blog, this integration may not work for you. That’s why we’ve made it completely optional to switch.

This option is available for all users today in our testing ground, Blogger in Draft, and will be accessible fromwww.blogger.com in the coming weeks.

If you have a Google+ account and would like to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile, log in todraft.blogger.com and click “Get started” on the promotion message, pictured below.

If you don’t have a Google+ account, you can create one here first, and then head back to draft.blogger.com and look for the promotion message.

To learn more, check out our FAQs or visit our Help Forum. Happy blogging!

Posted by Vardhman Jain, Software Engineer

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/10/use-your-google-profile-with-your.html

Google Buzz Bites the Dust

Goodbye, Google Buzz. The social messaging platform, which was meant to rival Twitter, is beingtossed aside by Google in an effort to slim down.

Google Buzz launched in February 2010 as a way to share status updates, photos, videos, and links with friends through Gmail. The secret sauce was a "page rank" algorithm that determined which status updates should be featured prominently and which ones should be collapsed. Google Buzz also mined users' Gmail contacts and set users up to automatically follow the people they e-mailed most.

Unfortunately for Google, this turned out to be a privacy nightmare. By default, users' follower lists were public, revealing their most frequent e-mail contacts to the world. Google Buzz also lacked a way to block people who didn't have public profiles at first.

Although Google apologized and fixed these problems, the network's reputation was already damaged. The fiasco even brought complaints from the Federal Communications Commission, forcing asettlement in which Google agreed to comprehensive, company-wide privacy measures.

Even if Google Buzz hadn't botched privacy, it still probably would've failed. The service did little to differentiate from Facebook or Twitter, and users quickly lost interest.

When Google+ launched in June, Google Buzz was assumed to be dead. Now it's official. Google+ is off to a much better start, with 40 million members, so it's unlikely that Google will give up on its newest social network so easily.

Read more

Google+ Real Time Search & Hashtags

Google is giving Google+ users two enhanced ways to find information disseminating across the social network, with real-time search and hashtags.

“Now when you search in Google+, you’ll see a message about new posts the instant they’re available,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social, explained in a post on Google+ Wednesday. “If you click on this message, or select ‘Most recent,’ then relevant posts will start appearing in real-time.”

Also, should you opt to put a hashtag in any of your Google+ updates, that hashtag will automatically link to search results for the term.

The improvements will come as welcome additions for Google+ power users, journalists and media types interested in keeping up with breaking news on Google+. The search updates may do little to convince more casual social networkers to stick around on the social site or give it second chance.

They have some long-term significance, however. We expect this technology to become the foundation for a revamped real-time search experience on Google.com itself.

You may recall that Google Realtime Search went on hiatus in July — after Google failed to reach an agreement with Twitter for continued access to its firehose of data

Google Introduces Cloud Database

CloudSQL service is free, for now.




Google has launched a new service to make its cloud computing platform more appealing to businesses. The company on Thursday introduced a limited preview of Google Cloud SQL, a scalable, hosted MySQL database environment.

Navneet Joneja, product manager for Google Cloud SQL, says that one of the most frequent requests from Google App Engine users has been for an easy way to develop traditional database-driven applications. Using App Engine, Google's platform-as-a-service offering, in conjunction with Cloud SQL allows developers to avoid the burden of database management, maintenance, and administration.

And at the moment, the price is hard to beat.

"Cloud SQL is available free of charge for now, and we will publish pricing at least 30 days before charging for it," said Joneja in a blog post. Google says it will not charge for the service in 2011.

But the price will go up eventually. Google in May said it planned to increase the price of using its App Engine cloud computing infrastructure later this year and recently shocked developers when the magnitude of the price increase became apparent. The outcrythat followed--partly the result of expectations set by the low price during App Engine's beta period--prompted Google engineering director Peter Magnusson to apologize for not providing developers with the tools to understand how their apps would be affected by the price change.

[ Find out more about Google's plans for App Engine. ReadGoogle Revs App Engine With Business Features. ]

Google has defended the price increase as necessary to make App Engine work as a business.

Read more from Information Week

Chrome extension enables remote computer control

Months of work on "chromoting" have reached fruition with Google's release on Friday of a new Chrome extension to let a person on one computer remotely control another across the network.

The Chrome Remote Desktop beta version, which arrived Friday, is a browser-based equivalent of remote desktop software for conventional operating systems. Such software is handy for IT administrators managing employees' machines, people taking care of their relatives' computers, or individuals getting access to their own machines from afar.

"Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is the first installment on a capability allowing users to remotely access another computer through the Chrome browser or a Chromebook," the release notes said. "Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is fully cross-platform, so you can connect any two computers that have a Chrome browser, including Windows, Linux, Mac, and Chromebooks."

Using the Chrome remote desktop extension requires the person sharing access to a computer give an access code to the person who will tap into it remotely.

(Credit: Google)

It's that latter category that likely was a very important factor in the development of the technology. Google's Chrome OS is geared in part for organizations that want to lower their computer administration costs, and remote management is an important factor when it comes to that goal.

The technology right now is limited so that permission must be granted each time remote administration is activated. "This version enables users to share with or get access to another computer by providing a one-time authentication code. Access is given only to the specific person the user identifies for one time only, and the sharing session is fully secured," the release notes said.

Via Erica Joy

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20117619-264/chrome-extension-enables-remote-computer-control/#ixzz1aEdb8ea3