Today Google has announced that they have launched Picasa 3.5, a new version of their very popular free photo editing software. This version of Picasa gives the user the ability to add name tags to their photos, using the same facial recognition technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums.
Name tags have been designed to help the user easily organise their photos by what matters most. Picasa identifies similar faces and puts these into an “Unnamed People” album. From there, you can easily add a name tag by clicking “Add a name” and typing the person’s name. After you’ve added name tags to some photos, you can use your tags to do creative things, like quickly find all the photos with the same two people in them, make a face collage with just one click or upload and share people albums with friends.
Additionally, Picasa 3.5 has integrated Google Maps, so it is easy to geotag your photos and then view them according to location. Finally, Google has completely redesigned the import process in which you can now import photos from your camera and upload the photos to Picasa Web Albums in one easy step.
No, it’s not exactly Google’s Twitter Timeline; but you could consider these as tweets I guess. This list represents the entire life of Google represented in chronologically: Google Timeline.
A few months back we’ve talked about the history of Microsoft, the OTHER big company, and we had the chance to see how from a simple idea you can, not only build an entire company, you can design the future. Quite similar like they did with Google, here’s what they’ve called “Google Master Plan”.
(Click on the picture to see a large version. You would probably be amazed with all the stuff that appears there and they haven’t done it, just yet)
Getting back to Google Timeline, take a close look to that, because you would probably find some things that you didn’t even know.
How much is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google involved in your common day activities? Did you ever ask yourself that? Where would you be if those didn’t exist?
Well there thousands of those existential questions that you may or may not asked yourself, and there’s no need to get real philosophical about this, but we sure can be certain that those technologies, web apps and more have an important presence in most of our days.
About those presences, here’s a very interesting video about the facts of several of these social tools, technologies and media: “Social Media Revolution”
Here are some of the facts that caught my attention:
Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
1 of 8 couples married in the US met via social media
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users, Facebook took less than 9 months to reach 100 millions
Ashton Kutcher has more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35% of books sales on Amazon are for Kindle
“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”
I have been after some great social media icons for a long time and I have finally come across a great set. All icons are circular and of the highest quality. Icons include AIM, Bebo, eBay, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Windows Live, Ning, Orkut, Twitter and more.
When Bing and Yahoo! decided recently that they would work together in an effort to stage an offensive against the internet giant that is Google, I though competition between the two had come to an untimely end. I was wrong.
As it happens, although the two search engines will work together to defeat Google they will still compete for glory. Perhaps we will see a kind of WW2 cooperation just like the bitter Allies united to defeat the Nazis…not that Google is a Nazi.
A senior vice president of Yahoo! said “We are Yahoo and that will continue…We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end,”
I guess this makes sense. I mean, what were we all expecting? Yahoo! and Bing to come together like two lost lovers? Nonsense. This is a recession and both companies will by going full steam ahead to stay afloat. They will share advertising revenue with both search engines using the Bing ad model. The deal is due to come into affect next year and will last for ten years. By the end of that time will Google have been defeated? And will Yahoo! be left needing Bing more than Bing needs Yahoo?
Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook are some of the internets biggest names. All of them have huge online presence with millions of hits every single day. Their names have become so well known that even elderly people who have never sat at a computer know what they are. Ever think about their electricity bills?
Me neither, until I came across a report by MIT which states that they are easily spending $30 million per annum on electricity. This is to keep their servers up and running. First they have to power the servers. Then comes the technology that runs them and all the cooling and networking systems in between. A tall task with an even taller bill.
This report suggests a way in which these companies could save on their electricity bills.
It doesn’t offer a green solution of cutting back, rather it suggests that they constantly change which servers power their machines on a daily, even hourly basis.
So for example, the cost of electricity could rise in the US for any given reason so they shift the workload to servers in Belgium where the electricity is cheaper on that particular day.
While this would be a costly investment to begin with, it should pay off. After all, the total energy usage by the internet’s servers is set to go up four times within the next decade. Time for the big lads to make a big decision I think.
Google Labs, as we said it many times, represent’s Google’s sandbox where they can try a lot of new technologies, and also sharing them with the globe. And if we talk about Google and new technologies we can always be amazed, and I guess this one it’s not the exception: Google Listen will provide audio search within th web, but wait, it is only available for Android (just for now I hope).
You can search, subscribe, download and strem podcasts and audio around the web. Interesting thing about this Android’s app: by subscribing to programs you will create a personalized audio-magazine.You can download Google Listen for your Adroid device from here.
You can see it like this:
Google Listen Home Page
The audio search is only available in English. And remember, this app belongs to Google Labs, so you should expect some bugs or lack of stability.
Also I’ve noticed that the Google Listen home page hasn’t been all that “available” in the last few days.
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It includes a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches.
Jumplists are part of the new Windows 7 taskbar. The jumplists basically provide access to program related options.
The latest dev version of Google Chrome is now offering jumplist support in Windows 7. The jumplist can be opened by right-clicking the Google Chrome icon in the Windows taskbar. The Google Chrome jumplist is divided into four areas of which three are always visible and one only if the user has added at least one item to it.
The Google Browser will display the most visited websites, the recently closed websites and tasks in the jumplist. The most visited and recent websites are directly taken from the web browser’s history while the task allow the user to open a new window (either normal or in incognito mode).
The fourth group only becomes available if the user pins an element in the jumplist. This is for example excellent for quickly accessing favorite websites from the Windows 7 jumplist. The latest developer build of Google Chrome can be downloaded from the dev channel page. It is interesting to see that the Google Chrome development team has added jumplist support while the Mozilla Firefox team has not shown any signs that they intend to support that feature in the near future.
Just a few days after being spotted in Chrome’s new tab page, the official Google Theme Gallery is now open for business. Currently there are 29 new themes in which you can add to Chrome.
Remember, you’ll need to be running the Chrome 3 beta or developer channel or be using a recent build of Chromium to get in on the fun. If that includes you, check ‘em out then tell us which one you’re switching to in the comments. Unless you’re not impressed with the selection, in which case – sound off!
Google have just announced that they have acquired a new technology company that will serve YouTube very well indeed.
That have just invested shares worth over $106 million dollars in On2 Technologies which are a video compression company. This new venture could change YouTube forever giving it faster download speeds and less buffering as a result.
This may also help to cut Google’s massive bandwidth bill of over $300 million per year that is necessary to keep YouTube up and running. By compressing the size of the videos (some of which are as big of 2GB since HD was introduced) this would make the site smaller and easier to manage while attracting more because of a better user experience.
“Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform.
“To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”
If you have some kind of mobile addiction and feel the necessity to constantly check your email with your mobile; I’m pretty sure that you usually get uncomfortable trying to use the small screen on your phone. Well this is not a revolutionary invention, but it keeps reminding me that Google is trying to keep things simpler: “Smart Links” automatically shortens long links and converts them into named links.
This is what you usually when you are reading an email with a long link:
And Smart Links converting it like this:
Of course these links, at least for now, will only work with Google related sites: Google Maps, Google Sites web pages and YouTube videos (but they are expecting to make it available soon for Google Docs as well).
There’s an important disclaimer about the use of this feature: only works with plain text emails.
Today Google has announced that they have launched Picasa 3.5, a new version of their very popular free photo editing software. This version of Picasa gives the user the ability to add name tags to their photos, using the same facial recognition technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums.
When Bing and Yahoo! 
If you have some kind of mobile addiction and feel the necessity to constantly check your email with your mobile; I’m pretty sure that you usually get uncomfortable trying to use the small screen on your phone. Well this is not a revolutionary invention, but it keeps reminding me that Google is trying to keep things simpler: “
