Google updated the YouTube app for Google TV yesterday, bringing YouTube's channel-based redesign to the living room. It also adds a 'Discover' tab for browsing new channels and videos to watch. The update also adds performance and navigation improvements.
Yesterday, Google TV's Facebook page seeded that a big announcement was coming. When Peter Kafka revealed that this YouTube app was it, he concluded that it was no big deal. But as far as Google TV goes, the YouTube app is big. YouTube is the new television. It's smart TV's killer app. But YouTube is not exclusive to Google TV. If Google TV wants to be relevant, it has to offer the best YouTube experience around.
Google+ is putting its volume slider on the What's Hot feature. What on Earth does that mean? It means that Google+ is giving its users fine-grained control over what appears in their main streams.
The volume slider came out in December to let users adjust the prominence of posts from individual circles in their overall streams. It's now available for the What's Hot feed as well, which is where Google+ shows users popular posts from across the network.
Google TV is supposed to be Android's entrance into your living room, the pioneering cusp of the "smart TV" revolution. It appears that it has been anything but. Since its release last year, only about 4,793,000 Google TV apps have been downloaded, according to Xyologic. While nearly five million downloads may seem like a success, six of those apps come pre-installed on Google TV devices, making up 92% of the ecosystem. Only 352,000 dedicated Android apps for Google TV have been downloaded.
While the idea of the smart TV is intriguing, consumers are still warming up to adoption. We expect that to change this year as more avenues for Internet-connected televisions become available and prices begin to fall. Google TV is just a small segment of the ecosystem with Apple TV, Roku, Boxee and Samsung all coming with solutions to connecting your living room to the Web.
When RWW webmaster Jared Smith sent me screenshots of yet another change to Google's top navigation bar, I thought it was a bug. Then I got it, too. It's a weird hybrid of the old, black nav bar with plain, gray text and the new, light one with the icons and Google search box. Sure enough, just now, Google announced the change, so it will be rolling out to all users soon.
The black bar, sometimes called the "sandbar," only appeared in the middle of last year as Google began to redesign its interfaces, and the gray Google Bar was launched in November. Some users still have the sandbar, and others have the gray one. Now there's a strange hybrid appearing, and it's sort of the worst of both worlds.
The next version of Chrome will help older computers catch up with rapidly accelerating Web-based graphics. The upcoming Chrome release will improve the performance of hardware-accelerated 2D animations using Canvas, which include many Web-based games and other graphically-intensive sites.
It will also let systems with older GPUs use SwiftShader for 3D graphics instead of WebGL, which older GPUs can't handle. It won't look quite as good, but users with older systems will still get more 3D content than they currently can. The new Chrome beta with these features is available today.
The Wall Street Journal has revived rumors about Google launching a cloud storage service called Drive. The comparison everybody wants to make is to Dropbox. The thinking is that Google will challenge everyone's favorite start-up by releasing a native desktop and mobile Drive app with the same syncing features Dropbox users know and love.
Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they've always conformed to the understanding of "The Cloud" that has prevailed at the time. If it's not like Apple's iCloud, which is integrated into Apple's devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don't. There's room for a third, stand-out option here.
2012 started with a flourish of new apps across iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The holiday season is the busiest time of year for app publishers but the follow up in January was equally impressive. That is a testament to the growing app ecosystem and the number of developers starting to program for mobile platforms. We take a look at some of our favorite new apps from last month below.
The app update section returns for the its fifth month and we found that fewer of our existing apps issued updates for new features or bug fixes than in months past. We also have a new treat in the Apps of the Month: a limited Staff Picks section where some of ReadWriteWeb's writers picked the apps they found most interesting during the month.
The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.
When Google announced that the Chrome browser would become its own operating system and run on netbooks, the thought around the tech community was that eventually Google would have to merge Chrome with Android. After all, what is the point of supporting two disparate mobile operating systems? The convergence has not yet occurred but may have taken a step further today as Google announced Chrome for Android available on devices running version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Chrome for Android is a win for everybody. Except, of course, most users. As of Google's latest Android platform numbers, only 1% of devices are running Ice Cream Sandwich. That will change as 2012 moves along with adoption accelerating from new device purchases and updates. Chrome for Android immediately becomes one of the go-to browsers on the platform, which is good for HTML5 development, reliability and security.
Google breaks ground today on the super-fast fiber optic network it plans to build for the lucky residents of Kansas City, Kan. They'll get a 1 gigabit-per-second Internet connection, which will offer downloads 100 times faster than what most Americans get. Uploads will be a thousand times faster than average.
Kansas City won this privilege over 1,100 other cities in March 2011. Since then, Google and the city have been surveying, planning, and eating "way too much barbecue," says Google's manager, Kevin Lo. Today, they start laying cable. A few months behind the Kansas side, neighbors on the other side of the river in Kansas City, Mo. will get the hook-up as well.
Google is taking new steps to identify and eliminate malware in the Android Market. Codenamed "Bouncer," Google will now scan every new and existing app in the Market against known malware, permissions and publisher information. This is the first time that Google has been so proactive in attacking the Android malware problem and a welcome step for its application ecosystem.
Google will institute Bouncer without disrupting the Android user experience or requiring an Apple-like approval process. The tactic that Google is using focuses on the cloud and identifying malware as opposed to checking each app's credentials at the door. Furthermore, Google said that Android malware is actually decreasing, contrary to prior reports.
