The Wall Street Journal reports today that Google is going back to China. Two years ago, facing censorship from the Chinese government, Google pulled out of mainland China, redirecting users to uncensored results from Hong Kong. Google took a stand against China's authoritarian regime, but it did so reluctantly. China is too tempting a market for Google to write off.
Nevertheless, the WSJ reports that Google is hiring more engineers, salespeople and product managers and building new consumer Web services. As China's mobile market booms, Google is pushing Android there, and opening a Chinese Android Market for mobile apps is one of the top priorities.
The Gmail team has updated its Web app for Chrome with settings controls for its HTML5 offline main storage. Users can now set it to store 7, 14 or 31 days of past email offline. Email work done offline - on an airplane, for example - is synced next time you connect.
Today's update also stores attachments for offline use, enables Gmail keyboard shortcuts offline, improves performance and fixes bugs. The Gmail offline app is available in the Chrome Web Store, and existing users will be updated automatically.
Ever since Google+ arrived on the social scene, Blogger has gone through a few transformations. Surprisingly, the latest update to Blogger has nothing to do with Google+.
Today the Google Buzz blog announced that blogger now supports threaded comments. These comments make it easier for the reader to figure out if a commenter is responding specifically to their comment, or just making a general comment on the thread.
There is a catch, however: Users must go to their Blogger profiles and select embedded comments, and enable a full-text blog feed. This is relatively easy to do.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone five years ago, it was a happy day for the Apple faithful. Less so for the folks at Palm, whose employer became a ticking time bomb. In one move, Apple leapfrogged its rivals in hardware and software and changed the mobile industry forever. And Palm -- a touch computing pioneer that lost its way -- was toast.
That's just one example of how quickly a company's fates can change in today's fast-moving tech industry. Every company -- even those as seemingly strong today as Apple and Google -- have clear risks and weaknesses. The iPad could drive Microsoft's decline. The government could smother Google's growth efforts. And a mobile player that doesn't even exist could be the one that takes down Facebook.
Hangouts, the versatile video chat that continues to be the standout feature of Google+, got a visual and functional update today. The primary video feed is now bigger and better emphasized.
Hangouts also now offer screen sharing between users, a feature available on Skype and Apple's iChat as well as more work-oriented collaboration platforms. This is a killer feature for Hangouts, making it even more useful as a tool for live collaboration.
Google announced yesterday that its layered 3D browser of the human body has become an open-source project. Google Body was built by Google engineers in their "20% time" - the 1/5th of Googlers' time and energy they can devote to creative projects - of which all other human beings are jealous.
Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.
Google shipped some major changes to search today. The announcement was called "Search, plus Your World." It was the inevitable launch of the integration between Google's core product, Web search, and its new identity
service, Google+. There are now two modes of search on Google, personal and global. Personal search shows users stuff from their Google+ circles, and global search is good old Google search, albeit with public Google+ posts included.
Before today, Google+ was shoved into Web search in uncomfortable ways. Public Google+ posts interfered with natural search when users were logged in. It looked like Google was going to force its social product into its users' lives. But that's not how it turned out. Today's updates put Google users' identities into their own hands.
If you're attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you'll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport.
Google has also partnered with some Las Vegas-area Best Buy stores, so it can guide gadget-addled convention-goers straight to the cash register. Today's update also releases the floor plans of some of the first locations submitted to Google.
Google has "shipped the Google part" of Google+, and everything went better than expected. Today, Google launches Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and People and Pages, new features of its core search product that mark the real beginning of Google's social search era. Google search now has two modes: global and personalized. Personal search results show content from your Google+ network, and global search results appear as though you're logged out of Google+.
If you're like me, you've dreaded this day. Just last week, I wrote that Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by turning Web search into a popularity contest. But the new Google unveiled today leaves the user in control. "Search, plus Your World," Google has called it. It's two kinds of search, and they're separate. If you don't want Google+-flavored results, just switch to global mode. You can even turn off personalized search altogether.
Social gaming has come a long way since your friend asked you to check out her farm on Facebook. Some estimates suggest that over a million developers worldwide are busily adding to the more than 50,000 games and applications already available on Facebook alone.
In 1994, the gaming world was taken by storm when Blizzard Entertainment launched World of Warcraft, which not only became their best-selling PC game but ballooned into 11 million active players in just 14 years. However, this is a drop in the bucket compared to what the current popular social games see on a regular basis. Zynga's CityVille has been reported to have nearly 76 million active monthly players and there are at least 30 other games with over 10 million active monthly users right behind it.
