Google is in the process of simplifying user experience by scrapping products that haven’t met their  goals, or merging them as features into other  products. Though I myself hadn’t heard of some of these features, I was interested to research what tools they had experimented with in order to achieve the Google we all love. Google’s continued pursuit of innovation and user experience perfection is inspiring to say the least.  Below are some of their test products that didn’t quite make their ‘Google cut’.

• Google Friend Connect – gave web masters the ability to add social features to their sites by embedding a few lines of code. The feature will be retired as of 1^st March 2012 for non-blogger sites. Affected sites have been encouraged to create a Google+ page, and add a Google+ badge to their site so they can keep in touch with their community of followers via their page.

• Google Gears – browser extension allowed creation of offline web applications. As part of efforts to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, as of 1^st December 2011, Gears based Gmail and Calendar offline will no longer work and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. Gmail, Calendar and Docs can instead be accessed offline in Chrome.

• Google Wave – a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. Development on Google Wave was stopped over a year ago, but as of 31^st January 2012 Wave will become read-only and no new “Waves” will be created. On 30^th April 2012 Wave will be turned off completely. Individual Waves can still be exported until the feature is turned off, but there are still open-source projects such as Apache Wave and Walkaround which offer equal functionality.

• Knol – aimed to improve web content by allowing experts to collaborate on in-depth articles (similar to Wikipedia). Annotum, “an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress” [1], has been created in order to continue the work of Knol – which will no longer be available as of 1^st October 2012.

These are just a few of the products Google will be scrapping, their aim: “to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience”[1], which, in turn, will benefit not only users but advertisers as well.

To find out how we can help your site to rank better on Google, take a look at our Search Engine Optimization page

References:

1. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html

After an almost 3months field trial, Google+ Social Network is now open for anyone to join with or without invite.

This was announced Tuesday 20^th September 2011 by Vic Gundotra, Google Senior Vice President of Engineering on the company’s blog. “For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal. We’re nowhere near done, but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups. This way anyone can visit google.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about.”

The new features are said to be rolled out over the course of today globally. [1]

Some of these features include improvements to +Hangouts which uses video to allow people to connect “face-to-face-to-face”.

Hangouts on your phone – the mobile app was rolled out on the Android Market Tuesday allowing Hanging out anytime from almost anywhere.

Hangouts On Air – allows Google+ users to speak to large audiences or view public broadcasts.

Hangouts with extras – offers additional features enhancing time spent hanging out such as : Screensharing – so you can show off pics, high scores or anything else that may be on your screen. Sketchpad – to allow drawing, doodles or scribbling together. Google Docs – enables writing, planning or presentations as a group. Named Hangouts – for creation of a public hang out based on any topic, be it Medicine, Politics, Fashion, or Music. Thought the extras are still under construction these features are being previewed and Google is looking for feedback.

Hangouts APIs – allows developers to build apps and games.

Search in Google+ – Enables users to perform searches of any topic returning relevant posts and popular web content. “Google+ search results include items that only you can see, so family updates are just as easy to find as international news”.  [1]

Google+ brings interesting innovations to Social Media as we have come to know it, and is sure to give long standing Social Media front runner Facebook a run for its money. Though the product is still new it has built a lot of excitement and looks promising to keep and build on this momentum.

References:

1. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96-97-98-99-100.html

A few months ago I was working on a Saturday morning and trying to find technologies that would make my live easier. It dawned on me that I need technology to keep up with technology. The world is changing so quickly and new things are popping up all over the place. I know I feel like my days should change to 48 hours instead of 24 just so I can get everything done. I have found some tools that have slightly countered this phenomenon and I would like to share them.

Now I find that I often have time available to me when I’m traveling between clients or even have some time to kill between meetings. These are the times that I need my digital life to be available to me. Now my example is specific to my situation and as such will be based on the iPhone but this is applicable to most phone brands in some form or way. I have my entire life synced on my phone. I can send emails, look up business and personal contacts and even access my important documents. My contacts are also synced automatically with my Mac and visa-versa.  This has enabled me to do business using my phone when I have time.

There are a few tools that you could use to sync your life. If you are an Apple user Apple have a service that integrates into everything called MobileMe this offers you syncing of your emails, contacts and offers you storage space online that you can access from your phone or other computers. There is however a free option. Google offers you functionality to sync your emails and contacts in a similar way to MobileMe the only difference is that it’s free. To have online storage you could make use of Dropbox, which integrates with all platforms, and you can even access it with only a browser. This means that you’re never far away from your important documents.

Other than that my whole life is stored on my phone. I use my phone to store my to-dos, which keeps my life organized. I also have the option to sync this with my Mac or computer, which means I don’t need to always access my phone to see what I have to-do today.

My last but one of the most important tools I use is an rss feed reader. Now these have been around for a long time but I have found that many people still don’t use them. I need to stay up to date in my job and this means reading hundreds of articles every week. I have certain key industry sites that I need to keep track of and checking these everyday would take up quite a fair amount of my time. RSS feed readers have made it possible for me to login to one program where I have subscribed to each site’s feed and then see the new content instantly. I have even synced this with my phone so I can read them on my phone when I have a bit of extra time. This has meant that I really get to use my time more effectively.

As you can see I’m a big evangelist of syncing your digital life so it is always available to you but also so it is always backed up. If you have any interesting tools, which I didn’t mention, please post it below.  And use those feed readers to subscribe to our feed, so you can stay up to date with the rest of the tools we will be posting this week.

Since yesterday you might have noticed the change of Google’s  search results page. They have changed the look and feel making it easier to find exactly what you are looking for and with additional tools to help enhance your search experience on Google.

What’s new?

They have added left-hand navigation navigation to the page, this gives you quick access to relevant options and tools.  Google will pick up that some content are more important than others, so with a click you can change the type of information you want, you wil easily be able to switch between news, images or video’s if you want to. The more relevant information will be shown first but you can always click on the more button to view other results.

You can customize your results and generate different views. you can view you examples on a timeline or restrict your results to the last 24 hours.

Other than the left-hand side changes they have updated the look and feel in terms of the colours and the logo. The new design streamlines the look, feel and functionality of Google making it easier to find what you are looking for.

The display URL  is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users. Google adjusted their display URL policy for sites that sit on shared or hosted domains (such as blogspot.com) to make this more clear.

As from this week, all ads leading to sites on hosted domains will need to have display URLs that accurately reflect their destinations.

Let’s say I wanted to create an ad linking to this blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com. In the past, blogspot.com would have been an acceptable display URL. Because there are so many independent blogs hosted on http://blogspot.com however, we now require the display URL to reflect the specific blog reached upon clicking the ad– in this case: adwords.blogspot.com.

Incorrect:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: blogspot.com

Correct:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: adwords.blogspot.com