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Games in Google+: fun that fits your schedule
August 11, 2011
My family has a games closet. Inside you’ll find a few decks of cards, two decades’ worth of board games and a Twister mat for those times when we’re feeling limber. Playing games is a great way for us to spend quality time with each other (and a little healthy competition never hurt anyone either).
Today we’re adding games to Google+. With the
Google+ project
, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life.
That means giving you control over when you see games, how you play them and with whom you share your experiences. Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don’t.
When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting—click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you’ve received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear. So you can comfortably share your latest high score—your circles will only see the updates when they’re interested in playing games too.
If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.
You’ll have a fun initial set of games to play with on Google+. Thanks to the developers who’ve worked with us to make them available:
If you’re a developer interested in building games for Google+, you can learn more on our new
Google+ developer blog
.
Today we’re starting to gradually roll out games in Google+. We look forward to making them fully available to everyone in Google+ soon. When you see a Games page in your account, please give games a try and send us feedback. Look for the "send feedback" button in the bottom right-hand corner of any page in Google+. Thanks for playing! Like the
rest of the Google+ project
, we're just getting started.
Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President, Engineering
We love Lucy
August 5, 2011
Lucille Ball
may have been born 100 years ago today, but her jokes are timeless. Having grown up with the comedic genius of “
I Love Lucy
,” it’s hard to believe that Lucy, Desi, Fred, and Ethel wrapped up the initial series in 1957. Lucy’s creativity, absurdity, and ever-changing facial expressions (especially when she was scarfing down candy, stomping on grapes or touting a new energy drink) have brought joy and laughter to generations of viewers.
We’re incredibly happy to celebrate her birthday with a doodle to highlight her brilliant career as an actress and businesswoman. Through the old-timey TV live on the
google.com
homepage all day on August 6th, you can flip the six channels for a special Lucy broadcast.
Happy birthday, Lucy — we still love you!
Posted by Jennifer Hom, Doodler
Inside Google's search office
August 5, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Inside Search Blog
)
I’ve been working with Matt Cutts and Ben Gomes in the same office for over 10 years. We work on search every day, and earlier this week, we took our office talk to the stage at an event hosted by the
Churchill Club
. Search Engine Land’s
Danny Sullivan
moderated our in-depth discussion on search, how it works, and what’s ahead for us in the future. We also reminisced about first joining Google, the time my car ran out of gas as Ben and I discussed a change to the algorithm, and other great memories over the years.
Come sit inside our office for a chat about Google Search:
To hear more about the principles that drive changes to the algorithm and how these changes are tested and implemented, go to
15:40
To hear the discussion on why we don’t hand-pick results, start watching at
41:04
For more on my vision for the future of search, jump to
1:12:28
Guess who Danny thinks is the brains, looks, and brawn of this operation at
1:08
(hint: I’m the brains).
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow
Restoring Bletchley Park, birthplace of modern computing
August 5, 2011
Late last year Google
backed the bid
to buy the papers of the British computer scientist and wartime codebreaker
Alan Turing
and return them to their rightful home at
Bletchley Park
. We were thrilled when this was finally
achieved in February
.
Now we’ve joined forces with the Bletchley Park Trust to help raise funds to rebuild Block C, the original wartime building that once housed the vast punched card index—in essence, the “search engine” at the heart of Bletchley Park’s decryption activity.
Block C at Bletchley Park, awaiting restoration
Bletchley Park played a pivotal role in computing history. For decades the extraordinary achievements of its veterans were hidden by order of the UK’s Official Secrets Act. It was not until the 1980s that the full secret of
Colossus
—the world’s first electronic programmable computer—was revealed. Housed at Bletchley Park, Colossus and other custom-built machines were crucial aids in the code-breaking, reputed to have
shortened World War II
by two years.
Tony Sale, leader of the Colossus rebuild project, demos it
at the National Museum of Computing
Today, Block C is derelict. We hope to help restore it to serve as a visitor and learning centre for both
Bletchley Park
and the UK’s
National Museum of Computing
. The fund-raising campaign kicked off this week with a Google-supported
garden party
in the Bletchley Park grounds, at which over £10,000 was raised. We still have a long way to go, though, so if you’d like to contribute,
please donate
at the Bletchley Park website.
If you’re in London, Bletchley Park is less than an hour away by train, and well worth an afternoon’s visit. You can see a working replica of Colossus, along with many other exhibits highlighting wartime work at Bletchley Park and the UK’s rich computing heritage.
Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations for Europe, Middle East and Africa
Google News highlights unique content with Editors’ Picks
August 4, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Google News Blog
)
News organizations tell stories online in ways that bring together the best of traditional and digital journalism, whether that involves long-form investigative features, compelling photo slideshows or interactive maps and charts that add new levels of engagement to the day's news. To help connect you to the best works of news publishers, Google News is introducing a new section in the right-hand column of the U.S. edition. The section is called "Editors' Picks,” and it displays original content that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications. This is the latest addition to
recent improvements
we’ve made to the variety and presence of stories and multimedia on Google News.
An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content. Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors' Picks will always be just that—picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. You can browse a set of publisher feeds that span national, specific and local interests—like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, the Guardian and The Root, among many others—via the side-to-side arrows next to each publisher's logo. The feeds you see are chosen based on a variety of factors, including your
news preferences
. If you’re interested in using source preferences on Google News, Editors' Picks helps you do that with the slider that appears just below the articles.
You may have first noticed Editors’ Picks
as an experiment last year
. Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they're interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites. We encourage any news organizations that are interested to visit our
Help Center
to get started.
Posted by Yogita Mehta, Software Engineer, Google News Team
When patents attack Android
August 3, 2011
I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what's going on. Here is what’s happening:
Android is on fire. More than 550,000 Android devices are
activated every day
, through a network of 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers. Android and other platforms are competing hard against each other, and that’s yielding cool new devices and amazing mobile apps for consumers.
But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.
They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “
CPTN
” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “
Rockstar
” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them;
seeking
$15 licensing fees for every Android device;
attempting
to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Phone 7; and even
suing
Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.
A smartphone
might
involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are
fighting through litigation
.
This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they’re really worth. The winning $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion. Fortunately, the law
frowns on
the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop.
We’re not naive; technology is a tough and ever-changing industry and we work very hard to stay focused on our own business and make better products. But in this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it.
We’re looking intensely at a number of ways to do that. We’re encouraged that the Department of Justice
forced
the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms, and that it’s
looking into
whether Microsoft and Apple acquired the Nortel patents for anti-competitive means. We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio. Unless we act, consumers could face rising costs for Android devices — and fewer choices for their next phone.
UPDATE
August 4, 2011 - 12:25pm PT
It's not surprising that Microsoft would want to divert attention by pushing a false "gotcha!" while failing to address the substance of the issues we raised. If you think about it, it's obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft's objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn't fall for it.
Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forcing Microsoft to sell the patents it bought and demanding that the winning group (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, EMC) give a license to the open-source community, changes the DoJ said were
“necessary to protect competition and innovation in the open source software community.”
This only reaffirms our point: Our competitors are waging a patent war on Android and working together to keep us from getting patents that would help balance the scales.
Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer
Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesses
August 2, 2011
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read how a small team took a successful grassroots approach to helping businesses advertise online. - Ed.
In early 2010, I was talking with some friends from Google’s India office about how to help small, local businesses advertise online. We found that small business owners the world over had a key commonality: very little time. We decided to tackle this problem head on, with the hopes of making the advertising process quicker and easier for small businesses.
My colleagues in India flew out to our headquarters in California, and we teamed up with a Google Maps product manager who had some first hand experience working with small business owners. One of his friends ran a small mountain clothing store in New Hampshire called
The Mountain Goat of Hanover
, which had just moved to town. She was responsible for staffing, bookkeeping, inventory management and many other time-intensive tasks—all with very little help. She had the desire to try promoting her business online, but learning to manage a new form of advertising wasn’t something she had time for.
Kendra Dynok, manager of The Mountain Goat of Hanover, helps a customer.
The Mountain Goat of Hanover was our first case study, but it seemed like any interaction we had with a small business led to a conversation about how it advertised. A photographer in Virginia, a San Francisco dentist and a contractor re-doing my kitchen all told the same story: Online advertising should be simpler.
What all of these business owners needed was advertising that was measurable, affordable and quick. While they could use AdWords, they needed something even faster: a tool that they could set up easily and then walk away from, trusting that their advertising would be managed efficiently.
A handful of us started building a new tool for advertisers that met these requirements and within a few weeks, we were beta testing it with the owner of The Mountain Goat, the photographer, the dentist and the contractor—inviting more small businesses as interest grew. We literally went door to door in San Francisco and Chicago, asking local businesses if our tool could help them advertise better. Soon, we had more than 50 businesses testing the new ads product and within a few months, that number was over 2,000.
Our team runs somewhat like the small businesses with which we work. We’re a small, close-knit group of friends that spend most of our time huddled in a room making decisions on the spot and moving fast to launch a product in a matter of months. By the end of 2010, we’d launched our tool, which we called Google Boost at the time, in 25 cities across five states. And just last week, we officially
launched
AdWords Express to all businesses in the U.S. We would never have been able to do that outside of Google, where we were able to leverage the existing AdWords system, infrastructure and dedicated teams. By making it easier for people to implement effective advertising campaigns, we’ve been able to bring tens of thousands of small businesses online—and we’ve only just begun.
Posted by Xuefu Wang, Tech Lead and Manager, AdWords Express
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