For some strange reason, you can't upload more than 5 photos at once in Picasa Web Albums and you need to manually select each photo.
Gmail and Google Docs use a Flash uploader, but Picasa Web Albums recommends to install Picasa if you want to upload photos. Internet Explorer users are lucky because they can install an ActiveX for uploading photos.
Fortunately, Google Buzz lets you upload multiple photos at once and it stores the files in Picasa Web Albums. That means you can use it to upload photos, without installing Picasa or the ActiveX control.
Open Gmail, go to the "Buzz" section, pretend you are posting a new message and click on "Photo". Select the photos you want to upload, add them to your message, but don't post the message.
If you go to Picasa Web Albums, you'll notice a new album that includes your photos. Using the "Organize and reorder" option, you can move the photos to another album.
Google tests a new option that lets you restrict the results to Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, Stack Overflow or Askville. After enabling "search options", users click on "discussions" and select the "Q&As" category.
Google's smart snippets include some useful information: the number of answers, the date of the most recent answers. Not all question answering sites show the status of a question, but Google is able to detect solved questions.
Depending on your query, you might want to read a brief answer or a detailed response. Google lets you find web pages that include short, medium or long answers.
You can try this feature by changing your Google cookie. Go to google.com and paste this in the address bar:
If you're not in the US and Google redirects you to a different domain, replace google.com with the appropriate domain.
Google has never managed to create a successful social network. Orkut's success is limited to Brazil and India, iGoogle's latest update was a let down and Google Friend Connect is still in its infancy.
In 2007, Gmail's code included some details about a feature that showed updates from your contacts. Google intended to create activity streams and share them with your friends. That feature wasn't ready to be launched, but Google unveiled the first piece of the puzzle: unified profiles.
Interestingly, in 2007 four ex-Googlers launched FriendFeed, a service that allowed you to share interesting pages with your friends and use them as the starting point for a meaningful conversation. FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook last year.
It took Google more than two years to launch a product for sharing and discussing ideas with your friends. It's called Google Buzz and it's integrated with many Google services, including Gmail and Google Maps.
"Buzz lets you share updates, photos, links, and pretty much anything else you'd like with your Gmail contacts; it's an easy way to follow your friends, too. When you click Buzz in your Gmail account, you'll see the stream of posts from people you're following, and a box for you to post your updates," explains a help article.
Much like FriendFeed, Google Buzz lets you import content from sites like Twitter, Flickr or Google Reader. You can follow interesting people, flag the items you like, add comments and get notifications in your inbox.
"There's a FriendFeed in my Gmail," commented Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who created Gmail and co-founded FriendFeed.
Google Buzz will be added to your Gmail account in the coming days, but Gmail is just one of the interfaces that will integrate Google Buzz. You can already try Google Buzz on your mobile phone by visiting buzz.google.com if you have an iPhone or an Android phone.
"We focused on making the sharing experience really rich by integrating photos, videos, and links. No more fuzzy little pictures: Buzz makes it easy to quickly flip through photos and experience them the way they were meant to be seen: big and full-resolution. And videos play inline so you can watch them without opening a new window. You can choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a small group of friends each time you post," informs Gmail's blog.
Google's search engine didn't become popular because of advertising. Many people liked that it returned relevant results, it was fast and had a simple interface, so they told their friends to try it.
Despite the noticeable cultural shift, it's still surprising to see that Google decided to promote its search engine at the Super Bowl.
"If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you'll have seen a video from Google called "Parisian Love". In fact you might have watched it before, because it's been on YouTube for over three months. We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience," explains Eric Schmidt.
Google's CEO mentioned in a Twitter message that someone told him: "Hell has indeed frozen over." This is Google's first Super Bowl ad:
Firefox has an option that lets you temporarily disable themes and extensions, so you can still use your browser even if one of your add-ons is buggy. It's called safe mode and it's "a special Firefox execution mode that can be used to troubleshoot issues in Firefox. In Safe Mode, you can reset some settings or disable add-ons that might be the source of the issue. By comparing Firefox behavior in normal mode to its behavior in Safe Mode with various items disabled, you may be able to diagnose issues."
Google Chrome doesn't have this feature, but you can open an incognito window to temporarily disable extensions.
If you want to create a shortcut that opens Chrome in incognito mode, duplicate an existing Chrome shortcut, right-click on the shortcut, select "Properties" and append this flag to the target value: --incognito (don't forget to add a space to separate the flag).
"On tablets, the UI would be adjusted to handle larger touch targets. Initial explorations have maintained the same basic chrome layout, but enlarged the controls. Icons could be placed above tabs to provide larger, square targets. Panels would be placed along the bottom edge and could be opened with upward dragging motions," explains Google.
Even if Chrome OS was initially designed for netbooks, Google hopes to create an operating system that works on tablets, laptops and desktop computers. "Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power".
Chrome OS has the advantage of a simple interface optimized for web applications. This may seem too restrictive, but Chrome, Safari, Firefox and other browsers are quickly evolving and many popular apps are migrating to the web.
One of the few great Hotmail features is the web search integration. When you compose a message, Hotmail lets you add maps, movie listings, local search results, images from the web without opening a new page.
Google's AJAX Search API lets you add similar features to any application, so it was surprising to see that Gmail didn't include a gadget that integrates with Google search. Last year, Gmail Labs added a Google Search gadget, but it only displayed web search results.
The Gmail Labs feature has been improved and you can now find images, maps, news articles, simple facts, weather information, definitions and even use Google Calculator from Gmail. Depending on your query, the gadget shows web search results or results from specialized search engines. Sometimes you'll see information that's usually displayed in an OneBox.
The main problem is that the gadget displays a small number of images, news articles or local search results, but there's no option to see more results from the same category. Another issue is that the specialized results are displayed only if Google finds that they're appropriate for your query.
