A version of Gmail used by Google employees has been revealed in a screenshot included with a Chromium OS bug report, and the image reveals more than a half dozen changes to the Gmail most of us are using today.

The blog Google Operating System posted the image yesterday, and we’ve also featured it below. Note that Google Operating System originally posted it as two images — the top bar that says “report issues” and so on was its own image, so we’re not sure how it’s really oriented in relation to the rest of the stuff you see.

Also remember that this internal version of Gmail may differ from future public versions.

Savvy Gmail users immediately picked apart the screenshot looking for new features and interesting changes. Most notably, Mail, Contacts and Tasks have all been featured in the top left as the three pillars of the user experience. Right below those, you can see that “Compose Mail” is now an actual button, not just a text link. That’s simply an aesthetic change, but it’s an interesting choice regardless.

Following that theme, there are no longer text links to actions such as “Select All” or “Select None” — those appear to now exist under a textless drop-down box above the Inbox. Drop-down boxes are ubiquitous in general, actually. Note that the e-mail address at the top menu is accompanied by a drop-down box — could that be the Gmail account switcher that Google promised? We’ll all find eventually, I’m sure.

Look in the chat window and you’ll see a new “Call Phone” button. That might be Google Voice integration. You’ll also see two little buttons in the top-right corner of the Google Talk window; one of those could be a rejiggered settings menu, but it’s hard to tell for sure.

Do you see anything else interesting in this image? Let us know in the comments.

More About: chromium os, gmail, Google, image, pic, picture, screenshot

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Google has indicated it’s going to be working with developers on checkins for location-based applications through its Places API.

This spring, Google announced Places as a revamping of its local and local-business listings. Originally, we saw Places as a SEM/user review mechanism, perhaps a Yelp competitor.

However, with the recent preview of the Google Places API at Google I/O, the company showed developers a whole world of geographical, commercial and social information attached to each Place on its vast radar.

In a May blog post, Maps API Product Manager Thor Mitchell wrote, “Each Place Page consolidates together everything we know about a single Place, be it a business, point of interest, or geographical feature such as a city or neighbourhood. We believe that this unified concept of Places more accurately reflects the way that Maps users see the world, and are working to bring an awareness of Places to the Google Maps API.”

Based on developers’ interest in the Places API, Google is going to begin offering access to certain apps. Mitchell wrote today that while his team has seen “applications looking to show a user Places around them and applications looking to offer a search and browse experience for Places similar to that offered on Google Maps,” what intrigued the company most were the applications that offered a checkin function — easily one of the hottest features of present-day social media.

“We are going to focus initially on check-in applications,” Mitchell continued. “These are the applications that we feel the API currently caters to well, and we are excited to work with developers building these applications to understand their requirements, and ensure that we are offering them the best possible experience… We have now begun reaching out to developers who have expressed an interest in building checkin applications using the API, including those working on client applications for the Buzz API.”

We can’t wait to see who gets to work with the Places API and what kinds of apps they build. Devs, what do you expect to come from Google’s interest in checkins?

And what do you think this new direction bodes for Latitude? Could a better, Places-based app take its place as Google’s de facto location-based service?

More About: checkin, geolocation, Google, google places, lbs, location, places API

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It turns out that you can play the classic game Snake (especially popular on cell phones back in the day) at Google-owned YouTube by holding the left and up arrow keys on your keyboard while a video is playing or paused.

Once the game starts, you can direct a transparent snake around the video player with the arrow keys to gobble up dots that cause the snake to grow. Hitting the edge of the player or any part of your snake’s body will end the game.

The easter egg — just one in a long series of similar stunts from Google — was discovered by users last week. No one’s sure exactly when the game was added, but it must be recent because it only works on the new YouTube video player introduced in April. It doesn’t work with embeds, either, so you’ll have to go to YouTube’s website to try it out.

Previously, Google put a button on YouTube videos that played a World Cup-style vuvuzela sound. Google’s no stranger to playable games on its websites, either; the logo on the Google home page became a playable game of Pac-Man two months ago, supposedly costing society more than $120 million in productivity.

This video that was embedded at gaming blog Kotaku reveals the feature, but note that the creator’s claim that you must be in a “Gaming” category video to play Snake is incorrect. Otherwise, it’s a solid explanation.

[via The Next Web]

More About: easter egg, Google, online games, snake, video, video games, youtube

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Today, Google has announced the launch of the Google Buzz firehose, which will give developers access to all public activity published on Buzz via a single feed with real-time PubSubHubBub syndication.

Google said the firehose was their most-requested features from developers. We’re also guessing that Google’s been eating its own dogfood, since they just launched Buzz results in Google Social Search a couple weeks ago.

In the announcement post, Google highlighted the pretty and mostly useless We Feel Fine-esque Buzz Mood, an app that parses Buzz updates for emotion-related verbs then relays them to the viewer with snappy, slide-y animations.

Partners for the firehose launch include some familiar names in the real-time space; both Collecta and OneRiot have integrated the firehose into their real-time search results, and Boulder-based social data firm Gnip was also among the first companies to use the Buzz firehose.

Buzz might not be the biggest source of currently available social data, but adding its firehose to a wider mix of real-time social update data can help expand and refine and application’s results.

Google is also releasing a few new API features today; users’ comments, users’ links and share counts will now be available via their respective feeds.

What do you have to say: Will you be using the firehose API in any of your applications? What do you find interesting or exciting about this development?

Reviews: Google

More About: api, developers, firehose, Google, google buzz, real-time

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For some time now, Flickr users have been able to use Picnik to edit photos in-stream without leaving the app. Now that Picnik is a Google property, Picasa users will have roughly the same advantage.

As of today, Picasa Web Albums users will be able to use Picnik’s editing tools without ever leaving their accounts.

Google acquired Picnik back in March. While Picnik’s free web app lacks the fuller features of tools like Aviary’s Phoenix, its simplicity makes it an appropriate complement for online photo-sharing sites.

On Picnik’s web app, users can crop and resize photos and adjust brightness, saturation, contrast and other attributes free of charge. The Picasa implementation will also let you add stickers, apply special effects and use advanced tools.

Edited photos can be saved as new images in your Picasa Web Album, or they can be used to replace the original image.

Here’s an example of what the app will look like and what you can do with it:

Although Flickr is a Yahoo property, Flickr users are currently still able to use Picnik to edit images from within the Flickr app “in Picnik mode,” as well. It’s unclear whether users will lose this functionality, but such seems unlikely at this time.

What do you think of the Picnik/Picasa integration so far?

More About: flickr, photo sharing, picasa, picnik

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Google Labs has just released a new Android app that aims to help users find and share parking. The app, called Open Spot, gives users the ability to update a map when they are leaving their parking spots with others who are looking for parking.

We’ve all driven around aimlessly, trying to find a parking spot — whether it’s on a street corner or in a shopping mall — and Google is hoping to crowdsource a solution that can save, gas, pollution and ultimately time.

The app is pretty simple; it pulls up a Google map near your current location and displays open parking spots within a 1.5km/0.9 mile radius of where you are. Spots are color coded based on how “fresh” they are. Spots are marked for twenty minutes and after that time, they disappear off the map.

When you leave the spot, you just mark it on your phone and alert those around you that a new spot is available.

While we think the idea has a lot of promise, there are some inherent limitations into this system. First, the time limitation means that there is the potential for a spot to be taken before you get to it. Even if a spot is marked as “fresh” (within five minutes), that might not mean the spot is available. If there was a way for users to confirm that they have “taken” a spot in the system, the process might be better.

The biggest problem though is that this is the sort of app that will only be useful if it gains widespread adoption. For instance, if you’re one of the only people in your neighborhood who uses the app, it will likely be useless to you unless you can convince others to join in.

Getting people to use the app is going to be the biggest challenge, we think, because while the idea is good, it’s also novel. It’s the sort of novel solution that we could see ourselves using once or twice and then utterly forgetting about. Ultimately, this just strikes us as something that looks great as a theory but will be too much work for too little payoff to gain lots of traction.

That isn’t to say we don’t love to see technology used to try to solve problems like finding parking spots. Android owners can download the app now and give it a try.

Would you be interested in using an app to find parking spots? Let us know in the comments!

More About: android, Android apps, Google, open spot, parking

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“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” So began the “letter from the founders” penned by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the company’s securities registration form in 2004. Despite ever-increasing commercial success since that date, Brin and Page have kept to their word.

Google is an unconventional company with a huge stake in our online lives. It is a source of fascination for many, including us, but what really happens in the Googleplex? And what cool factoids and stats exist from the company’s relatively short past?

Here we bring you 10 fun facts about Google to quench our own thirst for Google knowledge as well as hopefully offer you a distracting diversion from your daily life.

1. The First Google Doodle

Google’s famous homepage “Doodles” (the changing Google logo graphics) are well known and enjoyed by millions around the world as a way to mark an event or anniversary. But did you know that the very first Google Doodle was designed as a kind of “out of office” message?

In 1998 Brin and Page took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Burning Man doodle (shown above), was designed by the Google guys and added to the homepage to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.

2. Interesting Figures from the Google IPO

While the initial price for Google’s stock at its Initial Public Offering in August 2004 is an interesting stat in itself, there’s more to the story. The opening price for Google’s stock was $85 per share. At the time of writing, the stock price was $483 but has soared as high as $600 in the past year, making GOOG a rather nice investment for many.

A bonus factoid from Google’s IPO process is the value Google stated it hoped to raise on its S-1 form — as much as $2,718,281,828. It may just look like a string of numbers to non-mathletes, but 2,718,281,828 is actually the first ten digits of the mathematical constant ““e”,” showing that even as their company was planning to go public, the Google guys could still geek out with a bit of numerical humor.

3. The First Google Storage Was Made From LEGO

As proud hosts to Google back when it was still a research project, and known as “BackRub,” here Stanford now showcases the original Google storage from way back in 1996. It’s made up of a whopping 40 GB (less than a modern iPod) and it’s made from, as fans of the building bricks will be delighted to see, LEGO. It even hash funny mini-figures on the top.

Legend has it that the reason for the LEGO construction was that the Google guys needed an easily expandable, and cheap way to house 10 4 GB hard drives, and LEGO fit the bill. Whether the primary colors of the bricks used were the hues that went on to inspire the Google logo’s design is up for debate, but we’d guess it wasn’t just a coincidence.

4. Google’s First Ever Tweet

Google’s first ever Twitter post was as satisfyingly geeky as you could hope for. The message, sent in February 2009, reads “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”

For anyone not fluent in binary, here’s a hint — it’s a well known phrase from the company’s homepage. Got it? Yep, it reads: “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

5. Google Rents Goats

This one isn’t actually one of Google’s infamous April Fools’ Day jokes: Google rents out goats. Yes you read that right. It rents goats from a company called California Grazing to help cut down the amount of weeds and brush at Google HQ.

The operation of 200 goats (plus herder and a border collie) is kind to the environment, and as Google puts it: “A lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.”

6. Google’s Impact on Language

While you’d think the news that the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary adding “google” as a verb to their lexicons in 2006 would thrill the search engine, Google was actually none too pleased with the development.

“We’d like to make clear that you should please only use ‘Google’ when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services,” the company wrote in a blog post at the time.

The rationale behind the semantic displeasure was that Google had “a brand to protect,” and feared Google would “slip from trademarked status into common usage.” Now, four years later, we have to say Google was fighting a losing battle — just ‘google it.’

However, we’ve found some other Google-themed linguistic delights for you — a Google staffer is commonly referred to as a “Googler,” while a new team member joins as a “Noogler.” Nooglers also used to wear a colorful hat with a spinner on top. According to a former employee, those hats are now pretty scarce in some offices, instead: “Every Noogler gets a yellow smiley balloon and a nameplate.”

7. Google Is Dog-Friendly

Google is a super dog-friendly company. It proudly names “company dogs,” like Yoshka (described as a “free-range Leonberger”) pictured above. Yoshka accompanies Urs Holzle, senior VP operations and Google Fellow to the Googleplex. Less senior staff are also allowed to bring their dogs to the office.

According to Google’s “Dog Policy”, one indiscretion too many on the Google carpets, or aggressive behavior, means Lassie will have to stay at home in the future. Strong bladdered and friendly canines are more than welcome across the campus.

Unfortunately, cats are not quite as welcome. Here’s an excerpt taken directly from Google’s Code of Conduct: “Google’s affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.”

8. Google’s First Ever “Company Snack” Was Swedish Fish

Back in February, 1999, the chewy candy known as “Swedish Fish” became the first ever company snack (not counting beverages) that was ordered into the Google office.

Although a relatively small event, it has led to big things. Google is infamous in the industry for treating its employees to not just free drinks and snacks on tap, but full-on gourmet meals, three times a day at a plethora of on-site cafes and eateries, as well as regular BBQs during the summer.

Brin and Page have been quoted in the past as saying no Googler should have to go more than 100 feet for food, leading to snack-filled “microkitchens” that are liberally dotted around the Google offices.

In fact, the free food is said to be so tempting that Googlers risk the “Google 15,” similar to the “Freshman 15,” where they pile on weight soon after joining the company. Good thing they also have a Google gym.

Backing this up, here’s a stat from Google — “Bay Area Googlers consumed approximately 5,500 pounds of handmade chocolates from the snack bins in the microkitchens in 2007.” Wow.

9. The Google Logo Was Not Centered Until 2001

Google’s famously sparse homepage is considered a classic design in the online world. The Google logo, however, wasn’t actually centered on the page until March 31, 2001. As early users will remember, the homepage had a bias to the left-hand side, and even earlier — back in 1998 — Google sported a Yahoo-style exclamation mark.

10. Google Has a Company Dinosaur

By all accounts, there are many wondrous sights to be seen at the Googleplex, but one of the most arresting is surely the gigantic T-Rex skeleton — nicknamed “Stan” after a “real” dino found nearby — that looms menacingly at Googlers in Mountain View.

Joining Stan in the unique campus decorations is a scale replica of the SpaceShipOne, enormous Android-themed models, pink flamingos, a large LEGO man, Google-colored phone boxes and grown-up size ball pits. One thing seems for sure — just like the company itself — life at the Googleplex must be far from dull.

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More Google Resources from Mashable:

– 10 Must-See Google Street View Sightings
– 5 Must-See Google Easter Eggs
– 4 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Google Buzz
– The Small Business Guide to Google Apps
– 4 Surprising Google Wave Uses

Tags: April Fools' Day, binary code, burning man, dogs, Doodle, goats, Google, googleplex, googler, gym, ipo, language, larry page, Lego, noogler, office decor, pets, Sergey Brin, snacks

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Google has announced that it has completed the rollout of Google Caffeine, the new and improved web indexing system that now powers the world’s largest search engine.

In August of last year, it was revealed that Google was working on a new version of its search engine. The project, dubbed “Caffeine”, was initiated in order to create a faster, more accurate indexing and search system. It was also meant to better handle rich media and real-time content.

It’s been a while since we heard about Caffeine, but today Google says that Caffeine is live on Google’s servers.

Here’s how indexing on Google Search now works, according to the technology giant:

“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

With content being generated faster than ever, the changes make sense. The Bing threat is still there as well, making it imperative for Google to remain ahead of the game with its search technology. You may not notice the changes in the individual searches you make, but it’s very likely you’ll feel the impact of Caffeine in the days, months, and years to come.

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Reviews: Facebook, Google, Google search, Twitter

Tags: Caffiene, Google

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In the wake of the China attacks that resulted in Google threatening to leave China, the search giant is abandoning Windows due to concerns over security.

According to the Financial Times, the technology titan has been slowly phasing out the use of Windows internally since January, not long after it was assaulted by Chinese hackers. For example, new hires are no longer offered Windows PCs — the choices are now an Apple Mac computer or a PC loaded with Linux.

Google’s policies surrounding the internal use of Windows aren’t clear-cut, though. Some employees can still install Windows on their laptops, but not their desktop computers. However, Googlers need explicit permission from “quite senior levels” in order to keep using the Windows OS.

The move makes sense: Windows and Internet Explorer have been implicated as vectors in which hackers accessed personal accounts and confidential data from Google’s servers. And of course, Microsoft is one of Google’s primary competitors.

It’s important to note that later this year, Google is expected to release Chrome OS, the company’s web-centric operating system. However, the decision to leave Windows behind doesn’t seem to be motivated by the impending release of its experimental OS.

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Reviews: Facebook, Google, Internet Explorer, Linux, Twitter, Windows

Tags: Google, Linux, mac, Mac OS, microsoft, Windows, Windows 7

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