Nov 12, 2006

[Google] Another Google Week

While my real life situation continues to limit my blogging time, Google continue to come out with update after update that will keep any blogger busy. You have to admit, choosing to write about Google is practically a full-time job, which in turn becomes a testament of sorts to how dynamic Google can be as a company. Just look at how often new content shows up on blogs like the Google Operating System Blog or on Googlified, two of my favorite independent Google-related blogs.

This week we've been the beneficiaries of a number of little updates here and there across the Google-verse, so to speak. Some of the more interesting changes include letting you open attachments in compatible formats directly in Google Docs & Spreadsheets from GMail, a simple change but definitely handy and another part of the continuing integration of various Google products with one another. Could more integration with Picasa and Picasa Web Albums be far behind? I'm definitely crossing my fingers. Along with this, later this week Google also added five more features to GMail including the ability to forward an entire conversation or leaving Google Talk messages while offline.

This week we also saw the completion of the integration of Orkut and Google Talk as discussed here on the Google Blog. This means your Orkut contacts can also become your Google Talk contacts and vice-versa, definitely an interesting addition to the Google social networking service.

Google Checkout is offering free processing for the holidays for all Checkout users - definitely an interesting marketing push to get more retailers to sign up for the service.

Also, it's just been announced that all new Blogger accounts will be created in Blogger beta, surely a change that will bring joy to some users looking forward to the click-and-drag publishing and the security of being on Google's servers while some might not be so happy in the differences in how some of the templates are handled.

I'm sure there are others that I missed, but then again, there's always bound to be something Google is doing that we don't know about just yet.

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