[Google] Innovations For First Week of February

February is just beginning and already Google is impressing the world (including this geek) with a lot of their recent announcements and innovations. And I'm not just talking about the changes to the Google Docs interface, but more for their side projects of sorts that don't lead to direct improvements to their core products.

I think the biggest news for me, apart from the updates about progress made by Google.org is the Google partnership project to allow Egyptians to update Twitter via a voicemail service. The Speak2Tweet project was the result of hurried efforts by a group of Google, Twitter and SayNow engineers to find a way to sort of break the internet blockade that's in effect in Egypt. The result is a sort of Twitter drop box where updates from Egypt will appear on Twitter with the #Egypt hashtag in order to help identify them. It's a novel solution to the problem and I'm really thankful that Google's come up with this.

Image via WikipediaThen just today Google announced Google Art Project, which allows users to explore museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam using an interface similar to Google Street View. You can even see brushstroke-level detail for many famous art pieces that is almost unheard of in this day and age. It's something you would normally have to pay to see including your airfare and accommodations to get to these museums and now it's all available online.

Google can't possibly benefit from these efforts except for branding purposes, but they're both still pretty impressive.


Good job, Google. Good job indeed.