Google Updater Service

The latest version of Picasa* includes something very interesting: a Windows service called Google Updater, set to start automatically. The new service is connected to Picasa, which has new options. Before this version, Picasa had an option to check for new updates and let you manually install the new version.

There are also new keys in the Registry:

Although there's no information about the new service, it seems that Google wants to create a centralized update system, similar to Windows Updates, that will be installed with each Google software.

Google Updater is also a program that installs and updates the software for Google Pack, but this one has a GUI.

* Picasa 2.6, Build 35.83 (beta)
- changelog: mostly an update for Vista
- download here

Google Reader Notifier

So you use Google Reader and Firefox, but you don't want to visit reader.google.com from time to time to see what's new. Google Reader Notifier is a Firefox extension, developed by Mark D.B.D, that shows you how many new posts are in Google Reader. You can also see the number of unread items for each label and get alerts if there's something new. Of course, those numbers aren't very helpful because +100 can be anything from 101 to a googol or more.

For Mac users, there's an even better solution: a software called the same, that has sound alerts, shows the titles for the latest posts and sits nicely in the the menubar next to Google Notifier.

Mercora IMRadio

"Mercora's mission is to catalog and organize the world's music and make it universally searchable and legally listenable." Sounds familiar?

Mercora is a radio network that lets everyone create a radio station and stream music in a P2P fashion (people can't download music). You can invite your friends and listen to their music, search for an artist and find all his albums or just choose a genre. Mercora lets you discover similar artists, read biographies and add comments.

The software, Mercora IMRadio, has a social side, as you can log in with the username/password for an instant messaging client (Google Talk included) and invite your contacts. You can create a profile, interact with other users, share photos and much more.

Regarding copyright, Mercora says: "you can webcast any music that you own legally. These recordings must originate from an authorized source (either created originally by the artist or record label that owns the copyright), and are not unlawful copies that have been downloaded illegally or obtained from an unauthorized third party."

Mercora IMRadio is a freeware for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It uses an open source format for streaming (OGG Vorbis) and it depends a lot on network connection speed, so you may notice buffering problems.

Related stuff:
Vibe Streamer - personal MP3 server
Hype Machine - music search engine
Winamp moves to the web

Google Answers Comeback

While everyone notices that Google Answers is dead, the reactions vary. Google Answers researchers want it back and sign petitions, Greg Linden thinks "it is great that Google is shutting down some of its failed experiments to try to keep their focus", and Yahoo celebrates.

"The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months." And that happened 4 years ago, in April 2002. Here's an explanation for launching the product, from that time:

There are a lot of people looking for information on the web but don't have the time to find the information," said Cindy McCaffrey, Google's Vice President, Corporate Marketing. "This program takes the burden of time away." McCaffrey also said the program should appeal to people who don't understand how to search, and would prefer to delegate the process to a professional.

So why shutting down Google Answers?

Over the past year, many of you have written to ask about the future of Google Answers. Today we can finally offer a definitive response: after four and a half years, we're closing up shop. We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information.

The other efforts are:

* Google Co-op, that wants to annotate the web with the help of experts. Labels let you refine the search results and deal with a smaller set of authoritative sites.

* Google Q&A tries to crawl the web looking for facts like the population of Italy or the birthplace of George W. Bush. You can improve the service by adding your own facts using Subscribed Links.

* Google Base enables people to submit structured content and make it searchable online. Google also try to extract structured data from the web automatically.

Extraction of information from authoritative sites and building a huge database of connected information - this might the base of a new Google Answers.

Related:
The next step in search

Weather Forecasts in Google Video

Google Video has partnered with AccuWeather.com and now includes weather forecasts for important cities in the US. Each video has 94 seconds and is updated daily, so you can bookmark its address.

Google also shows information about weather if you enter queries like [Tampa forecast] in the web search.

Google Good News

Hello and welcome to Google News. Here are the headlines:

* World Peace sparks outpourings of joy. Almost all of the human race were united today in a vast expression of joy in response to the newfound world peace.

* Golden Age back. People leave their doors unlocked. Kids play on the streets. Community spirit back. Crime rate down. Drugs non-existent. Hovis Van drives slowly down cobblestone streets.

* Scientists pack up: "Everything explained". Scientists all round the world today went home for a nice cup of tea after a revolutionary breakthrough explained everything. The new unified theory (NUT) unites science and religion, explains genetics, the origin of the universe, quantum phenomena, and provides the first instant cure for a hangover in human history.

* All music to be free. Record companies are to give away their music. Artists will give free concerts. iPODs to be given to every child at birth.

More details at David McCandless' Goodle Good News, a vision of Google News homepage that will cheer you up.

Google's Plans for 2007

Business 2.0 asked 50 people "how to succeed in 2007". Two of the key people at Google talked about company's intentions and plans for the year to come. The key words seem to be: simplicity, integration and personalization.

Sergey Brin:

"Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it's very difficult. Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing.

We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features."

Eric Schmidt:

"Silicon Valley companies have a tendency to develop these systems that rely on complexity. But it produces things like the personal computer running Windows. Google from the beginning focused on the simple search box, the simple search page.

We have the tiger by the tail in that we have this huge phenomenon of personalization. Now we need to make it simpler for people. We are trying to shape the innovation going forward from here and get things more integrated, make Google more integrated. This is a big change in the way we run the company. In the past the philosophy has been "get this done, get it built, and get it out." But continuing that, we would end up with hundreds of products named X-Google, and people can only remember five products."