Google+ is the latest attempt by Google to stake a position as one of the predominant social networking sites. It competes directly with Facebook and Twitter. Google+ currently is invite only by people who already has a Google+ account. A public release is said to be end July. There are now already more than 10 millions users, a tremendous achievement as the site is less than 3 weeks old and is not public.

The Google+ app for iOS has just been approved by Apple and it is propagating to iTunes App Stores. Revisit a couple hours later if you can’t find the app on your iTunes App Store.

Google+ website

Google+ for iOS iTunes link

If you have an iPhone, do a Google search on the word “tilt” to get a bizarre search result that actually tilts. This trick works on iPhone and does not work on iPad.

Google finally releases an iOS app for Google Latitude, which is an app that allows you to share your location and view your friends’ location on Google Map. Its an free app.

Google Latitude iTunes link

This video has been played on a 540 square foot screen at New York’s Times Square. It is by Inside Google, a project by the Consumer Watchdog. The aim is to draw attention to what it perceives as Google’s lack of regard for online privacy, and to advocate a “Do Not Track Me” list registry similar to the Do Not Call Registry for telemarketers. The video featured Google CEO Eric Schmidt, but not sure if many walking on Times Square actually know who he is. He is not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates for sure.

We believe Google Search must be losing market share to Bing for the search portal to behave this way. First Google search result page is revamped with a left column similar to Bing. And now a background image on the search portal? And one that is poorly done that could make the page looks real ugly depending on the selected image. Luckily you can turn off the background and restore back the white background.

Google websites has always been geeky looking, its their trademark. Google search portal with background image is like someone who has poor fashion taste wearing the wrong clothes and pretending to be a fashion model.

According to Googlers, Google is phasing out internal use of MS Windows in favor of Linux or Mac OS X, due mainly to security concerns especially after Google China operations were hacked in January. Google employs more than 10,000 workers internationally. There is no official comment from Google yet.

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”
Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from “quite senior levels”, one employee said. “Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,” said another employee.

Looks like Chrome OS is not yet an employee option. Hopefully we will see Google putting priority to apps on Linux and Mac OS X. To Googlers: please release cool features in Chrome browser first for Linux and Mac version. Windows users can wait.

One bad news is malware developers now has incentive to target Linux and Mac OS X.

Via Financial Times

Google celebrated 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by having a playable Pac Man game on their logo for 3 days. It is gone from the home page and is now in a new url at http://www.google.com/pacman/.

Google has added an SSL option on its website to allow encrypted search. When you search using https://www.google.com/ (note the https protocol in url instead of the usual http), your search terms and the results returned by Google is encrypted between your computer and Google server.

SSL connection will make it harder for third party to peek at your search activities, with the penalty of slightly slower response due to the need to encrypt and decrypt the data. Google has put up a “Beta” label for this new SSL option.

Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.

SSL connection has been enabled for Gmail and Google Docs for years, nonetheless it is a welcomed feature for web search on Google main site.

FTC has concluded its investigation of Google AdMob deal and approved it with a unanimously 5-0 vote.

“As a result of Apple’s entry (into the market), AdMob’s success to date on the iPhone platform is unlikely to be an accurate predictor of AdMob’s competitive significance going forward, whether AdMob is owned by Google or not,” the Commission’s statement explains.

Below is the full FTC announcement:

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Google launched its loyalty free, open source WebM video format to much fanfare during its Google IO Conference this week. With 40 partners for the launch events including Adobe, this new video format is competitive to H264 since day one. Already Mozilla and Opera, off course Google’s own Chrome browser has nightly build with support for it. YouTube will be converting any video uploads with 720p or higher resolution to WebM format in addition to H264. Adobe is committing to support this format in Flash as well as its developer tools.

Already, an x264 developer has posted an unfavorable in-depth study of the new format. One alarming note from the article mentioned a possible pattern issue with WebM.

With regard to patents, VP8 copies way too much from H.264 for anyone sane to be comfortable with it, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free.

Irregardless, WebM is here to stay with Google behind it. WebM is derived from codec by On2 which Google acquired for about US$124million in February. Google has now offered the technology free to the world. It is interesting to speculate why this move by Goole. WebM with its VP8 technology is better than open source Ogg Theora but no better than H.264. Open-sourced and giving it loyalty free currently benefits Linux user and Mozilla Firefox browser, which has the philosophical tradition to use only free and open sourced technology, by which H.264 is not. With the world moving to HTML5 with H.264 as the main video codec of choice, WebM is a breather to Firefox which can remains competitive when WebM is commonplace.

Microsoft mentioned in its windows blog that IE9 will support WebM as long as the users has the codec installed in the PC. Which means IE9 will not support WebM natively but rather depends on third party plug-in for viewing WebM content in IE9. This is how Safari on the Mac OSX can support WebM without Apple’s involvement. But Apple needs to built the support into Safari for iPhone and iPad because there is no way third party plugin can work within iPhone OS.

AppleInsider has posted an article confirming that Apple does not intend to support WebM at the moment. Which means Safari on iPhone and iPad will be the only browsers not capable of viewing WebM content.

This might looks like an impending video format war, but it is not unless Google especially youTube abandons H264 and use WebM exclusively. WebM might make it to be an alternative video format but it might just be a niche format as Ogg Theora. As with many Google products lately, having a colorful logo attached does not mean a surefire success. It might just be another Google beta. As for Safari, there is no technical reason why it can’t support WebM.