This is a basically Google’s move to put YouTube on your living room and essentially on all television sets & set top boxes that has access to the Internet. However I don’t quite like the way they recommend videos. I know its largely done automatically by the algorithm based on my preference & social graph, however I think Google needs to go one step forward here and find out a way to make these video content really ’suitable’ for the living room. I mean, I may have came across a cat video and “liked” it on YouTube but that doesn’t mean that I am willing to watch cat videos all day on my TV.

How to get Youtube Leanback?

To experience YouTube Leanback yourself, simply go to www.youtube.com/leanback, and you’ll note that a selection of videos — your “feed” — plays immediately. This feed is created based on your YouTube settings and preferences. This includes videos from your subscriptions and stuff that your friends are sharing on Facebook (Provided that you have connected your Facebook account with YouTube). You can also watch the most popular comedy, entertainment, news, or more. And if you don’t care for the video that’s playing, use the right arrow key on your keyboard to skip ahead to the next video, or try the up/down arrows to search, access player controls, and browse channels and videos. The best thing about this interface is that you won’t need your mouse for this experience. Check out the video below to learn more:

But thanks god that Google has finally listened to their users and started supporting Rich Text Signatures out of the box in Gmail. Simply go to your Gmail Settings page and the option will be right there for you. You can now customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.

The feature has also been added to all Google Apps users, so if your company has been using text based signature all this while – It is time for you to move to a more creative version of email signature!

Gmail now also supports a unique signatures for each email address that you have associated with your account. So you can use a different signature for each of the accounts that you use to send out emails from. On the Gmail Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu.

[Source: Official Gmail Blog]

Good news for Malaysia! Google DevFest Southeast Asia 2010 is now coming to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the 16th of July.

DevFest events are a really great opportunity to learn more about Google technologies, new APIs & other developer products. Google DevFest Malaysia 2010 will give you a chance to meet Google developers and engineers in person and ask them any questions that you may have about the Google products. Best of all, DevFest events are free for all developers! However seats at Google DevFest Malaysia 2010 are very limited, so you need to register early.

Google DevFest Malaysia 2010

Date: July 16, 2010 (8:30am – 6:00pm)

Venue: Technology Park Malaysia, Ground Floor, Enterprise 4, Bukit Jalil, 57000 Kuala Lumpur

View Larger Map

Agenda:

- 8:30am – 9:30am – Registration
- 9:30am – 10:00am – Introduction
- 10:00am – 10:45am – Maps
- 10:45am – 11:00am – Break
- 11:00am – 11:45am – Chrome
- 11:45am – 12:00pm – Demos
- 12:00pm – 2:30pm – Lunch & Google Office Hours
- 2:30pm – 3:30pm – Social
- 3:30pm – 4:30pm – Apps
- 4:30pm – 6:00pm – Hackathon

Topics Covered: This year the primary topics of interest are – Chrome/HTML5, Google App Engine, Social APIs, Maps API and more.

For more info about the event & registration, visit the official page.

So are you going to Google DevFest Malaysia 2010?

However for things like Google Reader, Blogger, Picasa, I couldn’t use my Gapps account as those services are not a part of the offered Google Apps package. So I created a separate Google Account with the same email address kamal@myworkdomain.com and now I got myself – 1 Google Apps account and 1 Google Account but both has the same identifier (my email address).

It gets really confusing sometimes as you can’t be certain if you are logged in to your Regular Google account or the Google Apps account. Google Accounts also comes with Google Docs, thus now I have two different Google docs account! So when someone within my organization shares something with me, Google often messes up the permission settings as I believe it gets confused with the same user (kamal@myworkdomain.com) having two different accounts of Google Docs.

Now good news – Gina reported that Google is addressing this issue soon as someone has found a help document that explains Google’s plan of transitioning all Google Apps user and turning their account into a full blown Google Account so that it can be used with any GOOG products and services offered.

This is absolutely brilliant and Thank you Google for making this move (finally!). I was banging my head against the wall everyday in frustration due to issues caused by multi-account conflicts (it mostly has to do with Google docs & sharing).

Now the big question is – What If you already have created a Google account for the same email address that you are using in Google Apps?

“For example, your Google Apps email address is email@my-domain.com. A while back, you may have signed up for Blogger with this email address, which created a Google Account. Since we’ve moved your Google Apps account to a Google Account infrastructure to allow access to all Google products, your other Google Account will be renamed to: email+personal@my-domain.com. You should add the +personal extension to your email address if you’d like to sign in to your old account.”

So that means to some extent your old account will be “gone” as Google is pretty much just changing your old Google account email address to – username+personal@domain.com and at the same time they will give “Full Google power” to your GApps accounts so that you can access all of the Googley stuffs! I find the solution perfectly fine, in fact I was actually looking for a way to delete the account because of this whole two different Google Docs + Sharing conflicts.

But if you have a lot of data/documents in your “Google Account” then you might want to transfer them to your Google Apps account or back them up somehow. Because from what I understand, Google isn’t doing that for you during this transition.

But exporting your data out is pretty easy from Google. Especially for Google Docs, you can easily export all your files out as a big .zip file and upload them back into your Google Apps Docs account.

Update: The Official Google Blog confirms this and states that they are indeed rolling out more applications for Google App users. They have a form up for organizations who would want to become the first beta testers of this big transition. I have already signed up and I can’t wait for this!

For now, this new integration between Google Apps accounts and Google accounts is only available if you are a Trusted Tester, but Google promised that this will become publicly available in the coming months. “We intend to have all Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers moved to the new infrastructure that enables this change in the fall, and customers who would like more control over the timing of this change will be able to make the switch voluntarily during the summer.”

What is Blogger Template Designer?

Well just watch the video here. You will be amazed to see what it can do!

Highlights of Blogger Template Designer

There are a gazillion blogs out there and majority of them look just the same. Why? Because most of the blogging platform doesn’t make it easy to customize the look and feel of the blog. Of course there are templates available, but its hard to make edits on them if you are not a code wiz. SquareSpace really saw this as an opportunity and made a wonderful service that lets anybody to start a blog with a really cool and almost ‘unique’ design, without having to worry about coding, hosting or anything at all. But it didn’t get a lot of traction among the general bloggers who wants to blog about their cat or their hair for instance. The reason being, the service isn’t free and its not even cheap.

Google’s Blogger on the other hand is a free service and used by millions of people. However it had a lot of limitations in terms of what you could do with the design and layout. Those limitations made a lot of people to switch to other platforms like wordpress. But with the introduction of this new template designer, newbie bloggers might prefer to stick to Blogger for now.

With the Blogger Template Designer, you can create your own blog designs through:

19 Awesome looking templates. You can now quickly give your blog a great new look by selecting one of the new templates.

Finally, CSS Support! Designs are completely defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), meaning that any design can be applied to any blog layout, making templates more flexible and unique.

Lots of Free Stock Images for your blog. Google has partnered with iStockphoto to offer you hundreds of gorgeous background images at zero cost.

One Master control over your design colours. With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme.

Real time preview. You can watch your blog update as you create your template design via the real time preview feature.

Complete control. Under the advanced tab, you can override a design’s CSS and enter your own CSS in the editor and see your blog’s preview updated in real time.

Cross-browser support. Blogger handles cross browser support for you, so you don’t have to. Your blog will work perfectly in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and other major browsers.

and many more…

Lets Try Blogger Template Designer

Anyone can try out the template designer here. If you like your design, you can apply it to a new blog or to an existing blog. You can also try the Template Designer on your blog (Design > Template Designer).

Here are some Tips from the Blogger Team

• You can get your links to match a background image quickly by using the Background panel’s “Main color theme” to adjust all of your blog’s colors at once. This works particularly well with Simple’s second design.
• If you have a three-column footer, you can fit in several gadgets to interest your readers after they’re done reading your post.
• If you’re using our new Pages feature, put the Page List gadget in the wide section at the top of your blog.
• Many of the patterns in the background image picker are semi-transparent, to let your blog’s background color show through. Look for the “transparency page curl” to see which patterns these are.
• The Attribution gadget (added to the footer by all new templates) is there to give credit not just to the designer and artist of the background image, but to you as well. Edit its settings by clicking “Edit” on Layout > Page Elements to add your own authorship or copyright information.

So do you like the Blogger Template Designer? Share your experience with me!

But personally I really liked the original idea of being able to change & personalize the Google Search background as per your choice. I think many users would like the idea of having their own/family or any photo for that matter in the Google search home page. It sort of gives them the same experience as they get from their Desktop wallpaper. Now our life and our use of computer is mostly constricted inside a browser, so it makes sense to have a nice background image for our browser’s desktop – Google! Every time when I’m in front of my PC, I do see Google’s Home page/search page more than my desktop wallpaper.

How to add a Background Image in Google Home Page

If you wish to add a nice background image in the Google homepage and get rid of the boring plain white background, simply follow the steps below:

Step 1: Firstly of all sign in to your Google Account in the top right corner of the Google homepage. Your background will be set in the account level, thus regardless of which browser/computer you use, your background image will always show up as soon as you sign in to your Google Account.

Step 2: Click Change background image in the bottom left corner of the Google homepage.

Step 3: Choose where to select your background image. Currently Google gives you 4 options as follows:
– From my computer: You can select an image that is saved on your computer.
– My Picasa Web photos: You can select an image from your Picasa Web Albums.
– Public gallery: You can also select from public photos featured in Picasa Web Albums.
– Editor’s picks: Select from a set of Google recommended images.

Step 4: Once you’ve chosen your image, click Select at the bottom of the window. You are done! Your selected background image should appear in the Google home page instantly.

This is how my current Google homepage looks like:

If you wish to remove the background image from google’s home page at any time, simply click on the remove link on the bottom left corner. (I have highlighted the link in the screenshot).

So do you like this new feature? Show off your Google home page!

So far this is what Google has released:

Adsense for Content: If you you are an adsense publisher and you are running Adsense for content ads on your site then you get to keep 68 percent of what Google makes off from their advertisers. Thus Google takes 32% revenue share and passes the rest to the publisher. This number is surprisingly very high than what I initially guessed. Some suggested that this figure has been changed by Google recently, however google argues that this has been the figure since the launch of their adsense program.

Adsense for Search: If you using Google’s custom search on your website and using the Adsense for search, you are receiving 51 percent of whatever that Google makes off it’s advertisers.

Google said they will not disclose the revenue share of AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games at this point, but may disclose those revenue share amounts as the products mature.

Why the sudden change of heart about disclosing all these numbers? Well, frankly Google has been under a lot of heat lately because of Anti-trust issues, and SEL reported earlier this month that Italian Government was all over Google to make them reveal this cut for the Italian publishers. I guess finally Google figured out the meaning of being transparent, open and their ‘do-no-evil’ mojo.

Google on it’s Inside Adsense blog writes that it doesn’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change however they don’t have any current plans to do so for any of the AdSense products. In the next few months publisher will be able to see this revenue shares for AdSense for content and search right in the AdSense dashboard.

However do note that if you are a big publisher (especially newspapers or blogs with millions of pageviews), you can ‘negotiate’ a special cut with Google and that are most likely to be more than 68 percent.

But am I surprised with the numbers? Hell yeah!

Are you? Share in Comments!

The Google Font API gives a webmaster the ability to use a simple, cross-browser supported font from the Google Font Directory on any web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts are still searchable, and doesn’t get distorted like images when they are zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

“Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers.”

How to use Fonts from Google Font Directory?

All the fonts under the Google Font directory are hosted in the cloud. You don’t need to download or install anything on your side. In fact your visitor doesn’t need to have that font installed on his computer to view your site.

As a webmaster all you need to do is to add a simple line of code on your website to call the particular CSS file for the font. For example, if you want to use Droid Sans, add this code in the HEAD element:

link href=’http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans’ rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’ >

Then you can use Droid Sans in any CSS rule inside your stylesheet:

h1 { font-family: ‘Droid Sans’, arial, sans-serif; }

And you are all set! Due to the operations being performed behind the scenes, these custom fonts will even be recognized back to Internet Explorer 6! Isn’t that amazing?

Nettuts+ has a great video showing exactly how to implement this. I have embedded the video below:

Example of Google Font:

The only few possible downside of this whole thing:

• Google font server may go down! However, like any style-sheet, if the first font doesn’t load I’m sure it will point to an alternative. So your users will always see the text on your page.
• If you are using a very uncommon font, that the user is loading on his browser for the first time, he may experience a bit of slowness. But as he browses more and more pages, all these fonts are going to be cached locally on his browser/computer. Thus things will be really speedy on his future visits

So why do you think Google is doing this? Apart from the fact that this will make the whole web much ‘nicer’, do you think google has any other underlying interest for doing this whole thing? Share your speculations in the comments!

Google has this feature already built inside Google Mail (Gmail) and Google docs but this is the first time they are introducing this in their main search platform. Anybody can try out the Google secure encrypted search by going to: https://google.com (yes, don’t forget the ’s’ after http). Once you add the Https before the regular Google URL, both your search terms and search results will be encrypted as they travel across networks. This makes it much harder for third-parties to intercept them.

“When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators..”

Google’s Secure search feature is still in Beta. They pointed out that they aren’t changing the default to ’secure’ because of the following reasons:

• Confusion: People might think that other pages which aren’t SSL enabled are not secured. But this isn’t necessarily true.
• Speed: There is a minor speed issue when they add an extra layer of security (encryption) over top of the existing data. However I played with it for a while and I didn’t notice any significant difference in speed.
• Cross product security: Not all other google products which are linked from the search page (e.g. Google Images, Google Maps) are SSL enabled. Thus even if you use the SSL enabled page for your first search, you might eventually end up in a non-ssl page

Google highlights that using the secure page doesn’t necessarily mean that your ’search queries’ and your information aren’t stored by Google. The Secure Google page only prevents unauthorized individuals to intercept your queries/data on a network level.

Personally I don’t really see a use for this for normal users. However government, big enterprises might actually find this quite useful. An individual’s search history can tell a lot about that person. And if that person is a key individual of a big corporation or government, the security of that data is really essential.

So test this out and let me know in the comments if you see any significant ’speed difference’. Is it slower than the regular Google search?

Try it out right now, go to: https://google.com.

Pingdom, an awesome company that provide many free website monitoring services recently posted a nice infographic with a ton of facts and figures about Google. They have gone through Google’s SEC filings, news articles and the trusty old Wikipedia to get plenty of interesting data to include. By a single look at it, I knew that I will have to post it on my blog. So here it is:

(all credits to Pingdom, you can thank them on twitter: @pingdom)