Gettin' Themey With It, Na Na Na...

I love G-mail, don't you? Best free mail service out there, from the great search function to the G-Voice/Video Chat.
But you know what would make it better? Being able to add a theme to it and change as you will!
Google just announced that G-mail will now have many themes available for you to choose from to apply to your window. Currently there isn't any customization allowed, but we all know that sooner or later Google will open-source that bad boy.
They are rolling out this cool plug-in as we speak, some of you may already have it available, just go to your G-mail settings and click on the Themes tab.
I personally dig the chrome looking one, mid-left on the picture. Now I can add one more reason for me to be checking my e-mail every minute, good thing I don't own a Crackberry yet.

Source: Google

Children's Literature > American History?

As many of you know, Google usually does something creative with their logo on holidays/anniversaries/special symbolic days. Today is Columbus Day, and I wanted to see what Google has done to their logo to represent this. To my surprise, I did not see anything related to Columbus, just a cute little bear waiting for his ride to his destination. I was curious how this bear was related to the holiday so I clicked to dive deeper only to find a name, Paddington Bear. I was quite surprised to see that Google chose a 50th year anniversary of the book "A Bear Called Paddington", which was published in October 13th, 1958.
I guess Columbus Day happens every year, so they decided not to go with that for the logo change, although maybe they should start incorporating two or more celebrations into the logo. Maybe a nice little sea ship could have replaced the O's in Google.
Now that I think about it, I like the fact that Google chose a different celebration to display, because not many people would have known about this, and it just helps us learn more about other great things in history.
Yay Google!

Simon Says... Err, Google Says, Chrome!

Just a while ago Google released their browser, Chrome, to the public (striking resemblance to the game). Currently, this open source browser is available for Windows only. After using it for a little bit, my first impression is that the interface is very clean and simple. I wonder if Google will outdo Mozilla in the browser war.

Here are a couple cool features:

-Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it

-An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity

I am particularly interested in the incognito mode, if this becomes a very successful browser and this feature is popular amongst the users, what will happen to online marketers who drop cookies and track user's activity? Gone out the window are metrics for conversions, impressions, clicks, etc. This may well be a new change in technology that shoppers have been looking for, the ability to browse with privacy. It is still too early to tell though, we shall see what's to come. Give it a download and check it out for yourself!

There is also a comic book created to display key engineering decisions for this new technology. Pretty cool stuff. Here is a screenshot of the first page


Source: Crunchbase

Are You Cuil Enough?

Watch out Google, there's a new search engine in town. Ex-Google employees just made public their new search invention, Cuil, pronounced "Cool", which comes from the Irish word meaning "wisdom" or "knowledge." Claiming to have a search index 3 times bigger than Google, but it's not about quantity is it? After searching a few times through Cuil, I don't get much relevant results, just a bunch of random stuff. I must say I do like the black background better, save that energy!
With Google owning 62% of the search market, followed by Yahoo at 21% and Microsoft at 8.5%, I doubt Cuil will be able to get into that piece of the pie, as of now anyway. You often hear people say "Google it!", but never "Yahoo it!" or "Microsoft Live it!" But if Cuil were to become popular and we started saying "Cuil it!", people may think we are trying to tell them to calm down!
Maybe Cuil will be able to dive into a question that Google cannot!

Source: CNN Money

Do You Know Knol ?

Knol - A unit of knowledge. At least to Google it is!

This is a new addition to Google's monster utility belt, still in beta stage, but available to the public. I call it the wiki-copy. One difference is that only the author can edit the entry, unless he allows others to, and duplicates of the same topic may be written. Sounds like it will be a jumbo mess of disagreeing topics already, but this may be good to show different views and ideas. Most of the entries so far are health / home improvement related.
Who wants to be the first to write about LiL Wayne? Whoever likes writing in detail about a topic they know much about, head over to the Knol site now! They also have a rating system for every entry, pretty cool!

What's next Google, the G-phone? Hmm...