The good and bad of Google Latitude on iPhone

Last week Google released a Web app version of Google Latitude, its Geolocation-based social tracking service. At Apple's request, Google made it a Web app instead of a native app that required installation. There's a lot to like, and some that's not so great. Here's the breakdown:



The good:
• Simple service to use. If you've got it set to automatically refresh your location you just have to fire it up from a bookmark, or home screen shortcut and you're done.
• You can keep it running in a browser tab while you're doing things in other tabs. It's almost like running multiple applications at once!
• Works in both portrait and landscape modes. And what's impressive about landscape mode, is that you can still drag your finger around the map without scrolling the rest of the page.
• Really granular control over who can see where you are and what you're doing. Right down to a per-friend level.
• Turn-by-turn driving directions in your browser.

The bad:
• Safari-only, which means no push notifications, full-screen user interface, or special sounds.
• Missing some of Google Maps' bells and whistles including things like public transportation and walking directions. And no Street View of course.
• Slightly sluggish performance when compared to the Google Maps app. Filling out forms, and response when clicking on a button can be a bit delayed. Might just be our old, chugging iPhone 3G though.

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10296328-248.html

Related Posts
What is Google Latitude?

What is Google Latitude

How often do you find yourself wondering where your friends are and what they're up to? It's a pretty central question to our daily social lives, and it's precisely the question you can now answer using Google Latitude.

What is Google Latitude
Google Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device. It's also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you. So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather.

And with Google Latitude, not only can you see your friends' locations on a map, but you can also be in touch directly via SMS, Google Talk, Gmail, or by updating your status message; you can even upload a new profile photo on the fly. It's a fun way to feel close to the people you care about.

Fun aside, we recognize the sensitivity of location data, so we've built fine-grained privacy controls right into the application. Everything about Latitude is opt-in. You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see. For instance, let's say you are in Rome. Instead of having your approximate location detected and shared automatically, you can manually set your location for elsewhere — perhaps a visit to Niagara Falls. Since you may not want to share the same information with everyone, Google Latitude lets you change the settings on a friend-by-friend basis. So for each person, you can choose to share your best available location or your city-level location, or you can hide. Everything is under your control and, of course, you can sign out of Google Latitude at any time.

Ready to share your location? If you have a mobile smartphone, visit google.com/latitude on your phone's web browser to download the latest version of Google Maps for mobile with Latitude. Latitude is available on Blackberry, S60, and Windows Mobile, and will be available on Android in the next few days. We expect it will be coming to the iPhone, through Google Mobile App, very soon.

No smartphone? No worries. Visit google.com/latitude on your desktop or laptop to install the Latitude iGoogle gadget and share your location right from your computer. If you have Google Gears installed in your browser (you do by default if you use Google Chrome), you can automatically share your location; otherwise, manually set your location to let your friends know where you are.

What is Google Picasa

What is Google Picasa
What is Google Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos, Google Picasa originally created by Idealab and owned by Google since 2004."Google Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house" and "pic" for pictures (personalized art).In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free download. At the time of the acquisition, the company's management team consisted of Lars Perkins as CEO, Mike Herf as CTO, and Dan Engel as VP Market Development.

Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X are available through Google Labs. For Windows 98 and Windows Me, only an older version is available. There is also an iPhoto plugin or a stand-alone program for uploading photos available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

Organization and editing
For organizing photos, Picasa has file importing and tracking features, as well as tags and collections for further sorting. It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color enhancement, red eye reduction and cropping. Other features include slide shows, printing and image timelines. Images can also be prepared for external use, such as for e-mailing or printing, by reducing file size and setting up page layouts. There is also integration with online photo printing services.

Keywords
Google Picasa uses picasa.ini files to keep track of keywords for each image. In addition to this, Picasa attaches IPTC keyword data to JPEG files, but not to any other file format. Keywords attached to JPEG files in Picasa can be read by other image library software like Adobe (Photoshop, Album and Bridge), digiKam and iPhoto.

According to the Picasa Readme, Picasa can parse XMP data. However, it cannot search local files for existing XMP keywords.

Searching
Picasa has a search bar that is always visible when viewing the library. Searches are live in that displayed items are filtered as you type.

When a word is typed into the search bar, an image will be displayed if that word is all or part of a keyword, or part of the file name. If the search word is part of a folder name, all images in that folder are also displayed (but not necessarily images in subfolders, unless the word also exists in a keyword or filename.)

Picasa also supports boolean operators for searching in much the same way as Google's web search. All search terms are required by default (as with the operator "AND"), and images tagged with specified keywords can be excluded by using the hyphen (as in the boolean operator "NOT"). For example, searching for family children -friends will cause Picasa to display all images with the keywords "family" and "children", but which do not include the keyword "friends".

Viewing
Picasa has no separate view window. There is only an "edit view" with a viewing area. Fullscreen view is available in slideshow mode, by holding down the ctrl+alt keys while in "edit view", or by pressing the Alt Gr key. This feature is also available through the context menu of Windows Explorer, and provides a way to start the Picasa editor as well.

What is Orkut?

What is Orkut?
Orkut is a free-access social networking service owned and operated by Google. Orkut is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. In fact, as of May 2009, 49.83% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 17.51%.

Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut will be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.

Orkut Profile
A user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. There is an option to integrate GTalk (An instant messenger from Google) with Orkut enabling chatting and file sharing. currently gtalk has been integrated in orkut. Users can directly chat from orkut page.

What is Google Groups?

What is Google Groups
Google Groups is a free service from Google where groups of people have discussions about common interests. Internet users can find discussion groups related to their interests and participate in threaded conversations, either through the Google Groups web interface, or by e-mail. They can also start new groups. Google Groups also includes an archive of Usenet newsgroup postings dating back to 1981 and supports reading and posting to Usenet groups.Users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.

Google Groups provides two distinct kinds of groups: traditional Usenet groups, and non-Usenet groups that are more similar to mailing lists. The Google Groups user interface and help messages do not use a distinct name for mailing-list style groups, referring to both styles of group as "Google Groups".

The two kinds of groups differ both in the technology used and how they are governed. The Google Groups user interface encourages users to create new mailing-list-style groups, but does not provide any way to create a Usenet group.

Google Groups uses NNTP protocol
A Usenet group is decentralized and not hosted by any single organization. Many organizations other than Google allow Usenet groups to be read with newsreader software that uses the NNTP protocol. Most Usenet groups are unmoderated. Google recognizes the X-No-Archive header and archives messages containing it for only seven days.

A regular Google Group is hosted by Google. These groups can be accessed using a web browser or by subscribing to receive email, but can't be accessed using a Usenet news reader. They have one or more owners who decide who is allowed to subscribe to the group and whether non-members can access the group. This form of governance is similar to that provided by many other mailing list providers. Google Groups also allow for a group to be an archive of a group hosted on another mailing list server.

What is Google Docs

What is Google Docs
Google Docs is a free, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application offered by Google. Google Docs allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs combines the features of two services, Writely and Spreadsheets, which were merged into a single product on October 10, 2006. A third product for presentations, incorporating technology designed by Tonic Systems, was released on September 17, 2007.

What is Google Docs history
Google Docs originated from two separate products, Writely and Google Spreadsheets. Writely was an individual web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005. Spreadsheets, launched as Google Labs Spreadsheets on June 6, 2006,[3] originated from the acquisition of the XL2Web product developed by 2Web Technologies. Writely's original features included a collaborative text editing suite and access controls. Menus, keyboard shortcuts, and dialog boxes are similar to what users may expect in a desktop word processor such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer.

On March 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired Upstartle. the time of acquisition, Upstartle had four employees. Writely closed registration to its service until the move to Google servers was complete.[ 2006, Writely sent account invitations to everyone who had requested to be placed on a waiting list, and then became publicly available on August 23. Writely continued to maintain its own user system until September 19, 2006, when it was integrated with Google Accounts.

What is Google Calendar

What is Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free time-management web application offered by Google. It became available on April 13, 2006 and after over 3 years, as of July, 2009 it is no longer in beta stages. While users are not required to have a Gmail account, they are required to have a free Google Account in order to use Google Calendar. The interface of Google Calendar, designed by Kevin Fox (who also designed Gmail and the second version of Google Reader), is similar to desktop calendar applications such as Microsoft Outlook or iCal on Mac OS X.

User friendly Google Calendar
The Ajax-driven interface enables users to view, add, and drag-and-drop events from one date to another without reloading the page. It supports view modes such as weekly, monthly, and agenda. Users can "quick add" calendar events by typing standard English phrases, such as "Dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow". Users can also set the number of days to show in their custom view mode. All events in a Google Calendar can be commented on by its users.

What is Blogger

What is Google Blogger
Blogger (formerly Blogspot until 2006) is a blog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. The service itself is located at www.blogger.com, and blogs that do not publish to their own websites are hosted by Google at subdomains of blogspot.com.

As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user's Google Account were migrated to Google servers. Blogger claims that the service is now more reliable because of the quality of the servers.

Google Blogger New features
Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options. Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files.

In a version of the service called Blogger in Draft, new features are tested before being released to all users. New features are discussed in the service's official blog.

What is Google Code?

What is Google Code?
Google Code is Google's site for developers interested in Google-related/open-source development. The site contains open source code and a list of their services which support public APIs.

APIs
Google offers a variety of APIs for web and desktop programmers alike. They are often based around current Google products, including AdSense, Google Checkout and Google Toolbar.

What is Google Notebook

What is Google Notebook
Google Notebook is a free online application offered by Google that allows users to save and organize clips of information while conducting research online. The browser-based tool permits a user to write notes, clip text and images, and save links from pages during a browser session. The information is saved to an online "notebook" with sharing and collaboration features. Notebooks can be made "public", or visible to others, and can also be used to collaborate with a list of users (either publicly or privately).

Google Notebook as browser extension
A "lite" version of the Google notebook, with a reduced feature set, is available as a browser extension for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. This extension allows clipping information from the web without leaving the displayed page, by means of a context menu option. The latest version of the Firefox extension is 1.0.0.22.

A few months after the Firefox extension was released, Google added a "Note this" link to each Google search result when users are logged in. Clicking on it opens up an AJAX user interface near the bottom right of the screen just like the extension, but without the need for installing a browser add-on.

Google Notebook drag-and-drop features
Notebooks may contain headings and notes. New notes go at the bottom of a notebook, unless an insertion point (any specific note or section) has been pre-selected in the mini-notebook sub-window. Using the full-page notebook view, drag-and-drop features allow moving and reorganizing notes within a notebook, or between notebooks. It is also possible to export one's notebooks to Google Documents. As of November 1, 2007 labeling has now become available.

Google Notebook was announced on May 10, 2006 and made available May 15, 2006. In early 2009 Google announced that they were stopping development on the service: it is no longer open to sign-ups by new users nor being improved/debugged, however current users can still access all notebooks and data.

Google to launch open-source Chrome OS this year

Google Chrome for people who live on the web
Already, over 30 million people use Google Chrome browser regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS -for netbooks
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

Google Chrome OS for Better Computer
We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We're excited for what's to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

What is Google News

Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc. The initial idea, StoryRank—related to Google's PageRank formula—was developed by Krishna Bharat in 2001, the Principal Research Scientist of Google. No human is involved in the altering of the front page or story promotion, beyond tweaking the aggregation algorithm. Google News left beta in January 2006.

Introduced as a beta release in April 2002, the Google News service came out of beta on 23 January 2006. Different versions of the aggregator are available for more than 40 regions in 19 languages (as of 31 July 2008), with continuing development ongoing. Currently, service in the following languages is offered: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese (traditional and simplified characters), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Norwegian, Czech, Swedish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Polish and Malayalam.

The service covers news articles appearing within the past 30 days on various news websites. For the English language it covers about 4,500 sites[citation needed]; for other languages, less. Its front page provides roughly the first 200 characters of the article and a link to its larger content. Websites may or may not require a subscription; sites requiring subscription are noted in the article description.

What is Google Images?

What is Google image Search
Google Image Search is a search service created by Google which allows users to search the Web for image content. The feature was originally announced in December 2001. The keywords for the image search are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image. When searching for an image, a thumbnail of each matching image is displayed. Then when clicking on a thumbnail, the image is displayed in a frame at the top of the page and the website on which that image was found is displayed in a frame below it, making it easier to see from where the image is coming.

In early 2007 Google implemented an updated user interface for the image search, where much of the information about the image was hidden until the user moused over the thumbnail. This feature was discontinued after a few weeks.

What is Google Desktop

What is Google Desktop?
Google Desktop is desktop search software made by Google for Mac OS X, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. The program allows text searches of a user's e-mails, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and other "Google Gadgets."

After initially installing Google Desktop, the software completes an indexing of all the files in the computer. And after the initial indexing is completed, the software continues to index files as needed. Users can start searching for files immediately after installing the program. After performing searches, results can also be returned in an Internet browser on the Google Desktop Home Page much like the results for Google Web searches.

Google Desktop for different types of data
Google Desktop can index several different types of data, including email, web browsing history from Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, office documents in the OpenDocument and Microsoft Office formats, instant messenger transcripts from AOL, Google, MSN, Skype, Tencent QQ, and several multimedia file types. Additional file types can be indexed through the use of plug-ins. Google Desktop allows the user to control which types of data are indexed by the program.

One unfortunate aspect for users with large hard drives: Google Desktop only indexes 100,000 files per drive during the initial indexing period. If you have more than 100,000 files in a particular drive, Google Desktop won't index all of them during this initial period. However, Google Desktop adds files to your index during real-time indexing when you move or open them.

What is Google Books?

Whtat is Google Book Search
Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. When relevant to a user's keyword search, up to three results from the Google Book Search index are displayed above search results in the Google Web Search service (google.com). A user may also search just for books at the dedicated Google Book Search service. Clicking a result from Google Book Search opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book as well as content-related advertisements and links to the publisher's website and booksellers. Through a variety of access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking, Google limits the number of viewable pages and attempts to prevent page printing and text copying of material under copyright.

Google Book Search allows public-domain works
The Google Book Search service remains[update] in a beta stage but the underlying database continues to grow. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format. For users outside the United States, though, Google must be sure that the work in question is indeed out of copyright under local laws. According to a member of the Google Book Search Support Team, "Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain."

Many of the books are scanned using the Elphel 323 camera at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour.

The initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge, as well as criticized for potential copyright violations.

What is Google Blog Search ?

What is Google Web Blog Search?
Google Web Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any various subjects and is in a way you can say unbiased comments on the latest things happening around the world. Google says they are a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and they hope Blog Search will help its users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. The main goal of Blog Search is to include each and every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom) and is no way restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

Add your Blog to Google Blog Search
Those interested on having your blogs indexed by Google Blog Search, it’s quite easy. If you have a blog and it publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), google should be able to find and list your web blog.
Google is also soon expected to provide a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case it hasn’t been picked up automatically, just like the form used in google web search.

Google Blog Search supports many Languages
Google Blog Search can search blogs written in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.
When we tried making a blog search using the google blog search, we came across a lot of spam pages and junk, we hope google will clear this out soon enough as google blog search is still in its beta stages a few bugs were expected.

What is Google Alerts?

What is Google Alerts?
Google Alerts is a service offered by search engine company Google which notifies its users by email (or as a feed) about the latest web and news pages of their choice.

Types of Google Alerts
Google currently offers six types of alert searches: "News", "Web", "Blogs", "Comprehensive", "Video" and "Groups". A News alert is an email that lets the user know if new articles make it into the top ten results of his/her Google News search. A Web alert is an email that lets the user know if new web pages appear in the top twenty results for his/her Google Web search. A News & Web alert is an email that lets the user know when new articles related to his/her search term make it into the top ten results for a Google News search or the top twenty results for a Google Web search. A Groups alert is an email that lets the user know if new posts make it into the top fifty results of his/her Google Groups search.

Google Alert Frequency of checks
Google Alerts also allow its users to determine the frequency in which checks are made for new results. Three options are available: "once a day", "once a week", or "as it happens". These options do not necessarily control how often they will receive alerts. The first option, for example, means they will receive at most one alert email per day. The "as it happens" option can result in many alert emails per day, depending on the search.

What is Gmail ?

What is Gmail?
Gmail is a free webmail, POP3 and IMAP service provided by Google.In the United Kingdom and Germany it is officially called Google Mail.

Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007. Although over 100 million usershave opened Gmail accounts over the years, to this day[update] the service remains in beta status.

What is the storage capacity of Gmail
With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. The service currently offers over 7300 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 10 GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 (US) per year.

Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of the Ajax programming technique.

Gmail runs on Google Servlet Engine and Google GFE/1.3 which run on Linux.

What is Google Chrome?

What is Google Chrome?
Google Chrome is a web browser released and in large part developed by Google which uses the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September 2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. In May 2009, Chrome was the fourth most widely used browser, with 1.80% of worldwide usage share of web browsers. Development versions of Chrome for Linux and Mac OS X were released in June 2009.


Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome.[ The Google-authored portion of it is released under the BSD license,[clarification needed] with other parts being subject to a variety of different permissive open-source licenses, including the MIT License, the LGPL, the Ms-PL and a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license.[ implements the same feature set as Chrome, but has a slightly different logo.