Posts Tagged “ideas”
Post by Wiktor Gworek, 20% task force (Krakow, Poland)
Last year we announced that we wanted to hear your wish list for features in Google Reader, and one of most highly requested features was the ability to rename folders and tags. Today we are rolling out this feature with a little bit of Polish help from Krakow.
You can rename folders and tags on the settings page:
And you can also edit these names right from the contextual menu in your subscription list.
Also, as we announced last week, today we’ve disabled offline access through Gears, and phased out support for older browsers.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please head over to our help forums, or send us a message on Twitter.
Tags: google, ideas, twitter
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Posted by Sam Goto, Software Engineer
The other day I posted this video to the version of Buzz we use inside of Google. A few people commented on it, 13 liked it, and 68 of my coworkers thought it was interesting enough that they wanted to share it with their own followers. Collectively, thousands of people watched it, many of whom were many degrees away from me.
For the last couple weeks we've been testing reshare — and today we’re excited to roll it out to everyone. If you don't see the "Reshare" link quite yet, hang tight. It should be on for everyone by the end of the day.
How reshare works
When you find an interesting buzz post you want to reshare, instead of copying and pasting it (and maybe attributing the original poster with an @reply along the way), you can now reshare posts with two clicks.
First, click “Reshare”:
Then type up anything you want to add and click “Post”:
Your post will include a link to the original post:
Note that this only works for public posts; private posts won’t have the reshare link since the original poster intended to limit the audience of their post.
A little more background
Reshare has been one of our top user requests, so we hope we’ve made a number of you happy. We realize that just as many will likely wonder why we decided to implement it the way we did. So, here’s a bit more background for those who are curious:
- First, back to those two clicks: one click vs. two click reshare was a hard choice (I know, it doesn’t sound so hard, but we spent a lot of time on this!). Ultimately, we chose to go with two clicks because we want people to be able to reshare publicly or privately and also encourage resharers to add their own new content to the post.
- If you follow a bunch of people who all reshare the same thing, the last thing you want is for that same post to appear over and over again. When this happens, similar posts get collapsed, so you should only see each thing once.
- You’ll notice that resharing creates a new post, effectively forking the conversation. To fork or not fork was a decision we debated for a while. Ultimately, we think forked conversations help create more varied, intimate discussions around a single item. We realize people may want a non-forking version too, so we’re thinking about how to do that as well.
- When there is a chain of reshares, the names of all of the people who publicly reshare the post appear on the original item, even if they’re not directly connected to the original author. If you share something that ends up getting passed around by lots of other people, it’s pretty cool to see that.
- If you “like” a reshare, you don’t automatically also “like” the original post. Imagine what would happen if I reshare a very positive movie review and write “What a joke! This movie was terrible!” Someone who likes my post probably doesn’t want their “like” showing on the original post praising the film, too.
Overall, we’ve made a lot of progress since my original ASCII mockups…
…and after a lot of debate, we even settled on what to call it…
…but reshare is still very much a work in progress. We wanted to launch and iterate so be sure to let us know what you think in the forum or on Buzz.
Tags: gmail, google, ideas, interesting
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On behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation, I would like to thank everyone that attended the State of the Union event. A special thank you to the wonderful team at MySpace for arranging and hosting this event. With the participation of about a hundred at he event, I am confident we can move the standard forward.
If you missed it, you can check out the slides for the event. Here a quick summary of some of the key topics we discussed:
- We have new Board members and great energy (Welcome Cody Simms from Yahoo! and Jason Gary from IBM). Also, please take advantage of the 2 community seats available. Nominations are open and any member of the OpenSocial Foundation is welcome to participate.
- It is exciting to see OpenSocial adoption outside of “traditional” Social networks and into domain specific networks and even major enterprise vendors.
- We seek your help in giving our foundation’s pages/navigation an uplift. Feel free to jump in and add your ideas.
- OpenSocial 1.0 next–Here's what's on tap: improvements to the existing OAuth implementation, inter-gadget communication, and views for Mobile devices. We also need to pay attention to the development & spec process. Our goal is to get prototypes and spec patches in now, followed by a tight, well controlled, editing cycle.
- The board is excited about engaging OpenSocial’s worldwide community. We are looking to sponsor events outside the U.S. and will be working on figuring this out over the next few weeks.
Here are some more details below about the event. Please feel add your thoughts & suggestions as comments to this blog post.
The event started off with introductions of the Foundation Board members and officers. Cody Simms is Yahoo!’s corporate designate. IBM is a new corporate member and has designated Jason Gary as their representatives. Welcome Cody and Jason. The complete list of your Foundation Officers and Board Members is in the FAQs.
In addition to new corporate members of the OpenSocial Foundation Board, there are two community seats available. Anyone is able to serve on the board. The only requirement to nominate or hold the position is that you must be a member of the OpenSocial Foundation. There are no membership fees to join OpenSocial. All you need to do is fill out a simple on-line membership application.
It’s been an exciting year and a half for OpenSocial! We’ve seen continued adoption of the specification as new containers come on line. Perhaps what is more interesting is that we are starting to see OpenSocial adoption outside of “traditional” social networks. This includes adoption by enterprise vendors such as Jive, Atlassian, and IBM.
Before getting into the heart of the discussion, we reviewed our current Web presence. Right now, we’ve got information buried on existing pages, scattered across different sites, and in general, have an inconsistent way of engaging our members. As a result, we are going to start looking at how to clean this up. Please post a note to the community group list if you’d like to help with this effort. There’s also a wiki page to capture your ideas.
Looking ahead for the remainder of this year and into next, we’ve got some exciting things starting to happen. First of all, we agreed on the scope and timeline for “OpenSocial 1.0 next”. There were three areas that we’d like to start working on for the next version of the spec; improvements to the existing OAuth implementation, inter-gadget communication, and views for Mobile devices. There’s already some code for intergadget communication in Shindig, and the team from Mixi has put together a good starting point for Mobile.
We will be following the development process and incorporating the extensions mechanism that we outlined last year. This means that we should be able to accept patches to the spec and prototypes now! Our goal is to get prototypes and spec patches in now, followed by a tight, well controlled, editing cycle. Ideally, this gives us time to try out the prototypes now, rather than actually developing and prototyping the new features at the same time we are writing the spec. The specification process and extension process will be updated in the next few days to reflect these ideas.
It is also worth noting is that we’d like to get as many of these prototypes as possible into Shindig so it’s easy for people to try them out. Paul Linder and the Shindig community has done a great job over the last few months of refactoring and organizing the code to make this much easier. Thanks to Paul and the Shindig committers!
One of the original goals of OpenSocial was to create a community that could rapidly prototype new ideas. With the development process, the extensions mechanism, and Shindig, we’ve got all the pieces in place to do just that. An example of this is the work that has been done to provide a prototype of the ActivityStrea.ms specification.
But we don’t want to stop there! A number of new and exciting ideas in the social Web space are emerging, and as a community, we should be prototyping them as quickly as possible to understand their impact to OpenSocial. Examples of these include Salmon, Pubsubhubbub, Web Finger, and OAuth 2.0. Let’s get prototypes going now so that when these specs become final, it’s easy for us to provide an open source implementation and a clean path into OpenSocial spec. This way, we can move the entire industry forward—together—faster.
So far, most (if not all), of the ‘official’ OpenSocial Foundation sponsored events have been located in the United States. One of our goals for this year is to change that. A number of members have expressed interest in having events in Asia and Europe. This is a great way for our community to engage the large number of world wide container providers and businesses that are successfully implementing OpenSocial. The Board is very excited about reaching out to our worldwide membership and is looking forward to helping the community make this happen.
Thank you, once again, to the team at MySpace. There were great to work with and put on a fantastic event. I would also like to thank our community. It’s because of you that we had a great event.
Now let’s get prototyping!
Posted by Mark Weitzel, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation
Tags: google, ideas, interesting
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Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we’re sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search.
As you may already know, AdSense is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.
AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.
We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.
We also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. We aren’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they’re quickly evolving, and we’re still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since our costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts.
Of course, we can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don’t have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.
We hope this additional transparency helps you gain more insight into your business partnership with Google. We believe our revenue share is very competitive, and the vast number of advertisers who compete to appear on AdSense sites helps to ensure that you’re earning the most from every ad impression. Additionally, when considering different monetization options, we encourage you to focus on the total revenue generated from your site, rather than just revenue share, which can be misleading. For example, you would receive $68 with AdSense for content for $100 worth of advertising that appeared on your site. If another ad network offers an 80% revenue share, but is only able to collect $50 from ads served on your site, you would earn $40. In this case, a higher revenue share wouldn’t make up for the lower revenue yield of the other ad network.
We’re continually working on helping you improve the returns from your site while giving you more control and insight into AdSense. For example, we continue to improve our technology so that we can deliver even better matched ads and attract even more advertisers to your websites. Additionally, we recently began providing more granular ways to find and review the ads on your site, as well as the ability to filter more ads by category. We’re also focused on finding other ways to make AdSense better for you. As you may remember, last December, we asked for your ideas and feedback on how we can make AdSense better. We received more than 600 suggestions and 35,000 votes, and we’ve been reviewing them all.
Keep an eye on this blog for updates about the new features we’re building to help you maximize your advertising revenues.
Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management
Tags: google, ideas
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 Dear Lifehacker,
I have many half-empty bottles of red wine. After a week, they’re mostly undrinkable. I’d normally pour them down the sink, but it’s a shameful waste. So my question is, what can I do with leftover wine?
Signed,
Waste-Not Wine Drinker,
Dear Waste-Not,
It’s a valid point, and one we’re long due on considering at Lifehacker. We have, after all, offered plenty of suggestions on using wine corks, along with various recycling ideas for wine bottles. The red stuff itself, though—the kind that you don't want to serve out, even if corked with supposedly air-tight rubber stoppers—should be able to find some kind of second life.
There’s a lot of debate on this topic because, well, it’s a foodie thing, and it’s to be expected. But we’ve tried to round up some ideas for wine that’s just slightly started to turn. If your wine smells terrible and seems entirely inedible, just go ahead and toss it. If you just can’t use it up in very short order, here’s some suggestions:
Cook With It
Julia Child herself once said that you should never cook with a wine you wouldn’t enjoy drinking, and many agree with her. The New York Times does not. They assembled a panel of tasters to try dishes cooked with both esteemed and very cheap bottles, and in most cases, they could not tell the difference or turn their nose up at the stuff cooked with the cheap stuff.
A number of forum posters at the Chowhound boards also find slightly-old wine perfect for this purpose. Stick to dishes that require boiling down (“reducing”), slow braising over time, or even making a syrup, they say, and you’ll get good results from less-than-perfect wine.
Mull It
It’s not quite the season for cozying up with warm beverages (although some of the northeastern states might disagree, after this past weekend), but mulling wine gives it a new character that can work around its slightly oxygenated character.
The Fluther boards point us to a Danny Boome mulled wine recipe that uses an entire standard bottle, but you can adjust as needed. We’ve also previously pointed out the wonders of sbiten, a Russian remedy for whatever ails you. For a more traditional, holiday-style mulled wine drink, try Wired’s how-to wiki on holiday party drinks.
Make Vinegar
Old wine is basically on its way toward vinegar, anyways, so you may as well help it along in more tasty fashion. We’ve found helpful guides to buying a crock with a spout, obtaining a “starter” (similar to homemade bread yeasts), and gradually adding wine to your batch at the Wine Tastings Guide site, but I also remember a slightly more narrative-form guide in Food & Wine.
Enjoy your wine, whatever you end up using it for,
Lifehacker
P.S. Everyone peeking in on this correspondence is welcome to submit their own best uses for past-its-peak wine in the comments.
Top photo by biskuit.
Tags: ideas
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