Now Creating a Google Account Requires to Enter Your Birthday
Last year, I reported that creating a Google account requires entering your birthday if you are in the US. It seems that this requirement is no longer limited to the US and changing your location can’t be used as a workaround.
If you’re younger than 13 years old and you enter your real birthday, you’ll see this message: “Google could not create your account. In order to have a Google Account, you must meet certain age requirements. To learn more about online child safety, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s website.”
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act makes it difficult to collect personal information from children under 13, so that’s probably the reason why Google decided to prevent these users to create an account. For example, Google would have to “obtain verifiable parental consent from the child’s parent.” That’s not the case when your school created a Google Apps account for you, since the school has to obtain parental consent.
It’s interesting that you can’t edit your birthday from your account and that Google deletes the accounts of the children under 13, unless they provide a way to show that the birthday is incorrect. From Google’s FAQ:
You can re-enable your account by following our instructions to confirm that you are old enough to have a Google Account. You will see these instructions when you attempt to sign back in to your account. We currently offer two ways to confirm your age:
1. Sending in a signed form via mail or fax with a copy of your current, government-issued ID showing your date of birth, or
2. Performing a small transaction ($0.30 USD) on a valid credit card.
Creating a Google account is more and more complicated. Sometimes Google will ask to enter your phone number in order to confirm that you’re actually a human (and not a bot) and now you also need to enter your birthday. Some services require to create a Google Profile and if you want to use Google+, you need to use your real name or “the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you”. If something goes wrong, you’ll have to prove that it’s your name.
{ Thanks, Herin. }
Soon Google Sets Will Be Shut Down
Google Sets, one of my favorite Google Labs experiments, will be shut down on September 5, just like Google Squared. Launched in 2002, Google Sets is the only experiment from the early days of Google Labs that’s still available, even though it hasn’t graduated.
The great thing about Google Sets is that it only did one thing and did it very well: automatically generating lists from a few examples. Google Sets used the explicit and implicit lists from the pages indexed by Google and tried to find the lists that were relevant to the examples entered by users. For example, you could enter “Honda” and “Toyota” and Google Sets returned a long list of car brands.
The patent filed in 2003 explains that, at that time, there wasn’t any “mechanism for quickly and efficiently generating lists of items given one or more example”. Web pages included a lot of lists: some of them were created using special HTML tags (<ul>, <ol>, document headers), others used tables, while most of them were items separated by commas or tabs. The patent was filed by Simon Tong, a researcher who contributed to Google’s ranking algorithm, designed AdSense’s targeting algorithm and Gmail’s spam detection’s learning algorithm, and Jeff Dean, who designed Google’s crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, BigTable and MapReduce, the initial version of Google’s advertising serving system and a lot more.
Google Sets was the building block for Google Squared, a service that generated lists and information about the items. If you type “dogs” in Google Squared, you’ll see a list of dog breeds, related images, descriptions, the size and the country of origin. The list of dog breeds is now also displayed at the bottom of Google’s results page for [dogs]. The attributes aren’t yet available in Google Search, but this feature will probably added in the future.
While Google Sets and Google Squared will no longer be available, they’re still used in Google Search to better understand the content of a page and to provide lists of related searches.
Google Maps adds New Weather Layer
Google Maps added a layer for weather. Just mouse over the satellite box and select “weather” from the list of layers.
“When zoomed out, you’ll see a map with current weather conditions from U.S. Naval Research Lab. And, if you look closely, you can also tell if it’s day or night around the world by sun and moon icons. Enabling the weather layer also gives you an instant weather report for friends and family living around the world,” informs Google. Weather reports are powered by weather.com and include information about the current conditions (humidity, wind speed, temperature) and a 4-day forecast.
The nice thing about Google Maps layers is that you can combine them. For example, you can enable both the terrain and the weather layers, like you can see in the screenshot above.
Google Rocks Again: Audio Pronunciation in Google Search
Google added a new feature to the dictionary OneBox: audio pronunciation. This feature was available if you clicked “More” to read all the definitions, but now it’s more accessible.
Google uses Flash to play the audio file, so the feature doesn’t work if you disable Flash. It’s interesting that Google shows the audio icon if you use an iPad, even though the device doesn’t let you install the Flash plugin. The HTML5 audio tag is a better option for iOS devices and for the browsers that support it.
Now Google Chrome Adds Support for Native Client Apps
Almost three years after its announcement, Native Client is almost ready for prime time. It’s enabled in Chrome 14, which is now in beta and will reach the stable channel in less than a month.
Native Client is a very complex framework that allows browsers to run native compiled code in a sandbox. Google’s goal is to “maintain the OS portability and safety that people expect from web apps”, while allowing developers to use their preferred language. Right now, the only supported languages are C and C++ and Native Client only works in Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux.
“Native Client apps live on the web platform, so you don’t need to create separate versions of your app for each operating system. Rather than relying on OS-specific APIs, Native Client apps use Pepper, a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to the capabilities of HTML5. This means that once you’ve ported your code to Native Client, it will work across different operating systems, and you only need to maintain one code base. Today Native Client supports the Pepper APIs for 2D graphics, stereo audio, URL fetching, sandboxed local file access (File API), and asynchronous message passing to and from JavaScript. In future releases we will be adding support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics (OpenGL ES 2.0), fullscreen mode, networking (WebSockets and peer-to-peer connections), and much more,” informs Google.
Google announced that developers will be able to upload their native apps to the Chrome Web Store once Chrome 14 hits the stable channel. In the meantime, Chrome 14 users can try the examples from this gallery: a pi generator, a sine wave synthesizer and John Conway’s Game of Life.
NaCl (Native Client) + Pepper -> a lot of games, business apps, educational apps, image editors and virtual machine software running inside your browser. Suddenly, Chromebooks are no longer that limited.
Gmail’s Newest/Oldest Pagination Features
The latest Gmail design refresh replaced pagination links with arrow buttons. Even if it’s not obvious, the navigation links that sent you to the newest/oldest messages are still available in the new interface. Just click the message similar to “11-20 of 3903″ from the screenshot below and you’ll see the two options that appeared to be missing.
This works for Gmail’s search results and when you click one of the labels. For example, you can go to the “All Mail” system label, click the pagination message, select “Oldest” and find the first messages from your Gmail account.
For the search terms that return a lot of results, the only pagination feature that works is “newest” because Gmail shows vague estimations for the number of results like “1-20 of hundreds” or “1-20 of thousands” and it can’t determine the last page of results.
{ Thanks, jpp. }
Google Now Tests Infinite Scrolling for Search Results Pages
After testing a persistent header, Google continues to experiment with infinite scrolling for Google search results. A Webmaster World user spotted a new box that replaces the standard pagination links: “show more results”. When you click the message, Google loads the second page of results below the top results.
Barry Schwartz says that Google tested a similar interface back in June. I remember that SearchMash, Google’s old playground for search experiments, used infinite scrolling in the first iterations. Last year, Google Image Search added infinite scrolling,
There are many extensions that add infinite scrolling to Google search results pages. One of the best is AutoPager, which is available for Firefox and Chrome.
After a long wait Magento CE Version 1.6.0.0 Stable – Now Available
We are excited to announce the availability of Magento CE Version 1.6.0.0 Stable for download and upgrade.
The latest release is packed with new features as well as valuable code contributions from various community members around the world.
Some of the key new features in this release include:
- Persistent shopping – retain shopping cart content for customers across user sessions, browsers and devices.
- Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
- Refactoring multiple database
To see the full list of features and fixed issues please visit our release notes page. Diff files are available here.
Please Note: We do NOT recommend upgrading a production installation of Magento directly. Please backup database and all files before upgrading. Please make sure to check file permission before trying to upgrade through your Magento Connect Manager.
Please report all issues with this release in the bug tracker.
How to Use Google Cloud Print Apps
Google Cloud Print has a new homepage with more information about the service, a helpful video and a list of products that work with Cloud Print.
“Using Google Cloud Print, you can make your home and work printers available to you and anyone you choose, from the applications you use every day. Google Cloud Print works on your phone, tablet, Chromebook, PC, and any other web-connected device you want to print from,” explains Google.
It’s interesting to notice that not many Google products integrate with Cloud Print. By default, you can only print documents and Web pages in Chrome using Cloud Print if you have a Chromebook. There’s an unofficial extension that adds support for Cloud Print in Gmail, Google Docs and for some local documents. If you have an Android or iOS device, you can use Cloud Print in the Gmail and Google Docs mobile apps. For Android, there’s an unofficial app that lets you print files from your phone using Cloud Print. For iOS, there’s an advanced app that offers a lot of print-related features, including Cloud Print support, but it costs $9. Google needs to add native support for Cloud Print in Android and to develop an iPhone app for Cloud Print.
For more information about Cloud Print, watch this video:
{ Thanks, Herin. }
Play Google+ Games
6 weeks after the Google+ launch, the project received a major upgrade and added social games. “Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don’t. When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting — click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you’ve received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear.”
The nice thing is that game updates don’t clutter your main stream, but this also means that the stream will no longer be comprehensive and it will be difficult for a game to become popular in a short amount of time.
on Youtube
For now, there’s a small number of games from companies like Zynga, Rovio (Angry Birds), PopCap Games and it’s interesting to see that the games APIs aren’t publicly available. “We chose to start with a small number of partners so that we could experiment, get the kinks out of our APIs, and get real end-user feedback before opening up to the world. (…) Because we want to provide both a great user experience and a great developer experience, we’re focusing on quality before quantity. We will continue to add new partners and new features in small steps, starting with today’s release of the games APIs to a small number of developers,” explains Google.
Games aren’t available to all Google+ users because the feature is slowly rolled out. When you see a new tab at the top of the page, next to the search box, you should be able to play games.
Google+ games are social. When you play a game, you can share updates with your circles, buy virtual goods, send gifts, invite your friends. “Additionally, a game may involve multiple players in a single match (such as a poker table). In these situations, the other players in the room can see and interact with each other during gameplay. Some games allow you to partner up with (or work against) another player, such as a neighbor, ally, or an enemy/rival. These games use your circles to suggest people to interact with. You could show up as a suggestion to another player to become an ally or to challenge,” mentions Google.
Forbes reports that Google charges a 5% fee to developers for virtual goods transactions. “With this much lower fee to attract developers, Google is going after Facebook, which takes a 30% cut from developers for using its required Facebook Credits virtual currency system.”
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