Google Updates privacy policies and terms of service
First, Google privacy policies. Despite trimming policies in 2010, we still have more than 70 (yes, you read right … 70) privacy documents covering all of our different products. This approach is somewhat complicated. It’s also at odds with our efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google.
So we’re rolling out a new main privacy policy that covers the majority of our products and explains what information we collect, and how we use it, in a much more readable way. While we’ve had to keep a handful of separate privacy notices for legal and other reasons, we’re consolidating more than 60 into our main Privacy Policy.
Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies—and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web.
These changes will take effect on March 1, and we’re starting to notify users today, including via email and a notice on our homepage.
What does this mean in practice? The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.
Our recently launched personal search feature is a good example of the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products. Our search box now gives you great answers not just from the web, but your personal stuff too. So if I search for restaurants in Munich, I might see Google+ posts or photos that people have shared with me, or that are in my albums. Today we can also do things like make it easy for you to read a memo from Google Docs right in your Gmail, or add someone from your Gmail contacts to a meeting in Google Calendar.
But there’s so much more that Google can do to help you by sharing more of your information with … well, you. We can make search better—figuring out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink. We can provide more relevant ads too. For example, it’s January, but maybe you’re not a gym person, so fitness ads aren’t that useful to you. We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day. Or ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends’ names, are accurate because you’ve typed them before. People still have to do way too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them out.
Second, the Google Terms of Service—terms you agree to when you use our products. As with our privacy policies, we’ve rewritten them so they’re easier to read. We’ve also cut down the total number, so many of our products are now covered by our new main Google Terms of Service. Visit the Google Terms of Service page to find the revised terms.
Finally, what we’re not changing. We remain committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can. We don’t sell your personal information, nor do we share it externally without your permission except in very limited circumstances like a valid court order. We try hard to be transparent about the information we collect, and to give you meaningful choices about how it is used—for example our Ads Preferences Manager enables you to edit the interest categories we advertise against or turn off certain Google ads altogether. And we continue to design privacy controls, like Google+’s circles, into our products from the ground up.
We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer. Whether you’re a new Google user or an old hand, please do take the time to read our new privacy policy and terms, learn more about the changes we’re making and understand the controls we offer.
Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering
Two Ways to Export Your Google Docs
Google Takeout supports a new service: Google Docs. Now you can use the same interface to batch export your documents.
I tried both Google Takeout and the built-in feature from Google Docs that lets you download your documents. Even if they have the same purpose, they’re quite different. The Google Docs feature is more flexible: you can choose to download only spreadsheets or presentations and skip all the other documents. You can also skip the files uploaded to Google Docs and not converted to a Google Docs format (for example: PDF files, archives and video files). Google Takeout has a “configure” feature, but you can’t skip one or more document types. Another subtle difference is that Google Takeout lets you export only the files that you own, while Google Docs exports all the files from your account.
How to export all your files from Google Docs? Just go to the Google Docs homepage, select one or more documents, click “More” and then “Download”, click the “All items” tab, pick your favorite formats and click “Download”. The process is not that intuitive and you shouldn’t have to select a file to see the download option.
{ via Data Liberation Blog }
Google: Renewing old resolutions for the new year
Here’s an update on some products that will be merged, open-sourced, or phased out in the coming months:
- Google Message Continuity (GMC): In December 2010 we launched an email disaster recovery product for enterprise customers that use Google’s cloud to back up emails originally sent or received in an on-premise, Microsoft Exchange system. In the time since we launched, we’ve seen hundreds of businesses sign up for it. By comparison, in that same time, we’ve seen millions of businesses move entirely to the cloud with Google Apps, benefitting from disaster recovery capabilities built directly into Apps. Going forward we’ve decided to focus our efforts on Google Apps and end support for GMC. Current GMC customers will be able to use GMC for the duration of their contract and are encouraged to consider using Google Apps as their primary messaging and collaboration platform.
- Google Sky Map: This app was created by half a dozen Googlers at the Pittsburgh office in their 20 percent time to show off the amazing capabilities of the sensors in the first-generation Android phones and offer a window into the sky. Since we launched the tool in 2009, we have managed to share our passion with more than 20 million Android users. We will be open-sourcing Sky Map and are collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University in a partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects.
- Needlebase: We are retiring this data management platform, which we acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The technology is being evaluated for integration into Google’s other data-related initiatives.
- Picnik: We acquired this online photo editor in 2010. We’re retiring the service on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. You can download a zip file of your creations through Picnik Takeout or copy them to Google+. As of now, the premium service is free to everyone. Premium members will receive a full refund in the coming weeks.
- Social Graph API: This API makes information about the public connections between people on the web available for developers. The API isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like, and is being deprecated as of today. It will be fully retired on April 20, 2012.
- Urchin: In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics, helping businesses of all sizes measure their websites and online marketing. We’re fully committed to building an industry-leading online analytics product, so we’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.
Resolutions can be hard, and changing products that people love is hard too. But we’re excited to focus on creating a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google—an experience that will change the lives of millions of people.
Posted by Dave Girouard, VP of Product Management
Google Search, Punctuation Marks and Other Symbols
Google usually ignores punctuation and mathematical symbols from a query because it doesn’t index them. They rarely change the meaning of a query and Google’s index would have to grow a lot bigger, without improving the results too much. Some punctuation marks and mathematical symbols are used to provide advanced features (for example: colon, quotes, minus sign, plus sign).
I’ve recently noticed that Google started to show results for queries like [.], [,], [:], [;], [#], [%], [@], [^], [)], [~], [|], ["], [<], [$]. When you search for [%], Google shows the results for [percent sign] and that happens irrespective of the interface language, so it’s not a synonym generated by Google’s algorithms.
Search for [:] and you’ll get the results for [colon]. Most results are about the colon from the human anatomy and they’re not relevant.
WordPress: Reblogging is Back!
reblog posts directly from your reader, which displays a stream of all the updates published on all the blogs you follow from your WordPress.com account.
We’ve also brought the reblog button back to the toolbar that appears at the top of the screen when you’re logged into WordPress.com. Note that you’ll only see the like and reblog options while you’re looking at individual posts.
For example, you’ll see this on the left side of your toolbar while viewing http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs:
And your toolbar will look like this while you’re browsing the home page of en.blog.wordpress.com:
How does reblogging work?
Reblogging is a quick way to share posts published by other WordPress.com users on your own blog. People have been reblogging others’ posts since blogging started, but our new reblogging system enables authors to retain greater control over their content.
When a post is reblogged, it shows up with a link back to the blog it came from, the first image in the post, an excerpt of the post’s introduction (if it contains text), and thumbnails of any other images that the post contains. It also shows any comments left by the person who reblogged the post:
Reblogs published on blogs you follow will also appear in your reader:
What happens when my posts get reblogged?
An excerpt of your post will be published on the reblogger’s site (with a link back to your original post), and you’ll receive a reblog notification in the post comments (you might need to approve it first):
You’ll also receive an email notification of the reblog.
Do I get credit when someone else reblogs one of my posts?
Absolutely! All reblogs contain a link back to your original post, so the more people reblog your posts, the more likely it is that you’ll attract new visitors (and perhaps new followers, too!).
What happens if I reblog a reblog?
If, for example, Stephane reblogs a WordPress.com announcement on his site and Lori reblogs Stephane’s reblog, Lori only re-publishes any comments Stephane made about the announcement. If Lori wants to share the original announcement, she should reblog the post from en.blog.wordpress.com, not from Stephane’s reblog. But if Stephane leaves a really clever comment, Lori might want to share it by reblogging his reblog on her site.
Can I edit a post I’ve reblogged?
You can go back and edit the comments you left when you reblogged a post, but you cannot edit any parts of the original post excerpt (including the post title). If you like, you can add categories or tags to the post. Reblogs show up under Posts → All Posts in your dashboard, and they can be edited the same way you edit your own posts.
YouTube Tests Google+ Integration
Now that YouTube uses Google Accounts, Google can easily integrate YouTube with other Google services. The latest YouTube redesign made the integration with social networks more prominent and the videos from Google+ are just one click away.
YouTube now tests the header that’s already displayed in Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs and many other Google services. The header shows your Google+ notifications, a box that lets you share videos with other Google+ users and links related to your Google profile.
Right now, the Google+ header is only displayed if you haven’t created a YouTube account and you log in using your Google account (so you don’t have a YouTube username and channel). Obviously, you need to join Google+ to see the new features.
{ Thanks, Michael. }
Chrome’s Homepage Penalized for Paid Links
If you search for [google chrome], you’ll notice that Chrome’s homepage is no longer the top search result.
The explanation is that a video ad for Chrome was used in a lot of blog posts that promoted Chrome and one of the posts linked to Chrome’s homepage without using the nofollow attribute.
“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results,” explains a Google article.
Even though Google didn’t actually buy links, it’s strange to see that a Google Chrome campaign generated a lot of low-quality posts. Danny Sullivan says that “the bigger issue in this has always been the garbage content that was produced by the campaign, ‘thin’ material that Google has fought to keep out of its own search results. I’m still trying to understand how Google failed to understand that the marketing companies it engaged with would produce this.” Actually, the whole story is difficult to understand. “Google seems to have contracted with Essence Digital to have a video ad campaign be run across the web. Apparently, Google had no idea how Essence Digital was going to actually run the campaign or make the video ads appear across the web.”
A Google spokesperson says that the campaign wasn’t authorized by Google, but “Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site”. That’s the reason why Google “demoted www.google.com/chrome and lowered the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days”. As Matt Cutts explains, “after that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.”
Google already uses text ads for Chrome, sitelinks still point to the demoted page and the top result for [google chrome] is a Google page, so users will manage to find Chrome’s homepage, but it’s impressive to see that Google penalized one of the most important Google products because of a small mistake. After all, the videos used a DoubleClick redirect to link to Chrome’s homepage and only one of the posts linked directly to the page. That post has been removed by the blog author, so Google could have claimed that there were no paid links.
In 2009, Google Japan hired an Internet marketing company to promote one of its features. The company used paid posts and Google dropped the PageRank for Google Japan’s homepage from 9 to 5.
YouTube: Understanding Playback Restrictions
Have you ever tried to show a user a YouTube video embedded on your site only to find out that they don’t have access to view it? For instance, if you try to play the video below, it’ll say “This video contains content from test_yt_owner, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.” There are many reasons why video playback can be restricted. The user might be in a country where the video is blocked, or the video’s content owner might have decided to block access to the video from all mobile applications.
While we strive to make YouTube content available everywhere, we believe it’s important to give YouTube content owners the ability to control where their videos are viewed, which sometimes means you can’t view videos in a certain country or on a certain device.
With enhanced content controls comes increased complexity. The only foolproof way to determine if a user has access to watch a video is to ask them to try watching it. So, if you’re writing an application and you’d like to prevent users from seeing videos that they don’t have the ability to watch, here are a list of things to check:
Videos that are available for embedding on third-party applications will have the following:
<yt:accesscontrol action='embed' permission='allowed' />
If you’d like to only search for videos that are embeddable, add format=5 to your query.
Just as a video can be embeddable or not, it can also be syndicatable or not:
<yt:accesscontrol action='syndicate' permission='allowed' />
A video that is embeddable but not syndicatable will play on YouTube.com or on other sites that embed the YouTube player, but may not play on devices such as mobile phones or TVs. If you’d like to learn more about retrieving videos suitable for playback on mobile devices, see the developer’s guide.
Some videos may be restricted in certain countries. This restriction applies to where the viewer is located, not where your third-party server is located. For instance, if a video is blocked in the US, it will have the following:
<media:restriction type='country' relationship='deny'>US</media:restriction>
When you make a query, you can add a restriction parameter to filter videos that will not be playable by a client with a specific IP or from a specific country.
3. yt:state
It’s also important to check the yt:state of the video in the API response. Even if yt:accessControl indicates that syndication is allowed, yt:state might override it. For example, a video that has limited syndication would have the following:
<app:control>
<yt:state name='restricted' reasoncode='limitedSyndication'>
Syndication of this video was restricted by its owner.
</yt:state>
</app:control>
You might also see the message, “Syndication of this video was restricted by the content owner.” Hence, even if the uploader allows syndication, the content owner could override that and disallow syndication. For example, this could happen if someone uploads a video that contains a soundtrack that is owned by another content owner.
4. Rentals
Some YouTube videos are rentals. You can tell that they are rentals because they have a media:price tag:
<media:price type='rent' price='1.99' currency='USD' yt:duration='PT2592000S' />
Note that the media:price tag is only included in the response if you use a developer key in the query. If you are building a non-browser based YouTube application where it would be impossible for the user to rent a video, you might want to filter out the rentals. You can do that by passing the parameter paid-content=false.
5. Other Restrictions not Currently Exposed via the API
There are even more subtle restrictions that occasionally come into play. Not all of these are currently queryable via the API. For instance, some videos are only playable on a certain set of domains. As I mentioned above, the only foolproof way to know if a user has access to watch a video is to have them try watching it.
Going back to the video above, you might be wondering why it won’t play. If you look at its video entry:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/1kIsylLeHHU?v=2&prettyprint=true
you’ll see that it’s blocked in all countries:
<media:restriction type='country' relationship='deny'> BD BE BF... </media:restriction>
Furthermore, both syndication and embedding are disallowed:
<yt:accesscontrol action='embed' permission='denied' /> <yt:accesscontrol action='syndicate' permission='denied' />
Hopefully this short blog post on video playback restrictions will help you write applications that have a better understanding of what videos users can and can’t watch. If you have any questions, you can ask them on our forum.
Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team
Building Professional Video Sites with YouTube APIs
Using video on your website can add greater depth and richness for your audience. However, to do encoding, hosting and streaming right it takes some time and skill. If you’re lacking in either, here are some suggestions for sites that make it easy to help you setup video-based websites.
VidCaster is a video content management system, whose goal is to make building a website with video as easy as possible.
VidCaster makes use of custom URLs, video sitemaps, metadata, and thumbnails to integrate well with search engines. They provide lots of features to customize your video site, like uploading a logo, picking a theme and choosing custom colors, and you can even upload custom CSS. Using their video management interface, you can publish, unpublish and delete videos. VidCaster can even distribute the videos from your video site to third-party sites such as YouTube and Twitter, and they can also integrate analytics from third-party sources.
VidCaster uses OAuth2 with the YouTube API to manage the user’s YouTube account, using both SUP (Simple Update Protocol) and polling to make sure a user’s video site is always in sync with their YouTube channel. Companies that use VidCaster include AirBnB, Hackers and Founders, and Dirtcast.
By integrating closely with YouTube’s data API, VidCaster makes it easy for users to take advantage of YouTube’s video service from within their own custom video site.
Moviecom.tv tries to make it easy for businesses to build video sites about their company.
Like VidCaster, Moviecom.tv provides users with a variety of features to customize their video site. They too show videos hosted on YouTube, but their integration with YouTube doesn’t yet include all the features that VidCaster does — for instance, Moviecom.tv can show YouTube videos using the iframe player, but they haven’t yet integrated with YouTube’s data API. This is something they plan on doing early in 2012. Moviecom.tv also touts their mobile application which takes the friction out of recording and uploading video to the right place.
And they’re doing well at it — they were recently named a Red Herring Global 100 Winner. Internet World, City Index, and Staples are all example sites created using their platform:
Companies like VidCaster and Moviecom.tv are a welcome part of the online video ecosystem. As Moviecom.tv CEO Gillian O’Neil once noted, Moviecom.tv isn’t competing with YouTube. By enabling third-party video sites to embed YouTube videos, YouTube isn’t trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. They’re making the pie bigger.
Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team
Predictions for Google’s 2012
Last year’s predictions weren’t that great (the predictions for 2010 were better), but predicting the future is an addictive game, so I’ll try again. Here are my predictions for 2012:
1. Oflline Google stores that will sell Chromebooks, Android phones, Google TV boxes, Google-branded shirts and more.
2. Google Music will become a subscription service.
3. Google will focus on improving the quality of Android apps. It will offer better tools for creating consistent user interfaces, it will review some of the new apps and applications will be able to request additional permissions after they’ve been installed.
4. Google Games – a new service for multiplayer games that will combine the best games for Chrome, Android and Google+, while syncing your data, ranking users and allowing you to challenge your friends.
5. A new music editing online service that will only work in Chrome (and probably other Chrome-only services).
6. ARM Chromebooks (notebooks and tablets) and ARM Google TV boxes will be cheaper and more successful.
7. Google+ will have at least 300 million users at the end of 2012 and will incorporate many existing Google apps. Google will aggressively promote the service and will even integrate it with Chrome.
8. Google Instant Answers – an improved OneBox that will offer some of the detailed answers that are available in Wolfram Alpha.
9. A virtual assistant for Android that will be more powerful than Siri and it will also be available in the desktop Google interface as an upgrade for voice search. Google will get better at supporting natural language queries.
10. Google’s navigation menu will be customizable and the notification box will support new services.
11. The first Google-branded Motorola phones and tablets.
12. Google search results personalized based on information from your calendar, Google+ posts, the apps you install etc.
13. Google Doodle Creator – a service that lets you create a doodle and share it with your friends.
14. Image Search will be able to analyze images and recognize multiple objects and people.
15. Chrome Web Store apps and extensions for Android.
16. YouTube’s HTML5 player will become the default player.
17. YouTube’s new TV-like channels will combine some of the best videos that are available.
18. The largest fine in Google’s history.
19. Blog commenting service powered by Google+.
20. Google+ Answers service replaces Aardvark.
21. An online Chrome dashboard will let you access your data (bookmarks, passwords, apps) even when you don’t use Chrome.
22. Better Google Docs for tablets, Google Drive – a new name for the Google Docs list, apps for syncing files and more free storage.
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