Google Chrome 3

It's FAST. Get it. Dang, no really, it's really really fast.

A lot more at Lifehacker:
http://lifehacker.com/5359986/google-chrome-3-brings-more-speed-and-features-to-the-stable-release?skyline=true&s=x

Download at http://www.google.com/chrome

Grandcentral...the original Google Voice... closes today

I was lucky enough to sign up for a Grandcentral account years ago before it was bought by Google. Today, Grandcentral officially shuts down and you have to transfer your number to Google Voice (well worth it of course).

From Grandcentral.com

We are happy to announce the launch of Google Voice, the next version of GrandCentral. We've kept all the things people like about GrandCentral and added new features like transcripts, SMS, international calling, and conference calling. If you are a GrandCentral user, over the next few days you will be prompted to upgrade to Google Voice.

Currently only GrandCentral users have access to Google Voice, but we will be opening up the new service to new users soon. For more information about Google Voice, click here.

Another Android phone...this one for the masses?

We've been hearing for over a year now about the multiple new Android handsets that are supposed to be rolling out post TMobile's G1. Well the myTouch is here, and Hero is not far behind. Now HTC has announced the HTC Tattoo, an Android based phone that some are speculating might be priced under $100. The phone is equipped with Android, as well as the usual smartphone goodies such as wifi, 3.2 mp camera, etc.


Cnet at http://bit.ly/c9NN3 and HTC's product home page at http://bit.ly/2Fxxwp are good places for some more information.

Could be really sweet at under $100 and the right carrier. We'll see who gets it...stay tuned.

Google v. Apple: Buisness

Buisness insider is outlining 7 ways Google is trying to kill Apple. In the article they talk about iTunes vs YouTube, Chrome OS vs OS X, Safari vs Chrome, and of course the big one in my opinion, Android vs iPhone.

The mobile OS game is clearly what will determine success in the near and distant future. We know that it's heating up now that Android has some legit hand sets (see HTC Hero, myTouch). But is it already too late for Android after iPhone's incredible start? Seriously, who do you know with an Android phone (I can count the # of people I know on one hand)? Now how many do you know with an iPhone? As much as I love Google, it's clearly way far behind right now. But hopefully they'll catch up as it doesn't look like I can check my Google Voice voicemail from an iPhone anytime soon.


Full Link: http://bit.ly/q9EoE

Google Maps Monopoly...AWESOME!

From Gizmodo:

No, that's not a snarky business headline. Google and Hasbro are launching a worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the board. It's called Monopoly City Streets.

Each player starts with $3 million. They can buy any street in the world to erect houses, stadiums and even skyscapers allowing them to collect more and more daily rent (ranging from $50,000 to $100 million per property). The goal? "Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence."

Streets will vary in cost, of course, with the White House's Pennsylvania Ave. listed at $2 million, while Downing Street (London's home to the senior British cabinet) goes for just $231,000. (America, fuck yeah.)

If anyone sees a spot to register, please say so in the comments. So far we've only tracked down the game's official site and blog. And if we don't start playing right when this game starts, we'll lose out on another rare opportunity to be financially humbled by the real estate market.

From the site itself at http://monopolycitystreets.com/

Welcome to Monopoly City Streets. You versus the world in the biggest live game of MONOPOLY in history!

On the 9th SEPTEMBER, a world of property empire building on an unimaginable scale will be launched! A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.

Own any street in the world. Build humble houses, crazy castles and stupendous skyscrapers to collect rent. Use MONOPOLY Chance Cards to sabotage your mates by building Hazards on their streets.

Which strategy will you employ? Determined drive? Ingenious daring? Intelligent caution? Will you thrive under the pressure of a fast growing global property empire – or will you crumble? Find out if you’ll thrive, or even survive, in the amazing world of MONOPOLY City Streets. It's going to be epic fun!

Sound's ridiculously cool to me. Full link here: http://bit.ly/ALJ7f

HTC phone with Android coming to Sprint

Sprint, home of the cheap Simply Everything plan (w/ text, data etc), is getting an Android phone from HTC starting in October.

Sprint's plan gives 450 minutes, unlimited text and data for around $69.99. The comparable plan on AT&T runs around $90 a month (39 for voice, 20 for texts, another 30 or data). Having a Android alternative to the iPhone would be huge (especially since the Pre hit a few roadblocks, notably the App store).

As explained on cnet:

Other goodies on the 3G (EV-DO) handset include a 5-megapixel camera with video recoding, Bluetooth with a stereo profile, an accelerometer, visual voicemail, Sprint TV, a MicroSD card slot, NFL Mobile Live and Nascar Sprint Cup Mobile, a speakerphone, personal organizer options, messaging and e-mail, a music player, Wi-Fi and integrated GPS. Two especially welcome additions are the 3.5mm headset jack (previous Android devices had only proprietary connections and Out integration with e-mail, contacts and calendar (the MyTouch has e-mail only). And naturally, the Hero will support the full range of apps from the Android Market.

Full text at http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-10338820-251.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0

Happy Birthday: A Look Back at One Year of Google Chrome

An awesome look back at Google Chrome's 1 year by Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker.

http://lifehacker.com/5351067/happy-birthday-a-look-back-at-one-year-of-google-chrome

Can I sue Gmail for going off-line?

An interesting article by Chris Beam (actually an old college acquaintance of mine) over at Slate.com. He examines if he can sue Gmail for going off-line.

Gmail, Google's e-mail service, went down for about an hour and 45 minutes late Tuesday morning. Google apologized and blamed the outage on server maintenance, but only after millions of users were shut out during work hours. Can those people sue Google over the incident?
Sure, but they'd probably lose. Google's terms of service, which a user must accept before signing up for Gmail, explicitly state that "you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google's sole discretion, without prior notice to you." It also says that Google isn't liable for "any loss of data suffered" or "the deletion of, corruption of, or failure to store, any content and other communications data maintained or transmitted." In other words, Google has no obligation to save your e-mail.

The mere fact that almost no one bothers to read these terms before clicking "I accept" doesn't make them invalid. This kind of contract, known as a "clickwrap" agreement, is widely used by software manufacturers and has been upheld by the courts over and over again. According to the Restatement of Contracts, a summary of contract law, "standard form agreements"—that is, simple contracts that apply to a lot of people—should be enforced "without regard to their knowledge or understanding of the standard terms of the writing." If you don't read it, that's your problem.

There are situations in which courts might not uphold a clickwrap agreement. Say one term is especially outrageous—like you have to promise Google your firstborn—and the provision in question is buried in Volume 3, Section 2, Line 478 of a 1,000-page agreement. A judge isn't going to say, "Whoops! You should have read the whole thing." Or suppose that Google got people to sign up for Gmail by misrepresenting some aspect of its service—its reliability, say. In that case, a Gmail user could claim that he or she suffered "reliance damages" if Gmail suddenly collapsed.
Some e-mail programs do promise a certain level of reliability. For example, businesses contract with Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes to provide e-mail services, which cost money and come with performance guarantees. If they delete all your company's e-mail, you'll get some compensation. Gmail does offer a premium service known as Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 a year and promises to be functional more than 99.9 percent of the time. But the basic free service doesn't have the same guarantees.

Bonus Explainer: Can I back up my Gmail? Yes. There are several ways to do it. One is to simply set up a second Gmail account and automatically forward all your messages to it. That protects you if your primary account gets deleted or corrupted but not if the whole Google system crashes. For that contingency, you can set up your Gmail account to automatically save messages to your hard drive, which you can then access off-line with an e-mail program like Mozilla's Thunderbird. (See more detailed instructions here.) There's also a simple program called Gmail Backup that copies your archives to your hard drive with one click.

Full link here. http://www.slate.com/id/2227093/

Tuesday's GMail outage due to server overload...get more servers

I'm guessing Google owns more bandwidth than pretty much anyone, but somehow it wasn't enough Tuesday when GMail went down. According to Google:

This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn't in itself a problem -- we do this all the time, and Gmail's web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers -- servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded.

Sad times for those 30 minutes for me yesterday...

Chrome to be browser on Sony Vaio

According to the WSJ, Google and Sony have reached an agreement to get Google Chrome preinstalled on Sony's Vaio computers. Awesome for Chrome, which as I described before, is just a sweet browser (minus no extensions, but that will be fixed soon I am sure). Got a long way to go though in terms of market share. According to the article

As of July, Chrome accounted for 2.6% of the global Web browser market, according to Net Applications. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer accounted for 67.7%. Since the Sony laptops will still run Microsoft’s Windows operating system, people will likely also be able to easily access Internet Explorer from the computers too. Google executives have said in the past they are looking at a range of Chrome distribution deals.

Full link here. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/08/31/googles-chrome-nabs-sony/

Google Tip of the Day: Bookmarks in Chrome Toolbar

If you're still using Firefox (or if you somehow know what a blog is and are using IE), try out Chrome. It's just so much faster than the others. As one person said, it makes Firefox look like the new IE. Anyways quick tip from the Downloadsquad about how to add a bookmarks button to your Google Chrome toolbar. Useful because I don't like the additional real estate the bookmarks toolbar right now takes up if I keep it open and if I keep it closed, I need to open a new tab to get it quickly.

Most users of Google Chrome enjoy its minimal interface. So why use a clunky toolbar to display your bookmarks full-time if you don't have to? Like many other excellent Chrome features, adding a miniscule bookmarks menu button is only a command line switch away!

Just right click your Chrome shortcut and choose properties. In the target box, add a space and --bookmark-menu after chrome.exe. the result should something look like this:
C:\Users\LeeM\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --bookmark-menu
This works on versions 2, 3, and 4 of Google Chrome, so it's a tweak anyone can use. That is, as long as you're running Windows - my Linux and Mac versions don't seem to be able to add the button yet.

Netbook users, enjoy your extra 28 vertical pixels!

Note: as mentioned in the comments, yes, you CAN add multiple switches - just put a space in between each one like so:
chrome.exe --enable-user-scripts --enable-sync --bookmark-menu

Full link here. Thanks Downloadsquad

GMAIL DOWN!

My Gmail is down! 502 server error. I guess that's why its still in Beta. Problem is, without Gmail, I am lost. I just scanned a bunch of documents that I need to email myself, but now will have to do it all over again (public scanner). Scary how dependent we all are on Gmail/Google. Please come back soon!