Google Picasa Web Albums “Test” launched

Picasa Web Albums has launched.

Currently it is only a limited “test” release, and invitations are available from Google. To signup for an invitation, goto http://picasaweb.google.com/ and enter in your Gmail user name. Invitations are sent out on a first-come first-serve basis.

In the near future, Google will enable users to send out their own invites for friends and family.

Picasa Web Albums is Picasa’s newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web.

• One-click web upload using Picasa’s new “Web Albumâ€? button
• Free storage space to post and share approximately 1000 photos, with the option to upgrade to more space
• High-quality photos, automatically resized and optimized to fill available screen space
• Pre-loaded images enable quick scrolling using arrow keys, and mimic a desktop experience of “flippingâ€? through photos, even on the web
• End-to-end photo management that makes it easy to download uploaded photos back to your computer

Picasa offers 250MB of free storage for your images, but more storage is available for purchase if needed.

3D For Everyone - Google SketchUp for Mac OS X

SketchUp, a powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software tool by Google, is now available for Mac OS X.

SketchUp is a simple but powerful tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying your 3D ideas.

The minimum requirement to run SketchUp on a Mac, are:

Mac OS X®
400 MHz PowerPCâ„¢ G4
128 MB RAM
80 MB of available hard-disk space
QuickTime 5.0 and web browser for multimedia tutorials
Video card that is 100% OpenGL compliant

If you have never used SketchUp before, it’s definitely worth taking a look at. It is extremely easy to use, with a nice user interface.

Source Daring Fireball

Google Spreadsheets Sneak Peek

Google is accepting first-come, first-serve beta applications for their upcoming Google Spreadsheets web app. The new spreadsheet web tool from Google takes on Microsoft’s Office Excel application, which has dominated the industry, with very little competition so far.

Google Spreadsheets is a limited test. If you fill in your email address below, we’ll send you an invitation - first-come, first-served.

Digg VS Slashdot on Google Trends

In April of 2006, Digg surpassed rival website Slashdot, and entered the top 100 sites of the internet on Alexa’s rankings. According to Google Trends, Digg has now also passed Slashdot on google searches.

A little bit of background info.

Digg started by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson in November of 2004, digg has quickly become one of the most visited websites on the internet. Digg is a community based news site, where users submit stories which are then placed in a holding area where they are voted on by the community. If a submission gets enough “diggs”, it is automatically placed on the front page. Digg has very quickly become one of the fastest growing websites on the web surpassing 200,000 registered users in April of 2006.

Slashdot(often referred to as /.) was started by Rob Malda in 1997, and is now owned by the Open Source Technology Group, part of VA Software. Much like digg, slashdot is also a community based news site. Users can submit news, which is also placed in a holding area. However, unlike digg, slashdot mods control what makes it onto their front page.

When a story makes it to the home page of either site, any linked sites associated with that story get flooded with traffic. Slashdot is know for it’s “Slashdot Effect”, which usually is referred to websites crashing from the flood of incoming traffic.

Although the core audience of these sites is different, they are often considered rival websites.

Google Notebook Launches

Google Notebook has launched. “With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that’s accessible from any computer. Planning a trip? Researching a product? Just add clippings to your notebook. You don’t ever have to leave your browser window.”

Clip and collect information as you browse the web.

• Clip useful information.
  You can add clippings of text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window.
• Organize your notes.
  You can create multiple notebooks, divide them into sections, and drag-and-drop your notes to stay organized.
• Get access from anywhere.
  You can access your Google Notebooks from any computer by using your Google Accounts login.
• Publish your notebook.
  You can share your Google Notebook with the world by making it public.

How-To: Getting Google maps and Yahoo maps to work behind squid

If you are using Squid within your company and you need to allow access to certain sites, you can simply add them to your “goodsites” list.(If you are new to squid and need help setting it up, here is a quick start guide) However, some sites require just a little more work than that.

Here are a few quick tips for getting Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps to work with a Squid configuration which white-lists sites.

In your “goodsites” file add the following domains for Google Maps:

local.google.com
maps.google.com
mt0.google.com
mt1.google.com
mt2.google.com
mt3.google.com
mt4.google.com
mt5.google.com
kh0.google.com
kh1.google.com
kh2.google.com
kh3.google.com
kh4.google.com
kh5.google.com

and the following domains for Yahoo! Maps

.maps.yahoo.com
.rd.yahoo.com
.ard.yahoo.com
.srd.yahoo.com
.yimg.com

To figure out which domains you need to add to the list to allow access to a website that uses multiple servers(such as Google Maps), load up the page with a Firefox browser that has unrestricted internet access, and go to “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Media”. You probably need to add most of the domains that you see in that list to your “goodsites” file, to allow full access to that site.

Google expands into Arizona. Now hiring!

Google is now hiring at their new Phoenix, Arizona facility.

Built close to the Arizona State University, the brand new Google faciliy will employ 600 people, focusing mainly on engineering. Google will be recruiting computer science and network engineering graduates from the near by University.

As of late last year, the company was hiring at an average rate of 10 people a day.

Google Calendar is UP!

Google Calendar has launched! That’s right, the very(very!) long awaited Google Calendar service is now available for use. Just login with your google account and you’re set to go.