"The true rule, in determining to embrace or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil than of good. There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of government policy, is an inseparable compound of the two, so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded."
- Abraham Lincoln
The Data Liberation Front Delivers Google Takeout: "Since we began in 2007, the Data Liberation Front has been focused on one thing: making it easier for you to take your data in and out of Google. Our first step was to make it easier to get your data out of our products, one product at a time. While we’ve made great progress on this front, we’ve been on the lookout for even better ways to let you take your data out of Google.
Today we’re pleased to announce the Data Liberation Front’s first revolutionary product: Google Takeout.
Google Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products in one fell swoop. Moreover, you’ll find that all your data is in portable and open formats‚ so it’s easy to import to other services quickly.
Today, we’re launching with five products:
These are just the beginning: we will be adding more Google products as time goes on, so stay tuned. For now, check out the settings menu in Google+ or visit google.com/takeout to give Takeout a try.
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front
Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day.
Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.
In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.
We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project:
+Circles: share what matters, with the people who matter most
Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in “friend” paper—and sharing really suffers:
It’s sloppy. We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time.
It’s scary. Every online conversation (with over 100 “friends”) is a public performance, so we often share less because of stage fright.
It’s insensitive. We all define “friend” and “family” differently—in our own way, on our own terms—but we lose this nuance online.
In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time—with their circles.
From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: we brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new—just like any other day:
+Sparks: strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything
Healthy obsessions inspire sharing, and we’ve all got one (or two, or three...). Maybe it’s muscle cars, or comic books, or fashion, but the attraction is always the same: it comes up in conversation, we immediately jump in, and we share back and forth with other fans. Often for hours. The trick is getting things started, and getting over that initial hump. Fortunately, the web is the ultimate icebreaker.
The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. And great content can lead to great conversations. We noticed, however, that it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about—not without lots of work, and lots of noise. So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks.
Thanks to Google’s web expertise, Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share—with just the right circle of friends:
+Hangouts: stop by and say hello, face-to-face-to-face
Whether it's inside a pub or on a front porch, human beings have always enjoyed hanging out. And why not? It's how we unwind, recharge, and spend unscheduled time with old and new friends alike. Hanging out is deceptively simple though, and the nuance gets lost online.
Just think: when you walk into the pub or step onto your front porch, you're in fact signaling to everyone around, “Hey, I've got some time, so feel free to stop by.' Further, it’s this unspoken understanding that puts people at ease, and encourages conversation. But today’s online communication tools (like instant messaging and video-calling) don’t understand this subtlety:
They’re annoying, for starters. You can ping everyone that’s “available,” but you’re bound to interrupt someone’s plans.
They’re also really awkward. When someone doesn't respond, you don't know if they’re just not there, or just not interested.
With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts. By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you're free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face:
+Mobile: share what’s around, right now, without any hassle
These days a phone is the perfect sharing accessory: it's always with you, it's always online, and it's how we stay close with our closest friends. We didn’t want “just” a mobile experience, however, so with Google+ we focused on things (like GPS, cameras, and messaging) to make your pocket computer even more personal.
+Location, location, location
In life, the places we visit shape conversations in lots of meaningful ways. If we call John from the airport, he’ll likely ask about our trip. Or if Jane texts from a nearby restaurant, we might join her for dessert. With Google+ you can add your location to every post. (Or not. It’s always up to you.)
+Instant Upload
Getting photos off your phone is a huge pain, so most of us don't even bother. Of course pictures are meant to be shared, not stranded, so we created Instant Upload to help you never leave a photo behind. While you're snapping pictures, and with your permission, Google+ adds your photos to a private album in the cloud. This way they're always available across your devices—ready to share as you see fit.
+Huddle
Coordinating with friends and family in real-time is really hard in real life. After all, everyone's on different schedules, in different places, and plans can change at any moment. Phone calls and text messages can work in a pinch, but they're not quite right for getting the gang together. So Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what's going on, right this second.
Starting today Google+ is available on Android Market and the mobile web, and it’s coming soon to the App Store.
+You: putting you first, all across Google
That’s the Google+ project so far: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and mobile. We’re beginning in Field Trial, so you may find some rough edges, and the project is by invitation only. But online sharing needs a serious re-think, so it’s time we got started. There’s just one more thing—really the only thing: You.
You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus—on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data; and more ways to let us know how we’re doing. All across Google.
When your invite arrives we hope you’ll join the project. But it’s entirely up to +You.
Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President, Engineering
We get a lot of great feedback about how Gmail helps you be more efficient, keep in touch with family and friends, and get work done. We’ve saved you from forgetting attachments and made sure that you got the right Bob. Over the years, adding countless features to Gmail has made it an increasingly powerful communication hub, but along the way the interface has also become more cluttered and complex.
That’s one of the reasons we’re embarking on a series of interface updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful. This is part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that’s more focused, elastic, and effortless across all of our products. The changes are not going to happen all at once. We know that you love and care about Gmail as much as we do, and we’ll be working on these upgrades gradually over the next few months to allow plenty of time to understand and incorporate your feedback into the evolving design.
We’re kicking things off with two new themes for you to try out as a sort of sneak peek at what we’re up to. Starting today, you’ll see the “Preview” and “Preview (Dense)” themes in the Themes tab in Gmail Settings. Why two themes? Our new interface will eventually expand dynamically to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer.
Here’s what one of the new themes currently looks like:
And in conversation view:
Click the images above to see larger versions.
If you poke around you’ll hopefully find a lot to like and a much cleaner, modern look but also few rough edges. In particular, some Labs features may look a little strange in the new themes. We plan to fix these issues as we roll out changes in the coming months. You can also expect some updated themes that embody the same design principles but are better suited to working in a dark environment, use a different color palette, or include the illustrations that we know many of you love to see around your inbox.
Look out for these and other new features over the next few months. In the meantime, try out the new themes as a preview of the future of Gmail and let us know what you think.
P.S. Like Gmail, Google Calendar is also getting a new look. You’ll see it automatically within the next few days so there’s no need to turn it on, and we’ll also continue to make improvements there in the coming months. Details about the current changes to Calendar can be found in the Calendar help center.
As we talked about at our Google IO session, the Google Web Fonts team has been hard at work designing a new font browsing experience for www.google.com/webfonts. Today, this new interface is available for you to try! Just click here, or you can click the New Version link at the top of our current product. The interface has a lot of the features you've requested, including the ability to preview your own custom text, the ability to compare fonts side-by-side, as well as an indication of page load times.
To arrive at the final design, our team spent significant time researching how users pick which fonts to use on your web pages, blogs and projects. Based on our findings, we sketched out dozens of possible ways to design our font browsing experience. After many iterations of testing with our test users, we believe we've arrived at a font browsing experience you'll really like.
Our primary goal with this new interface is to ensure that as the library of free, open source web fonts grows, you can still browse the library quickly and easily. To accomplish this goal, we've introduced the concept of a collection, which is similar to the concept of a shopping cart on your favorite ecommerce website. Just add fonts to your collection, and then proceed through the Choose, Review and Use steps. During this process, you can compare them side by side, experience with them in sample layouts using the new Test Drive feature, and finally copy and paste the HTML snippet to use these fonts in your pages.
During our user studies, we noticed that when users proceeded to select a font, they have a certain use case in mind. In other words, they knew they were looking for a font for a logo, for a heading or for body text. So we designed 3 different viewing modes - Word, Sentence and Paragraph - to facilitate font browsing in each of these cases. By default, you are in Sentence mode, which shows about a sentence length of preview text. But when you switch to Word mode, the font preview size increases, and the font cards shrink so you can see more fonts on the screen. When you switch to Paragraph mode, the text size will shrink significantly, and you'll see the fonts used in sample paragraphs instead.
Second, the new interface allows for easy font browsing by weight. Just use the thickness filter in the left hand panel. Looking for an Ultra black font? How about Ultra Light? Look no further. This feature relies on the font technology of TypeDNA. The Google Web Fonts are analyzed to determine each font's specific boldness characteristic. In this way, you see a consistent level of boldness across the fonts in your filter, regardless of how the font designer originally categorized them.
The new interface introduces the Test Drive module, which allows users to visualize their font collection in a sample layout. In this way, you can see what your fonts look like in practice, before embedding them in the final product. To take your fonts for a test drive, click on the Test Drive tab from within the Review step.
And finally, the new interface has a final step, Use. Here you'll find an indication of page load time based on your font selections. It's important to remember that the more fonts you use on your page, the more font data needs to be downloaded before your users can use your pages. Although Google Web Fonts is highly optimized to serve web fonts quickly to any user in the world, it's always important to request only the font families and styles you intend to use on your pages.
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