Now, updates I make on those sites and accounts will also appear in my Google Buzz stream. Likewise, updates made by people (comments, etc.) will also be streamed into my Google Buzz. I only wish though that comments made on the Buzz will also be inserted into those sites (the other way around).

So, I’m looking at my Google Buzz as an stream of alerts. Other than that, I don’t see any use for it now. Feels like channel surfing.

But what happened to Google Wave? Buzz looked like a scaled down Google Wave to me. Hopefully, this won’t be another time-waster. I got some nagging privacy concerns too.

How do you find Google Buzz so far?

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First, let’s get one thing out of the way — the Nexus One wasn’t really manufactured by Google. HTC is the company behind it, the same phone manufacturer that did the Google G1. Google’s involvement is with the design concept and software integration. It’s an interesting partnership since HTC also promotes its own Android-powered handsets like the HTC Magic and HTC Hero.

The Nexus One has a solid design — combine a thin form factor, sexy curved edges with a polished finish and you get an almost perfect body. What’s a bit disappointing is the color tone used in the finish of the handset — the brown and dark gray combo turned out drab, bordering on ugly. Had they gone with a brushed-metal finish, it would have turned out nice (like that of the HTC Hero).

There’s not much physical buttons here — besides the optical trackball and power button, the only other button present is the volume rocker on the left side. There are dedicated touch points engraved on the bottom of the capacitive screen for Search, Home, Menu and Back. The bottom end houses the micro-USB port aligned with small metal contact points that’s used to connect to the optional dock (sold separately). At the back is the 5MP camera and LED flash.

The 3.7-inch screen is impressive — bright and crisp AMOLED display with resolution of 480×800 pixels. The screen real estate is large enough for comfortable viewing of web pages, Google Maps and watching videos. What the screen really is missing is multi-touch especially for browsing, viewing photos and navigating the maps. However, there are reports that the handset is capable of multi-touch and can be activated by a software update (The UK model has multi-touch and it is rumored that Google had a secret deal with Apple to temporarily disable multi-touch on the Nexus One for the US due to patent issues).

The Nexus One is powered by QualComm’s SnapDragon processor running 1GHz and you can really feel the responsiveness and how quick tasks and applications run on this handset. I’ve used the HTC Hero beside this unit and you can really spot the difference between the 528MHz and the 1GHz CPU. I’ve also tried the HTC HD2 (same 1GHz CPU) run WinMo 6.5 smoothly. The CPU performance really adds to a better over-all experience.

The connectivity options worked just fine — 3G/HSDPA, WiFi 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth. There’s no noticeable problems with 3G on both Globe and Smart, contrary to earlier reports in the US. What’s telling is that the Nexus One does not have native controls to turn on/off mobile internet — Google really expects you to have connectivity all the time. Good thing there’s a 3rd-party widget/app you can install to control this (saves on data charges and battery life). On the contrary, I have that widget built-in with the HTC Hero. The handset does not recognize the 3G network so APN settings have to be manually inputted.

The Google Android OS 2.1 has a number of improvements in it compared to version 1.5 which I am using on the Hero. However, they’re mostly cosmetic upgrades — live wallpapers, slightly new UI and better contacts list, among others. Using GMail is way better as the Contacts list automatically fills up the recipients filed as you type in the email addresses, a feature I didn’t have with the Hero.

The apps in the Android Marketplace is now more appreciated than ever, with applications and widgets running much better. I have yet to purchase a paid app though so that will be for another entry in the future.

The virtual keyboard is comfortable to use and responsive. Text input is still a pain in the first few weeks of using the unit. It gets better as you add more terms into the built-in dictionary. The predictive text gives you multiple choices at a time but you need to teach it which terms to include in the dictionary. The voice-to-text feature is nice, especially for searching. Unfortunately, my diction/accent doesn’t help a lot with the translation.

One other feature of the Nexus One that got my attention off the bat was the performance of the camera. The camera is snappy and has fast focusing. The photos have good white balance and color saturation too. Here are sample photos I took:

Video recording is almost as impressive and nearing HD quality (720×480 pixels at 20fps).

At the same time, video playback is smooth and not jumpy although the player is very simple and doesn’t support fit-to-screen to maximize viewing size. Random skipping from scene to scene is a snap and the audio is always in sync with the video. Audio volume is decent but not loud enough for open playback.

As for battery life, the Nexus One scored low in this aspect. I’d say one and a half days on regular use but expect to re-charge the handset at the end of the day, especially if you’re into mobile GMail and Twitter. Always bring the charger cable with you.

There are some stuff and features I missed from the HTC Hero with HTC Sense UI and Android 1.5 that I’ve been using for months:

• I missed the HTC Sense UI. It’s a nice addition on top of the Android UI. I missed the customizable calendar widgets and weather widget.
• The Calendar app on the HTC Hero is better compared to the Nexus One in terms of usability. It’s more visual and a lot less like the boring Google Calendar.
• The Nexus One only has 5 panels while the one on the HTC Hero has 7 (due to HTC Sense UI, Android 1.5 has 3 panels by default). That’s one point there for the HTC Sense.
• The optical trackball auto-scrolls the panels on the go with the Android 1.5. With version 2.1, the trackball selects widgets/icons in a row of the current panel before it scrolls to the next panel. Doesn’t make sense from a usability stand-point — I don’t need the trackball to select an icon/app/widget, I use the touchscreen.

The Nexus One is a great handset. The 1GHz SnapDragon is the heart of it all, if you asked me. This is more evident when doing a lot of multi-tasking. And for $529, I think it’s a steal. The Android OS 2.1 didn’t bring much to the table aside from eye-candy compared to the older versions of Android.

Update: The official Google Nexus One blog posted an entry that a software update will be available starting today. This includes a fixed to enable multi-touch functionality. Coolness! The update is not yet available on my unit though.

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If you’re in the Philippines, then you’re out of luck since Google does not support our country. Our neighbors from Singapore and Hong Kong can get one straight into their doorsteps.

However, I did some simple work-around to order my own review unit.

First, you need to get a US proxy IP address. I bought a 1-month pass for a private US IP for only $8 to make my transaction secure (I used ProxZ.com). Use that proxy on your browser (here’s a tutorial on how to configure proxy in your browser).

Now go to www.google.com/phone and order your Nexus One. It’s $529 for the unlock version ($179 for T-Mobile while Verizon and Vodafone will be available by spring). Google will allow you to have a laser engraving at the back for free but will take 72 hours longer before it’s shipped.

Next, you need a US, UK, Hong Kong or Singapore address to send the package. If you’re like me who wants it straight to your address here in the Philippines, you can try the service that I use which is MyUSMailBox (more details here).

I reckon my additional charges for shipping and customs would be around Php3k based on previous shipments I’ve made thru this service. That should land me a total bill of Php28k for the whole thing.

The unit should in 2 weeks and I’ll be getting you a better look and full review asap.

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When it first leaked out, I wasn’t too excited about it because of a couple of things — that this isn’t the first Google Android (the G1 was), that there are other similarly configured Android phones in the market (HTC Hero, Motorola Droid) and most especially that this isn’t really manufactured by Google but instead, by HTC all the same.

Still, the Google Nexus One is a looker with the promise of the better and sleeker Android 2.0 OS. The specs in itself is drool-worthy.

Nexus One
Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1 GHz processor
3.7 inches, 480 x 854 pixels
AMOLED capacitive touchscreen
512MB RAM, 512MB ROM
up to 32GB (on microSD card)
HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1
Stereo FM radio with RDS
5 MP camera with autofocus ( 2560х1920 pixels) and LED flash
Li-Ion 1400 mAh
Android OS v2.1

All these for a suggested retail price of $530. Not bad at all considering I bought my HTC Hero for $642 last month.

The other rumor that was going around before was that Google wanted to sell the Nexus One at cost for just $200 and will take profit from the use of Google services, apps and other content. That would have been awesome but did not materialized.

Nevertheless, The Nexus One deserves a good stare and people are excited just because it’s Google. If it starts selling in the US for $530 on January 5, I think you can order one and have it shipped to the Philippines all for under Php30,000 (taxes, custom duties and shipping included — see here how). Hopefully, I can grab a unit to show and review, assuming I have the budget.

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Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider.

To try it out, configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers.

If you don’t know this is done, check out these instructions if you are running on Windows, Mac or Linux.

We have some pretty serious DNS problems with our ISPs here in the Philippines so having Google Public DNS (and OpenDNS) is always a good thing.

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This is the full text from Omar Hamoui, founder of AdMob.

Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our publishers.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns.

After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our developer and publisher partners by:

* Building even more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.

* Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.

* Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our publishers.

You can read more about this deal at www.admob.com/google.

Omar

AdMob is like the AdSense for mobile sites serving billions of mobile ad impressions per month. Google AdSense for Mobile has also been recently introduced by Google but hasn’t really taken off. Acquiring AdMob is the next logical step. I just didn’t image how much that traffic acquisition is.

I’ve been doing some consultancy for a number of start-ups for some time now and one of my biggest advise to them is to invest in the mobile web this early. Just last week, I told one of them that AdMob could be Google’s next target. I’m just surprised my prediction happened this soon.

According to AdMob, the Philippines ranked #5 on their mobile web ad traffic report, up from #9 or #10 a couple of years ago. And for the last 2 years, I’ve been trying to get hold of them so we can have them talk on our annual Search Engine Marketing Conference about the mobile web and advertising.

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And mind you, these are real-time search from all Twitter updates.

Microsoft came out first with the announcement and has already implemented the search via http://bing.com/twitter:

However, upon inspection, the Twitter search on Bing doesn’t seen to be working. Now, that’s an epic fail on launch date.

On the other hand, Google’s announcement of the Twitter search integration is just an announcement. No specific date when this will be implemented and how the integration will be done.

So, why would Twitter want to give the search data to Bing and Google when they can do it on their own (which they’ve been actually doing already):

• Computing Power – search requires a huge amount of computing power (just ask administrators of very large forums on how their internal search is choking the servers). Google and Microsoft already has that technology so it spares Twitter from spending more on servers.
• Search Discovery – Twitter is already mainstream but it looks like its growth has plateaued (stagnant) for the last 3 months (according to Compete). Getting more traffic from search engines could help boost its growth.
• Monetization – Twitter could be developing a much better API and selling it as a premium to 3rd parties like Google and Microsoft. The search engines, in turn, can monetize the search traffic. It’s a win-win deal.

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Well, this is supposed to be a new way to communicate with people but if you’re the only one among friends who has a Google Wave account then there’s nobody to communicate with. You’d eventually end up leaving the window and forget about it. So unless Google puts Mafia Wars and Farmville inside Google Wave, I don’t think I’ll be spending more than 10 seconds with it (*jk*).

Second, the moment I saw the Spam Folder, I realized Google Wave isn’t moving far away from email. The biggest problem with email since time-immemorial is spam. If the Wave still has that, then we still have a problem.

Lastly, the Google Wave Panel reminds me of Outlook Express. Can they get some cool designer in the team and make it look snazzy?

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The additional Php299 monthly plan is only available to Nokia E75 subscribers but may be extended to other handsets that support Nokia Messaging.

For SMEs and corporate subscribers, the push email will also support POP3/IMAP accounts. There’s a 24-month lockin period for new applicants.

This plan may be a cheap alternative to those using mobile email on a daily basis since the minimum charge for Smart 3G is Php10 for 30 minutes. The Php299 monthly unlimited breaks down to Php10 per day.

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This was shown to me earlier by Art Samaniego of MB on his HTC Magic.

I did the same search on my iPhone 3G and it’s also there.

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The announcement same out today:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Google Chrome OS will be based on a Linux kernel and will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips. Google is actually talking to several netbook manufacturers to bring the Chrome OS to market by middle of next year.

Google Chrome OS is a separate project from Google Android. Everybody is going to get very busy — Nokia and Intel is cooperating on Moblin, Google has Chrome OS and Microsoft has Windows 7. Since Chrome OS is basically just another Linux flavor, will it succeed or go the same path as Xandros on the Eee PC?

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If you haven’t heard about it, you may want to check out this demo video from them (it’s an hour and 20 minutes long though so sit back and relax):

My impression with Google Wave is that it’s like a live session of GTalk, Wikipedia, Flickr and Twitter — all happening in a browser. It looks nice and cool — and that happens in the “clouds”.

The other impression that I am getting is that Google Wave wants to replace the way people “email” each other. We’ve already seen this with the threaded conversations in GMail and the GTalk chat feature inside GMail.

This would have been nice if people liked replying and sending out emails. But for one like me who’s flooded with emails all day, everyday and can barely cope up — there is no escape now.

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I have to admit, it’s a nice commercial though.

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Usually, after repeated communications with the culprits fail to gather any positive results, most publishers/webmaster would resort to a DMCA takedown which is filed with the web host. Sometimes it’s pretty effective and fast and sometimes not (they could always transfer to a new host or server).

The most painful way to get back at the scrapers is to hit them where its most painful — their pockets. Google offers a couple of solutions to this:

• If the culprit’s website runs Google AdSense, you can file for a copyright infringement report against that AdSense publisher. It’s most likely that the AdSense account of that publisher/scraper could get banned or terminated. Here are the steps you need to do that. Here’s more info about the DMCA for AdSense.
• If the site is intentionally scraping (misappropriating and republishing) your content but doesn’t have Google AdSense, you can file for a violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. You fill out the form here.

Just be reminded though that you must be the rightful copyright owner of the content you are complaining about. If it’s an image that came from screencap you made of a TV show or movie, you don’t own copyright of that image since it’s just a derivative of the original copyright owners (which is the TV networks or the movie producer). Neither can you complain about lyrics copied from your site by other blogs (because you don’t own the copyright to those lyrics anyway).

Now instead of just ranting on your blog about others copying your content, you can do something about it.

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TechCrunch picked up the story initially reported by Asiajin.

Paid reviews and link buying is a practice Google itself discourages so it’s a little confusing why Google would use the same tactics that it openly disapprove.

Hours after being outed, Baba Yasutsugu posted as response on the official Google Japan blog:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

Apparently, Google is trailing behind Yahoo! in Japan — just 39%, way below Yahoo’s 51.2% market share. This paid review campaign may just be one of Google’s efforts to gain more users in Japan. Too bad they got caught.

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Latitude is available on most phones — the Blackberry, S60, and Windows Mobile, and will be available on Android in the next few days. It’s highly likely it will be coming to the iPhone, through Google Mobile App, very soon — according to the official Google blog.

I tried installing it on my Nokia 5800 and it replaced my existing Google Maps to version 3. Here are some of the screenshots I took on the phone.

You can also view the location of your friends on Google Maps in your desktop (via iGoogle Gadget). The accuracy of the tracking will depending on how many satellites your GPS is connected too — up to 20 meters on 4-5 GPS satellites and as far as 800 meters on 1 satelite.

Looks cool but at the same time a little scary (especially when you know others can snoop on you). Of course, your privacy is of utmost concern for Google so you can pick who you share your data with (and assuming there’s no glitch in the system).

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Connie took a screenshot from her browser of what turned out to be human error from some engineers over at Google:

The incident happened sometime between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. as Google explains:

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

A single character (the “/”) did all that trouble. One can only imagine if it were a single word/command or a line of code?

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The list on the new Google Pack has Chrome “checked” by default and FireFox “unchecked”, displacing the latter in just less than 3 months after it was first revealed {via}.

This isn’t surprising and I’ve sort of expected this to happen (though not this soon). We even saw how FireFox ran to Yahoo! for some help.

Google will not completely remove FireFox from Google Pack nor totally stop promoting the browser as there’s still money to be had between the browser toolbar and the default search. Google even used to pay $1 for every Firefox referrals installed. The Google-Mozilla partnership generates hundreds of millions of dollars in ad clicks annually.

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Then, there’s the rumor that caught fire last Monday — about 10,000 contractors are affected by Google layoffs. According to an SEC filing, Google reported 20,123 employees by end of September 2008. However, the real number could actually be close to 30,000.

Google classifies the ~10,000 of the employees as temporary operational expenses or “workers”. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, “There is no question that the number (of workers) is too high” {via}.

From a CNet article, Google spokeswoman Jane Penner vaguely confirmed that:

“We have 10,000, and we have had a plan in place for awhile to significantly reduce that number. This is something we’ve been thinking about for awhile–six or seven months. It predates the most acute phase of the (present economic) crisis.”

Just like any other publicly listed company these days, Google shares have been sliding down in the last 6 months — hitting an all-year low of of $247 (from a high of $724.80).

Google was able to reach 3rd quarter earnings expectations by trimming operational expenses. This could have included ending or not renewing contract workers.

But even before this, news of cutting cost across all Google offices have been making the rounds:

• Renting out extra office spaces in the Google New York office.
• Shutting down in-house cafes in the Google Plex.
• Limiting employee guests to two free meals a month and no more bringing home of dinner food.
• Shutting down some beta products and services like Lively, SearchMash, etc. and re-distributing human resources.

There’s also a report by Premium AdSense Publishers and AdWords Advertisers that this year’s Christmas gift from Google will be more modest — a 2GB USB flash drive.

Google has been really good to project to the public that they’re crisis-proof. Not sure how long they can handle it well though.

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Here’s a copy of the email I receive. Odd thing though is that I’ve actually already migrated to Google Accounts so this looks like a mass email to all AdSense Publishers:

Hi,

We’re contacting you to let you know that we’ll be migrating your FeedBurner account yuga to your Google Account on 12/5/2008 .

Please rest assured, this change won’t disrupt your current feeds service. As part of this migration, all of your existing FeedBurner feeds will automatically redirect to Google feeds. You won’t lose any of your current subscribers in the process nor will this affect any email subscriptions.

All of your feeds will be moved to your new account and an initial batch of your most recent 30 days’ traffic stats will also be added. Your entire history, should it go beyond 30 days, will be added at a future date.

Once a part of the new Google FeedBurner systems, you’ll immediately be able to take advantage of our AdSense for feeds product. AdSense for feeds helps you monetize your feeds by delivering ads that are relevant to your content and your readers. Once migrated, you can start using AdSense by following these directions: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=99647 .

Please note that this migration process is required for all publishers. If your FeedBurner ID or Google Account information is incorrect, please let us know before the date at the beginning of this message.

Sincerely,
Google AdSense Team
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Last August, after migrating my FeedBurner account to Google Account, I also changed my feed URL which resulted into over a thousand subscribers dropped from the list.

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The Google Phone is one of the oddest phone I’ve ever seen in terms of design and form factor. Even the mechanism for flipping out the keyboard is a bit unconventional.

Took several shots of the phone together with the Nokia E71, iPhone 3G and Xperia X1 for some visual comparison. The G1 is indeed huge and bulky.

Will be done with my review before the week ends so watch out for it.

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A search for “yugatech” in 2001 reveals my old website hosted on HyperMart.net. It was an “AnandTech” wannabe.

Back then, .com domains were still $35 a year but there were at least two services that gave out free domains in exchange for free banner ads (via an ad bar) like NameDemo.

My university-hosted page also shows up when searching for my name and it showed our project page on WireLess LAN. I was playing around with 2Mbps WiFi networks back in 1999.

Check out Google in 2001.

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The GeoEye-1 satellite was launched into orbit the other day at a height of about 670 kilometers into the atmosphere.

Google used to buy satellite images electronic maps from mapping companies such as Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ (now owned by Nokia), some of which are old data so we don’t get to see better resolutions in some regions.

In other cities like Hyderabad, India, Google does some sort of crowd sourcing where residents are the ones who input street-level maps (to augment the Google Maps, Street View Project). The Google Product Manager explains to em that it’s a private site where volunteers login and fill out additional data to existing maps.

I said in the Philippines, this might be a difficult project since our lawmakers tend to change street names every other year and the MMDA constantly opens and closes roadways and alternate routes. *hehe*

The GeoEye-1 satellite will be able to capture hi-res images with resolution of about 41 centimeters although US restrictions only allow up to 50 cm (that means 1 pixel is equivalent to 0.5 meters in ratio). Google’s current resolution on some areas (including the Philippines) is only about 15 square meters per pixel.

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According to Statcounter.com, the turnover before, during and after the launch of Google Chrome showed significant decline of Firefox usage.

Now, that has got to hurt. While Google is supporting Firefox and have been funding them tens of millions of dollars a year, this early results is like a cat running around and eating it own tail.

Note: The Chrome browser was launched late in the day GMT time on Sept 2nd so the first full day of tracking for Chrome is Sept 3rd.

This information is based on a total sample for the period of over 250 million page views globally. All daily stats are based on 24 hour periods, bar the stats for today, September 4th, which are based on a 12 hour sample to 12noon GMT.

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But before that, let’s see what’s under the hood of Google Chrome and compare that with other browsers (layout engine):

Google Chrome: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Mozilla Firefox 3: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

Flock 1.2.4: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080714 Firefox/2.0.0.16 Flock/1.2.4

Apple Safari: AppleWebKit

Opera 9.5: Presto

In a sense, Chrome is like a hybrid of Firefox and Safari. It’s lean and its fast. When Flock came out, it was also lean and fast which is why I still use it as a secondary browser today. But nothing beats Firefox’s development community and the extensions.

Note: Google Chrome is running a serious security flaw so I wouldn’t encourage downloading and using it for the meantime.

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In an announcement in the official Google blog:

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Google will still continue efforts to help Mozilla but with the Google Chrome Browser already taking first priority, I’m not sure if the partnership will last. Of course, Google will reallocate marketing budget to its own product.

If this is an attempt to cut against Microsoft’s dominance with Internet Explorer, it might work. However, there’s a bigger possibility that Chrome will just attract Firefox users rather than IE n00bs.

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Since the early months, a lot has changed with Google Ad Manager. I’ve been using it for the last 5 months so I can say I witnessed how much improvements were made.

Now you can have several ways of serving ads:

• Target ad delivery by City, Country or Region.
• Day and Time Targeting so you can set what time and day of the week the ads should display.
• Ability to run AdSense ads on remnant inventories — AdSense ads kick in after banner impressions are completed.
• Filter ad serving by browser, browser language, operating system, bandwidth and user domain.
• Ability to serve equal amount of ads for a given time frame or display all ads as fast as possible.
• Creative rotation allows you to serve multiple display adds evenly, according to assigned weights, or based on CTR (ads with higher clicks get displayed more than the rest).
• Allows frequency capping so you can determine how many times a unique visitor gets to see a specific ad. Capping can be done per minute, hour, day, week, month or lifetime.

GAM also allows you to check available inventories per ad slot so you know if you can still rotate additional ads on a spot and how many ad impressions you can still serve.

There are still some more features I’m looking out for:

• Allow users to change their time zones. For now, I’m stuck with Hawaii time so I always adjust.
• Offer other currency for CPM rates other than US dollars.
• Fix the features in user access so publishers, advertisers, and administrators have controls and reporting available to them.

GAM is for publishers who handle multiple sites and manages direct ads on a CPM model. If you already have an AdSense account, check out Google Ad Manager and give it a spin.

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Some of the articles are just a replica of the original Wikipedia articles. But what’s really surprising is seeing high-caliber thoracic surgeons, dentists, diabetologist, gynecologists, and plastic surgeons taking their time out from their busy schedule just to write these “units of knowledge“.

I’m pretty sure that these articles should be ranking on the top of the search results anytime soon. What better way to host them than by putting them on a high authoritative domain like knol.google.com.

I just have this gut feeling that one day, we’ll see a Google Knol article at #1 and the original Wikipedia article at #2 in the search results. That’s about an additional 42 million unique visitors to Google a year.

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Google Engineering Manager, Niniane Wang, did the same thing with her time and created yet another Second Life clone called Lively. Lively rooms can be embedded on your favorite blog or website to get you to interact with friends and visitors.

A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions?

I started asking this question as a 20% project, and I’m excited to announce today’s release of Lively by Google – a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.

But Second Life never really took off or did it? Still, better late than never. Besides it’s just for fun.

Download copy of it here.

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Google started introducing the AdSense Referral Program back in November 2005 where publishers can get $100 bonus when they successfully referred someone into the AdSense network.

They slowly continued this program to include Google products (AdWords, AdSense, Picasa) as well as FireFox with Google Toolbar. And though western publishers get $1 for every Firefox downloads they refer, Asian publishers like in the Philippines only get 10% of that referral fee or $0.10 (I know it’s unfair and is tantamount to racial discrimination *hehehe*).

Then, Google finally expanded it globally with hundreds of 3rd-party affiliate products from airline tickets, to hotel reservations and several other commission-based sales.

For some unknown reasons, they started killing the AdSense Referrals back in January of this year and though they’ve somewhat retracted on that announcement, an email from Google AdSense just a couple minutes ago confirms my suspicions — Google is terminating AdSense referrals:

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

• Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.
• AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

• Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
• Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.

For most Publishers, this move is inconsequential as not many are actively using Google Referrals. The big players though (bloggers like Darren Rowse earning thousands of dollars from referring the AdSense program) who are in specific niches that get volumes of conversions will lose a passive income stream.

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