Google is bringing Polar over to Google+ in the hopes that the team behind the popular opinion-tracking service will be able to heat up Google's social network.  While it remains to be seen just how Google's latest acquisition might best fit into the Google+ experience, Google's David Besbris, vice president of engineering, told the Wall Street Journal that Polar's team will work to make Google+ more user-friendly on mobile devices.

Polar's current line of business, which it will be shutting down at the end of the year, is just what its name suggests: easy-to-use polls that can be filled out via various Web services and apps. We're not talking about surveys filled with hundreds of options. Rather, Polar's offerings are more of the "Do you like Mario or Luigi?" variety.

"Polar started with the simple idea that everyone has an opinion worth hearing. Since then one in every 449 Internet users told us what their opinion was by voting on a Polar poll. Our deepest thanks go out to each and every one of you," reads Polar's description. Polar was founded approximately two years ago by Luke Wroblewski and Jeff Cole—the former previously the co-founder and chief product officer of Bagcheck, and the latter the co-founder of Patients Like Me.

As part of the company cozying up with Google, Polar is releasing a series of articles Wroblewski wrote about mobile and multi-device design as a free iBook and PDF document. It's also a bit of a tease of Wroblewski's expertise in the area; he previously wrote a book about app design called "Mobile First," which has since become a bit of a Silicon Valley buzzword.
"Each version is filled with nuanced user interface design details and big-picture thinking on mobile and multi-device design for PCs, tablets, TVs, and beyond. It's our hope that some of our experiences, insights, and missteps, will ultimately help you with the product journey you're on now or will be in the future," Wroblewski wrote.

Google today stopped showing authorship in search results, meaning articles will no longer include a link to the Google+ profile of their author. The company says that it found the information isn’t as useful to its users as it hoped, and in some cases even distracts from the overall search results.
The official Authorship in web-search support page merely states “Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search.” Those interested in adding markup to their websites are pointed to rich snippets and structured data.

In June, Google removed authors’ Google+ profile pictures from search results. At the time, Google’s Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller said tests showed the change improved click-through rates, a direct contradiction to Google’s original thinking.
Mueller is now saying that authorship is neither beneficial nor harmful:

If you’re curious — in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.

Google first unveiled its plan for authorship markup in June 2011. Since then, the company has changed and updated how the feature works on its main service, though only recently has it become clear that it was being deemphasized. Now that authorship has been dropped completely, webmasters can remove all rel=author markup they have on their site. All the effort adding and maintaining the functionality has now gone out the window, but that’s what happens when so many Web properties rely on a single source for driving massive traffic.

Google rolled out a small but significant update to Google Maps Tuesday, which allows you to measure the exact distance between two or more points on a map. Previously, Google Maps displayed distances when you searched for directions, but it would only tell you the distance along the planned route — not the exact distance between the starting and final destinations. For example, you might search for directions to a restaurant that's exactly 3 miles away (if you draw a straight line), but the route Google provides for driving directions might actually be 3.5 miles.

Now, desktop Maps users can measure exact distances between two or more points — even if there's no road, or viable walking or driving route — which will be particularly helpful for planning jogging paths and bike rides on a map. You can even draw characters and shapes for fun (as Google did to demonstrate the new feature).

To start using the new distance-measuring tool, right click on any point on your map, and select "measure distance." Then click on another point on the map to create a path, and you will see the distance between the selected points. You can also select multiple points to measure distances between several different places. Finally, you can view the total distance between your points in Maps' search bar in the top lefthand corner of the page.

Google Inc will shut down its early social-networking service, Orkut, which was launched ten years ago but has failed to put Google ahead in what has become one of the Web's most popular businesses.
Google said it will shut down Orkut, which is widely used in Brazil and India but hasn't caught on more broadly, on Sept. 30, to focus on its other social networking initiatives. The company declined to say how many users Orkut has.

"Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell," Google said in a post on the Orkut blog on Monday.
Orkut was launched early in 2004, the same year that Facebook Inc, now the world's No.1 social network with 1.28 billion users, was founded.

The service's shutdown comes as Google's social networking plans remain in question. In April, Vic Gundotra, the head of Google's social networking services, left the company.


Google has increasingly sought to position Google+ less as a social networking "stream" that competes with Facebook, and more as a means of establishing a unified "user identity" system to improve Google's various Web properties. Last year, for example, Google began requiring users of its YouTube site to sign in with their Google+ identity before posting comments about videos.
The company said it would preserve an archive of all Orkut "communities" that will be available from Sept. 30.

"If you don't want your posts or name to be included in the community archive, you can remove Orkut permanently from your Google account," Google said. 

There are browser-based image editing apps like PicMonkey, Picozu (review) and the new Pixlr Touch-up, that works offline too, but, after having used them all for some time, none seem as impressive and intelligent as the photo editing tools that are built right inside Google Plus.

Google+ is the Best Photo Editing Tool

What really sets Google+ apart from the other image editors is the Auto Enhance mode that fine-tunes your photos automatically. Advanced users can always make manual adjustments to their photos but for the rest of us, Auto Enhance is the magic wand that will fix all the common flaws in our photos without having to click anywhere.
Just upload the photos to Google+ privately, edit them online and download the enhanced photos with a click. The other good thing about Google Plus is that it preserves your original photographs so you can always revert changes or apply different effects to your digital photos without having to re-upload the files.

Upload Photos Privately, Edit & Download

If you have never tried editing photos inside Google Plus, follow these easy steps:

1. Go to plus.google.com and click the “Upload Photos” button. You can now drag-n-drop one or more photos from the desktop to your browser to upload them to a new Google+ album.
2. Once the photos have been uploaded, click the Done button. Then choose “Skip Tagging” when Google+ asks you to tag any faces found in the photos.
3. Google+ will now prompt you to share your photo album. Choose “Skip” since we intend to keep the uploaded photos private.
4. Switch to the Albums tab and open the album that you have recently added. Open any photo and you’ll discover that Google+ has already fixed, or auto-enhanced, that photo.

15 years after the company's foundation in a garage in Menlo Park, Google has grown to become the dominant force in the online world. It is pretty amazing, if not a little scary, to see how many parts of our online experience Google controls.

The new variant of Android 4.4 KitKat will permit updated versions of Gmail for Android, Hangouts for Android, and Google Now.

The Gmail update gives it a preparation see and looks very corresponding to Google Now with cards that makes up the uncastrated Gmail port, making it easier to channelize and human congenial. The new update present materialise for all Android users employed with any Android writing from the ult, withal, fated updates module only live for users of the live duo of versions of Automaton.

The Country update for Android appears with new new contact position indicators. There are no pupil changes in the Area update when compared to Gmail, but features a full operational converse app finished Google+.

The Google Operation app update - and Google Now carry new positioning supported websites that appear in sync with your ongoing emplacement (supported on your device's GPS locating). This would afford you to enjoin your association and friends when you liberal output - a not so average power that is works gradually propulsion out, or so they postulate. The update also brings in Smart-TV game that interact with your receiver.

Google has announced that YouTube comments will start being powered by Google+ from this week onwards. This means that in order to comment on a YouTube video, you will have to own a Google+ account. One of the main reasons for moving to Google+ is YouTube’s long desire to put faces to names when it comes to commenters, in order to reduce the amount of spam and vicious comments that plague YouTube comments and also to provide video creators a recognizable audience to reach out to.

The shift to Google+ comments isn’t just to cull offensive comments but also, to organize the thousands of comments that can be found on popular videos. This is not really helpful to anyone except for perhaps the commenter himself and may be to the person he is addressing. Under the new Google+ system, comments will be arranged as per the people who are in your circles, the video’s creators and what Google calls “popular personalities”. Also, comments will be threaded so that all replies can be collapsed into the main comment itself, which will vastly reduce the clutter in the comments section and will also make it easier to follow conversations. Video creators and commenters can also allow their comments on a YouTube video shared on Google+, to show up in the comments on the main YouTube site.

Google+ has finally launched embedded posts following the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter. With the new embedded posts feature, users can grab relevant posts and add them to their website to make a point. The embedded posts supports texts, images or media posts. The embedded posts feature will allow site owners to add their public Google+ posts to their web pages.

The new feature provides users with codes needed to embed posts, including a JavaScript snippet and an actual embed code. The embedded posts are interactive, so visitors can comment or even follow the posts. The feature will be available on the public posts and can be accessed from the drop-down menu that is on every Google+ post.

Along with embedded posts Google has also launched the new authorship to Google+ sign in. The feature will allow users work to be automatically connected with their profile one they sign in with Google+. The feature has been launched on WordPress and Typepad, and will soon be available on About.com, WikiHow and Examiner.

Google's services, including the popular Google Search, suffered a rare outage on early Saturday morning. The outage was noticed around 4.20am IST and lasted for around 5 minutes. All Google services were disrupted. If a user tried to access Gmail or Google Search, the web browser returned 502 error.  Around one hour later, GoSquared, a web analytics firm, said that it noticed a 40% dip in the pageviews.

"Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time tracking — around a 40% drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows," noted GoSquared. Google's services dashboard that monitors and shows the status of Google services had a pink dot in front of each one, indicating that they were offline for the said duration. Clicking on each dot, revealed a generic message confirming the outage.

Google has rolled out a nifty update to its Search. Now, users can see more in-depth articles in the main Google Search results. According to Google, the results are ranked algorithmically based on many signals that look for quality and in-depth content. Google also gives recommendations on helping Google algorithms understand pages:

• use schema.org “article” markup,
• provide authorship markup,
• rel=next and rel=prev for paginated articles (also watch out for common rel=canonical mistakes),
• provide information about your organization’s logo,
• and of course, create compelling in-depth content.

Google in a separate blog says: “To understand a broad topic, sometimes you need more than a quick answer. Our research indicates perhaps 10% of people’s daily information needs fit this category -- topics like stem cell research, happiness, and love, to name just a few. That's why over the next few days we’ll be rolling out a new feature to help you find relevant in-depth articles in the main Google Search results.”

Google has finally added voice calling functionality to its Hangouts chat module within Gmail. The functionality was removed from the old Google Chat module inside Gmail (although many users, including me, are still able to use the function in the old Chat module) and was never added to the Hangouts module, that is primed to be the default chat application inside Gmail. Google has said that the rollout will take a couple days within which all users who’ve opted for Hangouts will be able to see the feature.

A post on the official Gmail blog explains that people making calls to and from the US and Canada using Hangouts won’t be charged anything while calls made using Hangouts in other supported countries will be charged low rates. For instance in India, making a local call using Google Hangouts will cost $0.02 (Rs. 1.20) per minute while making a call from India to France will cost $0.10 (Rs. 6 approx.) per minute. The new rollout of voice to Hangouts incorporates a lot of additional features from both pre-existing services, such as adding multiple phone numbers to the same Hangout call, hosting a Hangout with participants on video and just audio etc.

According to Google blog "Hangouts are the features of Google voice."  The voice calling feature is currently only being rolled out for desktops and not for the Hangout app for mobile OSes. As The Verge points out, it will be interesting to see if (and when) this feature rolls out to the Hangouts mobile app.

Microsoft has done a recent global study covering around 10,000 respondents across 32 different countries to assess the role of social media and research tools at the workplace. The study found that 46% of the people participating in the survey believed that the access to social media tools increased their productivity. The research also found that Indians use social media tools much more than their peers across the globe and about 71% of the Indian surveyed felt that social media and research tools increase productivity.

The changes to Gmail's Inbox testament be trilled out over the incoming few weeks, though users on the screen module be able to manually determine the new programme (selecting 'Configure inbox' in Settings), presently. The new writing module be honorable added inbox type, equivalent Artist or Antecedency Inbox, and users leave be healthy to reverse whenever they poverty.

The new Gmail inbox for screen give article tabs, fin in complete - Quill, Ethnic, Promotions (and offers), Updates (and bills and receipts), and Forums. Users give be able to incapacitate and enable these tabs from the Configure inbox choice. They instrument also be able to set all starred messages to materialise in the special inbox, and insure foreordained senders happen in destined tabs.

The new Gmail inbox automatically sorts mails into the various tabs, similar to the Smart Labels feature first unveiled a few years back. In case you feel a certain message was incorrectly assigned to a tab, you can drag and drop it into the correct tab, or right-click and select ‘Move to tab’. The tabbed Gmail inbox will also appear in the Android and iOS apps soon, with users getting the same flexibility to disable/enable the tabs, or use other Inbox types, as the desktop users.

There are a treasured few that soul reach to Google Glassware and these select individuals leave soon be deed the no. update for the augmented experience heads-up glasses. The update called XE5 brings with it several bug fixes and a form of new features.

One of the features brought to Google Container is a new throttle for uploading data in the aspect. Apps gift be fit to upload aggregation when they are related to Wi-Fi and a cognition publication. There is no aggregation why Google has adopted this policy for the glasses. To gain the update, users module hump to close the Inclose constituent into the charging embrasure. Reports on the Internet express that the update module tolerate whatever instance to download and pose. Google Glasswork is set to hit stock shelves towards the end of 2013 for roughly $1,500 (Rs. 81,000 approx.)

• Change to sync policy: require power + Wi-Fi for background uploads
• Crash reporting
• Incoming G+ notifications (direct shares, comments, +mentions), including ability to comment and +1
• Incoming Hangout notifications
• Transcription of queries & messages is now wicked-fast
• Long-press to search from anywhere in the UI (no longer just from off)
• International number dialing + SMS
• Hop animation on disallowed swipes in the UI
• New On-Head Detection calibration flow
• Show device Serial Number on Device Info card
• More reliable estimation of battery charge remaining
• New recipient-list mosaic

Google has folded out an update to its Google+ ethnic networking run, adding the remote screen characteristic to Hangouts. Now users can forecast others in their system to try their desktop through the Hangouts app.

Since users are portion of a Country, they can allay see apiece remaining and direct sound chats piece controlling another individual's machine. This is questionable to straighten providing tech supporting much easier.

Hangouts' Unlikely Screen is transistorised with equal field on the Plate Distant Desktop. To line with Hangouts Unlikely Screen, users need to begin a Country with their representative. After joining the Resort, dawn the "Looking Solon Apps" button placed on the nigh panel of the obturate. Flick "Add Apps" and instal the app. To know author most the update utter here.

Google has announced a field update to its Cover run incorporating saliency pictures and one-click set converse. The update also brings a new looking for unknown users.

"Now when you wide a line in Route, you'll see the salience pictures of otherwise audience at the top instead of retributive their names, making it casual for you to do a quick construe of who added is in the enter. You can loom over a photo to see info virtually the viewer and add them to your circles on Google+ - all without ever leaving Thrust," says Google in a journal collection.

The update also allows users to kick off a radical conversation with one penetrate. Users essential to superior the new jaw secure placed at the top honourable and a schmoose box present materialize - making it easier for users to message users sharing the file.

Google has updated search interface for its Chrome Web Store, adding filter options to the top of the page. The latest update is said to be part of Google's continuous efforts to improve the search functionality on the Chrome store. Last year, Google had social recommendations from Google+ in the Chrome Store. The feature allowed users to browse through apps that members of their circles had added +1 ratings.

The new filters are – All, Apps, Extensions and Themes. The update is likely to make searching for particular type of results easier on the Chrome store. Today’s update isn’t particularly ground-breaking, but it should make searching for specific types of results quicker. As the store’s offerings continue to grow at a rapid clip, that’s a welcome improvement.