Google Friend Connect, now more personalized

(Cross-posted with the Social Web Blog)

On the subway, I bump elbows with a guy for 20 city blocks without exchanging a single word. Forty-five minutes later, I find the same guy at the local guitar shop, and we start to talk — turns out he plays a Gibson Les Paul just like I do. We may have been strangers on the train, but in the guitar shop, we discover our shared passion for guitars.

Often, the web can feel like that subway. There are probably people commuting to the places you regularly visit, but you don’t know who those people are, and your paths may never cross. With Google Friend Connect, we've been helping millions of website owners make their sites more like that guitar shop — a social place where visitors can get to know each other — and less like the anonymous subway ride.

With this in mind, we're thrilled to introduce a new set of Friend Connect features that let site owners help their visitors get to know each other and personalize their site's experience and content.

Break the ice
Visitors to your site can get to know each other better by sharing details about themselves that are relevant to the site they're on. As a site owner, you can help them do this by visiting the new "Interests" section of your Friend Connect account, where you can add site-relevant questions that people can answer when joining your website or via the poll gadget. For instance, if you have a music website, you might ask people to share their favorite bands, the last concert they attended, or where they discover new music. Or if you run a hiking site, you can ask them about a favorite hike or national park. The details people share are added to their Friend Connect public profiles for your site, which are seen by other site visitors. This way, your visitors can learn more about each other in the context of the interests that bring them to your website.

We've also added the ability for people to send private messages to each other. That way, when a user discovers someone who shares their interests, they can send a message to that person via their Friend Connect profile to start a dialogue.

And as with any data you collect on Friend Connect, you can use open export tools and APIs to integrate this information with any other systems you might use. The interests people share on your website are also made available in the new "Community data" section of your account in the form of easy-to-read charts.

Personalize your website experience
The ice-breaking isn't limited to your visitors; you'll learn more about them too. The interests people share make it possible for you to create a more personalized experience on your website in a number of ways:

• Send custom newsletters: The new "Newsletter" section of your account lets you create, send and manage newsletters. And with the help of "Interests," you can either send out newsletters to all your subscribers, or send out custom newsletters to different segments of your subscribers, based on the interest responses they submit.
• Personalized content gadget: This new Friend Connect gadget automatically presents a dynamic personalized set of links to your site's content that matches each visitor's specific interests. Is a visitor learning how to play swing music? Links to articles your site has published about playing swing are presented to him or her.
• Google ads: For those of you who display ads on your website, your Friend Connect account now includes an "AdSense" section that lets you enable Google ad units that are matched both to your site's content and to the interests users publicly share on your website. 

All these new features are easy to implement and require no coding whatsoever. Here's a quick tour of what Friend Connect now has to offer:



If you'd like to see the new features in action, check out some of our partners' sites, like sfstation.com, metrolyrics.com and pachakam.com.

We're excited to see the web evolve into a place where visitors of all websites can get to know each other — to share and discuss the things they care about most. To get started with Friend Connect, visit http://google.com/friendconnect.

Update 11/15: Updated list of partners. 

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend's New York blog!

Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn't always very easy to find in one simple place. That's why today we're rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. It should be available for everyone to try by the end of the day, so be sure to check back.

A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend's New York blog probably isn't going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I'll find are some well-known and official sites. We've taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today's launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend's blog on the results page under the heading "Results from people in your social circle for New York." I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking "Show options" on the results page and clicking "Social." Check out this video for a demo:



All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we've done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you're following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we'll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we'll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

To learn more about how Social Search works behind the scenes, including the choices and control you have over the content you see and share, read our help center article or watch this video:



This feature is an experiment, but we've been using it at Google and the results have been exciting. We'd love to hear your feedback. Oh, and don't forget to create a public Google profile to expand your social circle and more easily find the information you're looking for (including that New York blog).

Posted by Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead and Murali Viswanathan, Product Manager

Reading gets personal with Popular items and Personalized ranking

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Reader Blog)

Today, we're launching two changes to Google Reader to help you discover more interesting content faster. Just as the launch of Personalized Search improved search results based on your search history, these changes use your Reader Trends to improve your reading experience.

• Explore section - We're always trying to help you discover new stuff in Reader, and today we're introducing Popular items and Recommended sources, two ways to find interesting content from all over the Internet. We use algorithms to find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions), collect them in the new Popular items section and order them by what we think you'll like best. Now you don't have to be embarrassed about missing that hilarious video everyone is talking about — it should show up in your Popular items feed automatically. And to make it easier to find interesting feeds, we're moving Recommendations into the new Explore section and giving it a new name — Recommended sources. Like always, it uses your Reader Trends and Web History (if you're opted into Web History) to generate a list of feeds we think you might like.

• Personalized ranking - Only have a 10-minute coffee break and want to see the best items first? All feeds now have a new sort option called "magic" that re-orders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order. Click "Sort by magic" under the Folder Settings menu of your feed to switch to personalized ranking. Unlike the old "auto" ranking, this new ranking is personalized for you, and gets better with time as we learn what you like best — the more you "like" and "share" stuff, the better your magic sort will be. Give it a try on a high-volume feed folder or All items and see for yourself!

The goal of personalization at Google remains the same as ever: to help you find the best content on the web. We hope these new features help you do just that — go Explore for yourself.

Finally, we'd love to hear your feedback — share your thoughts on our help group, Twitter or the Reader section of Get Satisfaction, a third party support community.

Posted by Beverly Yang, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Introducing this year's CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Finalists as iGoogle artists!

We're always delighted to introduce new design flair to our user experience, especially through the personal expression of iGoogle themes. As a canvas for artists to express themselves and reach Google users around the world, we've shared more than 125 iGoogle Artist themes since May 2008. Today, I'm excited to announce ten new artist themes, all from talented up-and-coming fashion designers you may not have already heard of.

Each year, Vogue and CFDA sponsor a fashion fund, created to support emerging designers. Through inspiration drawn from Google, our colors and our products, this year's ten finalists have created both incredible fashions and corresponding iGoogle themes. From the high-tech and contemporary designs of Wayne to the Google Maps-inspired work of Sophie Theallet, each of these ten new themes is a unique way to refresh your homepage's fall wardrobe.

Artist themes are one of many ways we invite talented artists and innovators to share their designs, whether world-renowned or emerging. So check out the latest Artist themes and pick one that appeals to you.


Finally, we'd like to offer our congratulations to this year's Fashion Fund finalists. We're proud to be showcasing them in our iGoogle artist themes. Based on their iGoogle themes and design entries, their talents are obvious and we're happy to see them recognized!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, and Michaela Prescott, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Fast, simple and now stylish: Google Chrome with Artist Themes

We're always keen to share updates about our browser Google Chrome. This past month, we launched a new stable release with speed improvements and updates to key features, as well as a little something extra to make your browser pop: themes. Today, we're excited to build on this initial splash of color. We invited leading artists, architects, musicians, illustrators, filmmakers and fashion and interior designers from around the globe to create artwork for an unusual canvas: the modern web browser. The result? Artist Themes for Google Chrome, a fusion of art and technology, with a hundred Artist Themes that we hope will enrich and personalize your web browsing experience.

We're honored to have had the opportunity to work with artists including Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Karim Rashid, Jonathan Adler, Oscar de la Renta, Anita Kunz, Tom Sachs, Kate Spade, Donna Karan, Kid Robot, Casey Reas, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Graves, Todd Oldham, Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Mariah Carey (and that's just to name a few!). We would like to extend our thanks to all the artists for lending their vision, imagination and hard work to this collaboration.

For a behind-the-scenes look at one illustrator's unique creative process, check out the Google Chrome Blog. And for a preview of these themes, here's a video flipbook we've compiled to showcase some of the artistry behind this project:



If you haven't tried Google Chrome recently, download the latest version and give the Artist Themes a whirl. If you're already using Google Chrome, check out the themes gallery and try on your favorite Artist Themes.

Posted by Glen Murphy, Software Engineer, and Mark Sabec, Associate Product Marketing Manager

I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social!

We launched iGoogle in 2005 as a way for people to quickly and easily personalize their Google experience with all the information on the web that was most useful to them. Now tens of millions of people choose to use their iGoogle homepage to check email, track the news, watch videos, chat with friends and much more. Today, we're pleased to tell you about the new social features that we're introducing to iGoogle.

First, we're excited to introduce social gadgets for iGoogle. Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we're debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun. If you're a gaming fanatic, compete with others in Who has the biggest brain? or challenge your fellow Chess or Scrabble enthusiasts to a quick match. Stay tuned in to the latest buzz with media-sharing gadgets from NPR, The Huffington Post, and YouTube. To manage your day-to-day more efficiently, check things off alongside your friends with the social To-Do list gadget.

Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates. Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more. To help you manage who you are sharing with, we've created a Friends group. You can add and edit friends in this group at any time. If you already have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you'll be able to easily share with those friends on iGoogle as well. If you don't care to share, iGoogle's social features are optional and can be disabled on a gadget-to-gadget basis with just a few clicks.

It's developers who have really made iGoogle into the rich experience it is — growing our gadget directory to over 60,000 gadgets today — and we know iGoogle developers will help us quickly expand our collection of social gadgets. You can get information about how to build social gadgets for iGoogle on our developer site: code.google.com/igoogle.

We introduced these new social features recently to Australia users and are gradually rolling them out to users in the U.S. over the next week. Don't fret if you don't see your iGoogle page updated yet — just check back soon. The Google homepage has always been a place that connects people to information, and we're excited to now also be a place that connects people to each other. We hope these social gadgets make iGoogle an even more fun and personal homepage for you. You can learn more by checking out the video below.



Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience and Rose Yao, iGoogle Product Manager

It's a bird...it's a plane...it's iGoogle comics themes!

We have always been excited to introduce design flair and whimsy to our user experience, especially on our homepage. Be it through our special holiday logos or special themes for our iGoogle users, we like to open up our homepage as a canvas for artists to express themselves and reach their fans and Google users around the world. Today, I'm particularly excited to announce the new comics themes for iGoogle, just in time for Comic-Con's 40th anniversary.

The themes showcase the amazingly diverse world of comics. Browse our gallery (www.google.com/comicsthemes) to choose from nostalgic comic strips like Peanuts, iconic heroes like Batman and Iron Man, or alternative comics greats like Dan Clowes, author of the graphic novel, "Ghost World." The dozens of themes represent talented artists from around the world including Rumiko Takahashi from Japan and Lewis Trondheim of France.

To offer his unique perspective as one of the world's most accomplished comics artists, I'm pleased to introduce guest author Jim Lee. In addition to being a recognized industry veteran, he also drew today's beautiful homepage logo incorporating some of DC Comics' most famous characters.

During his 20 year career, Jim has worked with DC and Marvel Comics, co-founded Image Comics and also WildStorm Comics – one of our iGoogle themes. His Batman, Superman, X-Men, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and WildC.A.T.s issues have sold millions of copies. Jim is a recipient of the Harvey Award, Golden Panel Award and is widely respected for his contributions as an artist, a creator and a publisher of comics.

An artist's POV by Jim Lee

Even as the world of comics evolves and embraces a new digital era, it doesn't change the universal, international appeal of the unique art form that is created through the simple marriage of word and picture. I'm excited to have been chosen to help launch this wonderful project. But I'm more elated, both as a professional and as a fan, that so many different types of comics have been chosen to be part of the iGoogle comics themes launch. From the mainstream superhero world of DC that I work in to the mainstays of the newspaper funnies from my childhood, to the Tokyopop manga titles I collect with my teenage daughters to the esoteric and more literary works of Dan Clowes and Gene Yang, two of my favorites; I think the breadth of choices available demonstrates the amazing diversity and the fundamental vitality of the stories comics can tell.


Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and Jim Lee, Comics Creator/Publisher

Toolbar, now with advanced translation

If you saw this text on a webpage, how would you figure out what it means?

Если вы читаете этот текст, вы, вероятно, уже говорите по-русски. Однако миллионы людей не знают русского и не могут прочитать миллионы русскоязычных веб-страниц.*

You would likely need to translate manually via our language tools or in Toolbar. Today we're excited to announce that translations will be even easier with the newest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. We have been working with the Translate team to make translations a faster and more integrated part of your browsing experience.

The Translate feature automatically detects if the language of a webpage you're on is different from your default language setting and allows you to translate it. With one click, you can now instantly translate the page and all of its text will appear in the new language.


Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google until you choose to translate a page. You can find more details about how the feature works in our help center.

If you go to another page in the same language, you will continue to see translations rather than have to translate one page at a time. And if the page has dynamic content, like Google Reader, you will get translations in real-time. Finally, if you frequently translate pages in the same language, Toolbar will let you translate that language automatically without any extra clicks in the future.

The new Translate feature is available in all international versions of Toolbar, including English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Download Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer to try it out for yourself. We'll add this feature to Toolbar for Firefox soon, too.

* In case you don't speak Russian, we translated the paragraph above for you using our translation engine:

If you are reading this text, you probably already speak in Russian. However, millions of people do not know Russian and cannot read the millions of Russian-language webpages.

Posted by Jerry Tang and Dick Sites, Software Engineers

We have a winner for the Google Photography Prize

Huge congratulations to Daniel Halasz from Hungary, who was awarded the Google Photography Prize this week. This was a global student competition to create themes for iGoogle. More than 3,600 students from across the world entered, and a couple of weeks ago we asked you to vote on the shortlist. The six finalists who got the most public votes were Amelia Ortúzar (Chile), Fahad AlDaajani (Saudi Arabia), Matjaz Tancic (U.K.), Mikhail Simin (U.S.) and Vesna Stojakovic (Serbia) — congratulations to all of them! From that group, a jury of respected art critics and artists chose Daniel as the winner. They also gave a special commendation prize to Aliyah Hussain from the U.K.

You can see the work Daniel and the other finalists submitted at the Saatchi Gallery in London until Sunday, June 28th. Come by if you're in town, or have a look at their photographs on google.com/photographyprize, where you can also add them to your iGoogle homepage.

Posted by Posted by Louise Rigby, Consumer Marketing Team

iGoogle goes au naturel

We are excited to release a new set of iGoogle themes today. Drawing on the arrival of summer and the spectacular beauty of the world around us, our new iGoogle themes focus on nature. To create these themes, we worked with organizations and photographers who capture the world's best nature photography, including National Geographic Society, BBC and Ansel Adams Gallery.

At its core, iGoogle is about personal expression. Themes are one of many ways we invite you to personalize your homepage with things that inspire you — artists, fashion designers, musicians, video games or simply the stunning beauty of the world around us.

Here's a quick preview of some of the highlights in our new nature collection:

• National Geographic's "Ocean Blue" takes you from shark territory in the Caribbean to ice floes on the polar caps
• The National Audubon Society's "Birds of Prey" features winged predators depicted in the classic Audobon hand-drawn illustration style
• Art Wolfe's "Travels to the Edge" includes views deep into the forests of North America and aerial shots of river deltas and rice paddies
• Rodney Lough's "Deserts" presents striking images of the most desolate — and stunning — corners of our planet

So, check out the new nature themes. We hope you enjoy exploring the world's wonders from the comfort of your iGoogle page. Then get outside this summer and celebrate the real thing.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and Nate Johnson, Product Marketing Manager

Snack time with the new iGoogle for Android and iPhone

(cross-posted with the Google Mobile Blog)

We like iGoogle because it lets us "snack" on interesting information all day long. We can read a little bit of news here and there, glance at finance portfolios, take a look at the weather forecast, and then do a Google search. It doesn't require a big commitment of time and energy — it's simply there for us whenever we need it. This kind of availability is even more important on a phone, where it can take a long time to surf. That's why iGoogle is so convenient on mobile devices. When you're waiting in line, you can check iGoogle on your phone for a quick "info snack" — even in areas with mediocre network coverage.

But speed isn't everything. Many of you have told us that you wanted to use more of your iGoogle gadgets on your phone. You wanted to see your tabs, too. We read your blog comments and forum posts and put your requests at the top of our to-do list.

Today, we're excited to roll out an improved beta version of iGoogle for the iPhone and Android-powered devices. This new version is faster and easier to use. It supports tabs as well as more of your favorite gadgets, including those built by third-party developers. Note that not all gadgets — like those with Flash — will work in mobile browsers.

One of our favorite new features is the in-line display of articles for feed-based gadgets. That means you can read article summaries without leaving the page. You can also rearrange gadget order or keep your favorite gadgets open for your next visit. None of these changes will mess up the layout of gadgets on your desktop computer, so feel free to play around and tune your mobile experience. 



The new version of iGoogle for mobile is available in 38 languages. To try it out, go to igoogle.com in your mobile browser and tap "Try the new Mobile iGoogle". Bookmark the page or make it your home page so you can return to it quickly. Finally, please fill out our survey by clicking on the "Tell us what you think" link at the top of the new home page. We'll continue to use your feedback to make iGoogle even better.

Update on 6/12 @ 8:50 AM: Video added. Check it out!

Posted by Dan Zivkovic and Zhen Wang, Software Engineers, Google mobile team

Translating the world's information with Google Translator Toolkit

At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.

For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit's bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system "learns" from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world's Internet population.


Besides Wikipedia, we've also integrated with Knol, and we support common document types including Word and HTML. For translation professionals, we provide advanced features such as terminology and translation memory management.

For more information, check out our introductory video below. And if you're a professional translator or just a linguaphile, try Google Translator Toolkit for easier and faster translations. Be sure and let us know what you think.



Posted by Michael Galvez and Sanjay Bhansali, Google Translator Toolkit team

Tour the homepages of your favorite celebrities

Have you ever wondered what celebrities do when they use the web? Today, we're announcing the new iGoogle Showcase, which allows you to see and share the homepages of some of your favorite icons. These 30 preeminent people, including Dave Matthews, Rachael Ray and Katie Couric, are sharing their iGoogle pages with you in full so you can get a glimpse into their interests and how they experience the web.

The iGoogle Showcase allows you to either add a celebrity's entire iGoogle page to your own, or browse through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes from several pages. For example, you might select Al Gore's iGoogle page for his preferred theme and gadgets for keeping up on the latest media news, supporting the Alliance for Climate protection cause or browsing through photos from National Geographic.



In addition, many of our celebrity partners have created their own custom iGoogle gadgets to easily connect with their fans every day. If you're a Ryan Seacrest fan, his new gadget can help you keep up with all the latest entertainment news. You can follow his tweets, watch exclusive videos, listen to radio interviews, and view his photo albums. Donald Trump offers advice to entrepreneurs, Martha Stewart shares recipes and tips, and Anderson Cooper delivers headline news and extras from his CNN show AC360.

To get any one of our celebrity themes or gadgets on your own iGoogle page, visit the iGoogle Showcase. We've all heard about "six degrees of separation," but now, some of your favorite stars are just a few clicks away.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience

iGoogle's got game... themes!

I'm happy to announce the launch of iGoogle game themes. These themes offer our users new iGoogle backdrops inspired by their favorite video games, including classics like "Mario" and "Mega Man" and new sensations like "Wii Sports" and "Spore." Like our iGoogle artist themes, fashion and music themes and themes for causes, we hope that the game themes delight our users and reflect their personal interests. As you can imagine, these themes in particular have captivated our iGoogle software engineers who are gamers themselves. I'll now turn the post over to one of our engineers who worked closely on the project, Matthew Chan, for more details.

A gamer's POV

I confess, I'm a game geek. My first experience with video games was spending hours and hours (not to mention my weekly allowance) playing "Donkey Kong" and "Galaga" at a nearby arcade until my fingers ached. These days I no longer have to ride my bike to the neighborhood arcade to play video games — I can do it in the comfort of my own home anytime I want! And even better... starting today, I can have images of my favorite childhood games right on my iGoogle page.

iGoogle now has graphics from all sorts of games that I know will excite my fellow gamers. Picture your homepage with "Burnout" cars zooming in the background, Ryu from "Street Fighter" blasting hadoukens across your page, or rock stars jamming out to tunes from "Guitar Hero." It doesn't end there. For those of you who used to dream about completing the Triforce or getting out of tombs alive, choose from "Zelda" or "Tomb Raider." Want more? Try "Dungeons & Dragons," "The Sims 3," or "World of Warcraft" on for size.

So come check out the new game themes (www.google.com/gamingthemes) and choose your favorite one. If you can't decide, no worries. Just add the game theme of the day and enjoy seeing a different one on your iGoogle page every day.

Here's a look at the themes in action:



Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, and Matthew Chan, iGoogle engineer

Chatting away on iGoogle...

I'm a creature of habit. My morning routine consists of going to my desk with coffee mug in hand and checking my email, reading the news and updating my to-do list. One place I can do all of that without having to go to multiple websites is iGoogle. Having the ability to work on email right on my iGoogle page has been awesome, but I simply couldn't get the same Gmail experience without the chat feature. So we got together with the iGoogle team several months back to talk about how to integrate a chat feature on iGoogle, and since then, we've been running experiments with a small number of iGoogle users and have also been using it internally. We're pleased to announce that starting today we are extending the feature to a larger set of iGoogle users.

Similar to the chat feature on Gmail, people will be able to send instant messages to their colleagues, friends and family straight from their iGoogle page. We've made this easy. If you're already a Gmail chat user, all your current chat settings will apply to iGoogle, so things will work the way you like in both places. But even more exciting is that you'll even be able to chat with friends who don't yet have a Gmail address — any email address will do. All you have to do is invite them as a chat buddy, and if they accept your invitation and sign up for iGoogle with their personal email account, their name becomes just a click away right on your page. Don't want to be bothered while you're checking out the latest news or reading your emails? You have a couple of options to hid the chat feature. You can either click the chat “options” link and selecting “hide chat,” or sign off completely by selecting "sign out of chat."

It's worth noting that this feature may have some kinks, so we ask for your patience as we work through them. Here at Google, it's common practice for us to involve our users as early possible so we can make sure we get it right. We'll also be rolling this feature out slowly, so if you don't see it on your iGoogle page and you simply can't wait to check it out, feel free to opt in by going to www.google.com/ig/v2invite.

Currently, iGoogle chat is rolling out in English for our U.S. users. But don't worry, the feature is coming soon for other iGoogle supported languages and countries. You can check out our Help Center for more information on how it works, and as always, we are interested in hearing any feedback you have.


Posted by Rhett Robinson, Google Talk Engineer

Share the iGoogle love

Since we launched iGoogle two years ago, we've received some fascinating stories from users telling us about interesting ways they're using their personalized Google homepage. Some have mentioned a particular gadget that they could not live without; others have said how much they enjoy artist themes. Some people have let us know how they've used our tools to create their own gadgets and themes. We've also heard personal stories about how people have tailored their page to keep their relationship alive, their news filtered, and their life organized.

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, we're asking all iGoogle fans to share the love by submitting a written story or video describing what's special about their homepage. Your story can mention anything you want about your page — from something practical to something heartwarming. If you aren't a video whiz, don't worry. You can just tell it like it is. But we do encourage you to spice up your submission however you'd like — the best ones will be showcased for all to see.

For each entry received, we will 'share the love' back by sending you a free set of iGoogle artist theme laptop stickers.* You can choose from six popular themes, by Radiohead, Michael Kors, Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Ecko, kate spade and Paul Frank.

Visit www.google.com/sharethelove09 to find out how to submit your story and receive your stickers. We're looking forward to reading (and watching) your love stories. To help you get inspired, we've put together this short video that shows some of our favorite ways to use iGoogle.



*One sheet per person. We regret we can only mail to U.S. addresses and only while supplies last.

Posted by Brittany Bohnet, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Making your personalized homepage even more personal

The holidays have passed, but if you're anything like me, you've got a gold mine of bear hugs and embarrassing moments captured on film. My holidays wouldn't be the same without Tabby, our family cat, who has been part of the winter festivities for 10 years. Over the holidays, we caught Tabby sticking out his tongue at the family get-together! Below is one of those prized moments I wanted to post everywhere, including on my personalized homepage:


Now, you too can capture memories and images on your iGoogle homepage by building a custom theme. We've just released our new tool for creating iGoogle themes. It's an easy way for iGoogle users to spruce up their personalized homepage without needing to know how to use XML, etc. All you need is an image, and we'll provide the rest.

The theme-building tool has a simple interface for uploading your photo from your desktop, Picasa Web Album, or the web. Once you've chosen a photo, the builder provides a basic set of tools to help you create your theme:

• Image Cropping - Crop your favorite photo to fit your iGoogle theme
• Color Schemes - Pick colors to complement your photo
• Real-time Preview - See immediate feedback of your changes to swiftly fine-tune your theme
• Public and Private Publishing - Choose who gets to see your original themes, whether it's just you, or if you want to share them with the world

Once your theme is created, it's immediately added to your iGoogle page for you to enjoy.

We hope you have fun customizing your iGoogle homepage with your favorite images, whether they're photos of your pets or places you've visited, drawings, designs, cartoons — or whatever else your heart desires.

Update on 1/16 @ 10:30 AM: A number of people are having trouble accessing our theme-builder tool. We're currently working on the issue, and we'll post here as soon as it's up and running again. We're sorry for the delay, and we'd like to thank everyone who let us know they had trouble accessing this feature.

Update on 1/22 @ 4:25 PM: Our theme-builder tool is now available to anyone in the U.S. who has their language default set to English, and we hope to release this feature in other languages and countries soon. Thanks for bearing with us, and we'll keep you posted on further updates.

Posted by Kathleen Ko, iGoogle Engineer

Give your gadgets some space

This week we launched a set of new features to all iGoogle users in the U.S. These features were designed to make it more powerful and bring more information to the homepage.

At the heart of this release is a feature we call "canvas view," which gives you the option to maximize your gadgets into full-screen mode. To use the Gmail gadget as an example, previously, you could only get a quick snippet of your Gmail messages on iGoogle. Now you can maximize Gmail to fully read and reply to your messages.

Comics. Games. Feeds. Photos. All of these get better when you give them some space. And to give you fast, one-click access to maximize your gadgets, we've introduced a new left-navigation model. This is a good way to navigate to these new, richer applications, and it makes space for more features you'll see in the coming months.

We invite you to take a tour of all the new features, and hope you'll give us a chance to show you why we're excited about the evolution of iGoogle.

Posted by Jessica Ewing, Group Product Manager, iGoogle