Google

Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Geographic and Local Services, joined in 1999 as the company’s 20th employee. During a recent 22-minute interview on Digg Dialogg, Mayer was asked “What do you think Google’s biggest mistake has been during your presence there?” Mayer’s answer pertained to three products: Wave, Dejanews.com, and Gmail. “Wave. Certainly there are things we’ve learnt from that, certain things we would have done differently,” Mayer said without any hesitation (this one we’re not really too surprised about). “Shutting down Dejanews.com at 11am on a Monday morning, and not having anywhere to post to or browse usergroups was perhaps a mistake,” she also admitted (Dejanews was a discussion group website on the Usenet network which Google shutdown and silently archived to its Google Groups service). “Launching Gmail on April Fools day was widely misinterpreted,” she added as a final thought (Google often “launches” ridiculous products on April Fools, so many thought Gmail was a joke until they realized it was still around the next day). ...

Google Scribe may not seem very useful, but it’s one of the features that could significantly improve virtual keyboards from mobile phones. Instead of showing suggestions from a dictionary, Google Scribe can provide contextually-relevant suggestions. Scrybe is a free Android keyboard that uses Google Scribe to generate suggestions. It’s not developed by Google and it uses an unofficial Google Scribe API, but it’s an interesting application. Scrybe needs to fix many issues to become really useful. If you delete some letters from word, Scrybe is not able to detect that you’re not writing a new word. Another problem is that you can’t type very fast because Scrybe tries to fetch the suggestions. ...

Let’s take a look in the Email I got from Google right now: Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year. Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case. ...

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered hiring Apple CEO Steve Jobs as the company’s first CEO, according to a new documentary. After interviewing a dozen unsuitable candidates during Google’s early years, Page and Brin went to meet Jobs, a personal “hero” of theirs. The pair then asked investor John Doerr, “Why can’t he be our CEO?” The anecdote comes from an episode on Page and Brin from the Bloomberg documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers.” Earlier this month, the Bloomberg series, which looks at “today’s most influential leaders,” aired an episode on Jobs. ...

Gmail has just added a new “Labs” feature that should save you some time if you’re the type of person that tends to plow through your e-mail inbox in bunches. As the name implies, the new “Auto-advance” option (that can be enabled under “Settings” > “Labs”) lets you automatically move to the previous or next conversation after archiving, deleting or muting an individual e-mail message. While that might sound like expected behavior, up until today, Gmail simply took you back to your inbox after taking any of those actions, meaning you essentially needed to scroll back down to wherever you were in your attempt at e-mail triage. ...

Google search engine’s latest innovation technology that allows users to search for information in real time does not come without its own challenges. For example, how do you prevent children from seeing adult related content while conducting a live search? Howbeit controversial, the solution, it appears, is by restricting a group of search terms so that they do not function with the new instant search feature. Consequently, users will not be exposed to viewing pornographic, hate, violent or disturbing results when conducting searches. This means that inasmuch as Google Instant was designed to simplify search and make finding information quicker on Google, no one will see results deemed to be offensive in nature by the Google team, unless they want to. Users will therefore have to hit enter to confirm a search query once Instant search stops delivering new results due to these restrictions. ...

FOXNEWS: That big old hard drive in your computer? Google says you don’t need it anymore. The company is also betting you won’t need that Windows, Macintosh or Linux stuff either. No, Google wants you to access, operate, and edit all your files on the Internet. To help with that, the company has developed a lightweight operating system of its own, the first new competition for Windows and Macs in years. It’s called Chrome OS. And it could have a profound effect on the way we work with computers. ...

In a CNN interview Monday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to questions about what Google knows about people by saying that if people don’t like having their homes photographed for Google Street View for the world to see, they can “just move.” The comment came during an interview on the Parker Spitzer show. “With Street View, we drive by exactly once, so you can just move,” said Schmidt, eliciting uncomfortable laughter from interviewer Kathleen Parker. “The point is, we only do it once. This is not a monitoring situation.” ...

Google knows it’s going to have a tough time convincing users to switch to its TV platform. As a result, over the next few weeks, the search giant is handing out 10,000 free Google TV units to developers in hopes of “empowering the developers of the world to make Google TV an even better experience, through websites that have been built with the TV screen in mind.” 3,000 Google TV devices (specifically, Logitech Revues) were already given away to attendees of the Adobe MAX conference. ...

Believe it or not, Google hasn’t forgotten about Feedburner. The RSS feed service has received an experimental new interface that better matches Google Analytics and looks like it might actually integrate into other Google AdSense and Webmaster tools. The interface doesn’t work for every component of Feedburner — if you need to access feed management or change certain settings, you can continue to use the old interface. The new interface — which is accessible via feedburner.google.com/gfb/ — shows real-time stats for clicks, views and podcast downloads from across your feeds. This is really powerful, especially if you use the Feedburner Socialize service to auto-ping Twitter when you publish a post. This can let you track how users are referred and what RSS clients are being used to access feeds. ...