Voice and Video Chat now in your Gmail window

Google has just launched Voice and Video chat right within the Gmail window. Go to Google’s Voice and Video Chat page and install the plugin available there. It uses Google updater to install the plugin software and does not need any inputs from you except the final prompt to restart your browsers. Here are a few screens showing you the install process.
 

After you restart your browser logon to your Gmail and sign-in to the Chat gadget on the left. Now you see the options to have Voice Chat and Video Chat depending on the capabilities of the PC other side.
 
Let me know your experience with this new cool feature from Gmail…

Share photos with friends and family using Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums is a great online photo hosting service from our own Google. Using this service you can upload hundreds of photos, organize them, view in a Slideshow and share them with your friends and family. The sweet thing is it is all free! Thanks to Google.

Recently Picasa Web Albums has introduced nice features that made it more competitive with similar service like Flickr. Picasa Web Albums now has an Explore page which showcases the best public pictures hosted on its service. You can even search for photos with keywords. Google has introduced the ability to tag photos automatically by identifying the faces within a photo to which they call Name Tags. Isn't it really cool to identify the faces in a picture once and then Picasa Web Albums finding that face in every other picture in the album automatically and tag it appropriately?

                       

Currently Picasa Web Albums has a storage limit of 1 gigabyte (sorry, it is not counting up Gmail does..) which is good enough to host as many as 3000+ photos of decent resolution to view on web. It also allows to geo tag you photos. Those in USA can order prints of their photos from popular printing services like Walgreens, Shutterfly, Snapfish and PhotoWorks.

Picasa Web Albums also provides the HTML code for embedding your photos as a Slideshow in your web site or blog. I am mostly a fan of this feature as it allows you to share the photos with your visitors straight in your web site or blog without having them to click the Next button again and again.

Here is an example Slideshow of some photos form my Picasa Web Albums.

 

 

There a lot of other cool features to explore in Google's Picasa Web Albums. So start exploring it and do not forget to let me know how much you love it :-)

Google speaks your language

Google offers local language interface among many of its services. Depending on the country from which you are accessing Google, you would get the links to choose Google.com in languages related to the region. For example , I being from India, when accessing Google.com would get language options such as Bengali, Telugu, Hindi etc. which are the local languages of India (Fyi, India has 20+ official languages being spoken across the country!).

                       

Why is such localization required? Well, there are many advantages. English is not spoken and not easily understood by the people of non-English world. People do prefer to use their mother tongue as much possible in their life to make communication with their family and friends easy and enjoyable . These reasons keep the distance between the people from these regions and Google which is a potential loss for Google in terms of ad revenue. Imagine the addition of 2-3 billion more people to Google's services :)

Primarily the local language interface is targeted at the Google Search users for obvious reasons of Ad Revenue. It will enable Google to show the more relevant Ads to you from your region and probably in your own language. Apart from Search, services like Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail are also available in languages other than English.

In this example I selected Telugu language as my preference and the Google Search interface on google.co.in changed like this:

                                

Here is an example where Google displaying the region specific Ads with search results. Notice that one of the Ads is in Hindi :

        

The language preference you have set for Google's interface will be reset to English as soon as you erase the cookies on your browser. So what are you waiting for? Start exploring Google in your very own language :)

Look forward to my posts on how to use Google to search web sites published in your local language and techniques to write documents in your own language... Wouldn't that be nice to know about?