Archive for January, 2009

Those of you who use Google Toolbar on Firefox are probably pretty familiar with the many features Toolbar 5 (beta) has to offer — from bookmarks to buttons and search box to "send to." We've added a couple more features to the Firefox Toolbar, so feel free to download this "second beta" to get all the latest and greatest Google Toolbar has to offer.

One of the features I'm really excited about is the new tab page. Now, when you open up a new tab, instead of the blank white page you see by default in Firefox, you will instead see small thumbnails of your favorite sites (up to 9), as well as recently-closed and bookmarked pages based on your browser history. You can edit the thumbnails, and all this data remains locally on your browser, which means none of the information about your most viewed sites or recently closed pages will be sent back to Google. If for whatever reason you don't like this updated new tab page, you can always change it back to a blank page or to the website of your choice through either your Toolbar or Firefox settings. Some tab extensions may conflict with this feature, and it currently isn't compatible with Firefox 2, so make sure you check your settings or visit the Google Toolbar help center if you are having any problems.


Next time you want to go to your favorite site more quickly or restore an accidentally closed tab, you don't need to type out the URL. Typing Ctrl + T or double-clicking to the right of your open tabs will open up the new tab page with all your favorite sites right at your finger tips.

In addition, this release now provides the ability for Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking users to access Toolbar 5 with robust right-to-left text support. We've also fixed some of the most reported bugs to give you a faster and more stable experience with this update.

We're always working on improvements and new features to Google Toolbar based on your feedback, so keep those suggestions coming.

Posted by Sergey Ryazanov, Software Engineer, Toolbar Team

It's that time of the year again, the spring conference season, and I've got a full schedule of appearances on tap for the next few months. Here's a quick rundown:

When?	Where?
February 5-8 (that's next week!)	Vancouver: At Interaction 09, I'll be teaching a design patterns workshop with fellow Yahoo Lucas Pettinati and former Yahoo (and founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library Erin Malone from Tangible UX. This is the shorter, half-day version of our workshop. It's not too late to sign up!
March 2-4	Dallas: At the 18th conference of JA-SIG (an organization of open source communities working in higher education), I'll be giving a keynote called User Experience is Everybody's Business. It's at 8:30 am on Tuesday, so don't stay out too late Monday night if you want to catch it.
March 18-22	Memphis: At the IA Summit, I'll be teaching two workshops and giving a presentation. On Wednesday, March 18, Lucas, Erin and I will be teaching our full-day patterns workshop. People seemed to really like it last year and we've only made it better. On Thursday, March 19, I'm teaching an updated version of the architecture of social websites workshop I did last year with Christina Wodtke from LinkedIn and Joshua Porter from Bokardo. This year Yahoo social platform designer Bryce Glass (and co-author of the upcoming Designing Web 2.0 Reputation Systems from Yahoo! Press) will be joining us. At some point during the conference proper (final schedule not determined yet), Erin and I will be giving a talk on "Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Best Practices and Patterns for Designing the Social Web" (essentially the topic of our book and wiki.
March 31	San Francisco: At the Web 2.0 Expo, Erin and I will be teaching a workshop called (surprise), Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Best Practices and Patterns for Designing the Social Web on 9:00 am Tuesday.
May 12	New York. At the Enterprise Search Summit, I'll be moderating a panel on Emergent Social Search Experiences, featuring Rob Spiro from the Mechanical Zoo, Susan Chun from Steve.Museum, and Christina Wodtke from LinkedIn.

Christian Crumlish
Pattern Detective
Yahoo! Developer Network

by Vera H-C Chan

Super Bowl Sunday is way more than a gridiron face-off. The all-American event is the ultimate couch-potato gathering, complete with guacamole dip, unashamed partisanship, and commercial excess. Amidst the usual fan frenzy of looking up the roster and betting odds and searching for team gear, a few die-hards actually zone in on "2009 super bowl commercials."

Web interest aside—and 100 million pairs of eyeballs are estimated to tune in on Sunday—ad sales have been a bit sluggish, and not all the regulars are coming back. At last count, NBC still had two empty slots out of 67 of the 30-second spots. Still, spots cost up to $3 million (higher than last year), which means companies are paying out $100,000 a second for airtime (math courtesy of The New York Times), about 3 cents per viewer (math courtesy of WCCO).

That assumes no one will blink when the commercials come on, but one poll does estimate more than half won't. And, 1 out of 5 viewers come just for those fleeting seconds between the field clashes.

As for the 2009 line-up, USA Today lists a "roster of Super Bowl ads," down to which quarter the pitches will roll. If you want a more detailed game plan on how it's all going to go down, below is a rundown on who took themselves out of the game, what didn't make NBC's standards, the special effects, and what you can get for (almost) nothing.

Getting a Pass. Among those not making a return visit: FedEx ("time for us to call a time out") and General Motors (with the mild understatement, "we're in the midst of cost-cutting"). CNET tracks the steady decline of tech ads, which saw their glory days in 2000.

Nixed. NBC has standards for its commercial (the programming, well, that's another story). The network couldn't stomach the PETA ad depicting lingerie models cavorting with cruciferous vegetables and gourds. Of course, rejection (and did we mention the lingerie?) inflamed the Buzz and prompted searches for "peta" (+142%) "banned peta commercial" (off the charts). (Incidentally, The Hollywood Reporter listed 8 cuts that PETA would have had to make to get a Sunday showing, like the "licking eggplant" moment.) On the other spectrum, NBC also said no to a pro-life video with President Obama as an unborn child, according to the Washington Times. Given that "banned super bowl ads" is a Search sideshow, these companies get to save the cash and reap the publicity.

Dogs, Denny's, and Tony the Tiger, Oh My. Among those stepping in for their pigskin premiere: Pedigree, Denny's, and Kellog's Frosted Flakes. Yes, the glam days have given way to comfort foods (well, except for maybe the dog food). Denny's pitch for its Grand Slam Breakfast doesn't quite match the sport, but the restaurant chain aims to get at audience stomachs through the funny bone. The dog-food maker will focus on adoption, while Kellog's feline flak Tony the Tiger wants viewers to choose which kids' playing field on its website should be renovated.

Three for 3D. A trailer for the animated "Monsters vs. Aliens," energy drinks, and an NBC comedy (airing the day after) will get a 3D treatment. PC Magazine gets into the technical details, although DreamWorks movie exec Jeffrey Katzenberg points out in a video blog that football fans will probably be too sloshed to appreciate the effect. About 125 million 3D glases were made and are free at places like Target and Best Buy, if there are any left.

Bribes and Surprises. Denny's promises a "special message that is sure to surprise and delight millions of Americans" (WSJ reveals it's just a breakfast give-away). The Universal Orlando resort says to look for an "unprecedented offer." Hulu aims to make a splash. Hyundai's sign-o'-the-times offer almost verges on anti-buy: Lose your job, you can change your mind on your purchase.

Ad Reruns. Because you can never watch enough ads, at least according to advertisers, some are already available online. Naturally, since this is the 21st century, the campaigns also go offscreen: The Orlando Sentinel reports E-Trade's talking baby has a Facebook profile, a food company created an iPhone "Shake and Bark" app, and a job site lets people "give tips to annoying co-workers." Does all this work? Yup, if one believes the Nielsen Company report measuring a 24% average increase in Web traffic for Super Bowl advertisers. (Album sales of the halftime acts don't do so badly either.)

Counter-programming Relief. Yes, the Puppy Bowl V returns, inducing high-pitched cooing squeals over packs of unbearable cuteness. Anthem singer: Pepper the Parrot. Token cats: Kitty Half-Time Show.

After our big launch of the new look and feel, the Reader team took a breather and worked on tying up loose ends (don't worry, we also took some time off). We've just pushed a new release that includes the following set of fixes and tweaks:

• Improvements to our rich mobile interface for iPhone, Android and other browsers, including a more compact page header, visual alignment tweaks and a faster loading time.
• Links on the home page giving you easy access to your recently read and kept unread items.
• Fixes for some "stuck" unread count issues.
• Better handling of feeds and items with malformed URLs.
• Less flickering when using the "Share with note" bookmark.
• Fixing of errors when deleting lots of tags and folders.
• Removal of extra image and backend requests, resulting in slightly faster loading times.

One other recent change is that we're now on Twitter. We've been fans of Twitter Search as a way of gathering feedback, but now we have a way of talking back. Feel free to send an @googlereader tweet to get our attention, and follow us for updates and quips.

Finally, we were honored to be nominated for a Bloggie. We encourage you to take a look at all the nominees in all the categories, it's a collection of some really great, subscribe-worthy, blogs

We're happy to report that we've officially integrated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand.

The Live Search add-on for Firefox gives you auto-suggestions from Live Search right in the browser while you're typing your query. For example, start to type "Bruce Springsteen" into the Live Search box, and you're shown relevant suggestions. The list of suggestions refreshes as you continue typing or when you change the query. You can click the suggestion that best matches what you were searching for to speed you to your results. The add-on is available in the following markets: Australia (AU), Canada (CA), India (IN), Ireland (IE), New Zealand (NZ), Philippines (PH), South Africa (ZA), United Kingdom (UK), and United States (US).

The Live Search add-on for Firefox is available to install at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10434. It's based on the Open Search standard and uses the JSON interface supported by Firefox to retrieve autosuggestions.

Enjoy speedier, easier searching, and let us know what you think!

Beatrice Oltean, Program Manager, Live Search
Debapriya Ray, Live Search, Senior Product Manager

by Mike Krumboltz

Cloned animals are nothing new. Heck, it's been over a decade since Dolly the genetically engineered sheep exploded (not literally) onto the scene. But now we're seeing something new: cloned animals that people pay copious cash for.

A Florida couple, Nina and Ed Otto, recently forked over $155,000 for the first commercially cloned puppy, Lancelot Encore. An article from Money.co.uk explains that the regal puppy is an exact replica of the couple's dearly departed dog, Sir Lancelot. The original Lancey passed away last year after a bout with cancer. The couple sold some serious jewelry so they could afford to bring back their favorite companion.

Now 10 weeks old and cute as a button, the yellow Labrador never would have existed had the couple not had the foresight to store some of their old dog's DNA in the hopes "that cloning technology would one day be readily available to those willing to pay."

Clearly, that day has arrived. The pooch made its national television debut on the Today Show, and search response was immediate. Queries surged on "cloned dog" and "lancelot the dog." Additionally, mad scientists have pushed up queries for "how to clone." As for Lancelot, he's already making himself at home with the Ottos' other pets: 9 dogs, 10 cats, 6 sheep, and 4 parrots.

This is one of my favorite times in the product cycle. IE8 is platform complete and as we get closer to releasing the final product, more and more web developers and designers will take advantage of the browser’s features to enable scenarios we haven’t even imagined!

Since the release of IE8 Beta 2 we’ve listened to feedback from many channels including IE8 Beta Feedback, standards working groups and this blog. We’ve made thousands of platform improvements in response to both feedback, and from running the test cases that Jason Upton blogged about on Tuesday. The platform is ready to be built on. I want to give you an overview of web platform improvements since Beta 2, some of which we’ve already talked about and some of which will be covered in more detail in the coming weeks.

Compatibility

It takes time for web developers, designers, and IT professionals to migrate a site to an updated browser. Yet our mutual customers expect the web to look and feel the same after they install the latest IE version. We’ve built Compat View and IE7 Standards Mode to ease migration and allow web developers and designers to opt-in to IE7’s behavior while they upgrade their site. Since Beta 2 we’ve improved IE7 Standards Mode fit-and-finish such that RC1 is very close to the real IE7 web platform.

Interoperability and Standards

• CSS 2.1. Layout interoperability with other browsers through the CSS2.1 standard has always been a top goal for IE8. Beta 2 supported all properties in the CSS 2.1 specification and passed over 3,200 test cases. We’ve made significant improvements since Beta 2 and this week’s RC1 passes well over twice as many test cases as Beta 2. For example, one of our favorite new features is IE8’s new support for High-Res layout, which we’ll blog about in more detail later. We expect very few changes between this RC and the full CSS2.1 support in the final product, which web developers and designers can use to write their pages once and have them rendered the same across browsers.
• HTML, Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript. Throughout Beta 1 and Beta 2 we’ve talked about how IE8 is much more interoperable with other browsers in core areas including attribute handling and element lookups like those through getElementById(). To help ensure future interoperability with other browsers and standards compliance, the Release Candidate includes the following updates, which we recently blogged about:
  • Mutable DOM Prototype includes the new ECMAScript 3.1 conformant getter/setter syntax.
  • ARIA supports the dash syntax “aria-checked” across all IE8 document modes. This means web developers can write code once that works across IE8 modes and with other browsers.
  • Cross-Domain Requests (XDR) now checks Access-Control-Allow-Origin header for a match to the origin URL as well as wildcards. As a result, data is only shared with sites whose origin the server specifies.
• Performance. Similar to interoperability, better performance helps improve developer productivity. To this end, we investigated core performance scenarios and focused on optimizing common AJAX design patterns. Web developers and end users alike will experience performance improvements since Beta2.

Development environment

• Developer tools. Beta 2 introduced more power with the JavaScript profiler, save to file, and console.log support. RC1 has dramatically improved stability and a much more accurate view of the HTML tree and CSS tracing. It also offers more flexibility by adding a menu option for viewing source with Notepad, the built-in viewer, or any other choice of viewer.
• Documentation. We think good documentation and communication is an important part of the development environment. To this end, we have updated our Internet Explorer Readiness Toolkit and MSDN IE Development Center for web developers and designers to use as references. Stay tuned to the blog for much more detail on improvements we’ve made since Beta 2 and tips for upgrading to IE8 Standards Mode.

We take your feedback on critical issues very seriously and we know that behavior changes to the platform have the potential for broad impact. We intend to make few platform changes between now and the final product. We’ll be very deliberate about what changes we make and diligent about documenting and communicating them.

Please download the RC1 and test with confidence if you haven’t already. We’re very excited about the improvements we’ve made to IE8’s web platform and developer tools and even more excited to see how web developers and designers build on them to enable new, incredible scenarios! If you’ve already enabled a new scenario using IE8 features, leave a comment and let us know about it.

Marc Silbey
Program Manager

Update 10:15 pm: fixing getElementById() reference.  Thanks Gérard!

If you are looking for more site information to help plan your display advertising campaigns and understand audiences on the web, Google Ad Planner can help. Our goal is to provide you with the most accurate site information for better planning and decision-making, and we're excited to kick off the new year with an improved traffic estimation model as well as several other features.
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

by Claudine Zap

The former go-to snack food has become the peanut pariah. Here, your resource roundup:

Totally Nuts
Every day there are more products that have become part of a massive national recall of peanut butter snack foods. all stemming from one processing plant in Georgia. The problem is that peanut butter is in everything (especially pre-packaged foods for kids and snack foods for people and pets), from Trader Joe's celery-and-peanut butter snacks to Luna bars to dog biscuits. The news is bad and keeps getting worse. Peanut Corp. just expanded its recall to include all peanut goods produced at the plant since January 1, 2007. The recall does not include major national brands of peanut butter. These nasty nuts are being traced to lots of food items. The searchable database on the CDC website already lists 430 recalled products, and this list will continue to grow. The CDC recommends checking back often. You can search for recalled peanut products here. But hey, as the saying goes: When in doubt, throw it out.

Salmonella 411
This bad bacteria that caused the peanut butter food poisoning outbreak has already sickened over 500 people and killed 8. Most who inadvertently ingest the stuff will experience severe stomach upset for about a week. However, for those with compromised immune systems, children, and the elderly, salmonella poisoning can be deadly.

Care Package Conundrum
Overseas, the CDC sent warning to active-duty troops to watch for products in care packages containing the nutty butter. The military is also pulling products out of warehouses in Europe that could contain suspect peanut products from the U.S.

What Does the FDA Say?
The FDA's recent report finds "the Peanut Butter Corporation of America [f]ail[ed] to manufacture foods under conditions and controls necessary to minimize the potential for growth of microorganisms and contamination." It also noted that the plant failed to clean its contaminated equipment for 3 ½ months after it first became aware of salmonella contamination.

In other words, lots more recall news is sure to come. So go to the FDA searchable database early and often, and for now, find a new favorite snack food.

In the past we've received a lot of feedback from our users who have implemented the _setVar method requesting that custom visitor segments not affect bounce rates. You've asked for it and we've listened! Today we're modifying this feature so that the _setVar method no longer counts as an interaction hit with the result that you may see higher bounce rates and more accurate time on page metrics in your reports.

As a refresher, Google Analytics calculates bounces and durations based upon interaction hits. Now, interaction hits will only include pageviews, events, transactions and experiments (such as with Google Website Optimizer). Here's more on how this change to the _setVar method could affect your data:

Higher bounce rates in your reports

Let's say that you've used the _setVar method on your landing pages to segment member vs. non-member site visitors. Previously, if a visitor came to your site and triggered the _setVar call, but viewed only one page, this would not be counted as a bounce. With this change the user defined call will not send an interaction hit and overall bounce rates will increase as this single page visit will now be counted as a bounce.

More accurate time on page metrics

Time on page metrics are normally counted by the difference in time stamps which are set by interaction hits. Prior to this change, using _setVar would cause Google Analytics to calculate the time on page metric between the time of the pageview hit and the interaction hit of the user defined variable. Now, as user-defined hits are no longer counted as an interaction hit, time on page metrics should more accurately reflect the time between one pageview and the next.

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team