Archive for May, 2009

We've noticed some misconceptions about Google Analytics floating around, and we thought we'd take a shot at correcting the most common ones. Without further ado, here they are, the top ten myths about Google Analytics debunked.
MYTH 1: "You get what you pay for." Google Analytics is free, which means the system is down a lot.

Google Analytics makes use of the same network of secure and reliable data centers used to power Google.com, making downtime an extremely rare occurrence. We have a large team focused exclusively on keeping your data safe and accessible, and benefit from multiple redundancies in our infrastructure around the globe (this makes us fast as well).

We even rely on Google Analytics for our own mission-critical products such as AdWords, which see huge volumes of traffic every day. If you're still having doubts, we'd encourage you to talk to some users and ask them how their experience has been with uptime.

MYTH 2: Google Analytics is basic and doesn't have any "advanced" features or metrics
MYTH 6: With Google Analytics you can't control your data



Posted by Sebastian Tonkin, Google Analytics Team

by Mike Krumboltz

In today's rough economic times, the dream of winning the lottery looms large. This week, somebody's dream came true. The lucky winner hasn't come forward yet, but various news outlets are reporting that someone in Winner, South Dakota (yes, that's the town's real name), has a ticket worth $232 million. The numbers, in case you have a time machine and want a cut of the winnings, were 5, 6, 12, 16, 21, and 7 (Powerball).

News that there is a flimsy piece of paper worth close to a quarter of a billion bucks inspired a mad rush to the Search box. Queries on "powerball numbers may 27 2009," "powerball winner," and "powerball winnings" posted immediate gains. Also surging among the greedy and curious: "biggest lotto win ever." While $232 million is nothing to sneeze at, it's far from the biggest jackpot ever. That title belongs to a $390 million jackpot from 2007. (Although, according to MegaMillions.com, that prize was shared between two winners. Sheesh, only $195 million each? Why even bother?)

Though they were nowhere near as popular as the "lotto winner" queries, searches on "lottery curse" were conducted by more than a few, we noticed. Indeed, there seems to be many times when someone wins millions of dollars only to suffer misfortune shortly thereafter. An ABC article from 2007 highlights some of the more glaring incidents. A couple won $25 million and saw their marriage end just months later. In 2002, another man won millions of dollars but "his life was consumed by hardship," including the death of his granddaughter and the end of his marriage. Most bizarrely, a 1996 lotto winner was kidnapped and killed by his sister-in-law and an accomplice.

Here's hoping the winner of this recent windfall manages to do what so many past winners have tried to accomplish: Do some good while continuing to live a happy life.

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by Mike Krumboltz

According to Us Weekly, Paris Hilton called "The Hills" TV show "lame and fake." That is all. As you were.

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by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Audrey Hepburn (Searches increased by 4,196%). A rare German stamp depicting the star in the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's" sold for $74,600 at auction.
2. Manchester United vs Barcelona (+432%). The Spanish footballers won the Champion League Final, 2-0.
3. Social Security stimulus checks (+222%). Checks have been going out all month. Anyone eligible to receive one should look for an envelope from the government by June 4.
4. "The Goode Family" (+404%). The latest animated series from Matt Drudge aired last night. The cartoon family features a vegan dog named Che.
5. Spelling Bee (+106%). The 41 semi-finalists continue in the competition today. The group will be culled to about a dozen students who move on to the finals.

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I spent my youth writing games on a computer hooked up to my parents' television but despite saving my pennies to buy a 300-baud modem, I was never able to realize my dream of writing a game that my best friend and I could play against each other on two computers. In all my games the I,J,K and M keys were used by player 1 while player 2 was stuck with W,A,S and Z on the same keyboard.

This was in the back of my mind when I started putting my 20% time towards building a simple javascript library on top of our Google Talk web client. After some demos, my 20% project grew to an 80% project, and we're now ready to show off -- and get feedback on -- the gadgets.realtime set of APIs. These APIs will let Google gadgets hosted in different user's browsers communicate with each other. The first API, gadgets.sharedstate, is available on the new Talk Developer Sandbox. With this API, you can share an object between instances of a gadget, and be notified in realtime when the other instance modifies it. More APIs and UI improvements to allow gadgets.realtime gadgets to be used on orkut and iGoogle are in the works and coming soon.















For more information and for sample applications, see the documentation.

We've set up a discussion group to collect feedback. So, help me out, fellow geeks! Try out this API and let me know what you think and share any cool gadgets you write.

Moishe Lettvin, Software Engineer

A couple months ago, we asked the community to tell us about their GWT applications and their experience developing them. We were greatly pleased to see many responses, and lots of neat applications. In fact, we had so many responses that we needed a better way to showcase and share them with the community.

Introducing the new GWT Application Gallery to save the day, now posted on the GWT homepage. Improving on the earlier GWT Application Gallery, the new gallery adds more features to make community interaction easier and application entries more meaningful. Here are some of these new features that you can look forward to:

• An easier way to submit entries for any GWT-related tools or application that you would like to share with the community
• A comment and rating system for others in the GWT community to rate your applications
• More screen real estate for application screenshots and thumbnails for your application entry
• Searchable tags that you can apply to your GWT application entry

We already have a number of entries both from the previous app gallery and newer entries from respondents to our call out a few months ago, and we'd love to hear from you too. So please, check out the new GWT App Gallery to see the kind of great applications the community has been developing, share your opinions through the comments and ratings feature, and add your own applications to the gallery.

As a sidenote, Google I/O is in full swing. In the spirit of sharing applications and development experiences, we've organized a Developer Sandbox area this year where third party developers who have used Google developer products can showcase their applications and talk about how they've created them. If you're attending Google I/O, drop by to check out some of these products live. I'll be around that area as well, so please come by to say hello.

Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold. (Jens insists it took him hours to convince me, but I like my version better.)

We had a blast the next couple years turning Where 2's prototype mapping site into Google Maps. But finally we decided it was time to leave the Maps team and turn Jens' new idea into a project, which we codenamed "Walkabout." We started with a set of tough questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms? 

After months holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person "startup" team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we're very eager to return and see what the world might think. Today we're giving developers an early preview of Google Wave.

A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.


Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we're inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

• The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave). 
• Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave. 

So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this?

If you're a developer and you'd like to roll up your sleeves and start working on Google Wave with us, you can read more on the Google Wave Developer blog about the Google Wave APIs, and check out the Google Code blog to learn more about the Google Wave Federation Protocol. 

If you'd like to be notified when we launch Google Wave as a public product, you can sign up at http://wave.google.com/. We don't have a specific timeframe for public release, but we're planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview. We're excited to see what feedback we get from our early tinkerers, and we'll undoubtedly make lots of changes to the Google Wave product, platform, and protocol as we go.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

This morning, Steve Ballmer is speaking at the D Conference where he’s unveiling our new search service — named Bing. Bing is rolling out internally to Microsoft employees worldwide today and will be available to you and your friends in the coming days.

We spent lots of time listening to you, learning how you use search today and what you’re trying to accomplish with search. We found that search is no longer just a tool for mapping a keyword to a document. If you’re like many people, you’re increasingly using search to help you make decisions: from everyday decisions, like which restaurant to eat at, to complicated decisions, like which digital camera to buy or when to fly and where to stay on your next vacation.

Problem is: search engines themselves haven’t evolved all that much to address the new ways that people like you are using search today.

So today we’re introducing a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organized results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions. We think of Bing as a Decision Engine.

So why did we pick Bing as the new brand name? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world. We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making — when you resolve those important tasks. And frankly, the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.

In the coming weeks we’ll be using the blog to update you on Bing and provide an inside look at how we’ve designed it to cut through the clutter on the Web and deliver more relevant results to help you make better choices. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out our press release, visit http://www.decisionengine.com, and follow us on Twitter (@Bing) for all the latest news.

Looking forward to sharing Bing with you very soon!

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Online Audience Business Group

by Mike Krumboltz

Warning: Jon and Kate Gosselin aren't going away. Far from it. E! Online reports that TLC has ordered a groan-inducing 40 episodes of "Jon and Kate Plus 8." To confirm, that's a "4" and then a "0." The entire Sopranos series had 86. The complete series of BBC's "The Office" had just 12 episodes and a special. 15 minutes of fame never seemed so long.

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