The Story Behind Gmail's Logo

The Story Behind Gmail's Logo: If you've ever wondered who designed Gmail's logo, Kevin Fox has the answer:

Dennis Hwang designed the Gmail logo. At the time, Dennis designed virtually all of the Google doodles and he did a lot of the new logo work as well.

The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey and I went down to his cube to watch him make it.

The initial version used the same font as the Google logo (Catull), but Catull has a very awkward 'a', so Dennis decided to use Catull for the 'G' to tie the brand to Google, then cast the others in a cleaner sans-serif (Myriad Pro, if I recall correctly).

Another ex-Googler, Douglas Edwards, confirms the story in his book "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59":

Dennis Hwang spent the day before the launch coming up with ideas for a logo and trying to make it work in conjunction with the clown-colored Google brand. (...) Even after four years at Google, I found it astounding that one twenty-something guy was sitting alone at his desk, sipping tea and developing the main branding element for a product to be used by millions of people - the night before it was scheduled to launch.

Two Ways to Export Your Google Docs

Two Ways to Export Your Google Docs: Google Takeout supports a new service: Google Docs. Now you can use the same interface to batch export your documents.


I tried both Google Takeout and the built-in feature from Google Docs that lets you download your documents. Even if they have the same purpose, they're quite different. The Google Docs feature is more flexible: you can choose to download only spreadsheets or presentations and skip all the other documents. You can also skip the files uploaded to Google Docs and not converted to a Google Docs format (for example: PDF files, archives and video files). Google Takeout has a "configure" feature, but you can't skip one or more document types. Another subtle difference is that Google Takeout lets you export only the files that you own, while Google Docs exports all the files from your account.


How to export all your files from Google Docs? Just go to the Google Docs homepage, select one or more documents, click "More" and then "Download", click the "All items" tab, pick your favorite formats and click "Download". The process is not that intuitive and you shouldn't have to select a file to see the download option.

{ via Data Liberation Blog }

Beckham kicks it at Google

Beckham kicks it at Google: International soccer phenom +David Beckham is taking off his boots and heading to Google for an exclusive live interview. Have a question you’ve been dying to personally ask Becks? Post it on Google+ with hashtag #GoogleBeckham, and maybe he’ll answer it live!



Watch the interview on Thursday, January 19 at 9am PT on youtube.com/atgoogletalks. And as an added bonus, hangout with him directly afterward on his Google+ profile at 10:30am PT. Add him to your circles now for all the latest updates.







Don’t worry if you can’t make the live interview or Google+ hangout—we’ll post them to YouTube shortly after.



So, what are you waiting for? Punt us your best questions on Google.com/+!



Posted by Andrew Schulte, Product Marketing Manager



(Cross-posted on the YouTube Blog)

IPv6: countdown to launch

IPv6: countdown to launch: Today, we’re joining the Internet Society and several major Internet companies to announce World IPv6 Launch, a coordinated launch of the next-generation Internet protocol on June 6, 2012. This builds on the success and momentum of last year’s World IPv6 Day by adding major contributions from ISPs and home networking vendors. With World IPv6 Launch, we’ll collectively close the gaps and begin to deliver the end-to-end, next-generation Internet.



IPv6 is the replacement for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, which is quickly running out of addresses. The original IPv6 specification was published more than 15 years ago, but for the entire career of most Internet engineers its deployment has always been in the future. Now it’s finally here. The widespread deployment of IPv6 paves the way for connecting together the billions of devices that permeate our livesーboth fixed and mobile, from the largest cloud computing services to the smallest sensors.



Just a year ago, we announced our participation in World IPv6 Day. Since then, the IPv4 address global free pool was officially depleted, each of the five regions around the world receiving one last address block. Soon after, the Asia-Pacific region exhausted its free IPv4 address pool. Hundreds of websites around the world turned on IPv6 for a 24-hour test flight last June. This time, IPv6 will stay on.



For Google, World IPv6 Launch means that virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available to the world over IPv6 permanently. Previously, only participants in the Google over IPv6 program (several hundred thousand users, including almost all Google employees [PDF]) have been using it every day. Now we’re including everyone.



The vast majority of users shouldn’t notice, but check out our test page and help article if you think you might run into difficulty. If you’re curious, you can test your connection now at ipv6test.google.com. If your ISP isn’t on board yet, ask them to join us. It will take years for the Internet to transition fully to IPv6, but as William Gibson is said to have said, “The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.”



We hope that even more websites, application and Internet access providers and network device manufacturers will join us for World IPv6 Launch. Permanently enabling global IPv6 access to Google services has been our goal since we first began our IPv6 project more than four years ago. We eagerly await the opportunity to realize that goal with our colleagues around the world this June. At long last, IPv6 will be the new normal.



Posted by Erik Kline, IPv6 Software Engineer, Tokyo

Don't censor the web

Don't censor the web: You might notice many of your favorite websites look different today. Wikipedia is down. WordPress is dark. We’re censoring our homepage logo and asking you to petition Congress. So what’s the big deal?



Right now in Washington D.C., Congress is considering two bills that would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses. They’re known as the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. Here’s what they’d do:

• PIPA & SOPA will censor the web. These bills would grant new powers to law enforcement to filter the Internet and block access to tools to get around those filters. We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world. SOPA and PIPA also eliminate due process. They provide incentives for American companies to shut down, block access to and stop servicing U.S. and foreign websites that copyright and trademark owners allege are illegal without any due process or ability of a wrongfully targeted website to seek restitution.


• PIPA & SOPA will risk our industry’s track record of innovation and job creation. These bills would make it easier to sue law-abiding U.S. companies. Law-abiding payment processors and Internet advertising services can be subject to these private rights of action. SOPA and PIPA would also create harmful (and uncertain) technology mandates on U.S. Internet companies, as federal judges second-guess technological measures used by these companies to stop bad actors, and potentially impose inconsistent injunctions on them.


• PIPA & SOPA will not stop piracy. These bills wouldn’t get rid of pirate sites. Pirate sites would just change their addresses in order to continue their criminal activities. There are better ways to address piracy than to ask U.S. companies to censor the Internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding. As a result, Google supports alternative approaches like the OPEN Act.

Fighting online piracy is extremely important. We are investing a lot of time and money in that fight. Last year alone we acted on copyright takedown notices for more than 5 million webpages and invested more than $60 million in the fight against ads appearing on bad sites. And we think there is more that can be done here—like targeted and focused steps to cut off the money supply to foreign pirate sites. If you cut off the money flow, you cut the incentive to steal.



Because we think there’s a good way forward that doesn’t cause collateral damage to the web, we’re joining Wikipedia, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Mozilla and other Internet companies in speaking out against SOPA and PIPA. And we’re asking you to sign a petition and join the millions who have already reached out to Congress through phone calls, letters and petitions asking them to rethink SOPA and PIPA.



Posted by David Drummond, SVP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Highlight Areas in Google Maps

Highlight Areas in Google Maps: Rodney G., a reader of this blog noticed a new feature in Google Maps. "When you search for a city or a county or a ZIP Code, Google Maps now highlights the boundaries of what you searched for. If you are zoomed out, the whole area is shaded pink. If you zoom in a bit, it has just a big pink border with grey shading. Zoom in even more and it's a dashed boundary with grey shading."




It's a really useful feature and the nice thing is that's enabled by default. Just search for a country, a city, a state or a ZIP code and Google Maps will automatically highlight it.

{ Thanks, Rodney. }

New Google Accounts Require Gmail and Google+

New Google Accounts Require Gmail and Google+: If you try to create a Google account from Google's homepage, you'll notice that Google redesigned the page, but that's not all. You'll now have to create a Gmail account, a Google Profile and you'll automatically join Google+.

Until now, creating a Google account was quite simple. You could either use an existing email address or create a Gmail account. The redesigned form includes new fields: name, gender (required for Google+) and mobile phone number (not required).



"Your Google Account is more than just Search. Talk, chat, share, schedule, store, organize, collaborate, discover and create. Use Google products from Gmail to Google+ to YouTube, view your search history, all with one username and password, all backed up all the time and easy to find at (you guessed it) Google.com," informs the page.

You can still delete your Google profile, the Google+ content and also your Gmail account.

New users no longer have to manually create a profile and join Google+, while Google found another way to increase the number of Google+ users (currently at 90 million) and the number of Gmail users (currently at 350 million). I've always wondered why Google never offered the option to create a Gmail account when you sign up for a Google account and now that's the only way to create a Google account.

Update: You can still use the old form if you know the URL or if you click "Sign up for a new Google Account" in Google Calendar, Blogger and probably a few other Google products.



Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Groups use a different page that lets you sign up using a Gmail address or a different email account. Just click "use a different email" and you'll see the old form.


Update 2. A Google spokesperson sent the following statement: "We're working to develop a consistent sign-up flow across our different products as part of our efforts to create an intuitive, beautifully simple, Google-wide user experience. Making it quick and easy to create a Google Account and a Google profile enables new users to take advantage of everything Google can offer."

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Picnik and Other Discontinued Google Services

Picnik and Other Discontinued Google Services: If you thought that Google will no longer close other projects this year, you were wrong. Picnik, one of the best online photo editing service, will no longer be available starting from April 20. Until then, you can use all the features from the paid version of Picnik for free. Google will focus on adding more Picnik features to Google+ and that's the reason why Picnik is discontinued.


Social Graph API, a great way to find public profiles and connections between people, will no longer be available. The service was used by Google to find your social connections and show social search results. Unfortunately, "the API isn't experiencing the kind of adoption we'd like, and is being deprecated as of today. It will be fully retired on April 20, 2012."

Google will also discontinue Urchin (the installable version of Google Analytics), Google Message Continuity (an enterprise service that allowed Microsoft Exchange customers to back up emails to Google's servers), Needlebase (a data management platform acquired from ITA Software) and Sky Map (an Android app developed "to show off the amazing capabilities of the sensors in the first-generation Android phones and offer a window into the sky"). Sky Map was open sourced and will be developed by Carnegie Mellon University students.

Google promises to take "a hard look at products that replicate other features, haven't achieved the promise we had hoped for or can't be properly integrated into the overall Google experience," so I'm sure we'll see other discontinued projects. From Orkut to Google Talk (the Windows software), from Patent Search to Google Bookmarks and Translator Toolkit, from iGoogle to Picasa, there are many projects that might be discontinued. Moving from standalone applications to platforms, Google gets rid of many tools that solved only one problem and tries to convince users to join all-encompassing services like Google+ or Google Apps.