Why download YouTube videos when it's so easy to upload videos? Now you can drag and drop multiple videos on YouTube's upload page instead of using the operating system's file open dialog. The new feature requires a recent version of Google Chrome and Firefox because it uses HTML5 APIs.

Two other Google services that support drag and drop uploading are Gmail and Google Docs, but other services will probably follow suit.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

YouTube's HTML5 interface has a very cool feature: if you right-click on a video, you'll no longer see the boring contextual menu displayed by the browser that added uninteresting features like downloading videos. Instead, you'll get a much more useful menu that sends you to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" video.

Some would say that this trick reminds them of the sites that annoyed users by disabling browser features like the contextual menu so that people can't save an image or copy some text. But that's not what happens here: YouTube's terms of use forbid users from downloading videos and the new menu solves this issue by offering a better option. After all, why download a video when you can listen to Rick Astley's fabulous song?


There are at least two uncivil browsers (Firefox and Opera) that treat videos just like images and allow users to right-click on a video and download it. Firefox even lets you disable custom contextual menus for all sites, while Opera provides more granular options. There's even a developer that breached YouTube's terms of use by creating a Greasemonkey script with a strange name: Youtube HTML5 Beta "Save Video As" Unrickroller. Apparently, he lost his sense of humor or he's not a Rick Astley fan.

I'm not going to use any of these features and I'll switch to Internet Explorer, a browser that doesn't offer a download option for videos (mostly because it doesn't support HTML5 videos). Whenever I want to download a YouTube video, I'll ignore all those scripts and tricks and I'll read YouTube's terms of use, while listening to Rick Astley's song. They're a perfect match.

"... You know the rules and so do I ..."

Google Docs lets you upload any kind of files, but not many of them can be previewed in Google Docs. You can open Microsoft Office documents and presentations, PDF files and some images. Now you can also play videos.

Uploaded video files can be up to 1 GB. These are the most common video formats that you can upload and play:

* WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
* .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
* .AVI (many cameras use this format - typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
* .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
* .WMV
* .FLV (Adobe - FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

Since Google uses YouTube's player, it's obvious that these are the formats supported by YouTube. After uploading a video to Google Docs, you'll have to wait until it's processed.

Why would someone upload videos to Google Docs instead of using YouTube? When Google adds more free storage to Google Docs and makes it easy to sync all your files, you'll upload documents, photos, music files and videos. Google Docs lets you organize files into folders, share multiple files with your friends and even keep old versions of your files.


Tip. To find all the videos uploaded to your Google Docs account, use this URL: https://docs.google.com/#videos.

{ Thanks, Cougar Abogado. }

Picasa Web Albums was one of the few Google apps that didn't support encrypted connections. Now you can go to the secure version at https://picasaweb.google.com to make sure that no one can intercept your requests. This is especially helpful if you use an unsecured WiFi connection.

Google Chrome says that Picasa Web Albums includes some resources that are sent via HTTP, but these aren't the usual suspects: images, CSS and JavaScript files. The culprit is an iframe used for loading ads. Internet Explorer shows a mixed content warning every time you visit a Picasa Web Albums page, which is really annoying. (Update: this was a quickly fixed.)


Many Google services support HTTPS connections: Gmail (enabled by default), Google Reader, Google Groups, Picasa Web Albums, Google Search, Google Finance, YouTube (partially encrypted). Other services only support encrypted connections: Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Health, Google Analytics, Google AdSense and AdWords, Google Web History, Google Bookmarks, Google Voice, Google Latitude, Google Checkout. It's probably easier to list the services that don't support HTTPS.

{ via Brian Rose }

Google has accidentally made public a YouTube video that shows Android 3.0 in action. It's a completely new interface for tablets that borrows a lot of ideas from BumpTop, the 3D desktop software acquired by Google last year.


Engadget says that the new interface "looks more or less nothing like Android". You might think it's a new operating system. The video mentions that this is "the next generation of Android" and that's built entirely for tablets.

Google has focused on improving the user interface and Android 3.0 comes with fluid home screens, better app switching, browser tabs, video chat, dynamic app shortcuts and new versions of Google's Android applications that take advantage of the bigger screen.

It seems that the Android tablets that will be launched in the coming months will have impressive hardware and an updated operating system that looks stunning, so they're poised for success.



Update: Google confirms the release of Android Honeycomb.

Honeycomb is the next version of the Android platform, designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. We’ve spent a lot of time refining the user experience in Honeycomb, and we’ve developed a brand new, truly virtual and holographic user interface. Many of Android’s existing features will really shine on Honeycomb: refined multi-tasking, elegant notifications, access to over 100,000 apps on Android Market, home screen customization with a new 3D experience and redesigned widgets that are richer and more interactive. We’ve also made some powerful upgrades to the web browser, including tabbed browsing, form auto-fill, syncing with your Google Chrome bookmarks, and incognito mode for private browsing.

Google Docs Viewer now works for spreadsheets too. Even if Google informs that the service can be used to preview "PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, and TIFF files", you can also try Adobe Postscript files, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.


The viewer is not optimized for spreadsheets, so Google has to convert them to documents. That's probably the reason why they don't look very well, they're not always readable and some of the characters are missing.


Unfortunately, if you click "Save in Google Docs", Google saves the spreadsheet as a regular non-editable file. To open the file in Google Spreadsheets, you need to right-click, select "Make a Google Docs copy", wait a few seconds and open the new file.

I really don't understand why Google didn't add a feature that lets you upload a bookmarks file exported by your browser to Google Bookmarks. Google still recommends to install Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer or Firefox to upload bookmarks, but this shouldn't be necessary. That's like installing Picasa to upload your photos to Picasa Web Albums.

Fortunately, Mihai Parparita built a tool for exporting your Delicious bookmarks to Google Bookmarks and it can be used to upload any bookmarks file to Google Bookmarks. Here's how to do that:

1. Go to delicious.com and sign in. If you haven't used Delicious before, you'll sign in using a Yahoo account. If you've previously bookmarked web pages using Delicious, it's probably a good idea to create a new account.

2. Unlike Google Bookmarks, Delicious has a bookmark importing feature. Upload the HTML file exported by your browser and wait until all your bookmarks are imported.


3. Use Delicious to Google Bookmarks to import your bookmarks to Google Bookmarks. You'll end up with two new labels added by the importing/exporting tools: imported and delicious-export.


The nice thing about Mihai Parparita's tool is that it's open source and it can be modified to import HTML bookmarks file.

Google Labs is the place where you can find a lot of experimental services that are developed by Google engineers in their "20 percent time". As Jeffrey Ressner points out, "Labs began [back in 2002] when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to allow engineers and programmers to devote 20 percent of their time, or one day each week, to projects of their own choosing. It was a bold move, but Page and Brin figured the great minds they hired would be even more creative if they were given free rein to unleash their imaginations and cultivate their personal interests instead of spending all their energies on assigned tasks." Aparna Chennapragada, product manager for Google Labs, says that Google tried to "remove all friction between the idea and the experiment".

Features like Google Suggest or Social Search and services like iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Local or Google Docs started as Labs projects. Here are some of the best services and features released in Google Labs, Gmail Labs, TestTube and other similar places in 2010:

1. Google Scribe is a powerful tool that uses aggregated data from Web pages to provide suggestions as you type. It could become an useful Google Docs feature and it could improve the suggestions provided by the default Android keyboard.


2. Body Browser, a WebGL application developed by the Google Health team that shows a detailed 3D model of the human body. Try it in Chrome 9 beta or Firefox 4 beta.

3. YouTube Leanback - a YouTube interface designed for Google TV or any other big screen. The great thing about YouTube Leanback is that it doesn't require interaction, so you can quickly watch the videos added to the queue or the latest videos from your subscribed channels.

4. Apps Search - a Gmail Labs feature that lets you search your Gmail messages, Google Docs files and Google Sites pages from a single search box. If Google shows results from other services and improves the interface, this feature could become very useful. Imagine searching your contacts, calendars, bookmarks, files and your browsing history from a single search box.

5. YouTube's HTML5 player has improved a lot ever since it was launched, back in January 2010. It now supports WebM videos and it works in most browsers: Chrome, Opera, Safari and the latest beta versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. YouTube even offers a new embedding code that triggers the HTML5 player if your browser supports it and Adobe Flash is not installed.


6. Aardvark, a social Q&A service acquired by Google last year, hasn't improved since its acquisition, but it has a lot of potential to make search more social. Google Spreadsheets also started as a Google Labs project, even though it was the result of an acquisition.

7. Public Data Explorer "makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate". This could be a great way to make Google Search more visual and more interactive.

8. Google Books Ngram Viewer is a Google Trends for books. It's useful if you want to see how often certain words or phrases have been used in books over time.


9. Google Reader Play - a new way to view your feeds and the most popular blog posts on the Web. The interface works well for photo blogs, comics and videos.

10. Google Calendar's Gentle Reminders replaces annoying pop-ups with a blinking tab and a notification sound. If you use Google Chrome, you'll also see desktop notifications.

It's interesting to see that most of the services are related to data visualization, cutting-edge browser features and productivity.

Voice Search is a Google Chrome extension that lets you search using your voice. It's not developed by Google, but it uses an experimental Chrome feature called form speech input. The feature is enabled by default in the dev channel builds, but it can be manually enabled by adding a command-line flag.

"Voice Search comes pre-loaded with the following default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha. You can also add your own user-defined search engines. It also integrates a speech input button for all websites using HTML5 search boxes. This extension requires a microphone. Speech input is very experimental, so don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Also, try to speak clearly for best speech recognition results," suggests the author.


Speech recognition is limited to English and it doesn't work very well, but this extension is a good way to test a feature that will be enabled in the future Chrome releases. If you have a website, it's quite easy to add support for speech input, but it may take a while until Google's Speech Input API specification becomes a standard and all browsers implement it.

{ Thanks, Silviu. }

Picasa Web Albums is one of the Google services that has been unfairly neglected by Google, even if it has a lot of flaws and many missing features. Probably the biggest flaw was the goal of the service: to be an online extension of Picasa, a popular photo management software. Picasa Web Albums inherited Picasa's limitations and didn't add many useful features because they were available in Picasa. Instead of focusing on improving the web app, Google developed Picasa for Mac, added new features to Picasa and acquired Picnik, an online image editor.

Picasa Web Albums is somewhat similar to Microsoft's Office Live, an online extension of a popular software, which is surprising, considering that Google is a big proponent of cloud computing.

If you try to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, you'll notice that Google recommends to install Picasa. That's because you can only upload up to 5 photos at a time using the web app (unless you're using Internet Explorer: Google developed an ActiveX control for uploading photos).


Try to download an album and you won't be able to do that without installing Picasa or using some workarounds.

To edit a photo, you need to use Picasa or Picnik, a slow Flash image editor. It would be much more useful to have some basic editing options inside Picasa Web Albums, so you can quickly retouch your photos.

Andrew Maxwell and François Beaufort created a long wish list for Picasa Web Albums (sorting albums by name, sub-albums, upload by drag and drop, multiple sign-in, offline mode) and many of their issues can be easily addressed by storing photos in Google Docs and transforming Picasa Web Albums into a Google Docs app. This way, you'll use a single file storage service, uploading and downloading multiple photos will be much easier, photos could be shared privately without revealing all the photos from an album, you could add photos to multiple folders and even create subfolders. Another benefit is that you'll be able to use a syncing software for all your files if Google decides to release a software like Dropbox or Windows Live Mesh.