How many times have you created a new account at a website and seen a message that said: “Thank you for creating an account. To activate your new account, please access your email and click the verification URL provided.”Even though you just want to start using the website, this lengthy process requires you to manually perform a whole bunch of steps—including switching to your mailbox, trying to find the message the website sent you (which might be in your Spam folder), opening the message, clicking the link, etc. Until recently, we also required people to follow these steps if they wanted to sign up for a Google Account using their existing email address, such as a @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or other address.To make this process simpler, we’re now using an Internet standard called OpenID which is supported by several email providers, including Yahoo!. Instead of the process above, Yahoo! users who sign up with Google see the page below with a button that sends them to Yahoo! for verification.Once you click that button, Yahoo! shows you a page to get your consent to share your email address with Google.After you agree, you’re done and can start using any Google service, such as Google Groups, Docs, Reader, AdWords, etc. We have found that a much larger number of people complete the email verification process when this method is used.In the future we hope to expand this feature to other email providers, and we also hope other website operators will read more on the Google Code Blog about how they can implement a similar feature.Posted by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager, Google Security

Original Source: The Official Google Blog

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This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.Recently we introduced powerful, time-saving features in Gmail: Priority Inbox and the ability to call phones right from Gmail. Google spreadsheets added new features, and many more businesses and schools moved to the cloud with Google Apps.Cut through the clutter with Gmail Priority InboxSince its beginning, Gmail has been helping people cope with large amounts of email, whether it’s with more than seven gigabytes of storage, really fast search, great spam filtering or automatically organized conversations. This Monday we launched Priority Inbox, which helps you get through your inbox even faster by automatically putting important messages front and center. The more that you use Gmail, the better Priority Inbox will become at categorizing the email you receive. Our research suggests that the typical information worker can save a whole week of work time each year with this feature!Call phones from GmailPeople in the U.S. can now call any phone right within Gmail. If you have a Google Voice account (it's free! and open to everyone in the U.S.), you can also receive calls to your Google Voice number right within Gmail. Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free at least until the end of the year, and international rates start at just $0.02 per minute. Google Apps customers won’t see this feature quite yet, but Google Voice and call phones in Gmail are coming soon with the new infrastructure for Google Apps accounts.Improved scheduler in Google CalendarLast Thursday we made it easier to set up new events in Google Calendar. The interface for repeating events is now more intuitive, and we’ve improved how we help you find a good time for your event, even if you’re coordinating a large group of people with busy schedules.In-cell drop-down with validation and more in Google spreadsheetsWe added two helpful features in spreadsheets last week as well. In-cell drop-down with validation allows you to configure cells to display a drop-down menu of accepted values. For example, you can require a cell’s value to be selected from a list of specific cities. We also introduced the ability to easily see which cells have formulas, which can come in handy when you’re working on a complicated mode. You can turn this feature on from the formula bar by selecting the “Show All Formulas” button, selecting “Show All Formulas” in the View menu or hitting Ctrl `.Who’s gone Google?The pace of organizations saying goodbye to legacy on-premises technology and moving into the cloud continues to accelerate. Read more about why The Richmond Group, Box.net, Bowerly Lane Bicycles and EPS Communications selected Google Apps for their messaging and collaboration needs.I hope these updates help you or your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Original Source: The Official Google Blog

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Long, complicated and lawyerly—that's what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:

Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well.

We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.

In addition, we’re adding:

• More content to some of our product Help Centers so people will be able to find information about protecting their privacy more easily; and
• A new privacy tools page to the Google Privacy Center. This will mean that our most popular privacy tools are now all in one place.

These privacy policy updates will take effect in a month, on October 3. You can see the new main Google Privacy Policy here, and if you have questions this FAQ should be helpful.Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction.Posted by Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel

Original Source: The Official Google Blog

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(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome Blog)Watching the 1985 classic Back to the Future last night, I was struck by how much things can change with time. The main character Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time, only to find that his house hadn’t been built yet, skateboards hadn’t been invented and nobody had ever heard rock ‘n roll.Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.Happy 2nd birthday, Google Chrome!(Illustration: Mike Lemanski, click image to expand)Since Chrome’s first beta launch for Windows, we’ve brought our Mac and Linux versions up to speed, and continued to make the browser faster, simpler, and safer across all three platforms. We’ve also introduced a boatload of features, including a more customizable New Tab page, browser themes, side-by-side view, password manager, better privacy controls, built-in Adobe Flash Player, Autofill, automatic translation, HTML5 capabilities and synchronization of various settings such as bookmarks, themes, extensions and browser preferences—just to name a few. Finally, there are now more than 6,000 extensions in our gallery to enhance your browsing experience.Behind the scenes, we continue to extend the security features that help you browse the web more safely. This includes Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology—which serves as a warning system if you’re about to visit a site suspected of phishing or hosting malware; Chrome’s auto-update mechanism—which helps ensure that the browser is always up-to-date with the latest security updates; and the browser’s “sandbox”—an added layer of protection which prevents malicious code on an exploited website from infecting your computer.The old Chrome: our very first beta!Chrome now: Our brand new release todayToday, we’re releasing a new stable version of Chrome that is even faster and more streamlined. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance. We’ve also been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome. As you can see, we took the already minimalist user interface and stripped it down a bit more to make it easier to use. We combined Chrome’s two menus into one, revisited the location of the buttons, cleaned up the treatment of the URL and the Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.Sliding back into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and setting the dial ahead by a few months, we have more in store for Chrome. As always, we’re hard at work on making Chrome even faster, and working on ways to improve graphics performance in the browser through hardware acceleration. With the Chrome Web Store, we hope to make it much easier to find and use great applications on the web. We also ratcheted up the pace of our releases so that we can get new features and improvements to everyone more quickly.If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.Life on the web, in the browser.(Illustration: Jack Hudson, click image to expand)Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

Original Source: The Official Google Blog

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It’s been 10 years since the first version of Google SketchUp was released, and there are more people modeling in SketchUp now that we ever could have imagined—over a million of you a week, in fact. That’s a pretty humbling number of 3D model makers.People around the world are modeling everything—from a new design for their kitchen to entire cities in Google Earth. For our small part in this global phenomenon, I’m proud to announce that SketchUp 8, the next major version of our 3D modeling tool, is available for download today. We’ve added significant new geo-modeling capabilities that leverage Google’s vast collection of geo-spatial data to make it quicker, easier and more fun than ever to build models of the world around us.Head on over to our website for the whole story, or just grab yourself a new build and get back to modeling.Posted by Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager

Original Source: The Official Google Blog

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