Google Friends Newsletter May 2006 As we work our way slowly but surely into the season of baseball and barbecues, it's our pleasure to welcome you, Google Friends, to the May edition of this newsletter. We hope you'll enjoy reading about what we've been up to in the last month, and find the updates useful. POWER TIP Adding pictures to Google Mail Most of you probably already know that Google Talk lets you add your own pictures to your icon slot, and were probably expecting that we'd eventually add that functionality to Google Mail too. Well, you were right: You can now choose your own pic to use as an icon in Google Mail. But you may not have heard that you can also display your own pictures of the people on your contacts list, and send them picture suggestions if you find something that would make a good icon. Assign a picture: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=38355 Suggest a picture: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=35528 NEW PRODUCTS Google Co-op Google Co-op improves search for everyone by allowing people to label web pages relevant to their areas of expertise and create specialized links users can subscribe to. So, for example, if a you're a doctor who knows a lot about arthritis, you can label web pages related to the disease, and other Google Co-op users who subscribe to your information will receive new search refinement options (such as "treatment," "symptoms," or "for health professionals") at the top of their results page when they enter a relevant query. http://www.google.com/coop Google Desktop Google Desktop 4 lets you personalize your desktop with a variety of Google Gadgets. These gadgets are mini-applications that reside on your desktop and deliver a variety of services and information, including games, media players, news updates, and weather info. We've also added several other features, including a new Google Desktop Gadgets API that will let you create your own gadgets and share them with others. http://desktop.google.com Google Notebook Google Notebook is a free browser tool that makes web research of all kinds-from planning a vacation to comparison shopping to purchasing a car-easier and more efficient. It allows you to send clippings of text, images, and links to an online notebook without ever leaving the page you're on. You can also add your own notes, organize notebooks into sections, and make your notebooks public for others to view. http://www.google.com/notebook Google Trends Google Trends enables you to compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. You can enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often. http://www.google.com/trends Google Page Creator The name says it all, really--Google Page Creator is a new Labs product we're testing that lets you easily create web pages that are both functional and stylish. Google Page Creator removes the usual headaches of designing a web page (like learning HTML or hiring someone who already has), so you can get your ideas up on the web faster. http://pages.google.com MISCELLANY Avoiding RSI If you're like a lot of people who work with computers, your desk chair molds perfectly to your body, and your mouse and keyboard are as broken-in as an old baseball glove. And if that is the case, then you might be as interested as we were to read the latest blog post from our staff doctor, Taraneh Razavi. In the post, Dr. Razavi weighs in on repetitive stress injury, or RSI, giving us a sense of just how widespread a problem it is and sharing some useful tips on how we can avoid it. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/avoiding-rsi.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our technology and products, and the company at large. http://googleblog.blogspot.com -------------------------------------------------- Share Google Friends with a friend through Google Groups (includes subscribe/unsubscribe information). http://groups.google.com/group/google-friends -------------------------------------------------- Google Friends archive: http://www.google.com/googlefriends/archive.html To unsubscribe from the Google Friends Newsletter, send an empty message to: [email protected] Google, Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---