Google Health

I have been staying quiet on the subject of this for a while. I am just letting it work its magic into the online world of personal health records. I am going to wait a while longer before I give my opinion about this recent release from Google Health. I want to have more of a chance to get to know this product.


As for Google, I look to see some big things here in the future. Check my blog later this week for a post about what I would like to see with two Google products.

Google Maps Adds Photos and Articles

Google Maps added a "More" tab to its ever-expanding top menu. The tab gives you access to photos from Panoramino and articles from Wikipedia. The geocoded photos are placed at their location on the map when selected. Wikipedia articles are also placed if there is a location given within the article.



Google Maps looks like it will be integrating more and more location information in the near future. Google Street View is also starting to blur faces in imagery.

Google Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect was released on Monday. As a web developer, I see this becoming very useful in the near future. The preview release only gives access to a select few. Friend Connect uses your friends on other social networks and social applications from OpenSocial to make a third party websites more social.

Google Maps Explore

Google Maps' new exploration feature shows geotagged photos, videos, and local user-created maps.

Google Talk Chatback Styles

Google Talk chatback released some new styles today. You can now show your status icon and message in a variety of ways with the hyperlink for visitors to chat with you. This offers a few better ways to embed the badge onto your personal web page and blog. You can find out more here.

New Google Reader Features

I have been waiting a while for some of the features in the latest update from Google Reader. Sometimes I find a blog that I am not subscribed to that I want to share with my Google Reader friends. This was not easy before as I had to send them individually a link to the article online. Now, through the new features, I can just add the article to my Google Reader from a bookmarking option. This makes it easy to share the article with my friends. Also, with the new features, they have added a way to send notes with your Reader friends. You can either share a note with your friends as a group, or you can share a post and attach a note with it saying why you have shared this particular article. Find it here on the notes page. Also, they have added a way to incorporate a theme into your shared items feed. This is interesting option maybe stemming from the recent release of artist themes for iGoogle. Lastly, they have implemented a way to distinguish from your own items and shared items within your All Items page on Reader. This will help when you find yourself wondering how you got the item in the first place.

All this is well enough for Google Reader. I use the service probably second most to Gmail. I would still like to see integration into Gmail as the services have similar schemes and style of use.