If you’re using threaded comments, you’ll see if someone responded directly to you, right in the notification.

You will see Approve, Spam, and Trash links in your comment notification if you have permission to moderate comments, allowing you to moderate the comment from within the notification:

Clicking Reply automatically approves a comment and displays an area for you to type a reply in. When you’re done, just click Reply and you can get back to whatever you were working on, without having to navigate to the dashboard to manage your comments.

You can still manage comments in your dashboard, but we hope you’ll find the comment notification a convenient shortcut.

Speed
With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.

Simplicity
Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web.

One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier.

And as with Chrome on desktop, we built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’).

Sign in
You can now bring your personalized Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:

• § View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer (also signed into Chrome)—picking up exactly where you left off.
• § Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, you’ll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.
• § Sync bookmarks: Conveniently access your favorite sites no matter where you are or which device you’re using.

Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Finally, we look forward to working closely with the developer community to create a better web on a platform that defines mobile.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps

(Cross-posted from the Chrome blog and on the Mobile blog)

What’s the message displayed by Gmail when there’s no message in your inbox? If you answered “No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader”, you are right. It was Google’s subtle way to promote Google Reader.

Before Google Reader was released, Gmail’s “inbox zero” message used to be: “No new mail! There’s always Google News if you’re looking for something to read.”

Now that Google focuses on developing Google+, a modern version of Google Reader, Gmail’s new message is: “No new mail! See what people are talking about on Google+.” The links sends Gmail users to the “what’s hot” section of Google+ which “highlights selected content thought to be exemplary, interesting, and appropriate: showing you serendipitous and diverse information”.

From Google News to Google Reader and now Google+, Gmail illustrates three different ways to read news. Google News ranks and clusters articles from the web, Google Reader allows you to read news from your favorite sites, while Google+ lets you read the articles shared by the people you follow. From news that are important to everyone to news that are important to the people you trust.

Let us consider some important possibilities and advantages of this program:
• All code highlights depending on a type, the also mixed code is thus supported, so the area of HTML will be highlighted as HTML, PHP as PHP, and Javascript as Javascript in a the same file. Thre is possibility of choice from color schemes, including popular IDEs.
• Powerful autocompletion for HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript, including HTML5 and CSS3. For PHP the structure of project is fully recognized, and the complete list of methods falls out in the proper places.
• HTML/CSS inspector on the type of Firebug, which allows easily to correlate the selected elements of page with a code and proper style.
• Context help on all supported languages. By pressing F1 key the page with detailed description for current tag, attribute or function will be opened.
• PHP debugger. PHP debugger allows to execute PHP scripts incrementally, watching the values of all variables in every line.
• SQL manager allows to produce all necessary actions with a database – to add, delete, edit a structure and records in tables, to export data, execute SQL queries. Highlighting and autocompletion works for SQL files also.
• Support of FTP allows to work straight with a remote server and to do all necessary changes with files;
• The portable option allows to use editor without the preliminary installation.
• Other useful utilities: pair highlighting, possibility of blocks selection, collapsing, tooltips, navigation on descriptions of functions and included files at withholding of the key of CTRL, viewing of structure of files and project, preview in a browser, book-marks, and all other standard possibilities for work with a code

Also there are special plugins for work with

• CMS: Drupal, Joomla
• PHP frameworks: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Yii
• JavaScript libraly: JQuery
• WordPress blogging engine
• Smarty template engine

So we’re rolling out a new main privacy policy that covers the majority of our products and explains what information we collect, and how we use it, in a much more readable way. While we’ve had to keep a handful of separate privacy notices for legal and other reasons, we’re consolidating more than 60 into our main Privacy Policy.

Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies—and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web.

These changes will take effect on March 1, and we’re starting to notify users today, including via email and a notice on our homepage.

What does this mean in practice? The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.

Our recently launched personal search feature is a good example of the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products. Our search box now gives you great answers not just from the web, but your personal stuff too. So if I search for restaurants in Munich, I might see Google+ posts or photos that people have shared with me, or that are in my albums. Today we can also do things like make it easy for you to read a memo from Google Docs right in your Gmail, or add someone from your Gmail contacts to a meeting in Google Calendar.

But there’s so much more that Google can do to help you by sharing more of your information with … well, you. We can make search better—figuring out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink. We can provide more relevant ads too. For example, it’s January, but maybe you’re not a gym person, so fitness ads aren’t that useful to you. We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day. Or ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends’ names, are accurate because you’ve typed them before. People still have to do way too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them out.

Second, the Google Terms of Service—terms you agree to when you use our products. As with our privacy policies, we’ve rewritten them so they’re easier to read. We’ve also cut down the total number, so many of our products are now covered by our new main Google Terms of Service. Visit the Google Terms of Service page to find the revised terms.

Finally, what we’re not changing. We remain committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can. We don’t sell your personal information, nor do we share it externally without your permission except in very limited circumstances like a valid court order. We try hard to be transparent about the information we collect, and to give you meaningful choices about how it is used—for example our Ads Preferences Manager enables you to edit the interest categories we advertise against or turn off certain Google ads altogether. And we continue to design privacy controls, like Google+’s circles, into our products from the ground up.

We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer. Whether you’re a new Google user or an old hand, please do take the time to read our new privacy policy and terms, learn more about the changes we’re making and understand the controls we offer.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

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 }

• Google Message Continuity (GMC): In December 2010 we launched an email disaster recovery product for enterprise customers that use Google’s cloud to back up emails originally sent or received in an on-premise, Microsoft Exchange system. In the time since we launched, we’ve seen hundreds of businesses sign up for it. By comparison, in that same time, we’ve seen millions of businesses move entirely to the cloud with Google Apps, benefitting from disaster recovery capabilities built directly into Apps. Going forward we’ve decided to focus our efforts on Google Apps and end support for GMC. Current GMC customers will be able to use GMC for the duration of their contract and are encouraged to consider using Google Apps as their primary messaging and collaboration platform.
• Google Sky Map: This app was created by half a dozen Googlers at the Pittsburgh office in their 20 percent time to show off the amazing capabilities of the sensors in the first-generation Android phones and offer a window into the sky. Since we launched the tool in 2009, we have managed to share our passion with more than 20 million Android users. We will be open-sourcing Sky Map and are collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University in a partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects.
• Needlebase: We are retiring this data management platform, which we acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The technology is being evaluated for integration into Google’s other data-related initiatives.
• Picnik: We acquired this online photo editor in 2010. We’re retiring the service on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. You can download a zip file of your creations through Picnik Takeout or copy them to Google+. As of now, the premium service is free to everyone. Premium members will receive a full refund in the coming weeks.
• Social Graph API: This API makes information about the public connections between people on the web available for developers. 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.
• Urchin: In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics, helping businesses of all sizes measure their websites and online marketing. We’re fully committed to building an industry-leading online analytics product, so we’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.

Resolutions can be hard, and changing products that people love is hard too. But we’re excited to focus on creating a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google—an experience that will change the lives of millions of people.

Posted by Dave Girouard, VP of Product Management

I’ve recently noticed that Google started to show results for queries like [.], [,], [:], [;], [#], [%], [@], [^], [)], [~], [|], ["], [<], [$]. When you search for [%], Google shows the results for [percent sign] and that happens irrespective of the interface language, so it’s not a synonym generated by Google’s algorithms.

Search for [:] and you’ll get the results for [colon]. Most results are about the colon from the human anatomy and they’re not relevant.

We’ve also brought the reblog button back to the toolbar that appears at the top of the screen when you’re logged into WordPress.com. Note that you’ll only see the like and reblog options while you’re looking at individual posts.

For example, you’ll see this on the left side of your toolbar while viewing http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs:

And your toolbar will look like this while you’re browsing the home page of en.blog.wordpress.com:

How does reblogging work?

Reblogging is a quick way to share posts published by other WordPress.com users on your own blog. People have been reblogging others’ posts since blogging started, but our new reblogging system enables authors to retain greater control over their content.

When a post is reblogged, it shows up with a link back to the blog it came from, the first image in the post, an excerpt of the post’s introduction (if it contains text), and thumbnails of any other images that the post contains. It also shows any comments left by the person who reblogged the post:

Reblogs published on blogs you follow will also appear in your reader:

What happens when my posts get reblogged?

An excerpt of your post will be published on the reblogger’s site (with a link back to your original post), and you’ll receive a reblog notification in the post comments (you might need to approve it first):

You’ll also receive an email notification of the reblog.

Do I get credit when someone else reblogs one of my posts?

Absolutely! All reblogs contain a link back to your original post, so the more people reblog your posts, the more likely it is that you’ll attract new visitors (and perhaps new followers, too!).

What happens if I reblog a reblog?

If, for example, Stephane reblogs a WordPress.com announcement on his site and Lori reblogs Stephane’s reblog, Lori only re-publishes any comments Stephane made about the announcement. If Lori wants to share the original announcement, she should reblog the post from en.blog.wordpress.com, not from Stephane’s reblog. But if Stephane leaves a really clever comment, Lori might want to share it by reblogging his reblog on her site.

Can I edit a post I’ve reblogged?

You can go back and edit the comments you left when you reblogged a post, but you cannot edit any parts of the original post excerpt (including the post title). If you like, you can add categories or tags to the post. Reblogs show up under Posts → All Posts in your dashboard, and they can be edited the same way you edit your own posts.