If anything that is constant in this world; it is ‘change’.
Google seems to have taken this thought onboard and has implemented a slew of enhancements, rearrangements and design changes to some of its most used resources.
Google’s sojourn journey began by spicing up Gmail with colors and themes. Not to be left behind, the Google Reader team introduced an updated look and feel for Google Reader. This is what they had to say, “Google is all about speed, both under the hood as well as in the user experience. So, in order to make Reader act and feel more speedy and responsive, we’ve removed some visual clutter, simplified some features and given everything a bit more breathing room. Out with the old rounded corners, drop shadows and heavily saturated colors — in with a softer palette, faster components and a fresh new look.”
The new features include collapsible navigation, a separate section for shared items from your friends, the ability to hide unread counts and feed bundles arranged by topics.
The Google ‘Webmaster Help Group’ got an image makeover too. According to an official post on Google Webmaster Central blog, “Today, however, I’m thrilled to announce that our English and Polish Help Groups are getting a makeover. And the changes are more than just skin-deep. Our new Help Forums should make it easier for you to find answers, share resources with others, and have your participation acknowledged.”
The old groups will no longer be accepting new posts; however it will still be available to public in a read only mode. While these changes are limited to English and Polish languages, Google has assured that this new format will be rolled out to other languages in 2009.
The Google ‘Webmaster Tools’ was not meant to be an exception and underwent a metamorphosis. One place for changing your site’s settings, an official post, announced that Webmaster Tools will now feature all settings for your site under a single head – “Settings”.
In addition to putting your entire site’s settings under one tab, the new interface will also allow you save and cancel the changes made. Of special interest are the Googlebot’s crawl rate settings which have been upgraded.
The slider bar function to set custom crawl rate will come handy for advanced users (those of us in the search engine optimization field and others), especially when they are having issues with server bandwidth. However the 90 day expiration period has been left unchanged. “You may use this setting only for root level sites and sites not hosted on a large domain like blogspot.com (we have special settings assigned for them),” says Google. If you are a basic user, it would best if you left the crawl rate setting to “Let Google determine my crawl rate (recommended).”
And now it is time to welcome a new entrant – Google Friend Connect. For webmasters who have been vying to add a dash of social to their websites, the wait is finally over.
Google Friend Connect service is designed to let webmasters “add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required.”
The last 48 hours have been manic – my twitter hasn’t stopped tweeting, the forums are on fire and as the other half of the world awakes the social media sphere is going to be flooded with all these updates.
If you are a social media geek as I am, get ready for the onslaught.
So much has happened in the last couple of days..has kept me running from one post to another. Thanks for putting it all together.
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onGoogle Re-jigged | Online Marketing BlogHere’s a quick excerptThe slider bar function to set custom crawl rate will come handy for advanced users (those of us in the search engine optimization field and others), especially when they are having issues with server bandwidth. … [...]