Google Voice Simplifies SMS to Multiple Recipients

Google has taken steps to make sending text messages to multiple recipients a little bit easier with Google Voice. In the past, users had to copy and paste the message for each person on the list.

Google is now letting users send the message to multiple people at once. Users now just need to click on the SMS button at the top of their Google Voice inbox, enter the names/numbers in the "To" field, separated by commas, and write the message.

"Replies from each recipient will be threaded into separate conversations, so you can keep track of them in your Google Voice inbox," explains

Google's Greg Hecht. "To prevent spam, we've set a maximum of five recipients per message."

The feature is also available in the Google Voice Chrome extension in the recently released gallery. Google says it will soon be adding it to the Google Voice mobile app.

Last week Google launched the new Google Voice mobile web app for iPhone OS 3.0 and higher and Palm Web OS devices. It utilizes HTML5.

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Google Chrome Extensions Not Limited to Gallery

Google recently launched its extensions Gallery for Chrome, but today the company is reminding users of the browser (which continues to gain popularity) that there are a lot more things you can do with it beyond just what's in the gallery. Google Chrome 4 supports Greasemonkey user scripts.

Chrome users can use Greasemonkey, which is a Firefox extension that allows developers to customize web pages using javascript, to install any user script with a single click.

"Ever since the beginning of the Chromium project, friends and coworkers have been asking me to add support for user scripts in Google Chrome," says software engineer Aaron Boodman. "I'm happy to report that as of the last Google Chrome release, you can install any user script with a single click. So, now you can use emoticons on blogger. Or, you can browse Google Image Search with a fancy lightbox. In fact, there's over 40,000 scripts on userscripts.org alone."

"Installation is quick and easy, just like installing an extension," adds Boodman. "That's because under the covers, the user script is actually converted into an extension. This means that management tasks like disabling and uninstalling work just like they do with extensions."

Boodman notes that scripts have full access to private data on sites, so you would want to be careful about what you install, and use caution when trusting them. Not all of the scripts work with Chrome yet (Boodman estimates 15% - 25%).

According to data from NetMarketShare, Chrome made market share gains in January, taking share away from both IE and Firefox. The browser gained .6% for the month. 

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Google Stresses Speed Yet Again with New Tool

Google has launched a new extension for its Chrome browser, which lets developers identify performance problems with their web apps. This may be an increasingly important issue if Google starts counting speed as a ranking factor in search results.

The tool is called Speed Tracer, and it uses a "sluggishness graph" combined with other metrics to help pinpoint the problems that are slowing web apps down. Engineering Director Bruce Johnson explains:

In the spirit of clean, simple design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application's Sluggishness Graph to see how they're doing:

    * If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
    * If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish

And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of additional data to help diagnose any particular performance issue

Following is a tutorial for the tool:

A longer video of Speed Tracer being discussed at Google's Campfire One event can be viewed below:

"We think developers will find that Speed Tracer looks under the covers of web applications like never before," says Johnson. "In fact, we even used Speed Tracer to optimize the performance of Speed Tracer itself!"

Google has been on a real speed kick as of late. For some other examples of what I'm talking about, just follow the related articles below.

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Interesting Chrome Extensions On the Way

Google has opened up the Chrome Extension Gallery (beta) to developers. This means that anyone can now upload their extensions. Google says it is making the upload flow available early so developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of Google's full launch.

"Once an extension is uploaded, our gallery takes care of packaging and signing," says Google software engineer Lei Zheng. "Updating an extension is also incredibly easy — all a developer needs to do is to upload a new file in the gallery. Finally, to further help developers, in the next few days, we plan to open up the gallery to a small group of trusted testers. They will provide developers with insights and bug reports that will help them polish their extensions ahead of our beta launch."

Google provides the following tips for uploading extensions:

- Upload a ZIP file of your extension directory, not a packaged CRX file.

- Include a well-designed product icon in your manifest (more info).

- After uploading your extension, you will need to provide a detailed description, as well as screenshots or a YouTube video of your extension in action.

The review process is fully automated in most cases. Google will manually review ones that include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect "file://" URLs. Developers will have to give Google additional information for these types of extensions, for security reasons.

Information about how to write extensions for Chrome can be found here. Google says all types of extensions are welcome, as long as they comply with their terms of service.


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