Google’s Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Designs

Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."

Features of the template designer include:

- 15 new templates (with more on the way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts, and more.

"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.

It's interesting that this kind of customization has not been available from Blogger until 2010, as Blogger itself is over a decade old, and has been Google-owned since 2003.

The Blogger Template Designer is available through Blogger in Draft, Blogger's testing ground/sandbox site.

HBO Launches Video Service For Verizon FiOS Customers

Verizon FiOS customers who subscribe to HBO will be able to watch the cable television's programming online for free, starting tomorrow.

Customers must subscribe to both FiOS TV and FiOS Internet to gain free access to the online video site HBO Go. HBO Go will support Verizon subaccounts and allow up to three users in the same house access content.

HBO Go allows users to create a watchlist where bookmarked content can be placed for later viewing and where the user will be notified to the arrival of new episodes. Users will also be able to customize their settings via multiple browsing and viewing options.

HBO Go will feature over 600 hours of programming, which is four times more viewing choices than HBO On Demand. Users will have access to HBO original programming, films, miniseries, documentaries, sports and movies. HBO Go will be updated more frequently than the company's on demand service.

"HBO GO adds more value to FiOS TV customers' HBO subscriptions with the convenience of accessing their programming in more ways and in more places," said Shawn Strickland, vice president of consumer strategy and planning for Verizon

"We're excited to add this deeper, richer experience to our already extensive HBO offerings, further enhancing the TV and Internet experience that only FiOS delivers."
 

 

Is Google Bad at Social Media or Really, Really Good at it?

Google often takes a lot of flack for not being incredibly successful with its social media efforts. Most recently, Caroline McCarthy and Tom Krazit tackled this subject in a CNET article claiming that "Google struggles with social skills." I would not go so far as to say that I completely disagree with them. They make plenty of factual points that are simply undeniable. Orkut hasn't set the world afire. Jaiku and Dodgeball didn't work out. YouTube was pretty much established by the time Google bought it, and even since it has not been the financial success many would have assumes it would be, despite its enormous popularity.

Is it that Google doesn't do well with social media or is it that Google is doing better at it than most people even consider. First, you have to ask yourself: what is a social network anyway? What is social media? Is it Facebook? MySpace? Twitter? Is it a network of connected people? Google Profile users can look at their "social circles" and quickly realize that Google has them connected to people.

If you look at the definitions for social media, you get things like "content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies," "a category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content." I think Google has done pretty well at indexing and monetizing user-generated content (that is if user means user of Google, which essentially makes the majority of all content user-generated).

When you compare Google to Facebook, wouldn't it be fairer to break down Google by its various offerings? Wouldn't it be fairer to compare Google itself to Facebook? You can say, well, Google Friend Connect isn't as successful as Facebook. Jaiku wasn't as successful as Facebook. Wouldn't it make more sense to chalk each of these offerings within Google as features of the broader Google network, for all intents and pruposes?

Most of Google's products require one account. You log in to your Google account and there are a lot of different things you are able to do, and it's all because of that one account. You can email people, chat, write documents and spreadsheets, use webmaster tools, etc., etc., etc. Is Google not just a social network with a lot more features than most others (not to mention what many would consider to be a better search tool than most other social networks)?

Is Google's "failure" at social media due to not having a proper Twitter-like stream (which Facebook essentially took and ran with by the way)? Maybe Google doesn't have the best feature in every social media category, but I think they've pretty much taken the cake in some categories, and last I checked, Google is pretty successful.

I write this not as some kind of Google fanboy, but each day, I see Google launching new products and features, finding new things for users to do, and particularly for those who have a Google account. A lot of what you can do with various Google products requires you to be logged in. A lot of it is very social (profiles, social search, real-time search, document sharing, Google reader sharing and commenting, emailing, chatting, Google latitude...just to name a few). Maybe we should consider the sum of all users across all of the company’s products to determine just how successful it is at this so-called “social media”. Google makes money. Crazy money.  I wonder how many people have Google accounts.

Note: For the record, I understand that nobody's saying Google itself isn't succesful.

Is Google really not good at social media? I'll ask again, what is social media really? We tend to put these labels on things, but I don't think it's so black and white.
 

Have You Read This?

> Google Luring More Account Users with New News Feature?

> Integration - The Key to Google as a Social Network

> Is Gmail Google's Real Social Network?

Google Latitude Introduces Location History, Smart Alerts

A quick, but important, note: the stuff we're about to discuss is only available on an opt-in basis.  So there's no need to stop halfway through this article and drown your phone or tape it to a neighbor's car.  Now, with that out of the way, let's move on to the news that Google Latitude's gained two features called Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (which is in beta).

Google Location History may be either the less cool or the less creepy offering, depending on one's point of view.  A post on the Google Mobile Blog explained that, with it, you can "store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations."  Then, "You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order."

In another nod to personal privacy, it's possible to delete part or all of your location history, too.

As for the second feature, it builds on the first and tries to intelligently connect you with acquaintances.  According to the post, "Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work.  Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time."

You can enable these offerings here if they suit your style.  And should you later change your mind, Google promises that you can disable them rather than head for the nearest sink or roll of duct tape.

Have You Read This?

> Google Puts All Of Your Personal Info In One Place

> Google Tracks User Data To Monitor Load Times

> iPhone Finally Gets A Google Latitude App

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