Just read on TweekDeck that Google has some “exciting announcements” to make about Chrome. The live webcast will be shown on their YouTube channel. I’ll be back after watching it, find out what all the excitement is about!

So a lot has been talked about in the Google presentation. Google is really trying to improve search and make it even faster as they’ve always spoken about. They also spoke about rolling out a notebook running Chrome OS. Chrome OS is all about using the internet and so you would be buying a laptop only intended for that. The notebook will be capable of a 3g  connection, they were showing Verizon as a partner in this with prices starting at 9.99 for data plans. They made sure to announce that you would not have to have a contract with Verizon and it’s up to you when you want to purchase your data. Security was also another big objective for Google in this project. Wanting users to know they are providing a safe and secure experience with Chrome OS. The more I hear about Chrome OS I can’t help but think about Android and why not combine the two. Instead of just putting a 100% effort into Chrome OS on a notebook. Well, after all I heard I am impressed with the advancements Google is making and it’s quite obvious that Chrome is advancing, like I said about Firefox , these two search engines are taking over search.

If your like me and own a Samsung Galaxy S phone your probably waiting for the Android 2.2 Froyo update. Unless you’ve rooted your phone and installed one of the roms out there with the update! I’m waiting for the actual release. Samsung originally made the announcement via Twitter that the update would arrive sometime in September. Since we only have ten days left in the month I figured I would mention the month is almost over. Most people agree that the update will be released this month but I also heard that Samsung doesn’t have the best track record releasing these updates as scheduled. I hope they release it within a reasonable amount of time. For anyone not familiar with the Froyo 2.2 update Google has a pretty useful short video explaining it. The talk regarding this update is that Flash will be enabled in the browser…after installing the Flash player available in the Android market. It’s pretty interesting how they worked this out. If you go to the market now and your not running Android 2.2. and you type in “Adobe Flash” you will not get any results for a player. Basically if your os is not meant to have the player, your not going to get it. So bottom line for all of us waiting, well we have some things to look forward to in 2.2. Faster os, faster browser, and a new updating feature for your installed apps where you can run multiple updates at once. The new update also includes some enhancements to the API and services that will give developers even more capabilities producing applications for Android. That’s about all I’ve read or watched about this 2.2 update. Now let’s wait for Samsung to release it for the Galaxy S phones!

If you thought Google was your favorite search engine because it was so fast you’ll be happy to know it got a lot faster this week. A new feature called Google instant was added to the search. This new addition to Google will allow you to type in search terms and as your typing the page will populate with results. For those not interested in this you can turn the feature on and off.  After it’s launch users started to question how people will get to the top of Google and what this makes for those who use Google advertising services like Adwords. Google Analytics user’s were also concerned about what this feature will do to their site’s popularity. Well it changes nothing in the game of marketing or position of your site with Google. Who says? Well Google announced today that it doesn’t. With all the questions they were getting they wanted to address  some of the more popular concerns with Google Instant. You can read the posting by Google here. It was also announced that Instant Search is coming to mobile devices in the near future. For now you can use the new feature in browsers that are compatible with handling this such as FireFox or Chrome. I believe most people are concerned with only the big companies owning the first page. But really, isn’t that the case already? The big companies investing in online marketing will always be the ones to own the search engines. And it’s not always paying for clicks, marketing a website goes far beyond just paying for that spot. Web development in itself is a marketing tool for those trying to gain an audience. Anyways Google is the top search engine and with new enhancements like Instant it will continue to stay ahead of it’s competition.

If your interested in adding Google maps to your WordPress blog, MapPress is a pretty cool plugin to use. It literally took me under five minutes to integrate this. Once you install the plugin you have to retrieve an API key from Google (developer provided a link to the Google page in the plugin settings). After that you’ll now have a map option when you go to create a new post. In the map below I set the default location to downtown New York City. The one thing I noticed missing was Google’s street view. But hey for what it’s worth this gets the job done and I’m sure in the future more features will be added. I’ll see you guys in the next post.

As someone who has always used Google Analytics I was a bit curious to know more about Google webmaster tools. The free service offered by Google allows developers and anyone else with a website for that matter to look a little closer at the site they own or manage. Now if your currently using Google Analytics you might feel you don’t need this.  Let me explain how Analytics works. Google Analytics service runs off a snipet of javascript that is provided by Google. For this to work javascript needs to be enabled on the users computer, then the site picks up the visit to your site. So what happens if the person doesn’t have that enabled on their computer or has it blocked? In short, Analytics will not calculate a person’s visit under these circumstances. Now with webmaster tools the data received is not based on any javascript coding. Setup is confirmed with Google via adding a meta tag provided, a separate html page, or DNS record. You can choose any one of the three options to enable this and confirm ownership of your site.  Once that’s done your ready to use webmaster tools to view a number of statistics regarding your site.  Keywords, links to your site, search queries, crawl errors, amongst other information is available.

With webmaster tools you can also monitor how Google views your site after it’s crawled. You can go even further by managing what you don’t want Google to see. Furthermore you can control how often Google bots visit your site. It all depends on your needs and the site that your working on. An added bonus to the tools is the sitemap submission. Yet another way for you to control how Google views your site. You can visit the Google webmaster tools page here. I’ll see you guys in the next post.