GRD Google Fans

Google has finally pulled back the curtain on its so-called Wikipedia killer, Google Knol. We first heard that Google was looking at launching a user-editable encyclopedia-style web services late last year. But to be perfectly honest, a lot’s happened in the last 7 months and we kind of forgot about it. Now that it’s here, we’re not entirely sure it’s fair to call it a Wikipedia-killer.

Knol provides a place to find information about topics ranging from lung cancer to toilet clogs. What makes it different from Wikipedia is that…

If you’ve ever thought it would be a good idea to embed a chat widget on your web site, Google has another proposition for you: Why stop there? Why not embed a 3D environment, let users create avatars, decorate a room, and chat with one another? The company has taken the wraps off of Lively, a 3D social networking/chat service that does just that. You can create or join Lively rooms through Lively.com or you can embed rooms on any site using a small snippet of HTML code.

We got…

Facebook has put out their chat service, Google has Google chat. There’s no desktop app for Facebook, but there is one for Google chat.

Confusing, and annoying. It’s also confusing and annoying to have to use those services in separate programs or multiple tabs in a web browser.

AIM is probably the most popular IM service known to man and woman, iChat for Mac…these are both desktop experiences.

Enter Gabtastik.

For Windows XP and Mac OS X, Gabtastik wants to take your browser chatting to the desktop where a lot us feels that…

It’s been about a month since Google announced its new Friend Connect platform which lets you add social widgets to any blog or web site. If you’ve been waiting patiently to see these widgets start popping up on the wild, wild web, it looks like the wait is over. Tech blogger Orli Yakuel has added a widget to her blog, Go2Web20.

The widget looks a lot like the recent readers widgets you find from services like MyBlogLog. But Friend Connect offers users the opportunity to interact with their contacts and communities more deeply…

Google now lets you add annotations to YouTube videos. What does that mean? Basically, you can add text to any video you upload.

You can use three different formats, speech bubbles, notes, and spotlights. You can see a speech bubble in the image above. A note looks pretty much the same, but without the arrow pointing toward a mouth. And the spotlight lets you draw a box around some element in the video. When a user scrolls their mouse over that element, the text will pop up.

Annotations are easy to…

A few months ago, Google launched Google Sites, a hosted wiki product built on JotSpot technology. But until this week, Google Sites was only available to Google Apps users, which basically meant you needed to have your own domain name to set up a wiki. Now Google is opening Google Sites up to everyone.

If you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, a wiki is basically a page that’s open to collaborative editing. While Google doesn’t call its new product a wiki, the service lets you create and…

Google has officially launched a public beta of its new health and medical information service. Google has been privately testing Google Health in partnership with the Cleveland Clinic since February. But now anybody can sign up for the free service.

So what exactly is Google Health? It’s a one stop for managing your personal medical records, sharing that information with doctors who use the service, and searching for health related information. You can use the service to get your prescriptions filled, check up on test results, or create alerts that will remind you…

YouTube has been linking copyrighted videos uploaded by third parties to their respective content owners. This occurred with a Modest Mouse video, which YouTube linked to the official Modest Mouse page. The link says “Contains Content From: Sony BMG,” and it may be YouTube’s way of preventing content owners from removing videos uploaded by fans.

Up until now, YouTube has said it shouldn’t be held responsible for the copyright violations performed by its members, but it has also been very cooperative in removing copyrighted material when asked. Last year Google announced a video…