Over the last several months you’ve probably come across Google’s +1 quite a few times. You may have even clicked it, only to wonder what exactly you’d just accomplished. Because, at least from the user’s perspective, there hasn’t been any reward from clicking on it. You’d push the button for the treat, only to leave empty-handed. That hasn’t stopped the +1 button from getting huge distribution — it’s now on 1 million sites and appears in 4 billion impressions every day, but that growth has had more to do with the fact that it’s Google than it does with the button being useful.

The +1 button has always had a subtle purpose, of course: Google says that it impacts search results, so pages you +1 may show up in your friends’ queries more prominently than they would otherwise. But who knows how often that happens. And while these +1 clicks also get saved in your Google+ profile, they’re not anywhere your friends are going to see them.

Today, that’s changing: Google has just announced that the +1 button will let you share to your Circles on Google+, directly from whatever page you’re browsing. Which means that you have a reason to keep clicking on them.

The feature appears to look pretty straightforward, and lot like Facebook’s ‘Send’ button, which lets you send content to a specific group of Facebook friends.

When you click on the +1 button and elect to share it with your Google+ Circles, you’ll notice that the shared story is pre-populated with both an image and some text from the page (again, Facebook’s sharing features work much the same way). Google is also letting publishers designate exactly which text they’d like to include with these ‘+Snippets’.

This is a big, if obvious, step forward for Google’s +1 button, as it gives users a much bigger incentive to click on them.

Here come the Google+ games. Google has announced a big move toward mainstream adoption today, integrating Web-based games within the brand new social network. “We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life,” the announcement says. Titles include Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz, Zynga Poker and Sudoku. Google has launched a new Google Plus Platform Blog to help encourage more.

Google seems a bit concerned about the distraction factor, though, and it wants to make sure these games don’t get in the way of your +1ing, sharing and other important Google Plus business. “Games in Google Plus are there when you want them and gone when you don’t,” the announcement says. “If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them.”

In every respect, from letting in members to developing mobile apps, the Google Plus project has been careful in its progress. A hasty implementation of games, or one that would cause a backlash, would be a major setback, and this announcement is worded to soothe that concern. But games have been expected since the launch of Google Plus (or earlier) and despite the company’s refusal to comment, multiple hints have been found in code and help documents.

As was reported last year, Google has quietly invested as much as $200 million in social game developer Zynga, maker of such illustrious titles as Farmville and Mafia Wars. Zynga’s business, while huge, has been almost entirely dependent on Facebook so far. As GigaOm’s Ryan Kim points out, Google Plus won’t have top Zynga titles like Cityville and Farmville because they’re exclusive to Facebook, but $200 million is sure to land Plus some fresh new titles of its own.

Games are an important feature for a social network that wants to compete with Facebook for users’ attention, not to mention its gaming business. “There is terrific potential for games on Google Plus,” Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst at M2 Research, told VentureBeat games specialist Dean Takahashi in a report on developer anticipation of games on Google Plus two weeks ago. “Opening up gaming on other social networks gives other publishers more opportunity to compete outside the Zynga-Facebook matrix, and can also help Zynga escape dependence on Facebook.” Takahashi wrote that he spoke to a number of game developers who were confident that Games on Plus would launch soon and that it “would change the game industry” when it does.

The battle for game developer attention is likely to be heated. Tricia Duryee reported late last month at All Things D that multiple sources told her Google would try to undercut Facebook by charging developers a lower fee for things like in-app sales.

Had a chance to try out Google+ yet? For many, the currently invite-only service has been a haven of calm away from the chaos of Facebook and the short-form conversation of Twitter, and a contributing factor in that has been a lack of social games and associated “Be My Neighbor! Send Me Gifts! Please Love Me!” spam on the service.

According to Google’s own help document, though, pictured below, the addition of gaming to the service might not be that far away. But early adopters of Google+ hoping to escape the Hand of Zynga shouldn’t despair just yet, and here’s why.

Google+ Games Confirmed!

For those who haven’t yet made use of Google+, the key concept of the service is the use of “Circles.” These allow you to organize your friends, acquaintances and favorite celebrities into separate “streams” so that not only can you customize what you’re reading at any one time, but you can also share your own content selectively. This helps get around the age-old problem of suddenly realizing that your boss can see those pictures of that disgusting thing you did to that girl on Saturday.

When the addition of games to Google+ was first rumored, many questions were raised about how people would be able to avoid the game notifications if they weren’t interested. Would users have to manually add gamers to their own separate Circle? Would there be a means of filtering specific content out? No-one knew.

However, Google, it seems, has paid attention to users’ concerns and have decided to constrict game updates to their own separate stream.

That sounds like a good solution for everyone involved. Those who enjoy a game of CityVille (you know who you are) can play and send all their begging notifications to their friends while the rest of the community can remain blissfully unaware if they so please.

Google is opening up its Google Map Maker to U.S. users as of today, allowing anyone to submit updates, revisions and additional information to the company’s online mapping service. The tool was originally designed for users in other countries without access to the mapping resources we have stateside. Says Google, prior to the launch of Map Maker, only 15% of the world’s population had detailed access to online maps of their neighborhoods, but now, citizen cartographers in 183 countries and regions have created maps of the places they live. Today, 30% of users people worldwide have access to online maps, thanks to Map Maker.

Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.

Google Map Maker

With the Map Maker, Google says you can fix the name of local businesses or add improved descriptions. You can also add more information about an area, like details on bike lanes or the names of buildings on college campuses, for example. To prevent any high jinx from occurring, Google notes that it will review the user-created submissions before they go live.

While on the surface, the launch of Map Maker in the U.S. appears to just be another useful feature to differentiate Google’s mapping service from its competitors, there may be some additional motives behind this launch.

One motive may have to do with the expansion of Google Places, the search company’s Yelp-like business locator service. In April, Google merged its socially-infused local business recommendation service called Hotpot into Google Places, the larger business database which provides reviews and venue information. Now Google is crowdsourcing edits to that same database via this U.S. launch of Google Map Maker.

Building a Better Location Database, Thanks to You

One of the primary assets of companies involved in providing location-based services is their database of venues. On this front, Facebook is a tough Google competitor, with its own database of locations called Facebook Places. In September 2010, a company spokesperson said the goal for Facebook Places was to be the “central platform for location data” across the Web. And in February 2011, Facebook made some under-the-hood changes to the way it houses venues listed on its site, a move that enables the network to have an accurate, universally standardized database of locations.

Location-based checkin service Foursquare also has its own venue database, and, like Google will now as well, uses crowdsourcing to help keep that database accurate. In theory, select superuserson Foursquare’s service are enlisted to clean up duplicate venues and make sure each pushpin is accurately placed. The job of crowdsourcing this cleanup is not going well in some areas with nearly every major venue having at least 2 or 3 clones, if not more. This may or may not be an across-the-board complaint, but it does highlight the challenges of creating a location database where users themselves are permitted to enter venues of their own, with no direct company oversight.

It should also be noted that another Google competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, has also gone the crowdsourcing route to some extent, partnering with Open Street Map (OSM) back in August 2010, to make it available as an additional layer on top of Bing Maps. The company has donated aerial imagery back to the Open Street Maps community too, and, in November, hired OSM founder Steve Coast to come work at Bing Maps.

To put it simply, today’s announcement from Google has a deeper impact to the company’s overall strategic initiatives than simply a case of “oh look, new tools!” Clean, accurate, robust, detailed and up-to-date maps and databases of locations will be key to growing any business that leverages location data in the future, which today includes a number of mobile services, and their online counterparts.

Google has begun notifying users of its email system, Gmail, that “better ads” are on the way. Being sure to note that “ads in Gmail are fully automated” and that “no humans read your messages,” the company announced that it will be using a process similar to that of Priority Inbox to bring users fewer, but more relevant, advertisements.

Can the company pull off more precise advertising without creeping out its user base? Ads, of course, are no new thing to the email provider, but users may not be too keen on receiving more personalized advertising. The company clearly states in its privacy policy that it is careful about the advertising it shows.

“To ensure a quality user experience for all Gmail users, we avoid showing ads reflecting sensitive or inappropriate content by only showing ads that have been classified as ‘Family-Safe,’” reads the policy. “We also avoid targeting ads to messages about catastrophic events or tragedies.”

Google says that it plans on better targeting advertising not only to provide a better experience, but to show “fewer irrelevant ads” and provide “offers and coupons for your local area.” How? With the same technology it uses to categorize emails in your Priority Inbox.

With features like Priority Inbox, we’ve been working hard to help sort through the ‘bacn‘ in your messages — the unimportant messages that get in your way. Soon we’re going to try a similar approach to ads: using some of the same signals that help predict which messages are likely to be important to you, Gmail will better predict which ads may be useful to you. For example, if you’ve recently received a lot of messages about photography or cameras, a deal from a local camera store might be interesting. On the other hand if you’ve reported these messages as spam, you probably don’t want to see that deal.

Google told TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid, who first noticed the feature, that it would be notifying users over coming days  about the feature but that personalized ads won’t go live for about a month. Users who don’t want any other eyes – computer or not – to be pouring over their emails will have to ability to opt out.

Will you keep the advertising machine running or will you opt out? (And did you know that you already could opt out of Gmail ads?)

Google has long touted the speed of Chrome, most recently tying the Year of the Rabbit in to its announcement of a Chrome beta. Today, the stable version of the browser is being released.

Google says the speed boost correspondents to a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance in benchmark tests.

But speed isn’t just the “pure brawn” under the hood, says Google, and the new interface in this most recent version of Chrome is meant to help the user move more quickly as well, particularly when it comes to changing settings. The settings interface now takes up its own tab in the browser, and there’s a new search box so you can quickly find what you’re looking to manage.

Chrome speed benchmarks

The new Chrome also lets you synchronize your passwords across the various computers you use. You can encrypt these for additional security. To enable this feature, visit the “Personal Stuff” section in Chrome’s settings.

Google has also extended Chrome’s sandboxing to the browser’s integrated Flash Player, which will help protect you against malicious webpages.

You can download the latest version here, or if you’re already using Chrome, you’ll be automatically updated soon. Also be sure to check out these two YouTube videos that describe both the new settings menu as well as what exactly “sandboxing” is.

Despite the abundance of cooking websites, finding a good recipe can be quite challenging. It isn’t simply a matter of finding highly-rated recipes or recipes with pictures. How do you wade through all the available recipes and find the one that matches dish you want to make, the cooking and prep time you have available, and the ingredients you have in stock?

To assist with that, Google has added a new feature to its search engine: Recipe View. The new view lets you narrow your search results to display only recipes. You can click on Recipes in the sidebar to view just recipe results. The new view also gives you a number of filters to help find the right recipe. You can clearly see the ratings, the pictures, and the ingredients. The latter is great as it lets you filter your recipe search so that, for example, you only pull up shepherd’s pie recipes that contain lamb (not beef, folks. Please, not beef).

Recipes Search Results

The Recipe View also lets you try more open-ended searches, so you can pull up recipes based on a specific ingredient.

Google says the new Recipe View is based on data from rich snippets markup. If you’re a recipe publisher, you can add the markup to your Web pages so that your content can appear with this improved presentation.

Google didn’t indicate if it has plans to expand this sort of markup into other search efforts, but it’s a good reason – at the very least for recipe publishers – to mark up your websites.

Given how much data we’re trusting to online sites these days — email, search history, even voice calls — the repercussions to having our account passwords phished, hacked, or guessed are worse than ever. Unfortunately as far as consumers are concerned, account security has been stagnant for years: nearly every service requires a username and password, and that’s it.

But today, Google is making things much, much better for those who want it and will be rolling this out over the next few days, so you may not see it quite yet.

The feature is called two-factor authentication, and it’s been available to Google Apps customers since September. Now it’s rolling out to everyone. It’s a bit confusing and the set-up process will probably intimidate a lot of people, but it’s well worth looking into if you value your account data. You can activate it by hitting the ‘two-step verification’ link on this page.  So what exactly does it do?

2-Step Verification

In short, it makes it so that when you go to login to your Google account, you need to enter both your existing password and a special new second passcode — one that you don’t have to write down or memorize because it’s always changing, so it’s nearly impossible to phish. You generate this second password by firing up a new mobile app available for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry called ‘Google Authenticator’, or by having Google call or send you a text message to a phone number you entered when you set up the feature. That password will expire in just a few minutes though, so be quick (and yes, you will feel like a secret agent the first few times you use it).

It’s not as stressful as it sounds, because you can elect to only require this second password once per computer (this still keeps phishers from being able to access your account). There are a few more quirks to it — in order to save passwords in applications like iCal, Mail, and most other desktop apps, you’ll have to generate a unique app-specific password. But again, you can save this so you only have to do it once per app.

There are also a few backup measures in place should you lose access to your mobile phone. You can designate a second, backup phone number to send the passcode to, and you’re also strongly encouraged to print out a set of ‘one-time’ passwords to keep in a safe place. This is only for the secondary password — you’ll still have to keep that ‘normal’ Google password memorized.

To be clear, two-factor authentication isn’t a new idea. It’s been used by large businesses for years. But giving consumers access to this same protection is a big win, and I’m hoping other services will follow suit in the near future.

Google Authenticator

Google Latitude

Google has finally hopped onto the check-in bandwagon, but with extra twists that make it more appealing than many of the other options. The company announced Tuesday that it had updated its location-based social media service, Google Latitude, to support check-ins at local businesses. Although Google is a little late to the party, the new feature may have been implemented so that it could tie in with Google’s soon-to-be-introduced local discount service.

Users of Google Latitude could previously share their locations with friends and family—it was one of the first major services to let users do this in such a user-friendly and visually pleasing way. Now, however, users can also check in at various locations, such as the coffee shop down the street or the art museum on the other side of town. This allows them to post photos and comments about what they’re doing and lets their friends see exactly where they are instead of just an abstract location on a map.

Numerous other companies—Facebook, FourSquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, etc.—also allow users to check in and share photos of the businesses they are patronizing, and people have already flocked to one (or more) of those services. Google is stepping up to the challenge, though, by making it painfully easy to check in through Latitude.

One of the main problems with check-in services is that they usually rely on the user to remember to check in whenever he or she enters a place—Google is addressing this by either letting users’ phones automatically check in for them, or sending notifications to users to remind them to check in when the app detects that they have arrived somewhere. Latitude also checks users back out of a place once their GPS locations show that they have left, and Google has even added a FourSquare-style “status” game for extra appeal.

Why would you want to check in somewhere? Google has built in its reviews system (called “Places”) so that you can read what others have said about the business in question or see if your friends are there. Additionally, it’s likely that Google will tie in the new check-ins with Google Offers, its Groupon-like local discount service. Offers has yet to be formally announced by the company, but Google did acknowledge last month that it was “communicating with small businesses to enlist their support and participation in a test of a prepaid offers/vouchers program.”

Facebook’s check-in service, also called Places, already lets businesses give discounts to users when they check in, so the idea isn’t entirely novel. Still, Facebook implements it differently than Google probably would—the combo of Groupon-style “deal of the day” with location-based check-ins would at least differentiate Latitude from its competition.

Last week, after nearly two years of waiting, Google Voice finally enabled number porting — the highly requested feature that lets you transfer an existing phone number to Google’s powerful telephony service. And then, just as everyone was getting excited, the feature disappeared. But now it’s back.

Turns out last week’s number porting launch was just a test (which is why Google didn’t announce it). Given the logistical hurdles involved it’s not really surprising that Google wanted to kick the tires first, and now it looks like they’re pleased with the results. Google Voice number porting is going live today for all existing accounts, and new accounts will be able to use number porting in the next few weeks.

The feature costs $20 to enable, and it comes with plenty of strings attached. When you port your number away from your carrier, you’ll likely automatically cancel your existing contract and will be charged an early termination fee that can run hundreds of dollars. It’s possible to avoid this fee by getting a new number from your carrier and keeping the contract alive, but that process will involve calling the carrier (likely more than once) to help you through the process.

Once you’ve agreed to plenty of warnings and paid your $20, your number will be transfered to Google Voice within 24 hours. You won’t miss any calls, but there’s a three day window where you may be missing text messages.

It’s a hassle, but, having gone through it myself, I think it’s totally worth it. Whether you like being able to more effectively screen your calls, or you have multiple phones, or you just like making phone calls from Gmail (which is awesome), Google Voice packs a lot of power, and it’s likely going to become even more useful over the coming years.

Microsoft is at odds with a researcher employed by Google who published a zero-day Internet Explorer vulnerability on New Year’s Day. The vulnerability was discovered using cross_fuzz, a browser fuzzing tool created by Google researcher Michal Zalewski, who says he gave Microsoft more than six months of warning before going public with the flaw. That hasn’t stopped Microsoft from sharply disagreeing, however, with the company arguing that Zalewski has now put thousands of IE users at risk.

According to Zalewski’s published timeline of events, he first told Microsoft about the vulnerability in July of last year and provided the company with copies of cross_fuzz for independent verification. Zalewski informed the company that he planned to release the tool in January, and Microsoft acknowledged the report at that time—confirmed on Tuesday by Microsoft spokesperson Jerry Bryant.

Microsoft said it was unable to reproduce any problems using the cross_fuzz tool upon being informed of the issue in July, despite Zalewski’s insistence that he saw “multiple crashes and GDI corruption issues” in IE. The company claims it was only notified on December 21 of a new version of cross_fuzz that could cause a potentially exploitable crash.

Microsoft immediately issued Security Advisory (2488013), confirming that the vulnerability impacted all supported versions of IE. Microsoft explained that the vulnerability exists due to the creation of uninitialized memory during a CSS function within the browser, making it possible for the memory to be leveraged by an attacker with a specially crafted webpage.

“We immediately worked to reproduce the issue with the updated and original tool and are currently investigating it further to determine if it is actually exploitable,” Bryant told sources.

This is when the stories diverge, however. Zalewski says he heard virtually nothing from Microsoft until mid-December, at which point others were able to reproduce the problem, including by means of the original cross_fuzz version used last July. According to Zalewski, Microsoft was suddenly concerned about the potential PR fallout and claimed the IE problems only surfaced after he had updated his code. Zalewski said he confirmed that the problem was unchanged by running both the new and old versions of the fuzzer and told Microsoft again that he planned to release the tool in January.

“Response from [Microsoft Security Research Center] confirms that these crashes are reproducible with the July 29 fuzzer; unclear why they were unable to replicate them earlier, or follow up on the case,” Zalewski wrote on December 29. As promised, he released the fuzzer on January 1.

Now, Microsoft is accusing Zalewski of increasing the risk to IE users—the company says attackers may find a way to exploit the flaw before a patch can be tested and distributed. Zalewski insists that Microsoft knew about the flaw and his plan to release in January for more than six months, however, and did nothing until it was almost too late.

Whichever way this he-said, she-said fight ends up, Microsoft says it’s actively monitoring the situation and plans to issue a patch soon.

There are increasing concerns about website attacks on the mind today, thanks to hackers’ takedown of high-profile sites during the Wikileaks cyberwar in particular, and the website defacements that often accompany political turmoil such as those that hit both Pakistanese andIndian government-run sites recently as well as some prompted by political issues here in the U.S. Sometimes the hacks are more akin topranks, while other times they serve as a way for those with strong opinions to express that sentiment anonymously. And sometimes, the hacks are initiated by spammers, instead of these sorts of political “hacktivests.”

To defend against this form of online vandalism, Google has announced it will begin to identify hacked sites, right in the Google search results.

According to news from Google’s Webmaster Central blog, the Internet search giant will begin warning Web surfers of sites that may have been hacked with a message that reads “This site may be compromised.” This will help protect those browsing the Web from becoming victims of malware, as is especially the case when sites are compromised by spammers, says Google.

Example of compromised websites in search results.

Users clicking the warning link will be directed to this page in Google’s Help Center that explains more about the notice and what it means, but Google will not stop you from clicking through on the search result itself, nor does it insert an additional warning after doing so, as it does with sites known to host malware.

Google says it will use “a variety of automated tools” to detect signs of hacked sites as quickly as possible and it will then add the notification and alert the site’s webmaster to the issue. Webmasters who are worried that the notices will negatively affect their search traffic can request a site review to accelerate the notification’s removal once this problem has been resolved.

Google just announced it’s extending the drag-and-drop functionality in its online office suite, Google Docs. A few weeks ago, it introduced an image uploader for docs that worked the same way as the new feature does – you simply drag a file from your computer’s and it will immediately upload to “the cloud,” (the cloud, in this case being the Google Docs online service). Today’s upgrade now brings drag-and-drop to the file upload page, where it serves as an easier way to move your off your PC’s hard drive and into Google Docs.

The file uploader isn’t really a ground-breaking new feature – after all, plenty of sites today are offering drag-and-drop uploads – if anything, it’s a long overdue upgrade for the Google Docs service. However, it comes at an important time for Google as it continues to compete with Microsoft Office, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows to this day.

Google Docs Drag and Drop feature.

Microsoft arrived late to the Web Office game, introducing its own online suite in July. Microsoft is also deeply integrating its Office Web Apps into Facebook, and it will also be integrated with Facebook’s newly announced messaging platform. Facebook and Google, although seemingly dissimilar services, are actually two of the biggest rivals in the Internet industry today. Facebook has been poaching top Google engineers left-and-right and is attempting to “out-Google” Google by organizing the Internet through social relationships and “likes” instead of algorithms and analyzing links, as Google does. If successful, Facebook could not only cut deeply into Google’s advertising business, but could become people’s default search portal, too. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is integrated with Facebook’s search. (Microsoft’s $240 million 2007 investment in Facebook doesn’t look so crazy now, does it?)

Two days ago, Google unveiled a counterattack against Microsoft’s stalwart suite. It launched a service called “Google Cloud Connect” that allows people still using Office to take advantage of Google Docs’ Web-based collaboration features within Office. The product arose from Google’s acquisition of DocVerse from earlier this year. With Cloud Connect, files created in Microsoft Office are synced to Google’s “cloud” but can still be used in Office for editing purposes.

The goal, of course, is not to improve life for Office users, necessarily, but to make the transition from the desktop to the cloud easier and less cumbersome.

Drag-and-drop is just another example of this ongoing push to get people to leave Office behind.

Google also announced another minor feature today which allows you to hide the title bar above the document editor by choosing either View -> Compact controls or pressing Ctrl Shift F (Cmd Shift F on Macs).

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Google’s new “instant” search results are here to stay. The company recently announced that Google Instant was coming to mobile devices, and now, Google is expanding upon that functionality with the introduction of Instant Previews: a way to visually scan through your dynamically-generated search results before choosing which link to click. The feature is (as usual) slowly rolling out to Google users over the next “few days,” according to the company, and will be available in 40 languages.

The Instant Previews aren’t shown by default, but a magnifying glass next to your search results will indicate that it’s there for you to see. When you click on the glass (or the text of the snippet under the page link, for that matter), a snapshot of the site in question will appear to the right of your results—you can see previews for other links by hovering over them once you’ve clicked on the magnifying glass the first time. Not only that, but Google will highlight the part on the preview where your relevant text is so that you know where to find it on the page (see image above).

Google’s Tech Lead for Web Search Features Jeremy Silber was asked why the company chose to invoke the preview only when the user clicked on something, and not by default. “We don’t want to mess with a good thing—text snippets are really good for most things, and are certainly fast,” he said. “Plus there will always be some people who don’t like a new feature, so we don’t want people to feel forced into it.”

Silber added that, despite the fact that the previews require users to discover them, discovery hasn’t been a problem during Google’s extensive testing. “A lot of users clicked on magnifying glass the first time,” Silber told us.

Google hopes that the new preview feature will allow users to add more context before making a decision by letting them quickly compare results and see relevant content on those pages. This can be particularly helpful if you’re looking for a page you’ve seen before—if you have a general idea of what it looks like and what topic you were searching for, Instant Preview can help you find that again without having to click on a bunch of extra links.

The same applies if you’re trying to find a specific person in a list of links—Google’s example is Google Product Manager Raj Krishnan, who isn’t the first hit for his name on Google, but easily differentiated once you see previews of the pages:

“People using this tool are about 5 percent more likely to be satisfied with their results,” Silber said. That five percent may not seem like a lot, but Google is all about trying to save its users little bits and pieces of time as of late—not to mention that it keeps people on its own site more, interacting with more things before moving onto somewhere else.

Three and a half years ago, Google made what seemed to be a pretty big $100 million acquisition: FeedBurner. You remember that company, right? They’re the ones that dominated RSS management before all of that real time tech came along and rendered it obsolete for many people. Today, Google is putting the real time paddles to FeedBurner’s heart in an attempt to rivive it.

If you visit FeedBurner today, you’ll see a “Try out our NEW (beta) version!” message in the top menu. Clicking on this will take you to the new version. So what’s new? The entire look and feel has been revamped. The new Home screen is loaded up with overview stats and alerts for the sites you run. But the real key, of course, is in the Feeds area.

Here you’ll see a completely new way of looking at your subscribers and data. In a move that should surprise no one, it looks a lot more like Google Analytics. But the key is what’s going on behind the scenes. As Google notes:

The real story is what’s new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.

In fact, Google mentions Twitter a couple times in their post about the update — more than they mention their own RSS reader product, Google Reader. Clearly, they see where the future of content consumption is heading.

And it’s interesting that Twitter is so vital here. One of FeedBurner’s co-founders and CEO was Dick Costolo — yes, the same man who is now the CEO of Twitter.

Costolo left Google in July of 2009 after he had already moved on from the FeedBurner team. It seemed pretty clear to many of us that after the acquisition, Google wasn’t putting the resources it should have into the product. And its time at Google has been filled with bugs, problems, and a general growing disinterest from most users.

Maybe that will change now. Hopefully.

Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data.

The disclosure appeared in a report on Street View released today by Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who said that “collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it.” Assembling an extensive list of the location of Wi-Fi access points can aid in geolocation, especially in areas where connections to cell towers are unreliable.

Instead, Stoddart said that, based on her conversations with headquarters in Mountain View, Ca., “Google intends to obtain the information needed to populate its location-based services database” from “users’ handsets.”

That, at least, should come as no surprise. As CNET reported in June, mobile phone and laptop users who run certain Google applications already share their location information with the company, which then uses this crowdsourced data to refine its mapping capabilities.

When Google Maps Navigation users requests a location fix with the “use wireless networks” option checked in their settings, their device sends over a list of all nearby addresses associated with wireless hot spots, which can in turn be checked against Google’s existing database of those addresses gathered through the Street View project. Google has said it doesn’t collect information about laptops or other mobile devices–both for privacy reasons and because the locations are typically transitory.

Google’s PC software takes a similar approach. A note in the source code of Google’s open-source Chromium browser, which shares code with Google Chrome, says “currently we get only MAC address, signal strength, channel signal-to-noise and SSID” for each Wi-Fi network surveyed. (The MAC address is unique for each wireless access point, and the SSID is the user-given name for the wireless network.)

Google discloses this behavior to its customers. Its privacy policy for mobile devices says: “If you use location-enabled products and services, such as Google Maps for mobile, you may be sending us location information.” On the other hand, if you opt out of data-sharing, don’t count on being able to use Wi-Fi hot spots for triangulation.

“With Android, location-sharing is opt-in,” Google spokeswoman Christine Chen said today. “Whether we’re talking about location provider services or individual apps that use location, Android provides users with notice and control over collection of location, sharing of location and use of location to help provide a better mobile experience…We don’t share individual location collected from user devices with any applications or services.”

Google had said in a blog post in July that it had halted Wi-Fi data collection through its Street View cars, but had not said whether it would be resumed or not.

Here are instructions for mobile users on how to disable this feature if you wish for Google not to be able to capture this information.

Priya Nayak, who works in consumer operations under Google’s “Google Accounts” wing, puts it best: “My Google Account is very valuable to me.” And thus, in honor of National Cyber Security Awareness month, Nayak has taken to the Google blogs to dish out a list of helpful security measures one can use to have an online life that’s hacker-free.

Nayak does make a good point—whether it’s Google or another service, the world is increasingly moving toward a shared, online experience. Our photos are online; our e-mail is online; our blogs and calendars are online. As such, our online identities present a lucrative target for scammers, phishers, and others who would seek to harm our digital domains.

More importantly, one’s online accounts can be seen as a launching pad to do harm to others. After all, if everyone on your contacts list assumes that everything you send is on the up-and-up, it makes scams like those, “send me money, I need help” kinds of deals even more effective—why would anyone question your queries if you’ve had an excellent online track record so far?

“Account hijackers prey on the bad habits of the average Internet user,” writes Nayak. “Understanding common hijacking techniques and using better security practices will help you stay one step ahead of them.”

So how, then, do you do that?

Google—via Nayak—recommends that you start by choosing unique passwords for each of the major online “terminals,” as it were, which you use to access sensitive information about your life. That means no reusing passwords between, say, your Google Accounts and your online banking setup, or your Facebook page and your work e-mail, etc.

And once you have this batch of unique passwords set up, get ready to practice your memorization skills—that’s because Google recommends that you change your passwords no fewer than two times per year. Before you get ready to take the easy way out, Google prefaces that it’s not enough to just change a letter or append a new number to your existing password. You have to go back to the drawing board and concoct a brand-new segment of numbers and letters.

It’s double-important that you realize just how your passwords and accounts are used, in the sense that a given service provider isn’t going to just call you up on the phone and ask you for this information.
Phishing, after all, is one of the top four ways that unscrupulous folk gain access to your sensitive online information. That’s in addition to someone reusing any passwords they’ve previously acquired from you across new sites, malware that infects your system and logs your password without you knowing, and brute force attacks on your accounts.

If you want to check out just how secure you are online, Google’s crafted a simple checklist you can use to ensure that you’re going about your digital business the right way.

For all the controversy they create with privacy issues, there’s no denying that Facebook has good ideas. The latest feature they’re starting to roll out today is very, very smart: one-time passwords.

We’ve likely all had the situation where we’ve logged into some account at an Internet cafe, library, or friend’s computer and worried that we forgot to log out and/or accidentally saved our passwords on that computer. Facebook’s new feature allows you to simply text “otp” to 32665 from your mobile phone (the one associated with your Facebook account) and you’ll immediately receive a temporary password that can only be used once and will expire in 20 minutes. Brilliant.

The only downside seems to be that you need to remember that texting shortcode, but perhaps they’ll put a link prominently on their mobile site and/or apps.

On top of one-time passwords, Facebook is finally rolling out the ability to sign out of your account remotely. This obviously also solves the problem of worrying you forgot to log out of your account on another machine. Google and other services have had this for a while, and it can be very useful.

Example of recent facebook account activity.

In your Account Settings page, Facebook also now shows you your period of last activity on the service, just in case you’re afraid someone has accessed your account. This is also similar to what Google does with Gmail, but it’s laid out in a much nicer way on Facebook — including the approximate location of the person and what device they were using to access the account (Google lists both of those things as well but in a much more computerized format).

Facebook also notes:

Lastly, when people log in to Facebook we will regularly prompt them to keep their security information updated. If you ever lose access to your account, having this information helps us verify who you are and get you back into your account quickly.

Speaking of Google, they’ve also been recently stepping up their game with regard to security. Last month, they started enabling two-step authentication which requires you enter a username, password, and secret code sent to the mobile phone associated with your Google account.

In April 2007, Google launched a feature that, for the time, was very nifty: a free, fully automated 411 service called Goog-411 that would accept verbal commands to look up business listings. Today, after over three years of dutifully doling out free information to millions of phones, Google is announcing that it will be shuttering the service on November 12.

As Google alludes to in its blog post, the 411 service didn’t exist solely because Google wanted to help people out — it also gave Google a vast amount of voice data, allowing it to improve its speech recognition technology for the voice services that are now present throughout Android and on many other phones, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia S60, and Windows.

In the blog post, Google also hints that we’ll be seeing much more voice functionality on the way:

Our success encouraged us to aim for more innovation. Thus, we’re putting all of our resources into speech-enabling the next generation of Google products and services across a multitude of languages.

Here’s how the service was described back when it first launched.

Goog-411 can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The product is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for additional or clarifying information. You tell it your city and state, and then ask for a specific business or business category. In my tests the product was excellent. Although the voice recognition was only working at about 70% efficiency, I just said “back” and retried when it didn’t understand what I said. Results are spoken back or text messaged back to you, and you are automatically put through to the phone number requested.

It will be sad to see it go, as I used it quite a few times before Android phones were around. So it seems this will be for the best… so farewell GOOG-411.

Google TV

Earlier this morning, Google unveiled a new standalone portal for its upcoming Google TV platform, which will be landing in living rooms this fall. In addition to providing a pretty thorough walkthrough of Google TV’s interface, Google is also showing off additional functionality that’s being developed by third parties.

In its blog post, Google says that it’s “been overwhelmed by interest” from third parties, and that Google TV will be shipping with at least the following applications: Netflix, Twitter, CNBC, Pandora, Napster, NBA Game Time, Amazon Video On Demand and Gallery. Some of the big ones, like Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand, were already briefly mentioned during Google TV’s debut at Google I/O last May. Others are new, and it’s clear that Google TV is seeing adoption from both web companies, like Pandora, and the content creators themselves. Unfortunately third party developers will have to wait until next year before they can deploy their own Android Apps to Google TV, but this should give the platform a solid start.

You can see some of the apps in action in the video below.

Partners are beginning to post further details about their applications. Here’s some detail on what you can do with the Twitter app:

The application has most of the features and functionality that you’d expect from Twitter. It makes it easy to look through Tweets, @mentions, and favorites. When you click on a Tweet, you can reply, retweet, favorite, or share it. You will also see additional options depending on the content of the Tweet. For example, you can visit a URL or click a hashtag to search for it on Twitter. If a user is mentioned, you can visit that user’s profile to see their Tweets or follow them. And if there is a link to a photo or video, you can see a thumbnail version. Clicking the link will take you to the site so you can see a larger version of the photo or watch the video.

And here’s one from the Pandora app:

With Pandora for Google TV you can easily tune in to the personalized stations you’ve created on the web or on your phone, listen, and rate songs with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. You can even create new stations right on Google TV. It’s great for parties too — as you listen, the screen updates with big beautiful album art and information that illustrates what’s playing – a great conversation piece for you and your guests.

In addition to these native applications, Google is also showcasing web applications built by content owners, including VEVO, CNN, New York Times, and Cartoon Network (the TNT shot below is of a web app, the rest are for native apps). These are interesting for a few reasons. Google TV promises access to the full web though its integrated web browser, but, as we’ve discussed previously, the Internet is not optimized for the ten foot experience — Google needs these publishers to rework their sites the way they have for mobile, and it seems to be having luck.

A second, less obvious implication: this is good news for other TV-based platforms that come with a web browser, like Boxee. Right now Boxee does some interesting technical gymnastics to make web video play nicely on your TV — web apps should make their job a lot easier.