Join our bookstore and win free books
At Fastbooks.eu, a European bookstore we’re running, there is a new exciting feature. Actually it’s more than a feature, it’s a prize draw! We’re giving away books for free. Really, no kidding. And we’re doing it every second week!
The rules are easy: Anyone who likes our Facebook page could be a winner. We’ll draw one winner each 14 days from all the people that have clicked Like and will send them the book for free.
The first book we’re giving away is a paperback classic: “The Little Prince” by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. Make sure you join if you haven’t done so! You can get the details and read how to join and win on our page.
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Google is discontinuing several services
After quite successful Google+ launch Larry Page announced that Google will focus and prioritize more. This means more focus to core services (search, ads), popular services (YouTube, Chrome, Android) and new services (Google+, Commerce, Local) and closing down not so focused or popular services.
With updating the looks of the user graphical interface they are also discontinuing the services. After closing several services (including Wave, Lively, Notebook, Answers and others) in the span of several years this trend has recently grown and become much faster. Here is the list of Google’s discontinued services that have stopped (or it has been announced that they will) recently:
- Google Health
- Powermeter
- Google Toolbar for Firefox
- Google Labs
- Google Directory
The list will surely grow and in my opinion we’ll also see several apps re-branded with Google’s name, for example Picasa, Blogger or Picnic. YouTube is too popular to have its name changed. All the service that Google will offer in the future will also be available over a short url, g.co, which will be used only for Google’s services.
Which of the services wouldn’t you like to see closed?
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Google is gradually changing graphic design
As you might have noticed with several Google products and services the graphic design of the user interface is changing. When Google+ was published in the end of June 2011, it showed how the new Google will look like. Since then several services have changed their look or at least offer the user to choose between the old and the new look (or in some cases, the new look is default but let users choose the old look).
The new design has more whitespace, design looks sleeker, and the colors used are lighter. Every service include the black title bar with the link to many services and Google+. The new color palette includes blue, red, grey and orange colors, the buttons are bigger and titles (and some text) are displayed in Open Sans web font. The new look, however, isn’t always more useful – bigger spacing makes the web site real estate smaller.
Here is a list of services where you can see and try the new design:
- Search
- Google Calendar (if clicked on ‘Try the new look’ link)
- Gmail (by using ‘Preview’ or ‘Preview (dense)’ themes)
- Blogger (through ‘Blogger in Draft’)
- Google Translate
- Google Documents Help
- Google Analytics (if clicked on ‘New Version’ link)
- Several Google product pages, for example page for Chromebooks
The list is growing every day as Google is gradually transitioning services to new design amking them all look similar again.
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