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just found a very cool Adobe AIR-based desktop-app for accessing Google Analytics…try it out!

Googler Dolapo Falola has spent his 20% self-allocated time improving the mobile version of Google Reader, especially tinkering with the iPhone-ized app, which is easily the most comfortable way to read feeds on the go - thx! all important features (sharing & starring items, tags) are accessible through the top navigation and the app is sufficiently fast even on slow EDGE/GSM connections.

(just goto reader.google.com on your iPhone).

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• OpenSocial - Google Code -
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no way you haven’t heard about this yet… …coverage worth reading:

• Marc Canter - Open Social compatibility: social networks and applications vendors working together
• Marc Andreessen - Report from the front: Tonight’s launch of Open Social (Ning is supporting OpenSocial as well, examples here)
• John  Battelle - MySpace Tosses in With Google

Zorgloob - a guy with plenty of time at his hand, seemingly - has created this gigantic map of Google’s web-services & -products - that’s easily more than 100 services, including some you might never even have heard of…

(via Search Engine Land)

Google just spiced up Docs & Spreadsheets with an improved file-manager, including - lo and behold - the ability to store documents in a folder-structure (initial folders are automatically built based on given tagging). don’t expect Gmail to follow this anytime soon, though

Google finally released their own (there have been some more or less well-working rip-offs in the past) mobile version of YouTube at m.youtube.com! the mobile XHTML-application utilizes external video-player software for playback (Real Networks’ media-player in case of most current Nokia-phones). unlike Robert Scoble, who’s on a Nokia N95 going for 750,- USD, everything worked fine on my oldschool Nokia 6630 (after I’ve setup the default data-gateway in my Real Player, that is). naturally, YouTube’s rather poor video-quality translates quite well to the low-resolution screens of most mobile phones…the biggest catch however is, that YouTube currently doesn’t provide all videos on their mobile portal (long tail anyone?). otherwise, the stripped down XHTML-app works quite well - after opening the frontpage, I’ve got video playback started within a single click. I only wish the search-box would have been placed on top of the page, not at the bottom…

have you tried out m.youtube.com on your phone yet? shoot me a comment, and don’t forget to mention which phone you’re on…

Google Operating System has screenshots of the upcoming relaunch of YouTube’s flash-based video-player. although the embedded demo doesn’t work for me, it seems like the new player will feature cue-jumping to parts of the clip not yet downloaded as well as embedded thumbnail-preview of related clips.

these days, the recently launched Universal Search is the predominant topic when it comes to Google. that, however, shouldn’t keep you from trying out some of the other very recent additions the search-company search, ads & apps-company has made…

launched today, Google Hot Trends feels like an - almost - real-time-version of the popular Zeitgeist periodical (edit: okay, seems like it’s calculated at several times a day). based on rather mysterious algorithms, Hot Trends highlights the most active search-queries, apparently localized to state/country, although localization currently seems to be restricted to the US (this morning, Hot Trends was filled with various queries on the ABC-show “The Bachelor”).

coming from Google Experimental is another nice feature, which algorithmically tries to display search-results in timelines and map-views - doesn’t really work perfectly on all kinds of queries, but still is an interesting idea.

in what might turn the most substantial upgrade to their core search service since the beginning, Google’s Marissa Mayer announced the launch of Universal Search as of today. don’t expect a completely new product though. Universal Search is basically all about blending search-results from Google’s numerous vertical search engines (think news, images, video, books etc. - we’re talking about 14 different search-indexes!) into a single, inter-ranked result-page. from an SEO-perspective, the most interesting question is how Google is going to rank results from their various engines against each other.

Universal Search should be rolling out for google.com within the next days. meanwhile I recommend reading Danny Sullivans extensive roundup on Search Engine Land, “Google 2.0″.