In a post yesterday, the Google Talkabout blog announced they've launched a new help forum for Google Talk )and closed the old Google Talk Group to new posts in the process(. It's interesting to see that Google could be moving away from using Google Groups for their own product support forums. Some of you might remember the Pomoc Google service launched in June by Google Poland,

Google Maps UK has finally added live traffic data to the major roads. As with other areas in Google Maps that have traffic data enabled, you can also let Google predict what the traffic situation will be like on any day at a specific time. In other Google Maps news, NYC has just got Google Transit directions , which allows users to plan their public transportation routes online. You can visit the Google Transit site to see which other cities also have this functionality.

Earlier this week, I received a greetings card from someone called Shelia who was using "Orkut Greetings" )supposedly a service offered by Orkut , Google's social network(. Or at least that's what the sender of this email wanted me to believe: Those extra details are usually hidden by default, but I expanded them to verify that the email genuinely came from Google. It appears to have been sent from an Orkut email address and was even signed by the google.com domain.

Before Google's 3D chat world Lively was released , the product was called Google Rooms. Here are some left-over screenshots that we discovered on Google's servers shortly after Lively was launched: The Google Rooms logo used in the rooms directory, showing a palm tree from the island room Selecting an avatar from the directory,

In much the same way that Google launched the Russian-only Knowledge Search almost exactly a year ago, a new Google Help site has now been launched by Google Poland. The site's FAQ page )available in English( states: <<Google Help is a place where you can ask questions about Google services and give answers to questions posted by other users looking for help. Google Help is an unmoderated forum for users wanting to discuss Google Products. We encourage you to ask questions,

Following Philipp's announcement last month about the release of Google Apps Hacks , written by him and published by O'Reilly, I'm pleased to say that another O'Reilly book recently hit the shelves. Over the last couple of months, I've been the technical reviewer for Google Apps: The Missing Manual , a book aimed at users who are either new to Google's online applications, such as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar, iGoogle, Page Creator,

It seems a bunch of new functionality might be coming to the Google Docs spreadsheets application. By accessing one of Google's experimental sites )like the one where I found offline access would be coming to Google Docs ( I was able to get a sneaky look at some of this functionality, including the ability to record, edit and run macros, edit a shared spreadsheet in something called "List mode" and a few new functions for use in spreadsheet formulas.

It seems Google Docs has finally added a View menu which allows users to view their documents using the new fixed-width page layout or the standard full-width view. This layout was first spotted a couple of months ago when a screenshot was included in one of Google's presentations. Microsoft Office users will recognize this as being similar to the default "Print Layout" available in Word. However,

Google Website Optimizer )which was originally launched as a closed beta test in October 2006 ( has finally dropped its "Beta" label and been made available as a standalone product, Google announced in a press release yesterday. Previously only available as a feature within Google AdWords , anyone can now use it on its own "to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent" and "test and optimize site content and design,

The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post about best practices to follow when moving your site from one domain to another without losing your Google rankings. Here are the main points: Test your processes by moving only one directory or subdomain first. Check to see whether those pages are appearing in Google's search results before moving your entire site. Don't just redirect all pages from your old site to the home page of your new site.

One thing that iGoogle doesn't currently allow you to do is move your tabs around to change the order of them. A quick Google search returns hundreds of pages where iGoogle users are asking how to do this. Until this feature is officially added, here's how you can do it yourself... Yesterday, Google added a feature to iGoogle which allows you to export and import your settings.

Google has just released a new AJAX API which allows developers to easily add machine translation capabilities to their websites. Using the Google AJAX Language API , you can detect the language of a piece of text and translate it into any of the supported Google Translate languages. As a simple example, you can translate the first few paragraphs of this post into Arabic, Chinese )Simplified or Traditional(, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese,

I've lost count of the number of times people have posted threads in the forum asking if a website is down for everyone or if it's just their connection. With the minimal Down for everyone or just me? website, you can quickly and easily check whether a website is down for everyone or just you! Simply enter the domain you want to check, hit return and you'll be told in nice big letters: )Of course,

A new option has just appeared in the Google Docs Settings page for tracking your published documents. Simply enter one of your Google Analytics account tracking codes and you'll apparently be able to view statistics showing when any of your published documents have been viewed. )Both Philipp and I received an error when trying to save our Google Analytics codes the first time, but it eventually worked for me.

Early hints surfaced almost two years ago when I found a service called M Scrapbook )presumably short for "Medical Scrapbook"( which later changed its name to "Weaver". Since then, we've seen some leaked screenshots and found more login pages . But the Associated Press is now reporting that it recently learned from the Cleveland Clinic that Google Health will finally begin its pilot today.

Since some new iGoogle themes were released last month and the Holiday Village theme for iGoogle was spotted more recently, I wondered how many other themes Google might be hiding from us... and found these two: TC ) tc.xml ( Similar to the default Classic theme, this skin keeps things simple but adds a soft blue gradient background, removes link underlining and adds a bit more space around links in the navigation. Skateboard ) skateboard.