Google has just acquired the popular Picnik online image and photo editor. It was officially announced on the Picnik blog and the Google Photos Blog. Picnik was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Seattle. It soon became a popular free alternative to desktop editors such as Adobe Photoshop, with millions of visitors per month. Picnik is integrated into many online photo services such as Flickr. Picnik will continue to be fully operational and I suspect that Google will integrate Picnik into their [...]

Google Analytics is a great free website statistics tool. However, do you really want your own visits to be counted? Since you, as the owner of the website, are likely to visit your own site a lot, it would probably be best to exclude your own visits. It provides an easy option to exclude internal traffic by IP Address filters but many users have a dynamic IP, so the exclude your own traffic, an exclude cookie is needed. Create the Filter Step 1: Login to your Google Account for Google Analytics. Step [...]

Web users need more than a browser that is lightweight and fast. They need one that is secure and that’s why the security company Comodo launched a new browser named Comodo Dragon. What’s the browser based on? That’s right, the open source Chromium (Google Chrome). A Chromium technology-based Browser that offers you all of Chrome’s features PLUS the unparalleled level of security and privacy you only get from Comodo. Including a greater level of privacy than Chromium technology [...]

Ever wanted to comment on Google Chat statuses? Want to share updates, videos, and more right from Gmail? With Google Buzz, now you can.Google Buzz is Google’s new social product that allows people to share updates, videos, and more as well as make conversations from everything. Similar to Facebook, users can ‘Like’ and ‘Comment’ on all items. Comment and Like Buzz items, including Public Buzzes, chat status, Google Reader, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and more. Paste [...]

Google is a huge online advertising company through Google Adwords and Doubleclick. While they advertise a lot online, they never really reached the dominant medium. That’s right, television. Yesterday, CEO Eric Schmidt sent a tweet hinting at a commericial during the Super Bowl: Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”) But it looks like the Superbowl changed things when they had [...]

Want to try out some of YouTube’s experiments and ideas? Similar to Gmail Labs, YouTube offers TestTube, with a collection of useful ideas for YouTube, some of which are new features while others change the site’s layout. Here are the two I found to be the most interesting. HTML5 Video The newest addition to TestTube is HTML5 Video. What is HTML5? HTML 5 is the upcoming version of HTML with features such as “flash-less” audio and video using <audio> and <video> [...]

Wanted to try Google Chrome’s number one requested feature, extensions, but you were hesitant to use a possibly unstable beta version of the browser? Well, you no longer have to, cause Google Chrome 4 is released to the stable channel, with the primary new feature being Google Chrome Extensions.The install page for the Google Mail Checker, the most popular extension at the time of writing. Another noticeable new feature is bookmark sync (a feature of Google Toolbar), which we had covered [...]

Mac OS X has a useful feature known as widgets, which add useful gadgets to your dashboard. Gadgets can range anywhere from a simple search bar, to an email notifier, to a full system process monitor. But how can Windows users experience widgets? First Class Flyer is a weekly series published every Friday comparing two or more free software products of the same category. This week, we’re taking a look at some desktop widget engines for Microsoft Windows.Background Windows Vista includes Windows [...]