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Following the footsteps of Google’s personalized homepage, Gmail added themes. Once the new option is enabled in your account (as usually, Gmail’s new features are slowly rolled out), you’ll find a tab named “Themes” in the settings page and you’ll be able to choose from 30 themes. “We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company,” mentions Gmail’s blog.

Gmail’s help center provides an interesting tidbit about the new themes: “In some cases, you can also customize by location. Some themes change during the day, and we use the location information you provide to correctly time these changes with your local sunrise, sunset, and/or weather. If you select one of these themes, you’ll see a Country/Region drop-down menu appear.” Source: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/gmail-themes.html

Google plans to launch the beta version of its open source web browser called Google Chrome. “So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web,” reads Google blog.

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web. more…

“Google Chrome” joins IE, Firefox, and Safari. (And Opera, if you’re into that sort of thing.) It’s a super-competitive field, partly because browser-makers get paid every time you use the built-in search box.

Google chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine, but has a new, superfast javascript engine (I’d love to see a comparison with the new firefox thing — tracemonkey?) and some novel stability/security measures. It also hooks into google’s cloud supercomputer in a few ways.

Google’s on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside of Google, and the two companies are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source.

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One of the benefits of Web-based email is the ability to log on from just about anywhere — at home, at work, a friend’s house, a mobile device or even a public library or cybercafe.

But what if you forget to log off? Someone else who encounters an active session not only can read your personal correspondences, but they also can use that account to grab your passwords from many online services that offer to send reminders via email.

Google Inc’s Gmail service is trying to address that by letting you know if you’re still logged on elsewhere and giving you a chance to disconnect remotely.

At the bottom of a Gmail inbox is a small notice of other active sessions. The new feature, being rolled out to users in waves, also offers some information on the time and location of recent Gmail activities.

The notification is bound to be useful, though it’s by no means foolproof. You have to be log on somewhere to learn of other active sessions, and you have to look carefully for that notice. And if you have chosen to save your password on the other computer, someone else can simply log back on unless you change it.

At the bottom of your screen: Last account activity: 1 minute ago at this IP (xxx.xxx.xxx.xx).  Details

After  you are logged on to another system:

This account is open in 1 other location at this IP (xxx.xxx.xx.xxx).   Last account activity: 0 minutes ago.  Details

Click on “Details” link to see which all systems you account is logged on. Also you can log out all those other sessions, and if you feel you password might be changed, you can do it before anyone else dose it.

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

More on: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080701-google-yahoo-spiders-can-now-crawl-through-flash-sites.html