Are you in USA and did you see the Thank You page which is displayed after the download of Google Chrome is complete? If yes then you are amongst the first 2 million who actually saw that Thank You page within the first 7 days after the launch of Google Chrome.

As per Nielsen, from all the users who used Internet last week in US about 1.4% of those Internet surfers downloaded Google Chrome. I guess that is huge success for some a newly launched browser. Remember that many of those users might have downloaded Google Chrome just to check how the new browser behaves. I am sure that many shifted to their default browsers after chroming for couple of hours.

[via Download Squad]

Couple of hours back I read the Archit’s blog post which said Google is celebrating its 10th birthday this month. As usual I googled about this as I like following everything that is related to Google. I didn’t forget their 9th birthday. While I was searching for the right Google Doodle for there 10 birthday I stumbled on this article which doubted Google’s original age.

Even Google doubts the original date of its birthday and same is the reason why they changed the text on the page which talked about their birthday to:

Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google’s history:
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

Before this the page used to quote:

Google’s official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we’re just getting started. To discover more about Google’s history, please visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about our mission, please see http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

We really don’t need to celebrate their birthday on some specific day. 365 days might be less to praise them. 10 years ago they started by searching the Internet and today they are still busy searching the same Internet.

Last year my blog turned 9 months old when Google turned 9 years old. Today this post is number 500th in this blog and Google is 10 years old. Looks like this blog’s milestons are somehow related to Google News.

Possibly my eyes saw this a little late but whatever be the case, the change in favicon (see image below) of GMail is something which I just didn’t expect from Google.

Google’s logo has been the example of simplicity over the Internet but designing a new ‘g’ for its favicon could well be a reason that they are planning to switch their logo. What say? I think these people need to take a break at the Hilton Head rentals to cool off their brains so that such silly stuffs don’t happen again.

More:

Hidden Google Pages

A year back Bill Gates announced that Microsoft will be supporting the OpenID concept and that was enough to launch OpenID in the ever expanding web 2.0.  At that time OpenID was accepted by some 500 services including LiveJournal, social networking site Vox and photo-sharing site Zooomr. But that wasn’t enough for the OpenID concept to actually takeover the Internet.

To be frank OpenID has been suffering from huge marketing problems. People have accounts over a couple of websites which support the OpenID concept but I am very sure that they have no idea what is OpenID and what are it’s benefits. People still prefer using their respective login accounts for different services instead of using OpenID for all of them.

But with the recent announcement by Yahoo that it’s 926 applications will be supporting OpenID and Google enabling the OpenID support for the blogger users, the OpenID concept is set to rise. I hope the two giants will be able to bring the concept of OpenID to the masses and some day I will be able to use one single ID for my yahoo, gmail, orkut, wordpress, blogger ….. accounts!

One of the much awaited features for Google blogger has been offline blogging. The ability to write the content while the writer is offline and than later on, as soon as the Internet connection is available, the posts go live.

Using the blogger javascript library, people at Google seem to work on Blog.gears, a Blogger client that works offline using Google Gears. One can create posts, delete them or even publish new content even though you do not have the Internet connection. As soon as your computer goes online Blog.gears will synchronize the data stored offline with the data from Blogger’s servers. Even though you cannot add images in this example offline editor or preview the created posts, but it is a cool preview of what Google blogger users can dream of with there “offline” Google blogger.