Everyone who’s been hoping and praying for a Britney Spears comeback all these years, you finally have your wish…well, kind of. While the former pop princess may not be back to her days of musical ubiquity just yet–personally, I’ve not liked anything she’s done since “Toxic,” but that’s just me–she has just taken the top spot…of Google+ users.
Wave goodbye to Google Wave and a bunch of others stuff, says Google, listing a full seven services due to sign off permanently over the next few months.
Wikipedia has found a welcome benefactor for its annual fundraising effort, with the foundation created by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki donating $500,000 towards its $28.3 million budget goal.
The Galaxy Nexus is a new pure-Google phone which, like the Nexus S before it, is a collaboration between Google and Samsung. It’s the first handset to feature Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google’s ambitious new upgrade. Judging from the brief time I’ve had with a unit loaned to me by Google, Ice Cream Sandwich makes the Galaxy Nexus a bit of a breakthrough. This phone lives up to its potential in ways that even the Nexus One and Nexus S did not.
Google Music is now open to everyone in the U.S. It’s a free service that you can use to store up to 20,000 of your songs on Google’s servers and stream those songs to compatible devices. Songs can now be purchased directly from the Android Market as well.
–Google product manager Matthew Izatt, in a company blog post announcing that the iPhone and iPad Gmail app is ready for download once again. The app was made available two weeks ago but got pulled from the App Store almost immediately after users complained of the broken notifications system and an error message that popped [...]
If Bank of America’s Google+ page is to be believed, the financial institution throws parties every time it forecloses on a home, and threatens Occupy Wall Street protesters with having their assets seized as part of the bank’s new “Counter-Financial-Terrorism policy.” Yes, fake parody accounts have come to Google+, the network previously hung up on ensuring that pseudonyms were never, ever to be used.
Google is giving YouTube a makeover with a new dashboard, home screen and color palette. The bigger news, however, is the continued integration of Google+ into more and more of Google’s products.
Android, meet your not-so-shockingly exposed dance partner, Google Music, and Google, meet another Google Music store rumor roundup, this one bolstered by screens that may indeed depict the upcoming Google-powered online music boutique.
The diversity of Android hardware is a virtue as well as a complication–if you’re looking for a particular phone feature, such as a physical keyboard, odds are that one or more Android handsets offer it. Still, I think that the software situation is pretty depressing. More important, I think it’s possible to fix it.
