Google Maps has just released a new feature: ‘My Maps’. With all the features of Google Maps, you can now create and personalize your own map of the world. To start, you will need an account with Google. Once you begin, you are given the option of making your map ‘private’ or ‘public’. Making your map ‘public’ will give it its own URL, allowing you to share it with other people on the trip, family, friends, or whomever you wish. (more…)

It has been speculated over the past week that Google will aquire YouTube, the video giant. And today Google announced that they will buy it for $1.65 Billion in stock. This aquisition in Google’s eight year history is by far the most expensive. (more…)

Google Checkout, which launched today is similar to paypal, buy things sell things, and “One cool feature of Google Checkout is that you can buy from stores with a single Google login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you’ll see a little icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout. (more…)

Googles just recently launched Picasa web albums, I guess they are trying to take on Flickr which is very similar to this.  Although this is still in preview, so you need to apply for an invititation it took for me about one week.  Its an oinline photo storage, with a web 2.0 look allowing you to add tags to your photos for better searching capabalities.  Something that Picasa has better than Flickr is that you can download the standalone Picasa 2 programs to organize in your desktop then upload to the web or just do it all online.  (more…)

If you use Gmail for your emails and have your own domain name, you will love gmail for hosted domains, which basically means that you can view your domain name email from the gmail interface with 2 gigabytes for each account and upto 25 accounts. This is one of those type of invites that you need to apply for in google. You can apply for a beta account here. Once you are accepted to this, google will give you all the steps needed to make it work all you have to do is just change a few MX records. (more…)

Google has yet launched another of their web products, but not officially. It’s the google spreadsheets. An Ajax based spreadsheets, which isn’t available to the general public yet, but you can try out if you ask for an invitation to try it out. For now their aren’t that many features however you can open up and save as an excel file or, import CSV, XLS, and HTML formats. You can have multiple people share a particular file, and chat with them through google’s services, and they can change the file and update certain things while still communicating in the chat feature. (more…)