Former Google Video user?  If so, you should think back to see if you have any files there you want to keep.

Google has decided to shut down Google Video, which actually stopped allowing uploads in 2009.  If you’re (were) a Google Video user, here’s some info that can help you save your files.  You have until May 13.

[Thanks, Kate!]

Last fall, Google released a new collaboration product, Shared Spaces.  This allows you to create customized collaboration work spaces with anyone.  You can create a place to play games, plan a trip, make lists or search Amazon, with people you know.

Google Wave apparently wasn’t so popular with the users.  From the Google blog;

“But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

Full post here.

Now that Google Voice is open to The World, anyone can sign up for an account.   CNet offered a recent post about the ins and outs of Google Voice and a few basic pieces of information to know before you get started.

Google also has detailed help pages once you’re ready to get started.

Our Text-a-Librarian service has just improved, significantly!  We now have our own phone number, courtesy of Google Voice, where patrons can text us directly with questions.  This is tied into Libraryh3lp, so any questions that are sent will go directly to Libraryh3lp where the person taking IM questions can also answer the text questions.

A couple of points:

To know whether someone is contacting us via text, look at the “from” in Pidgin.  The greyed out section is the incoming phone number, and you’ll notice that it says “textalibrarian” and “voice” (meaning, Google Voice).

Both library queues will be getting the text questions, so if you see one come in, go ahead and claim it if you can answer it.  Any questions that come in when no one is online will appear when the next person logs in.

Our new text number is 918-DREXEL1.  Give it a try!

For you Gmail users and Google lovers, you’ve certainly seen Google Buzz, the newest addition for sharing content and status. CNet’s WebCrawler has posted a comparison between Buzz, Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter that highlights some of the differences between the features.

In case you haven’t noticed it in your Gmail, you’ll see it just below your inbox link.

Google recently released a preview of their newest application, Google Wave.  By asking “what would email look like if were invented today?”, they’ve created a unique collaborative space for people to communicate in their own browser — no extra software required.

For example, you can reply to parts of emails (you don’t have to copy/past parts of messages) and you can optionally have IM conversations with a live character-by-character view of what the other person is typing (you don’t have to wait for them to finish typing before you start typing a response).

There’s also functionality that allows for collaboration across installations, meaning that we could have one installation with our accounts, and another university could have theirs, and they’d still communicate as if they were the same. (See video minutes 1:05 to 1:10)

It’s open source, with an API, meaning that software developers have the chance to create interoperable services before its release.

There’s a developer preview underway now, but it will be open to the public later in the year.

Here’s a video of Google’s presentation. The whole video is 1 hour 20 minutes, but you get a sense of a few of the basic features (not necessarily the coolest ones, though) between minutes 8 and 15.  Other video features include its interoperability with Twitter around 57:30, and live translation (while typing!) around 1:10..

[Thanks to Peter for the video link]

• For those of you for whom search can’t be fast enough, here’s Keyboardr, a search mashup that provides the results of your search from Google, Wikipedia, blogs and images, As You Type!  [from ReadWriteWeb]

• Change.gov, Obama’s transition website, was offering an open forum for asking questions, and then allowing people to vote to prioritize which ones should be answered first.   Apparently, they got an overwhelming response and closed it down at midnight, last night.  You can still, however, see the list of all the questions, and how people voted for them, here.  The tool they used to accomplish this is Google Moderator, which is designed for just such a function.

• Unofficial survey: Is anyone using Twitter for work?  Do you find it useful for communicating with patrons, or with staff?  Tame the Web has a post about using Twitter for internal communication in the library.  Post your thoughts in the comments!

ALA & ARL published this useful 23-page PDF document outlining the details of the Google settlement.  One of the interesting parts was a bulleted list of paid/free user services under the terms of the agreement.  Here are some excerpts from the list of free user services, starting on page 4 of the document.

• All users in the United States will have the ability to search Google’s entire search database for digitized books responsive to their queries.

• For a public domain book, Google will display the full text.

• For an in-copyright, not commercially available book, the default rule is that
Google will display up to 20% of the book’s text.

• Although under this “standard preview” Google can display up to 20% of a
book’s text, for most non-fiction works Google generally can display no more
than five adjacent pages at a time. Thus, when a user lands on a given page from
a search, the user can see four pages adjacent to that page.

• Different default rules apply to works of fiction for the amount a user can see in
response to a single command. Each time a user lands on a page of a fiction
book, Google can display 5% of the book or fifteen adjacent pages, whichever is
less.

• Still different default display rules apply to other categories of works. No text
display is allowed of anthologies of drama and fiction by multiple authors, or
collections of poetry or short stories. And for dictionaries, drug reference guides,
encyclopedias, price/buyer guides, quotation books, test preparation guides, and
thesauri, Google will provide only a “fixed preview”—it will display the same
pages regardless of the user query, up to 10% of the book.

• For an in-copyright, commercially available book, the default rule is that Google
will display only bibliographic information and front material, such as the title
page, the copyright page, the table of contents, and the index. For books in this
category, Google will no longer display even snippets, as it currently does, unless
the rightsholder so authorizes.

• As noted above, a rightsholder can vary the default rules for its book. Moreover,
the settlement allows the rightsholder of a work contained within another
rightsholder’s book to exercise its rights under the settlement independently.
However, unlike a book’s rightsholder, an insert’s rightsholder cannot insist that
the insert be removed altogether from the Google Library Project. Thus, so long
as a book’s rightsholder does not remove the book, all inserts within the book
will be searchable, even if their rightsholders exclude them from any displays.

Yesterday, Google, the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers reached a settlement about Google’s Book Search project. There’s an article in today’s Chronicle about it. [Thanks Tim]

There has been a fair amount of list traffic and discussion on the topic, and one of the interesting things I found by following some of this is that Google plans to offer an institutional subscription for libraries that would allow researchers to search the full-text of the titles they’ve digitized.  It’s not clear from their info page how this differs from the book search capabilities available to the general public, or from the institutional subscriptions.

“Academics will be able to apply through an institution to run computational queries through the index without actually reading individual books” From #5 here.

There is certainly more to come.