Last December, we wrote about our immersive Google Earth environment, Liquid Galaxy: eight 55-inch LCD screens showing Google Earth in a unified, surround view.

Liquid Galaxy at TED 2010

Since then, we’ve taken it to a lot of conferences, built Liquid Galaxies in Google offices all over the world and even put one in the Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif. We love watching people try it for the first time. Almost everybody wants to see their own house first; but then they start to explore, and we can never guess where they’ll choose to go next.

But we just couldn’t bring it to enough people—we could only go to so many conferences, and only friends and family of Googlers could try out the Liquid Galaxies in our offices.

So we decided to put the features that make Liquid Galaxy possible into the latest release of Google Earth, and open-source all the supporting work, from our Ubuntu sysadmin scripts to the mechanical design of our custom frames.

Not everyone will have the know-how to network computers together and get view synchronization working, but we tried to make it as easy as possible. If you think you’re up to the challenge, check out our Quick Start page. You can also contact our supplier End Point if you’d rather buy than build (or just need some professional assistance). Here’s a video they made that shows Liquid Galaxy in action:

Liquid Galaxies don’t have to be made from eight big LCD screens; the view sync features scale just fine from two to dozens of screens. And they can run more than just Google Earth; we’ve had success playing video in sync in our Liquid Galaxies, and even modified a Free Software video game for after-hours fun. We’ve daydreamed about making panoramic movies, head tracking or even real-time video from distant panoramic cameras. We’re excited to see what you come up with! Show off your creations in the liquid-galaxy discussion group.

Check out the Liquid Galaxy project at code.google.com.

Since we launched Android and Android Market, we have seen the population of Android users and devices expand into many countries. This widespread adoption has brought with it growing interest in Android Market’s support for the buying and selling of paid applications in these additional countries.

We have been hard at work on this and it is my pleasure to announce that effective today, developers from 20 more countries can now sell paid apps on Android Market. Additionally, over the next 2 weeks, users in 18 additional countries will be able to purchase paid apps from Android Market.

Support for paid application sales is now expanded to developers in 29 countries, with today’s additions of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

In addition, Android Market users from 32 countries will be able to buy apps, with the addition of Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan. No action is necessary if you have targeted your paid apps to be available to “All Locations” and would like to launch in these additional countries. If you have not selected “All Locations” and would like to target these additional countries, or if you have selected “All Locations” and do not want to launch your apps in these additional buyer countries, please visit the Android Market publisher site regularly over the next two weeks to make the necessary adjustments as the new buyer countries launch.

We remain committed to continuing to improve the buyer and seller experiences on Android Market. Among other initiatives, we look forward to bringing the Android Market paid apps ecosystem to even more countries in the coming months. Please stay tuned.

We first introduced the Google URL Shortener (goo.gl) last December as part of Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Since our initial release, we’ve integrated the technology into many other Google products including News, Blogger, Maps, Picasa Web Albums, and Moderator, but people have been asking for a direct way to use the service. Today we’re giving goo.gl its own website (http://goo.gl/, of course!). We don’t intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

• Stability: We’ve had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we’ve worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
• Security: We’ve added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
• Speed: We’ve more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.

To access the new website and start taking advantage of these improvements, simply type “goo.gl” in your web browser and hit enter. There you’ll find a simple interface where you can quickly shorten a URL.

We’ve focused on making the service lean, but you will find some helpful features. If you sign-in to your Google Account, you’ll see a list of URLs you’ve shortened in the past. Click the “details” link next to any of shortened URL and you’ll find public, real-time analytics data, complete with traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles. This can be a great way to better understand who’s interested in your links, how they’re finding them and when they’re reading.

We also wanted to thank the many application developers out there who took the time to build extensions and other services integrating goo.gl technology. Even without an official API, there are extensions available for browsers like Chrome (eg: goo.gl URL Shortener, Shareaholic for Google Chrome) and Firefox (eg: goo.gl lite). Before people start writing code to incorporate our new features, we wanted to let you know we do plan to release an official API for goo.gl in the future. You’ll be able to use the API to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications.

Happy shortening!

Posted by Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Software Engineer