How to import your Facebook friends to Google+

By now you’ve probably figured out from our Google+ coverage that we here at 9to5Google are big fans of Google’s latest social thingie. There’s just one problem with this service: There’s no easy way to bring all your Facebook friends to Google+ because, you know, Facebook and Google are at odds with each other. Lifehacker comes to the rescue with this nifty workaround.

It involves authorizing Yahoo Mail to access your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and then transferring Facebook contacts to the Yahoo Mail Address Book. From there, you can easily import them into Google+. Alternatively, you can use the Friends to Gmail web app to bring along all your Facebook contacts to Gmail. Both solutions will transfers only contacts, not other Facebook data or your social graph you’ve been building on Zuckerberg’s social network. And should you ever want to take out your data from Google+ or any other Google property, you can use the new Google Takeout service. Zuck, you listening?

How to bypass getting an invite for Google+

Google+ was announced earlier in the week, but currently it is invite only. Last night Google opened invites for all users and later closed it down. Some of you may have been luckyand received an invite from us, but others not so. On his personal blog, David Di Franco has posteda guide on how to bypass the invite system, for now.

1. View your “Circles” page.
2. Click “Add a new person” to add someone to your circle.
3. Select your person from the list. If they are not appearing, simply input their email address.
4. Add the person to your circle. After doing so, go to “Home” where you can view the stream.
5. Compose a new post, but make sure the box is checked next to “Also email…”
6. Click “Share” and you’re set. Now the person will see the post in their inbox, which will grant them access to Google+.

We can’t guarantee this will work, but if you have a friend with Google+ ask them to give it a try.I’m buuuusy….

Play Songs with Google Music Chrome Extension

Google Music is a beta service from Google which is currently available only in United States. This un-official extension for Google music lets you to play, pause, skip, reverse, shuffle, repeat songs in Google music by just tapping a click from the address bar icon without going to the Google music page.

Google Music chrome extension allows you to access Google music from the Chrome address bar without going to the actual page. It lets you to do anything such as play/pause, skip, reverse, shuffle, and repeat songs in any Chrome window. You will also get notification of the song change too.

Features of Google Music Extension :


    * Scrobbling of songs (option to turn on or off)
    * Ability to “love” the song on Last.FM
    * Google thumbs up/down
    * Desktop notifications (toasts) of song changes (option to turn off)
    * Playback controls (Play/Pause, Skip, Reverse, Shuffle, and Repeat) in a button on the browser bar
    * Persistent “miniplayer” in options panel (notifications still happen unless toggled off)
    * Playlist switching (autoplay on switch) in minplayer and popup (browser button) windows


Download Google Music Extension [Chrome]

Google Takes Another Crack at Social with Google+

I’m on Google every day. For hours a day. When new logos pops up for Father’s Day or the anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, those are hard to miss. But the smaller changes are easy to notice, too: a subtle Google Docs redesign, a new menu here or there. Even a tweaked icon stands out when I see it dozens of times a day. When the white ribbon that runs across the top of all Google sites suddenly turned black, I knew something was coming.

That something was Google+, a social networking platform that aims to integrate elements of real-world social interaction into the web medium. In other words, this is Google’s apology for Buzz: a deeper, broader system for sharing media and communicating with other people. Google hopes to change the way sharing works with Circles, encourage face-to-face chatting with Hangouts, and bring people with common interest together with Sparks.


Here’s everything you need to know about Google+.


Like every new endeavor Google embarks upon, the Google+ project begins life as an invite-only beta available to a select few. That black pinstripe now adorning the Google family of sites gains a “+You” button once you’re enrolled in Google+, and from there the social networking experience begins. Google isn’t really calling it social networking, though: the official description is “real-life sharing rethought for the web.”


That sounds a little sappy, and Google’s introductory videos for the + project are a bit sappy themselves. It’s an earnest description, though: Google clearly put a lot of thought into how we interact with people in our real lives and tried to build that into a social system on the Internet. Social circles and casual hangouts inform the backbone of Google+, making it an extremely different platform than Twitter. In fact, it’s the very thing Gary Whitta was recently wishing for on This Is Only a Test: a communication tool for sending out messages to specific groups of people instead of every living soul on Twitter. This all assumes your friends are using Google+, of course.

Will they want to? Will you want to? Here are the features that make up Google+.


Circles allow you to separate out your contacts into different groups just like you would in real life. You have your friends from high school, friends from college, co-workers, family, neighbors you might invite over for dinner once a year. We interact with all of these people differently--some we share more personal information with, some we want to see more often, some we mostly just goof off with. Circles builds off that. This is hardly a new concept--other sites like Facebook have groups for interacting with different people--but Google wants to do it better, dancing the line between sharing with too few people and too many. It remains to be seen if Google+’s attractive web design and hooks into the Google ecosystem make these Circles more popular than other groups.


Sparks has Google+’s best tagline: “Nerding out. Together.” That’s exactly what it is: a system for discovering cool stuff you’re interested in, be it comic books or photography, and sharing that with the right people. Given Google’s strong background in search, this should be a powerful component of the Google+ social system. They call Sparks an “online sharing engine,” which mostly looks like an integrated Google search bar with some pretty featured links for popular topics embedded below. Think of your Sparks as a personalized Facebook stream--you’re only looking at stuff you actually care about.

Instant Upload isn’t so much a social feature as it is an extension of Google’s cross-device integration. An 
Android Google+ app will upload every photo you take on your phone to a private folder in the cloud for later sharing. You have to give it permission first--Google definitely doesn’t want to recreate the Buzz privacy debacle here. An iPhone app is also on the way.


Huddles are--seriously--just group chatrooms. Google’s apparently banking on the idea that implementation really matters when it comes to building a successful chatroom. We’re not sure if the average group of friends wants to get together into a big IM chat to plan out all their activities, but Huddles hopes to alleviate some of the stress of aligning schedules by getting everyone into a virtual room together to bang out plans. Optimistic, but they’re off to a good start with the Google+ app and web browser support. Platform agnostic access is key.

Hangouts represent Google+’s strongest core idea and perhaps its least-likely-to-succeed feature. Hangouts want to tap into that experience of spending long nights with friends doing nothing but chatting and enjoying the company of the people you care about most. Those are the nights you remember for years: not because of what you did, but because of who was with you. Google aptly realized that adult lives with adult schedules make those moments rare.


That’s a powerful experience to chase after, and Hangouts use video chats for up to 10 people to try to capture those moments. It’s an open-ended design that encourages people to stop by rather than plan get-togethers. Do people regularly do this with video chat? Some, definitely, but probably not as many as Google hopes.


Those are the basics of Google+. You can put your name down for an invitation here. And you should, because Google+ represents something different for Google. This is not a product, like Wave, that will disappear if it doesn’t perform well. Google+ represents an urgent need to add a social layer--a people layer--onto Google’s library of services. Instantly becoming the replacement for Facebook or Twitter isn’t the goal--this is the first step towards a transformed, more tightly integrated Google experience.

Gmail Rolls Out Its New, Minimal Look

Gmail just rolled out, via preview themes, their new, minimal look. Keeping in line with the update to Google Calendar, the new interface brings a lighter and cleaner look to your Gmail inbox. It's not the default just yet, so to turn it on:

1. Go to your Themes tab in Gmail
2.  Click one of the Preview theme links (bottom right of the themes for me); one is called Preview, the other Preview (Dense)
3.  That's all

Gmail's the preferred email client of most of blogs's readership, so a redesign of this magnitude is pretty significant. Give it a try on your account and let's hear how you like it in the comments.



A preview of Gmail's new look | Official Gmail Blog

Best Email Client: Gmail

Last week we asked you to share your favorite email client, then we rounded up the results for a vote. Now we're back to announce the winners and how the race shook out.

Google Adds 5 New Dynamic Templates to Blogspot Blogs Viewers

If you’re blogging through the free blogspot platfrom by Google, then you might have experienced new changes over the past weeks. They have redesigned the blogspot dashboard, also now Google has added 5 new dynamic templates for blogspot blogs. Google says ” people can previewing five new templates in Blogger and they will soon be available in a wider launch. Also it adds, the new template views use the latest web technology, including AJAX, HTML5, and CSS3. The new template views include Mosaic, Flipcard, sidebar, and Timeslide.

What are the benefits of these 5 dynamic templates ?