10 #Google Toys You Probably Aren’t Playing With

by Tinu Abayomi-Paul

Google’s always coming out with new fangled gizmos. I’m amazed at how many I find during routine research.

There are probably a few on this list that you  know,  and a couple you’ve heard of but may not know much about.

Today, I’m gonna do a brief summary, then I’ll do some videos on the more complex ones in coming days.

1- Google News Timeline (help page)
http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

Google News Timeline can help you examine the growth of a story, track mentions of your company in the press over time, or see what’s hot in different times of publications. it can even give you a link if you want to follow the progress of say, the Kenneth Cole tweet disaster. (Did you know it made USA Today?)

2- Google Follow Finder
http://followfinder.googlelabs.com/

Not yet a Google Labs graduate. Plug in your name and see who Google thinks you should follow after digging into your social graph. I like to use it to find more people who are like my favorite Twitter friends.

3- Google Reader Sharing
http://www.google.com/reader

If you have Google Buzz turned on, you’ll notice when you next log in to Google Reader that there’s a section for “People You Follow”. You can share links – or random thoughts, with all the people who are following you, or a select group, and they can share with you.

Those links also show up on your Google Buzz page. I enjoy getting suggestions from people who know and understand me, and what kind of news I like or need. I also like being able to split my audience into targeted groups of people so I can send them updates just on things they would want to know, instead of the whole firehose.

Accessing Google profiles from within Google Reader has helped me get to know a lot of people better as well.

4- Google Calendar Labs
https://www.google.com/calendar/

Go to your Google Calendar, then go to settings, then click on Labs. You’ll get a bunch of neat beta features you can use to enhance your Google calendar. Some help you interact with other people’s shared calendars to figure out things like when you’re both free, or  when to reschedule a meeting. Others just make your calendar prettier or more useful.

5- Gmail Labs
http://mail.google.com/mail/

There are a lot of great extras in GMail, my favorite being canned responses, which are editable pre-filled emails you can save for later repeated use. If you constantly get the same question and it has a similar response that is too long for an FAQ page, this feature can save you hours of time.

There are tons of time saving additions here that reduce common actions to a few mouse strokes. Another one I love brings Google Docs into GMail. Ever cut and paste a message into Google Docs for safe keeping? Now you can do it with one click.

6- Your Google Social Circle and Social Content
http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcircle

Lots of people are dismissive of Google’s Social Search. This was  understandabe when since the searches that turned up social results were still at the bottom of the screen, and not featured in the sidebar. This is no longer the case, as stated in a recent update to Google Social Search.

But as I predicted last year, Google has integrated Social Search results into the main results, and is likely making Tweets and other social signal data part of their algorithm, starting with Real Time Search.

But there’s a lot you can learn just from the Social Circle Google has discovered for you from how you fill out your Google Profile.

For example, if you’re connected to someone on Twitter, and you can’t figure out which LinkedIn profile belongs to them due to a common name, Google Social Circle can help with that.

Each person/entity is grouped with the social links that they’ve decided to make public on their Google Profile. True, you can also find this by searching the Google Profile directory, but if you’re looking for several people at a time, this is a heaven sent time saver.

You can also spot trends of what sites you’re not on that are becoming hot, or figure out which service your friend is using that has the least noise, and thus, the highest chance of contact. The secondary connections section will also help you find new people to connect to in your favorite social media site.

7- Google Map Maker
http://maps.google.com/maps/mapmaker/

Getting Started Guide
http://www.google.com/mapmaker/mapfiles/s/support.html

I stumbled across this when I found out that my favorite nearby local park was not identified on Google Maps. From the “help page“,

Google Map Maker allows you to create a map by adding or editing features such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more.

8- Add Google Maps to Your Site
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/getmaps/

You can add directions to your site, maps to points of interest nearby, or even plot many locations on a map.

9 – Google Insights for Search
http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Is your business seasonal? Does your favorite search term reflect this? Has the term  you targeted peaked? Are there other related terms you could attain rising in popularity? You can use Google Insights for Search to research all these things.

10 –  Google Trends for Websites
http://trends.google.com/websites
(Defaults to a Wikipedia search.)

This is useful to help find sites in the same family. It’s different from getting similar sites – one of the charts you’ll see is a list of sites that people who visit the site in question also visit.

You can also compare the popularity of two sites.

I’ll start putting up videos soon to help you get a better idea of how you can use these sites to help your business.