Google will now let users add personal photos to the background of the traditionally minimalist search page, Google announced in a blog post Thursday.

In what is perhaps a transparent effort to out-feature Microsoft Bing, Google is ditching its boring white background and letting users upload their own photos. TheMicrosoft Bing search site features a different, Microsoft-chosen background picture every day.

Users are given three methods for customization--they can upload a photo from their computer, they can choose a photo from their Google-run Picasa photo album, or they can choose a photo from the public Picasa photo album. The feature is not yet available to all users, but Google said it plans to roll out the feature for U.S. users over the next few days.

To change your Google background photo: click on the link in the lower left corner of the Google search page (if you do not see this link, the feature has not been added to your Google yet).

Will a big hulking image on the search page background affect Google's load time, though? No, Google assured InformationWeek in an email, the load time will not be affected.

According to a Google spokesperson, "The homepage does not load any slower. With or without a background image, the Google search elements show as quickly as before, allowing users to search just as quickly as without the new feature. We make this possible by post-loading the photo -- we load the search elements first and then load the picture into your browser cache and show it as soon as it is available. Meanwhile you can already perform your search."

So it looks like Google is dedicated to user personalization--either that, or they looked at Bing and decided that perhaps minimalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. If you really enjoy Google's traditional search page, don't worry--you can still use it.

Google's Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, suggests that users start tweeting snapshots of their new Google search pages, using the Twitter hashtag #myGooglepage. I won't get started on how even Google thinks you should tweet instead of "buzzing."

BM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff. Little known today, these remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. Henson would return to their gags and situations in his famous later works–and he plucked the Cookie Monster from one of them when assembling the Muppet cast for Sesame Street in 1969.

Whose idea was this unique collaboration? Well, Henson had already established himself in the advertising field. He was best known at the time for the Muppets’ guest skits on variety shows and Rowlf the Dog’s appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show . But he was busier making a wide array of commercials and longer sales films for regional and national products from Esskay Meats to Marathon Gasoline.

For its own part, IBM was keenly aware that its products–including computers, electric typewriters, and very early word processors–had to be explained to both the public and IBM’s own employees. So it formed its own advertising group, including a film and television division. An executive named David Lazer headed this division, overseeing the production of training and sales films.

Jim Henson and friends in the 1960s.According to Henson archivist Karen Falk, the IBM films were produced between 1966 and 1976, but most of the only confirmed examples date to the 1960s, primarily 1967. Jim Henson was the primary puppeteer and director in these projects. Assisting were the Muppets Inc./Henson Inc. staffers: Frank Oz (later to play Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and others), writer Jerry Juhl (who co-wrote The Muppet Movie, worked onFraggle Rock, and scripted classic Ernie and Bert sketches), and puppet builder Don Sahlin (whose credits included George Pal’s Time Machine).

1967 was an interesting time for the team-up: two years before the Muppets’ national prominence would rise thanks to Sesame Street, and two years after the introduction of IBM’s Selectric typewriter, an electric device which was crucial in the transition from old Remington typewriters to the modern word processors which would soon make the Selectric look old-fashioned.

Short and Silly Films

The films Henson made for IBM fell into two basic classes. The first were short comedic “meeting films,” which acted as icebreakers or to signal breaks in long corporate, sales, and training meetings. The second category consisted of longer industrial films which explained IBM’s products, service, and approach. Though the industrials look like commercials, their purpose seems to have been to motivate IBM’s sales team and/or to serve as a primer to potential corporate clients.

The meeting films were comedy bits which could have fit right in on The Muppet Show(and in fact some would be reworked and repeated on the series). Muppet trademarks, such as characters eating each other or spontaneous explosions, were already in force, as seen in a clip with two businessmen arguing.

Another features an early version of Kermit the Frog, one of only two star Muppets at the time, attempting to deliver a long speech on sales success

The third spot, “Coffee Break Machine,” is a quintessential Muppet comedy skit (it was remade twice, for The Ed Sullivan Show and The Muppet Show). It’s also the first explicit link between the meeting films and IBM’s products. The premise is simple, as an elaborate talking computer device (voiced by Jim Henson) recites a laundry list of features and components all to produce a single cup of coffee. A Muppet monster, instantly recognizable as a prototype of Cookie Monster (but scruffier and with prominent teeth), enters and devours the machine piece by piece. (The monster’s voraciousness would remain when Cookie showed up on Sesame Street , but a modified toothless puppet would be used instead.)

There has been plenty of headway in the realm of in-car technological innovation in recent years. From the days of being able to give out your car-phone number, to modern cars with built in HUDs for navigation.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to criticisms surrounding user privacy and admitted his company had made mistakes during an interview at the D8 conference on Wednesday. The Facebook chief also took questions from the audience denying the rumor that the social network was building a Webmail service to compete with Gmail and Hotmail, according toAll Things D.

But despite some direct answers to audience questions, the Facebook CEO appeared to be doing his best to avoid candid and direct responses during the interview, based on videos released by D8 organizers. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Zuckerberg routinely avoided the serious privacy issues that were raised. Instead, he offered some canned responses about Facebook's history and goals.

One example: Zuckerberg was asked by Swisher about Facebook's privacy controversies and whether Zuckerberg felt he was "adequately portrayed" in the media. Zuckerberg spent almost a minute-and-a-half recounting the early days of Facebook, and talked about past offers from major companies to buy the burgeoning social network. Only towards the end of this diatribe did Zuckerberg make a vague reference to past mistakes made by Facebook in terms of user privacy.

Watching Zuckerberg ramble on during video excerpts from the interview, I felt like I was watching the young CEO collapse under intense questioning on Meet the Press.

It also didn't help that Zuckerberg chose to wear an insulated hoodie under hot stage lights. Zuckerberg's poor wardrobe choice caused the young CEO to sweat profusely, and appear even more disturbed by the direct yet relatively gentle questioning from Mossberg and Swisher. Live blogging the interview, All Things D's Jon Paczkowski remarked, "[Zuckerberg is] flushed, and you can see the beads of sweat rolling down his face. Could this be his Nixon moment?"

Zuckerberg on Privacy:

At about the 3:30 mark of this video, Mossberg asks about Facebook's habit of automatically enrolling people into new services that potentially expose more user data to third parties. "Why are you [Facebook] taking preemptive steps that make me go and check and make sure that I have the control I want?" Mossberg asked.

"How the system is set up is a really important part for how it functions," was Zuckerberg's initial response before going off about how people like to share on Facebook. Later in the interview, Mossberg comes back to the opt-in versus opt-out question, and Zuckerberg said, "Making these products that people can share and that people can control and that are simple to do both is this balance...opt-in versus opt-out is one part of that balance."

It happened to me all the time that I have visited a lot of good sites and I clicked save on the bookmarks of my internet browsers.

I don’t think I am the only person who use multiple internet browsers. For some reason IE is not work well for me. I didn’t say I don’t like it at all but there’s a lot of security alerts come up and it didn’t provide me any add-one I need.

Today I am using 3 internet browsers: Firefox, Chrome and IE.

How can I combine all these bookmarks when I have multiple browsers like this? And what happen if one one you need to change your computer?

Firefox got an backup and restore add-one which I used few weeks ago while I was using a backup laptop. That tools help me a lot to backup my bookmarks in Firefox and Thunderbird. I just need to do one click backup and restore in one single file.

But once again what is the name of that tools and how can I find it again when I want to download and install on another computer ?

Google Bookmarks can help you all.

It provide you a one single place to save your bookmarks from any browser … (I tested with Firefox and Chrome). It works perfectly fine for me.

Anytime, from anywhere I can consult my bookmarks and add by simply click on “Add to list” button at the toolbar of the browsers.

When you logged into your Google Bookmarks Account, try to find the button as below:

Drag and Drop this button at the toolbar of your browser, While you view and website and it think it’s interesting to add to your bookmarks, you simply click the button that you just dropped.

Simple ? Let me know about your own experiences with this tool.

On Day One of my Pacific Northwest EVO 4G Tour last Thursday (May 27), I checked out the performance of Sprint’s new EVO 4G phone running on Clearwire’s 4G WiMax networks in the Washington cities of Bellingham, Seattle, Snohomish, and Tacoma.

The EVO 4G phone is the first phone designed to run on a U.S. 4G network. The phone has been receiving great reviews; but to get a feel for the phone's capabilities, I wanted to see it in action on a 4G connection, which is said to offer data speeds up to ten times faster than those a 3G wireless data service can deliver.

I didn't find this kind of performance in Washington; in fact, I saw only flashes of the EVO’s potential in 4G mode. So on Day Two (Friday, May 28), I sampled the 4G service in two Oregon cities: Portland and Salem. Here are my impressions.

Click here for information on 4G networks.

Click here for descriptions of my testing methodology and of the apps I used.

Day Two

According to its 4G coverage map, Clearwire offers 4G service in Salem, Oregon and Portland, Oregon. Image: ClearwireMy impressions of the 4G-connected EVO 4G in Oregon were broadly consistent with my experience with the phone and the service in Washington. The Clearwire 4G service (now available in 36 U.S. cities) seemed generally available where it was supposed to be (and then some, as discussed in the Salem section), but the service simply isn't fast enough to turn the EVO 4G into the “revolutionary” communications device it's being hyped as. Don’t get me wrong: The EVO is a truly impressive phone even in 3G mode. What prevents it from being a real game-changer is the speed of the Clearwire 4G service.

The speeds I saw in Oregon were marginally better than those I saw in my Washington tests, but still less than the download speeds of between 3 megabits per second and 6 mbps that Sprint and Clearwire advertise. In my Oregon tests, the EVO registered average download speeds of 2.3 mbps. And as in Washington, I never encountered the 10-mbps bursts of speed that Sprint says the Clearwire 4G network is capable of.

Portland

My testing locations in Portland, Oregon (from left to right): Pioneer Square (city center), Portland State University campus, Grant Park, and Portland International Airport.I began testing in North Portland (roughly 4 miles north of the city center) and found that I could not get a 4G signal on the EVO 4G or with the Sprint Overdrivemobile hotspot. Driving toward downtown I noted that 4G service became available roughly 2 miles north of the bridge that takes you into downtown Portland.

At the other four locations I tested in Portland, I was able to connect with the 4G network--sometimes immediately, and sometimes after a little tinkering with the phone’s wireless networking settings. At Pioneer Square (city center), for example, I couldn't connect the EVO phone to the 4G network while sitting in the car. But after walking to the center of the square and fiddling with the phone’s wireless settings for a few minutes, I was able to connect.

Meanwhile, back in the car, my Sprint Overdrive hotspot connected with the 4G network straight off, and stayed connected for the duration of my tests at that location. I had the same experience at almost all of the 14 testing locations I visited during my two days in the Northwest.

On the campus of Portland State, the EVO 4G connected with the 4G network immediately and stayed connected at reasonable speeds (approximately 2.4 mbps) as I wandered around campus.

Across the river at Grant Park, however, the 4G signal was noticeably weaker: I had to drive around to the side of the park facing downtown before I could pick up and hold the 4G signal. At the Portland airport later in the day, I had similar troubles. Though the Sprint Overdrive hotspot connected to 4G immediately and at high speed, I had to take the EVO 4G phone outside the car to catch and hold the 4G signal.

Pioneer Square at city center in Portland, Oregon.The YouTube video looked relatively good in my tests in Portland--by 3G standards, at least. In my Pioneer Square and Portland State test locations, the video was enjoyable to watch, though I noticed at least a little bit of artifacting, as well as some mild jitter in moments of high motion. The general quality of the video wasn’t as sharp and fluid as high-quality video should be. Watching the same video on my laptop, with the laptop plugged into a wired broadband connection, I saw true high-quality video with no artifacting or jitter--just smooth, fluid picture and motion.

As I moved away from downtown Portland to Grant Park across the river and then to Portland International Airport, I noticed that the video quality deteriorated slightly. At Grant Park (in a soft rain), the video took about 10 seconds to start running, and showed some visible artifacting and jitter, especially when the action recorded on the video involved lots of quick movement. I noted the same symptoms while watching video at the airport (also in a light rain) later on in the day, though the video did load much faster there.

The Qik live video streaming app continued to give me problems in Portland. At three of of my four testing locations (not counting the fifth location in North Portland, where I couldn't pick up 4G at all), the live video shot by the EVO 4G showed up at the Qik site in a browser running on my laptop after a lag of 5 seconds or more. And after the video finally showed up in the browser, the video often stalled, increasing the delay to between 10 and 15 seconds. Again I marveled at the idea that people might try to use this app to conduct a videoconferencing session between two smartphones connected on the 4G network. If such use is to be practical, the speed simply must improve.

Portland State University campus in Portland, Oregon.The positive exception was my test at Portland State. There the real-time video that the EVO 4G was shooting showed up on the Qik site within a few seconds of my pushing Record. The delay grew to about 5 seconds after the video displayed in the browser, however.

The Layar app performed well all over Portland. When I instructed it to search for nearby restaurants, numerous “food” symbols popped up on the EVO’s screen. When I searched for tweets nearby, the app seemed to need a little more time to register them. But after a few seconds, blue bubbles showed up over the locations of nearby tweets (with the content of the tweets displaying at the bottom of the screen); and after a few more seconds, the app began displaying the actual profile pictures of the tweeters.

alem

The Oregon State Capital Building in Salem, Oregon.On Friday afternoon, I drove 45 miles south from Portland to the Oregon state capital, Salem. Leaving Portland I noted that the EVO 4G continued to pick up a strong 4G signal as I moved south toward Salem. I continued checking and found that 4G was available on the freeway for nearly 20 miles outside Portland. In one location, the phone clocked one of the highest 4G speeds of any of my tests (almost 3 mbps). As I drove, I clicked on the high-resolution YouTube video and observed that its quality, while not quite HD, was as good as that of any streamed video I’d seen in the previous two days. I continued to pick up the 4G signal until I was about halfway to Salem.

The Sprint GPS service running on the EVO 4G took me directly to city center, to theOregon State Capital building, where I parked the car and began testing. I had begun connecting with 4G service shortly after I got off the freeway and headed into town. When I parked the car it was still on, and the Overdrive hotspot established a 4G connection immediately. Unfortunately, the speeds weren’t very impressive. The EVO 4G connected at a download speed of 1.5 mbps--a good speed for 3G, but pedestrian for 4G. The Overdrive didn’t do much better: Its downlink speed was about 1.8 mbps.

My testing locations in Salem, Oregon (from left to right): State Capital Building, Salem Airport, Oregon State Hospital.Elsewhere in Salem, I had less success connecting the EVO to 4G. First I drove across town to the Oregon State Hospital, but couldn't connect the EVO 4G to the 4G network even after turning 4G off and on in the phone’s settings (this trick had worked before). Oddly, the Overdrive couldn't connect with 4G either. Abandoning that test location, I drove to a Kmart parking lot near the Salem Airport, where I succeeded in connecting the EVO to 4G, but only after walking around the parking lot, turning the phone’s 4G radio on and off. The Overdrive connected immediately at the airport. But again, the download speeds I saw were unimpressive: 970 kbps (not quite 1 mbps) on the EVO, and 1.5 mpbs on the Overdrive.

Predictably, the high-quality YouTube video I watched in Salem wasn’t perfect. Though the video was watchable at both the State Capital and the Airport locations, I noticed some minor artifacting and jitter--not enough to ruin the experience, but lacking the smooth, fluid look of HD video.

Surprisingly, at both of the 4G locations in Salem, the Qik live video app worked better than it did in most of my other Pacific Northwest city test locations. The live video stream (shot from the EVO phone) popped up on the Qik site (on my 4G-connected laptop) after only about 3 or 4 seconds. At the capitol building, the delay after the video began streaming was only about 3 to 4 seconds, which ranked as one of the best performances I saw from the Qik app anywhere in the Northwest. With that short a delay time, I could almost imagine what viable video conferencing might be like in 4G--but it was still a stretch. At the Salem airport, the delay between the live video and its display on the site lengthened to 7 or 8 seconds.

At both Salem locations, the Layar app registered nearby eateries--with directory information--after a few seconds of delay. Searching for nearby tweeters, the app needed a few seconds to detect them (displaying them as blue bubbles on the horizon), and then another few seconds to display their profile pictures.

Day-Two Conclusions

Many people in the media have been waiting for the release of the “first 4G phone.” We were thrilled at the look and feel of the HTC EVO 4G phone when it stole the show at CTIA this year, and we hoped that this powerful phone running on the first available 4G network (Clearwire) would represent a quantum leap forward in mobile computing.

Alas, after two days of using the phone in 4G country in the Northwest, I have the sense that the great phone is still looking for a great network. The Clearwire 4G network is definitely faster than the Sprint 3G network, but my tests suggest that it’s not 10 times as fast, nor as fast as advertised, nor fast enough to usher in a new wave of high-bandwidth mobile apps (such as videoconferencing). At this point anyway, the 4G signal will merely make the apps you already use in 3G run marginally faster. No revolution here yet.

Stay tuned for the final article in this series, which will explore the specific connection speeds I recorded on the EVO during my two days in the Northwest.