Google Wave and Google Buzz may have had troubles attracting usage, but the new ability to place calls from Gmailappears to have caught on quickly.

“Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours!” Google tweeted Thursday, evidently pleased with the number.

For comparison, there are somewhat more than 300 million people in the United States. If the average person makes 10 calls per day–research in 2008 put the number at 208 calls per month–that means about one out of every 3,000 calls in the U.S. went through the service on its first day.

The service lets Gmail users make free calls to U.S. and Canada and inexpensive calls to phones in other countries. It uses Gmail as an interface and optionally can integrate with Google Voice to receive calls as well.

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Google Inc. said users of Gmail will now be able to call telephones directly from their email, putting it in direct competition with Web calling service Skype and more traditional operators such as AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications.

The Google Gmail Blog announced today that “We’ve just started to roll out Gmail voice and video chat for both PCs and Macs, so if you don’t see it right away, don’t worry — it could take a day or so for this feature to be available in all Gmail and Google Apps accounts. If you want to download the plugin right away, visit http://gmail.com/videochat

Read more – Google Gmail Blog

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Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr

A tweet from the EFF pointed me to a short article detailing part of Eric Schmidt’s speech to the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe on August 4.

According to Schmidt, true transparency and anonymity on the Internet will become a thing of the past because of the need to combat criminal and ‘anti-social’ behavior.

‘Governments will demand it,’ he says, referring to full accountability and a ‘name service for people,’ possibly hinting towards mandatory Internet passports.

The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: ‘If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go … show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are.

You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!

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Malicious hackers attacked Google’s YouTube on Sunday, exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on the ultra-popular video sharing site, hitting primarily sections where users post comments.

“Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour [of discovering the problem], and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours. We’re continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future,” a Google spokesman said via e-mail.

The attack potentially put at risk YouTube cookies of users who visited a compromised page, but it couldn’t be used to access their Google accounts, the spokesman said.

As a precaution, YouTube users should log out of their account and log back in again.

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It shouldn’t be any surprise to those used to the easy and flexible functionality of Google’s products that Google Maps is good for a lot more than mapping the quickest route on your next road trip.

Some uses of the technology are just for fun, but there are also many practical, real-life applications that can make your life on and off the Internet easier.

From finding a place to park at the airport to mapping your latest family photos, here are a few unusual ways to use Google Maps.
Travel Information Google Maps is great for getting directions to just about anywhere, but it can also be used to get all kinds of travel information on distances, travel times, and where to stop for gas.

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