Social login is now an essential part of any site which performs user authentication. It does not need to replace the standard form based authentication, quite the contrary, social login complements it. Login with social accounts is a straightforward process and it saves the users a lot of time, as they won't need to fill the whole form. They just sign up with their social account and they can log into the website with just a few clicks.
Google is a popular platform that is commonly used on websites as registration or login option. It allows us to register with our Google account with just a few clicks and skip the process of email validation. It saves us a lot of time and makes the life easier as we don't need to remember all those credentials for different websites anymore.
reCAPTCHA, a service by Google designed to protect websites from spam and abuse, has been predominantly free for most sites. While enjoying the free tier limits of 1 million assessments per month, leading to near-universal implementation on millions of websites, it appears that a change is imminent starting April 1st, 2024.
A leader of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said he has asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over China-related data security concerns. The wildly popular short video app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
Brendan Carr, one of the FCC’s commissioners, shared via Twitter a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The letter pointed to reports and other developments that made TikTok non-compliant with the two companies’ app store policies. Carr’s letter, dated June 24 on FCC letterhead, said if the Apple and Alphabet do not remove TikTok from their app stores, they should provide statements to him by July 8.
Google is adopting continuous scrolling for desktop search results as it did for the mobile website in October 2021. Google says "you’ll now be able to see up to six pages of results" after reaching the bottom of a search results page, which is marked by a loading indicator and presumably faster than finding and clicking Next. This is meant to make things easier and it reflects the feed nature of countless modern services, though this is more common on mobile apps than desktop platforms.
Goals measure how well your site or app fulfills your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. Google Analytics goals are a way to capture interactions and allow reports to analyze behavioral, acquisition and demographic data against that information. When a visitor to your site or user of your app performs an action defined as a goal, Analytics records that as a conversion.
According to a report from Search Engine Land, the latest feature to be discontinued by Google is continuous scrolling on search results. As we discussed in a previous article, originally introduced for mobile devices in October 2021 and extended to desktop search results in late 2022, this feature mimicked the endless scrolling behavior seen on social media feeds.
Google is retiring the Chromecast brand and removing its Chromecast hardware from the market after 11 years, but it is not exiting the streaming device business. Instead, Google is introducing a new product called the Google TV Streamer, designed to compete with high-end streaming boxes like the Apple TV and Roku Ultra.
Google has made a significant change to its Workspace suite, offering all its AI features - previously exclusive to the Gemini Business plan - at no extra cost. Until recently, users needed to pay an additional $20 per user per month to access these tools within Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, and other apps. Now, these features are included for free, signaling Google’s push to stay competitive with Microsoft, OpenAI, and others in the race to deliver the most advanced AI-powered office suite.
Google has agreed to either delete or de-identify billions of records of web browsing data gathered while users were in its private browsing mode, "Incognito", as outlined in a proposed class action settlement filed on Monday.
The settlement proposed in the case of Brown v. Google will additionally require the company to provide more transparency regarding its data collection practices in Incognito mode and impose restrictions on future data gathering. Pending approval from a federal judge in California, the settlement may affect 136 million Google users. The lawsuit, initiated in 2020 by Google account holders, alleged that the company unlawfully monitored their activities through the private browsing feature.
