If you want to change the image to one of your own choosing, you can click on the link in the bottom left corner of the screen – provided you are logged in with a Google account. If you do not have one you can set one up here: Google Accounts. Otherwise, our understanding is that the homepage will return to normal tomorrow. Whether the link will still be there remains to be seen.

This initiative to make the classically simple Google interface more colourful and ‘homely’ (to use their words) can be seen, I believe, as a direct response to Bing’s popular use of imagery in its homepage. Google’s pared down, minimalist even, user interface was a breath of fresh air when it first arrived and has had a good run of it. But, one must ask the question, and it seems that Google are doing so themselves, as to whether people are starting to tire a little bit of it?

For me the answer is yes, and I am looking forward to being able to upload my own images and to choose from a tasteful selection in the Picasa user gallery. Empowering users to make their own choice as to whether they prefer the classic look of Google or if they wish to customise it with an image of their choosing, Google will soon know the answer one way or the other.

What the blog post does say explicitly is that the company was “no longer willing to continue censoring our results” on their Chinese search engine Google.cn. The company seems to have taken particular issue with the fact that “we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

LS Digital Media applauds Google for taking the moral high ground, for putting principles before profit. Okay, Google aren’t perfect but at least they are trying to do good and there are a very many companies, organisations and governments that could take a leaf out of their book. Well done the Big G!

This seems to be something of a genre-changing move by Google and highlights the company’s drive to be at the cutting edge of online technical innovation. The keyword here is integration. Google believes that by integrating a number of tools into one platform, productivity and collaboration will increase, and hence the value-add to the user.

Users will be able to create ‘waves,’ and add documents and collaborators to it. The system will feature concurrent rich-text editing, as well as email and IM-like messaging functions. Lars Rasmussen, one of the co-founders and lead engineers behind this project, especially stressed the real-time nature of Wave, where edits to a wave, be they new messages or edits in a document, appear immediately on the screens of all participants.

This post was inspired by ReadWriteWeb’s article: Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email.

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