Google has just announced a new search feature, which lets you search within and across your Google+ photo albums from Google Search itself. All you have to do is need sign into the account you use to store your Google+ photo albums and fire away with a keyword. What takes this search technology up a notch is Google’s introduction of machine learning and computer vision to the way it recognizes specific photographs.

Google Checkout is the next Google service to be discontinued, and will be closing shop on November 20th. The payment gateway will cease operations in favor of Google Wallet. Google Checkout is a PayPal alternative for Web merchants, and also the favored transaction medium for Google Play developers. Google expects the transition to be smooth as it announced its focus on Google Wallet as the new medium of commerce.

Google+ Circles are just that – a circle of friends organized around the way you want to share with them. Think of them as special and specific “drop zones” for stuff. The great thing about Circles is that you can use them in a variety of flexible ways. The ideas for using Google+ Circles for personal productivity aren’t new by any means. Here are five.

In one inspiring move, Yahoo! has upped the ante by offering a full 1 Terabyte of space to all Flickr users, and by updating the already-dated Flickr interface. To put things into perspective, 1 TB amounts to over 500,000 original, full-resolution, pixel-perfect, brilliant photos, according to Yahoo!. The free TB offer comes neatly packaged in a completely redone user interface which is bigger, neater, and far more appealing than the old photo stream.

Contest. That word has a charm of its own. Ever since the days of the cavemen right till today’s Olympics, the brave and the meek have gone up against each other. Photographers aren’t in any way left out. In fact, they seem to be the most proactive lot when it comes to contests. So, let’s launch into some more popular photo contests and pit ourselves against the best of the rest.

A signature tells you something about a personality. Just as two people hardly write alike, they also sign differently. That’s how the “science” of Graphology came into being. But the digital age and the email signature have reduced the way you sign-off on a mail to a footnote. Just a typed name, and maybe a phone number or a Twitter handle – how utterly dull. Just as there is a way to write and format proper emails, there are also ways to end them well.

Another one of Google’s I/O announcements, Google Play for Education is a new initiative that aims to make it easier for schools to implement mobile learning in classrooms. Google Play for Education is a customized, curated version of the Play Store designed for K-12 needs. Announcing the launch at the I/O event (Google’s annual developer conference), Google said the education-centric Play Store will launch this fall.

A weather forecast website should be designed to make gloomy weather a bit palatable. The appropriately named Forecast.io ticks most of the boxes; including the one that says – elegance. Take the first look at its interface, and I am sure you will agree with me that good design matters. By the time we end this article, I hope you will agree that good design and easy-to-grasp weather data without dumbing it down, matters more.

If you do any form of writing on the web – as a developer, or as an author – it’s about time you became familiar with one of the more lightweight languages out there. Markdown is a simple markup language that’s easier than HTML. In fact, you can think of it as a big brother to plain text writing. Developers know all about it. It’s time, we simple writers became familiar with it.

Now, I presume it is easier to train yourself for a career in the movie arts. You could take the indie route and make documentaries for a start. The next Steven Spielberg is probably doing it right now. If you are as enthusiastic, what’s holding you back? You just have to tap into YouTube and join a digital filmmaking school for the price of a “free admission”.

If you are wondering what’s going viral across the U.S., YouTube has the answer fon its newly launched interactive trends map. The Trends Map tells you at a glance which YouTube videos are popular according to both shares and views, and includes a breakdown of popular YouTube videos by region and city. Or at least that’s the promise, as the map is currently only available for the U.S., but Google tells us to stay tuned for updates.

The RSS game is wide open. RSS aggregators are back in the feeding frenzy. But then, the tribe of feed readers was already there…we mostly had time for the king. Google Reader will be dead in a couple of months. Long live the King! Now, it’s time to look at the princelings. Reading the feeds we subscribe to is a pretty basic day-to-day activity, and you can bet there are enough Chrome extensions for that.

I am sure you know that creating rhyming poems – though high on the cheesy scale – has its uses. From birthday cards to classroom assignments, from Valentine endearments to Facebook status updates, rhyming words to make a poem is an “in-demand” art form. I reckon that if aspiring poets can have their poetry apps and poetry get-togethers on the web, we amateurs can do with a bit of rhyming help.

The mention of version control or revision control makes it seem like something for geeks. You will be surprised to know that version control systems have their place not only in academic writing but in anything that has to do with typing an alphabet on a document. As writers, we know the word draft. But draft is a mere rough sketch and it doesn’t actually take us back in time to the incremental changes we make.

Google added a small but potentially significant update to its Google+ Hangouts: a remote desktop feature. Similar to Skype’s desktop-sharing feature, Google+ remote desktop lets you remotely control and view another person’s computer while chatting away, assuming you get that person’s permission, of course.