Google Senior User Experience Designer Jon Wiley posted an explanation of the new Google redesign from a design perspective today. He talks about how other elements of the Google experience were made simpler to lighten the load as the left panel got more complex.

Twitter is testing a new home page, aimed at showing more of the information that "flows through Twitter."

"This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone," says Twitter Designer Doug Bowman. "With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account."

Google has launched a new Google Labs experiment called Browser Size, which is a tool aimed at helping webmasters see how others view their site. Google’s official description of the tool says:

Ever wondered what parts of your site can’t be seen without scrolling? Browser Size shows you what portion of users can see a give spot on the screen. This is not screen resolution but the area available to the browser – as gathered from www.google.com users.

Here is what it looks like:

Google has introduced a new Gmail Labs feature, which gives Gmail users control over the default style of their text. In other words, you can set how you like your text to appear normally, and it will automatically appear that way.

AOL has shown off a new logo, which it considers a significant part of its new "brand identity." That is of course to go with its newfound independence from Time Warner. The logo is simple. Aol. That’s it – capital A, lower-case o, lower case l, and a period.

Web designers beware. Google is expanding its templates for Google Sites, which is part of Google Apps, and the company is really pushing Google Apps these days. What this means is that as more businesses adopt Google Apps and find a wider variety of site templates to choose from, the less they may need the services of web designers for basic design work (developers are a different story).

What is it with airlines?

If they’re not breaking guitars, their pilots are missing airports, or they’re berating people that are trying to help them.

Earlier this month, StumbleUpon started showcasing their new homepage design, when they touted their “Google + Twitter” social search. Now they’ve gone through the rest of the site to make it more consistent (less customizable), easy to understand and streamlined.

Google is rolling out the biggest set of changes it has ever made to Google Maps since it launched nearly five years ago. The changes come in a variety of manners, like refinements to color, density, typography, and road-styling. These changes are visible in the "map" and "hybrid" views around the world.

Facebook has quietly made a few changes to its design. It’s not exactly a huge overhaul that will provoke the backlash that last year’s big redesign did, but just a few simple things that people shouldn’t have too much of a problem with.

Google is updating the default font faces associated with specific AdSense ad formats. The decision to do so is based on findings that different fonts perform better with different formats.

Microsoft has launched Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 today. Silverlight is a browser plug-in that enables companies to design, develop, and deliver web apps. Expression is a set of design tools and technologies.

The new Silverlight release in particular is big news. Over 1/3 of Internet devices have installed version 2 since its launch less than nine months ago.

Microsoft also announced that MGM and NBC Sports are using Silverlight for different forthcoming video efforts.

The following is based on research, not sexism or prejudice of any kind. Conclusions are by nature overly general, and there are many exceptions to the following “rules” of masculine and feminine behavior. Quite simply, there really are general and stark differences in the behaviors men and women, but this fact should never be used for discrimination or other types of abuse. Also, in the following, jokes and wisecracks abound. The author apologizes in advance if you don’t find him funny and reminds you they’re only jokes.

Google has been working on a couple of new features for Google Image Search. The first one is the addition of suggestions for Google Image Search, which is basically just Google Suggest for the image search engine.

I probably don’t have to tell you that people are looking for ways to make extra income in this economy. Luckily there are ways you can get extra revenue out of sites you already have.

A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews that the company is seeing more and more people doing just that. "We’ve also been seeing regular people capitalizing on changes in consumer behavior (ie, more people searching for recipe sites and therefore stay at home mom’s creating recipe blogs as a result)," he says.

You can use every marketing strategy under the sun, but if they don’t translate into conversions, it’s all for nothing. Some methods take longer than others to lead to conversions, and there are hundreds of variables that come into play for the success of any campaign.

Conversions end with your site. That’s why you need to concentrate on what is and what isn’t working. There are plenty of web analytics tools that can help you figure out where your traffic is coming from, where you are losing your visitors, etc.

Original Article (update at the end): 

There are a couple of newsworthy Facebook changes going on. The first would be changes to the social network’s terms of service.

Since last fall, Yahoo has been testing new concepts for its homepage, but the company says it is now getting close to a final design. The other day Yahoo issued an update on the homepage testing and included a recap of what has been done and what is still being done.

Google has highlighted a few Firefox add-ons that could be of great use to AdSense publishers. These include:

eBay’s users aren’t the only ones down on the company. A Collins Stewart analyst has lowered it’s stock rating to "Sell," claiming that eBay will continue to lose market share to Amazon this year, and weaken in the advertising department.

Last week, Google began a series of videos called "Optimisation Essentials" for AdSense tips. When I reported on that, some discussion was sparked in our comments, and hopefully that will continue now because Google has put up the second video in the series. The theme here is "Dress for success – impressing your audience."