Google New Tells You What's New...At Google Itself

Though Google is at heart (provided the "heart" of a company is its wallet) an advertising company, Google sometimes has a hard time advertising its new products. That's partly due to the pace of releases and the massive scope of all of Google's projects--just following, say, Android requires near-constant monitoring. Factor in dozens of different projects, all releasing new features and updates, plus the stream of new announcements, and it can get pretty hairy.

That can be a problem both for Google and for its users. If you're not checking the tech blogs every five minutes, you could very easily miss a great new product or feature. Hell, even tech writers like myself, who really are checking the tech blogs every five minutes, can miss some of that stuff.

Google has long needed a central repository of updates, and Google New will fill that niche. Google New, which went live two days ago, is basically a grid of all of Google's new updates, spanning products like Maps, Search, Android, Gmail, AdSense, Blogger, YouTube, and Chrome, among so very many others. There's a nice easy way to filter the updates either by specific product or by a general area of interest, so you can check out either all the recent Google Docs updates or everything related to business.

This also gives Google a rare opportunity to advertise itself, outside of the standard Google blogs. Right now, for instance, Google has put Instant, its new search function, up front and center.

What do you guys think: Is this shameless self-promotion, or a useful tool? Are you going to start checking out Google New?

Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).