Google has added an option to quickly view PDF documents in your browser from search results, while keeping formatting intact. This comes in the form of a simple "Quick View" link located in the search result snippet for PDF results.

"In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application," says Google. "To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily view these files as HTML right in a web browser by clicking ‘View as HTML.’ This was an improvement, but unfortunately the ‘View as HTML’ option loses some of the formatting from the original PDF, such as graphics, tables, fonts and other elements."

The new links are based on the same technology that is used by Google Docs and Gmail. Google says they’ve actually been rolling out the feature in search results since July, and now they have more than half of the PDFs in their index available this way.

When you click the "Quick View" link, it will open the PDF in your browser, and will look something like this:

Google recently gave webmasters a new way to display PDFs (as well as PPTs and TIFFs). They launched the Google Docs Viewer, which displays these types of files directly in a user’s web browser without requiring a download. The tool for this can be found here. 

Friendfeed announced today that it has added a feature, which allows users to share files. Previously, users were able to upload photos, but now other documents like PDFs and spreadsheets can be shared.

"This has been an especially popular request from organizations and companies that collaborate using FriendFeed groups," says Dan Hsiao on the FriendFeed Blog. "We’ve certainly been using this feature internally and have found it extremely useful. We hope it’ll help make you and your collaborators even more productive, and a little more attached to FriendFeed."

To use the feature, just click the "files" link underneath the post box and select the fiels you want to include. Another convenient way to use the feature is to include files as attachments on emails sent to share@friendfeed.com, which posts to your feed right from your email program.

In addition, FriendFeed allows you to post to a group by emailing groupname@friendfeed.com or direct message somebody by emailing username@friendfeed.com.

The new file-sharing capabilities are sure to be much appreciated by the FriendFeed user base. I wonder if the feature will get abused.

A while back, Google introduced a viewer in Gmail for PDFs, and that has now been improved upon to support TIFF and PowerPoint documents. This means you can view PDFs, PPTs, and TIFFs in Gmail right from your browser without having to save them or have any additional software.

Marc Miller on the Gmail notes that Gmail has had a "view as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while, but the conversion technology is now integrated into this viewer.

There are more features with this viewer than with the old "view as slideshow" version, including zooming in and out, selecting text to copy/paste, and "printing" the presentation to a PDF document. You also don’t have to have a Flash plugin to run it like in the past.

"I don’t know about you, but the TIFF files I receive are almost always multiple-page faxes — and the default TIFF viewer on my computer only shows me the first page," says Miller. "It’s quite frustrating."

This viewer is powered by Google Docs and shows every page and provides the "print" option to prepare a ready-to-print PDF file. You can also upload documents right to Google Docs for further editing.