Videos on Flickr, which I've long waited for, has arrived. I look forward to having videos and photos from events living side-by-side. Not-so-thrilling are the 90 second limits on video length: most of my videos are of author events and other talks, so I'll still have to stick with Youtube for those. Given that they've restricted video uploading to pro accounts, you would think that there would be less concerns about copyright violation, which is the usual bugaboo raised with longer videos. Or perhaps they really do think that videos on Flickr should only be "long photos.".

At least they've raised the limits to 20MB for uploading photos: ever since I got my 40D I've been running into their limits repeatedly.

As for Google Appengine, I can't wait to get off the wait list. I never got off my butt to do anything with Amazon's EC2 as the startup cost was a bit too much. With Google's Appengine, I should be able to crank out something simple in a matter of minutes, something interesting in a matter of hours. I really want to build a photo gallery engine on top of it, but that will have to wait until they allow you to buy over their 500MB storage limits.

• Gmail: '[' and ']' let you archive and move to the next/previous message in your inbox with a single keystroke. I'm still waiting for the hosted Gmail to get the recent Gmail update with this shortcut.
• iPhone Safari scrolling: two fingers lets you scroll an individual frame. The iPhone may be intuitive, but this had me stumped until today's TUAW post.

• Enter "sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy" into Google's new Translate service. Ah, the wonders of AI.
• IMAP support in GMail which means better iPhone experience, among other things.

Update: my kwc.org account has IMAP support now. For the first time I can send e-mail from my iPhone using that account. I also don't have to go through the duplicate effort of deleting e-mails twice anymore -- though that could sometimes be a plus.

In the grand tradition of Google acquisitions, Feedburner's TotalStats and MyBrand 'PRO' services are now free, though you still have to manually upgrade each feed to these extra features. TotalStats 'PRO' level allows you to track Item Views and Reach. MyBrand lets you switch feeds.feedburner.com/feedname with feeds.yourdomain.com/feedname.

For more information, including how to enable: Feedburner for Everyone

Google Maps has a major new update: you can adjust driving directions simply by dragging. Want to drive via the East Bay instead? Simply drag the route over to the East Bay and it instantaneously recalculates. It's so cool because you can actually use this to deliberate various driving directions on the fly, and it also gets around the fact that Google Maps driving directions have never been the best.

Update: there's more -- you can also click to set your starting/destination point, just in case you don't really know the address

Much was made of the Google's release of the Streetview maps, but I haven't seen any posts that really focus on what I see as the real potential here. Instead, there's been the fun efforts to find 'interesting' StreetViews as well as a cat in a window being elevated to a New York Times article on Google + privacy (note: you can have images removed by clicking on 'Street View Help', 'Report image as inappropriate'). Good and/or fun to discuss, but where is this going?

Following the thread in my previous post:

• Google buys Keyhole and recoins their product Google Earth
• Google buys SketchUp and makes it easy to create 3-D buildings for Google Earth
• Google integrates 3D-like buildings into Google Maps
• Google licenses technology from Stanford/Stanley for 3D license for creating drive-by 3D models of buildings.
• Google releases StreetView, aka drive-by photos of buildings

I know its been obvious from the start that photo-textured 3D buildings is where Google is headed, but it sure seems like their getting much, much closer now. How long before the StreetView car gets a SICK laser?

I'll close with my own little StreetView find, something fit for Year Zero.

Google waited until late today to announce Google Gears, which allows you to run Gears-enabled apps in 'offline' mode. You can use this in Google Reader, for example, to download the latest 2000 messages and then browse your feeds far away from any WiFi connection. Actually, that's all you can do right now as that's their demo, for now, but you can easily imagine all of the major Google Apps -- Gmail, Calendar, Docs, etc... -- getting a similar treatment. They've already released an update to the Google Web Toolkit to support Gears.

As is, it's definitely a 'beta' for me: I had to run the installer twice and the Google Reader extension doesn't download any images. Images are the primary way in which I filter entries to read, so I can't see myself really using this extension just yet. Update: I may have to already uninstall. Google Reader has asked me five times this morning if I wanted to switch to offline reading mode ("Connection error: A connection to the internet could not be made. Would you prefer to read in offline mode?"). I'm reading from a wired connection at work, this is downright annoying.

Also, Google will hardly be the only provider of this sort of technology. Firefox 3.0 will ship with similar APIs out of the box and Adobe's Apollo toolkit does the same. Hopefully we won't end up with 20 different offline synchronization programs that we have to download and install just to use the Web. Google took a positive step by releasing this as open source and indicating that they are willing to work with Mozilla, Adobe, and Opera.

Google Labs has gotten a bubbling cauldron: Google Experimental Labs. The coolest of the bunch is Timeline and Map view. Compare, for example, Tour de France (timeline) and Tour de France (map). More interesting, perhaps, is Route 66 (map), Benjamin Franklin (map), Christopher Columbus (timeline), or Computers (timeline).

I've been having fun trying to produce timeline results in the future, but with limited results as it appears that future dates are downweighted. Population growth and climate change provide a glimpse into the future, but armageddon already occurred many times and the future is past.

I have some quibbles, but they are fairly easily resolved: the timeline labels are misleading, the map sometimes leads you to miss the outlying datapoints, and the results are a bit wobbly -- your results can change as you browse a timeline, leading to vanishing and re-appearing data points.

Also in the Experimental Labs are keyboard shortcuts, which I believe has been around, left-hand search navigation, and right-hand contextual search navigation.

I'll leave you with the presidency of George W. Bush (map)

Google may own both Google Video and Youtube, but that doesn't mean that the two have moved towards parity, yet. I tried uploading my Michael Chabon book talk clips to both services last night. I tried:

• Google Video's Web upload form
• Google Video's Desktop uploader
• Youtube's Web upload form

The results are clear: Youtube wins for both reliability and speed. The Google Video Web uploader failed three times on me and all three failures occurred after almost an hour of waiting. Youtube's Web upload form was 3/3 and the videos were ready for viewing immediately after they finish. This was unlike Google Video's Desktop uploader, which took several hours to 'process' the videos after the uploads finish, and the uploads were much slower than Youtube. The Desktop uploader also has a strange behavior in which it will reject punctuation marks in your video's filename. As a software programmer, I can't think of any reason why this is necessary -- it would be trivial to remap the characters, as the Web uploader must have to do.

Another plus for Youtube: the Web upload form tracks the upload progress so you know if it is still working.

• Google Reader for Wii
• Google Analytics is slowly rolling out a new redesign. It looks like they've copied some lessons from MeasureMap (which they've let degenerate)

Google just transferred my Analytics account to the redesign and I like it very, very much. The new graphs are much more legible (they were very difficult to read for long data ranges previously). There are also sparklines next to summary data for easy trend reading, draggable date selection widgets, and a customizable dashboard for viewing your favorite reports.

There really wasn't any trouble adapting to the new interface as it pretty much is the same old data with the same basic navigation structure, but it is so much easier to grok now that it feels like a whole new product (one digression: thinner lines and scalable y-axis would help even more). It did crash my Firefox, but luckily SessionSaver saved this blog post from oblivion. Also, the 'Site Overlay' feature doesn't work for me anymore, but it's not something I used very often.

Google Operating System: 3D Buildings in Google's Street Maps

Google Maps now has isometric projections for buildings in select cities, possibly drawing on 3D building data they have been gathering with their Google Earth product. It's not as cool as Microsoft's Virtual Earth 3D, but at least it works in any 'ole browser.

Checkout Boston or read the Google OS blog entry for more.

I made a map of my Hawaii Vacation to try out the new Google Maps "My Maps" feature. There are numerous sites out there that do something similar with Google Maps, but its nice to see that Google is now providing an in-house version. As an added bonus, you can export your map to KML, which is their format for Google Earth.

Update: Added some whale watching, Byodo-In temple, and Spitting Cave photos

My vacation map is a bit incomplete as I still haven't uploaded my photos of humpback whales or West Oahu yet. I similarly mapped my photos using Flickr's builtin mapping features, but this is much more fun as you can create your own distinct map instead of a single universal map of all your photos. Of course, it also takes a little more effort to do it the Google Maps way.

If you don't mind giving up your credit card info to Google, you can get $10 if you signup for Google Checkout. I got $5 (or was it $10?) of Dana Street coffee when I helped user test Google Checkout several months ago, so I'm becoming quite fond of the service ;). I used my $10 to pre-order the Hellboy Animated Sword of Storms from DVD Empire.

I liked Google Checkout slightly better than PayPal. Checkout can forward e-mails from the seller to keep your address private and the overall experience is a bit more polished (shopping cart looks like seller's, the receipts are easier to read).

davextreme just informed me via comment that Google Reader has added that he, bp, and me all seem to want: sort by oldest. Sorting by newest starves those older entries and sometimes it just doesn't make sense to read feeds in reverse chronological order.

The also announced the "sort by auto" feature, though this has actually been live longer. The sort by auto feature tries to give your least frequently updated feeds (i.e. friends) higher placement so that you can get to them sooner, while leaving things like Gizmodo/Engadget/BoingBoing further down for the daily feed slog.

update: now sorting by oldest (thanks davextreme for the link)

Yes, I have finally abandoned Bloglines, which has carried me so far into the world of feeds. I have some quibbles with Google Reader, but the big win for me was the fact that it doesn't mark items as read until you read them. I tend to power through lists of hundreds of items at a time; Google Reader lets me stop halfway through, Bloglines demands I finish the job. It still took bp teaching me a couple of keyboard shortcuts I missed (shift-n, shift-p, and shift-o for navigating the list of feeds) to become fully comfortable with the switch.

Pros: * Doesn't mark items as read until you've read them, which makes it much easier to plow through feeds incrementally. * Better keyboard navigation. Bloglines has a shortcut for reading the next feed or folder, but there's no way to really tell what is next. * Can have more than 200 unread items in a feed, which means that you can catch up on everything you missed while on vacation.

Cons: * Not as easy to create feeds for things like weather, packages, and social sites. * Organizational system for read items is poorly integrated and modelled -- its not terribly clear what tags are, you can't browse by tags ('gt' -- goto tag -- is not the same as browsing), and you can't segment starred items by tag. Bloglines only has clip blogs, but at least they made sense to me. * Only loads entries 20 at a time. Once you make it to the 20th item, it loads the next 20. This wouldn't be so annoying if they loaded the next 20 when I got to the 18th or 19th item, but as implemented it means you have to wait for the next 20 items to load.

Just last week at lunch, we were discussing Google Earth and MS's Virtual Earth 3D and how cool it would be once there is enough data to start adding a time slider to it all. Move the slider on Mountain View and you'd get to watch the town collapse all the way down to a stage coach stop. Move the slider over San Francisco and watch the skyline appear and the Golden Gate Bridge come into fruition.

Well, as it turns out, we were discussing a feature that is, in some ways, already there. The new Google Earth 4 comes with a time slider, which works with any timestamp data. It's not the all encompassing time machine, as it is a feature that still awaits massive amounts of data, but people have already put it to work with Hurricane Katrina, London buildings, and more.

There's also another feature they've announced that fits well with all of this: new historical map layers.

This, to me, is a critical tipping point for consumer mapping applications. Before, they could only show us the present. Now, they can show us our past, i.e. give us glimpses into our cultural memory, take a walk down Memory Lane in 3D. Now, we just need data.

Google Earth Blog: Google Earth 4th Dimension Redux

Rumors are afoot that Google is going to buy Youtube, but this is just an excuse for me to pontificate on a discussion I recently had with a friend: can a large company (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon) successfully create a social/community service like Youtube? Google Video is a failure in comparison to Youtube, Yahoo had to buy Flickr to supplement its photo offerings, Amazon's product tagging service sucks to use, Google's Bookmarks and Yahoo's My Web 2.0 trail (Yahoo-acquired) del.icio.us, etc... NOTE: 'large company' isn't the right label here, but 'large company that stores your private data' is a bit wordy.

Many of the failings that I perceive in Google Video are attributable to a lack of understanding of community. There isn't even an easy way to find all the videos by a particular user -- lonelygirl15 would have a much harder time gaining popularity. Some of Google Video's failings were boneheaded technical decisions -- it took over two weeks for them to approve a video that I had uploaded -- but Youtube is hardly a technical or visual masterpiece.

There are several theories one could expound: smaller companies have more 'cool', which is important to community services; there is a big first mover advantage in establishing a community service; Google/Yahoo/Amazon IT infrastructure wasn't built to do open-community-style interactions for their users (note: Yahoo is a community service, but it is a closed community). This latter reason does resonate with me a bit: this is an Amazon URL for a tag: http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/glance/ex%20machina/ref=tagdpct/102-8509772-8364930?ie=UTF8 . This is the same tag on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/exmachina. But I don't think it's the major reason.

My own personal theory is one of digital identity management: my Google and my Yahoo identities are too personal to give away in a community service. Google/Yahoo identities are tied to e-mail, search history, calendars, and more. If you publicly reveal that identity you at least open yourself up to more spam and at worst invite identity theft of a much larger scale: determined individuals can figure out who I am from my Flickr account, but that's because I chose to tie my Flickr account to my overall 'kwc' moniker. It's related to danah boyd's mention of managing social contexts, e.g. teens don't necessarily want to hang out in the same social space as their parents (related: MySpace is drawing older visitors, study finds).

There is also a technological corollaries to this. My "home page" for Google is private-facing while my "home page" for Flickr is public facing. A company managing your private identity has to have less lax login procedures: Flickr can keep you signed in for weeks, Yahoo needs to sign you out almost immediately. There is also screen-handle assignment: I can be 'kwc' on Flickr, due to the smaller user population, but there is no way I would ever be able to get that for Yahoo.

So, what is the point of all this pontificating? To go back to the original question, I do think big companies storing your private data can successfully create new public community services, but they have to create separated sandboxes for these services. They have to allow 'alter egos', perhaps many, so that you can remain in control of your privacy. This is what they effectively do when these large companies acquire community services, but sometimes attempt ruin the whole deal, e.g. Yahoo's announcing they will merge Flickr accounts with Yahoo! accounts. Arguably, this is what Google did with Orkut, but Orkut couldn't scale to meet demand.

Google buying Youtube would be an interesting test for Google. Google didn't really muck with the Blogger community when it bought itself into that, but Blogger's development was stalled for over a year and the service became overrun with blogspam. If Google makes the right decisions with how to Google-ize Youtube without vacating its community, then it could possibly be the start of Google becoming more of a community player. Or it could pull another Blogger and watch users run to one of the many Youtube clones. The rumored $1.6B price tag is an expensive price to find out if Google has learned its lessons.

Bloglines is still getting the job done, but I like the fact that Google revamped Google Reader to get rid of my many, many annoyances with the first incarnation. The new expanded view makes it much easier for people like me with 100+ subscriptions to actually make it through our feeds. There is also a big improvement over Bloglines: Google Reader only marks items as read as you scroll through them, which lets you catch up on the last 100 posts of BoingBoing in more manageable chunks. My only real annoyance so far is that Google Reader loads posts into the Expanded View in 20-post chunks, waiting until you are on the 20th item before loading in the next 20. As I tried to catch up on some feeds in Reader, I would have to sit an twiddle my thumbs constantly.

What would be a switcher feature for me is if they could integrate their GMail package tracking link with Google Reader. I've been playing around with Bloglines package tracking feature, but I have to copy the UPS/DHL/FedEx tracking number out of an e-mail, go to Bloglines, click add, click on Package Tracking, paste in the number, and then select a folder to add the information to. That's a lot of steps. If GMail and Reader were integrated, I could do it in one click as GMail already detects package tracking numbers.

At the very sparse pages.kwc.org you can see the start of a my new Google-hosted Pages site. It's much like their GMail for your domain product -- they share the same administration controls -- but with this particular port of their product, you get 100MB for your entire domain and only domain adminstrators are allowed to make edits. I hope that they open this up more in the future -- it would be nice if you could hand out individual Pages accounts to your users as well as setup collaborative Web spaces on your domain, although I personally don't have a need for that right now.

Those of us who already had hosted GMail got the upgrade to the "Google Apps" suite automatically. In addition to Pages I can now hand out kwc.org accounts for Google Talk and Google Calendar. I'm not a big fan of either of those products, so not a big deal right now. I'm wondering how long it will be until Writely and Spreadsheets join the suite.

I'm not sure when Google did this, but the Google Sitemap pages offer far more specific stats than they used to. You can now filter what search terms are popular for your site by type of search (Web/Images/Mobile) and you can also view stats for each sitemap on your site, instead of just the whole site in aggregate. You can now also rate each tool to give Google feedback on what you like.

I found out some surprising things, like the fact that spare cycles was the #2 search result for 'phonak landis' and the 14th most popular click for this site is an image search for 'ugly.'

In my original YouTube vs. Google Video test, YouTube came out way ahead. The one thing that was really killer for me is that Google took days, in one case weeks, to 'verify' a video that I had uploaded. The need to wait an extended period was so... anti-Web. There were also plenty of other features missing, like tagging, commenting, and rating -- features that help generate a community around a pool of videos.

The Google Video team has seemed to take note of YouTube's feature lead and has sent out a mass e-mail detailing all their new features. Everything listed here has been available on YouTube, which goes to show how deficient GVideo was, but now, in a bulleted list at least, Google Video is looking more on par with YouTube. One area they might surpass YouTube is something they haven't released yet: sharing in ad revenue for the videos that you post. Whether this is text ads hosted on the side of your video or video ads before/after your clips, I have no clue. While the opportunity to make money off little videos is attractive, I'm less excited by the idea that I might have to watch more video ads (note: there is no indication that Google is going to do this type of ad, I'm just specuating).

Here's a list of the new features (in their own words, as I have neither the videos nor the time to try this out): * Instant gratification: A web-based video uploader for immediate upload and playback * Share your video with the world, or maybe just your friends: Single-click video posting to popular blog services, including MySpace and Blogger * Get involved!: Now add ratings, tags, and comments for all videos * Zeit-what? Now you can see a "Top 100" list, updated daily, that shows what people are watching * It's "Football", not "Soccer": Google Video now exists in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Poland, and the Netherlands

Google has a map of the Mountain View wifi access points they've put up. They've also marked areas that aren't yet covered -- most areas are, and I'm glad to see that most places I generally go with laptop are in the green.

Google recently launched Google related links to compete with Yahoo's Y!Q for publishers. Both provide you an automated mechanism for inserting "related" links into your own Web site. I don't get it. Let me start off with an example of a human-authored attempt to incorporate related links (from Wikipedia's April 1, 2006 article, but just about any Wikipedia article will do):

Slashdot incorporated a pink "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" theme [1] at 00:00 UTC. This girlish theme is in stark contrast for a techie website believed to be mostly frequented by male nerds.

The only related links in that sentence important to understanding the subject (link "[1]") were Slashdot and OMG, but there are plenty of other 'related' links to Wikipedia entries about pink, girlish, male, nerds, contrast and Web sites -- great if your goal is to spend three hours on Wikipedia exploring the interconnectedness of entries, but not much more.

A link is a way for someone to leave your page. With either Google Related or Y!Q, you, as a publisher, are saying that you want to insert more ways for a visitor to get the heck out, that the fire marshal has directed visitors to proceed to the nearest related link safety exit in a calm and collected manner.

I use a more profitable system for saying, "Get the heck out": ads. A large percentage of the entries on this site are crap or have only short-term relevance. My entry about Bootcamp won't matter for long, but many more people will read it a year from now because of search engines. I'm too lazy to keep older blog entries relevant and I don't want to delete part of my historical record, so I review older entries from time to time and place my ad exit signs if I think that the entry won't age well... or if I think I can make a buck :).

Ads are just as crappy as related links, but older entries are mostly compost and you can't really crap on crap. At least Google is better incentivized to make ads more relevant. As a publisher, masking the smell with a Google Adsense check helps and there is one good that comes of it all: you can buy fancy new toys to blog about ;).

for Kolo, I've posted a couple more screenshots of the "Manage Domain" screens for hosted GMail.

Update: more screenshots

Here's a screenshot of my customized kwc.org gmail, slightly altered to block out some visible names (yes, that is my e-mail address if you wish to contact me). There's not much to review here that hasn't been said before: it's GMail. It feels a little cooler because it's my GMail (notice my little custom graphic at the top), but otherwise it's plain-old GMail: 2GB, chat, etc... My account has been 'verified' so I'm now sending and receiving e-mail with no problems other than the slight GMail slowdowns that I've noticed on both of my accounts today (@kwc.org and @gmail.com).

I'm still waiting for the day when we can get rid of our corporate IMAP mail servers and replace them with GMail boxes or something similar. I'm tired of slow search and trying to keep things filed in folders.

Update: screenshots and more screenshots

I've never had @kwc.org e-mail addresses before. I'm just too lazy. I also prefer Web e-mail and very few options exist that would be superior to my regular GMail account. Now, in a couple short minutes -- short enough to do lazily -- I have a GMail-hosted @kwc.org account. I'm still in the setup process. I can receive, but not send e-mail (they are verifying my account or something).

The details I've gleaned so far: * you can login to both your @gmail and your own hosted account simultaneously * you get up to 10 e-mail accounts free * 2GB (I don't know if this is per address or total yet) * you can set your own logo to replace the GMail logo * you can enable/disable chat across accounts * you can customize the sign-in box color

I've always wondered why other free-mail services (hotmail, yahoo) haven't made similar moves. There is a wretched land grab that occurs with any of these services where everyone scrambles to get their screenname of choice; the late-comers are left with bob1230923x@atleastitwasfree.com . About once a month I get mis-sent e-mail for a Kimberly or a Kevin or some other poor soul would probably has some meaningless digit appended to their account name.

With domain-hosted e-mail, GMail now has effectively infinite screennames for its users. I get to have a screenname that makes sense (guess my e-mail, it's really, really easy), no one else accidentally gets my e-mail, and other people should hopefully be able to easily remember the address.

I recently had the chance to try out YouTube vs. Google Video as a video publisher. I had some clips from the Tour of California that I wanted to put online and my DSL doesn't do the best job hosting video.

It's hard not to notice the rise of YouTube. It seems that everytime I see a video link I end up on that site and they certainly seem to have the attention of NBC, which is sending cease and desist after cease and desist for SNL videos (is SNL officially no longer lame?). I've run across Google Video much less frequently. I wasn't sure if this was due to laxer policies on the part of YouTube in allowing content like Oscar clips or if YouTube was superior in some manner.

I believe I now have the answer: YouTube is far, far superior. Google Video does have a better video uploader, but that's about its only advantage. For my test I uploaded the same Tour of California clip to both services. Google Video took over 24 hours to 'verify' the video. I still have a video that I uploaded on February 21st (two weeks ago) that is in the 'verification' process. Time it took YouTube to post my video online: instant. 24 hours is just a mind-boggling long time to have to wait, let alone two weeks. As far as I can tell, Google Video doesn't even tell you when your video is ready, so you have to keep revisiting your video status page.

YouTube also has three features that Google Video does not: tagging, commenting, visitor counting, and rating. I don't care much for ratings, but tagging makes it easier for people to find my videos, commenting is nice for feedback, and visitor counting tells me whether or not it was worth my time even posting the video.

Both services seem to degrade the quality of the original video. The cycling videos I uploaded weren't of the greatest quality as they were shot with an ELPH, but they were definitely more intelligible than these:

• Google Video Sample
• YouTube Video Sample

Nevertheless, if you don't have to server to host the video and you want to get the video online to share with others, I highly recommend YouTube as the route to go.

If GDrive (Google's online storage technology) launches, we'll be one step closer to addressing two of my biggest pet peeves about computer technology: data synchronization and data loss. I find it archaic that we still think of data living on a physical computer. Why should I have to take an extra step to make sure that a CD I ripped is on all three of my computers? Why should I risk losing all of the data on a computer when the hard drive fails? Why do I have to make backups of my computer? My ideal solution would be that all my computers talk to each other and provide one unified storage area -- I retain control over my data. Another solution that has it's own benefits is for a company like Google to provide free online storage.

I imagine that personal data storage is a bit of a holy grail for an information company like Google. One of the main criteria I use when evaluating a new startup is whether or not it makes more information accessible as well as the value of the information being provided. FlySpy and Zillow evaluate well by this criteria because both enable users to access valuable information that was previously thought inaccessible. Now imagine if your company could store all of your personal data. Your personal data is the most valuable data a company could present to you. Making your personal data available to me anywhere would also solve data synchronization and backup headaches while also enabling an entire new breed of Web applications that directly interface to your online storage.

The main impediment to controlling this data is the obvious costs associated with storing hundreds of gigabytes of data per user. Google has to index billions of Web pages, but it can share the cost of that index across all of it's users. Personal data must only be shared with one person. Desktop search technologies are a cheaper approach, but they don't offer the same control; I can always install multiple desktop search technologies or switch from one to the other. Desktop search solutions also get the EFF to raise red flags when they try to assert a bit more control over your personal data -- it's better to be explicit about what it is you're trying to do, especially when walking the grey areas of privacy.

GDrive will be entering a crowded space. There are many other competitors and it's not clear that Google will even have the leading product in the field. However, Google is a more interesting player in the space because (a) it is offering to store 100% of your data and (b) the variety of other Google services. GDrive, GMail, and the rumored Google Calendar could interact seamlessly. You could publish to Google Video with a single click. You could save copies of searches and Web pages directly into your online storage. It's these new types of interactions between Web applications that I think will be the major factor in the next generation of Web applications -- they are the ones necessary to facilitate a greater transition to an online mode of interaction with a more diverse ecosystem of devices (personal computers, handheld devices, cellphones, etc...).

update: novak has pointed out the easier "standard without chat" link at the bottom of your GMail inbox that will completely disable the chat functionality (including annoying popups).

GMail Chat has finally migrated to all of my GMail accounts. I don't really plan on using the chat functionality, so mostly I'm annoyed as the update also includes a popup window that appears anytime you hover over someone's name. It seems really, really, silly to me to see an "Invite to Chat" button when I hover over an Amazon purchase confirmation.

If you're as annoyed as I am and you have Firefox+Greasemonkey installed, Garett Rogers has written a Greasemonkey script that banishes the popup to the netherworld.

Warning: it eliminates all popup windows, including the one for the Quick Contacts pane. The popup window in the contacts pane is the only way I know managing your Quick Contacts, so if you still need to use the chat functionality you may wish to do without.

Eliminate Gmail Chat popup windows Greasemonkey script

Turns out that there is a 'Map This' link that appears in the right-column of Gmail if you're reading an e-mail with an address in it. There's also similar links like "Track USPS package." I found out about it here, but according to their help documentation this feature may have been there since last August. Nice feature, but the ad column isn't the best place to get me to notice it.

I installed Picasa on my dad's computer to help him manage all the digital photos that he's been taking and I am impressed. I'm not impressed because Picasa has better features that Adobe Photoshop Elements, Aperture, or any other photo management software out there. In fact, the features of Picasa are fairly streamlined to include only the most basic photo retouching capabilities.

The reason I am impressed is that it's one of the few pieces of software that my dad was comfortable and competent with almost immediately. My dad is a complete computer novice who doesn't use his computer for much more than writing letters, surfing the Internet, and balancing his checkbook. To see him immediately latch onto the red eye tool, retouch several photos, and then print them with only minimal assistance is a great accomplishment in user interface design. Importing photos from the camera was also a snap because Picasa doesn't really care how you import the photos -- it finds them automatically -- so it doesn't really matter which of the numerous import options Windows pops up he chooses, it will probably work, i.e. Picasa gets around Windows' lack of usability.

There are still some features that my dad had trouble with. The selection tools for cropping and red-eye correction gave him some fuss, it's hard to tell which options you have selected on some menus (the highlight around a selected button is too faint), and the button layout is a bit inconsistent, including the placement of the OK/Cancel options. However, Picasa doesn't edit the photos directly, so it's hard to do permanent damage.

Picasa most directly compares to iPhoto. Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Aperture have more features but require more computer-savvy users. Picasa is much faster than iPhoto and I believe it's UI is a better design for photo-editing and browsing, but you'd never really have to choose because Picasa is only for PCs. So, if your parents have a PC and you want to get them good, free, photo-management software, or you love iPhoto and are stuck on a PC, you may want to give it a shot. It will be better than the crap that comes with your digital camera.

Our little city of Mountain View is going to be the first city to receieve free city-wide Google wireless. Just think, I could convert my R/C to run off of 802.11.

Wandering the Yahoo! cafeteria, it seems to be a less cool Google cafeteria. The Y! cafeteria has some nice things, but you get them for free at Google.

They were out of coffee.

This involves Google and blogs, so of course I'm obligated to post: Google Blog Search.

Pros: 1) It's fast. 2) It's really fast. 3) It places a "References" link next to blog entries that are linked to by others. 4) You can get feeds of your search queries (ala IceRocket).

Cons: 1) I can't make heads or tails of their relevance. 2) Their index isn't impressive yet (both in depth and recency). 3) It's pretty easy to get a spam blog or two in the top search results page.

Relevance is a difficult issue. When I search for 'jython' do I want a blog about Jython-related issues, or do I want a recent blog entries mentioning Jython. They try to offer both by having a short list of "related blogs" at the top of each search result listing, but it's far from perfect: I get bp's comment feed instead of his main blog when I search for 'bp.'

You can get off-results even for very prominent blogs. I searched for Scoble, author of "the scobelizer weblog." Presumably, someone who is #30 on Technorati's Top 100 with 6,087 links from 4,003 sites be an easy search result. For related blogs, Google returns "Alex Scoble's IT Notes" (a different Scoble). The top result in the main list of results is "the scobelizer weblog," but the URL listed beneath it is http://www.velveetaland.com, which is a blog that links to Scoble. I get similar problems if I search for "John Gruber" (author of Daring Fireball, #76 on Technorati's list).

Of course, a normal Google result for either Scoble or John Gruber gives the desired result.

Sites like Technorati are all but unusable because of slowness and frequent database outages, so speed is IMHO the competitive advantage here. It's hard to care about feature XYZ when it only works 50% of the time and takes 30 seconds to complete.

BTW: My favorite blog search is still Bloglines. It's slow, and it does have frequent outages, but lets you exclude your subscriptions from the search results and it contains a very broad index. I'm also a fan of IceRocket, which has RSS search subscriptions and tends to catch tons of people who link to my mythbusters entries. It's also pretty zippy, though not Google zippy.

Of course I am trying out Google Talk, at least long enough to figure out how to make most of it work inside of Trillian. Feel free to find me online if you want to play with it, but I'll tell you upfront that it's rather bland and feature-sparse as IM goes. At least it's very 'clean' and 'simple.'

If you're going to dominate the world, at least the world of software, then an IM client is pretty much obligatory. They're also really, really easy to implement -- it seems that whenever I have to come up with a software design/prototype for something, IM ends up listed as an ancillary feature. In Google's case, they didn't have to implement as much as they based theirs on pre-existing Jabber software. They did add voice chat to the mix, which is nice, but also not groundbreaking.

In order for it to be groundbreaking, I would have expected something more... Googley... i.e. I would have expected them to allow you to save your IM conversations on their servers and search them later on, or to be able to lookup terms/acronyms/names that other people use (Trillian does auto-Wikipedia transclusions), or I would have expected some sort of interesting 'conversation' integration with GMail given that the Talk client is already leveraging your GMail contacts. One of the things I've noticed about GMail is that the conversation UI means that when you are e-mailing with other GMailers, it can frequently start to approach the brevity and speed of IM -- a seemless transition between the two environments would be a difficult but useful innovation.

Even though every tech site on the Internet has already dissected this, I would be remiss in not mentioning the new Google Desktop 2.0 Beta. I was underimpressed with the first Google Desktop as it was lacking in Google's core strength: it did not return good search results. I hope the new version does, but if it doesn't there are a lot more competitors in this space now that I can try out.

The feature I'm most pleased to see is Quick Find, which appears to be a direct copy of Quicksilver. I've long wished for a descent PC equivalent of this Mac-only tool and perhaps this will be it.

The most noticeable new feature is the 'sidebar', which appears to be a copy of the sidebar that has appeared from time-to-time in betas of the next version of Windows (Longhorn). I have previously discussed how many of Google's current moves (Desktop search, GMail) are better understood in the context of Longhorn. All Microsoft has to do is put up search boxes that use their own search technologies and the average user will be too laxy to go to Google.com.

Google has two strategies that it can use to counter this threat: * make sure their own search box is there (the Google Desktop strategy) * own the data that the user is trying to search (the GMail strategy)

These two strategies make sense and, with the frequently announced delays to Longhorn, Google has plenty of time to stake their territory.

I just didn't realize that there was a third strategy: copy Microsoft's ugly, space-hogging sidebars.

Google is rolling out personalized search once again, this time through the "Search History" feature that they rolled out awhile ago. The old personalized search was a bit kooky to use because you had to fill out a profile of interest categories, and if you trashed your cookies or used a different browser your profile was lost.

I can't quite tell yet what triggers a personalized search results. If I do a query for "test search," then I get personalized search results. If I do a search for "Armstrong" (to test if Lance, Neil, or Louis gets top placement) or "Java" (language, island, coffee) then I get no personalization.

I don't get the cool Kaltix-based category slider that lets me refine my search dynamically, but I'm hoping that makes a re-appearance as they refine this.

Just got my copy of the Google Earth Beta. I can't test it just yet because I purchased the cheaper NVIDIA-only license for Keyhole that will only run on Chunk (my home laptop) (update: added my own screenshots below).

Looking at the feature list, it looks like this will be a big upgrade: * GPS support * new primary database with imagery for Australia, South/Central America, Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, as well as hi-res support for all of Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, and, Massachusetts. * 3D buildings in select cities (update: added a screenshot of an awfully pencil-like TransAmerica building in the extended entry) * integrated driving directions (don't care about this per se, but this is integrated with the flyover feature, which hopefully will be more useful than it's previous "flying morass of pixels" incarnation) * extension to their previous markup language, KML, which is now KMZ (KML zipped). From reading the descriptions, it looks like it will be easier to create photomaps (both in UI as well as with scripting tools). It's rather hard-to-tell, though, because Keyhole never released a public specification of KML, and I don't see any released for KMZ yet, either. In the past people have reversed-engineered the XML spec, but hopefully they will be nicer this time around. update: Google has posted the KML documentation and tutorial. (thanks Mickey)

The UI looks a lot cheesier, like some misguided homage to OS X (screenshot), but if the features live up the hype, this should be a nice upgrade from Keyhole NV.

Update: woohoo! There's a lot more imagery for Japan now, and they've unfogged my birthplace (military base). Here's a shot of Mt. Fuji close-up (checkout the extended entry if you want to see a screenshot of Fuji looming over Tokyo Bay):

The flyover driving directions are also sweet -- the map even spins as you go through a cloverleaf. It's mostly an eyecandy feature, though, as it takes about as long for it to fly between San Francisco and San Diego as it does to do the actual driving (even on the fastest flyover setting). Also, they went a little too crazy with the driving directions (in the spirit of Google Maps), which means that you'll find amusing popups like:

Peter Norvig, Google; Ken Norton, Yahoo!; Mark Fletcher, Bloglines/Ask Jeeves; Udi Manber, A9; Jakob Nielsen, NN Group

I went with bp and Neil to a BayCHI talk on "Recent Innovations in Search." I agree with bp's sentiment -- there were some interesting moments, but the talk was short on revelations or insights. I guess that is to be expected as the title of the talk is past focused ("Recent Innovations") rather than future focused ("Future Innovations"); it's hard to believe that the panelists would give away yet unrevealed technologies they were working on. I'm going to try and save as much effort as possible, given that bp posted his notes. In fact, as I am going to crib from his notes, or just omit what he already has, you should just go read them instead.

I've seen several Google Maps hacks since its recent release, but this one takes the prize for actually being useful: Craigslist + Google Maps

You can see all of the Craiglist apartment rent/sale listings overlaid on a Google Map, and if you click on a listing it will show you the details for that listing, including pictures. You can also narrow the listings down to your particular price range.

Having used Craigslist before to find housing, I know that this would have saved a lot of time and effort.