"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
I was watching an old (June 2005, I think) interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on the Charlie Rose Show. Amongst the other points of discussion that are quite interesting, I especially liked the part where Schmidt asks Rose:
“Have you ever searched for your name on Google?”
Rose: “Yes”
Schmidt: “Did you get more than one result?”
Rose: “Yes”
Schmidt (smiling): “Well that’s a bug.”
According to this ElectricNews article, Google has received a patent for technology that could develop into a new voice-assisted search method. Users could then google for information through voice-queries instead of text-based ones.
This could build up into a really amazing feature for Google Talk. The concept of having a module that actively looks for the “google
The article mentions that the patent was filed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin along with three associates; two of the other named inventors in the patent are Alexander Franz and Brian Milch, who co-authored an academic paper, entitled “Searching the Web by Voice” back in 2002.
My account request for Google Page Creator got accepted yesterday, and I started off with a test drive of Google’s new publishing tool - here’s my Google Page. True to their claim, this is a really easy way for anyone to create and publish useful and pretty attractive pages (yes, you choose from templates), in minutes.
If you’ve grown accustomed to Gmail’s RTF interface, you would have no problems getting around the publisher interface with Google Pages - and all the useful features like auto-save. Although the tool integrates with your Google Account ID, there’s a separate 100MB limit for pages and uploaded files. It would be nice if Google could later tap into a user’s unused Gmail space to store content.
In case you’re wondering why someone would want this tool over, say, a blog (that also allows standalone webpage creation and independent links to posts), well - not everyone needs a journal type publishing system. I’d also like to think of this as a tool that people could use to create virtual flyers and such.
Google clarifies that web pages created using Google Page Creator will never receive any preferential treatment of any kind in Google search results.
Screenshot
There’s an update to the spicy rumor about Google’s next big thing. The story is that a new OS designed by Google (originally for internal use) will be hitting the marketplace soon, as a competitor to Microsoft Windows. While this is old news, the twist is that this unnamed OS now has a title - Goobuntu! As the name hints, this OS is supposedly developed by Google based on Ubuntu Linux (which is great) and the Gnome desktop.
If Gmail is your primary mail client like it is for me, you probably need to have these two options (amongst others), to add valuable functionality. The first is a Greasemonkey user script that modifies all mailto: links within a webpage to open Gmail compose windows rather than firing up your default mail client. If you’d rather have the client, you can always disable Greasemonkey by clicking its icon in the Firefox status bar.
Another must-have, is the Gmail This! button. This is actually a bookmark, that loads a new Gmail Compose window, preloaded with RTF text and images that you select on a webpage, along with a referring link. You can add this to any browser by dragging the Gmail This! link below into your bookmarks toolbar on your browser.
With over 2.6GB of storage on Gmail, its likely that most people could afford to save even one-time-readable messages like reminders and such, and never run out of space. Not me though. I easily delete more messages than I archive, and still have used up over 25% of my Gmail space. Well, until now I was using this excellent Greasemonkey user script (Firefox only), which adds a Delete button with seamless interface integration. Greasemonkey, for those of you who don’t know, is an excellent Firefox extension that allows advanced Java-based scripts (that add or modify website features) to be incorporated into the browser. Sadly, there’s no use for this brilliant script anymore, as Google now provides a delete button that works exactly like the Gmail Delete user script. You can find awesome scripts at UserScripts.org. And for those of you who don’t use Firefox, well, Get Firefox!
When Google Video was launched back in June, 2005, not many could guess where Google wanted to take their new promising venture. The picture gets clearer now as Google Video has its own store where you can purchase copyrighted content such as TV shows and other video clips, that are protected by Google’s own DRM. While this initiative looks more promising than Apple’s range of offering via the iTunes Music (and Video?) Store, there are some more plusses to Google Video. To start with, you can upload your own videos, and also earn revenue from them. There is a ton of open rights content available already, and a good place to start looking is the Popular Videos section on the main page. The feature I liked the most, is the link that Google adds next to the video that allows you to put it on your own website. Some HTML code is generated, that can be easily copy-pasted into your blog page, for example, and a Flash-based embedded video interface is added. Its even easier to feature your choice of open rights video content on your page, with virtually no online storage cost (the video streams directly from Google, of course).
Here’s a video that I thought I’d propagate - the concept of a Matrix-style table tennis match is totally awesome.
And here’s a ‘Dodge this’ video, Lego style.
Then again, as Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon) says, ‘Down with DRM!’. On his ‘So Sue Me’ blog, he’s posted some code that allows you to remove the restricting feature in the Google Video Player that prevents playback of videos not hosted on Google servers (running the patch requires .NET runtime).
If you average between 21 and 40 Google searches a day like I do, you’re bound to have a great deal of search history recorded in the background (assuming you are signed in to your Google account while you search). A new feature within Search History that I noticed, is a way to look at your search trends. Google can return your top ten search keywords, top sites and top clicks. Even more interesting are the monthly, weekly, and hourly search activity histograms. I just discovered that I am most likely to hit the search button at 10pm on a Wednesday in August.
This is fresh news - Google Base is a new service being tested by Google that ‘helps the world to find your content’. The premise is that Google hosts all your stuff thats worth sharing with the world - such as coupons, jobs, classified ads, and even comic books. At first glance, with its primary ability to seamlessly integrate with other Google services, the service seems to take a bite out of online services such as those offered by Craigslist and Half.com (both owned by Ebay). Google Base goes a step further in consolidating a wider range of sources, and even offers better results for engineering resources. Google Base is not yet listed on the Google Labs page.
This is old news if you read Om Malik’s GigaOm blog, but I thought I’d relay this piece of information to my own clique as well, just in case. If you are a Mac user or are using a machine without Google Talk, head to Gtalkr.com - an online service that allows you to ‘Go anywhere, to any computer, and have access to your Google Talk account via Gtalkr’. Yes, it is totally Flash-based. No, it is not owned by Google (yet?). Yes, it does have the sweet sweet UI that resembles something that would come out of Google Labs. Except that Google would go the Javascript way.
The add-ons that Gtalkr allows are simply amazing, and amazingly simple - like creating a list or adding buddy logon notification (through a separate Gtalkr notifier). Gtalkr also allows you to star a Gtalk conversation and lets you have your own gtalk inbox (note that this resides on a non-google server). The simplicity and design just might make you choose Gtalkr over Google Talk itself!
