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Archive for the ‘google’ Category

Crowdsourcing the google way

05 Aug

Remember googles innovative image labeler idea ? They seem to be doing it again with getting the masses to build maps for Google in india. India unlike US and many other western countries doesn’t have well documented maps for its streets. Eicher is the only organization I know about which actively maps and provides printed maps in india.

Here is what Braddy Forrest has to say…

“Google has been sending GPS kits to India that enable locals to make more detailed maps of their area. After the data has been uploaded and then verified against other participant’s data it becomes a part of the map. The process is very reminiscent of what Open Street Map, the community map-building project, has been doing. The biggest difference is that the data (to my knowledge) is owned by Google and is not freely available back to the community like it is with OSM.”

 
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Posted in google

 

Customizing driving directions

29 Jul

Am I the first one to figure out that google now has “customized driving directions” ? This is really cool… I always wanted to see how much longer or shorter a specific route is/can be. Now I can.

 
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Sitemaps now supported by Microsoft and Yahoo.

16 Nov

Google started it, but sitemaps has since been adopted by most of the large search organizations out there. If you own a website, and have a lot of static content, you probably should be investigating at creating and updating sitemap on regular basis.

Sitemap is basically an XML file which describes the contents and change frequency of the site. If you ever had pages hidden deep inside your website which were not getting indexed before, sitemaps is an excellent way of advertising those pages to the search engine.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

 
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Posted in google, microsoft, searchengine, yahoo

 

Google Talk

16 Aug

Google has released a newer version of Google Talk. This one allows you to leave Voicemails.
googletalk.png

File and photo sharing in Google Talk works like you’d expect: Simple, fast, and fun. Simplicity means that you can drag and drop one or more files directly onto a chat window. As soon as your friend clicks ‘Accept’, the bits will start flowing. When the transfer completes, the recipient can open the file or find it on disk with a single click.

File transfer is fast. Google Talk makes a direct connection to your friend’s computer whenever possible, enabling the fastest speed available. And even if your super-secure firewall won’t allow a direct connection, we’ll still get it there at a decent speed, because we’re nice like that.

Photo sharing is fun! When you drop up to 10 photos on Google Talk, smaller previews automatically appear right inside the chat window, so you can chat about them right away. The previews adjust to the size of your chat window, so just enlarge the window when you want to see more detail. To view the images at full size, or to save them for later, click the ‘Download Originals’ link.

 
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Posted in google

 

Google checkout and SSO

29 Jun

Google checkout is out, and as expected its so lean and mean that I couldn’t figure out if it was actually a new google component. With froogle already in place, Google checkout can cash on the goodwill people have for its froogle service. I think this news is a big one for other business organizations, but probably isn’t as significant for end user.

Remember Microsoft Passport ? Now think Google Single Sign on. I noticed a story about it being released and pulled yesterday due to some unkown reason. Personally I’ve always supported Federated authentication system, because it can reduce security problems due to reduced number of passwords one needs to remember. However, using a 3rd party single signon over which we have no control is like the government trying to control/monitor our income. That being said I’m still ready to subject myself to Google’s Single sign on if it reduces security risks.

 
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Posted in google, security

 

Notes: WikiMapia, Digg, IPv6, flock and Google Sync.

25 Jun

WikiMapia

  • This is the first time I happen to stumble upon WikiMapia, which looks like a wiki of maps. Very interesting and creative idea. WikiMapia uses Google Maps API and allows users to mark places and add text to locations around the world.
  • Its like  a large world map with people scribling all over it. Google recently updated its global map database to include some very high resolutions satallite images around the world which makes WikiMapia an even more very interesting new service to look out for.

Digg

  • Digg has been around for just over a year and has already surpassed slashdot in traffic volume. The Digg 3.0 release party demoed some really interesting new tools which are set to come out soon after 3.0 release on monday. The one tool which already exists is Digg Spy.

IPv6

  • US Government has plans to enable IPv6 on backbone routers by 2008.
  • Comcast is probably the first large organization who has already started deploying IPv6. Here are some interesting presentation slides from one of their talks.
  • I looked up ARIN and noticed that Google, Microsoft and Cisco all have /32 assigned to them which is a significant allotment. Even though ARIN policy kind-of states that /32 allotments requires the aquiree to act as an ISP and give away atleast 200 blocks to smaller ISPs or organizations in 5 years, I don’t think this is enforced. Cisco for example has its IPv6 block since 2000 and is well past its 5 year limit.
  • Aparently, during IPv6 I also found out that while IPv6 is being deployed, multihoming is not yet standardized.

Flock

  • If you like Firefox you’ll like Flock too. Just like the web is slowing moving towards web 2.0, flock is kind of an extention to the firefox experience which gives you “web 2.0 rich” experience.
  • Features like social tagging, blogging and photo sharing are built into the browser. But what I liked the best in flock is its implementation of the RSS new reader.
  • Flock beta 1 was released on June 13th.

Google Sync

  • Google Sync is a firefox plugin which claims to synchronize your browser settings with your gmail account so that you can carry them with you when you switch desktops.
  • Unfortunately though flock is based off firefox, its not supported which is a shame cause I primarily use flock. However, there is a hacked version of Google Sync which will work for flock here.
  • BTW, I think that Google Sync is far from mature, ’cause over the weekend Google Sync successfully locked up my Firefox browser on windows XP and even reboot doesn’t bring it up anymore.
 
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Posted in blogging, google, hacking

 

Could the Google and Sun rumor be about Java ?

18 Mar

If you have been following writings from Daniel M Harrison you would notice how strong his convictions are on this topic. Daniel strongly believes that Google is buying Sun. And any reader who doesn’t understand how Google and Sun operate can easily be swayed to believe this. But not me.

The fact that Google or Sun haven’t publicly denied these new rumors, means that something might be cooking. But Google buying Sun doesn’t sound very interesting.

  • Sun has a large pool of talent who know how to create fault tolerant, high performance parallel processing computing infrastructure.
  • Google has a large pool of talent who have perfected the art of distributed computing using cheap hardware clusters using free tools and operating systems
  • Sun is a hardware, software and services company
  • Google makes its revenue from advertisements
  • If Google buys Sun, it would be forced to use Sun technology. Microsoft had a hard time switching Hotmail.com from FreeBSD to Microsoft based solutions.
  • The change for Google to switch to Sun based hardware and software and the time spent to do it could be quite significant.
  • A lot of goodwill for Google stems from the fact that Google is Open source friendly. Even though Sun has made attempts to open its Operating System, the perception is not the same. Google might have to face some negative publicity if they don’t take immediate damage control initiatives after a buy out.

If there is any truth to these rumors, its more likely that its about Java than anything else.

  • Google already has an agreement with Sun over cross distribution of Java and Google desktop.
  • Based on what I know, its more likely that Google might buy out Sun’s Java technology than buying the whole company itself.
  • Java is one platform which is truely write-once-run-everywhere. Nothing else comes closer to this reality.
  • Google desktop has made significant inroads into desktop world running Microsoft OS. But lacks critical foothold in non-Microsoft world. This could change if it switches to Java as the application platform for all of its client side applications
  • If Google plans to quickly build applications like GDrive and integrate writely.com with other applications running on the local operating system, it would need a more universal platform. Java, though slow, is still faster than javascript and has more access to the operating system to do such tasks.
  • With better control over how Java develops, Google could use its strong technical background to speed it up and customize it for its own applications. The way Microsoft is trying to use .NET to spread its word.
  • This may or may not be a good thing for Java. But will definitely be a awesome add on for Google.
 
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Posted in google, java, unix

 

Google CL2 : Is Google Calender finally ready ?

26 Feb

Its been a month since we heard of google calender rumors. Just when everything has cooled down, Paul stone dug up some links within googles code to a “Google Links” page which had a whole bunch of google services listed. What stood out on that page was a link to “Google CL2″ which said “A calendar for you and the world”. If you have a google account go to this link http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=barc and see for yourself. Image1 Image2

 
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Posted in google

 

Google address translation

13 Jan

John Resig has come up with a very example of how to do address translation of a physical address into a lat/long using geocoder library. The examples he provided work only in US and Canada.

 
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Posted in google, interesting

 

Apple’s MacBook, Mobile crunch, google video store and blogofy

12 Jan

Steve Jobs launched the new year with a 15″ Intel-based MacBook. Compared to the Powerbook, MacBooks are more than 4 times faster with just a small increase in price. If I hadn’t bought my Powerbook in march last year, I would have definitely bought the MacBook this week. The other interesting feature on MacBook is the MagSafe connector which is nothing more than a simple power connector using magnets to stick to the laptop which easily give way when someone trips over them.

Techcrunch gave birth to a new blog today Mobilecrunch, which would be written by Oliver Starr and will focus purely on mobile technology.

Google video store has opened up…. and all of you who were waiting for it should probably pack up and leave now. Google might have got the search part right, but the UI is probably one of un-appealing. If you really want to see how a video store should look like you can start looking at iTunes which does a good job of helping you find what you are looking for.

 
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Posted in apple, google

 
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