Google « Thejo Kote

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SMS Channels from Google

Google just launched a labs project called SMS Channels. Seems very similar to what we’re doing with MyToday. What a coincidence…

I think it had to happen at some point considering the numbers we have. But, I wouldn’t really conclude that Google is taking on MyToday with this labs launch. My guess is that this is a 20% project and not a “let’s crush these midgets” type strategic move. Many Google products are born from 20% projects, so you never know how far they’ll take it. Either way, competition is always good and the attractiveness of the space got validated some more. Of course, whether competiton from Google is good is open to debate.

Update: Rajesh has posted an interview he gave on the competition from Google.

Google / India / Startups — View Comments
5
Jan 08

Competition for SlideShare?

A globally successful site built out of India in the last few years we can all be proud of (apart from Zoho) is SlideShare. It does one thing really well. Sharing slide shows. But, it looks like Google has taken a first step in competing with them. Of course, SlideShare does so much more at this point, but with a lot of Google products becoming “social” (like Reader), you never know. I guess it’s time for the SlideShare guys to put their heads down to out-innovate them, because there is no way a 16K people company with all their bureaucracy is going to keep up with a motivated start up. All the best to Amit and team.

Google — View Comments
19
Aug 07

DRM sucks. Again.

Google recently killed the paid video downloads service, and told the people who have bought videos all these days that they can no longer view them. It’s yet another instance which shows why DRM is such a bad idea.

By picking up its marbles and going home, Google just demonstrated how completely bizarre and anti-consumer DRM technology can be. Most importantly, by pulling the plug on the service, Google proved why consumers have to be allowed to circumvent copy controls.

More at Ars.

Asides / Google — View Comments
11
Mar 07

Google offers bus rides!

As with all things related to Google, the press is gushing about Google arranging transportation for its employees. The report says around 1,200 employees use the transportation service. Compare that to the 18,000 employees of Infosys who work out of Electronics City in Bangalore, most of whom use the bus facility provided by them. Of course, the service from Infy is not free and there’s no free Wi-Fi access and other perks, but, purely from a logistical perspective, it was a massive, well run operation, atleast when I was there.

Asides / Google — View Comments
7
Mar 07

Ubiquity first, Revenue Later

Eric Schmidt on criticism that Youtube may have been a bad investment -

…an old joke in the Internet is that URL stands for Ubiquity first, Revenue Later.

[Link]

Cool / Google — View Comments
2
Sep 06

Google Image Labeler – Very addictive

Google has released a new Labs project called Image Labeler. It’s a game where you and another random user try to give images the same label in a 90 second period. 100 points for every match. It’s very addictive. I wasted an hour playing it. Google in turn got human intelligence labelling their images, so the image search quality should improve.

Google — View Comments
22
Apr 06

A rare mistake

Even the best automated systems get it wrong sometimes….
Google News Headline

Asides / E-mail / Google — View Comments
30
Aug 05

Address groups in Gmail

Creating mailing lists, which is a very useful feature, is currently not supported by Gmail. Here’s an excellent workaround.

Asides / Google — View Comments
7
Jul 05

Google currency conversion

If it’s something that you can query through a text box, Google seems to be there. Now it’s a currency converter. I’ve always used the excellent xe.com for conversions, but Google has made it easier. It works like the basic calculator, and its biggest strength is the ability to understand natural language queries. One need not even know the currency of the country before trying to get a conversion. For example the query “uae money in indian money” works just fine.

Cool / Google / Search — View Comments
29
Jun 05

Google Earth

Google recently acquired Keyhole, the satellite imaging company. They have now released a product which integrates satellite imagery and Google search. It’s called Google Earth, and in traditional Google style, there’s a free version. I had tried out Keyhole earlier and it was a lot of fun. Google Earth aims to be more than just fun, but that’s just for users in the United states. For users in other countries, it’s more of a toy that is a lot of fun to play with. Features like the one which flies you along the route you want to take along real roads are really cool. Users in the US, especially those living in big cities, can enjoy the integration of Google Earth with Local search, to actually ’see’ search results. The combination of actual photos with relevant search results are a huge improvement over graphical maps.

Just to illustrate the difference in the resolution of the images available, I chose Chicago in the US and Mysore in India.

The image above shows houses and cars on the streets too.

I took this screenshot as the name is shown in the way it is pronounced in my native language, Kannada, and not as it is usually done in English. That was cool. If you’re familiar with the area, you can actually identify some landmarks.

Google / Services — View Comments
16
Jun 05

Why Google chose Wunderground for weather updates

When Google launched their weather update service, I had wondered why they chose Wunderground which was restricted to the US. I was wrong about Wunderground being a US only service, which makes Google’s choice of not providing updates for all countries all the more puzzling. The point of this post is that I now know why they chose Wunderground over the more popular Weather Channel.
Larry Page recently spoke to the graduating class of the University of Michigan and a student recorded the talk (Slashdotted here). I finally got around to listening to that speech and Larry Page mentions how his friend Alan Steremberg, the co-founder of Wunderground and he “basically downloaded the whole web” and did other cool stuff. So, there was no other choice really!

Another useless bit of trivia filed away…

Google / Services — View Comments
21
May 05

Personal Google homepage

After denying for long that they have any interest in becoming a portal like Yahoo!, it looks like Google has taken it’s first step towards becoming one with it’s new Personalize your homepage project.

In a fashion similar to the personalization of Google News, users can now add news, quotes, posts from Slashdot, mail from Gmail etc. to the homepage below the search box. The drag and drop rearrangement is cool, but, I really don’t see any value in having all that stuff below the search box.
It’s much simpler to get that kind of information through an aggregator like Bloglines. But, most people don’t use aggregators and Google is definitely targeting them with this service, and, of course to get people to register with them to catch up with Yahoo! and Microsoft on that front.

On an unrelated note, here’s an over the top theory of what Google might be planning for the future.

E-mail / Google — View Comments
15
May 05

Gmail locked

My Gmail account got locked twice in the past week. The reason given provided no clue as to what I might be guilty of. Since I use Gmail as my primary account, getting it locked was not very convenient. I wrote to the e-mail address given asking for the reasons. As usual I got the standard reply which asked me to write back if anything in a list of no-no’s was applicable to me. I was under the impression that the Greasemonkey script that I use to add a ‘Delete’ button might be the culprit. When I enquired if that was the case, the reply I got was another standard copy-paste mail, but, this one said something that was applicable to me –

- Receiving, deleting, or popping out large amounts of mail in a short period of time
- Sending mail to a large number of recipients in a short period of time
- Using 3rd party file-sharing or storing software in your account
- Logging in from multiple locations in a short period of time
- Using your account for purposes other than email

It looks like Gmail will lock your account if it is accessed at the same time from two different places. The problem was that I access Gmail from work and home, and as I reboot the computer at work only once a month at best, Gmail is always open. I then access it from home during nights at and weekends.
But, the problem I feel is with Gmail itself. It automatically refreshes every two minutes (yes, a stopwatch was involved) and so, if one forgets to close the window at one place it’s as good as accessing the account from two places simultaneously. Users should atleast have the option to switch the two minute page refresh off.
The message that was displayed when the account was locked said upto 24 hours, but it was unlocked within a few hours. Anyway, the good news is that the Greasemonkey script that I use isn’t the reason for the lockdown, though some other scripts might be responsible as the repository points out.

Google / Software / Web — View Comments
9
May 05

Google Webaccelerator – Bad idea?

Google recently released a ‘web accelerator‘. It basically acts as a proxy and uses the Google might to push pages faster at us, among other methods to improve the speed. As with all Google products expectations were high, but, this one has gone horribly wrong. First came the news that Webaccelerator automatically logged you in as someone else on many online forums, then it seemed to wreck web-apps.
But, amidst all the noise, I can confidently say that I don’t know if any of it is true! That’s because I just can’t get the thing to work. There seems to be some problems connecting to the local server. Surprising, because Google Desktop search doesn’t seem to have any problems. Also, after I installed Webaccelerator, GDS started displaying a huge error message about incorrect network settings on startup and quit. Worse still, I lost access to the net, even after uninstalling Webaccelerator. I really don’t know if WA was the culprit, but only a reinstall of windows could fix the problem.
It looks like the Google servers couldn’t handle all those requests, as they’ve pulled WA off the site. Somehow, it seems like Google organised a DDOS attack on itself!
The thing I don’t get about this service is that it claims to improve browsing speeds only if you have a broadband connection. But, shouldn’t it be the other way around, with the service helping out dial-up users?

On an unrelated note, it looks like Google had some major DNS issues and all of it’s sites were offline for around 15 minutes yesterday. So, Google can do wrong…….

Asides / E-mail / Google — View Comments
28
Apr 05

Delete button in Gmail

As much as I like Gmail, the absence of a Delete button to trash mail is very irritating. But, the Gmail-Smart-Delete-Button Greasemonkey script does that brilliantly. No more ‘Move to Trash’ in the drop down box.

Asides / Gaming / Google — View Comments
26
Apr 05

Guess the Google

A game in which we need to guess the search term in Google Image Search that would have returned the pictures that are shown. Fun way to waste time…

Google / Search / Services — View Comments
22
Apr 05

Google Search History

I’ve been trying out Google’s new Search History feature and find it pretty unusable at the moment. Traditionally Google has been excellent when it comes to user friendliness and attention to detail. But, this new feature breaks that trend. Search History saves both the users search request, and all the outgoing clicks from the results page. My gripe is that the design is towards, on login to the Google account, saving all searches and visited pages. Given the number of searches performed by the average user and the number of pages visited from each results page, the search history feature quickly becomes useless. With four out of five searches and almost 75 percent of referrals to websites happening through Google, I’m sure the search history of users will be overflowing pretty soon. It’s more useful when that odd important search or well crafted query needs to be saved for later retrieval.

A pause option is provided to stop the addition of pages to the history, but, if that is used, it requires a repeat search after enabling it to add the search to the history. So, it would have been better had the design facilitated easier adding of searches after it has been performed. What I have found after using Filangy for a while is that, I seldom need to search through my history. What will be more useful is the ability to selectively add searches than the ability to selectively remove them.

This service is at present similar to what Filangy offers and, as I noted earlier, it was bound to happen. Google isn’t the first to offer such a service though, A9 and AskJeeves already do.

Asides / E-mail / Google — View Comments
19
Apr 05

Gmail adds feed reading

Gmail adds feed reading. User added feeds in Gmail? Maybe, they plan to have a Bloglines like feed reader eventually. That much more data to mine!

Asides / Cool / Google / Search / Yahoo! — View Comments
15
Apr 05

yahoo! vs. google

yahoo! vs. google provides a nice comparison of the relative ranking of a search term by Google and Yahoo!.

Browsers / Google / Interesting / Web — View Comments
14
Apr 05

Greasemonkey

One of the main reasons Firefox is popular, is because of it’s extension system. Firefox still can’t compete with Maxthon when it comes to features. But, an extension like Greasemonkey makes a strong case.
Greasemonkey is a FF extension that lets users change the functionality of a site by installing scripts. So, the content providers no longer have an absolute say in how their content is consumed. For example, the Customizegoogle site has combined a number of scripts written by many people and allows the installation of one script which results in a number of improvements, like bringing the Suggest feature to the normal search page and adding a ‘Delete’ button to the Gmail interface (Gmail really needed that one), and many others. The script repository has many many more very useful scripts and the contributions are pouring in. A separate site for the management of scripts is also in the works.
I thought it would be great to write a user script. But, I’m still learning Javascript, and so I took the easy way out and modified an existing script to skip all the ads on the ad-farm Indiatimes.com
Ad-block already does that pretty effectively, but the script is more generic. You can get the script here.
The best part is, I started a thread on the Maxthon Forums, and some talented guy is almost ready with a Greasemonkey like plugin for Maxthon.

Google

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