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.

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 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.

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.

Even the best automated systems get it wrong sometimes….

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.

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…

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.

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 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…….