Googlified

I haven’t check my Google Reader for over a month, and this is what it looks like. :o

First of all, I apologize to everyone that’s been waiting for my return to update this blog. Well, I am back now, but got some bad news, as some of you have figured a long time ago, is that I will stop updating Googlified.

“OMG, Haochi, why are you doing this?!?!?”

Well, I love this blog and I love doing this very much, albeit I don’t love/like/admire Google anymore - the bigger reason behind this whole thing, plus that life sucks (and wonderful at the same time - which I am learning to appreciate it) that wouldn’t allow me to have 48-hour days. Life gets overwhelmed at times and sacrifices needed to be done so that’s that, there aren’t a lot to be said.

So What Now?

The Internet without Googlified will still be the Internet, there are many great blogs and communities that talks about Google on the Web. I will still participate in the discussions, just not publishing them on this blog, that’s all. I do (shamelessly) admit that there are many great things about this blog that you will miss, but well, c’est la vie I guess.

I am not sure what to do with this blog yet, but one thing I am sure is that I will keep this blog online for another couple of months and wait till then to decide. As for the OVER NINE THOUSAND unread items in Google Reader, I will just “mark as read” them all. :D

Also, I have a personal blog, if you are interested, go ahead and subscribe it. :)

And for those who have never seen a photo of me, see below, I am radiating love and peace.

Due to the mountain of school works and (final) exams I am having toward the end of this school year, I will not be able to update this blog this week. In the mean time, you can checkout the blogs on the right (click here if you are reading this in a feed reader).

Also, I got into a car accident today, but I am fine, still in one piece, no scratches or anything. Thanks for asking. And yes, I am blowing soap bubbles in the above picture (outside of school), and yes, it is fun.

The Google LatLong Blog announced several updates to the images of Manhanttan used in Google Street View. Among the updates, I find their new move to blur out people’s faces to be quite interesting.

We’re also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making — working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery.

They are probably putting Neven Vision (an image recognition technology Google acquired two years ago) in use. Pascal from the GoogleWatchBlog said that the pictures are “a bit out of focus, even if there are no people,” and those new images are indeed a bit blurry when zoomed-in, despite Google claiming that they are now “sharper.” (I am probably comparing apple to orange, so please correct me if I am wrong.)

May 12, 2008 - a sad day for the whole community of Google Street View Stalkers (G.S.V.S) that will always be remembered.

Today’s Mother’s Day (in the U.S., and many other countries) and well, you know what to do (and it’s never too late). Orkut also have a special logo to celebrate the holiday.

In the U.K., Google’s celebrating the birthday (May 12) of Florence Nightingale, who is known as “The Lady with the Lamp”.

Florence Nightingale, who came to be known as “The Lady with the Lamp”, was a pioneer of modern nursing, a writer and a noted statistician. [Wikipedia]

[thanks to Pascal]

Last week, the Google Mac team released Vidnik, a “simple program for using the built-in camera on your Mac to create movies and upload them to YouTube.” It’s pretty easier to use and offers many functions like using the program to record video (or just drag & drop existing videos) and upload them as video comments.

Mambo on the Google Blogoscoped forum commented that, “I’ve just tried it out. To be honest, I think iMovie ‘08 does a much better job. It’s just as easy to use, but offers more flexibility, and flawless YouTube integration.”

Google Israel today celebrates the 60th anniversary of independence. (You can see 60 replacing “oo” behind the flag.)

Yom Ha’atzmaut is the national Israeli independence day, commemorating the declaration of independence of Israel in 1948. It falls on the 5th of the Jewish lunar month Iyar celebrating the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, and the end of the British Mandate of Palestine. [Wikipedia]

Now talk about being controversial.

A rather mysterious painting on a wall in the Google Phoenix office. I hope nobody’s turning into a werewolf (it shows a full moon). :D

Arooo!

[photo by Googler Don Loeb, used under a CC-license]

Orkut recently announced to increase their silly limit of 50 photos per user to 10,000 and up to 10MB per photo. Now let’s do some simple math, 10,000 photos * 10MB/photo = ~100GB of photo storage, and guess what, you need to pay about $200 per year to have that much storage in Picasa Web Albums (PWA doesn’t have a 100GB plan, but it has a 150GB plan for $250 a year).

Not that everyone have cameras that take 10MB photos, but still (I have ~1700 photos - mostly 6 megapixels - on PWA right now and it takes a bit over 1GB - PWA probably compressed them).

A couple of downsides are that you can’t upload photos directly from Picasa (or any other major photo management tools that I know of. They do have bulk uploader for Internet Explorer and Firefox though, but the link for the Firefox one is currently showing a “Cannot be found” page) and no API to access the photos (you can always roll out your own!).

IT’S OVER NINE THOUSAND!!

Google Reader added another social feature that lets users to post notes or comment on a feed post and share them with their friends. Post a note is pretty easy, just go to Notes under Your stuff on the left sidebar, type in your note in the text field and click on Post Note, and your note will be shown to your friends using Google Reader and be listed on your Google Reader’s shared items page. You can unshare the items at anytime by clicking on the Unshare buttom.

Sharing a feed post with your note on it is equally easy, but just on Share with note button. The title and content of the post can be edited before sharing. Another fancy thing you can do now is choose a theme for your shared items page, Ice Cream, Ninjas, and Sea, or you can just stick to the default style - clean and simple, the real eye candy.

This Weekend Project #19: build a custom feed reader.

Google Japan celebrates Children’s Day today (actually, more like yesterday to them - timezone difference), like they have done in the previous years.

May 05 is Children’s Day. On this day, children display samurai swords, armor, and Kintar? dolls. Two important symbols of Children’s day are carps and irises. Traditionally, families fly carp kites with a carp representing each son*. [Wikipedia]

I am doing this again, but today is also Cinco de Mayo, and apparently “Google Doodles doesn’t care about Mexican people” - says ValleyWag.

And last but not least, Google is holding yet another Doodle4Google contest, and this time for the Israeli children.

* so Google has three sons?

Twitter famous for it, Facebook and MySpace has it, and now Orkut finally added status updates to its social networking platform. To update your status, just go to your Profile page, click on “Set your status here” (or the “edit” button), and enter your status. The status is viewable to all (Orkut users) and there doesn’t seem to be a privacy setting on who can view the status.

Whatever happened to Jaiku? (other than moving their infrastructure over to Google App Engine)

[via Inside Orkut]

On April 30th, Google Netherlands celebrated Queen’s Day with the above logo.

Queen’s Day is a national holiday in the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba on 30 April. Queen’s Day celebrates the birthday of the Queen of the Netherlands and is supposed to be a day of national unity and “togetherness”. [...] During the celebrations as reference to the colours of the House of Orange-Nassau, people dress in the colour orange, which is sometimes called “orange craze”. [Wikipedia]

Google had celebrated the holiday previously, in 2003 and 2005 (the logos look pretty much the same though).