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.

Blogger Joelle McNichol caught her cat installing Google Desktop. She describes: “Anthony and Jax cat managed to install Google desktop by falling asleep on the laptop.”

It’s so easy that even a cat can do it!

[photo by Joelle McNichol, used under a CC-license]

As TechCrunch anticipated, Google launched App Engines today, a new service that “lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.” The service currently supports Python only, but Google says they are looking forward to add more languages in the future. It offers database querying, “automatic scaling and load balancing” and API that let’s the application to send out email. It let’s you to run your application on “the same building blocks that Google uses, like GFS and Bigtable.” [Official Google Blog] You can also integrate with other Google service very easily.

The service is currently free, but Google has plan to let people buy additional resources “at competitive market prices” in the near future. Some of the current limits are:

• Three apps per developer
• 500MB storage per app
• ~10GB incoming/outgoing bandwidth per day
• 2.5 million datastore (database) calls per day

I think limits are pretty generous for a free account, it should be enough for most small to medium websites. Although Python will definitely turn a lot of developers away, but on the other hand, offering free hosting and computing power will attract a lot more people into learning Python. Well, guess I should get out my Python for Dummies again (Python kills me, seriously). :)

Google Analytics recently introduced new graphing options that enables users choose whether to display the stats by hour*, week, and month. The best thing is that we can now see the amount of traffic by hour, just like in the old days (nostalgia strikes).

*The hour option is only available for the graphs in Visitor Trending tree under Visitors.

If you are in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, the UK, or the US right now, don’t be surprise when you see the home page of Google went dark today, because they are promoting Earth Hour, an effort to “raise awareness of worldwide energy conservation.”

Google invite you (and everyone) to join other people worldwide to turn off your lights “for one hour - from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in [your] local time zone.”

Google had a history of promoting events like this: San Francisco and a couple of German-speaking countries last year, and in Israel a few days ago.

UPDATE: Added Google Ireland. [thanks Tom!]

After months of delay, Google finally released the beta of the 6th major version of Urchin - a web statistics analysis program that Google acquired in 2005 and currently serving as the back-end software for Google Analytics.

Unlike Google Analytics though, Urchin requires you to “install and manage the software on your own servers,” which is “useful for those who want to perform ad-hoc historical log processing, who want to store their web analytics on local servers, and those requiring third-party data audits.” Also, it’s not free, the final version will be a whooping $2995 (cheaper if you are upgrading from v5), but you can download a 90-day trial version here.

One of the new features is “improved user interface”. Yes, it’s improved comparing to Urchin 5, but the interface is also (pretty much) the old interface for Google Analytics.

Google added a new option that you can associate additional email addresses (that are not yet registered with Google) with your Google Account. You can find this new option under Edit Personal Information in the “My Account” page. To add an additional email address, simply enter your email address, click on the “Save” button below, and Google will send a verification email to the email address you enter.

Following the link in the email Google sent you will take you to a sign in page similar to the one above and ask you to enter your password to verify the association of the two email address on Google. Once you enter the (correct) password (and Google tells you that the “email address is now associated with your Google account”), you can use the additional email address to access your services/data on Google.

You can add as many email address you like (I suppose, at least at a reasonable number) and you can “disassociate this email address at any time” in the Edit Personal Information page.

I initially asked myself, “What’s the point of this?” and then something snapped, “Not everyone’s using Google as their primary ____ (insert Google product name here).”

[via Google Blogoscoped]

If you visit Google Germany today, you will see that the background of the homepage is black, representing “lights out” - a message from environmental groups to raise awareness of a nationwide energy conservation called “Licht aus! Für unser Klima” (Lights out! For our climate).

A similar event, called the “Lights Out San Francisco” was also promoted on Google’s home page to San Francisco residents in October.

UPDATE: Google Austria have their lights turned off as well.

[via Stefan]

Gmail Chat today updates with two new features/improvements - multicolor smileys and group chat. The exact same features were added to the Google Talk Gadget in May and June separately. However, this update doesn’t include the Flickr and Picasa Web photo slideshow feature that was added to the GTalk Gadget in April.

The first update on Google’s Talkabout Blog in more than 2 months only announced that the Google Talk Gadget is in 20 new languages. And the Google Talk desktop client haven’t got any major update during the year of 2007.

We may still have hopes though.

[thanks to Adil Arif]

Google today promotes a energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco, showing the Google Homepage with black background (hence lights out) to its San Francisco Bay Area users.

On Saturday, October 20, 2007, Lights Out San Francisco invites the entire city of San Francisco to install one compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) and turn off all lights for one hour, from 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm PDT.

FYI: Google already knows that “displaying black may actually increase energy usage”. :-/

[via Google Operating System->Geeked.info]

It’s already been a few days since the new Google Desktop has been out and I had some time to play around with it. Besides a prettier button and a better looking quick search bar, there also have been some improvements to the API. For interested developers, there a few changes as stated in the Google Desktop APIs Blog:

* Radio buttons
* Combo boxes
* Sorting of clickable items based on click history within a gadget (see the ranking API)
* Built-in, styled text for buttons and checkboxes
* New properties to help you change the color and cropping of images

Moreover, Outlook search is said to be enhanced. Another cool feature is, that each gadget can be added as many times as you want, which could for example be used to manage separate to-do lists, having different count down timers or RSS readers.

However, the biggest change is the ability to add Desktop Gadgets to your iGoogle homepage. When Google Desktop started, there weren’t any iGoogle gadgets. Later, those iGoogle gadgets were made available to put on every webpage and also Google Desktop. Hence their name “universal gadgets”. But now, the Desktop Gadgets are getting kind of universal themselves: They can be easily added in the iGoogle Add Stuff dialog. Check them out here.

What does that mean for the gadget world? Google is pushing innovation and tries once more to break the barrier between the desktop and the web. True, you must have Google Desktop installed for running those gadgets on iGoogle, but not the full version. In fact, if you try to install a desktop gadget on iGoogle and don’t have the latest Google Desktop, you can install a “streamlined” version of Google Desktop with just one click. This version will do nothing but provide you the engine to display those gadgets. That means there will be no indexing of your hard drive and no sidebar. If you want to install the full GD, you can do that with a right click on the GD symbol and click “Enable Google Desktop”.
This is a very good solution, as everyone can enjoy their gadgets in iGoogle, even if they might not want to install Google Desktop fully. On the other hand, it will surely increase installation rate and thus, both products, Google Desktop and iGoogle are going to mutually profit from this latest move.

Here below is a screen, which shows some of the latest features. You can see three to-do lists installed: two on floating and one in the sidebar. Furthermore, there are two digg.com gadgets in iGoogle. The one on the top is a desktop gadget and the one below a native iGoogle one. Now it’s up to you to decide if you want to have the desktop one with many features like dynamically browsing through topics, or the static iGoogle gadget.

Unfortunately, you have a problem if you are dual booting other operating systems than windows, since GD for linux and mac do not support gadgets. However, you might solve this problem by having multiple tabs on your iGoogle hompepage. Then, you could only use Desktop Gadgets in some tabs, so that you can fully see all your iGoogle information on any OS or on a public computer on another tab.

This latest move of mashing the desktop and the web also lead to some speculation about a Google web OS once again:

“Masked” even made a mock screen of what it could look like in Google Groups:
It certainly looks like a cool idea, but in my opinion, it doesn’t use space well. Why would we want the old desktop metaphor again on the web? If you ask me, developers shouldn’t create web operating systems that are like common OSs, because you take with them all the good things, but also and weaknesses. I wouldn’t want to access my gmail or calendar in this little and cluttered way; most people use the whole screen for one app. iGoogle or eDesktop or whatever you want to call it wouldn’t get better, if you had to ability to freely move those items around, because only time and probably also space would be wasted. You can do that already with Windows as we know it. It’s not about reinventing the desktop, it should be about revolutionizing it.
It should rather employ and build out a system, which uses gadgets to show a lot of information on a small screen to get a quick overview and provides a full screen to work and if real interaction is needed. Yet, this is future speculation anyways, but I am sure we are to see many more cool improvements in the future.

Google quietly launched Shared Stuff, a service that allows users to share interesting web page with their friends through the users’ “Shared Stuff” page, 3rd party bookmarking sites like Reddit and Furl, or by email.

You can start using Shared Stuff by dragging this bookmarklet onto your browser’s bookmarks bar (though it’s not required) and click on the bookmarklet whenever you want to bookmark a page.

By default the pages should be bookmarked to the “My Shared Stuff page”, which is publicly visible, but you can also send the links to your friends by email or bookmark it to other bookmarking or link sharing sites as mentioned above.

You can find the most popular shared links on this page (though they maybe NOT popular); pages from a specific domain; or pages of a specific tag. Also, when log-in, you can see your contacts’ shared links here. Most of these pages are RSS-enabled, meaning that you can subscribe to the popular links and/or your friends’ shared links with a feed reader.

This is kinda like Google Bookmark mashes with Google Reader’s sharing feature and for some reason it tells me that its not going to be a hit without some improvements (e.g. a browser plugin instead of bookmarklet, etc.)

[share-icon by Alex King, used under a CC-license]