Recently in Google Category

I've recently switched to Google Reader for all of my feed reading needs. This is the latest iteration in a long line of trying to find the perfect feed reading experience. Here's what "perfect" means to me in this context:

• Readily available so that I can polish off a few items whenever I have a spare minute
• Enables me to clear out a batch of unread items easily
• Fast
• Navigable by keyboard for faster reading
• Native applications for whatever platform I'm on plus a Web application backend
• Sync between work, home, and phone

I subscribe to 250 feeds presently so the primary consideration is staying on top of them. There is a real cognitive weight to having 1,593 unread items and I strongly dislike declaring "feed bankruptcy." So I have spent the last few years testing different options.

For most of that time, Bloglines was my go-to solution. It was fast and fairly efficient. But I was never satisfied because it was Web-based, lacked decent keyboard navigation, and required an Internet connection to access at all. I tried Google Reader when it first came out but it left me cold. Since I spent my working life on a Windows XP machine, I resigned myself to a Web-based application.

Then I got a Mac at work and suddenly all of the great Mac OS X feed reading applications were available. I again tried all of the ones I had evaluated at home: NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Shrook, and some others that I can't remember now. I settled on NetNewsWire because of the NewsGator syncing, the native iPhone application, and decent keyboard navigation. I still wasn't completely happy with the set up because the NewsGator Web application is terrible: no keyboard navigation, slower than you'd think possible, and hard to mark items as read.

As I said earlier, Google Reader is my current solution and I think it's going to stick this time. The Web application has matured substantially since I looked at it four years ago. It lacks a native Mac OS X application but I found a way around that earlier this week, which I chronicled in this Super User answer:

1. Download Fluid.app.
2. Save this PNG image (or this higher-resolution one) to your Desktop.
3. Open Fluid.app and use the Google Reader URL, name, and newly-saved icon.
4. Launch the Google Reader application from your Applications folder.
5. Buy Byline or use the really good mobile version of Google Reader (you can save it to your Home screen to boot).

This setup is very fast, feels native (Fluid.app even displays the unread item count as a badge on the Dock icon), syncs between all environments, has great keyboard navigation, and is always available. I've gotten my total unread item count down to 8 and kept it in double digits for the last week, something I haven't done since I started feed reading.

It's refreshing to have that load off my mind.

I've just finished reading Scott McCloud's comic book introduction to Google Chrome, Google's new browser that will be released tomorrow in some fashion. I am very intrigued by this new player and I think McCloud's work is an accessible introduction to the basic ideas behind the design. (Of course, it could have been summarized in a single page or blog entry much more efficiently than being spread over 40 pages but McCloud did a great job in explaining things.)

When Jason Kottke first began speculating that Google was working on its own browser, I dismissed it just like I did his notion of Google OS—a Linux distro with Google branding. (I'm not sure Kottke can count this as a win, by the way, since five years worth of bupkis does not make for a successful prediction.) It seemed like an overreach for Google, well outside its focus. The intervening years have proven that Google views its mission as pretty much everything on or related to the Internet.

But I think Google Chrome makes a lot of sense. For one thing, Google now has some skin in the game. It can act in such a way that Microsoft and Apple have for so long: if there's some special feature that it would like to be prevalent, it can implement it in its browser and propose it as a standard to some friendly standards body. Microsoft got XMLHttpRequest in there early (among many other examples) and Apple got the canvas element accepted in exactly that way. Google, previously, had to work within the Microsoft-Apple-Mozilla constraints and now it gets to be the interloper, the mole. I think that's a powerful position and likely well worth whatever money Google is throwing at this project.

Also, it clearly has some innovations to bring forth. Putting each tab in its own process is genius. At once it solves the issue of memory leaks and the expansive memory footprint that afflicts every modern browser as well as protecting the user from malicious code in a very effective way. Google also developed its own Javascript virtual machine called V8 to couple to the open-source WebKit. Refactoring the Javascript engine has become a hobby with the browser makers: SquirrelFish from Apple, TraceMonkey from Mozilla, and excuses from Microsoft (paraphrased thusly: "Oh, Javascript isn't really that important. We focused our performance improvements in IE8 on everything else that stunk about IE.") The neat thing about Google's Javascript optimizations is that they took a completely different approach to speeding things up, which means the other browser makers will likely copy them. Innovation in the browser space is an unmitigated good thing.

Finally, as the most popular set of properties on the Internet, Google can drive adoption of its browser by offering improved performance and heightened functionality when visited using Chrome. It can tie its sites into the browser in a way that it never could if it weren't a browser maker itself.

In the end, each of these reasons for developing its own browser also benefit the user so I applaud Google's decision and hope that they can succeed in following through—which has always been a problem in Google's application ADD environment.

[UPDATE (9/2/2008): Google Books has a better version, so I've updated the Google Blogoscoped link to point there.]

Google recently announced its AppEngine initiative and I can't say I get who would want it. It strikes me as too inextricable from Google.

Amazon Web Services operates in a similar fashion but it is clearly serving as an infrastructure provider rather than a platform. While it'd be hard to migrate off of AWS if you ever chose to do that, it's not as if you're promoting Amazon by virtue of creating and running your application. At every turn, the AppEngine application uses Google products like Google Checkout and Google Accounts. Building a business so closely associated with the largest Internet company in the world strikes me as perilous.

AppEngine aspires to be a platform like Facebook has become. But it lacks the social aspects that make Facebook so attractive as an application platform. So, ultimately, I think AppEngine's main competitor is not Amazon, Facebook, or even Microsoft (which has its own cloud initiative in development) but Ning. Who's Ning? Exactly. I just don't see this market as compelling so I don't understand why Google's entered it.

Google Maps now has real-time traffic data. I checked Phoenix and I see lots of green. I assume that it means "go" but I have absolutely no context for what "go" would mean on a freeway. There's no legend anywhere on the page. Digging through the help, I find this article that indicates green means an average speed of 50+ MPH on that stretch. Yellow means 25–50 MPH and red means under 25 MPH (grey indicates unavailable data).

Yahoo's version is nice in that it shows average MPH at various points along the freeway, but you have to be at a sufficient zoom level for them to show up at all. Google's shows up from a citywide zoom level all the way down.

I guess to maintain consistency across those levels, you really have to boil down the presentation to something as simple as red, yellow, green, and grey. Still, it'd be nice to have actual speeds at some point…

Adam Bosworth, bigwig at Google, is interested in tackling health URLs. As soon as I saw that term, my mind exploded with possibilities. Imagine no more charts that must be transferred between family physicians, full medical histories available to emergency personnel, and the ability to know whether doctors have ever considered you "difficult."

But then I remembered that the health care industry is one of the most regulated segments of our society. For a moment, I was under the misapprehension that it would just take an agreement between me, my HMO (possibly), Google, and my doctors. But that's not possible in today's political environment: you know that every branch of government would want to make sure that it followed onerous regulations, complied with their whims, and required paperwork that utterly defeated its purpose.

All that would be done in the name of protecting the patient's privacy. Never mind that the patient could protect his own privacy, thank you very much. The nanny statists know that consumers just aren't as sophisticated as they are and that those who would provide such record retention would jump at the chance of selling it to anyone who expressed an interest.

But I don't believe that. I believe that I should make my own decisions and the idea of having my entire medical history available on the Web, no matter what health care insurance I have or who my doctor is, excites me. If Google does an adequate implementation and limits access to those whom I specify, then I don't see anything untoward happening.

And if they restrict access by the government by requiring a subpoena, all the better.

So Google's going to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion. This really doesn't surprise me. Oh sure, there's thorny copyright issues to overcome and YouTube's revenue scheme is practically non-existent. But there's three points that made this is a certainty to me: 1) Google already has Google Video; 2) Google blew it with MySpace; and 3) Google needs ad growth.

The fact that Google has already done Google Video indicates that the company realizes that it needs to be a player in this space. It has gone through several revisions, uncharacteristic of Google's fire-and-forget product development cycle. They've even negotiated exclusive deals with several content providers. This is an area that Google wants to own; my gut tells me that it's because it was largely wide-open when they got into it. Music was (and is) dominated by Apple, but movies and video is a nascent market.

I remember when News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million reading that Google was an early suitor for the social networking site. My guess is that Google decided that MySpace just wasn't worth it at the time—up to that time, by my recollection, all of their acquisitions were pretty small potatoes compared to ones by Yahoo and Microsoft. That passing proved to be a huge and costly mistake for Google since they then ended up paying $900 million to be MySpace's exclusive search partner later that year. And that's not even including the revenue they could have kept in-house through advertising sales on MySpace's notoriously page-inflationary site.

The management at Google probably views YouTube in a much different light because of that blunder. While $1.65 billion might seem dear to us, 100 million videos per day could yield untold amounts of advertising revenue that would be kept within the company. Further, Google could keep YouTube's search functionality for itself. If Google didn't buy YouTube, it's pretty clear that someone else would and the number of companies that could pull off such an acquisition is pretty exclusive. In other words, Google saw another MySpace in the making and acted decisively to stave that possibility off.

The addition of 100 million video-based ads and some smaller number of page views for serving textual ads would rejuvenate Google's ad growth in a very big way. With Yahoo's shares tumbling recently on the announcement by its CEO of falling ad revenue, Google could quickly stand out from its peers on that front and watch its stock soar as Wall Street rewards its discovery of a new advertising mine.

It should be interesting to see how Google integrates YouTube into its orbit. I suspect that the press release's statement that YouTube will remain as it is is the best move Google could make. Why tamper with what's working? Adopting a ham-handed branding could kill YouTube's popularity and there are certainly any number of players in this space that could bleed YouTube dry if its fortunes changed. In fact, the distinct corporate identity could allow Google to try different ad variations that it couldn't readily do under the AdWords or AdSense umbrellas. In due time, these questions will be answered of course.

Google can try to whitewash its decision to offer a censored version of Google to the Chinese, but it's not going to fly. It's just too naked of a capitulation. Comparing the results for a search on Tiananmen on Google and Google China puts the matter in stark relief (via Diana Hsieh).

The other search engines are yielding to the Chinese to get some of those billions of ad clicks that would result, but so what? If Google is truly about delivering information to the world, how does helping the Chinese government to retain power and pretend it's a legitimate, democratic regime further that mission? It's possible to take a principled stand for something and still make money. The other thing you get from such an action is respect.

In Google's case, everyone was waiting for them to misstep on the "don't be evil" pledge. Perhaps they thought they'd get it over with and future evil would be met with jaded cynicism rather than righteous indignation. Whatever the reason, I think Google's really exercised poor judgement. I'll still use them but I won't be so vociferous in my admiration any longer.

Web Authoring Statistics: I can't believe how incredibly interesting this is. Google analyzed the way over a billion Web pages were composed and distilled it into various statistics. I love it.

Google's response to the Justice Department's request for search data is exactly what a company that pledges to do no evil would do. I hope this convinces the naysayers that Google really means what it says. Yahoo, AOL, and MSN all folded like origami, agreeing to cooperate without so much as a peep.

This behavior is unsurprising from the Bush Administration, which has been on a tear lately to protect the American people from themselves—especially American children. And, of course, the response from the Democrats in Congress—those who cherish our privacy so—is to force search engines to permanently destroy the data on a regular basis. Sadly, Google's defense is that the subpoena is "overreaching"—not exactly a spirited or principled one.

[UPDATE (1/25/2006): Oh, forget it.]

Visit to the Googleplex: how does anyone get any work done in that environment?!?! {via}

Google Box: Cringely's new column on what Google's up to is out. I thought he was stretching for the datacenter-in-a-shipping-container column, but this one is ridiculous. I'm glad that it's not just Mac fans who ascribe big dreams to their mothership.

Okay, this is all over the blogs this morning but I have to talk about it because it's a subject near and dear to my heart. As some of you may know, I track my browser stats religiously. I've developed a shell script that pulls down my logs from my host, gzips them, and then prepares five reports from the data. When I had my laptop at my last job, I would pull down the logs several times a day. I only combed through them during breaks or when I got home, but I still needed to know about the traffic my site was enjoying.

My new host, Dreamhost, prepares three reports using Analog automatically every day. That's been close enough for me so I don't run my own reports on every domain I administer. DH's reports don't cover everything my own reports do, but they're close enough and close enough is good enough for a lazy person.

So the big news today is that Google has finally unveiled the fruits of their Urchin acquisition: Google Analytics. Since I'm fairly familiar with Urchin's reporting capabilities, I signed up as soon as I heard. Urchin has a Javascript-based tracking code snippet that will gather visitor information in real-time and generate reports. The best news of all is that it's free and easy, both of which make it a no-brainer for me.

All my base are belong to Google.

Google Base is coming soon, apparently. From the screenshot, it seems like some sort of Craigslist knock-off. It makes a lot of sense, but I mostly can't wait to see how they implement it. Will it be generalizable to non-items? To more general information storage and retrieval? Let's wait and see! {via}

[UPDATE: In a completely unprecedented move, Google has publicly commented on this—even if rather obliquely. I'm not sure what to make of that. From the Google Blogoscoped entry, it sounds a lot more robust than a comparison with Google Sitemaps would warrant.]

So Google's added an online RSS aggregator to their Google Labs. I was excited to say the least and quickly imported an OPML version of my Bloglines subscriptions (numbering 279 at present). I figured that I'd switch in a heartbeat if it was cool like Google Maps—you know, a whole new way of looking at feeds. After the import, it said that I had 211 feeds so there's the first blemish.

After trying to mimic my Bloglines style of reading feeds and failing miserably, I took the tour to see what the developers had intended the flow to be like. Uhh, nothing much there. Slugging through the interface, I was confronted by numerous slowdowns. As near as I can figure, this is geared towards someone with a limited number of subscriptions that likes to browse each item one by one.

The initial screen you're dropped into after importing or adding subscriptions reads like a long chronological list of feed items. By default, they're sorted by relevance, which has no meaning since I haven't given Google a context to determine what is relevant or not. Further, I carefully organize my feeds into folders (called labels by Google Reader) so that I can read a folder at a time, thereby making my huge feed collection digestible. The imported labels are nowhere to be found on the initial screen. I have to click on "Your subscriptions"—an odd formulation for "my" feed reader—and that adds a little table above the regular feed reading interface where I can see labels and the feeds they contain. If I click on a label, it appears to bring up the feeds it subsumes into the reader interface but it's hard to say.

So, for me, Google Reader is a no go for the following reasons:

1. I couldn't possibly deal with its slowness. It would be beyond maddening over time.
2. I want labels on the front page so that I can easily read the feeds they hide.
3. There needs to be a way to view all the items in a feed or folder of feeds at once and mark all of them read. My general feed reading style is to scroll through a dozen feeds worth of items in one long page, looking for things that strike me. Feeds aren't email: there's just too many items to scroll through one by one.
4. Google Reader is missing the helpful little details that Bloglines has: the Firefox extension for easy subscription, the subscriber count on every feed, Citations (oh, what a lovely feature), the item counts on the folders and the individual feeds, and countless other little UI niceties that make for a more satisfying experience. Granted, Google Reader is still in its infancy but I'm certainly not growing to stick around to raise it.

[UPDATE: Oh, one thing that it does have is excellent Javascript obfuscation. I have to hope that there is an automatic step that transforms nice, well-documented Javascript into this. If there isn't, then I hope the QA process is extensive since I could see typographical errors being really serious business with that.]

There's some buzz this morning around the fact that talk.google.com attempts to start an XMPP session—the indications of a Jabber server. We use Jabber at work and I immediately thought that the public Jabber server was probably for internal use.

This Slashdot comment got me to thinking, though. XMPP is XML-based and the whole XmlHttpRequest phenomena that Google has launched is often XML-based (the "X" in AJAX, to wit). What if they made a web-based IM client that didn't require page refreshes? It could easily be a part of the Gmail interface and, with some DHTML trickery, it could rest on top of Gmail—and easily moved aside at will. Or it could integrate Gmail users so you could see when your contacts are online and not have to send an email.

Imagine targeted ads tied to real-time conversations. I'm sure Google is imagining it. "Have you found a hotel for your trip to New York, Martha?" "Not yet." *ad appears for travelocity* "Wait. Okay, I just booked it." Incredible.

[UPDATE: Kottke's got some wild speculation up about Google's direction. It's entirely possible that he's spot on, but one little thing kept pestering me as I was reading it: so GoogleOS makes the underlying OS irrelevant, but few people run just a stock OS. They have applications that they use, many of which would never be practical over the Web. The ones that are have pretty good desktop equivalents.

So what's the compelling reason to use a GoogleOS version of iTunes instead of the Windows or Apple version? If you can only listen to it on your machine when it's online (or offline, when you're disconnected from the Internet), then what does that get you beyond the regular iTunes? Kottke didn't say that you could listen to *your* music over the Web-ified iTunes and there's a reason he didn't: the RIAA wouldn't stand for it.

There's another problem with Kottke's vision: bandwidth. His backup app would require a considerable amount of storage as well as a huge amount of bandwidth (though I reckon that with a largely-denuded computer, there might not be much to backup). Can you imagine wanting to put an image of your computer for easy restoration on the Web? You've got a huge task going up and a huge task coming down.

Being generous, it's interesting speculation but I think that Kottke should leave the wild-eyed conjecture for the master: Robert X. Cringely.]

[UPDATE 2: After further consideration, I think that Google isn't as cunning as Kottke and others suppose. It's possible that they're not entertaining any grand schemes or ambitions beyond monetizing advertising in every form they can. It's possible that they developed Google Desktop not as some sort of insidious beachhead into the user's computer so that they can build an operating system piecemeal but more as an additional value to the Google search engine. It's instructive that Google Desktop shows up on the Google home page and vice versa.

As a software engineer (though not of the caliber to work at Google), I can say that much of what they've done over the years seems very engineer-driven. There have been many applications that don't really have a revenue purpose but are really cool and have probably generated a lot of revenue through goodwill. The GoogleOS that Kottke describes sounds very much like something a marketer or MBA would dream up. As I said before, Kottke may be completely right—but I think he's likely spectacularly wrong.]

[UPDATE 3: Wow, Google Talk is a live Jabber server that can be accessed using your Gmail credentials. {via}]

[UPDATE 4: Google Talk is live! Wow. It's a lot more than a simple Jabber client. I love that the sample screenshot they include refers to the circulating rumors. Sadly, none of my above speculation was correct. But neither was Kottke's. {via}]

[UPDATE (8/26/2005): Wow, Cringely's downright reasonable on this subject.]

Google Earth is now available and it's free. Only for Windows right now, though the download page says that they're working on Macintosh support.

[UPDATE: Ooo, there's even virtual sightseeing. {via}]

[UPDATE (6/29/05): Ooo, Google Maps now has an official API.]

[UPDATE (6/30/05): Google search for Google Maps API. It only shows up in the Sponsored Links, which I didn't even see for awhile.]

Google's Summer of Code: now that is an interesting way to fund open-source projects.

My Google?!

Google X: a version of the home page for the Mac OS X owners. Note to Windows users: it's the Dock-like rollover tab replacement.

[UPDATE: Here's the background story.]

[UPDATE (6/22/2008): They've long since taken the official version down, but here's a mirror.]

Google's got a new toolbar version out and it's got a lot of nice features. Of course, I'm a Mac guy at home so I can't use any of them and a Firefox user at work so I can't use it there either. It's still nice because it gives some of my friends and co-workers the chance to do stuff that I can do in Firefox with some small effort (keywords and such) which aren't really possible with Internet Explorer.

Of course, the Google haters are out in force. They blithely drop any context in an effort to smear Google. For example, Microsoft's SmartTag was to be an OS-wide feature that was present unless a user turned it off or the site developer included a special tag in his page to disable it. Google's AutoLink isn't automatically on by default and can be turned off by clicking on the AutoLink button. A user has to actually download the toolbar and then they have to click on the AutoLink button to create the links to Google properties.

That makes a lot of difference in my mind since it's akin to downloading a Firefox extension that manipulates site content. The user has to make quite a few decisions before it does its thing. Microsoft's feature required quite a few decisions to make it stop.

[UPDATE (2/27/05): Winer's kept up a pretty steady pace of complaining this week. Thankfully, someone's posted an excellent entry defending Google and a similarly excellent reply to his response.]

[UPDATE (2/28/05): Someone went ahead and crafted a Javascript bookmarklet to transform content on Scripting.com in an absolutely hilarious manner. Bing!]

[UPDATE (3/4/05): Finally, some well-reasoned and moderate comment on the controversy over at Kuro5hin.]