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Yahoo and Microsoft making the rounds with old lovers?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:28:00 +0000

Yahoo and Microsoft making the rounds with old lovers?

A bit of deja vu is creeping into recent media reports of Microsoft whispering into the right ear of News Corp. and Time Warner's AOL about potential partnerships, while Yahoo is whispering in their left.

According to a Reuters report, Yahoo and Time Warner have been chatting for months about a potential deal involving Time Warner's AOL and Yahoo. The report, however, notes that the parties don't appear any closer to inking a deal than they were when Microsoft had a buyout bid on the table for the Internet search pioneer.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo's talks with Time Warner have regained some traction, now that Microsoft's withdrawn offer of $33 a share for the Internet search pioneer appears to remain comatose. But as with Reuters, the Journal also notes that the discussions don't appear to be serious. For one thing, the Journal notes such a combination had put an approximate $10 billion valuation on AOL, but that was before Yahoo's stock had plummeted back to trading levels near the pre-Microsoft offer watermark.

In the end, Yahoo is looking for ways to bring its value back to the $33 a share that Microsoft had offered before merger talks broke off in early May, and Microsoft is looking for ways to bring scale to its online advertising search business, which may one day ultimately pay for any free business applications the Redmond giant gives out to compete with those currently offered by Google, like its Google Docs and Google Calendar.

So, Yahoo and Microsoft can continue to hit the replay button with Time Warner and News Corp., or switch to a new channel. I hear a new season with potentially a new cast of characters is gearing up for an August 1 debut.

Founder makes largest Dell insider purchase

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:04:00 +0000

Founder makes largest Dell insider purchase

Dell shares rose as high as 4.5 percent Wednesday, following reports that founder Michael Dell acquired nearly $100 million in shares in the computer maker.

Dell climbed as high as $23.18 a share in intraday trading, before closing out the session at $22.70 a share, up 2.34 percent.

Dell's founder, according to a report in MarketWatch, purchased 4.5 million shares between June 27 and July 1 at an average price of $22.14 a share.

Dell's buying spree comes after the company reported respectable first-quarter results, which came off a challenging 2007 when it was feeling the effects of missing out on some big industry trends.

During the first quarter, Dell told analysts, the company's unit shipments grew 22 percent, while the industry rose by 14 percent. And Dell's notebook revenue climbed 22 percent over the past year.

Michael Dell's stock purchase not only marked the largest he's ever made of the computer maker's shares, but also puts him at the top of conducting the largest purchase ever at the company by an insider, according to MarketWatch's report.

Google wins source code ruling against Viacom

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:37:00 +0000

Google wins source code ruling against Viacom

Google won a legal ruling that allows it to keep secret from Viacom the source code central to search functions on YouTube.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the search giant doesn't have to turn over the code to Viacom, which filed a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google in 2007. In granting Google's motion for a protective order, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton in Manhattan agreed with Google's characterization of the source code as a trade secret that can't be disclosed without risking the loss of business.

"YouTube and Google should not be made to place this vital asset in hazard merely to allay speculation," the judge said. "A plausible showing that YouTube and Google's denials are false, and that the search function can and has been used to discriminate in favor of infringing content, should be required before disclosure of so valuable and vulnerable an asset is compelled."

The judge also denied Viacom's motion for Google to produce source code for its Video Identification Tool, which helps copyright notify Google of copyright infringement.

At stake in the legal battle is a key part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the 1998 law that shields Web site owners from copyright infringement involving material published by users. The "safe harbor" provision in the law can protect against infringement claims as long as copyrighted material is removed upon notification.

After the suit, YouTube launched an antipiracy tool that checks uploaded videos against the original content in an effort to flag piracy.

The Great Return of Ajax

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:41:00 +0000

Some relatively new Google applications have prompted renewed interest in a programming technique that is years old.

Google Suggest and Google Maps gave Web users the sense they were using a desktop application instead of an Internet-based tool.

Google Suggest fills in words for suggested search terms, and typing an address into Google Maps returns a detailed map of the immediate area with the ability to pan out to state or national boundaries.

The apps were created using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), which calls from the server only the information you need for the Web browser. Rather than querying the Web server directly every time a request is made from the browser, AJAX sticks a JavaScript (define) element between the two. This allows the browser to maintain its state while the script runs the data request to the Web server and back.

Bret Taylor, product manager of Google Maps, said the buzz created around the company's applications happened because of how they differ from most of today's Web pages.

"It's definitely a new awareness of older technologies, but I also think it's fairly typical that technologies mature to the point where they become widely accepted."

The Promise of AJAX

Given the excitement AJAX has caused so far, you'd think it was the latest whiz-bang technology to emerge from a research laboratory. That's not the case.

Before Google and Amazon, with its A9 search engine, used the technology, Microsoft was already onboard with Outlook Web Access.

The programming style incorporates a number of open Web standards, including XHTML (define), XML (define), CSS (define), XMLHttpRequest, XSLT (define) and DOM (define).

The promise AJAX programming brings to Web development, with its speedy and powerful processing times, has led some to speculate whether the medium could replace the need for desktop applications altogether. If a Web application can do what a desktop application does on the PC, why bother with software installs?

That's a huge leap in logic to make, said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with research firm ZapThink. He points to the claims made by Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s with its "network as a computer" concept of putting software on the server.

"Just because you can run application functionality remotely doesn't mean it's appropriate for everything, like when you're offline," he said. "Basically, anything that requires productivity over distribution, there's no reason to have a remote word processor because what's the benefit of having it over the Web versus having it on your desktop?"

What's Holding AJAX Back?

Two things have kept AJAX in the backseat of Web application development. First, Microsoft's adoption of Web standards in Internet Explorer (IE) has been tepid. And second, it's hard to pull off.

Microsoft used XMLHTTP (define) to get information from the server to the browser, without having to refresh. But there has been little major incorporation of Web standards into IE for Web application developers to manipulate. So developers have little choice but to limit their applications, or else much of the Web-surfing public would be unable to view the page.

Developers have Firefox and other alternative browsers, with their native XML support, to thank for the recent change by Microsoft to incorporate more Web standards, Schmelzer said.

Microsoft has had robust XML since IE 6, he said, but the company was pushing ActiveX (define) over using XML and JavaScript as the method of choice. Firefox's growing popularity, however, has shifted opinion that XML is the way to go for data, rather than the Windows-centric ActiveX.

"There's no such thing as ActiveX on the Mac platform or Linux platform, so when you're building a Web site and say, 'I'm using ActiveX,' you are going to by necessity cut out some of your audience," he said.

Another reason for the relative dearth of AJAX-powered applications is its complexity, though software developers are beginning to step forward with solutions.

AJAX requires developers to have a firm grasp on not only the Web standards being used but also the server-side knowledge to extract information from a database or other repository.

"Doing AJAX is rocket science, it's so hard," said Brian Goldfarb, product manager of Microsoft's Web platform and tools group. "You look at the stuff Google did with Google Maps and Amazon with A9; they're some of the brightest minds in the industry building lots and lots of code to enable those types of sites."

That makes it a difficult proposition for the mass of developers in the industry today, he said. Microsoft, of course, has an answer to that complexity in the form of an upcoming client-side framework code-named Atlas.

Atlas eases the code complexity with drag-and-drop boxes and other objects to take the manual labor out of code development. Goldfarb said that with Atlas, what took Google hundreds of lines of code to do with Google Suggest will take 10 or 15 lines in Atlas.

A developer's preview version of Atlas will be available in September at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Goldfarb said. The final version is expected about the same time as Windows Vista.

Microsoft sees a potential in AJAX-style programming and asynchronous data retrieval. The company will look at ways to tie this technology into the Microsoft product line, so that customers will be able to take an eBay auction and drag it into their Outlook calendars.

AJAX Platforms

ZapThink's Schmelzer sees Web development coalescing around two interactive development platforms: AJAX and Macromedia's Flash.

"The person who builds a Flash application is not exactly the same kind of person who would build an AJAX application, but at some point I think those are going to be the two dominant, rich Internet solutions out there," he said.

Macromedia officials, for their part, are happy to hear about the excitement building in the developer world over rich interactive Internet applications.

Jeff Whatcott, the company's vice president of product management, said that fundamentally the two technologies work well together. Flash, like AJAX, uses XML for the server-side information asynchronously and ActionScript, which is a cousin to JavaScript, to grab the information.

While the buzz generated by AJAX is a good thing, he said, developers looking to create rich interactive Web sites are going to find that the programming technique falls short.

AJAX improvements, Whatcott said, are dependent on the Web standards implemented in browsers; Flash development, on the other hand, relies on the 480KB-sized Flash plug-in found on 98 percent of the world's PCs.

He noted it took four years for IE 6, the version with the added XML support, to reach 80 percent of Windows desktops. It takes 12 months for a new Flash plug-in version to reach that same penetration rate.

"The distribution dynamics of Flash versus browsers -- this lowest common denominator problem you have when you rely on features that are shared across browsers -- is a fundamental issue that is going to leave a lot of people dissatisfied with how far they can go with the AJAX technique."

That doesn't mean that he thinks AJAX will go away any time soon; in fact he thinks it will be around forever, which is good because it raises awareness about what both camps are trying to achieve.

My Favorite Firefox 3.0 Upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:30:00 +0000

My Favorite Firefox 3.0 Upgrade

Around last week I made the switch to Firefox 3.0 RC 2. I wanted to get my feet wet in the browser before it came out and once Foxmarks was released there was no more reasons for delay.

I have to admit the browser is stunning. The list of improvements seems endless, but there is one that I think shine above the rest.

This was in my opinion the new address bar. The new address bar is possibly the most noticeable yet functioning addition to Firefox 3. For me it is because I have over 1500 bookmarks and sorting through them was a pain. Finding them in my jungle of folders and sub folders was about impossible and I am not fond of using social bookmarks as my default. The new address bar makes it really easy to find your bookmarks and traffic history by only inserting part of the URL or a description. So if I want to find Blogiseverything, I could just type in, “everything,” and sure enough the site would be on the list. Also they have integrated the tagging system in to the bookmark manager. You can tag your favorite site for quick reference. One more bonus to the address bar was the little star on the right hand corner. It gives you the functionality to bookmark a page with only one click. For there you can find it in the new folder titled, “Unsorted Bookmarks.” As you can see the address bar is a big upgrade.

Google, the New Microsoft?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:26:00 +0000

Google, the New Microsoft?

"Google is the new Microsoft. (...) I look at Google as a far more threatening company than Microsoft is today," said Joe Kraus in an interview with Robert Scoble, reiterating what he said for New York Times last year:

To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990's, he said, I.B.M. was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a "gentle giant" that was easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an "extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything."

Now, in the view of Mr. Kraus, "Microsoft is becoming I.B.M. and Google is becoming Microsoft." Mr. Kraus is the chief executive and a founder of JotSpot, a Silicon Valley start-up hoping to sell blogging and other self-publishing tools to corporations.

It's interesting to note that Joe Kraus is the co-founder of Excite, a search engine that lost the battle with Google many years ago. Now Joe Kraus joins Google to help it polish the web office suite.

10 Tips For Google Image Search

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:24:00 +0000

10 Tips For Google Image Search

Google Image Search could be used in many ways.

1. If you want to know if a person is a man or a woman and the name doesn't help, do a search for the name.

2. If you don't know the meaning of a word, the pictures may help you.

3. A better search for Flickr. Google uses information from other sites that link to Flickr photos, so you may find Google search better.

4. Find what's interesting about a site, by looking at the pictures included. For example: wired.com.

5. Find a new wallpaper for your desktop by restricting your search to large images. You can automate this using an application.

6. Find random personal pictures, using standard file names from digital cameras.

7. Type the name of a painter and you can take an art class.

8. Install a Greasemonkey script so you can view the original version of the image directly by clicking on the thumbnail.

9. Find the color of a word. "Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the average hue, which is later converted to a color."

10. If you want to grab search results, GoogleGrab is a tool that downloads images from Google Image Search. It even supports batch search.

Google Invests in a Better Web

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:18:00 +0000

Google Invests in a Better Web

Google I/O's keynote, titled "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud", discussed the latest Google developer-orientated initiatives and their significance. Vic Gundotra, vice-president at Google, explained that Google wants to make it easier to develop web applications by transforming browsers into powerful clients and by making "the cloud" more accessible.

Gears is an open source plug-in that adds offline storage, a local database, asynchronous threads, and other features which could be used to create web applications that are closer to their native counterparts.

In the fragmented mobile space, Google bets on Android, an open mobile platform that includes a powerful browser and APIs that enable developers to create applications which take advantage of the connectivity.

Google App Engine lets you build web applications without having to worry about infrastructure, setting up servers and databases. Anyone can create a web application for free and pay for more resources, once the applications becomes popular.

Google APIs could be used to enhance web applications by integrating them with Google's services: you can get data from Google's apps or from the content indexed by Google.

Web Toolkit lets you use Java to create the front end for AJAX applications and translates your code into optimized JavaScript.

OpenSocial is an effort to make the web more social by providing a standard for creating social web applications.

Most of Google's solutions are open source software (Gears, Web Toolkit, Android) and steps toward creating standards (Gears, OpenSocial) that should move the web forward. Google says that its only incentive for building these tools is that enabling the development of more web applications brings more Internet users and, indirectly, more Google revenue. Some of that revenue is invested in other initiatives that fuel Internet's growth and the cycle continues.
Here's the full 90-minute keynote. Don't miss the cool Android demo at min. 26.

Richer Local Search Results in Google Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:08:00 +0000

Richer Local Search Results in Google Maps

Google Maps shows enhanced local search results. Compared to the previous format, Google Maps lets you find more information about the local businesses without having to click on each result. You can see a thumbnail, an excerpt from the most recent review and a link that encourages to post your own review. This format was already used in the text view, but probably few people noticed it.

Excerpts from reviews are included in local search OneBoxes as well, but Google chooses different reviews. Judging from these changes, I think businesses will start to upload images to the Local Business Center and will encourage their customers to post reviews to Google Maps or other sites.

Public Transit Directions in Mobile Google Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:10:00 +0000

Public Transit Directions in Mobile Google Maps

The latest version of Google Maps for Mobile includes an option that was already available in Google Maps: directions for public transportation. Google's coverage has been continuously expanded in the past months to many US states, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, important cities from Canada, Italy, France, UK and Australia. Google Maps is one of the applications that is very useful when you are on the go and this new feature is a good alternative to the existing driving directions.

"This version of Google Maps for mobile even has a few tricks not yet available on the desktop version of Google Maps. For instance, you can find the last transit trips of the day (to figure out how late you can stay at the party) and more easily browse through earlier or later trips," suggests Google Mobile blog.

You can download the latest version of the mobile Google Maps for Blackberry and Java-enabled phones by visiting www.google.com/gmm on your mobile phone or by following the instructions from Google's site.

Google Trends with Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:05:00 +0000

Google Trends with Numbers

Google Trends, the service that compares the volume of searches, has been updated to show numbers on the vertical axis. "These numbers don't refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might scale to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you've entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period," explains Google Blog.

Now that you can compare more accurately the popularity of up to five search terms, there's also an option to download the data as a CSV file: http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=QUERY&graph=all_csv. The file actually contains values separated by tabs, so change the extension to tsv before uploading it to Google Spreadsheets.

Google doesn't show absolute numbers for competitive reasons, but also because those numbers wouldn't be exact. "Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time."

The new features are available only if you sign in, probably to protect against automatic data download. If you try to download a CSV file without being logged in, you'll get a file that contains this message: "You must be signed in to export data from Google Trend". An API would've been a better idea.

Google-Yahoo Search Ads Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:03:00 +0000

Google-Yahoo Search Ads Deal

In June 2000, Google became the default search engine provider for Yahoo. The agreement lasted until 2004, when Yahoo launched its own search engine. Yahoo realized that you can actually make money from search, so it acquired Overture, a company specialized in pay-per-click advertising that also owned two search engines: AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Unfortunately for Yahoo, it moved too slowly and Google became the leader in both search and PPC advertising.

Yahoo's decision to temporarily outsource some of its search ads to Google was predictable, especially after the two-week test from April. Instead of being acquired by Microsoft, Yahoo chose to partner with a company that has a better search ads system.

"Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will select the search term queries for which - and the pages on which - Yahoo! may offer Google paid search results. (...) Yahoo! believes that this agreement will enable the Company to better monetize Yahoo!'s search inventory in the United States and Canada. At current monetization rates, this is an approximately $800 million annual revenue opportunity. In the first 12 months following implementation, Yahoo! expects the agreement to generate an estimated $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow. The agreement will enhance Yahoo!'s ability to achieve its goal to grow operating cash flow significantly, while at the same time providing flexibility to continue to invest in ongoing initiatives such as algorithmic search innovation and search and display advertising platforms. It gives Yahoo! complete flexibility to continue to use its Panama paid search results."

Yahoo gets a lot of value from this deal and is no longer pressured by investors to significantly improve the search ads. Even if the agreement has a term of up to ten years, I think this is a short-term deal and Yahoo is more motivated than ever to succeed on its own.

Google Blog is quick to announce that this isn't an anti-competitive move. "Yahoo! will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating. Even during this agreement, Yahoo! can use our technology as much or as little as it chooses." Since the agreement is non-exclusive and Yahoo won't drop the search ads services, it's unlikely that the U.S. Department of Justice will block the deal.

In other related news, Google Talk users have a reason to rejoice. "Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users." Hopefully, this will actually happen, since the previous agreements with AOL and eBay didn't produce any visible effect and there's still no interoperability with AIM and Skype.

Related:
Search, ads, Yahoo and Microsoft
Could Google save Yahoo from Microsoft?
Yahoo tests Google's search ads

Update: Google Watch has some interesting quotes from the conference call. "We began by saying 'Is there a partnership that would make sense? Is there one that is strategic to both companies and in particular a partnership that would allow Yahoo to remain independent," said Eric Schmidt. "Then Schmidt turned cloak-and-dagger like, noting that the executives met in an empty building that Google owned in an unknown and unfindable location for most of us. Apparently, Yang, Schmidt, Yahoo's Sue Decker and others showed up, sometimes on bicycles."

New Google Mobile Homepage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:57:00 +0000

New Google Mobile Homepage

Google decided to remove the gadgets from the mobile homepage and place them in a separate iGoogle page. You still can't see all the gadgets from the desktop version of iGoogle, but your favorite feeds, the weather information and the Gmail summary no longer slow down the homepage.

Google Mobile Blog gives another reason why the mobile homepage will load faster: "when you navigate to google.com in your browser, we cache the homepage on your phone. If you bookmark this homepage, then returning to Google using the bookmark is almost instantaneous."

Since the homepage is now static and doesn't display personalized content, it can be cached indefinitely. Google chose to politely ask your browser to cache it for 1,209,600 seconds = 14 days.

But Google still wants to see how many people visit the mobile homepage and this is impossible if all the content is cached. That's why, the last element from the homepage is a tracking pixel, a 1x1 GIF image: http://www.google.com/m/ping?source=magmahome.

Better Terrain Representation in Google Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:35:00 +0000

Better Terrain Representation in Google Maps

Mehmet K. noticed an update of the terrain layer from Google Maps, a feature that lets you view physical features, such as mountains and vegetation, with elevation shading.

The fairly recent "terrain" feature in Google Maps now plots contours as well as hill shading. The only problem that I can see is that the contours are in feet in the UK whereas feet are only really used in the States. Even in the UK where we still use miles for our roads, looking at familiar hill heights in feet is very off putting. When I looked at other countries (Kenya) the heights there were in meters.

"Contour lines are lines drawn on a map connecting points of equal elevation. If you walk along a contour line you neither gain or lose elevation." The other method used for representing terrain, "hill shading is a computer based mapping technique that shades each area of the surface to proportional to the amount of light that would be reflected off the surface from a light source at a specified location, usually to the northwest of the area of interest. Hill shading produces a planimetrically correct map that looks like a three-dimensional view of the surface."

Back in April, Google's geo blog mentioned some practical uses for these features. "Now, at a glance you can see the height of the world's peaks, or plan your next camping trip. Contour lines can even help you find a flatter bike route for your daily commute, which is key if you live in a city like Seattle."

Froogle Integrates with Google Book Search

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:22:00 +0000

Froogle Integrates with Google Book Search

After updating the listings for electronics, Google Product Search (previously known as Froogle) integrated the data from Google's book search engine. In addition to the list of stores where you can find a certain book, Google shows a summary of the book, the table of contents, references from the web and related books. There's also a link to Google Book Search, where you can preview and search inside the book.

In other book-related news, Panlibus points to Zoomii, a great visualization for Amazon's bookstore where books are placed in virtual shelves. If the products are more tangible, people are more likely to buy them, so Google should show more visual information: images, videos, trend charts, feature comparison etc.

How to Display Google Talk Presence

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:00:00 +0000

If you wanted to post your Google Talk ID on a site and display an icon that shows your status, it's quite easy. Google offers a chatback feature for anonymous conversations with the visitors of a site and this feature has been recently updated with more ways to display the badge.

To get your presence icon, go to the badge generation page, select "Hyperlink and status icon (no frame)" from the list of styles, click on "Update badge" and copy the code in a text editor. You should identify a URL that looks like this (the bold part could be removed to simplify the address):

http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/Show?
tk=LIST_OF_CHARACTERS&w=9&h=9

This image could be displayed next to your Google Talk username to show whether you are available for chat. Obviously, if you like the chatback feature, you could add the entire code generated by Google.

How can we Increase Font Size in Google Reader

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:57:00 +0000

Google Reader added an option to increase/decrease font size for all the posts: press = to magnify text and - to decrease its size. Unfortunately, Google Reader doesn't save your preference, so the next time you open it you'll see the original font size.

While most browsers include a zoom feature (Opera, IE7, Firefox 3) or an option to increase the font size, Google Reader applies the new font size only to the posts, not to the entire page.

There's also a new keyboard shortcut for sharing posts and adding notes: Shift+D. To see a list of all the shortcuts, press ? in Google Reader.

Oh, and one more thing: you can now delete notes, not just unshare them.

Explore Places in Google Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:54:00 +0000

Google Maps started to integrate some of the most popular mapplets and user-generated maps. When you search for a location (like Rome), you'll be able to see Panoramio photos, YouTube videos, places of interest, popular searches and maps so you can get a better sense of what to expect if you go there. As you zoom the map, the sidebar is updated to reflect your new location.

The feature is reminiscent of Flickr Places, but the map plays the role of placeholder for geotagged content.

Google Translate Becomes the Best Free Online Translator

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:50:00 +0000

Google Translate's coverage has been expanded dramatically. It now supports the translation between any of the following languages: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish (the new languages are shown in bold). From 26 language pairs, Google Translate now supports 506 language pairs and becomes the most comprehensive online translation tool available for free.

Obviously, the translation is far from being perfect or even coherent, but it's a great way to understand the central ideas from a text. Now that Google Translate supports so many languages, it's not hard to imagine that you'll be able to read almost any web page in your language and maybe any application will be able to use Google Translate's APIs to speak your language.

"Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of work to define vocabularies and grammars. Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. (...) Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer a quick and seamless translation experience," explains Google Translate's FAQ.

{ via Page2RSS }

Picasa's Hello Discontinued

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:47:00 +0000

Hello, Picasa's obscure instant messenger, has been discontinued and will be completely shut down on May 15th. Hello's last major update was released in January 2005, six months after Picasa was acquired by Google.

According to its site, "Hello is a program that lets you connect directly with your friends to share your digital pictures. (...) With Hello, you just pick what pictures you want to show off, and click Send. That's it. Hello takes care of all the hard work. And you and your friends can download full resolution, print-quality pictures from each other, while you're doing more important things, like talking about your pictures. (...) With Hello's file sharing technology, [your friends] only have to download high quality versions of the [pictures] they really like. Everything else comes in at a smaller size, optimized for viewing on-screen."

"Hello enables users to instantly share images securely over a peer-to-peer network and chat about them. Hello currently has more than 250,000 users and can be used with or without Picasa, the company's flagship digital photo organizing software," mentioned Picasa in a press release from May 2004. It would be interesting to know the number of active users as of today, but it's probably much lower than 250,000.

The instant messenger was integrated with Picasa, so you could select the photos from Picasa and send them to Hello, but also view in Picasa the pictures you receive. Like Picasa, Hello was easy to use and shared the same clean interface. Despite its usefulness, Hello should have been a feature in a more powerful IM client, not a stand-alone application.

If you haven't tried Hello, you can still download the application from http://updates.picasa.com/hello/651/Hello651.exe. You and all your contacts need to have Picasa accounts. According to hello.com, you can still use the application one more week.

Here's Hello's goodbye:

"We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello. We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come. We hope that you continue to enjoy the other sharing products Google offers including Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk."

and here are some reactions:

"I live on Hello because it allows me as a designer to show my clients the screen I am working on real time. It also allows me to communicate with other designers who work for my business and mentor them through the design process, or get myself some mentoring!"

"i credit hello for leading to some very good friendships of mine all over the US, and i credit hello for my transition from crafter to artist. i do not want to lose this program."

"PLEASE reconsider the decision to shut down Hello. It is an invaluable tool for the digital scrapbook community, especially the designers. I can't imagine what I would do without the ease Hello provides to show off screen shots and get critique on my Designs."

"I use Hello daily in conversation and to share photos with family members out of state. It has also been very useful in learning and teaching applications by using real time screen shots. There just isn't anything else that compares that is so easy to use!"

"My mother who has no idea what IM even stands for, uses Hello everyday. We send her pictures of her grandkids, she shows us pictures she's taken, its awesome! She only uses it because it is simple and user friendly. IM programs like Google Talk, Yahoo, MSN or Goober are way too complex for her to figure out and I doubt she is the only one in this situation."

{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Using Google's N-Gram Corpus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:44:00 +0000

Two years ago, Google released a collection of n-grams from web pages and made it available on Linguistic Data Consortium's website. "We processed 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,176,470,663 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,588,391 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times." Here are some examples of 3-grams, followed by their frequencies:

ceramics collectables collectibles 55
ceramics collectables fine 130
ceramics collected by 52

While this huge corpora is useful to build linguistic models, there are other ways to use it. Chris Harrison created some visualizations for bigrams and trigrams that start with pronouns. "These visual comparisons allow us to see differences in how the two subjects are used - both where they are similar and diverge. For example, among the top 120 trigrams, 'He' and 'She' have many common second words. However, they differ on some interesting ones, for example, only 'he' connects to 'argues', while only 'she' connects to 'love'."

Chris DiBona from Google works on IsolWrite, a word processing program that will include a text prediction option. "I gotta get my greasy hands on an open version of our published n-gram data (which is ranked) and incorporate that, if it makes sense."

Do you know Reorder iGoogle Tabs

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:41:00 +0000

iGoogle finally offers a way to reorder tabs: just go to google.com/ig/settings and use the arrows displayed next to each tab name in the Content section. This solution is not very elegant, compared to other services like Netvibes, where you can reorder the tabs using drag and drop.

If you're wondering how to access the settings page from iGoogle, click on the small arrow displayed next to the name of the current tab and select "Edit this tab". The settings page is also the place where you can select your location, choose to automatically open links in a new tab, change the name and the layout of a tab or backup the iGoogle page. Oh, and don't forget to click on the barely noticeable Save button every time you change the settings of a tab.

It's amazing to see how simple and intuitive Netvibes' interface can be: the tabs can be reordered using drag and drop, tab names can be changed using a simple click and switching between different tabs doesn't reload the page. iGoogle still has a lot to learn from Netvibes in terms of user friendliness.

What is Yahoo Search's Differential Features

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:37:00 +0000

Yahoo's strategy to increase the search market share is to add features that can't be found at Google or somewhere else. The problem is that these features need to be distinctive and useful enough to attract the attention and make people switch to Yahoo or at least use it a secondary search engine.

The first innovative feature added by Yahoo was Search Assistant, an integrated pane that combined autocomplete and related searches. Search Assistant was heavily inspired by Ask.com's left sidebar, but it included a distinctive feature that made it less obtrusive: the pane is only displayed if you stop typing for a couple of seconds or when your typing slows.

Google also tests a query suggestion feature and places a list of related searches at the top of the page, but Yahoo's implementation is more interesting.

This week, Yahoo started to add SiteAdvisor's warnings next to search results. "Safety ratings from McAfee SiteAdvisor are based on automated safety tests of Web sites and are enhanced by feedback from volunteer reviewers". Yahoo only shows warnings next to sites that use browser exploits, offer malicious software or send spam. Google also shows warnings next to web pages that may install malicious software, but McAfee SiteAdvisor seems to offer a more comprehensive protection and more information about the potential threats (you can also install a plug-in for IE or Firefox that works with the most popular search engines or manually find the testing results for a site).

Probably the most impressive new feature in Yahoo Search and the only one that's not yet live is SearchMonkey (an unfortunate play on GreaseMonkey), a way for site owners to enrich the snippets with structured information. "Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page."

Yahoo uses semantic web standards to retrieve structured information from web sites, but users are the ones who decide if they want richer search results from a site. Yahoo will support a small number of microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, XFN), "some of the vocabulary of Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, and MediaRSS, as well as RDFa, eRDF, and the OpenSearch specification".

Google chose a different approach - plus boxes that show additional information automatically detected: addresses, stock symbols, products etc. Google also lets you add subscribed links to search results pages, but very few sites took advantage of this feature.

If Yahoo manages to promote these features and site owners build interesting applications for SearchMonkey, people might discover that Yahoo has a pretty good search engine and search is not synonymous with Google. Exploring different ways to present search results will lead to a better user experience and to an improvement for all search engines, since the best features are usually copied by all of them. Yahoo Search hopes to become a serious alternative to Google by having a distinctive voice, but the history of Ask.com or Opera shows that being innovative is not the only necessary ingredient for becoming popular.

What are the Tips for Linking to Google Presentations

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:34:00 +0000

If you publish a presentation at Google Docs, you'll receive a simple URL that can be used to view the presentation online. Unfortunately, if you go to that URL without being logged in to a Google Account, Google will ask you to log in:

The explanation is that Google Presentations offers some advanced features that require authentication: chatting with other people that view the presentation and joining a presentation that's already in progress. To view the presentation without logging in, click on the small link from the bottom of the page: "View published presentation in a new window".

If you want to link directly to the presentation and skip the authentication page, just add "&skipauth=true" to the URL provided by Google and replace "Presentation" with "Present". Here's an example.

URL provided by Google:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?docid=ID

Modified URL:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ID&skipauth=true
(replace ID with the presentation's ID)

Most people will also want to download the presentation, but Google doesn't offer this feature in the view-only interface. You can link to the PPT file by using this format:

http://docs.google.com/MiscCommands?command=saveasdoc&exportFormat=ppt&docid=ID

Customize Google Docs Forms

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:47:00 +0000

Customize Google Docs Forms

Adding forms as a way to include information in a Google Spreadsheet was one of the best decisions made by Google lately as it increased the adoption of the product. Unfortunately, Google doesn't offer options to customize the forms or validate the input. But just because Google hosts the forms for you doesn't mean you can't copy the code on your web pages and edit it.

After copying the code, you can edit the CSS rules to customize the form, remove the references to external files or the links to Google's terms of use. This article has a list of pretty forms customized only using CSS. If some of the fields need to have a certain format (for example: dates, email addresses etc.), you may include some JavaScript code that validates the input before submitting the form or after a certain field loses the focus. This JavaScript library includes the code for some common validations, so you can use it without too much programming effort. LiveValidation requires to write some code, but it validates the input as you type.

Here's a simple styled form that validates the first field using an annoying alert (you can submit the form only if JavaScript is enabled):

And here's the code:

<style type="text/css" media="screen">.ss-form-container{width: 380px;background-color: #FFF;border: 1px solid #CCC;padding: 0.5em 1em;font-size: 0.9em;}.ss-q-title{font-weight: bold;padding-left:7px;display: block;}.ss-q-submit{color: #000;}.ss-form-entry{margin-bottom: 1.5em;} .ss-q-short, .ss-q-submit{background:#f7f7f7;border:solid gray 1px;margin:8px;padding:0px 3px; color:#666666; }</style><script type="text/javascript">function custommsg() {document.getElementById("form-message").style.display=""; document.getElementById("form-message").innerHTML="Thanks for your answers!"; document.getElementById("form-container").style.display="none";} function validate(f){var year =parseInt(f.elements[0].value);if (isNaN(year)|| year<1996> (new Date()).getFullYear()){alert("Invalid year");return false; } return true;}</script> <div class="ss-form-container" style="display:none;" id="form-message"> </div> <div class="ss-form-container" id="form-container"><form action="" method="POST" target="fake-target" onsubmit="this.action='http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?key=pLaE9tsVLp_1lGkqPo-vdfw'; if (validate(this)) {custommsg(); return true;} else return false;"><div class="ss-form-entry"><span class="ss-q-title">In what year did you first use Google?</span><input type="text" class="ss-q-short" name="single:0"></div><div class="ss-form-entry"><span class="ss-q-title">What search engines did you use before Google?</span><input type="text" class="ss-q-short" name="single:1"></div><p></p><input type="submit" class="ss-q-submit" value="Submit"></form></div><br />

Validation only works when JavaScript is enabled in your browser. Note that if you edit the form using Google Docs, you need to change the code from your web page.