I love it how a multi billion dollar such as google is still able to retain its sense of humor. Google launched a secret subsite where everything is written just how Elmer Fudd would say it.
Check it here, Wabbit!
One of my very favorite things about Google is how they take their time to honor various artists and intellectuals with a few additions to the Google logo every now and then.
Yesterday, the 20th of April, was the birthday of the Spanish painter Joan Miro. Google, being their usual self, replaced their usual logo with a logo influenced by the famous Miro style as a tribute to this artist.
Yesterday morning, the family of Joan Miró was upset to discover this and The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, asked Google to remove the image early, saying that there are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró.
What do I think? Booooooooooo!
During his lifetime, Miró had expressed contempt for conventional painting methods and his desire to abandon them (in his words “murder” and “assassinate” and or “rape” them) in favour of more contemporary means of expression, and perhaps it’s just me, but I would think that he would have appreciated this little contemporary move from Google’s side memoralizing his fame and artistic genius.
Oh, well. You can check out the Google logo gallery here.
Google seems to be on the roll buying companies left and right this week, first Writely and now Sketchup. If you haven’t heard of sketchup yet; it’s time to get acquianted.
Sktechup is a 3D sketching software designed to make 3D graphics creation insanely easy, even for the novice user. I still haven’t used my trial version properly; in which case this would have became a review. But from the first impressions, this tool is much easier and spontaneous than anything I’ve used in the past, although it doesn’t really compare to Autocad.
But why would google buy a 3D software company you’d ask? Apparently Sketchup has a Google Earth plugin that allows you to model your sketch in real world context; a possible add on to the Google Earth Pro edition tool chest. Quite smart and very useful for an architect I presume.
Congractulations to the Sketchup team for being Googled:
Well, about the biggest thing ever: we’ve been Googled. That’s right, Google Inc. has acquired @Last Software… so you might have just spit your coffee all over your keyboard, or you’re rolling your eyes thinking this is another one of my April Fool’s jokes. Believe me, we’re still having a hard time believing it ourselves, but it’s real — we are now Google!
Now I wonder who’s next? numsum?
[Via] [Don't Miss out on the 8 hours trial version]
Ha!This mash-up showing Google in 10 years is hitting the nail right on the head, at least for someone as messy as myself.
Back in Novermber, Yazan had a post that cracked me up (because we all relate don’t we?)
I wish Google would index my apartment, things would be much easier to find!
Dreams about to come true? 
[2:48 AM]
I’ve been keeping this post in my drafts for quite sometime till rumors are confirmed. Writely has been aqcuired by Google. Earlier on a friend of mine and a co-blogger wrote about the death of MS Office on toot’s blog. While I disagree with that and frimly believe the death of MS Office takes a whole lot more than an AJAX application like writely. I find it quite interesting how Google is now going out of its way to compete with Microsoft. Was Live.com too much of a threat?
If you don’t have a writely account and want to get one just because it’s a Google product, you no longer can. I presume Writely will get a face lift and get converted from ASPX to PHP or something open source before Google allows registrations again.
To be clear, Writely is still in beta, and it’s far from perfect. Upholding our great user experience means everything to us, so we’re not accepting new registrations until we’ve moved Writely to Google’s software architecture. If you’re interested in giving us a try, we hope you’ll get on the waitlist so we can let you know when you’ll be able to try out Writely.
A 14 year old boy named Anthony discovered a flaw in Gmail while trying to send a piece of javascript from his Yahoo account to his Gmail e-mail. He found that if the code fit into the preview portion (very beginning of the body) of the e-mail, it would execute. By writing a very small subject leaving more room for a preview for an e-mail, substantial code could be placed into this portion and run. The flaw does not work on a Gmail to Gmail message.
No known malicious scripts are currently targetting Gmail, but there’s no reason their won’t be. Bug still exists at the time of this post.
Update: The vulnerability has been fixed (in a relatively short period of time I must say [via]
I love rich and useful products. Google Maps is one, we’ve seen loads of variations and uses for it, from frappr, a technology that allows you to map who reads your blog or listen to your podcast. To MusicianMix, a service that allows you to look up artists and musical teachers based on distance.
The API is rich, well updated and fun to play with. But even with an open API and the emensive resouces Google has; I haven’t yet seen anything like Microsoft Live Local technical preview found at http://preview.local.live.com/. The service makes use of Virtual Earth API and allows the user to drag a car around the map and see streetlevel pictures of the area you’re going through.
The service is compatible with both Firefox and Internet Explorer and is completely written in AJAX, really impressive stuff. It asynchronously preloads and caches pictures based on the angle of the car. Mind you this is just a technical preview; future improvements could include GPS locations would would allow Geotagging, etc.
If you’re interested in a technical insight into the service I suggest you head over to channel 9 and watch this video. If you’re low on bandwidth I suggest you head over and read scobles entry on this:
They took a van with 10 cameras to Seattle and San Francisco (more cities coming soon) and built quite a remarkable AJAX app. Lots of fun. Drive your own car down the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and you can search for the closest Starbucks, too! It’s like playing a video game. Driving through tunnels is a lot of fun! How many images? Seattle alone is 10 million images. What a database!
Speaking of AJAX i should get back to work! Enjoy dragging your car around.
Note: Looking at the page with no style would provide you with an insight on how it works and what pictures are preloaded as you move the car around.
I never watch movie award shows because I’d rather Google my life away than go to the movies, so with all the Oscar talk in town, I’m pretty much the lost person who has never heard of most of the movies people are discussing.
So imagine my pleasure when I came upon Google rolling it’s award acceptance-speech, because it was just awarded the “2006 Best Product: Information Management” in Network Worlds Best Products Issue!
Network World gave the search tool 4.35 out of 5 points, saying that it is both easy to configure and maintain. He also liked it because of the underlying, highly accurate, crawler-driven engine, which is capable of indexing 220 types of content.
Other people on the award list include HP, Cisco, and Symantec. Check out all the winners here.
Google does a good job of making sites available for mobiles, in addition to making Gmail available for mobiles & reformatting sites for mobiles google has been doing a good job at making blogger available for mobile bloggers such as MC Hammer. Google added Mobile News to their Mobile Arsenal yesterday.
That’s what’s cool about Google News for mobile devices. You can access the news you want, whenever you want, by using a search box, top headline listings, and browsable news categories. Just type google.com on your web-enabled phone, and click the link to Google News. Goodbye, Waldo. Hello, everything else
Now there’s a Google Service I like! Check it out at (http://mobile.google.com/news). Hammer Time!
So what do you do when you’re under pressure to come up with more revenue? You exploit your user base and immitate an already successful business model. Incase you haven’t heard of it yet; Google will be launching Purchases, a new service that allows users to make micropayments within Google Base to buy and sell all sorts of items; as well as videos from Google video and items off the Google Store. Which places them directly in competition with Ebay and possibly paypal in the future.
All you need is a Google Account (gmail or any other email that is setup with google) and you’re good to go. To see some of the sample items that are marked for sale go to Google Base and search for xyzzy. You will notice that the payment is set as “Payment By Google”. Techcrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic has some screenshots of that as well as an exclusive review.
The checkout process is extremely quick and much faster than Paypal’s (page loading times are Google fast) – it also has a much nicer interface making it easier for a user to navigate their way through a checkout and purchase. Overall with Google Base and payments the experience for a user is much nicer than what it is on eBay, a very nice interface and many search features while maintaining the very minimal yet functional interface as expected from Google. I can see that they will be able to maintain this nice interface even as the inventory of items for sale gets much much bigger – their choice of using tags for items as opposed to categories makes it much easier to find items and to fine-tune search results.
It’s highly possible that Google will eventually allow money transfers in addition to selling and buying stuff on Google Base. I still haven’t formed my opinion on this; on one hand Google is global and is likely to allow such transactions from countries that are not allowed on Paypal (example: Middle East). On the other hand; this will only serve to decrease my privacy and add my purchasing patterns into the Google Grid.
What do you think of this? Do you think it will Kill ebay, craig’s list and the likes? And would you use it if it becomes like paypal?
You might also want to check this post
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