Gabbly - Chat with Visitors of a Site

Gabbly Chat is an Ajax project that lets you chat with the visitors of any site in real time. If you add http://gabbly.com in front of a URL, the page will load, along with a small chat window where you can talk with other fellows.

You can use HTML code, including embedded images, links (spammers are probably thrilled).

In 3 hours after being submitted on Digg, the site was dead, which means their servers weren't ready for too many users. The site quickly recovered.

The concept is interesting: a webmaster could talk to the visitors of his site on any page, visitors could see other opinions about products, but on the other hand, it can simply become an Ajax IRC - full of spammers and teens that say "hi" and "ASL PLS".

Warning: the chat may contain explicit images and words.

Let's chat: http://gabbly.com/googlesystem.blogspot.com

Microsoft Memo: Windows Live Is a Big Bet

BusinessWeek reports on an internal memo they acquired where Microsoft senior vice-president David Cole is very optimistic about the success of Windows Live:

"Make no mistake, Windows Live is our strategic bet to change the game and win, while we grow and drive revenue with MSN.com," writes Cole, head of MSN and the Personal Services Group.

Windows Live Mail, the new version of Microsoft's flagship Hotmail e-mail, is hosting 750,000 users, and the company hopes it will host 20 million by June, according to the memo.

Windows Live Local search, customized to the user's geographic location, "is surpassing our competition with industry-leading technology," the memo predicts.

"Over the next 3-6 months, we'll ship more innovative technology into the marketplace than during our entire 10-year history," writes Cole.

"We'll release new services as they become available, upgrade existing services, and launch marketing efforts in global phases," the memo says. One such service is a click-per-call capability that will let users connect to businesses via Web-based calls by clicking on MSN search links.

Windows Live Toolbar Shines

I think this blog will become Google Operating System vs Windows Live. This year is crucial for Microsoft, they'll launch a new operating system, a new office suite, they'll finish Windows Live project, they'll try to improve their search engine and they'll launch MSN adCenter. Maybe they try too much.

Windows Live Toolbar (if you want to visit the page, you should first sign in) is, of course, a replacement for MSN Search Toolbar.



What features does it have:
• Search using Windows Live Search
• Phishing Filter (will be built-in in IE 7)
• Collect, organize and share the info you find online
• Auto-detect a site's RSS feeds, and have them automatically sent to your personalized Live.com home page
• Access your favorites from any PC
• Tabbed browsing (will be built-in in IE 7)

It's nice that the installer is just 800 KB and includes only the basic features. If you want more (desktop search, RSS feeds detector) you can select them from a list.

The cool thing about this toolbar is that it includes Onfolio, a technology recently acquired by Microsoft, that lets you capture sites (recursively, with advanced restrictions), manage collections of sites, read RSS news feeds, and share content in emails, blogs and documents. It's useful for research, blogging and it looks pretty impressive. You can create a collection of sites, pages, snippets and organize them in folders, search them or include in your blog.

Windows Live Search is slow, but nice - it uses Ajax to create an "infinte" stream of results so you never click Next. Feed Search lets you preview RSS feeds and add them to Live homepage, while Image Search enlargers images when hovering them. Just cosmetic changes.

Live Favorites didn't seem to work for me: I couldn't add any site to the list.

Except for the custom buttons and the spell-checking that are very nice implemented in Google Toolbar, Windows Live Toolbar has almost everything and will definitely be a success.

Google and the Wisdom of Crowds

From the famous PowerPoint presentation that leaked on Google's site:

"Slide #10 – Picture of Cow / "Collective Wisdom"

What does a cow have anything to do with this?

If you haven't read James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds", I highly recommend it. In the book, Surowiecki tells a story about an experiment done in the 19th century. It was by this British anthropologist named Francis Galton.

What Galton did in the experiment was go to a county fair where he had close to 800 people guess the weight of an ox by writing their guess on a slip of paper. Among the 800 or so people were a lot of ordinary county fair goers but there were also some experts – butchers, cattle farmers, you know, the sort of people who would have a reasonably good idea how much a particular cow should weigh.

The remarkable outcome of this experiment is that when Galton tallied all the guesses, the average guess, that is, the collective guess of the crowd was significantly better than the guess of any individual within the group. Think about that. The crowd was wiser than any individual, and that included the experts.

This principle has proven out over and over. And you see it everywhere: financial markets, political elections, and even the synchronization of traffic.

So let's go back to the Hustle and Flow graph I showed you earlier. But instead of just Hustle and Flow, think about every single piece of content ever created and owned by CBS. Now let me ask you a few questions – these are rhetorical:

* Do you know exactly how many assets you have? By assets, I mean all the content you've ever owned or created. Do you know exactly? Do you have the count? (Remember, I'm a computer scientist. I have to ask these things.)

* What percentage of your assets is currently available to users such that they can access it any time, view it, enjoy it any time? And I don't necessarily mean on Google Video, but it could be on your own web sites. What percentage? Pretty small?

* Now let's say you could suddenly make all your assets available to users worldwide. If this happened, do you know which of your assets would be most popular? Would it be last season's Survivor finale? Or would it be a segment from 60 Minutes that might have aired 10 years ago? Do you know which assets would be most popular in Miami vs. most popular in Ft. Lauderdale? Or in the U.S. vs. in Cambodia? Or on Wednesday mornings vs. Sunday nights?

Here's a fact that I've learned while at Google and I want to share it with you: a company is not smarter than the consumers of that company's products. "

More about Google Analyst Day:

Google Analyst Day Highlights
Google wants to become a $100 billion company
Google focuses on search
Infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power
Google strategy in 2006

CeBIT 2006: Origami Doesn't Impress

Video from Gizmodo. Microsoft Origami isn't impressive and the digital screen has some flaws.



Related posts:
Microsoft Origami Project
Ultra-Mobile PC, a.k.a. Microsoft Origami

Google Video Feeds

Google will introduce RSS feeds for Google Videos. The link that hinted at this is:
http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=popular&num=20&output=rss.

To access a feed of any search results page, go to:
http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=type%3Agpick&num=20&output=rss

It will be nice if they allow RSS feeds for custom searches. This way you could see when they include new videos about iPod, for example.

Google is the only major search engine that doesn't have feeds for web search: Yahoo and MSN include this option. Google has feeds only in this sections: Google Groups and Google News.

Update: the video feed announcement on Yahoo! Groups.

Google Related Content

Google will launch a new beta that will provide interactivity for sites. It's similar to Yahoo's Y!Q, and extends what you have seen in SERPs as "Related pages". This time, you can see related searches, related news, related pages and probably more (maybe Froogle products).

For now, the product is tested by Google Trusted Testers, and one of them, a Romanian Googler, Octavian Mihai COSTACHE, displays the box on his personal blog.

IBM's General Parallel File System Breaks Records

IBM announced that it had scored a breakthrough in file system technology that increases the speed of data access by seven times. Researchers were able to attain a 102-gigabyte per second transfer rate on the ASC Purple supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a recent test.

The file system was 1.6 petabytes in size, the largest ever in the world, and performance was maintained even as 1,000 clients pushed workloads into the file. The project used 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes and 416 storage controllers, IBM said in a statement.

Called the General Parallel File System (GPFS), the technology allows for high-speed access to files across multiple nodes of a Linux or AIX cluster. The file system could be used in a variety of fields, including engineering design, digital media and entertainment, data mining, financial analysis, seismic data processing and scientific research.

Gmail Horror Story: Gmail Account Deleted

Bob, a reader of Google Blogoscoped, announced yesterday that his Gmail account was deleted.

"The account you attempted to access has been deleted. You may click here to sign up for a new account." was the text of the error page.

The Gmail team investigated the issue, but couldn't find a solution.

Unfortunately, Bob used Gmail as his primary account and he didn't backup his mail.

So can you do to feel safe? Use a POP3 client, like Mozilla Thunderbird. You can even put Thunderbird on a USB drive to have your emails with you everywhere you go. Another idea is not to use Gmail as a primary mail account, but just as a way to collect emails forwarded from other accounts. Other alternatives: forward your mail from Gmail to other (Gmail) account or use Google Desktop to store and search your mail offline.

Read more: The mail Bob got from Gmail Support

Windows Vista Won't Support EFI

Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.

Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco, Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz, also revealed that there will never be any support for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors.

Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server.

Office 2007 Screenshots

While Google acquires Writely, Microsoft works on the new Office 2007. Today at the CeBIT conference in Germany, they revealed the new visuals for the Office 2007 user interface.

Microsoft does a better job at organizing the interface, but it still feels cluttered. They use contextual tabs instead of menus, and the toolbars are really big and combine images with lists and buttons.

I really like the new Office button that provides access to all of the document and system-level functionality in the program.

You can find more screenshots at Jensen Harris' blog.

Web 2.0 Fonts

Fontfeed lists an impressive number of logos from Web 2.0 startups (or former startups).

"A clear trend in new identities is the use of soft, rounded typefaces dominated by VAG Rounded, but also including Helvetica Rounded, Arial Rounded, Bryant, and FF Cocon. All of these lend a modern friendliness to the what might otherwise be a cold trademark."

If you were curious, Flickr uses Frutiger Black, last.fm uses ITC Ronda, while NewsGator uses ITC Bauhaus Medium.

Google Acquires Writely

Google Blog announces a new acquisition: Writely - the web word processor.

"For the last five months, I've been part of a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle, which makes Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Well, as of Monday, I'm happy to say that I, and the rest of the Writely team, are now part of Google." says Jen Mazzon, from the new Google Writely team.

But what is Writely? A Web 2.0 Ajax application that lets you edit and share documents, collaborate and organize documents by tags. Writely also backups data every 10 seconds, lets you create web pages from your documents and control who can see your pages.

Google Writely will probably be integrated in the new GDrive project that gives users (almost) infinite storage and web applications that create a seamless transition to what will eventually be Google Operating System.

Spring Cleaning: Windows Optimization Toolkit

All the programs below are free, small, easy to use and very powerful. They'll help you make the spring cleaning for your PC.

PageDefrag (Sysinternals) - defragments registry, event log files, Windows 2000/XP hibernation files.

NT Registry Optimizer - defragments registry files, by recreating each registry hive "from scratch", removing any slack space that may be left from previously modified or deleted keys.

Power Defragmenter GUI - GUI application for Contig (Sysinternals). It's perfect for quickly optimizing files that are continuously becoming fragmented, or that you want to ensure are in as few fragments as possible.

CrapCleaner - cleans Temporary files, URL history, cookies, autocomplete form history from IE, Firefox, Opera. Also cleans registry, temporary files from Windows and other third-party applications (eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, MS Office, Nero, etc).

FreeRAM XP Pro - read more about the freeware in this article.

Also read interesting tips about pagefile optimization.

Ultra-Mobile PC, a.k.a. Microsoft Origami

Microsoft revealed the true identity of the Origami gadget: Ultra-Mobile PC, a device that is portable, lightweight, and configured to connect on the go. It has WiFi connectivity, it's Bluetooth enabled and uses a Windows Tablet PC Edition packed with Microsoft Office, Movielink, Street & Trips 2007, FolderShare. UMPC will have an Intel processor, and will be manufactured by Samsung and Asus.

Some specs:

• Approximately 7'' diagonal display (or smaller)


• Minimum 800 x 480 resolution


• Approximately 2 pounds

Learn more about the Ultra-Mobile PC.

Ubuntu: Probably The Best Linux Distribution

Ubuntu has been voted the best Linux distribution on the market by the users of LinuxQuestions.org: 2500 users voted in a site poll, 19.5 percent voted for Ubuntu as the Linux distribution of the year, narrowly beating Slackware, which received 19 percent of the votes. Other voted distributions: Suse (13%) and Debian (10%).

In November 2005, Ubuntu Linux 5.10 was awarded an editor's Choice award by ZDNet UK, beating commercial distributions Novell Linux Desktop 9, SUSE Linux 10, Red Hat Desktop 4 and Mandriva Linux 2006.

Ubuntu also won the Best Debian Derivative Distribution award in a ceremony at Germany's Linux World Expo in November 2005. In October, it was awarded the Reader's Choice Award by Linux Journal and the Reader Award at the UK Linux & Open Source Awards dinner.

Also see:
Google creates a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu: Goobuntu

Yahoo Workers Are Also Google Tester

From ValleyWag:

"You've probably read the buzz about Google Calendar on TechCrunch. The story behind how he got the screen shots is even more interesting. He alluded to it in his post, but he's afraid to come out and say it.

Obviously, he knows a number of people at Yahoo!. He was able to track down the Product Manager over there that got into the Google Early Tester and finagled the screen shots out of him. He's been sitting on these screen shots for about a week now.

Eventually, Yahoo! told Google about the insider in the tester program and Google canceled the account. What Yahoo! didn't tell them was that the screen shots were already out there. Google is generally extremely tight about their early tester programs and this leak is a big deal over there.

Supposedly, Yahoo! has numerous accounts in several Google early tester programs to this day."

I can't believe Google can't check who are the testers. They were supposed to be invited by a friend or family member who currently works at Google.

Flickr Leech - 500 Interestingness Pictures On One Page

Flickr Leech is a great way to get a lot Flickr thumbnails (500 images) in a single page. Try the interestingness tab that gives you an extraordinary landscape.

Marissa Mayer prefers Pine to Gmail

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience at Google confesses to CNN Money that she doesn't use Gmail for her business mail.

"I don't feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it. I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast.

I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It's a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts. I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight."

Pine is a mail program developed at the University of Washington. It has a lot of keyboard shortcuts and countless ways to sort, shuffle, and sift through your email.

Update: Looking for Marissa Mayer's email address? It's marissa@google.com.

Google Strategy In 2006

Here's Google business strategy in 2006. They can't provide a "more complete Ads system", because complete is the maximum you can create. They can't scale until they build the best hardware infrastructure. They are already the best search engine, so I think the real aims are:

1. go beyond search
2. invest in hardware

Related posts:
Infinite Storage, Bandwidth, and CPU Power
Google Focuses on Search

Google CL2 Calendar Screenshots

Techcrunch got possession of screenshots from Google’s new Ajax calendar application, which will be called "CL2".

"CL2 makes it easy — even effortless — to keep track of all the events in your life and compare them to what your friends and family have going on in theirs. We’ve designed a calendar that works for you — helping you add events from email, friends, and other public calendars — so you don’t have to spend all your time maintaining your schedule. CL2 even helps you discover new events you might be interested in. We think it’s a great tool for managing your daily schedule, keeping track of what everyone in your family is doing, organizing events for a club or team, or creating public events that you can promote to the world." (About Google CL2)




New: view other Google Calendar screenshots.

Update: Google Calendar is live.

Live Clipboard

At O'Reilly ETech conference, Microsoft's guru, Ray Ozzie, launched an idea: let's improve the clipboard model by letting the user copy-paste structured data.

"In the PC world, whose pre-GUI history was experienced through various flavors of MS-DOS, one of the greatest user benefits first delivered pervasively by the GUI was the radical concept of running multiple applications simultaneously and, more importantly, using them concurrently and inter-operably.
And what was the most fundamental technology enabling “mash-ups” of desktop applications? The clipboard. And a set of common clipboard data formats.

In its simplest form, the clipboard enabled the user to simply grasp the concept of moving a copy of the information from one application to another (i.e. by value).

In its most advanced form, the clipboard enabled users to set up “publish and subscribe” relationships among applications – dynamically interconnecting a “publisher” with a “subscriber” (i.e. by reference).

Each site is still in many ways like a standalone application. Data inside of one site is contained within a silo. Sure, we can cut and paste text string fragments from here to there, but the excitement on the web these days is all about “structured data” such as Contacts and Profiles, Events and Calendars, and Shopping Carts and Receipts, etc. And in most cases, the structured form of this data, which could be externalized as an XML item or a microformat, generally isn’t. It’s trapped inside the page, relegated to a pretty rendering.

So, where’s the clipboard of the web?

Where’s the user model that would enable a user to copy and paste structured information from one website to another?

Where’s the user model that would enable a user to copy and paste structured information from a website to an application running on a PC or other kind of device, or vice-versa?"

Here's a demo for Live Clipboard, that will hopefully be implemented in sites such as live.com and that can copy data as an object.

Some examples for Live Clipboard:

* Copy an event from Eventful to your desktop calendar so it automagically gets placed in the proper date & time

* Copy your profile from MSN Spaces to Facebook, with the custom field for 'location' getting added to the profile

* Copy billing & shipping address information from the clipboard to an e-commerce site

Windows Live Messenger Beta Review

Windows Live Messenger (or MSN Messenger 8.0 if you don't give a damn about the Live brand) is an invite-only beta. You can get an invitation from http://ideas.live.com.

After you download the whooping 13.5MB, you get the translucent dialog from the right. There aren't many changes in Windows Live Messenger.

Sharing Folders - new and simple way to share personal photos, documents, and files with your Messenger contacts. You will be able to create a Sharing Folder by simply dragging files onto a contact name in Messenger. This will create an exact copy of the files on both you and your contact's computers, and create a Sharing Folder that can be accessed from Messenger, and on the desktop.

Live Call - using Windows Live Call in Messenger, you’ll be able to start making calls within minutes to your friends across the country or around the world by signing up for MCI Web Calling. You will be able to purchase minutes upfront from MCI and then add minutes when your balance runs low. This feature is not included yet.



If you still wonder what's the Live thing, here's a semi-official explanation: "After a few successful years, the creators of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer split the cast and concept in half and created a new and almost equally successful show, Angel. Buffy focused on the human experience, while Angel catered to the sci-fi-action-loving crowd. Think of MSN like Buffy and Windows Live like the Angel spin-off: same people and same missions, but divided in the interest of better focus. MSN now means content, like MSN.com and MSNBC. While Windows Live means services like Live.com, Mail, and of course, Instant Messaging."

Pico - Implicit Search Engine From Blinkx

Pico is a small application that lets you navigate the Internet in a new way. As you work, Pico reads your active screen, infers the meaning of what you're looking at, and then retrieves relevant information from across the Web and the other Pico channels. Pico works on all applications that have text including your browser, email and word processing applications.

"With Pico, we turned the search paradigm on its head, and asked, 'what if search could be brought to you?'" said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CTO of blinkx, the company that developed Pico. "While others, including Microsoft and Apple, have talked about the potential of implicit search before, blinkx has once again pre-empted others by making it reality first. More than anything else, Pico is about the possibility of search-less search."

Pico demonstrates the existence of a Latent Web. While you're doing something on your desktop (reading an email, writing a report or just surfing the web) there's a Web of links that are relevant to what you're doing but, those links are normally latent, hidden from view and difficult to find. Pico works to expose that latent Web by working constantly to make links between your current activity and all that stuff.

The download is just 1MB (that's why the name of the software is Pico)

blinkx also offers Web-based video and podcast search services, desktop search and a service that lets people search for video content and upload results to an iPod or portable video player.

How Much Money Did Firefox Make From Google in 2005?

From calcanis.com:

Firefox made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees.

Another possibly new Yahoo homepage

This design is very nice, it's classic, with a better categorization.



Related post:
Other Yahoo homepage design

Google Interviews Have Puzzling Questions

What would you answer to these questions?

"You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?"

"How would you find out if a machine's stack grows up or down in memory?"

"Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew."

"How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?"

I know, you will say they are weird and don't know what to say. These are some of the questions from a Google interview and they are quite shocking. If you want to see some answers and an interesting discussion check the original forum and the Digg thread.

Control your Windows from Run

The Run dialog gives you easy access to many different programs and options. To get to the Run dialog, click the Start button, then click Run. Type in the command and press Enter, to launch it. For example, type "control folders" (without the quotes) in the Run dialog and press ENTER. Here is a list of commands to use, and what they do:

control - Control Panel
control folders - Folder Options
control userpasswords - User Accounts
control userpasswords2 - Advanced User Accounts
control desktop - Display Properties
control printers - Printers and Faxes
control mouse - Mouse Properties
control keyboard - Keyboard Properties
control netconnections - Network Connections
control color - Display Properties \ Screensaver
control date/time - Date and Time Properties
control schedtasks - Scheduled Tasks
control admintools - Administrative Tools
control telephony - Phone and Modem Options
control fonts - Fonts Folder
control international - Regional and Language
control speech - Speech recognition

Many commands work in Windows 98/Me, as well as in Windows 2000/XP.

Other interesting shortcuts you can use from Run:

dxdiag (for DirectX, sound, input devices-joysticks, etc. info)
freecell (opens freecell game)
mplayer2 (opens Windows Media Player 6.4)
msconfig (accesses programs that run on startup)
mshearts (opens hearts game)
msinfo32 (accesses system resources info)
notepad (opens program)
regedit (accesses command to edit the registry)
services.msc (like msconfig but more options)
sndrec32 (opens sound recorder)
sndvol32 (opens sound volume utility)
sol (opens a solitaire game)
winver (displays the Windows verson installed on the computer)
wmplayer (opens Windows Media Player)
wordpad (opens program)
wupdmgr (connects to Windows update)