How Google Image Search Might Look

Google started to use a game similar to The ESP Game to improve its image search engine. The addictive tool lets people contribute with valuable information and tag the millions of images from Google's index.

So how will Google Image Search look if Google uses the keywords obtained from the game? Here's ESP Image Search, a search engine based on the data from The ESP Game. Unfortunately, this search engine has a small index (around 30,000 images).

So, let's compare.

Image search for "China" on Google:


Image search for "China" on ESP:



The search engines have different sets of pictures and ESP shows the results randomly. However, it has better results.

Open Source Windows-Like Operating System

Last month, the third major version of an operating system was launched. This version added the ability to connect to a network. The operating system, whose name is ReactOS, has been trying for 10 years to become the first Windows-like OS that's also free. ReactOS wants to become binary-compatible with Microsoft Windows applications and drivers.

Although it's still in alpha, the operating system runs many applications (mostly using Wine), including Notepad, Firefox, Opera, mIRC, AbiWord, Explorer-like file manager, and even games like Quake or Unreal Tournament.

The GUI is similar to the one from Windows 2000 and you can use something similar to Windows command-line.

The OS is more like a proof-of-concept now, but you can try it for yourself to see how good it is. I plan to burn a LiveCD to test it, as it's not a good idea to install an alpha operating system.

More screenshots | Flash demo | Review

{ Via Digg. }

On Bookmarks

Wikipedia says: "Bookmarks are pointers — primarily to URLs — built-in to most Internet web browsers. The primary purpose of bookmarks is to easily catalog and access web pages that the web browser user has visited or plans to visit, without having to remember the page URLs or rely on other computer programs."

Many, many years ago, there was a single way you could bookmark a page: using the browser's Bookmarks/Favorites menu. But this option wasn't so good. What if you use more than one browser? What if you use more than one computer? What if you have too many bookmarks? Then you have to import/export them or find a software to do that for you.

Now we have online solutions like del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks. del.icio.us offers you public bookmarks (by default), while Google has only private bookmarks. I think Google is on the right path as bookmarks should be private and searchable. Unlike del.icio.us, where you can only search the descriptions, Google Bookmarks lets you search the page content. But no solution is good enough.

(1) Bookmarks shouldn't need tags or folders

Why should I tag a page that has a title, plenty of content and links from other pages with content? There's enough information for the page.

(2) Bookmarks should be integrated into the browser

The same way you can subscribe to feeds in Firefox 2.0, you should be able to bookmark pages from the Bookmark menu. You wouldn't need extensions, bookmarklets, toolbars and links in blogs.

(3) Bookmarks should be synchronized

You should save a bookmark in your server of choice and your browser should save a copy locally. Then, from time to time, the bookmarks should be synchronized. This way, it would be easy to change your provider and you'd have more control over your bookmarks.

(4) Bookmarks should be invisible

I don't want to see a huge list of bookmarks in my browser. In fact, all I want to see is a search box, so I can search bookmarks using my online provider.

(5) Bookmarks should not only be web pages

You should be able to bookmark only some content from a page and annotate it.

(6) Bookmarks should be cached

Sometimes web pages disappear or are radically modified. A bookmark service should cache at least one version of the web page.

(7) Bookmarks should be easy to create

All I want is to click a button, the same way you do now in Google Toolbar, but I want to do the same way in any browser, on any platform, for any provider.

(8) Bookmarks should be searchable

I want my own search engine, that searches only my bookmarks. Google already does that.

(9) Bookmarks should be private by default

Sites could use aggregated information about bookmarks, but they shouldn't make bookmarks public by default.

(10) Bookmarks should be shared through lists

If I want to share some of my bookmarks, I could create a list using search. The list could be public or password-protected.

The closest to these simple rules is Google Bookmarks, who already does (7)-(9). The rest of my wishes are still far from being implemented by a single social bookmarking system or browser.

Google Bookmarks can be accessed:
* in Internet Explorer, using Google Toolbar
* in Firefox, using GMarks, a 3rd party extension
* with a bookmarklet, available at the bottom of this page.

Play Google Video Files In Windows Media Player

I'll tell you a secret: what I like about this blog is that I can say stupid things, or small parts from the truth, and then other people may tell the truth or share the whole picture. And it's not that I intentionally say stupid things or parts of the truth.

When I wrote Download Google Videos as AVI, I heard that Linux users had a direct link to AVI files in Google Video. Then I looked in the code from video.google.com and discovered that Google hides the link from Windows users, so they have to download Google Video Player. I really like bookmarklets, so I made a simple one to launch the download of the AVI file. And it seemed OK. But people started to say they can't play the video. Then I realized that the video works only in Media Player Classic, MPlayer, but not in Windows Media Player. The real problem was that Google adds a small header in the file, and most players (including WMP) don't like that.

Then I found (in the comments of the post) a really nice site that has a lot of tips about downloading videos from Google Video, YouTube and other video sharing sites. It even has a super-bookmarklet that works with all these sites. There are also utilities that remove Google's header and transform the video into a regular AVI file. My favorite converter is GVI2AVI, a small portable software (44k) that requires the .NET Framework.

What I wanted to say in this post is that you can make a small step and then discover that others have already discovered the whole truth. But that's OK, everybody's gotta learn sometime.

The Paper About Bigtable

The paper about Bigtable, a new kind of distributed database and one of the most interesting Google innovations (next to Google File System and MapReduce), is available:

"Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable."

BigTable is used by many Google services, including Google Analytics, Google Finance, Orkut, Personalized Search, Writely, and Google Earth.

Google Image Labeler

Google Image Labeler is a place where you can help Google improve Google Image Search by tagging images.

It's similar to what you do in Google Video. But Google transformed this boring activity into a nice interactive game. Everytime you login, Google finds you a partner and shows you the same images for 90 seconds. The first label found by both of you is considered a good answer and brings you 100 points (while two people can both fail in finding a good label, the probability is much smaller than for one person). After the time expires, you can see where the images came from and what were your partner's labels. And then you can start again, as the game is addictive.

The same images will be shown to other people, so, in the end, the images will keep only the best labels. This way, when you search for "car", you'll only find pictures of cars. I wonder if Google intends to use the labels directly or it's just a test for their recently acquired object recognition system.

A similar game is The ESP Game (requires Java) and this was the inspiration for Google Image Labeler. Here are the rules of the ESP Game:

* two-player online game
* partners don't know each other
* partners can't communicate
* the goal: type the same word
* only thing in common: an image

You can find out more about game from this video.

August Recap: Google's Deals of the Year

What's so great about this month? Let's see:

Google's deals

Google made a lot of deals this month: with AOL to bundle Google Toolbar and Desktop with Real Player, with XM for Radio AdSense, with News Corp. for search and ads, with Viacom for Google Video ads, with eBay for VoIP ads.

New features

You can now save locations in Google Maps, find Google Video and Google Books on the homepage, have a better blog at Blogger so people won't laugh at you anymore. Google Talk adds voicemail and file transfer for the 42,000 happy users. Gmail has an MP3 player.

Available

Google Spreadsheets, Google Analytics, Writely are available for anyone. Gmail doesn't need invitations in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Google WiFi is finally available for everyone in Mountain View.

Birthdays

There were too many birthdays: Google Talk has one year, Blogger turned seven, Linux is 15, Sergey Brin is 33.

New products

Gmail for Your Domain becomes Google Apps for Your Domain.

The most popular post (Analytics says that):
Create email blacklists in Gmail.

The most meaningful post (I say so):
Google Persistent Memory.

The best Google product of the month:
Eric Schmidt, for all the great deals that will mean a lot in the future and for being a part of Apple's board.

<< July recap

Google Wants To Team Up With Emmy Winners

If you're in the US and search for one of the Emmy winners, like Julia Louis Dreyfus, Google has a nice little ad that says "Google congratulates". Here's the text of the landing page:

"We were rooting for you to strike gold at the Emmy Awards ceremony the other night, and we were thrilled when you did. As firm believers in accountability, Google salutes professionals like you who have accomplished great things.

The question is, what's left to conquer?
To explore additional collaborative opportunities in this field, please contact: entertainment-team@google.com."


The question here is: what does Google want? A partnership with Google Video? Here's one possible translation:

"We liked Seinfeld, but never seen anything great from you since then. We were surprised to see you winning an award.

The question is: why do you Google yourself? You must have a big ego and you must want some money to feed it. Drop us a mail. We know you hate people, but we're Google."

{ Via One Park Avenue. }

Are You Logged In?

I have a little conspiracy theory. First there was the Gmail account: few people had it, many were afraid of it, some would pay money to have it. Then there was the Google account: you already had it if you used Gmail, it wasn't very useful. Then Google started to add some services to Google account: Froogle WishList, the personalized homepage, the personalized search and many more.

Before creating the Google accounts, Google used to rely on cookies to save preferences. The new accounts are a way to save personal stuff and all Google services have something to save. But not everyone visits Froogle Wishlist, or Search History, not many people have heard of Google Spreadsheets or Picasa Web. But everyone has heard of Gmail and a lot of people use it, although it's in beta and it still requires invitation. I think Gmail was created to make people have a Google Account and remain logged in.

What's the most common activity on the Internet? Email. What's the most visited subdomain on Yahoo? Yahoo Mail. People check their mail all the time and won't log out too often.

Now all Google services will migrate to Google Accounts (AdWords and Orkut have migrated; Blogger and Writely are next) and you'll have more reasons to be logged in. But why would Google want to be logged in? By combining the information from all these services, Google can know more about you, improve the search results and ad targeting.

This is just a conspiracy theory that passes through my head everytime I see my username above the search results. I could delete the personalized search service, but I would still be logged in.

If you're wondering about the picture above, Google accounts' codename is GAIA, which is the goddess of the earth, in the Greek mithology.

This quote is from Susan Mernit (September 2004):

"Google's much speculated integration of services seems to have moved forward a step with the further integration of Google Accounts, a control center for those of us who subscribe to any combination of gmail, Google groups and Google search or news alerts.

Apparently, this new feature's been live for a week, but I was shocked when I tried to sign up for a news alert and Google immediately defaulted to my gmail account--not the place I'd planned to put it.

Clearly, the moment when gmail is the underpinning to link all the services together--including Blogger, Picasa, and Froogle--is coming closer., And that is going to make A LOT of people pay attention."

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 Improves Visual Theme

The second beta of Firefox 2 includes a slick redesigned chrome, in addition to the features already available in beta 1.

Mozilla hired Radiant Core, a company from Toronto, to design the new theme. IT Business says that the "criteria for the [theme] proposals included that they respect native OS look and feel (Firefox runs on Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms), that the themes appear modern and contemporary with current Web and client apps and appear consistent across platforms."

So now we have translucent buttons, an improved search box and new tab strip that shows the active tab prominently. There's also an arrow next to the last tab that hides a list of all the open tabs.



You can download Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 for:
Windows (5.6 MB) | Mac (18 MB) | Linux (9.2 MB) | Other versions

In order to be able to use the incompatible extensions, follow the tips from here.

Google Calendar Gadget Shows All Your Calendars

Google Calendar Gadget for Google Desktop is an easy way to view your calendar without visiting Google Calendar site. Now the small gadget allows you to view all your calendars or only the calendars you want, not just the main calendar.

It's also easier to add events in the calendar without going to the site. If you enable the alerts in Google Desktop, you can be notified about the events. Even if your Internet connection goes down, you'll still be able to see your calendar and get alerts.

The gadget requires Google Desktop 4, which was also updated to version 4.2006.825. If you already have the gadget, you need to download the new version.

Related:
Add events to Google Calendar faster
Google Persistent Memory

Site 24x7 - Free Website Monitoring

Site 24x7 is a free service that lets you monitor a site's response time over time and sends alerts if a site is down or slow. You can set how often Site 24x7 monitors the site: the smallest interval is 5 minutes.

What's nice about this service is that you can get alerts by mail or SMS if something bad happens with a site: slow load time, most of the content is changed (defacement?), HTTP errors. Reports can be sent to any number of mail addresses and phone numbers, but you can only have 10 free SMS notifications per month.

The service is in beta and will continue to be free after it's officially launched, although it will have some limitations for the number of monitored sites.

You can try a demo to see how it works.

Google Relaunches OCR Software

Tesseract is an OCR engine developed at the HP Labs between 1985 and 1995. HP decided to abandon OCR research and, for ten years, the software's development has been frozen. Last year, HP made Tesseract open source (Apache License) and Google, together with a research institute, have continued the development of the program. Now Google announces that the new version is pretty stable and that it's the best open source OCR engine.

"A few things to know about Tesseract OCR: for now it only supports the English language, and does not include a page layout analysis module (yet), so it will perform poorly on multi-column material. It also doesn't do well on grayscale and color documents, and it's not nearly as accurate as some of the best commercial OCR packages out there. Yet, as far as we know, despite its shortcomings, Tesseract is far more accurate than any other Open Source OCR package out there."

OCR is useful for Google Book Search and it could be useful for Picasa or Image Search in addition to an object recognition engine. And, if Google improves the software, it could be launched as a successful alternative to commercial applications. Currently, the software has no UI and it can be run in Linux and Windows.

Related:
Use camera phones for OCR

Learn SEO From Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

Vanessa Fox from Google and Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch (unfortunately, not for too long) talk about search engine optimization. They share a lot of interesting tips for webmasters, by placing everyone in the story of Buffy, the vampire slayer. You'll find a lot about forums, links, bad neighborhood, link baiting, having your own domain, authority, SERPs and the discussion is really entertaining. The audio file has 68 minutes and it's an episode of GoodKarma, at Webmaster Radio.



Direct link to the MP3 file [63 MB]

Eric Schmidt Is a Member of Apple's Board

Apple and Google have the most loyal users and are similar in many ways. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, is now the eighth member of Apple's board.

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said that "like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric's insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead." Before becoming Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt worked at Sun and Novel.

"Apple is one of the companies in the world that I most admire," said Eric Schmidt. And he's not the only one from Google who does that. "How did Apple and Madonna stay cool and innovative in the past 23 years? Not by being perfect, but by constantly reinventing themselves," concluded Marissa Mayer at a Stanford seminar.

Although I don't think this would mean some big changes for the two companies, here's what could happen:

* more attention to Mac users from Google's part (Picasa, Google Talk for Mac)

* a partnership between Google Video and iTunes Store

* a better way to deal with Microsoft's competition (Vista, new Office, Zune)

Related:
Google software for Mac
The best speech of Steve Jobs

Box.net Lite - File Hosting With Less Limitations

I've written about Box.net, a service that provides 1 GB of free online storage. To increase the adoption, Box.net has released a new service called Box.net Lite, that allows you to upload a file of up to 10 MB and get a direct link.

You can upload any kind of file and there are no traffic limitations. You don't have to register, although you have to provide an email address, so that if you decide you need to manage your uploaded files, you can sign in for a Box.net account. If you don't want to do that, test@example.com seems to work.

For photos, you also get a thumbnail, so you just have to copy-paste the code into your blog. I think this service is a good replacement for All you can upload: you don't have options for resizing, but you can do that with any image editor, and you can upload more than photos.

If you upload audio files (I've tried only with MP3 files), Box.net offers you a very slick Flash player, so you can embed it into your blog.

All in all, this is a very good file hosting service if you don't have a domain or you don't want to pay for the traffic.

Download Public Domain Books From Google

BBC News reports that Google has started to allow users to download public domain books as PDF files in Google Book Search. To find books available for download like Dante's Divina Comedia, you need to restrict the search to full view books, but not all the results will have the download option.

HTML view (plain text) should follow naturally for public domain books, as the downloaded PDF contains only the scanned pages, without OCR. Google should also improve the way books are read online, by optimizing page view for any resolution. The download option for public domain books will be followed shortly by an easier way to buy books directly from Google.

Project Gutenberg offers 19,000 free ebooks, but their content is not searchable online. The books can be downloaded as text files.

Related:
Google's Digital Library of Alexandria

Google Apps For Domains, Mocked By A Hosting Company

Intermedia.NET, a company that says it is the "US Leader in Microsoft Exchange Hosting" has released a satirical press release, in which shows the limits of Google Apps for Your Domain. I already showed some of the problems with Google's offer in a previous post, but here is the funny copy from Intermedia.NET:

Intermedia.NET, the US leader in Microsoft Exchange hosting for small and medium businesses (SMBs), today praised the innovative new service, Google Apps for Your Domain. By offering 24x0 support, no wireless access and scanning of company email and documents, Google has bucked the trend of what companies expect from a business email provider. The Apps for your Domain key features:

* 24x0 support. This is important because companies for whom email and schedules are mission-critical will want to know they can pick up a phone and get support 24 hours a day, 0 days per week. Google also gives the option of filling out a support form and receiving an automated response.

* No wireless access. Where Intermedia.NET hosted Exchange gives users access to information via BlackBerry, Treo, Q or any other device, Google has bucked this trend, perhaps suggesting that wireless email is in fact a productivity-sapping distraction for employees.

* Private data read by others. Google Apps for your Desktop again bucks the trend that businesses should not allow outsiders to read their proprietary documents and email. Businesses can rest easy knowing that Google is looking at all emails and documents.

* Ads inside applications. Clearly, employees are more productive when their business applications stream ads for online poker sites and pills to combat ED.

* No uptime guarantee. Rather than a predictable 99.9% uptime guarantee, such as the one offered by Intermedia.NET, Google does not provide a set percentage of the time when email will be up and running. This keeps corporate collaboration more exciting, by allowing staff to guess whether the system will be working or not.

"While we are happy that Google is making people aware that business-quality email is essential for small and medium businesses, we do have some reservations," said Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia.NET. "There is a large difference between an enterprise-class, proven Microsoft Exchange system with 24x7 fully-managed telephone support and wireless access, and a more basic offering with 24x0 support, embedded ads and no wireless access."

Of course, Intermedia.NET fails to see that Google's offer is free and that they'll launch a premium package without ads and with full support. I wonder if Microsoft has anything to do with this attempt of being brave.

Intermedia.NET:
$29.95/mo
* 100 mailboxes
* 1 GB Mailbox space
* 24x7x365 support
* 99.9% uptime guarantee

Google:
$0/mo
* a lot of mailboxes (I've heard about someone who received 200 mail accounts)
* more than 2.5 GB space and growing 2 GB space
* mail support for admins
* no uptime guarantee

{ Via Inside Google. }

Flickr Adds Geotagging

Flickr allows you to geotag your photos. You need to go to Organize mode, click on the map, choose a location and drag the photos to that location. Flickr uses Yahoo Maps, that are less detailed than Google Maps, especially outside of the US. By default, the location of the photo will be available to anyone, but you can change that for all your photos or on a case by case basis.

Flickr should also try to guess the address from the tags or from the title, as most people write the location there. But in the future most cameras will have GPS or they'll be integrated with a system like Sony's GPS-CS1, "a 3.5 inch long GPS device that will add geographic data to pictures taken with your Sony digicam".

Flickr has created a screencast to explain how to use the new feature.

To see all the photos that have been geotagged, visit this map.

Related:
Picasa 2.5 allows you to geotag photos in Google Earth
Panoramio - geotag photos in Google Maps

Homepage 2.0

For many users, browser's homepage was a nice page that included news, horoscopes and recipes. The homepage was usually a portal like MSN.com that allowed some customization, but whose content was provided by partners and its own verticals. "Do you want news about cars? We have MSN Cars. We also have weather, classifieds, games, sports, tech and horoscopes. All from MSN."

The new personalized homepages (like IGoogle, Netvibes, Windows Live) give people more choices. You can add a module from your favorite news provider or your favorite weather service. If it doesn't have a module, you can create one. While the Homepage 1.0 was founded on centralized content, the Homepage 2.0 is based on feeds and shared content. If Homepage 1.0 tried to lock-in the consumer, the new personalized homepage wants to be truly yours. When more services will open and create APIs, the personalized homepage will be a mashup of your online life.

ReadWriteWeb asks what will be the business model of the Homepage 2.0. Some ideas are letting businesses create their own branded homepages or affiliate marketing. But I think the answer is delivering ads that are appropriate for your preferred content. You choose what you like and the ads respect that.

In the meanwhile, I'll stick with my Homepage 0.1, that is about:blank.

Badware (True Beauty Lies Within)

Badware is an umbrella for an interesting type of software. While you think it's just a screensaver with pretty landscapes, the program also includes a stealth dialer if you use dial-up so you pay more for the Internet, it will change your homepage, your default search engine and even your life. You'll also get completely unrelated software that loads at start-up, pop-up ads and many icons on your desktop.

Jessica Simpson Screensaver is a "photo slide show of over 40 extremely high quality photos of the now famous Jessica Simpson with 103 transition effects, adjustable speed and mutable music."

But if you look behind the nice pictures, you'll find that:

Jessica Simpson Screensaver is bundled with a number of Trojan horses, or applications that can secretly install additional programs without disclosing to the user that any installation is occurring.

None of the bundled applications included with the Jessica Simpson Screensaver can be closed by a typical user. They must be closed by killing the individual processes from within the Windows Task Manager.

While Jessica Simpson Screensaver comes with an uninstaller, this only uninstalls the screensaver itself, not the bundled applications. None of the bundled applications includes an uninstaller, making uninstallation very difficult for a typical user. At least one of the bundled applications, GetMirar, actually requires the user to download a separate uninstaller from their website.

Jessica Simpson Screensaver is bundled with a stealth dialer called AvenueMedia (also known as "Money Tree"). Stealth dialers attempt to dial up numbers (such as 'adult' sites) with the user's modem, thereby incurring charges for the user.

Jessica Simpson Screensaver is bundled with a number of programs that display advertisements on the user's computer and track the user's web habits (e2give, GetMirar, EzuLa) or log the user's search terms (Safesurfing).

Prutect, one of the applications bundled with Jessica Simpson Screensaver, attempts to close or disable various anti-spyware and anti-virus applications (such as Adaware, Norton Internet Security, and Spybot Search & Destroy) if it finds them on the user's computer.

The adware that is bundled with the Jessica Simpson Screensaver causes numerous pop-up ads to appear on the user's desktop. Sometimes these ads are triggered by a user's search; sometimes they appear without any action being performed by the user (e.g., just leaving the computer alone).

Jessica Simpson Screensaver is one example of badware (or malware). Campaigns like StopBadware (that provided the description above) try to find this kind of software and make people aware of the danger of installing deceptive software. Google is one of the sponsors of this campaign.

A New Breed Of Spam

Who said spam can't be interesting? A new breed of spam hit my mail box. They aren't the usual mails that claim they'll help solve your medical problems or win a lot of money. Not at all: they contain excerpts from famous books. I could read texts from Stendhal, Galsworthy and they are very good.

"Yes, old man, I've been washing them ever since, but I cant get them clean. The first remark from Smither confirmed the uneasiness which had taken him forth.
It was HERE we came on your mother, Jon, and our stars were crossed.
She could call tomorrow, of course, openly at Green Street, and probably NOT see him. Could so short a sound mean so much, say so much, be so startling?"

As any quality content has a price, the mail comes with an ad attached as an image: it tells me to buy stocks from PPTL. I'll take that into account the next time I'll decide to make investments.

The mail was marked as spam by Gmail and didn't come alone. All the mails had he text from the Project Gutenberg, albeit they had some parsing errors. Another interesting thing is that the phrases are in random order, so it's pretty hard to make up something meaningful.



Related: Spam art

Why a Corporate Google Office Won't Be Successful

After Google launched a corporate package that includes mail, calendar and Page Creator, the question that rises is: will they be successful?

I think Google will only be successful with their program for schools and will have a moderate success only for small organizations.

Why? Businesses don't want to lose control over their information. Storing mails, documents, web pages on Google servers sounds tempting, but businesses want predictability and control. They'll also fear that Google's services aren't that reliable (Gmail has problems daily) and their image will suffer. "I couldn't answer you mail, dear client. Gmail was down for about an hour."

A solution like Page Creator is useful for students that want to have a personal page, but a small business won't be satisfied with such limited options.

Then there's the problem of privacy. A compromised Google Account might result in the disclosure of a lot of sensitive data. Google also has the right to close an account without giving any explanation. Furthermore, revealing to much data about your business to Google would seem unacceptable to many people.

eBay and Google Launch VoIP Click-to-Call Ads

Google will start to place ads on eBay and will become the exclusive provider of text ads outside of the US. Google will also use "click-to-call", a feature that makes it easier for businesses to connect with customers: with one click, you're able to talk for free with someone from the company that placed the ad. They will start to test the two components at the beginning of next year.

As of today, "click-to-call" works this way: you provide your phone number, Google calls your number and connects you with the company. In the near future, Google and eBay will use their VoIP clients (Google Talk and Skype) for click-to-call.

This move is interesting if you take into account that Google started to offer this year Google Checkout, a service that could evolve into a PayPal rival. Still, eBay is one of the largest advertisers on AdWords and the partnership will be good for both parties: Google will have more pages where to show ads, while eBay will makes sure Google will not expand too much into its area. It's also a good way to promote their VoIP clients.

Another interesting aspect of the agreement is that "the companies will also explore interoperability between Skype and Google Talk via open standards to enable text chat and online presence."

Google Launches Corporate Package

CNet reports that Google will expand Gmail for Your Domain into a much more interesting offer. Google will start to offer Google Apps for Your Domain, a hosted service that includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator. The service is mainly targeted at businesses, universities and other organizations, as it allows them to provide the same Google experience in a customized package.

The service is free, but Google will start to offer a premium service with larger storage, ad-free and with support at the end of the year.

Google's Dave Girouard said: "Organizations of all sizes face a common challenge of helping their users communicate and share information more effectively. A hosted service like Google Apps for Your Domain eliminates many of the expenses and hassles of maintaining a communications infrastructure, which is welcome relief for many small business owners and IT staffers."

The offer will, most likely, be more substantial in the future, with the addition of Writely, Google Spreadsheets and other applications and will start to look like a true Google Office. Google tried to be more attractive for corporate users by creating enterprise versions for Google Desktop and Google Toolbar, but without much success.

Amazon Grid

Amazon has two interesting services for developers.

One is Simple Storage Service (S3) that allows you to store and retrieve almost any amount of data. "It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites."

The other one is the just-launched Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (limited beta), a service that enables you to use Amazon's computing power for your own needs. You can install your own applications and libraries and select the configuration.

Maluke.com explains it's not too expensive to use EC2: "It costs 10 cents per full hour of usage + usual S3 bandwidth fees. That means that if you run it 24/7 it will cost around $72/month + bandwidth. That's cheaper than a dedicated server (with reliability similar to what I expect from Amazon) but more expensive than an unmanaged VPS. However, look at the specs: an instance is roughly equivalent to a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth (bursting to 1Gb) and that's a lot of power, sounds like Amazon will put a lot of smaller hosting companies out of business."

The service is very useful for start-ups that need a lot of computing power and a good scalability of their service.

I think Google needs to offer a similar service to attract more developers and to outsource the power of their servers. Google already has a proxy service and a open-source software hosting project. Maybe a free virtual computing environment (a Google Grid) is not that far.

Edit Web Pages Instantly In Opera

Opera has many interesting features. One of the most useful feature for webmasters (and not just for them) is "reload from cache". Load a web page, view the source and edit the code. After you finished, click on "reload from cache" and see the updated web page.

This way, you don't have the edit code locally, preview in the browser, upload it and then preview the page again. It's also useful if you want to create screenshots for a page that contains sensitive information. For example, you can remove the username from Gmail and other Google pages.

Opera also has a toolbar for web developers, similar to a well-known Firefox extension.

Update: For Firefox, there is a much more complex extension that lets you modify a Web page from the browser. It's called Platypus.

Related:
10 great features from Opera