Tutorial Proggraming Free

Google Reader Notifier

So you use Google Reader and Firefox, but you don't want to visit reader.google.com from time to time to see what's new. Google Reader Notifier is a Firefox extension, developed by Mark D.B.D, that shows you how many new posts are in Google Reader. You can also see the number of unread items for each label and get alerts if there's something new. Of course, those numbers aren't very helpful because +100 can be anything from 101 to a googol or more.

For Mac users, there's an even better solution: a software called the same, that has sound alerts, shows the titles for the latest posts and sits nicely in the the menubar next to Google Notifier.

Mercora IMRadio

"Mercora's mission is to catalog and organize the world's music and make it universally searchable and legally listenable." Sounds familiar?

Mercora is a radio network that lets everyone create a radio station and stream music in a P2P fashion (people can't download music). You can invite your friends and listen to their music, search for an artist and find all his albums or just choose a genre. Mercora lets you discover similar artists, read biographies and add comments.

The software, Mercora IMRadio, has a social side, as you can log in with the username/password for an instant messaging client (Google Talk included) and invite your contacts. You can create a profile, interact with other users, share photos and much more.

Regarding copyright, Mercora says: "you can webcast any music that you own legally. These recordings must originate from an authorized source (either created originally by the artist or record label that owns the copyright), and are not unlawful copies that have been downloaded illegally or obtained from an unauthorized third party."

Mercora IMRadio is a freeware for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It uses an open source format for streaming (OGG Vorbis) and it depends a lot on network connection speed, so you may notice buffering problems.

Related stuff:
Vibe Streamer - personal MP3 server
Hype Machine - music search engine
Winamp moves to the web

Google Answers Comeback

While everyone notices that Google Answers is dead, the reactions vary. Google Answers researchers want it back and sign petitions, Greg Linden thinks "it is great that Google is shutting down some of its failed experiments to try to keep their focus", and Yahoo celebrates.

"The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months." And that happened 4 years ago, in April 2002. Here's an explanation for launching the product, from that time:

There are a lot of people looking for information on the web but don't have the time to find the information," said Cindy McCaffrey, Google's Vice President, Corporate Marketing. "This program takes the burden of time away." McCaffrey also said the program should appeal to people who don't understand how to search, and would prefer to delegate the process to a professional.

So why shutting down Google Answers?

Over the past year, many of you have written to ask about the future of Google Answers. Today we can finally offer a definitive response: after four and a half years, we're closing up shop. We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information.

The other efforts are:

* Google Co-op, that wants to annotate the web with the help of experts. Labels let you refine the search results and deal with a smaller set of authoritative sites.

* Google Q&A tries to crawl the web looking for facts like the population of Italy or the birthplace of George W. Bush. You can improve the service by adding your own facts using Subscribed Links.

* Google Base enables people to submit structured content and make it searchable online. Google also try to extract structured data from the web automatically.

Extraction of information from authoritative sites and building a huge database of connected information - this might the base of a new Google Answers.

Related:
The next step in search

Weather Forecasts in Google Video

Google Video has partnered with AccuWeather.com and now includes weather forecasts for important cities in the US. Each video has 94 seconds and is updated daily, so you can bookmark its address.

Google also shows information about weather if you enter queries like [Tampa forecast] in the web search.

Google Good News

Hello and welcome to Google News. Here are the headlines:

* World Peace sparks outpourings of joy. Almost all of the human race were united today in a vast expression of joy in response to the newfound world peace.

* Golden Age back. People leave their doors unlocked. Kids play on the streets. Community spirit back. Crime rate down. Drugs non-existent. Hovis Van drives slowly down cobblestone streets.

* Scientists pack up: "Everything explained". Scientists all round the world today went home for a nice cup of tea after a revolutionary breakthrough explained everything. The new unified theory (NUT) unites science and religion, explains genetics, the origin of the universe, quantum phenomena, and provides the first instant cure for a hangover in human history.

* All music to be free. Record companies are to give away their music. Artists will give free concerts. iPODs to be given to every child at birth.

More details at David McCandless' Goodle Good News, a vision of Google News homepage that will cheer you up.

Google's Plans for 2007

Business 2.0 asked 50 people "how to succeed in 2007". Two of the key people at Google talked about company's intentions and plans for the year to come. The key words seem to be: simplicity, integration and personalization.

Sergey Brin:

"Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it's very difficult. Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing.

We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features."

Eric Schmidt:

"Silicon Valley companies have a tendency to develop these systems that rely on complexity. But it produces things like the personal computer running Windows. Google from the beginning focused on the simple search box, the simple search page.

We have the tiger by the tail in that we have this huge phenomenon of personalization. Now we need to make it simpler for people. We are trying to shape the innovation going forward from here and get things more integrated, make Google more integrated. This is a big change in the way we run the company. In the past the philosophy has been "get this done, get it built, and get it out." But continuing that, we would end up with hundreds of products named X-Google, and people can only remember five products."

November Recap: New Answers for Old Problems

Problem: Google Checkout is not successful.
Solution: Free processing and other incentives for holidays.

Problem: orkut doesn't do well in the US.
Solution: make it available to everyone and integrate Google Talk.

Problem: Gmail needs some Web 2.0 changes.
Solution: a new design for displaying messages.

Problem: Vista comes for Google Desktop too.
Solution: a transparent sidebar.

Problem: Windows Live Local has click-to-call.
Solution: add click-to-call to Google Maps.

Problem: it's hard to read books in Google Book Search.
Solution: new Adobe Reader-like design. Still few full-view books.

Problem: very few people use Google Answers.
Solution: delete Google Answers and come up with a better service. This time a free service.

Problem: people want charts in Google Spreadsheets.
Solution: new functions, easy-to-publish spreadsheets and an API. Also kill iRows.

Comment of the month (from Jon):
"This is sad. Yahoo Answers is pitiful. It should be renamed Yahoo Preteen Opinions, because that's the quality of "answers" one will find there. Unresearched, juvenile, illiterate, asinine, absurd, naïve, giggly, drivel is about the extent of what you will find there. Oh, but wait, at least they have disgusting, cutesy little avatars.

OK, maybe it's not all that bad, but Yahoo Answers does not even come close to the quality of the Google Answers website. The only reason it has succeeded is that there are far more people wishing to hear free, feel-good, life-affirming drivel (and see cutesy avatars), than those who will pay for well-researched answers (life-affirming or not). Just sickening."

No idea why, but people found my 10 tips for Google Image Search useful.

Google Spreadsheets Has an API

I told you Google Spreadsheets is way ahead of Google Docs. Now you can update your spreadsheets programmatically using Google Spreadsheets API. You can use it to get a list of spreadsheets for an account, to add or delete rows from a spreadsheets or to send simple SQL-like queries.

While the API isn't powerful enough to create desktop applications, as you can't manage spreadsheets, you could use the API to synchronize multiple spreadsheets or to import data from the web.

The API uses Google Data, "a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web".

{ Found on Blogoscoped. }

Pieces of Google

If you have a screenshot of a Google product taken in a special moment, if you found something interesting at Google.com and want to share it with the world, if you have a meaningful photo related to Google, post a link in the comments.

The best photos will be a part of an album that will be available at the end of the year.

* Don't submit copyrighted photos. Your photos will be licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike license, unless you request otherwise. Please remove personal or sensitive information.

Update: 12 pieces of Google.

Google Display Advertising Network

John Chow has been invited to join Google Display Advertising Network, a new CPM network that uses image and video ads.

"The Google Display Advertising Network was created so Google can go after Fortune 1000 companies, which buy advertising to build a brand more than to sell a product. (...) Every display network member negotiates a flat CPM rate with Google. The contracts are one year long and publishers have to guarantee Google that they will provide a minimum amount of ad inventory each month."

There's no mention of this network on Google's sites and the only way to become a part of it is to be invited by Google.

Major Update in Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets continues to be surprising and miles ahead of the other half of the package, Google Docs. This is probably the biggest update since the product has been launched.

Now you can publish a spreadsheets in every imaginable format (HTML, PDF, XLS, ODS, CSV) or as a feed. What's great is that the file is automatically updated, so you'll be almost certain that someone gets the latest version. You can also publish all the sheets or only some of them. But the coolest thing you can do is to embed a spreadsheet into your blog or site. The spreadsheet you can see here shows the top 20 queries for this blog's search from April 1st until yesterday.

Google Spreadsheets shows you all the revisions of a spreadsheets, so it's easy to go back to an earlier version. And there are two new functions that use information from the web:

* GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute") that returns information about a stock. GoogleFinance("GOOG", "price") returns the current price for GOOG.

* GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute") that returns answers to simple questions like: population of Italy, Jay Leno's date of birth, that usually appear at the top of search results in Google.com. GoogleLookup("Italy", "population") will return the population of Italy.

Don't forget to place an equal in front of the function name.

The Failure of Google Answers

Google Answers, the service where you could ask questions in exchange of a sum of money, is now officially dead. "We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information."

The problem? While Google Answers is almost invisible, Yahoo Answers is a big success, produces results for many search results page and has a big community. The big difference between the two services is that Yahoo Answers doesn't involve money: no one pays or gets paid. But, as I showed in Asking the Internet, "while Google's researchers give more detailed answers, Yahoo uses the advantage of having a strong community" and sorts the good answers.

So what happened to Google Answers? Let's see what Google Answers experts have to say:

"The quality of GA has become diluted with spam questions that are conceivably attempts from credit card thieves to verify the validity of stolen credit card numbers, webmasters realizing that a mention of their website in a GA question may boost their ranking in the search results (although this may have been resolved), and the disappearance of researchers."

"It would be nice to think that G-A has itself reduced the demand for search assistance by demonstrating how to search and how to use search features that are not immediately obvious to the layman/woman). But it could be that people have just become more savvy to the system by themselves."

"I think a big problem is that there is no obvious link to GA anymore from Google's homepage."

"Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they're not accepting new researchers? I answered two questions (correctly, I might add -- one $5 and one $20) before I realized that I had to be a "researcher" in order to submit an actual answer (as opposed to a comment) and get paid for it."

The problem seem to be that people don't want to pay some experts to get detailed answers, they just want simple answers from the man on the street. People don't have time to read books, newspapers with a lot of pages and long articles, but they're eager to watch reality shows. Listening people as clueless as you gives you a comforting feeling.

Offline Google

Felice M., from Italy, sent me this:

Last Wednesday we had, here in Italy, some big troubles connecting to Google services; we have been disconnected for two days. It was a problem with some routers of our Telecom Operator.

Reading local blogs, people underline that we are too dependent on web 2.0 services (..) In the end, we lend our data to Google in exchange for advertisements and world indexing (and marketing research etc.)

And this is telling me that we need a new feature in our Google Operating System: BACKUP.

Let's call it SNAP (snap.google.com); a service that will present me with all the Google Services I'm subscribed to (personal web site, notes, Gmail, Picasa Web, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc.), allowing me to choose the set of data I want to download to my PC for web backup purposes.

I would like to be able to choose data to download based at least on size and age, but a combination of a lot of other switches is, for sure, welcome.

Opera Mini 3.0 Launched

The new version of the best free mobile browser is out. Opera Mini 3.0 includes a feed reader, makes it easier to share photos, has support for secure connections (SSL) and it's optimized for AJAX web pages. In addition to being slick, fast and easy to use.

You can test it using this Java emulator on your computer or just point your mobile phone to operamini.com to download it.

Opera Mini does a much better job than Google's transcoding and tries to keep the browsing experience intact, so you'll see a single page instead of multiple smaller pages, most of the time.

Mobile YouTube

New York Times reports that a select number of YouTube videos will be available next month to Verizon Wireless subscribers. Despite the fact that the service won't be free, YouTube expects to be successful. Modern people don't have patience anymore and don't know how to enjoy the rare quiet moments, so they'll go to YouTube on their mobile phone to view some funny videos.

"Verizon Wireless and YouTube said the service would be available early next month. The companies would not discuss the financial terms of their deal but said Verizon would have the exclusive rights to distribute YouTube videos on mobile phones for a limited period of time."

If the experiment is successful, expect more carriers to make deals for mobile YouTube videos.

Related:
Almost a mobile Google Video
Google Video remote control

Historical Trends in Google Finance

Google Finance shows historical data in the charts, so now it's easier to see the evolution of a stock. The earliest year available in Google Finance is 1970 (until this update it was 2001), while Yahoo Finance shows data from 1962.

Yahoo Mail Maps Addresses

Yahoo Mail has become a little smarter. If you receive an email that includes addresses, Yahoo Mail recognizes them and underlines them, so you can easily view on a map, get directions or add to the address book. Yahoo Mail also underlines email addresses and phone numbers.

Yahoo has a very broad definition for addresses because even country names are underlined. But instead of the "add to Address Book" option, you'll see search results. If you don't like the new features, you can go to Mail Options and turn them off.

Gmail had this feature for a long time, but the integration is more subtle.

Related:
Refine search results in Yahoo Mail
The new Yahoo Mail, slowly released

The $100 Laptop (Video)

One Laptop per Child is a non-profit organization that develops a $100 laptop, so that every child can have access to education and technology.

The actual specifications aren't very different from what Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop per Child, envisioned. "The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3x the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data."

The first machines have already been built, as you can see from these pictures. And here's a small demo that shows the user interface. Note that the operating system is emulated using VMware.

Daylight Map

Daylight Map is a segmentation of the Earth using the day/night criteria. You can add places on the map and even change the date. The site also shows you the local time for each place you add on the Google map. If you bookmark a permalink to the current state, you can check it later. I think this presentation is more attractive than some random world clocks.

You probably know that if you search for [time in city-name], the major search engines show direct answers at the top of the page.

Google Checkout for Holiday Shopping

The new Google Checkout site created for holidays is now live and includes a small selection of colorful, popular gifts. Google says thousands of merchants accept Google Checkout and, using this payment system, you'll eliminate 15 steps, on average. Another incentive is that you'll get $10 off purchases of $30, or $20 off purchases of $50 and more. You can also go to that site to make donations to charities: for the first donation of $30 or more, Google adds $10.

These days, Google Checkout is almost everywhere. Let's recap a list of places where you might see Checkout's shopping cart:

* searching for products, you'll see a Froogle OneBox and a link to products that can be bought using Checkout.

* you may see Google ads that have a small shopping cart.

* stores that accept Checkout and search results that can be bought from these stores are clearly marked at Froogle.

* many stores show a "Google Checkout" option.

Update: John Battelle had a bad experience with Google Checkout and took a closer look at the privacy policy.

Google's Ranking Algorithm

Many people have tried to find how Google ranks web pages. While the algorithm is still secret and in continuous change, we know it uses more than 200 signals, one of the most important being PageRank.

As Google explains... "the heart of our software is PageRank, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools."

Compiling the opinions of webmasters, search engine optimizers and Google's explanation, Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist is a long list of positive and negative factors that may influence a page's ranking. While the list contains a lot of interesting observations and suggestions, you should take everything with a grain of salt.

The Full Google Master Plan 1.0

Google's Master Plan, from the lobby whiteboard, has been erased two months ago. Chris diBona says: "It was getting kind of crufty." The mix of serious plans with geek humor shows a lot about Google's culture. From hiring hardware engineer to redesigning TCP/IP and HTTP, from the space elevator to buying AOL, from Google OS to Noosphere, and finally to saving the world.

You can see the now-erased Master Plan in a series of photos taken by Chris diBona and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license if you go to this album (you should click on magnify button to see each photo clearly). Or you could check the plan in one single high-resolution image from Undergoogle.com.

{ Rediscovered by Googlified. }

Powerful Search Features in Netvibes

Here's an interesting new feature from Netvibes, probably the best personalized homepage. Now you can perform a search in all your feeds simultaneously. You can filter only recent content from your feeds, and also from other modules like Gmail or ToDo list. While searching your feeds is not something innovative, this feature is powerful because you can see each feed separately.

But the fun starts when you add search modules for web search, image search etc. If you click on Search, you'll get results from all the search engines and for all the search flavors simultaneously. To see the snippets, you have to hover over each search result, but that's the price you have to pay in order to see all this information in one place.

I know what Google would say: "but we have Google Ajax Search API", and it's very nice, but Netvibes' solution is simpler and works for almost any module.

What's the Best Embedded Video Player?

Life Goggles compares seven online video sites: YouTube, Google Video, MSN Soapbox, Revver, Blip.tv, MyHeavy and Vimeo. One video has been uploaded to all these sites and you can see the differences between embedded Flash players, the video quality and the information displayed next to the video.

The only players that offer some information about the video are: Soapbox, MyHeavy and Vimeo, while MyHeavy lets you rate the video from the player. If we look at the video quality, Soapbox and YouTube seem to be the best and also the fastest. Revver is the only service that shows ads at the end of the video and does a revenue split with the publisher. The easiest to share are the videos from Soapbox, MyHeavy and Vimeo, that lets you copy the code directly from the player. Google Video only wins at simplicity and design.

That means Microsoft's Soapbox has the best video player. For the moment, Soapbox is an invitation-only service.

Lyrics Plugin

Good things are simple and come in small packages. If you wanted a plugin for your music player that finds and displays lyrics for your songs, Lyrics Plugin is a good answer. It's free, small (around 60 KB) and available for Winamp and Windows Media Player. You don't have to configure anything, the plugin works well out of the box.

The drawback of this plugin is that the lyrics database is not very big, so you may still find famous songs that don't have lyrics. But it's easy to add them.