Find the Number of Google Subscribers for Any Feed

Google exposed the number of Google Reader / iGoogle subscribers to a feed in the crawler's user-agent and in the Webmaster Console, but that's only useful for your own feed. What if you want to see how many subscribers Google Operating System has?

Now you can see the number of subscribers by searching for the feed in Google Reader: click on "Add subscription", enter the name of a blog or some parts of your feed's URL and you'll see the number of subscribers next to each (hopefully relevant) result. This number includes everyone who subscribed to a feed using Google, but the subscribers aren't necessarily active.

It's not very clear whether Google Reader shows the subscribers from all Google properties (iGoogle, orkut) or only Google Reader subscribers. FeedBurner's stats show higher numbers of Google subscribers than Google Reader.

Google Reader:

FeedBurner:

Update: Mihai Parparita confirms that "these numbers include subscribers across all Google services". There's a difference between FeedBurner's numbers and Google Reader's numbers because FeedBurner counts the subscribers to all of the feeds that redirect to the FeedBurner feed.

YouTube Brings Google Earth to Life

The latest version of Google Earth (namely 4.2) added support for Flash content in placemark balloons. Probably the most popular usage of Flash in the last 2 years is for displaying videos online, an idea that made YouTube a hit. Now that YouTube offers an option to enter the location of a video when you upload it, the connection between YouTube and Google Earth becomes clearer.

Google Earth added a layer that displays YouTube videos related to the current location. Videos bring a place to life and capture the atmosphere that makes it unique. You'll also find many stories from people that live there.

(Tip: The layer can be found in the layers sidebar, by expanding the featured content section.)

A similar layer is available in Google Maps as a mapplet, but unfortunately these are the only two ways to view geotagged YouTube videos. YouTube doesn't provide an option for restricting search results to a certain area or for viewing the location of a video.

Connecting content with geographical information is still a difficult problem because, in many cases, users have to manually enter the location. For its books index, Google automatically identified the places mentioned in the text and exposed this information in a Google Earth layer, but the data is imprecise. In Picasa Web Albums, you can enter the location or select it using Google Maps, but Google had to buy a community site centered on mapping photos to add high-quality photos to Google Earth.

Gmail's Storage Increases, 6 GB in January 2008

Gmail will increase the free storage gradually in the next days. On October 23, you'll get 4321 MB of storage, then the growth will slow down until January 4, when you'll have 6283 MB of storage. From January 4, you'll receive 3.3 MB every day, that's 10 times bigger than the current rate of growth.

Another good news is that Google Apps mail accounts will have the same quota as standard Gmail accounts, while Google Apps Premier Edition will have 25 GB mail accounts. Previously, Google Apps accounts had 2 GB of storage, while the business edition offered 10 GB per account.

Gmail didn't abandon the paid storage option, but you'll get around 50% more storage for the same price: 10 GB for $20/year, 40 GB for $75/year, 150 GB for $250/year and 400 GB for $500/year. The paid storage will probably become more attractive when Google adds more services, like Google Docs, JotSpot or GDrive.

"In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our "Infinity+1" storage plan. At that time, we realized we'd never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able," explains the Gmail Blog. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft also increased the storage (Yahoo even claims to offer "infinite" storage) and Gmail became the top webmail service with the least amount of free storage.

From Google to Facebook

"On Friday July 13th, 2007 I resigned from Google in search of new challenges and risks. This was a hard decision to come to and I have been seriously thinking about it for the last few months. In the end I decided (with support from my wife) that I am at the point in my career where I can make risky decisions." [two months later...] "I'm now at facebook and love it! Well I've been here for 2 months now. I have the same kind of excitement about work that I had early on at Google. I can get lots and lots done and the only thing slowing me down is how quickly I can go. What we will do in the coming years is really exciting!" (Pedram Keyani, who left orkut for Facebook)

"A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven't already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company. Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. (...) That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land." (Justin Rosenstein, ex-Googler)

Now the news is that Benjamin Ling, who worked on Google Checkout and Google SMS, left Google for Facebook. "Ling will be heading the Facebook platform, the software architecture upon which the popular social network is built."

While Facebook's recent growth influenced Google's plans in the social space, it's hard to move fast when you're expanding in so many directions. Organizational inertia can begin to set in, making new product launches more difficult. "People will say, 'That doesn't live up to Google's standards,'" says Mayer. "But, ultimately, Google's reputation becomes a burden," explained Marissa Mayer in a Business Week article from 2005. And Facebook could be just the right place for recreating the initial excitement of working for a company with big goals and challenging projects.

{ Screenshot from a Facebook ad posted by Valleywag. }

Google Maps Universal Search

Google Maps implemented its own "universal search" by mixing personalized maps and KML files with standard local results. Depending on the query, you could see a group of up to three community results individualized on the map using blue pushpins. Until now, these user-created maps were displayed if there weren't relevant business listings for your query, but now they're a part of the standard results.

"The blue markers ('community maps') indicate relevant user-contributed results for your search. You can click on the 'see more community maps' link either in the community box or at the bottom of the page to see more user-contributed results," explains Google.

Google includes in the search index all the public personalized maps, but also geolocated content from the web: GeoRSS feeds and KML files. So you'll be able to find Flickr photos that have a public location or news from topix.com. The index is far from being comprehensive, so it would be nice to see in Google Maps all the content from the web related to a location: photos, videos, news, blog posts, events.

Six New Cities Added to Google Street View

Google continues to add street-view imagery for 6 new US cities, even after Immersive Media announced it will terminate the content license agreement at the end of the year. The new cities are: Chicago, Phoenix, Tucson, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Portland (the first three cities have high-resolution images). Google Street View now covers 15 cities in the US.

"Ever wish you could pan up to the very top of a 50-story skyscraper using Street View? Well, prepare yourself for some serious sightseeing; we've introduced the ability to pan up in most new cities," announces the LatLong blog. A good example is the Sears Tower, the tallest building in the United States.

Google Buys Jaiku, a Lifestreaming Service

Last month, Google bought a mobile social network. The latest Google acquisition is Jaiku, "an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones". It's similar to Twitter, the service that made the concept of microblogging successful, but Jaiku also lets you add feeds from other sites and mix them with your messages. Like in Twitter, you can add a list of contacts and see an overview of their latest updates. You can post messages from the web, by SMS or using a mobile application for Nokia S60 phones.

ReadWriteWeb thinks that Google preferred Jaiku to Twitter because it "may be stronger on the mobile platform than Twitter and probably came at a much lower price". It's worth noting that Twitter was started by Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and a former Googler. Other former Google employees launched FriendFeed, a service that merged the feeds from sites that broadcast your online activities. Jaiku is a combination between Twitter and FriendFeed.

Jaiku creates a lifestream by joining timestamped bits of content that define your life. "Every time I ping Twitter, the message is time stamped. Every time I post a link to Del.icio.us, that's time stamped. Every time I upload a picture to Flickr, a time stamp of when the picture was taken is also sent. Whenever I listen to a song on iTunes, the track information is sent to Last.fm with a time stamp. (...) Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn't it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?" wrote Jeremy Keith in November 2006, defining the concept of lifestream.

"Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it's more difficult to keep track of everyone when they're running around at warp speed. That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Jaiku, a company that's been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most -- regardless of whether you're at a computer or on a mobile phone," explains Google the decision.

The service could be a part of Google's mobile plans and one of the features included in the Google Phone. It could also be integrated in Google's social project that intends to produce activity streams and build a social network around Gmail and the rest of Google's communication apps.

Google Crosses $600 a Share for the First Time

Google's stock price had an impressive growth in the past two weeks and, for the first time, GOOG was traded at more than $600, closing the day at $609.62.

"The shares have increased more than sevenfold from their initial public offering price of $85, bringing the nine-year-old company's market value to $190 billion - eclipsing bigger, more mature businesses like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. It took 10 1/2 months for Google's stock to leap from $500 to $600 and more than a year for the journey from $400 to $500. The shares hurdled $300 in June 2005 after passing the $100 and $200 thresholds in 2004," writes AP.

Google didn't launch a lot of exciting products lately, so it's difficult to give an explanation for this sudden optimism. "Google stands to benefit because it runs the largest advertising network on the world's hottest marketing medium, the Internet," wrote AP in September. Google wants to extend its dominance in the mobile space, that's why it launched a mobile version of AdSense and ads for Google Mobile Search. A Google Phone that comes with an operating system and software produced by Google could make rich web applications more accessible and increase Google's ad revenues. Coupling this with Google's plans in the social space and collaborative software, the future sounds promising.

Search Engine Comparison Poll: The Results

Six days ago, I posted a poll that asked you to evaluate the quality of the first results from Google, Yahoo, Windows Live. You had to enter a query you were particularly interested in and decide which result is the best. If you found two or three equally good results, you were allowed to select all of them.

Obviously, the poll doesn't have any scientific value, but it's still interesting to see that Google doesn't have an impressive score (in only 51% of the cases, Google delivered the best result), while Windows Live and Yahoo have similar scores: 35% for Windows Live and 30% for Yahoo. It's also interesting to see that these results were almost constant every day of the experiment, so there might be some truth there.

While I didn't monitor the correlation between queries and votes, here's a list of some of the most frequent queries: Google, test, directoryEntry, Linux, Microsoft, Radiohead, cow, Gmail, Java, search, sex, "Magnus Franklin", The Torah and the West Bank, art Liverpool, sweet krissy, quchen, server based solutions, ruby, sweet krissy.

Google Online Desktop

Even though Google offers many web applications that could replace traditional software, the integration between them is barely visible. The closest thing to an online desktop that displays your favorite applications is iGoogle, where you can set up themed tabs like this one.

To switch from Gmail to Google Calendar, you'll click on the navigation bar and open a new window or tab. While you can always resize the windows and keep both Gmail and Google Calendar visible, it would be nice if iGoogle provided a way to freely move the gadgets inside the window, like in yourminis.com.

With the addition of Google Desktop gadgets and the customizable layouts, the personalized homepage could really replace your desktop. But gadgets need to be more powerful and offer more than a list of links. Ideally, the Gmail gadget should have an expanded version that lets you read messages, compose mail and search inside the archive.

Max designed a small proof-of-concept that groups many of Google's web applications. "I think that it would be a good idea for Google to group all of the online applications in to a single web application. Something like an eDesktop," he writes at Google Groups.

Max's vision for a Google eDesktop. Click to enlarge.

Public Transit Directions in Google Maps

Google Maps integrated the data about public transportation routes previously available at Google Transit. That means you'll have a new option for directions: take public transit. "Google Maps will suggest up to four trips for you to take, which may contain different modes of transportation. For example, one trip may use the train while another uses the bus." You can choose the departure or the arrival time and see estimations for cost and travel time.

Unfortunately, the service is only available in a very limited number of US cities (including San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Dallas, Seattle) and Japan. There are already some very good trip planners like HopStop or Transport for London, but all of them are limited to a city or an area. Google Maps should increase the coverage and make the transit directions available from the mobile phone.