Last year, Google acquired a data visualization technology from Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit organization. Gapminder's technology, Trendalyzer, was used to visualize data from United Nations Common Database in an intuitive way. To quote from Gapminder's site, "this software unveils the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics." For example, you could see the evolution of carbon dioxide emissions in a country over time or find correlations between CO2 emissions and the income per capita.
Google probably intends to use this technology to visualize custom data. One of the interfaces that will allow you create your own Trendalyzer visualizations is an iGoogle gadget which creates a Flash multi dimensional chart. The input is a file with the following structure: the first column is the item's name, the second is time, the third is for x-coordinates, the forth is for y-coordinates, and the fifth is the size of a ball. I tried to upload a file that has this structure, but the gadget didn't accept it. The gadget is probably a part of a new service that also hosts your data.
This is not the only data visualization gadget developed. Another gadget creates an interactive table that supports filtering and grouping, the simple table gadget lets you perform queries, while the heat map gadget "displays a map with color intensities that match given values". There are also gadgets for pie charts, column charts, bar charts, area charts, image lines, scatter charts, organizational charts, time series.
Hopefully we'll be able to actually use these gadgets and Google will create a service around visualizing data.
Update: The gadgets are a part of a new Google Spreadsheets feature.
Search, Ads, Yahoo and Microsoft
While everyone comments about Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo, I think it's interesting to look back at the struggle to stop Google's domination in search and PPC ads.
Yahoo Inc. yesterday announced plans to buy Internet advertising firm Overture Services Inc. for $1.63 billion in stock and cash in a move designed to help the online giant exploit the growing market for sponsored search results. (...)
Overture, formerly known as GoTo.com, pioneered the approach of letting advertisers bid for the right to place their links alongside search terms and paying only when users click through to their Web site. Overture, based in Pasadena, Calif., claims 88,000 advertisers and licenses its commercial results to Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN.com and other Web portals. Google has copied Overture's business model and claims 100,000 advertisers. (...)
Overture sells sponsored search results to other portals besides Yahoo. Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com is one of Overture's top customers, and analysts consider it highly unlikely the Redmond, Wash., software giant will want to continue using Overture's ad network once rival Yahoo completes the takeover.
(Washington Post, July 15, 2003)
On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he regretted not spending more on in-house search research and development in the past, but said the company has addressed the oversight and plans to unveil its own search product within the next 12 months.
"Not only do I think Microsoft is capable of building extraordinary search technology, I believe Microsoft is hell-bent on developing that technology in Redmond (Wash.) without a material acquisition," said Rohan. "That is the Microsoft way."
(CNet, March 26, 2004)
Rashtchy estimated that the search industry will reach nearly $7 billion in revenue by 2007, growing at a compounded rate of 35% each year. Those kinds of numbers attract a lot of attention. In 2003, Yahoo!, which was outsourcing its search to Google, wanted in on the action and paid $1.63 billion to buy Overture. Last month Yahoo! dumped Google and now exclusively uses Overture, officially declaring war. Sleeping giant Microsoft, meanwhile, was rumored to have made an unsuccessful stab at acquiring Google, and is now using its nearly infinite resources to improve it own search engine.
(Forbes, April 26, 2004)
Keyword search is the largest component of U.S. online advertising, and Google derives virtually all of its ad revenues from this category. The growth in that segment speaks for itself. Based on data from PricewaterhouseCoopers/IAB Internet Advertising Reports, the overall keyword search category generated $81 million in revenues in 2000, representing only 1% of overall online ad sales. Jump ahead to 2003, and keyword search accounted for $2.5 billion in revenues -- a hefty 35% of the total U.S. online ad-sales pie.
(BusinessWeek, June 11, 2004)
As previously reported, Microsoft's Internet group is developing a pay-per-click ad-bidding system that pairs search results with sponsored text messages from advertisers. Yahoo's Overture Services currently supplies MSN with sponsored search links, which complement MSN-sold "featured sites." (...) With the product, Microsoft will move into the mother lode of a multibillion-dollar ad business dominated by Google and Yahoo. Search-engine marketing is expected to be worth as much as $5 billion this year, and nearly $9 billion annually within four years, according to Jupiter Research. Microsoft's piece of the pie is smaller than the shares enjoyed by market leaders Yahoo and Google, and the software giant is hungry for more. Google fields 35.1 percent of the searches online, followed by Yahoo at 31.8 percent and MSN at 16 percent, according to ComScore QSearch.
(ZDNet, March 16, 2005)
Microsoft is taking on the great Google Money Machine with an inhouse answer to Google Adwords.
Step forward Microsoft adCenter, launched yesterday to pump out all-paid search traffic on MSN and other Microsoft online properties in the US. Microsoft’s adCenter replaces Yahoo!'s Overture as the paid-for search engine on MSN. The only surprise is how long it took Microsoft to make the switcheroo – predicted ever since Yahoo! bought Overture in 2003 – and confirmed this time last year by Microsoft at its annual MSN Strategic Account Summit.
(The Register, May 4, 2006)
The Internet search-advertising wars are getting hotter: Vowing to catch up to industry leader Google, Yahoo Monday will demonstrate an overhauled advertising system that promises to generate higher revenue and enlist more clients.
On May 4, Microsoft unveiled its own search advertising program and said it would invest up to $6 billion in a bid to catch up with Google.
Yet Google still easily dominates paid search ads — those little text ads that appear near search queries. The Internet powerhouse has made several enhancements to its search program as well.
Google says it hasn't heard anything from Yahoo or MSN to make it worry.
"There's been nothing that's announced that makes me want to change what we do," says Richard Holden, director of production management for Google's paid search programs.
(USA Today, May 14, 2006)
Struggling to make a dent in rival Google Inc.'s dominance over online search, Yahoo Inc. reported a quarterly decline in profit Tuesday but managed to match already lowered expectations. (...) During a Tuesday conference call with analysts, Susan Decker, who was promoted to president when Semel was replaced by Yang, acknowledged Yahoo's past failings.
She said the company had been slow to recognize emerging trends in online advertising and that Yahoo's management structure was overly complex, opening the door for more nimble competitors. (...)
Yahoo commanded an 18.3% share of paid-search marketing spending in June, up from May's 17.8%, Rohan said, but June's percentage is still the third lowest at Yahoo since January 2006.
"Google continues to dominate spending with over 75% market share," he wrote. "Panama stabilized Yahoo's market share slide, but has not reversed it."
Rohan said that even with Panama, advertisers see a better return on investment with Google, which boasts higher click-through rates at lower prices. "Yahoo's Panama was modestly successful but only temporarily halted Google's gains in marketshare," he said.
(Hollywood Reporter, July 18, 2007)
Despite the hopes of many and rumors that Yahoo would post "strong" earnings, Q4 2007 results were mixed, and net income was down from a year ago. In addition, CEO Jerry Yang said the company faced "headwinds" in 2008 and offered weak guidance but promised a return to growth in 2009. Investors were unhappy, and stock was down at one point 10 percent in after-hours trading (this morning it has recovered).
Total revenue in Q4 was $1.83 billion, which represented 8 percent growth of the same period a year ago ($1.7 billion). Full year 2007 revenues for Yahoo were $6.97 billion. Simultaneously, Yahoo announced it would be cutting 1,000 jobs.
(Search Engine Land, January 30, 2008)
Social Graph API
In "Thoughts on the Social Graph", Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
Five months later, Brad Fitzpatrick announced that Google will start to index FOAF files and the XFN microformats from web pages to gather publicly defined relations between people. For example, "XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships."
It's easy to edit the links from your blogroll to highlight your friends or your acquaintances.
<a href="http://danielboyd.com/" rel="friend">Daniel</a>
You can also link to your other site or to your pages from Flickr, del.cio.us, Twitter etc. and consolidate your online identity:
<a href="http://twitter.com/ev" rel="me">My Twitters</a>
Google allows you to access these social relationships using a simple JSON API. The API could be used by social applications to discover some of your friends that already use the same application. "So you've just built a totally sweet new social app and you can't wait for people to start using it, but there's a problem: when people join they don't have any friends on your site. They're lonely, and the experience isn't good because they can't use the app with people they know. You could ask them to search for and add all their friends, but you know that every other app is asking them to do the same thing and they're getting sick of it." Since the data is already publicly available, this API makes it easy to discover your friends and let you select the ones you want to keep in the new context.
For example, Bradfitz from LiveJournal has a friend Jane274. When Brad joins Twitter, the API could discover that he also have a LiveJournal page and his LiveJournal friend Jane274 is the same as Jane from Twitter. This way, Brad found a friend who has a Twitter account.
Of course, the problem is that few people use FOAF and XFN to declare their relationships, but Google's new API could make them more visible and social applications could use them. Ultimately, Google could also index the relationships from social networks if people are comfortable with that.
There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens. (...) If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.
Five months later, Brad Fitzpatrick announced that Google will start to index FOAF files and the XFN microformats from web pages to gather publicly defined relations between people. For example, "XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships."
It's easy to edit the links from your blogroll to highlight your friends or your acquaintances.
<a href="http://danielboyd.com/" rel="friend">Daniel</a>
You can also link to your other site or to your pages from Flickr, del.cio.us, Twitter etc. and consolidate your online identity:
<a href="http://twitter.com/ev" rel="me">My Twitters</a>
Google allows you to access these social relationships using a simple JSON API. The API could be used by social applications to discover some of your friends that already use the same application. "So you've just built a totally sweet new social app and you can't wait for people to start using it, but there's a problem: when people join they don't have any friends on your site. They're lonely, and the experience isn't good because they can't use the app with people they know. You could ask them to search for and add all their friends, but you know that every other app is asking them to do the same thing and they're getting sick of it." Since the data is already publicly available, this API makes it easy to discover your friends and let you select the ones you want to keep in the new context.
For example, Bradfitz from LiveJournal has a friend Jane274. When Brad joins Twitter, the API could discover that he also have a LiveJournal page and his LiveJournal friend Jane274 is the same as Jane from Twitter. This way, Brad found a friend who has a Twitter account.
Of course, the problem is that few people use FOAF and XFN to declare their relationships, but Google's new API could make them more visible and social applications could use them. Ultimately, Google could also index the relationships from social networks if people are comfortable with that.
Personalizing Search Results Using Social Information
VentureBeat has an interview with Google's VP Marissa Mayer about social search. Marissa's definitions for social search is "any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection... Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend what movies are good to go see? or where should we go to dinner?, you are doing a verbal social search. You're trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a piece of information that would be better than what you'd come up with on your own."
She explains that Google tried to add a social layer by allowing its users to annotate search results in Google Co-op, but that didn't work very well. "There have been a few topical areas that have had a lot of traction, but overall the annotation model needs to evolve."
Marissa Mayer suggests that Google could show you the results labeled by the people you trust, for example your Facebook friends. Google could also personalize your search results by promoting web pages bookmarked by your friends. "PageRank itself relies on the link structure of the web to try to find the most authoritative pages. For example, it's clear that people would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited."
Asked about the future of search, Marissa predicted that in ten years search engines will answer to queries like "what movies are good to see?", "where's the nearest sushi restaurant that's good?" by using information from the user's social context. Basically, the social data is just another way to personalize search results, along with your search history or your location.
Once your social data becomes portable (and OpenSocial could play an important role here), Google could use aggregate information from your friends to modify the weights in a personalized PageRank model.
Related:
Google and social search
Google's no-longer-existent Facebook app
She explains that Google tried to add a social layer by allowing its users to annotate search results in Google Co-op, but that didn't work very well. "There have been a few topical areas that have had a lot of traction, but overall the annotation model needs to evolve."
Marissa Mayer suggests that Google could show you the results labeled by the people you trust, for example your Facebook friends. Google could also personalize your search results by promoting web pages bookmarked by your friends. "PageRank itself relies on the link structure of the web to try to find the most authoritative pages. For example, it's clear that people would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited."
Asked about the future of search, Marissa predicted that in ten years search engines will answer to queries like "what movies are good to see?", "where's the nearest sushi restaurant that's good?" by using information from the user's social context. Basically, the social data is just another way to personalize search results, along with your search history or your location.
Once your social data becomes portable (and OpenSocial could play an important role here), Google could use aggregate information from your friends to modify the weights in a personalized PageRank model.
Related:
Google and social search
Google's no-longer-existent Facebook app
The Number of Google Subscribers
Google Reader Subscribers Count is a discreet Greasemonkey script that shows the number of Google subscribers to a site's feeds. The number is overlayed at the bottom of each page that has feeds and it's one of the ways you can measure the popularity of a site. If you click on the number, you can subscribe to the feed.
As usually, the script requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension, although it could also work in other browsers. A related script is Google Reader Subscribe Button, which shows if you've subscribed to a feed and lets you subscribe to it in Google Reader. It would be interesting to combine the two scripts.
As usually, the script requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension, although it could also work in other browsers. A related script is Google Reader Subscribe Button, which shows if you've subscribed to a feed and lets you subscribe to it in Google Reader. It would be interesting to combine the two scripts.
Tips for Google Mobile Search
Google's mobile search engine (google.com/m) has a lot of features that aren't available in the regular desktop interface. Its latest interface was launched in March last year in the US and yesterday in the UK, France, Germany and Canada. The main change in Google's mobile interface is the integration between the web results, images, news and local results, which are displayed on a single pages, based on their relevance to the query. Here are some features specific to Google Mobile Search:
1. Information about sports: European football, NBA, NHL and more.
2. Optimized calculator that shows the results in a search box so you can use them for other calculations.
3. Weather conditions for airports
4. Since Google shows the transcoded version of search results, it can improve the way you access the web pages. If the results are very big, Google splits them in several pages and it can send you directly to the section that is the most relevant to your query.
5. The phonebook listings let you call people directly from search results, the same as Google's local search results:
6. Google promotes the site specifically designed for mobile phones and you can recognize them by looking for a small phone icon next to the snippet.
7. You can hide the images from search results by clicking on "Hide Images" at the bottom of the page. Google only shows thumbnails, which load faster and are more appropiate for small screens.
8. If you enter your location on the homepage, you won't have to add it to your queries. Since Google knows you're in Boston, you should only enter "weather", "movies", "book stores" etc. Google also saves your recent locations and they're accessible from a drop-down next to each group of local search results.
9. Google reformats the links to point to the transcoded versions so you can use Google Mobile Search as a bridge between your mobile browser and the web. You won't be able to access through Google Mobile Search secure web pages and some web pages lose their functionality as Google removes embedded objects, JavaScript code, tables etc. There's also a simple interface for Google's transcoder that lets you enter a URL.
10. If you have a mobile browser that is able to display web pages, you can disable Google's transcoder by going to Settings and deactivating "Format web pages for your phone". You can also go to the standard Google interface by selecting "View Google in... classic" at the bottom of Google's homepage.
1. Information about sports: European football, NBA, NHL and more.
2. Optimized calculator that shows the results in a search box so you can use them for other calculations.
3. Weather conditions for airports
4. Since Google shows the transcoded version of search results, it can improve the way you access the web pages. If the results are very big, Google splits them in several pages and it can send you directly to the section that is the most relevant to your query.
5. The phonebook listings let you call people directly from search results, the same as Google's local search results:
6. Google promotes the site specifically designed for mobile phones and you can recognize them by looking for a small phone icon next to the snippet.
7. You can hide the images from search results by clicking on "Hide Images" at the bottom of the page. Google only shows thumbnails, which load faster and are more appropiate for small screens.
8. If you enter your location on the homepage, you won't have to add it to your queries. Since Google knows you're in Boston, you should only enter "weather", "movies", "book stores" etc. Google also saves your recent locations and they're accessible from a drop-down next to each group of local search results.
9. Google reformats the links to point to the transcoded versions so you can use Google Mobile Search as a bridge between your mobile browser and the web. You won't be able to access through Google Mobile Search secure web pages and some web pages lose their functionality as Google removes embedded objects, JavaScript code, tables etc. There's also a simple interface for Google's transcoder that lets you enter a URL.
10. If you have a mobile browser that is able to display web pages, you can disable Google's transcoder by going to Settings and deactivating "Format web pages for your phone". You can also go to the standard Google interface by selecting "View Google in... classic" at the bottom of Google's homepage.
Subscribe to Feeds in Google Reader Mobile
MG Siegler reports that the iPhone version of Google Reader has an option to add subscriptions. "Recently the 'Feeds' area welcomed the 'Add subscription' button that you'll recognize from the regular version of the site. Clicking on this button from the iPhone takes you to a 'Discover and search' page where you can search for a new feed or quickly add any of their pre-packaged bundles."
Not everyone has an iPhone and I'm sure this would be a welcome feature in the mobile Google Reader. Fortunately, the feature already exists, even if not in Google Reader, but in the mobile Google Search. To go from Google Reader to Google's homepage, click on "More Google Products" and select Search from the list. If you search the web using Google and click on a search result from a site that has feeds, the feeds are listed at the top. Clicking on a feed, you'll be able to preview it in Google Reader and also subscribe to it.
If you already know the address of a feed, you can use this URL to subscribe to it:
http://google.com/reader/m/view/feed/<FEED_URL>
(replace <FEED_URL> with the actual URL)
Related:
Mobile Google Reader is also a good way to read blogs on a mobile phone
Not everyone has an iPhone and I'm sure this would be a welcome feature in the mobile Google Reader. Fortunately, the feature already exists, even if not in Google Reader, but in the mobile Google Search. To go from Google Reader to Google's homepage, click on "More Google Products" and select Search from the list. If you search the web using Google and click on a search result from a site that has feeds, the feeds are listed at the top. Clicking on a feed, you'll be able to preview it in Google Reader and also subscribe to it.
If you already know the address of a feed, you can use this URL to subscribe to it:
http://google.com/reader/m/view/feed/<FEED_URL>
(replace <FEED_URL> with the actual URL)
Related:
Mobile Google Reader is also a good way to read blogs on a mobile phone
Display a Google Calendar in Google Maps
Tony Hirst found a simple way to place the events from a Google Calendar on a map. Assuming that the calendar is public, all you need to do is to find the XML address of the calendar, enter the address in a Yahoo Pipe that extracts the locations and generates a geoRSS feed, click on "More options" and copy the link to the KML output. You can enter the URL in a Google Maps search box and you'll see the events on a map. The items can be saved to My Maps or embedded into a web page if you select "Link to this page".
Tony notes that "the call to the Yahoo Pipe sometimes times out in the map. To guarantee the map displaying the KML feed, you could always save the KML feed as a KML file, then upload it somewhere and use that URL in the Google Map search box".
Tony notes that "the call to the Yahoo Pipe sometimes times out in the map. To guarantee the map displaying the KML feed, you could always save the KML feed as a KML file, then upload it somewhere and use that URL in the Google Map search box".
Bookmark Google Search Results
An interesting side effect of Google Notebook's integration with Google Bookmarks is that you can now bookmark search results without having to install plug-ins or use bookmarklets. When you log in to a Google Account, a new option appears next to each search result: "note this". If you click on "note this", Google will open a small version of Google Notebook and add a link to the search result, the title and its snippet as a note. Google's service has a predefined notebook that stores bookmarks (Unfiled bookmarks), so Google also creates a bookmark from your link.
The only thing you need to do before clicking on "note this" is to make sure that the active notebook is "Unfiled bookmarks". You can click on the "My Notebooks" link from the top of Google's search results page to activate that notebook.
After bookmarking a page, you can add labels and comments. The bookmarks can be accessed from Google Notebook's mini-window, Google Bookmarks or from an iGoogle gadget, but also from plug-ins like Google Toolbar.
The only thing you need to do before clicking on "note this" is to make sure that the active notebook is "Unfiled bookmarks". You can click on the "My Notebooks" link from the top of Google's search results page to activate that notebook.
After bookmarking a page, you can add labels and comments. The bookmarks can be accessed from Google Notebook's mini-window, Google Bookmarks or from an iGoogle gadget, but also from plug-ins like Google Toolbar.
Things Google Can Improve
Durrell Robinson has a lot of great ideas for Google and he decided to share them with you. I only selected some of the most interesting ideas and found their place inside this post.
Contact manager integration with Picasa Web Albums and customizable Facebook-like tags that allow you to tag a person you know in a picture you took and maybe even allow them to untag themselves like the Facebook allows. People will be more likely to upload and tag pictures if they are connected in some way to people they already know or have in their contact list. People are also more likely to make pictures public if they have a specific "public" in mind instead of the very large, abstract "public" that is anyone who uses Google and Google Image Search. We might also be more comfortable with it if we can untag ourselves. Also, people tagging us makes us more likely to be fully aware of the photo option and more likely to share our own photos (Google has an edge over Facebook because you can geotag photos and display them on Google Maps. People will also be able to use these pictures in Gmail which can be very helpful).
People tagging in Facebook. Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons.
A Picasa Albums quota that increases as your items are viewed more. So if you share photos with friends who actually view them and download them or comment on them, you get more storage space. If you add photos from your vacation that are viewed in the Picasa layer on Google Maps then you get more space, etc. So people who use it for personal storage stay at 1GB while people who use it to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible (;-)) get more space to continue doing it. It will be like people whose invites signed up got more invites to use when Gmail was in private beta. People will also probably be excited about the auto-space upgrades (maybe even send them a little email) and become obsessed with having as large a storage limit as possible and so they will begin to add more and more popular items. This will feed into itself.
It would be really nice to have text messages saved to my Gmail like Google Talk chats. I always wonder sometimes what I told someone and I hate having to delete sweet texts because I don't have space.
Integration of Google Docs and Picasa Web Albums into Gmail to allow the searching and sending of files directly from Gmail as attachments or otherwise. This will increase the ease of collaboration and other use of Google Documents that are sent and edited often. This will also help build a community around Picasa.
Add Google Profiles to Google Contact Manager so people can change the information listed for them. Also make it layered like in Orkut based on how close I am to someone (close friend, business associate, etc.). Consolidate my identity with my friends so I only show up once on their chat list whether I'm on GChat or AIM. They can also list my other screen names, location, birthday and status based on my calendar settings (busy v. available), etc. etc. but only in layers depending on how close I am to a contact. Allow me to list my spouse and have a link to their account/profile like in Facebook. Allow me to see if I have friends in common with my other contacts, etc. Give Google the social element that no other sight can have. Plaxo Pulse is hot but Google has interesting products that can make it even better than what Plaxo can offer.
Google's unified profiles, available in Google Maps and Google Reader.
Add a Google Site to everyone's Google Profile like a Facebook or MySpace page. It will have to have aspects (like photos, location, etc.) that can be made restricted based on friendship status. This is one of the reasons people share so much on Facebook. They feel that they better know the people who are the audience of their material. I don't want everyone in the world to see my daughter's baby photos. It will have several pages to it just like a regular website (not just a one-sided, slim webpage like Facebook and MySpace) and will be linked up to other Google services. Instead of fighting to get new users, Google can create heavy users out of its current loyal users. Like with many businesses, it is often wise to increase total sales by catering to repeat customers to tap into a steady source of longterm users who give regular feedback, are pioneer early adopters of technology, and who can help fine tune several types of products.
Integrate my other services into the Google Site so you can have a natural transition from this page to my profile (one of the pages on my site) and see maps and reviews I've written, a list of common friends' profiles and shared Google Reader subscriptions with recently shared posts (a page on my site), my library from Google Books (and Google Scholar) and books we have in common, my blog(s) (a page on my site), my photos and photos and videos I've been tagged in (a page on my site), upcoming events on my calendar that I want to share on my site for other people to add to their calendars.
Picasa Web Albums can be transformed into an art room looking page with paintings, photographs, cool frames, etc. as the background theme. There can be pictures with slideshows, comments, geotag/Google Maps info, etc. Either way, this can be people's creative design for showing off their pictures on a web page that is more unique and dynamic than the simply MySpace or Facebook pages that say "I have pictures. Here." You can display the most commented, shared, favorited, etc. pictures that we've uploaded.
An exhibit of Andrew Wyeth's art. Photo licensed as Creative Commons.
It would be great to have GrandCentral integration with Google Calendar. I can set certain settings that make a meeting send all calls to my work number so my assistant can take the call, write down what's important, etc. If I have nothing listed it can go to my cell depending on the number. It will make Calendar more useful (people will want to make sure they have all their events on their calendar and that their calendar's are up to date and once they are they will want to share it more (like with receptionist that maybe keeps it up or partner to coordinate schedules, etc.)) and more popular. It will also make people want phones with Google Calendar on them so they can change a little event (push it back 15 minutes) whenever necessary so their life is completely organized. People with Blackberries do it already all the time. It would also be really nice to be able to "Ignore with text" automatically. If I'm in a meeting, it can reply "I'm sorry I can't take your call right now. I'm in a meeting which I expect to end at 5:00 PM EST" or "I'm unavailable. I am available in approximately 2 Hours and 43 Minutes at 5:00PM EST" or something like that. Phone companies love giving an excuse to send texts and we would love for each time someone called me for it to tell them I'm busy and not to waste their time calling back in 15 minutes.
Sharing advertisements. I have often seen something that is somewhat related to me but not exactly what I need. It might, however, be exactly what my brother, dad, best friend, etc. were saying they were looking for. This might be an ad for a job (I'm sure my parents would love to send my brother a few of these his way when they come across them), or deals on a vacation getaway package, personal tutors, nail fungus remover, etc. If we could have an option to access your contacts and send them a recommended advertisement, we can tap into the "word of mouth" way that people have been selling things for years. Instead of judging a site by its content or tracking people's movement across several webpages (which people think is very creepy) we can allow people to be the judge of what others will like to see (this will also encourage people to pay more attention to ads even if not for themselves) based on how much better they know that person than Google ever could (or should). We might wanna try pay-per-action ads first since people might be more likely to click on an ad because its funny or send/share it as a prank instead of as a legitimate lead and pay-per-action can help flush out people being silly from people making purchases or signing up for services. Also, people tend to hate ads generally speaking but they are likely to be much more receptive to them when it comes with a friend's recommendation (like a word-of-mouth purchase which people tend to feel much more comfortable making than going on the advertisement alone or from a salesperson/solicitation). People will be more attentive to ads that catch their eye for sales and other events that if their friends saw it and didn't pass the information along they would be upset (i.e. Friend: I saw an ad the other day for exactly what you're talking about and I think it was cheaper. You: Well why did you send it to me or something? You knew before that I would've been interested in that!).
Share Almost Any Blog Post in Google Reader
Google Reader's sharing feature is very cool, but it's limited to your subscriptions. If you find an interesting post and you want to share it with your friends without subscribing to the feed, Google Reader is not very helpful. On a closer look, you'll notice that Google Reader lets you preview any feed without subscribing to it if you go to this page:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/FEED_URL
But it's not that easy to find the feed and build that URL every time you want to share a post. And even if you do that, you'll still have to find the post.
So I created a bookmarklet that automates the process: it finds the feed and creates a different URL that tells Google Reader to search for the page's title in that feed. Hopefully, the first result is the page you want to share.
Here's how to add the bookmarklet to your browser (because of a Google Reader bug, this doesn't work in Opera and Safari):
1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:
* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox
* Links in Internet Explorer
2. Don't click on the link below! For Firefox, right-click on the link, select "Bookmark this Link" and choose "Bookmarks Toolbar" from the dropdown. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the link, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.
Share in Google Reader
Note that you'll be able to share pages only from sites that have feeds and only if you go to the blog post, not to the blog's homepage. If the post is very recent, it's likely that Google Reader didn't index it yet. If the page's title is not identical to the post's title, select the title before clicking on the bookmarklet.
Credits: the bookmarklet contains code from Google Reader's subscription bookmarklet; based on a idea by Louis Gray.
http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/FEED_URL
But it's not that easy to find the feed and build that URL every time you want to share a post. And even if you do that, you'll still have to find the post.
So I created a bookmarklet that automates the process: it finds the feed and creates a different URL that tells Google Reader to search for the page's title in that feed. Hopefully, the first result is the page you want to share.
Here's how to add the bookmarklet to your browser (because of a Google Reader bug, this doesn't work in Opera and Safari):
1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:
* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox
* Links in Internet Explorer
2. Don't click on the link below! For Firefox, right-click on the link, select "Bookmark this Link" and choose "Bookmarks Toolbar" from the dropdown. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the link, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.
Share in Google Reader
Note that you'll be able to share pages only from sites that have feeds and only if you go to the blog post, not to the blog's homepage. If the post is very recent, it's likely that Google Reader didn't index it yet. If the page's title is not identical to the post's title, select the title before clicking on the bookmarklet.
Credits: the bookmarklet contains code from Google Reader's subscription bookmarklet; based on a idea by Louis Gray.
Google Apartment View
In which two young men discover that Google Maps tests an on-demand street view feature, but it's not yet ready for launch. A video from The Vacationeers, "a stylized comedic film group that features Todd Berger, Kevin Brennan, Jeff Grace and Blaise Miller".
{ via Jess Lee }
{ via Jess Lee }
Google Docs in Firefox Sidebar
Google Docs Bar (gDocsBar) is a Firefox extension that shows the list of documents from Google Docs in the sidebar. The extension has many features from Google's file explorer: you can search for a file, restrict the list to documents, spreadsheets or presentations and view a certain folder (the subfolders aren't yet supported).
A great feature that makes this extension more valuable is uploading files using drag and drop. Drag one or more files from Windows Explorer to the sidebar and they'll be uploaded in the background.
For those who are worried about security, the extension sends your credentials directly to Google and stores them in Firefox's password manager. After installing the extension, you can make the sidebar visible by going to View > Sidebar > Google Docs Bar. The sidebar will always show the list of documents and it's useful if you frequently use Google Docs.
Related:
Google sidebars for Firefox and Opera
Google Maps in your sidebar (Firefox extension)
{ via Firefox Facts }
A great feature that makes this extension more valuable is uploading files using drag and drop. Drag one or more files from Windows Explorer to the sidebar and they'll be uploaded in the background.
For those who are worried about security, the extension sends your credentials directly to Google and stores them in Firefox's password manager. After installing the extension, you can make the sidebar visible by going to View > Sidebar > Google Docs Bar. The sidebar will always show the list of documents and it's useful if you frequently use Google Docs.
Related:
Google sidebars for Firefox and Opera
Google Maps in your sidebar (Firefox extension)
{ via Firefox Facts }
Google Shows More Results in the Local OneBox
When you search for something like [italian restaurant ny], the local search results are more useful than the web results, so Google displays a OneBox that includes these results at the top of the page or in other position. Google has recently increased the number of results displayed in the local OneBox from 3 to 10.
Last year, in January, the OneBox was enriched with a static map, information about reviews, directions. To make room for 10 results instead of 3, Google removed the addresses, the links to directions and the ratings.
It's very interesting to see that the other general search engines (Yahoo, Live Search, Ask.com) link to pages from their local search engines, while Google links to the homepage of each business. Another difference is that Google's box has a variable position, depending on the relevance to user's query.
Search Engine Land asked Google why it decided to increase the number of results. The reason is that "many people didn't realize there was additional local content available beyond the three listings, despite the more results... prompt. Accordingly, Google said that with the 10 links it is hoping to signal people that there is much more local content a click away. The ranking of those ten results is based on a range of factors, including the query, proximity, availability of ratings/reviews and their quality and several other variables."
Last year, in January, the OneBox was enriched with a static map, information about reviews, directions. To make room for 10 results instead of 3, Google removed the addresses, the links to directions and the ratings.
It's very interesting to see that the other general search engines (Yahoo, Live Search, Ask.com) link to pages from their local search engines, while Google links to the homepage of each business. Another difference is that Google's box has a variable position, depending on the relevance to user's query.
Search Engine Land asked Google why it decided to increase the number of results. The reason is that "many people didn't realize there was additional local content available beyond the three listings, despite the more results... prompt. Accordingly, Google said that with the 10 links it is hoping to signal people that there is much more local content a click away. The ranking of those ten results is based on a range of factors, including the query, proximity, availability of ratings/reviews and their quality and several other variables."
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