Tag: google

Google Environment

To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment. Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success. Yahoo could add an extra $1.5b to their revenue overnight by conceding monetization to Google and becoming a distribution partner for Adwords, as Ask Jeeves did.

Search API Shutdown

Google is protecting its cash cow (search+advertising) by turning off the direct data pipe to search and requiring that you use their library to mediate. Like it or not, it’s their data after all and they can do what they want with it. What’s ironic is that we just spent God knows how many engineering dollars putting an open protocol head (SOAP) on one of our cash cows (Windows).

pretty good discussion on the google soap api shutdown, with comments from markl: The search results we provide are just as rich, if not richer than whats provided by the SOAP API.

IM Interop

I must be psychic. This morning I was recalling that Google and AOL have long promised to integrate their instant messaging platforms. This would allow users on Google Talk to chat with their peeps who are on AOL Instant Messenger and vice versa. Low and behold, when I went to look it up I discovered that the expanded AOL-Google deal was unveiled exactly 1 year ago today. So what gives? Perhaps much more than what meets the eye.

Google Mondrian

sweet. i look forward to using this 🙂

Code reviews can be initiated and completed from within the Mondrian interface. A developer requests a review from another user or a group of users to kick off the process. Each invited reviewer can add comments directly underneath a line of code or reference the entire file. You can request and diff the file against previous versions as well. It’s a pretty slick interface, lightly highlighting each line of code as you hover, and popping open a comment box in response to a double-click. Comments can be saved as a draft and shared at a later time.

People Doing Stuff

That is why I wrote the ‘People Doing Stuff’ random image finder. Sometimes I just like to see where the net will take me. I click it, see a little thumb nail and think, “What the heck is that?” Open it in a new tab and have a window into a unknown world.

So how to use this thing. Sip your favorite beverage. Click on the new name and verb button for a few hours and enjoy.

playful UI to discover the ginormous quantities of images. once the image labeling project is making a dent these folks will really be cooking with gas