Forbes gives Google grades on each of its courses, er services.
- Search, the big kahuna, gets an A-, losing points due to concerns that Google is running out of inventory, that growth can’t increase any more
- Contextual ads scores C+, since Forbes doesn’t think its as popular as it could be (possibly), the fact that Google doesn’t make that much of a share of AdSense, and a lack of perceived growth for the platform
- Google Local / Google Maps / Google Earth together earn a B+ grade, losing points only on the fact that monetization is taking time
- Froogle sits in the corner with a D+, with its lack of popularity, lack of comissions from retailers, and slow development
- Gmail squeeks in a C, hurting for lack of wide use and slow development (two years old this April!)
- Google Base also gets a C, since few use it and there’s no money. GBuy should help
- Google Search Appliance / Google Mini get a nice B, since they make money and are well-regarded. Forbes only regret: Google could dominate this market, if only it applied itself
- Google Pack rates only a C-, since there’s no money there and no buzz
- Google Video Store has to take home a C to mama, getting a bad grade for UI (compared to iTunes) and this analyst quote: “”Right now, I don’t think Google cares if anyone buys videos at the store or not”. Ouch!
- Blogger can’t like its C-, something it earned for lack of interoperability, lack of updates, and the fact that it doesn’t earn a dime
- Google Talk surprises with a shiny B-, Forbes recognizing its potential
So, grades of: A-B+BB-C+CCC-C-D+, do you think this Phd company is underperforming? Anyone want to calculate the GPA?
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Blogger, Google Earth, Google Local, Google Video, Talk, Store, Google Pack, Google Maps, AdSense, Advertising, Gmail, Search, Services, Products, Froogle, General |
2 comments
Philipp has made a game he calls “The Google Adventure“, a choose-your-way text game. The game invites you, a new Google hire, to make a series of choices that will supposedly lead either to fame or Plaxo. Five minutes in, I haven’t done much adventuring, so maybe someone can suggest a path that doesn’t have me getting fired for playing Minesweeper.
I remember seeing an online choose-your-own-adventure game that invited participants to write branches that weren’t written yet, a sort of wiki adventure, maybe we could try that, adding in all the different things that a Googler can do, like:
- Build a wacky/useful/massive revenue project in your free time
- Use your free 20% time to play with your kids, or volleyball
- Run over a Google founder with a Segway
- Get fired for blogging
- Become a very boring type of superhero who hunts down search spammers and has only one very strong superpower: deindexing
- Be older than most Googlers, hate the Google culture and sue them because you didn’t have fun
- Snap your spine over a large, colorful ball and spend the rest of your life hooked up as an AI within a Google datacenter
- Go on the Google ski trip, everyone gets trapped by an avalanche, and we find out what PhD brains taste like when you have to survive
- Run a raid on Yahoo and steal their mascot. Realize Yahoo doesn’t have a mascot, steal Zawodny’s glider
- Add AJAX to your kids mittens
- Forget about your job and wait for your stock options to vest
- Move to the Kirkland office and listen to jealous Microsoft employees
- Date Marissa Mayer
- Date Larry Page
- Date Google Calendar (good luck!)
- Aquire a promising startup, distribute their team throughout the company, and forget the startup ever existed
- Discover you have a 187 IQ. Spend the rest of your career wearing the dunce cap
Come up with your own in the comments, or try to figure out which of mine actually happened.
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Googleplex, Culture, Humor, General |
no comments
Chris Beasley says Amazon has contacted him about putting contextual, non-product related third party text advertising on his website. According to Chris, Amazon has been contacting members of its Associates program to beta test this new service, designed to compete with Google AdSense, and replace the Google ads on some of Amazon’s sites.
When I first heard about this I thought it’d be Amazon product listings displayed in an Adsense-like way and I figured it’d analyze your content for for products to serve, but they’d be Amazon products. Turns out I was wrong, they want their own contextual advertising network.
On the phone last night it was explained to me that this is more or less an Adsense clone, meaning third party sponsored links, not Amazon links. It is known that Amazon currently get’s sponsored links for their own sites from Google, but apparently they wish to take out the middleman and break out on their own. … Amazon realizes that if they want to compete as a major Internet destination, not just an ecommerce site, they need to capture a larger chunk of the online advertising revenue.
Amazon could certainly take its huge Associates network, which may challenge AdSense in size, and certainly has broken in the blogosphere as deeply as Google has, and convince a huge portion of that network to use its ads instead of Google’s. This would work especially well if Amazon delivered ads that bloggers could use, as opposed to the “blog” and “rss” ads every stupid blog suffers with.
(via Threadwatch)
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Amazon, AdSense, Advertising, General |
no comments
Here are actual comment spams I received on Sunday:
- How to download Real Audio streams and convert Real Audio to MP3.
- had a similar problem a while back where i wanted to split large mp3s (live sets) into parts, while there are quite a number of apps out there that can do it, i found most of them to be bloated or they required you to buy it, so i ended up writing my o…
- Replace mp3-*-name.mp3 with the names of your songs (using Terminal, you can just drag and drop the file/names to Terminal and it’ll add the name/path). The “>” is the output pipe, and the “joined-songs.mp3″ would be the resulting name. You can ch…
- Hmm… Yeah I guess that might work. I’ll have to try it out.
- Wer Fuller selbst gerne einmal reden hören und sehen will, kann sich Aufnahmen seines legendären 42-stündigen Vortrags Everything I know streamen lassen (die Seite ist allerdings recht häufig nicht zu erreichen).
- If you’re not afraid of the Unix command line, you could do this with the Cat command. Just type cat mp3-1-name.mp3 mp3-2-name.mp3 mp3-3-name.mp3 > joined-songs.mp3.
- Wow!! I personally knew Bucky. I was the one who took him to Apple Computer and introduced him to Steve Jobs who gave him a tour of the Cupertino facility.
- Have you tried TotalRecorder? I believe it can record pretty much anything you want and output it as MP3.
- Sounds like a shell script should be able to do it… I’d mpg123 them to .wav, concatenate the wavs (I bet there’s some neat little app that does that), and convert them back.
- I am so thrilled to find this being served for FREE. This is the greatest discovery I have ever made on the web.
- Are there any mp3 sources for these lectures? It’d be great to be able to listen to them off-line.
Wow, the spams are getting more and more real looking! I predict that the next innovation in comment spam will involve actual humans commenting on blogs with insightful, relevant, on-topic information. And I would be proud to approve them.
By the way, have you tried out coComment? It lets you, via a bookmarklet, track and share your comments on everybody else’s blogs. Its invite only, but if you enter your email on the webpage, you might get an invite code within hours (I did). If you really want to know what I’m saying on other blogs, you can subscribe to my coComment feed.
UPDATE: TDavid has the seven sure signs you’re looking at a comment spam.
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Blogs, General |
one comment
Darren “Problogger” Rowse brings up the question of comment-post ratios. I think this is fairly useful, as some bloggers consider comments to be one of the biggest marks of a successful blog. Personally, as I’ve seen my CPPR (Comments Per Post Ratio) increase, it’s made me very happy.
While I was staring at a one-to-one ratio for awhile, I’m liking the current ratio:
- InsideGoogle - 1,770 posts, 4,884 comments - CPPR = 2.759 / PPCR = 0.36
- InsideMicrosoft - 1,281 posts, 1,927 comments - CPPR = 1.504 / PPCR = 0.6647
- Both blogs - 3,051 posts, 6,811 comments - CPPR = 2.255 / PPCR = 0.4479
Any suggestions on how to get it up further? I love comments more than I love AdSense checks!
Oh, who am I kidding 
But seriously, comments are a huge source of happiness for me. So, please, post your CPPR ratios below (personally, I think the PPCR method sucks) and help improve my own ratio. After all, Darren is sitting pretty on 8.9 comments per post.
Oh, my comment spam to comment ratio on InsideGoogle is 35,191/4,884. Ouch! And I think I cleared the spams once, months ago.
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Blogs, General |
5 comments
Sometimes, I get to a story about Google I just don’t want to write. Either it doesn’t interest me, I feel I have nothing to add to the story, or it bores me too much to do the research on. Today, that story is the Google/FON story. I’ll probably write something up later, but if someone wants to publicize his blog, feel free to just send me something.
Yeah, maybe its lazy, but I truly, 100% just don’t care for the story. But I’ll bet there is someone who does, and could use the publicity. This is a relatively popular blog after all. If this works out, maybe we’ll do this more often.
If you can do this story justice, or just love links, comment below, leaving your email address hidden from prying eyes in the email field, and I’ll contact you back.
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
5 comments
Volkswagen has announced that it is working with Google and Nvidia to build an in-car navigation system that has a 3D display, powered by Google Earth. A screenshot shows a familiar Google Earth display with a different interface and 3D buildings turned on:
From the press release:
Highlights of Volkswagen’s prototype vehicle include a vehicle-centric touchscreen interface to Google Earth with state-of-the-art graphics, accurate 3D maps and real-time traffic updates and routing. This open system harnesses the power of the web to maintain a dynamic database of current information on restaurants, dealerships, gas stations and other points of interest that can be overlaid directly onto the user’s 3D map. With the increasing accuracy of GPS, dead-reckoning and laser-radar imaging, as well as ever-improving car-to-infrastructure communication, this prototype will be available on showroom floors in the near future.
Presumably, Google would be making money from this, an extreme oddity for any Google product, but something that would make Wall Street happy. Of course, the vehicle will deliver “personalized content updates” for users, so maybe Google just want to put ads in your car.
(via Nicholas Carr > Findory)
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Google Earth, Products, Advertising, General |
one comment
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is indeed testing what has been rumored for a long time: a payments system designed to allow consumers to buy things from AdWords. Called GBuy, the service will place little icons next to AdWords that are in the program, and allow searchers to buy products or services right there.
According to the Journal, Google has been recruiting online retailers to test the service, which it hopes will draw even more people to look at the ads, perhaps in search of a bargain. Users will be able to store their credit card information in Google, leaving only two items of personal information Google doesn’t have (your driver’s license and passport).
The article mostly focuses on eBay’ PayPal, which has been running an intelligence operation to discover information on Google’s service. Jeff Jordan, president of the PayPal unit, determined that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was not telling the truth when he said Google’s payments product would not compete with eBay.
According to rumors I’ve heard, although not printed in the Journal, Jordan knew Schmidt was being dishonest due to two factors: (a) Schmidt was speaking on behalf of Google, and (b) His lips were moving.
But in all seriousness, when this launches, the success of the program will be determined by the little choices that Google makes, the things that determine if retailers are comfortable with the service, and if enough customers feel safe to use it. If it does take off, given Google’s enormous audience, this could mean some very happy news in future earnings reports.
While Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt confirmed in press accounts that the company was building a payment service, Mr. Schmidt also denied it would directly compete with PayPal. Mr. Schmidt said Google didn’t intend to offer a “person-to-person, stored-value payments system,” which many people consider a description of PayPal’s service.
Mr. Jordan says he and his team immediately “dissected the wording” of Google’s statements. He says he doesn’t believe Mr. Schmidt. In the past, Mr. Jordan says, Mr. Schmidt had denied Google would roll out a payments service, only to take it back later. “We took [the comments Mr. Schmidt made] as ‘Thou doth protest too much,’ ” says Mr. Jordan.
…
But PayPal must now contend with Google. The Mountain View, Calif., Web-search giant, which has terrified Silicon Valley with its ability to quickly create new consumer products and services, is developing a rival service called GBuy. For the last nine months, Google has recruited online retailers to test GBuy, according to one person briefed on the service. GBuy will feature an icon posted alongside the paid-search ads of merchants, which Google hopes will tempt consumers to click on the ads, says this person. GBuy will also let consumers store their credit-card information on Google.
(via WebProNews)
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Advertising, General |
5 comments
Tecniblog has some funny Photoshops of Google AdWords in odd places, like on bathing suit bottoms.
A few points:
- If Google did this, they’d make sure the ads were contextual, like the ad on the model’s tush would either advertise clothes, or say, “Stop staring!”
- Lets see more of these! Google Blogoscoped has a blimp ad.
- If people want to start a contest here for these, I could probably come up with a prize
- Just a few ideas: Tattoo ads, car ads, bus ads, ads on your watch, ads on flowers, ads made out of star constellations (hey, Google has the cash!), ads on soft drinks, ads on burgers, ads on pizza, ads on ads, ads on shoes, ads on babies in a maternity ward, ads on homeless people, ads on doctor’s scrubs, ads on silverware, ads on bibles, ads in books, and, of course, ads on ads on ads.
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
no comments
British DJ Flavorjenkins wants a job at Google, so to prove he deserves it, he’s showing off a music video he made in Google Earth. According to CNET, Flavorjenkins was rejected at every record company he sent a demo to, so he created this, which shows a van driving to record companies, him getting signed and buying lots of bling.
But he uses the video to imagine what would happen when he does finally sign his deal: scads of money, champagne, cigars and a fast car, which he then has driving around the Google Earth images instead of the truck; paparazzi following him everywhere; shopping at Harrod’s; visiting Buckingham Palace; flying on a private jet with scantily clad models; and finally landing on his own private island.
The article also mentions that he might be trying to replicate the success of Paul Rademacher, who built the Craigslist/Google Maps mashup HousingMaps… and got a job at Google.
When did this happen?
Anyway, I don’t think this’ll work quite as well, since unlike Rademacher, jenkins isn’t showing off a working product, but a Flash movie which seems to superimpose 2D images of a van on Google Earth, and then breaks away to show other images. Now, if jenkins can use the Google Earth program to create a plugin that does all this, he might have something.
And I don’t think he should expect a job at Google for his music. Besides the fact that Google has no interest in signing artists, the music is kind of, well, ordinary. Not bad, but it won’t be tearing up the charts anytime soon.
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Culture, Google Earth, Products, Humor, General |
no comments
There were several classic games today, from the Steelers thrilling Super Bowl victory, the Lingerie Bowl and the Arena Bowl, but none could compare to the cuteness factor of the Puppy Bowl.
This year’s Puppy Bowl, the second annual, presented by Animal Planet, was a thrilling contest pitting 14 puppies, all 2.5 to 3 months old, on a puppy-sized football field, complete with a fake crowd that took pictures, a human referree that cleaned up when a puppy made a “penalty” on the field, and thrilling fights between the contestants. Seriously, there was more straight up violence in the Puppy Bowl, but it was all over stuffed toys.
I must have watched at least 55 minutes of Puppy Bowl action, in between the pregame shows and ignoring the Rolling Stones retched performance. The Puppy Bowl is a great sort of counterprogramming, the sort of thing to keep kids and the odd football-hating woman content throughout hours of Super Bowl obsession. And the puppies are so damn cute!
Anyway, some other Big Game thoughts:
- Early on in the game, I said Hines Ward would finish as game MVP. Nobody believed me. Obviously, they should have.
- Sorry, Paul Allen. You’ll get one eventually.
- They should have let the Bus rush on the last play, just because. Who would have dared tackle him, with nothing on the line?
- Moment of the night: My wonderful fiance’ screaming that Big Ben got the ball over the plane of the goal line in the second quarter. Screaming! I was so proud.
- Favorite commercial: Coca-Cola Full Throttle:
- Runner up: Degree “Stunt City”:
- Biggest waste of several million dollars: TIE: Cadillac Escalade commercial, and the halftime show
- View all the commercials on Google Video
- Okay, I may not be the only Puppy Bowl blogger, but I am the most-read one. Animal Planet should send me a DVD. Especially since I missed the halftime kitten show.
- Next year’s Puppy Bowl could use two additions: A scoring system, perhaps either judges passing out points for winning toy fights, cuteness, and penalizing for on the field “penalties”. And second, next year, all the puppies wear uniforms.
A good night, except for Seahawks fans. To them, I say, you guys played good, and you’ll be even better next year. Besides, you beat the Rams twice, so maybe you deserved it.
UPDATE: Om Malik digs in Paul Allen:
Poor Paul Allen — always the bridesmaid, never the bride. The Steelers won by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the Seahawks operating system with a defensive denial of service attack. Though the ‘Hawks often crashed on their own, with their executables throwing exceptions like offensive pass interference. Maybe Bill can buy up all the Steelers and integrate their best features into Paul’s product.
February 6th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
4 comments
