Lazy Labor Day Link Post
Labor Day Search Logos
Barry listed these search engine (and related) stuff being done for today:
This ran on Dogpile:
and this on Search Engine Roundtable:
Google didn’t run anything, and neither did Yahoo, Ask or Windows Live.
New Google Web Toolkit
Google released a new version of its Web Toolkit, a toolkit for creating high-end Java applications in the Google style. Read more about it here.
Google Earth, Windows Live Maps & Others In Flash
Flash Earth now lets you use a Flash interface to get around Google Maps, Windows Live Maps (aerial and labeled), Yahoo Maps, Ask Maps (aerial and physical), OpenLayers and NASA Terra daily satellite imagery.
(via, via, via)
Google Sued For Email Patent
Polaris IP, one of those soul-sucking companies that appears to exist for no reason except to sue companies who do productive and innovative things over patents they own and don’t use, has sued Google, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, Borders and IAC over some email patent. The patent has something to do with email rules and automatic message routing.
Considering they didn’t invent anything, but bought the patent from a company that did, and the patent shouldn’t have been issued (other companies were doing the same thing before the original patent holder filed for the patent), this is just another one of those patent lawsuits that would go away in a world with a sensible justice system.
Some Quintura Stuff
Someone pointed out Quintura to me. They’ve got this kid search engine (I think they may have just launched it), which has a kid-friendly interface (including only five results per page, to make things easier). Both their kid search engine and their regular search interface include this really cool tag cloud feature, where you roll over a word and it rebuilds the cloud (without you clicking anything) based on that word, and does so endlessly as you roll over new words.
YouTube Competitor Gets A Crappy Name
NBC and News Corp revealed the name of their YouTube competitor, which they have been talking about but still haven’t launched for half a year. The name: Hulu, exactly the sort of means-nothing non-offensive crap name that you’d expect six months of focus groups to turn out. Good work, time to move on to being a failure!
Not only does the name mean nothing of importance to users and is likely to bore people away from visiting the website, it actually means “cease and desist” in Swahili. So, at least we know they have their priorities straight! Where would you rather go: (a) YouTube or (b) SafeguardingIntellectualPropertyTube?
I guess you could get Hulu pantyhose.
Of course, you could also feel bad the NBC/FOX appears to have taken the four-letter domain name from a seven-year old girl’s picture website (though the kid shouldn’t mind, since she probably got paid a hefty sum).
Google Says “We Do Dogfood, We Swear!”
After an Infoworld article mentioned in passing that Google Apps/Docs aren’t used at Google for major tasks, and I wrote an article focusing on how companies shouldn’t develop products that aren’t good enough for their own employees to use, the Google Docs blog released an article saying that Googlers do, indeed, use Google Docs.
They say that they didn’t need to convince or force employees to use it, it just happened, and that 87% of Googlers used it in the last week and 96% in the last month. Which sounds nice, but a better stat would be: How many have stopped using Microsoft Word and Excel? If Word and Excel usage have dropped by half, then you’ve got some real confidence, and I apologize.
AdSense Vista Gadget
If you need to check your AdSense earnings every few minutes without loading a webpage, there’s an AdSense Gadget for Windows Vista’s Sidebar. And if you can get the Gadget to actually work, you deserve a hug (and send me an email).
(via, via)
Google Docs Gets Right-Click Menu
Google added a good UI feature to Google Docs & Other Things, letting you right-click in the file manager to get a context menu. While it would be unfair to say they’ve now caught up with Windows 95 (they are trying very hard, and this takes time), it is good to know that the interface is maturing. Ionut Alex has examples with screenshots.
YouTube Partners Winning Over YouTube Users?
Ionut Alex wrote a post looking at the new branding for YouTube partner pages I mentioned recently, with a different YouTube player and a giant advertisement, but he also noted something strage: The Universal Music Group official version of a music video had 14 million views, compared to the user uploaded version, which had 378 thousand. This despite the fact that the user version could be embedded on any website, and the partner version was trapped in the walled garden.
Could it be that these partners are solving a problem for YouTube, bringing the user onto YouTube with their market power, instead of having users leech most of the bandwidth from external embeds? Could the partners be winning? I have so many questions, but this is supposed to be a lazy post, so, moving on…
Just a personal example re: Google Docs from one Googler (yours truly):
I find that I very, very rarely use MS Office products now. And the times I do use them are rather odd/amusing. For instance, the last time I actually fired up Word, I used it to alphabetize a list. I dropped the text in, alphabetized it, copied it, then closed Word.
I can’t remember the last time I used Outlook or Excel at work. Then again, in fairness, I’m betting that some of our accountant folks still need to use Excel, and Googlers making complex docs with footnotes aren’t (yet) able to get by with Docs.
Anyway, yes, we really do eat our own dogfood. 100% of the Googlers I know use Google Calendar (and many, if not most of us, use it for personal stuff, too), and it’s extremely rare that I get a Word doc sent to me by a colleague.
Comment by Adam Lasnik | September 4, 2007
Hulu that sucks, who came up with that I can’t even pronounce the word.
They’re gonna have to do a lot better than that if they want to compete with Youtube.
Comment by Kevin | September 4, 2007
To be fair, since Google doesn’t have an Exchange Server (I’m assuming here), employees are forced for collaboration reasons to use Google Calendar for schedule sharing. Also, Calendar is more of a prime time application than Docs or Spreadsheets, and for many, Gmail and Calendar can very well compete with Outlook in a way Docs and Spreadsheets can’t. The main thing, though, is that as long as other Googlers use Google Calendar, everyone else pretty much has to so they can work together.
As for Google Docs, I’m glad you’re using it, and that it has that much traction in the company. I guess there are few circumstances specifically for a Googler that a simpler program, like Docs or Spreadsheets, can’t handle. If you code all day, or work in PR, Docs is good for the occasional document, but like you said, for accountants, Spreadsheets doesn’t have needed features, and for desktop publishing, Word would pretty much have to be used.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | September 5, 2007