Zoli was happy to discover that Google’s Street View cars had made it into his former home town, the small suburb of Pleasanton, California (population: 67,724) and snapped pictures of his former house. Street View has made it into some obscure places, like the inside of tunnels or the parking lot roads of Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
If you live in a small area, and Street View has made it to you, let me know. Queens is hardly small, but my immediate neighborhood has supposedly 38,216 people (in a borough of 2 million and a city of 8 million) and Google hasn’t made it here. The closest Street View vehicle was 8 blocks away, in the park, and I hope they return eventually.
There’s one other question I’ve been asking lately: Is there any real value to Street View? Now that Google’s Local Business Referrals are putting pictures of storefronts into Google Maps, do we need cars driving around, taking pictures of random useless people on the street and then blurring them back out of the pictures? Street View is supposed to help us find businesses, not sightsee, as far as I know, so why not put more effort into storefronts and less into taking pictures of everything?
Remember all the people who were worried that Gmail’s advertising system would be spying on your email? Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Witness this ad that appeared above a scam spam email:
Google has changed its “More” menu on search pages yet again, this time adding YouTube to the bottom of the list, just below the Video link. This is the first time Google’s search engine has ever acknowledged to its search engine visitiors that, yes, Google does own YouTube.
It also creates this weird conflict between the YouTube and Video links, which are sitting on each other. If you type a term into the search box and hit “More”, you can choose Video, and search a whole lot of internet video sites, or you can choose YouTube and also search video, but only search videos on YouTube.com.
On the one hand, Google is building a great video search engine and wants to promote it. On the other hand, Google wants to promote YouTube from its main search engine, its most popular property. For now, this two-state solution is going to have to be their means, at least until they come up with something better.
TiVo announced a new feature this week that lets users stream photos from their Picasa Web Albums or Photobucket accounts to their TiVo digital recorders. In addition, users can search publicly available albums to view on their TV. Photos are viewed at the highest resolution the player is capable of, which means on the newest TiVos you can see your photos in full high definition glory.
Gmail has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, none of which I use because I never bothered to learn them. If you’d like to start taking advantage of the convenience of shortcuts, Gmail now has a popup dialog that will remind you of all of them at a glance. In the new Gmail, just hit the question mark key on your keyboard and the popup, pictured above, will appear. Easy, right?
For now, as long as I’m losing out on the great new features, including this popup and AIM integration, I’m sticking with accessing Gmail in Outlook via IMAP. I hope they enable the new Gmail in Opera one day.
YouTube’s Project Direct, which invited aspiring directors to upload short films to YouTube and have them judged by Jason Reitman (director of “Thank You For Smoking”), has announced its winner. Here’s the video announcement:
So, the winner is “Laços (Ties)”, shown here:
You know, at first I hated this video, and found the dialog, or at least the subtitles, to be lacking, but there’s something about the back-and-forth between the two characters that gets more captivating as it goes on. Not a big fan of the original music.
Second place, “Gone in a Flash”:
This one I really liked, especially the ridiculous premise. I never thought I’d see two straight videos with the word “shenanigans”, though.
Third place:
Okay, three videos with “I demand an explanation for these shenanigans”? Clearly, this must have been in the contest rules.
There are a couple of interesting requirements being asked for however. Firstly, a character in the video must face a situation “above his or her maturity level,” and a line must be included in the dialogue: “I demand an explanation for these shenanigans. What do you have to say?”. A scene must also include one character passing a photograph to another.
If you found any of the other films in the contest interesting, let me know.
Google Trends is getting an API, at least eventually, hopefully letting outsiders creating cool mashups that do more with Trends than Google is doing now. Google obviously doesn’t put a high priority on Trends, evidenced by the multiple fiascos* of not updating for months, so don’t expect the API soon, but when it does come, I’m hoping to get an interactive charting interface more like the one Google Finance uses.
Until then, rejoice in the fact that Google Apps has a new API, one for handling mail migration. With this, corporate email administrators can move email across systems, including in bulk, helping the operation of parallel systems. An app built on it is GMove, which can move everything in Outlook (mail, calendars, contacts and tasks) into Google Apps, or even into Gmail.
* - the plural of fiasco is normally fiascos, but fiascoes is also acceptable
Google is ending the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up option for AdSense. They are removing the “Advertise On This Site” link from AdSense ads, as well as shutting down all those customized landing pages many publishers set up to invite potential advertisers to target their website. Site Targeting for AdWords isn’t going away, but Google saw that inviting advertisers to use it on every single page wasn’t converting well, plus the added text probably did more to hurt click-through rates than anything else.
Here’s the email I got from Google about it:
Hello,
We want to share an important update with you about the Onsite
Advertiser Sign-up feature. You may recognize this feature as a
link on certain ad units that reads, “Advertise on this site”, or
you may have included direct links to the Onsite Advertiser
Sign-up landing page on your site. Unfortunately, this feature has
not been performing as well as we had hoped, and in the coming
weeks the feature will be retired.
As the AdSense product evolves, we occasionally re-evaluate
aspects of the product to make sure they are performing well for
our publishers and meeting our goals. We found that the Onsite
Advertiser Sign-up feature was under-performing, and so we have
made the decision to focus our efforts on features that we believe
will drive the best results for publishers.
The Onsite Advertiser Sign-up link will no longer appear on any of
our ad units. If you included direct links on your site to the
customizable Onsite Advertiser Sign-up page, these links will soon
redirect to the main AdWords sign-up page.
Thank you again for your support of the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up
feature in the past, and we apologize for any inconvenience this
news may cause.
Jason figured out that Google’s new form for reporting malicious websites will validate site URLs passed along to it just right. So, he’s created a bookmarklet you can use to submit any site you come along while browsing as containing malicious code.
Just drag that link to your bookmarks and save that. Anytime you find yourself on a site trying to mess up your computer, click the bookmarklet and a new window will open with the form to report the evil site to Google, with the URL already filled in.
The top searches of the past year (or rather, the first 11 months of it) are being released by the major search engines.
Google’s Marissa Mayer revealed the ten fastest growing queries of the past year, though the 2007 year-end Zeitgeist is not out yet. They are:
1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith
The fact that MySpace and YouTube are on this list is a testament to the fact that, even though they were incredibly popular before 2007, they enjoyed amazing growth all year. Celebrity gossip was a big deal on the internet, as gossip blogs supplanted shows like “The Insider” and mags like “The Enquirer” as the top source of celebrity dirt. And the iPhone, a brand new product, became more popular than baseball.
Yahoo has their full 2007 report, including top news stories (Sadaam, Iran, Iraq, gas prices, presidential candidates, the S.D. fires, Virginia Tech), top environmental searches (number 6: Al Gore), top troubled celebrities (Britney, Vanessa Hudgens, Amy Winehouse, Rosie), top tech (top 3: YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook), top consumer recalls (#1: pet food), top endings (top 3: Harry Potter, Anna Nicole, Sopranos), top del.icio.us tags (top 3: design, HDTV, games).
(via Andy)
Ask also put out its list of the top actual searches (as opposed to a sanitized or top rising searches list):
1. MySpace
2. Dictionary
3. Google
4. Themes
5. Area Codes
6. Cars
7. Weather
8. Games
9. Song Lyrics
10. Movies
The list speaks to ask’s strengths. They are the only engine with smart answers for area codes, easy weather for any city or area, and lots of smart answer boxes for things like movies. Annoying that the number 3 search is looking for Google.
They’ve also got a list of the most popular searched-for presidential candidates:
Zoli was happy to discover that Google’s Street View cars had made it into his former home town, the small suburb of Pleasanton, California (population: 67,724) and snapped pictures of his former house. Street View has made it into some obscure places, like the inside of tunnels or the parking lot roads of Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
