Sunday, August 29, 2004

Things Google Knows

Here’s a list of things Google knows about you. [Via Kottke.]

Things Google Knows by Philipp Lenssen

Hard-to-Spell Emails

Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail: it’s always best to choose a username which is easy to spell even on the phone. Here are examples by Timothy McSweeney which are definitely not:

• MikeUnderscore2004@yahoo.com
• MikeAtYahooDotCom@hotmail.com
• Mike_WardAllOneWord@yahoo.com
• AAAAAThatsSixAs@yahoo.com

Hard-to-Spell Emails by Philipp Lenssen

Netscan Newsgroup Data

This Netscan treemap visualizes the hierarchical relationships of Newsgroups in the Usenet. Thew Netscan newsgroup search on the other hand offers statistical data such as number of posts, or average post length. [Thanks Gary.]

Netscan Newsgroup Data by Philipp Lenssen

Gmail Labels Moving Left

As spotted before, the Gmail labeler now moved to the left select-box. This feels more integrated and intuitive to me and makes sense (I was always taking some extra-seconds finding the labels box – a long time in Usability).

One thing Google could now better make use of is grouping options. This is a W3C standard which works well in major browsers. Here is how the markup appears in your browser, followed by the (X)HTML needed to build this:

More options... > Move to trash + Mark as read - Mark as unread + Add star - Remove star + Job + Family + Photos New label...

<select name="action">
    <option>More options...</option>

    <optgroup label="Trash">
        <option value="1">&gt; Move to trash</option>
    </optgroup>

    <optgroup label="Mark">
        <option value="2">+ Mark as read</option>
        <option value="3">- Mark as unread</option>
        <option value="4">+ Add star</option>
        <option value="5">- Remove star</option>
    </optgroup>

    <optgroup label="Apply label">
        <option value="label1">+ Job</option>
        <option value="label2">+ Family</option>
        <option value="label3">+ Photos</option>
        <option value="newlabel">New label...</option>
    </optgroup>
</select>

Gmail Labels Moving Left by Philipp Lenssen

New Google Patent

The Google guys seem to have registered a new patent. [Thanks Gary.]
Here’s the abstract:

“Serving content-relevant advertisements with client-side device support

A client-side application (such as a browser, a browser plug-in, a browser toolbar plug-in, etc. on an end user’s computer) is used to support the serving of content-relevant ads to the client device. The client-side application may provide such support by sending document information (such as a document identifier, document content, content relevance information, etc.) to a content ad server. The client-side application may also be used to combine content of the document and the content-relevant ads. For example, the client-side application may combine content of the document and the ads in a window (e.g., in a browser window), may provide the ads in a window above, below, adjacent to a document window, may provide the ads in “chrome” of the browser, etc.”

New Google Patent by Philipp Lenssen

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