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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Google Checkout Party Canceled Due to eBay Pressure

Here’s a little episode from the money-makes-the-world-go-round department. Google on Monday announced an alternative Google Checkout party with free food & massages at the side of an eBay event – likely to lure away sellers (Checkout is a competitor to eBay-owned PayPal):

Are you an online seller attending eBay Live! in Boston this week? If so, join us for a celebration of user choice at the Google Checkout Freedom Party on Thursday night

This didn’t bode so well with eBay, who, according to Valleywag, reacted by withdrawing AdWords ads on Google. And now, in a new blog post Google says that after “speaking with officials at eBay, we ... agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event.” (The post doesn’t elaborate on the reasons, except that Google “did not want to detract from” the eBay Live event – as often with official company blogs, they hide more than they reveal when it comes to sensitive issues.)

[Thanks Colin Colehour and Ionut Alex. Chitu!]

Dilbert-Creator on Solving the Energy Problem

Scott Adams thought about how to solve the energy problem and came up with an idea that he says might be implemented by a company like Google somewhen in the future. In a nut-shell, he considers it weird that most cars driving around carry only a single passenger (I always find that weird too – such a waste!), and proposes a smart car-sharing service.

In the present day in the meantime, Google and others announced a Climate Savers Computing initiative. “Believe it or not,” the site says, “the average desktop PC wastes nearly half the power delivered to it.”

Also see this old Scott Adams Google logo doodle as well as the story behind it.

[Thanks Josh Meyer!]

Visit Referrers From Google Analytics

A small improvement to the interface of Google Analytics might save you some time in the future: you can now click on a small icon  next to referrer URLs to have the referrer open in a new window. (To try this, go to e.g. Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites, and click on a specific domain.)

Analytics is very good by now, but why do we still have to log in everytime we enter “analytics.google.com"? (Going straight to “google.com/analytics/home/” does skip the login box.)

[Via Google’s blogs -> Google Analytics blog.]

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