Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Blogger.com’s Change of Mind

Old Blogger Slogan

New Blogger Slogan

[Thanks Capt.]

Blogger.com’s Change of M ... by Philipp Lenssen

Gmail Wish-List

Gmail is already great. Still, here goes a wish-list to make it even better. [A tip of the hat to Orkut Gmail community.]

• Possibility to keep a session even after closing browser
• Bring back the Delete All button for trash and spam folders
• Give users the option to display attached images on-page
• More options to create filters
• “Ignore list” to block certain emails
• Signature features
• 10 Gigabyte storage*

HTML composing, PGP (privacy encoding), dynamic-search-as-label, and a “share folder with group” option were some more suggestions from Orkut. And why not integrate this email client with Google Groups and Usenet, so that it could be my newsreader as well? (I currently use XanaNews for that, but it’s not a web-based application.)

Sidenote: what with all the buzz concerning Gmail’s Ads, it was striking me as ironic that most advertisement I see in my account is actually straight from Hotmail and Yahoo... delivered via their spammy, auto-attached ad signature.

*Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day, but teach a man how to fish and he will try to take away your fishing rod.

Gmail Wish-List by Philipp Lenssen

Google’s Silverstein Interviewed

Google’s Technology director Craig Silverstein is interviewed. He says PageRank is not dead but there are two or three main categories ranking is based on:

“[We] try to understand and leverage human intelligence. We look for signals that people put in to indicate intelligence, like deciding to link from one page to another or annotating text with the description of what the text is about.”
– Craig Silverstein interviewed by Stefanie Olsen, Google’s employee No. 1--search and create (CNET), May 12, 2004

Silverstein likens search being integrated into Microsoft’s upcoming OS to the Microsoft-Netscape debate some years ago.
Also he says there is no video search coming up anytime soon – and that real Artificial Intelligence (understanding language) will have to wait around 200 to 300 years.

Google’s Silverstein Inte ... by Philipp Lenssen

Reuters and Feedster RSS

Reuters added a bunch of RSS feeds. I added them to FindForward’s RSS search.
Also nice is Feedster’s search-result-as-RSS feature, similar to what Yahoo! News is offering. I added both feeds to my Authorama book pages, so you can now see author news, or blogs mentioning a specific book.

Reuters and Feedster RSS by Philipp Lenssen

Google’s IPO Googlebomb

Another Googlebomb-to-be at Google-Watch.com: Google’s IPO. See this “modest proposal to keep Google from being evil”.

Google’s IPO Googlebomb by Philipp Lenssen

What If... Google Would Be Evil? (Part 5 of 10)

Google repeated their mantra in the latest statement attached to their IPO filing, when Larry Page wrote “Don’t be evil”. This was to remind us what the big G strives to avoid. And some might already be scared. We don’t like to switch tools all the time, and put trust into things served by google.com. Google may be our website host (Blogger.com), our community (Orkut), our paycheck (AdSense), and last not least our search engine. But we are ready to watch for the signs – and as Google also repeatedly states, other sites are just one click away.
So let’s ask ourselves: What if... Google would be evil?

5. Infamous cookie set loose in world’s biggest information merger

You heard of that long-lived Google cookie to expire January 17, 2038. And you probably know Google shares it amongst all of its services. (Did you know this is only possible because whereever you are, it’s something dot google dot com?) Which means when you log-in to Gmail, someone at Google knows what you were searching for. When you log-in to Blogger.com, Google tracks what you are publishing. Log-in to Orkut, and Google knows who your friends are, what you like, where you live and how old you are. Let’s face it: now Google merged all that faithfully submitted data, they know more about you than your own mother. Time’s rife for old-fashioned blackmailing or something infinitely more clever... after all, it’s Google engineers we’re talking about.

To be continued...

What If... Google Would B ... by Philipp Lenssen

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