techno.blog("Dion")

How many times have I mistakenly clicks on the “JVM with NetBeans” link when trying to get the latest JRE onto a machine? More than I would like.

Now, I will have to watch out for the “JVM with Google Toolbar” link too? Are you kidding me?

Next we will have a “JVM with a MacDonalds Coupon” :)

I think it is great that Google and Sun are working together and all, but I look forward to an announcement of a real project that they worked on. This felt like a marketing project :) Google Office works ;)

You keep hearing Google rumors on a daily basis. It really is quite amazing how much buzz they get. I don’t think I have seen such a constant stream for any company in my time.

However, I think that everyone is missing the Big One ™. It isn’t Google Wifi, and it wasn’t Google Talk.

I think the next big thing revolves around the imaging product. If you do image searches, you notice that you can say “don’t show me anything XXX”. This means that Google has the power to take a photo and say “this is raunchy”.

They could take this as a power for good and simply flip the bit. Imagine how many people would use a search engine that ONLY searches the raunchy. I bet Google can probably do more than just know “yes/no”, but also “blond/brunette” and even more (you can get creative I am sure).

So, the cat is out of the bag Google. We know that this entire company was made to come up with the Big One. Google Porn.

So the feature that I am most excited about today isn’t Google Talk, or the fact that GMail is open but is is a “small” GMail addition.

Now you can send email as a non-gmail address. This is the ONE feature I need in webmail. I don’t want to use [email protected], I want to use my REAL email address, but use gmail to read and store it.

This is the final piece of the puzzle so I will use gmail a lot more now.

Great job on that Google!

Settings – Accounts – Add another email address

Ergh, when I got the email it came in as:

[email protected]; on behalf of; Dion Almaer [[email protected]]

So, Google Talk is finally here.

After all of the hype and the rumors. I wondered how Google would innovate in the IM arena, with the likes of Skype around.

There are a few nice features such as popping up the messages, simple clean interface, and the fact that it is Jabber based.

But, how come most of the developers I know at Google are Mac guys, yet the Mac is such a poor man wrt Google products. No client?

I know I can use Adium/Trillian etc….

I guess I am not quite seeing the value add yet (apart from having gmail integration ;). Seems a little rushed out?

I do grok that Mac penetration != Windows penetration, and I know that it isn’t that most developers @ Google are Macers (note: ‘who I know’), but I just can’t help thinking of Bob and co. :)

Cool to see Google supporting Word as a publishing platform.

The fact is, for better or for worse, that a large % of the world uses Word for all things documents, and it is nice to have rich integration rather than reinventing the wheel.

Hopefully it will grok standard posting APIs so it can be used for non-blogger sites?

There have been some interesting items that have been on the great newstands recently:

Sun Bonuses

How about if you got huge bonuses even if you company was tanking? This is what our trusted friends in the Sun management team are getting.

Sun’s board and top management approved McNealy’s $1.1 million bonus last week, after the company reported an 85 percent decline in fourth-quarter net income and said it would slash 1,000 jobs–about 3 percent of its work force.

The board approved a $280,000 bonus for Sun President Jonathan Schwartz and rewards of more than $150,000 for the heads of finance, human resources and technology

Apple

Who can take a commodity device, innovate a little, and resell it for a larger margin than anyone else? Only Apple.

Although, maybe this is changing a little. Instead of all of the “we love you apple” talk, we are getting:

One fan threatened to remove his Apple tattoo should the company include the security chip in its new Macintosh products.

There are MANY things wrong with that statement :)

Googzilla

Mozilla.com hit the ‘net this week. Brendan Eich put it out there, and many got right on it.

Conclusion? “Come on. this is just so Google can buy it right?”

Scott Andrew thinks he knows why Google Maps wins:

It occurs to me that the real winning feature of Google Maps is not its DHTML-goodness, its endless scrolling surfaces, its Ajax underpinnings nor its satellite photo views. Rather, the winning feature is the user types the address into a single input box. No more entering street address, city, state and zip into separate boxes. You don’t even need commas, AFAICT.

Good point. I always liked how in England I would just get asked for my house number (18, 213 #B, etc) and postal (zip) code. With that information you can calculate every location in England.

If we could really push the whole zip+4 then we can get the same affect. Right now if I put in my zip+4 to Google Maps, it just gives me the high level of the 5 digit version.

More Google Maps / UK hacks here

So, we now have something that lets us personalize Google:

http://www.google.com/ig

You can even drag and drop ;)

It would be nice to be able to have a checkbox for “Suggest”

More press at the factory tour

Google has a tradition of reinventing a service that Yahoo! already has (Gmail, Maps).

I would be willing to bet that GPortal is around the corner. How will Google be able to reinvent that bad boy? This is where Ajax comes in.

Ajax finally delivers on the vision of the portal/portlets. None of the annoying lifecycle issues, and change pages when in different modes… now the components can really have a nice lifecycle and the portlets can change in the page itself.

There will also be a nicer way to rearrange your portal (like this example).

I can’t wait to see it ;)

Google just announced the beta service: Web Accelerator. The magic behind this is that the Google Grid is now a proxy itself.

It is even a smart proxy than can send diffs rather than full pages, and can actually gzip the content.

The most interesting part of this how thing, is how Google can use the data. I am not talking about the privacy folks jumping up and down warning you not to use it, rather it can be used for GOOD.

One problem with Google crawling around the web is that the GoogleBot is a bot. It isn’t human.

Now, if enough people use this service, they will be able to work out the important links. If a popular page such as Slashdot put hidden links, Google wouldn’t be fooled as NO humans would be following those links.

This can be huge, and can add to Trust Rank by grokking the human element. Interesting stuff. I am a little sceptical to see how much the tool speeds things up though, but I will give it a shot :)

I wonder if Google and Firefox could be tweaked to work even better together… and I also wonder how it works out how much time the accelerator has saved you :)