techno.blog("Dion")

Remember the big argument over Adam Bosworth talking about open source databases? At the time some people came out swinging saying that “Google doesn’t do open source, so why should they ask others to do work for them! They just use others”.

Google came back saying:

• We do contribute to open source
• We do GIVE YOU GOOGLE FOR FREE!

Now, they announce http://code.google.com which has open source projects from Google.

Cedric: Where is Test NG? :)

Bob: Where is dynAop? :)

GoogleX. I think an Apple fan had fun in the Google Labs with his 20% time? :)

On the plus side:

• You can fit more items in than text

On the minus side:

• You have to ‘learn’ what a lot of those icons MEAN. Having to mouseover to read the name is painful

It would be nice to have a personalized Google home page where power users can choose icons / text / icons+text… and can even choose which tools they want there etc.

I made a prediction around Google AdSense and their usage of XHR.

I also see some interesting things revolving around offline clients with JavaScript.

One of the goals of RSSBling, was that Ben and I wanted to show that you could cut the plug and it would still continue to work. This is a problem that many people have worked on, including Adam Bosworth with Alchemy (where did that go?) when he was still at BEA.

With JavaScript, and the right signed code with permissions, you can actually really go offline mode.

Imagine if you could use GMail in offline mode? That would be killer. The biggest problem with that context is the size of the data, so it would actually be harder there than other apps where you could really just save out the state to disk in JSON format, and read it right in again later!

It is interesting to see that you can lookup weather via Google now:

Search:

weather Madison, WI

weather 10024

It is interesting how rather than having “Google Weather”, or something like it, this feature is embedded into the main area. This fits in nicely with other features such as airport listings (sfo airport), and addresses.

How long until it becomes Ask Jeeves-ish and you can type in English (and it actually does do what you want)

I currently never see a Google Ad from AdSense. This is because I have installed AdBlock for Firefox.

I have blocked the iframe, and nothing from the google ad servers is shown.

How can Google get around this problem? One solution would be to use XmlHttpRequest:

• Have XHR go back to the servers to get the ad content
• Add this content to a <div> dynamically

Of course, this isn’t a solution. We could then block those div elements based on IDs. So, Google would probably want to randomly create div ids for the content.

Also, there are many other possibilities. The ads could change dynamically based on:

• Where you are on the page
• If you are mouse over a div with a given rel tag, the ad could change to something relevant to that area even
• “Those who were here, also went there”
• etc..

This is very cool. Although, it probably shows you what you thought was common sense, it is great to see true analysis.

A joint eye tracking study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it.com and eye tracking firm Eyetools has shown that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a

The other day I wrote about the behind the scenes of corporate Google.

Today, thanks to Alasdair Allan we can listen to Google Engineers talk about the scalability issues that they come across.

This video talks about the Google File System, their MapReduce framework, and having fun with data. Now here are real scalability problems ;)

John Heilemann has written a thorough piece titled: Journey to the center of Google.

He takes a quick parade through the first chapter of Google. From the start, to the IPO, and the troubles along the way.

It was interesting to read this after just finishing the book on Steve Jobs. Google has a lot of interesting issues ahead for sure. Hopefully they can keep coming up with good technology for the masses, and “don’t be evil”.

Jon Udell is spot on. We are going to annotate the planet. One of the ways in which we will do this is Google Maps. It isn’t just a way to look something up… it is a platform for us to use!

Take a look at how he took his GPS info. Still photos. Digital movies. And greated
a walking tour of Keene, MA using Google Maps.

It was inspired by Matt King.

See more Google Maps Hacks

I noticed that Google Maps has a slight change on the front page of its UI.

I mentioned the right hand side ‘Examples’ when I first saw the app. Having the text boxes and multiple search buttons was confusing.

Now Google has taken them out and has replaced them with sample text and ‘Try it’ links which run the sample queries.

It took me a bit to change my pattern of:

yp.yahoo.com

find the place that I want

map it

to:

maps.google.com

nameOfPlace in theTown

My next request is due to having my father-in-law with a Hybrid. Have you noticed how you can get obsessed with seeing your hybrid not use the engine, and watching it get energy back via braking etc?

There should be a ‘Show me directions that are most energy efficient for my hybrid” to complement “shortest distance” and “shortest time” ;)