→ Cringely on the future of google
Interesting take on google’s network and hardware expertise.

Microsoft can’t compete. Yahoo probably can’t compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That’s less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Game over.

→ 6 GB of gmail storage space by January

→ Google mashes up two of their properties: google earth and youtube.
Find user generated video taken at specific locations. Why not put a tour of your library there?

Considering how your child’s name will appear in google’s index is nerdy, maybe smart, and speaks to your faith in the longevity of PageRankâ„¢.

Ok, so I might be a bit of a geowanker, but I think the street level views on google maps is great. I wonder how long it will take for all cities to be covered…

I want to see the best library and book related images that can be found on google maps street level but can’t find them all by myself, so…

Here’s the contest:

• Find a great library or book related image on google maps street level.
• Take a screen grab and post it to your Flickr account, and post the URL in a comment here.
• In one week I’ll post a list of the best images here. Which ever image becomes most favorited on Flickr will win a Ranganathan sticker and a $5 gift card to amazon!

Happy hunting!

Google Gears
For the past few months I’ve been using Google Reader instead of Bloglines. While this has nearly completed Google’s hegemony in my life, I made the switch because with the Greasemonkey script Better Gmail I can integrate Reader right into Gmail. Now there’s another reason I’m glad I made the transition. Google Gears is a new browser add-on from Google, enabling offline use of their online products. So far it only works with Reader but I’m sure that integration with Documents and Gmail isn’t far behind.

What can this do for you? If you’re with your laptop someplace and have a connection but won’t have a connection for much longer (e.g. boarding a plane), you can download the content of your RSS feeds (and soon Documents and Gmail!) by clicking on a little green arrow (upper right corner in this screen grab).

When you’re again connected, you click the arrow to sync what you’ve done with your online account. Nice! One could argue that a tool like this will continue to be less important as wireless connectivity becomes increasingly pervasive. This might be true, but until we’re all connected 100% of the time we want to be, being able to work offline might come in handy.

Google Mashup Editor
Only available to a small number of developers at this point, Google recently released Google Mashup Editor which is like Yahoo! Pipes (mentioned here) but perhaps a bit more text heavy.

This weekend at the conference I got to spend some quality time with Jessamyn. Not only did we share one of the best wifi experiences I’ve ever had, but she also turned me on to a Firefox extension I’m wild about: CustomizeGoogle. If you haven’t explored the world of extensions for Firefox (you *are* using Firefox, right?), they are little add-ons that can make the browser even more functional. Here’s a list of “The Firefox Hacks You Must Have” from Wired.

Back to CustomizeGoogle. This little guy removes Google ads from search results, gmail, gcal, and other apps in the Google suite. We’ve all become good at ignoring these ads, but the pages are much easier to look at without the extra clutter. One other nifty thing it can do (among a bunch of other stuff) is add links to other search tools to the top of a Google search.

CustomizeGoogle might be useful for school librarians and teachers that want to get students using these tools (because they are free, or to expose them to the latest and greatest) but don’t necessarily care for making those ads part of the curriculum. Then again, is preventing students from seeing real world ads not preparing them for real world web surfing? Is taking the google ads off of a public access computer in a public library censorship?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, but CustomizeGoogle is still a great way to filter your own internet experience!

We’ll see about that, right?

Chris Sherman started his keynote on the state of search by telling us that the media are obsessed with covering Google, and that there’s other interesting stuff going on. I therefore thought he wouldn’t talk about Google very much. While he did cover some new features of Ask, Yahoo and MSN, like most other search coverage, he talked mostly about Google. Totally fine, I understand.

He claimed that Ask now has “true natural language search” now. I find that a bit hard to believe, but I do like one product of theirs. The map feature on Ask doesn’t look extremely special, but it can give both driving and *walking* directions.

His views on Google’s responsibilities of privacy and freedom of information in China were 99% positive. Phrases he used were:

“I still trust google, but I am a bit more cautious.”

“Trust but verify.”

“Savvy Chinese know they can use proxies.”

This last attitude seems prone to reinfornce any digital divide that’s in China.

The slashdot thread about google’s acquisition of 5% of AOL was of interest to me because of GTalk and AIM. The deal is all about advertisements, and all about IM (which itself is about advertisements (scanning our conversations?), and probably VOIP). Even though Trillian and Meebo make it less necessary to have network interoperability, it’ll be nice to see two networks communicating with each other. As for Google getting tainted with some of AOL’s evil, one slashdotter stated:

I swear, if I get ONE damned Google CD in the mail, EVER - I’ll go to a LIBRARY before I look something up on Google again.

Er…thanks for thinking of us!

google’s latest offering appears to be google sms. this makes me excited.

Proposed uses for the service, according to google, are:

-Get local business listings when you’re on the road and want to find a place to eat
-Compare online product prices with ones you find in retail stores
-Look up dictionary definitions to expand your vocabulary or prove a point
-Find other specialized types of information, as described in how to use Google SMS

To send your google sms queries to 46645, which is GOOGL on most phones.

As soon as I get into an area with cell service (i.e. not the library) I’m going to check it out.

misc
press release from google blog
how to use google sms