Google

Google latitude is an interesting app available at least on Nokia phones that allows you to see where your friends are according to their mobile phone. At the moment it’s limited just to your gmail friends but expand to include more. What makes this application interesting in the near future is that as more of the early adopting friends of yours install this app you’ll see which city they’re in quite easily. If the friends are in a public space then you can get more accurate directions. It’s an interesting application.

It’s not often that you see me seated at a PC running windows but when Google Chrome was released that’s the OS of choice. I had to test it and so far there are a few features I find of interest. These featres are seen when looking at the Google Chrome most visited page. Here you can see the 9 most often visited sites as thumbnails. Drag those thumbnails up to the bar above and you’ve got bookmarks for quick access at a later time. This window also displays the search and recent bookmarks tab. So far so good. As with firefox there is site guessing text that appears for suggested URL’s and for those you may have visited. Type in your username and password and you’ve got the option to save the password once you’re logged in. Very useful for those of us spending our time on a minimum of ten websites a day. With the tabbing feature I was able to open at least fourty tabs at a time with one minor problem. There was no manner of telling which site was on which tab. As a result they may need to think about creating a list view of tabs, or even implement what we saw in versions of operat ten years ago, the option to resize tabs within the browser. It may be of value. In the search and URL bar there’s the star, click on it and you can bookmark a page, add the title you want. The usual shortcut keys do the same thing. Click on the page tab at the right of the search bar and you’ve got one option of particular interest. “Create Application shortuct”. Select this option and you’re given thre options, Desktop, Start Menu and Quicklaunch bar. There, now you’ve got the app as a shortcut link, great for getting straight to the web application you want in one quick move. That may be for twitter, your blog, twitter or any other website you find of interest. The final feature is the task manager. It allows you to see which websites are open and how many resources they’re using. The three collumns are Memory, CPU and network. It allows you to understand which page is slowing down your system, or if you open several tabs at once which tab has finished loading. Overall it’s an interesting product and it’s dissapointing that I had to test it on an older windows machine rather than my laptop but so far my opinion of the browser is not that bad. I’d like to see a tab counter implemented as well as a thumbnail view of all the currently opened tabs for quick selection of the site or page I want to see.

Documentally - Oct 2, 2007

wow.. you were quick defining the word twitterstorm.. Not quick enough to buy the dot com though.. ;)

The Twitterstorm is a description of an event where hundreds of 140 character messages are sent at the same time. The most recent example of this occurrence is the one that took place when news of Jaiku being swallowed by google broke. Both Twitter and Jaiku are similar. They both give you 140 characters to express yourself and they can both be taken with you.

When Jaiku was sold to Google the Twitter community has been wondering what’s next for them. That is true, at least for those who are not heavy users of twitter. For the more passive user Jaiku is more appealing because it’s got more bells and whistles. Twitter relies on your ability to express what is on your mind exclusively through text. Tinyurl does make the task a little simpler.

A recent article has brought to the world’s attention that Wikipedia has over 2 million articles on its website and that’s great. What it means is that thousands of people have taken a little time out of their day to provide what knowledge they had to a global audience through their small contribution.

The World Wide Web was not always as easy to use as it is today. Back when I started using the world wide web there were less than six million web pages. Now there are several billion and google is helping to index this mess. This mess I’m talking about is the enormous amount of content that people have created and shared on the world wide web without any consideration for ease of retrieval. In 1997 when I wrote about the Romans I was one of ten to twenty people who created content on this topic. As a result, it was not hard to get other people’s attention. As pioneers of online content when Larry Page and others started to create lists of interesting websites it was easy to be added to the collection. As more content was produced so the link collection would have to be stepped up and get help from search algorithms. I remember when Altavista was one of the great websites you wanted to be linked from.

According to a number of articles, 02 and Apple are in final discussions about the iPhone and how they will distribute it within the European Union. So far we still have to wait until December of this year to get it in Europe. I don’t think I want to own this particular phone because the one I have now has almost all these functionalities to start with. I also like having a qwerty keyboard for ease of typing whilst on the move, unlike the iPhone. The browser is probably the strongest feature of the iPhone but this is irrelevant for most websites. Both Google and Facebook, two of the only websites I’m interested in using on the move have created useful interfaces for those on the move. in the case of Gmail, it’s the interface that allows you to check and send e-mail within their own java applet which is installed on your phone. In the case of Facebook, their strength is in giving you just the features you want, i.e. what your friends are doing, the latest news, and more. It’s great to get some quick information whilst unable to go online. I want to try out the iPhone and see how great and easy it is to use. Apple loves making software that is simple to use, without submenus as you find with windows mobile so for newbies it’s better. In a few months, I may get to see the iPhone in person and see how good it is…. unless I fly to the US or go to one of the EU Macworld.

There is an individual from Wembley who wants to sue google for search results apparently defaming him. The content was posted by anonymous sources and due to this fact, it is time-consuming to find who was the source of these allegations. There is a problem with the complaint. The worldwide web generates several hundreds of thousands of words a day in a multitude of languages and anyone can read the articles. It is malleable and ever-changing. If your reputation is put into question on the world wide web there is only one thing you can do. Write a response on your own website to demonstrate that these allegations are false. If you’re going to attempt to sue a search engine for making search results visible then that is going against what the world wide web, i.e. the free flow of information. When an anonymous source prints something that is incorrect then it is up to the reader of the source to evaluate whether he will take this source seriously or not. It is up to the user to take this content and look in a number of trusted resources to form a proper opinion. Can you imagine the millions of hours it would take to investigate and verify all the content on the web? It’d make the world wide web far slower and less responsive to news and information. One of the great things about the world wide web is that it encourages people to do research from the comfort of their own home. If you want to buy a new laptop you can find information easily from a number of sources, the same as with travel destinations and more. When someone writes something then the creator of the content, rather than the search engine, should be held accountable for the content they make available, not the search engine. If you want to control what search engines link to then you are slowing down the world wide web and you are hindering its progression. What makes the world wide web so powerful is it’s size. It is dealt with on a daily basis by millions of people, some being experts and others being more impulsive. What this means is that content on the world wide web should not work you up so far as to attempt to sue a company. He’s got increased visibility, by writing something negative more people find out about the company. As they find out about the company they may be more interested in what the company has to say. If it does not address the issue then it is missing a PR opportunity. It seems rather stupid to sue Google for something like this.

Twitter is a global short messaging system that allows people to post what they are doing 140 characters at a time. For the moment it is a relatively new phenomenon therefore it’s not too hard to keep track of the conversations going on. They are also geo logged. As you’re watching people’s messages you can see China say that they’re getting ready for the night ahead whilst in Europe people are going out to lunch. In the US people are complaining about having to wake up early in order to catch their planes, go for walks or in certain cases go to bed. It’s amusing and it’s reminiscent of ten years ago when I spent 13hrs in a chatroom at a time when spending ten minutes online was expensive. it’s cyclical. One thing is popular, then is replaced by something else before becoming popular again. One difference this time is the technology used. Google maps show where in the world people are tweeting from whilst the twitter site simply shows what people have written. It’s amusing to watch the world and what people are doing in it.