Tag: Google

Portland was added to Google Maps street view today. Here is a shot of my MINI next to Ryan’s red Rabbit.

I’ve been having a conversation with Andy Beard on a post of his entitled “Google are killing the future of RSS“. For some reason, my most recent comment has not appeared on the page. I can only assume that he did not appreciate its tone. So, I have decided to post the comment here:

The task list examples are bogus. It’s the user’s personal information, not the publisher’s. The user should be able to do what he wants with it, even accidentally share it with the world.

The financial information and marketing examples do have some merit. (Why someone would subscribe to a feed full of marketing speak is beyond me. But whatever.)

However, I don’t think any of these cases are strong enough to warrant adding a no-sharing restriction to feeds. (I’m taking back the “more power to you” statement in my last post. That was an incredibly stupid thing to say.) I’ve come to the realization that what we’re really talking about is a DRM scheme. We’ve already seen the kind of damage that can be done with DRM in the music, film, and ebook industries. Adding it to RSS for some short-term gain would be a disaster.

There’s another programmatic way you could solve this problem. Simply prevent applications that allow for sharing to access your feeds. Very easy to implement. It would also help you with your goal of having less readers.

Tonight Google finally unveiled the beta of Google Apps for your Domain. Not a very catchy name. Why not call it what it really is? Google Office. I guess once Writely and Google Spreadsheets are added to the suite, the name will be more appropriate.

What was it that people were saying about Google not having a strategy?

Of course, Steve Gillmor has a good deal to say about this.

Let the disruption begin.

Gmail Notifier has become Google Notifier (via TUAW). The application now includes notifications and a menu bar icon for Google Calendar. I’m really happy about the calendar integration. It’s something I’ve been wanting for a while now.

As you may remember, the lack of task lists was my one complaint about Google Calendar. ZDNet’s Garett Rogers has done some digging in the code and discovered task lists are in the works.

Yesterday, Google launched Google Calendar. So far, I’m very impressed.

As far as I can tell, it does everything that Apple’s iCal does, except for to-do lists. A few things I liked:

• Importing events from an iCal file
• Each calendar generates its own iCal feed
• Notifications can be sent via pop-up, e-mail, and SMS
• You move and change the length of events by clicking and dragging

There isn’t much bad to say about the service. In about ten minutes of use, I did manage to find one display bug in the Agenda view, which was no big deal. But I was quite disappointed that they didn’t include some sort of to-do functionality. In my quest to increase the portability of my data, I was hoping to move my to-do/event list to Google Calendar. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that added at a future date.

Google Calendar has been launched. I’ll write more once I have a chance to check it out.

Gmail Notifier for OS X, the one good Google desktop app for this OS, has been broken for almost two days. It’s definitely something wrong on Google’s end, yet there has been no acknowledgement of the problem.

At least I’ll have one less distraction in my life until they get things fixed. New mail notifications are attention magnets.

Gmail Notifier for OS X has been updated (via TUAW). It’s now a universal binary, supports plugins, and has a new icon.

I’m not normally one to praise a marketing guy, but Seth Godin seems to have a lot of good insights about how to sell a product in today’s world. His recent presentation at Google (thanks to Robert Scoble) is recommended viewing for both its style and its content.

There are some people out there who think that Seth is more hype than substance. But when you get past the storytelling, the buzzwords, and the smooth presentation style, you’ll find truth that, while sometimes obvious, a lot of companies just don’t understand. Honestly, when was the last time the company you work for set out to do something remarkable?