Tag: google Posts

Just for yucks, I integrated Google Latitude into the sidebar in my blog section. Google latitude, for those that don’t know, allows people with GPS-enabled devices to share their locations with their friends (I think it can do it based on geo-IP as well, but that’s not super exciting IMO). I’m not entirely sure showing a map with all my friends on it is particularly useful to be honest, but I thought I’d toss my location up on there for something to do. Far better, in my opinion, would be integration with services such as IM, such that I can see my friend’s list sorted by distance to me. That way if I wanted to go to the bar (and drink water, as per my last post), I could find a list of people close by and blast out a quick group message. Some people are worried about privacy — […]

Hey, that sounds like a great idea. What brilliant strategist came up with that new plan, and who’s the guy from before who thought they should make things without user input?

One of my major criticisms of Google over the last few years has been the state of most of their products. While many of them are initially innovative and useful, they usually fall by the way side and seemingly get abandoned. The “beta” moniker seems to be ever-present on most of their services, leading one to almost believe that there is no such thing as a finish product within the walls of Google. I just read this article where someone took the time to figure out just how many of Google’s products are in beta. The verdict? Nearly half of them, including the four year old gmail product and google docs. Everyone knows Google is fond of the beta label on its products, but we wanted some actual numbers so went through all of Google’s products to see how many of them are in beta,” Pingdom analyst Peter Alguacil tells […]

So, it’s 30 minutes past midnight, and we just got back from another long day at Google. I’m sitting in Scott’s 82 degree fahrenheit hotel room with Derek and twelve beers. Last night we realized that a 14 hour day would be a lot better if we had a few beers to finish it off, so we basically started the midnight-gas-station-beer-run tradition. For those of you who don’t really know what Silicon Valley is like, I’ll give you a little heads up. Most of Silicon Valley is centered around a city south of San Francisco called San Jose (affectionately called “Man Jose” by the locals, since it’s predominantly populated by guys). Unfortunately, there’s not really much to do in the high-tech areas except for work, or drink gas station beer. We’ve done fairly well on both of those activities so far. I spent most of today messing around with the […]

I feel like writing a blog entry right now about as much as I feel like putting a spinning drill-bit into my temple. But I really wanted to jot down some of my thoughts from today before I passed out. There’s a group of seven of us down in Mountain View right now. The purpose of this trip is to try and hash out a complete peer-to-peer communications protocol based on open-standards. When it’s complete, it will essentially be an open source framework that will allow functionality similar to Skype, including encryption between nodes, even in an adhoc configuration. This trip marks the first time I have spent any significant time on the Google campus. One of the first things you notice is how many perks the employees get. There is free food and beverages scattered all over the buildings. The good thing is that they really strive to make […]

Ok, ok. I’ll take a break from writing about the iPhone. But business has been great lately – my traffic has nearly doubled in the last few days. Not like I really pay attention to those things, but it’s pretty clear when there’s a big prolonged spike — clearly people are excited about the iPhone. To be honest, while talking about web traffic, I’m actually surprised mine has stayed up. I used to host all my plugins here and sort of assumed when I finally moved them over to BraveNewCode that alot of my traffic would disappear. But for whatever reason, my traffic has actually increased quite a bit since then. Strange things, these tubes. Anyways. As I pointed out, Bell Mobility finally lost the battle against me. I could rant endlessly about the disappointment I have that every business nowadays seems to just be looking to screw you as […]

I’ve been using Google Reader as my main RSS reader for some time. For the most part, I’m pretty happy with it. They’ve recently added the ability to share items, which makes it far more interesting. The one thing I’d love to see though is the ability to add local comments on those shared items, comments that only my friends could see. So many times I’ve read items in my friends’ shared feeds and really wanted to say something, or get clarification. Going to the real site and posting a comment sort of implies a certain level of knowledge on my part (especially if it’s a technical discussion). However, that barrier is much reduced when talking amongst my friends, and I really would love to see side-channel discussions on shared items. That’s my request for the day. So Google, you missed my birthday a few weeks ago, but you should […]

Ok, I’m going to go into rant mode. Why is everyone so enamored with Google these days? I read yesterday about their recent Google App Engine, and didn’t really see anything that particularly turned my crank. I’ve been bouncing around the web today reading what people are saying, and for the most part, everyone is down in the People’s Temple drinking the Kool-Aid. I don’t think the App Engine is a bad idea, I just don’t really get why you’d even consider it, especially considering AWS is around and has a much more flexible offering. First, I’m going to start by saying that 99% of web companies never even reach a point in their business where they actually require scaling. I’ve seen this talked about many times. So why, when developing a new web technology or company would you lock yourself into the Google shackles simply on the hope that […]

I’ve decided to do a multipart series on how to take your WordPress installation to the next level. Most people seem to have an out-of-the-box WordPress installation, and I think they are really missing out on a few things that can really improve the quality of their blog. The first topic I’d like to cover is search engines. Most of you know how a search engine works, but for those who don’t, here’s a really quick primer. Search engines employ little agents called “Bots” that basically roam around the internet taking snapshots of the content. Google’s little guy is called “GoogleBot”, and identifies itself by a unique User-Agent header in all HTTP requests (if you have some kind of data analytics program, you might see GoogleBot show up from time to time). Whenever a search engine encounters a hyperlink, it checks to see if it’s in its database, and if […]

So here’s some food for thought for the blogosphere. Lately I’ve been pondering a few of the legal aspects of the Internet, namely what it is we are all allowed to do, and what it is some companies think we shouldn’t be allowed to. Let me give you a use-case to demonstrate what I’m talking about. Photo by Ben Sheldon on Flickr Let’s say I set up a blog, and I’m checking out Flickr and I see a photo I like. Let’s say for a second that the CC license is set in such a way that I can use the photo on my blog. So, I right click on the image, say “copy image address”, and slap it into a blog entry. Now, according to Flickr’s terms of service, I’m not technically allowed to link to any one of their images without providing a hyperlink back to the website. […]