Category Archives: Google and Gmail

New stuff in Gmail

Google has changed GMail around a bit in recent days.

“Move to trash” is now called “Delete”. Woo hoo.

A trash icon is next to items in the Trash folder.

View some attachments as HTML.

“Web clips” let you view RSS headlines on the GMail screen… but only if English (US) is your display language.

Google stuff

Google’s guidelines on web sites.

A Googler’s guidelines on how to get back in if Google kicks you out for something naughty.

It is a little worrying though that the process seems a tad secretive. While Google does an excellent job of keeping the spammers out of their index, and I suppose they don’t want to give the spammers too much information on how it’s done, legitimate sites do get caught up in it from time to time (sometimes through ignorance), and there seems to be little in the way of feedback from Google about what a site might have done to get themselves banned.

Why Google is the new Apple

They’re not Microsoft

They innovate

People watch everything they do

They’re cool amongst da people

Despite being cool, they’re quite secretive (no Google blogs apart from an official one… no Apple blogs at all)

They don’t speculate on their products until they launch them, catching their opposition by surprise

I’d love to think of some more, but I’m late for dinner.

How open is open?

While Google Talk will use the Jabber protocol, there are concerns over network interopability, with Jabber Australia President (and Geekrant reader) Jeremy Lunn questioning how (and if) Google Talk will work with existing networks.

Meanwhile, the extremely popular but extremely proprietary Skype has opened up… just a teensy bit… with an API to let developers hook into Skype a little more easily. Doesn’t mean other clients will be able to use the Skype protocols, or extend Skype support onto new platforms, mind you.

Google Talk

Google have launched Google Talk, a chat service that uses GMail logon/password for authentication, and supports instant messaging and voice.

It uses the XMPP protocol for instant messaging, so other clients can connect (including those on non-Windows platforms that their client doesn’t support yet), and they say they will support SIP in future for voice.

Now… why wasn’t this included with their Desktop sidebar? That would be one killer helper app. Not that I’m convinced the world needed another IM network.

Google Desktop V 2

Go download the new Google Desktop Search and run it in side bar mode.

I’m playing with it now and it’s pretty cool. It offers way too many things I’ll never use or simply don’t need (photo slide show, ‘web clips’ – come on, just call it RSS and be done with it, no weather for non-US cities, ‘what’s hot’) and some nifty features (check the Quick Find feature and the Outlook integration along with a great little scratch pad) in a download that now works with VET anti-virus programs.

MSN Desktop Search is a far more elegant search application and much more focused – it searches your stuff, and searches it well but for sheer geek fun Google delivers.

Google blacklists CNet

Google blacklists CNet, saying they won’t talk to news.com reporters for a year, in reaction to a news.com story that highlighted various information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that could be considered sensitive, but was found through Google itself.

It’s interesting, because it seems so at odds with Google’s cleancut friendly image. I suppose it was a bit cheeky of CNet to use a Google executive as the subject of its searches, but the proliferation of personal information on Google and elsewhere on the Net is an important subject.

And if you’re wondering, yes, you can find this story in Google news.

(BTW, Lucas Heights nuclear reactor are nervous about Google Earth, though the Federal government doesn’t seem too concerned.)

Two things Google can do better

Google r0x0rs. Utterly. But there’s a couple of things they can improve.

If they’re clever, they should read sites like those done on WordPress and work out how to index the content at the permalinks, rather than the front page, so that people can find content on sites that have frequently updating front pages. Example: Geekrant is currently top hit for “melbourne itrip frequency”, but it’s pointing to the front page, and is no longer on the first screenful. It will have fallen off the front page in the next few days.

They need to realise that sites hosted in country X are not necessarily about, native to, or located in country X. A better way would be to check the country of the admin contact of the domain. (Tony mentioned an example of a .co.uk site he did for somebody; it hardly rated on Google UK until he moved the physical hosting to the UK.)

Monday snippets

From the forthcoming book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, here’s an article about how Google got started.

How to deploy Visual Studio .Net applications to Linux. (via Brad)

Now maybe I can sell off my old BBC B, once I get a Beeb emulator working. Shame I might never recover my old Ultima clone that some friends and I were working on in 1988.