- Page II -
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Google China Music Player Gets Makeover
Google launched a redesign of their Chinese music player (partnered with Top100.cn), which pops up in a new window when you perform a search at the Music base site. The new player puts more focus on search (results will be loaded in the old window), relocates some buttons, and also links to a music list sharing functionality using a Microsoft or Yahoo account, among others.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Locking SafeSearch
Google has added a “Lock SafeSearch” feature, available via their search preferences page. It’s meant for concerned adults who don’t want kids to switch away from the SafeSearch filtering (SafeSearch prevents certain adult content from entering web or image results). Once you enable the lock, Google-colored balls as pictured above will appear stamped on the page, meant to be seen by adults from further away – not even logging out will get rid of them. Once cookies are deleted though the lock is gone (and it’s always possibe to switch to another search engine, like Microsoft Bing).
A technical side effect to all this is that now, logging out is not always a clean separation anymore – e.g. if another person signs in to their own account after you’ve activated the lock and signed out, they will still find your email address on their preferences page (it will read e.g. “SafeSearch is currently locked. If you are philipp.lenssen@gmail.com, you can unlock or verify this preference.”)
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Go! vs Go
Francis McCabe writes:
I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have been papers published on this and I have a book.
I would appreciate it if google changed the name of this language; as I do not want to have to change my language!
More specifically, Francis’ language is called “Go!” (with an exclamation mark), and his book is self-published at Lulu. I get the feeling no one should be able to “reserve” a normal word for their product/ invention/ programming language and then block others from using it in the future – what are your thoughts?
Google Latitude History and Alerts
Google’s human location tracking service Latitude has received two new features: a history (i.e. a route of where you’ve been), and a “friend is nearby" type of alert functionality. The second feature depends on the first to work, because Google wanted to make location alerts smart enough to understand when a friend visit is something you might want to know about – because it’s not too regular – and when not... “It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work”, as Google puts it.
[Thanks DPic!]
Go, a Programming Language by Google
Google has released a new programming language called Go. Google wants to offer a couple of benefits from their language: fast compilation, easy analyzing of dependencies, static types that nevertheless feel more lightweight compared to some other languages, and multi-core machine support.
Go is not (not yet anyway) an approved official Google-internal language, but apparently more of an experiment for "adventurous users", started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. The motivation for a new language is explained at the Go site:
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
Why doesn't Go offer generic types? Google explains that the language does not offer them yet, but that they may well be added at some point. The site says:
Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it. Meanwhile, Go's built-in maps and slices, plus the ability to use the empty interface to construct containers (with explicit unboxing) mean in many cases it is possible to write code that does what generics would enable, if less smoothly.
This remains an open issue.
Here's a bit of Go code to give you an idea, and much more is explained in Google's tutorials. I've just copied some syntax samples into this bit of code, not to create a compilable valid program but for the sake of showing off some of the := declaration syntax, the "missing" if and for brackets, the use of semi-colons as separators but not terminators (the tutorial code seems to be inconsequential about this, or I'm missing something), the implicit break in the switch statement and more:
package main
import fmt "fmt"
const (
Space = " ";
)
func main() {
var s string = "";
for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
if i > 0 {
s += Space
}
s += "foo"
}
var a int;
b := 0;
c := 0;
switch {
case a < b:
c = -1
case a == b:
c = 0
case a > b:
c = 1
}
}[Thanks Manoj, DPic and Steffi!]
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Google Acquiring AdMob
Google has announced it’s acquiring mobile ad platform AdMob for $750 million in stock. Roger Browne comments, “If Google had allowed AdSense publishers to put the ads into applications, Google would already be market leader and wouldn’t need to be buying AdMob!” Additionally, TechCrunch is reporting that Google acquired Skype competitor Gizmo. Just recently, Google let it be known that they’ve got plans to push more video features into Gmail...
[Thanks Hebbet, James Xuan and Roger!]
Google Street View Hawaii, and More
Google has added Hawaii to the spots featured in Google Maps Street View (Street View Netherlands is also expanded, WebSonic comments). They also created a special gallery to highlight some Street View places... like Legoland, or Obama hometown spots. In the meantime, you can vote among the final contenders for a place Google’s trike should start recording panorama pics next. I’ve troubles accessing nearly all of this content from China, so if you got a screenshot to share please post in the comments.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal, now at Google) Talks About Programming
Brad Fitzpatrick, born in 1980, started to learn programming at the age of 5. In high school he went on to create a voting booth script called FreeVote, which he says earned him as much as 27 cent per click on banner ads back then (making for 25, 27 grand per month). He went on to create blogging platform LiveJournal, thinking and implementing a lot to scale this to the traffic needs, and is currently working at Google. The following excerpt is from the book Coders at Work, in which Peter Seibel – himself a programmer – interviews many interesting programmers (some of them working at Google), asking a whole lot of interesting questions.
Seibel: You’ve done a lot of work in Perl, which is a pretty high-level language. How low do you think programmers need to go – do programmers still need to know assembly and how chips work?
Fitzpatrick: I don’t know. I see people that are really smart – I would say they’re good programmers – but say they only know Java. The way they think about solving things is always within the space they know. They don’t think ends-to-ends as much. I think it’s really important to know the whole stack even if you don’t operate within the whole stack.
When I was doing stuff on LiveJournal, I was thinking about things from JavaScript to how things were interacting in the kernel. I was reading Linux kernel code about epoll and I was like, “Well, what if we have all these long TCP connections that are going to this load balancer?” I was trying to think of how much memory is in each structure here. That’s still somewhat high-level, but then we were thinking about things like, we’re getting so many interrupts on the Ethernet card – do we switch to this NAPI thing in the kernel where rather than the NIC sending an interrupt on every incoming packet it coalesces them to boundaries that were equivalent to 100 megabits speed even though it was a gigabit NIC. We were collecting numbers to see at what point this made sense and freed up the processor.
We were getting a lot of wins for really low-level stuff. I had somebody recently tell me about something: “Java takes care of that; we don’t have to deal with that.” I was like: “No, Java can’t take care of this because I know what kernel version you’re using and the kernel doesn’t support it. Your virtual machine may be hiding that from you and giving you some abstraction that makes it look like that’s efficient, but it’s only efficient when you’re running on this kernel.” (...)
In practice, nothing works. There are all these beautiful abstractions that are backed by shit. The implementations of libraries that look like they could be beautiful are shit. And so if you’re the one responsible for the cost of buying servers, or reliability – if you’re on call for pages – it helps to actually know what’s going on under the covers and not trust everyone else’s library, and code, and interfaces. (...)
Seibel: Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers?
Fitzpatrick: Always try to do something a little harder, that’s outside your reach. Read code. I heard this a lot, but it didn’t really sink in until later. (...)
Seibel: What about code ownership? Is it important for people to own code individually or is it better for a team to share ownership?
Fitzpatrick: I don’t think code should be owned. I don’t think anyone really thinks that. The way it works within Google is that it’s one massive source tree, one root, and one unified build system across all of it. And so anyone can go and change anything. But there are code reviews, and directories have owners, always at least two people, just in case someone quits or is on vacation.
To check in you need three conditions met: You need someone to review it and say it looks good. You need to be certified in the language – basically, you’ve proven you know the style of this language – called “readability.” And then you also need the approval from somebody in the owner’s file in that directory. So in the case that you already are an owner of that directory and you have readability in that language, you just need someone to say, “Yeah, it looks good.” And it’s a pretty good system, because there tends to be a minimum of two, up to twenty, thirty owners. Once you work on a code base for a while, someone just adds you to owners. I think it’s a great system.
[Photo CC licensed by Dan Farber. I embolded the questions from the interview.]
Friday, November 6, 2009
Dan Siroker: CarrotSticks, Google Chrome, and Obama
Dan Siroker is the founder of kid’s learning games site CarrotSticks.com. Before that, he was involved with the Obama campaign transition as deputy new media director; prior to that, Dan was a product manager for Google Chrome.
This email interview was made possible with the friendly help of the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference (December 7-11 this year), where Dan Siroker – as well as Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do – are keynote speakers. [Thanks Byron!]
Can you explain your role at CarrotSticks.com?
CarrotSticks is an online multiplayer game where kids practice math through real-time social competition with their peers. Our mission at CarrotSticks is to provide parents with solutions to make learning a more exciting and interactive experience for their children. Research shows that peers have a tremendous influence on a child’s attitudes towards learning. We want to harness this influence in a positive way by using technology to make learning social. My role at CarrotSticks has two aspects to it: customer development and product development. Through customer development we listen to our customers and potential customers and identify their pain points and what we can build to help solve them. Once we have a clear picture of the problem we are trying to solve, we develop the product to help solve it. Our goal is to make something people want and the only way we know how to do that is to listen to a lot of parents and teachers.
You probably know the market of learning games, what was the thing you wanted to do differently with CarrotSticks – what was the need you saw?
We built CarrotSticks after meeting with dozens of parents and hearing two pain points over and over again: my child’s school isn’t rigorous enough when it comes to math, and my child doesn’t enjoy supplemental math programs. Given these two pain points our goal was to build a rigorous supplemental math program that is so fun kids love doing it. CarrotSticks is a rigorous way for kids to practice math because we’ve built a step-by-step interface that gives immediate feedback at every step of the problem when the child answers correctly or incorrectly. If they get it wrong, they get a helpful hint. If they get it right, they are rewarded with carrots. What makes CarrotSticks so fun is that we allow kids to compete with other kids in real-time competitions. This transformed ordinary math problems into a fun game in which the objective is to get as many carrots as you can in 30 seconds.
Do you do usability testing with kids? Could you give us some examples of revealing findings you stumbled upon during testing?
We’ve done several classroom trials in which we watch 20-30 kids at a time playing CarrotSticks. Through this we’ve learned a lot about the way young kids use our product. I’ll describe two findings we stumbled upon through this testing.
The first finding was that kids don’t navigate. The very first version of CarrotSticks we showed kids had a lot of navigational elements to it. We had separate tabs for the leaderboard, saving your account, etc. Turns out kids don’t click on any of this. They just play what’s directly in front of them. This forced us to re-design CarrotSticks to put everything on the front page. Now the leaderboard shows up on the right-hand side of the screen as you practice and you get automatically prompted to save your account after you complete a certain number of problems.
The second finding was that kids love interacting with each other in a social way. We were blown away the first time we showed kids the avatar and social competition features. We were in a 3rd grade class in Palo Alto and intended to have the kids use it for at most half an hour. The kids were hooked for almost an hour straight until the bell for recess rang. To our surprise, the teacher gave the kids a choice: you can stay in the classroom and keep playing CarrotSticks, or you can go to recess. Not a single kid went to recess!
Many parts of your site can be entered as guest, with no registration. How important is that?
Anyone can use CarrotSticks anonymously without signing up for as long as they want. Forcing users to register before they even try a product is silly. It’s annoying to users because most of them came to our site through an ad or from a word-of-mouth recommendation. Almost all of them are here just to try it out and see if it is worth buying. The more steps we put between them showing up to our home page and them realizing the value in our product the worse it is for our business because users will just bounce. We know that if the user actually tries our product they will be hooked so we want to get them engaged as soon as possible.
Who designs the games on your site, and how do you go about it?
We have built all the games ourselves. We have done this because the user experience is so important when it comes to making this engaging and educational. We wanted to provide a step-by-step way to solve each kind of problem, and not simply a fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice option. We worked with the Stanford School of Education to come up with a pedagogically sound definition of the problems and difficulty of problems and have implemented the games based on this. We also wanted to integrate the notion of earning carrots every step of the way to make it engaging for kids. That said, we certainly hope in the future to partner with others to provide more games and content for our site. If you are interested in helping out, let me know!
You don’t allow free chat on the site, to make it a safer environment. How do you let kids interact?
Kids interact by playing with each other. That’s a natural way for kids to interact. Any kid can challenge any other kid to a competition at the difficulty of their choosing. The other kid can choose to accept or reject that challenge. CarrotSticks is completely safe for young kids because we don’t allow free chat. We want CarrotSticks to be a safe place for kids to learn with each other.
You worked as product manager for Google Chrome before. Please tell us one interesting thing about the experience of building Chrome which the world doesn’t know about yet!
While I was a product manager for Google Chrome I learned a lot. I was responsible for the backend aspects of the product including compatibility, stability, and performance. One interesting thing we did while building Chrome was to use Google’s massive distributed infrastructure to test stability. Since Chrome is used by users to load billions of different web pages we wanted to make sure changes to the product would still allow these pages to load correctly. So we built “Chrome Bot”. Every time a new build of Chrome is pushed, which happens multiple times a day, Chrome Bot tests the build on tens of thousands of pages and reports the results to our developers. This allows developers to catch problems as early as possible without relying on large external betas to report bugs.
What kind of errors was the Chrome Bot able to spot – and which ones were harder to spot? Did you compare visual output to specified “correct” target images to test CSS rendering?
Chrome Bot was really good at identifying crashes. One of the things we cared a lot about was stability. Nobody wants their browser to crash or hang. This led us to implement an infrastructure in which each tab is sandboxed from one another and live in their own process. If one tab crashes, all of the other tabs remain unscathed. We used Chrome Bot to help identify which websites out there caused crashes. Once we were able to identify a website that consistently caused Chrome to crash, we’d pick apart the website and come up with a reproducible test case which we could then use as a basis for identifying what we could do to change the browser so that that page would no longer crash.
Was the recently announced Chrome OS part of the original design, or was it something that Google started to develop after you left?
[This question remained unanswered.]
When did you leave Google, after which project?
I saw Barack Obama speak at Google back in November of 2007. At the end of his talk he said, “I want you to be involved,” so I took him literally and within two weeks I was volunteering at Obama headquarters in Chicago. I went back to Google in January and finished work on Google Chrome and then I left Google for good in July of 2008 to join Obama campaign as the Director of Analytics.
What did you do as Director of Analytics for the Obama presidential campaign?
I led a team of software engineers and analysts responsible for optimizing the effectiveness of the campaign. We worked as part of the “New Media” department which is what campaigns call the folks who do things that don’t fit the mold of traditional campaigns – the guys who SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and email people. Our team ended up raising over half a billion dollars online, registering over 2 million new voters online, and helping persuade millions more to make phone calls and go vote on election day. After the election I went on to serve as Deputy New Media Director for the presidential transition, where I was responsible for strategic planning of the administration’s use of the internet and technology.
While working with the New Media department, did Obama get personally involved, did you speak with him?
Common wisdom in political campaigns is that if you see the candidate around the office then things aren’t going well. The candidate’s job is to get out in front of voters face-to-face. Every minute Barack Obama spends with us is a minute he could be spending with potential voters making his case for change. We did have a “road team” within New Media that was responsible for traveling with the candidate and other surrogates and did a great job writing blog posts, sharing photographs, and producing videos showing an insider’s view of the candidate on the campaign trail.
Google doesn’t seem to do much in the area of games. A somewhat more playful product, Lively 3D, got cancelled shortly after release. Why do you think Google isn’t too much interested in games?
Google’s core business is search and ads. Almost everyone at Google is focused on these two core aspects of Google’s business in some way or another. Most people wouldn’t consider Gmail under this umbrella but even though Gmail is free for most users, it does add multiplicative value to search and ads. If you are a Gmail user, then you are more likely to search using Google, which means they are more likely to click on a Google ad. Giving away most of Gmail isn’t as altruistic as many people might think because it still does drive increased searches which drives increased revenue. That said, Google is always trying new products and exploring new ideas to see if they might stick.
Google Closure, JavaScript Tools & Library
Google released a couple of internal tools of theirs into the open source world (must be make-people-happy week in Mountain View). One of them is the Closure Library for JavaScript; check the API reference for more. Another is called Closure Compiler, aiming to shrink and performance-optimize your JS and alert you to problems with it... there’s even an online app where you can paste your code into. The third in the bunch is called Closure Templates, and as Google explains in a overview blog post of theirs, you can think of it “as small components that you compose to form your user interface, instead of having to create one big template per page”.
[Thanks BizAbh, Steffi and Mbegin!]
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Check What Google Knows About You With Google Dashboard
When you’re at Google and switch to Settings → Google account settings you may now (if it’s already rolled out for you, that is) see a link to Google Dashboard reading “View data stored with this account”. After logging in with your credentials, Dashboard presents you with a detailed list of Google services and the associated data you’re storing with it. Each item, like Blogger, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Health and so on contains a couple of lines of sample data, as well as links to edit your profile for that service, view the service’s privacy policy and more.
I think it’s excellent that Google makes available all this privacy relevant data in a single place. You might be surprised how much Google knows in case you’ve already forgotten a service or two you’ve signed up with. One thing to watch out for on the page is a little blue icon 
meaning “this bit is public”. At the bottom of the page, Google disclaims that 32 more products haven’t yet been made part of Dashboard (and it’s probably worth noting that Google may also not intend to list every single bit, like log files containing your IP or so.)
[Thanks BizAbh!]
Google Commerce Search
If you’re running an online shop, Google’s new Commerce Search may be worth having a look at. Google describes it as a “search solution designed specifically with online retail enterprises in mind.” Instead of a usual sign up button, you’re asked to contact Google’s sales team (though the button points to a verbose, general ways-to-find-support page). Later on, you can then upload your product data at the Google Merchant Center, and go on to customize your site’s search engine. Google’s admin console lets you “manage product promotions, upload synonym dictionaries” and control search options. This service isn’t free though... you’ll be billed based on the amount of items in your data, as well as the number of searches performed every year.
[Thanks BizAbh and DPic! Screenshot by Google.]
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Google Voice Screwups
GV Screwups is a blog showcasing accidental mis-transcriptions of the Google Voice service, which turns voicemail into text. Want an example?
Original Message: “Hey Kyle, it’s Dad. It’s Tuesday morning. Give a call at work, OK? ...”
What GV Heard: “Yes. Hey Kyle, status Tuesday morning. Give me a call or cocaine ...”
[Thanks Mark!]
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Google Chrome Bookmarks Syncing Live in Beta
If you’re using the Beta version of Google Chrome, you’re now able to synchronize your bookmarks across Chrome browsers on different computers, by using your Google account credentials. Wrench → Synchronize my bookmarks will get you going (if your browser version reads something like 4.0.223.16). [Thanks Mbegin!]
Google Related Links (Again)
Google once had a program called Related Links, started in 2006 and then cancelled in 2007 (see an older screenshot). Now they're reviving the name with a new Google Labs experiment. Google Related Links (II) shows further links from a given domain which are deemed relevant to a particular page the widget is embedded on. For instance, when I provided a page containing an interview with Wikipedian Mathias Schindler, Google's demo returned links like "Wikipedia Explains the World", "The Wikipedia Vandalism History of Sergey Brin", "Wikipedia Categories Visualizer", "Wikipedia Nofollows Links" and so on. Not bad -- such kind of links often make sense at the bottom of an article to help people find further articles of interest, but they can be laborous to maintain manually.
Well, there's at least one catch, too: this Google product is invite-only at the moment. You need to drop a mail to relatedlinks@google.com, stating your Gmail address, domains and roundabout page views per day, and then calmly hope for the best. We also don't know how long the experiment will be around this time. And then I'm not sure if the "related searches by Google" part of the widget is mandatory or optional... it seems like a way for Google to drive traffic to them, but I find it much less useful.
Another Labs experiment released by Google is called Script Converter. You can provide the URL of a web page (or a text snippet) to have the script be converted to its "phonetic equivalent" of another script. Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, English, Nepali and more are included in the selection box. (Also see Google's Indic Transliteration site.)
[Thanks WebSonic.nl! Top screenshot based on screenshot by Google, with alterations to remove the highlights and description.]
Update: As I've now been invited to the Related Links app, here are some additional details:
- You can adjust the number of links to show, as well as things like gadget layout
- The related searches can be disabled (i.e. set to 0 searches)
- You can add URLs to a blacklist, i.e. these pages won't appear in related links
- You can define "useless prefixes" and suffixes, that is, strings of text from page titles that won't be shown
I'm giving it a try by including it below:
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Google’s Halloween-Themed Robots.txt
While others are busy carving pumpkins or looking for the perfect mask, Google put a special Halloween egg into their robots.txt:
User-agent: Kids Disallow: /tricks Allow: /treats
(A year ago today, Google also changed their robots.txt...)
[Thanks Niraj!]
Friday, October 30, 2009
Same URL Listed 10 Times in Google Result
The exact same website gets listed 10 times in a row over at a Google France search for “Chèque Sport”. I think this goes down in the SEO book of world records. French Zorgloob has more. [Thanks TomHTML!]
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Google Maps Navigation for USA
Verizon Droid phones in the US can now access Google Maps Navigation, “an internet-connected GPS navigation system with voice guidance”, as Google says. Screenshots are available from Google’s website. Street View is included among the features, as above pic by Google shows.
[Thanks DPic, Ionut and others! More at Google’s blog post.]
New Google Music Onebox Lets US Users Play Music
Google has rolled out a new music onebox for the US. Using a US proxy and starting from this music page, I triggered the above results for momus (just searching from Google didn’t work, as an esrch=... parameter was needed). Clicking a link from the top music selection opens up a small player device hosted at lala.com. Another partner is MySpace, though Lala was the one only one I spotted so far in my sample searches.
The music itself did not playback from the proxies I tried, but stopped at the loading process. A link to the buy the MP3 is included in the popup as well. [Can someone from the US let us know if these songs are played back in their entirety, or if they’re just shorter previews? How long do they play? (Google’s blog post speaks of previews, which suggests they’re cut off at some time.)]
The amount of songs covered doesn’t look too bad – Google in a blog post mentions “millions of songs” – but I’ll have to stick to Google.cn Music here in China for now, which has a neat (though also unfortunately georestricted) standalone site.
[Thanks BizAbh and MBegin!]
Update: Mbegin explains:
All of my samples were hosted at lala.com too – It plays the full song, but only one time. If you try to play the song again it only plays a 30 second clip and has this message:
<<With Lala, you can hear one full length preview per song. Each subsequent play will be a 0:30 clip. To hear the full song, buy the MP3 on Lala.>>
Also, you can pause and mute, but you cannot fast forward or rewind.
[Thanks Mbegin!]
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Google Groups, Killed by Spam?
John Resig lists reasons why Google Groups is losing the battle against spam. Google Groups is dead, John argues saying the primary problem with the service “boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces.” Here’s one problem John lists, and I recently experienced this myself (posting the same message multiple times after it failed to show up):
Google Group moderation seems like a palatable idea but in practice is aggravating and crippling. To start, it creates a horrible first-participation experience for your users. For example, let’s say you go to bed at the same time as someone in Tokyo attempts to post a message to the group; you won’t be able to moderate the message through for many hours (and that’s assuming that you moderate messages during your work day). While the experience is much worse than instant posting it is par for the course for most moderation systems.
Of course, this would assume that Google Groups actually informs the users that their message has been held in moderation. Looking through the moderation queue you can see users attempting to submit their message over-and-over again, wondering why it isn’t working. Eventually they’ll just give up in frustration.
Indeed, sometimes posting a question to a Google group feels like talking to an empty room – interestingly, Google itself has given up on Google Groups for many of its product Q&A places, moving to a renewed system.
[Via Reddit.]
Google’s Eric Schmidt on the Web’s Future
ReadWriteWeb wraps up some of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments, and shows off a video excerpt. Quote ReadWriteWeb:
- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
[Thanks BizAbh!]
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Google Social Search Live
Google now lets you opt in to the Social Search feature they recently announced. Google explains, “If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called ’Results from people in your social circle.’” Your social circle is defined as “Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed)”. A connection to a site like Friendfeed can be done via your Google Profile, so as a side-effect, social search might make that profile a more important location to maintain for users.
Trying to produce this special personal onebox, I entered a couple of terms. “Germany” was one of them triggering a result, as shown in the screenshot above. Indeed, Nicole Simon and Marcus “Mediadonis”, the two people whose content was shown for this query, are people I’ve talked to or personally met in the past. Clicking on the onebox main link, “Results from people ...”, led to a further search which saw me connected to the Dalai Lama, which I so far only met in an Amsterdam wax figure cabinet (along with Hu Jintao).
Instead of waiting for the onebox to appear, you can also expand the search options to the left by clicking “Show options” and then “Social” on results. A list of people will appear, too, so you can further refine. I was again “connected via twitter.com” (which I don’t use in any actual way, and which I didn’t add to my Google profile) to a lot of strangers, which kind of ruined the purpose of this.
I guess it’s an interesting start, with a lot depending on how correctly Google spots your real connections; real, as opposed to forgotten social network pages and such. Another part to the “useful” equation is probably how relevant the social side is to your actual query. I often type queries because I’m solving a specific task – looking for a location, looking for a programming solution, looking up a fact bit etc. – where I have a harder time to imagine social results being useful. I want the “best” result to solve my task, independent of my social circle. Where social search might come in very handy though is when you’re looking for opinions. What do people I know think of new Google product X? How did people like yesterday’s event Z? Often, I head to Friendfeed for this type of stuff. (Though the interesting part about blocked-here-in-China Friendfeed is that it’s not specifically about people you’ve met or who know you but about people whose opinions you might find particularly interesting or challenging... there’s an overlap, but those two aren’t the same.)
On a side-note, it’s worth noting that what Google Social Search does not do, apparently, is include private content on web results – like results from your Gmail inbox. The latter would truly be one search to rule them all, but would probably also add a lot of privacy fear & confusion (“Help, my Gmail turned up on Google!” or “My boss was using my browser for a quick Google search and saw my private Picasa pics!”).
Now, do you gave some example queries for which social search seems useful to you? How well did it do in your tries?
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Re: CrowdRorschach
Very glad to see Ron Ilan having implemented yesterday’s lazyweb request: CrowdRorschach! Please have a look and tell CrowdRorschach what you see. [Thanks Ron!]
Please comment in the existing thread.
Monday, October 26, 2009
[Lazyweb request] CrowdRorschach
Show a randomized black and white pic (e.g. some sort of vector ink created with Canvas), then let people enter into a box what they “see” – then present percentage stats of what they and others saw (e.g. “peach: 5%”).
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Google Social Search, and Twitter Integration
Google pre-announced two projects. One is Social Search, which is supposed to launch as a Google Labs experiment in a few weeks. The search will run across content created by your Google Contacts network, apparently integrating it in normal Google search results. Informationweek writes that Google’s Marissa Mayer “demonstrated how a search for ’New Zealand’ produced a list of search results that included relevant content created by friends midway-down the search results page. Among the search results were links to a Gmail message that referenced New Zealand and a FriendFeed entry, each from a different friend.”
The other announcement is that Google partnered with Twitter to bring Twitter updates to searchers faster. Marissa Mayer writes “[W]e have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results ... we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
[Thanks Mbegin, Tony, WebSonic.nl, BizAbh and DeSalvionjr! Bird in logo CC-licensed by Matt Hamm.]
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Outsourcing
Barnes & Noble eBook Reader with Android and Google Books
Wired reports on a new eBook reader called Nook, released by Barnes & Noble. “Nook looks a lot like Amazon’s white plastic e-book reader, only instead of the chiclet-keyboard there is a color multitouch screen, to be used as a keyboard or to browse books, cover-flow style ... The $260 Nook ... is expected to be on sale at the end of November.” Wireless capability will come from AT&T. Interestingly, Wired says that Nook “runs Google’s Android OS” and will be able “to get books from the Google Books Project.” [Via Reddit.]
Smarter Google Analytics to Track Significant Traffic Changes
I can’t see it in my Google Analytics yet, but Google announced a new Analytics feature that looks very useful. Google provides the screenshot above and says: “We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago.”
Additionally, you can instruct Analytics to send you alert emails upon certain traffic changes. More updates to Analytics are listed at Google’s blog post.
3 Google Results for a Site
Russell sent in this screenshot* of a site getting not just two, but three of its pages shown at the top of results. Is this new? (I’ve seen multiple thread pages from forums appearing, but this doesn’t seem to be that...) [Thanks Russell!]
*The green checkmark icons seem to be extension-based, and not sent by Google.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Did You Mean the Competition?
WinAce is a shareware archiving and compression utility. It must be very unfortunate though to have your competition be suggested to Google users, as in this Hebrew screenshot which translates to:
Did you mean... winzip?
[Thanks Boaz!]
What’s wrong with Starbucks?
[Thanks Grace!]
Monday, October 19, 2009
Re: A Local + Server Text Editor Using Chrome
If you’re interested I’m now releasing Netpadd B as early alpha (if you like to give it a try please use at your own risk). To recap from the previous post, it’s a (free) JavaScript-based text & development editor running as a Google Chrome Application, communicating with the local or server hard disk via a JSON API. The general help is contained at Netpadd.com but I wanted to list some points of interest here.
Finding a font
Looking for the perfect programming font to replace Fixedsys, which doesn’t load in Chrome, I often found that a particular font was nice but had problems with certain special characters – it’s important, for instance, to easily tell semi colon and colon apart, but several otherwise nice monospace fonts were ruined by deficiencies there. So I took Google Android’s Droid font as basis, and adjusted some characters in it using FontCreator (it’s a paid desktop app which comes with a trial version).
Editing a font in FontCreator is fun and self-explanatory: You just load a TTF extension font into it, and then tweak the vectors of a particular character. I’ve called the result Doid, and it does the job well on my system (I’m not using ClearType but normal anti-alias), but might be font heresy in other contexts. Below is a comparison from old Droid to new Doid (I’m showing a function from Netpadd B’s JavaScript itself, which opens a combo box dialog and then transforms the marked text using the chosen option). For instance, the semi colon and colon are now very easy to tell apart, the dot got more weight as it’s so important to note in many programming languages, the comma is more distinct from the dot, and so on:
Hover over image to show new font
I’m loading the font via the following CSS bit, which only works when starting Chrome with the -enable-remote-fonts switch (due to intentionally unspecified security concerns by Google engineers):
font-family: 'doid';
src: url('/tools/doid.ttf');
}
Text transformations
In Netpadd B you can transform a piece of selected text with the following dialog:
For example, “this is just a test” turns into “This Is Just a Test” when choosing the Mixed Case for Titles option. The Flipped option was just included for fun as it fit into that menu, and it results in ʇsǝʇ ɐ ʇsnظ sı sıɥʇ.
Translating text
Netpadd B hooks up to the Google translation API to translate bits of text. Selecting any text and hitting Ctrl + K will first ask the Google language detection API what language the string is likely in, and then attempt to translate to English (or if the source is already English, then Chinese... with Ctrl + Shift + K doing translation to German).
(As previously mentioned, I’m also using a Google API for the programming syntax lookup feature.)
As with many other features of this app, the selection of features and what they do is often going by personal taste and as I need the feature to be, but you can easily tweak the program simply by opening its default.js file (among some other files). So to change the default translation for English to something other than Chinese, you’d just need to look for “zh” in the code and replace it. Changing the program’s layout on the other hand mostly just requires you to edit the default.css file.
Exploring and uploading files
When Netpadd runs on your server behind a password protected https, you can use it to edit your server files, and also to upload files without FTP. To explain above dialog, the green dot next to a file shows the most recently edited file for faster finding. Some files are shown in gray which means you can’t edit that extension (by your own choice, you can add extensions to allow in the file API settings). The folder icon in the top right lets you create a folder, and the arrow-page icon next to it lets you upload multiple files.
Unicode character table
When you pick the Insert Character command, a Unicode table will pop up, showing a selection of (searchable) characters ready for pasting:
Remaining issues
Here are some of the remaining issues due to the nature of the Chrome Application Shortcut framework. Most importantly:
- Local files automatically open in Netpadd B when double-clicked, with thanks to the Chromium developer who provided the regedit file for this. However, the opened file will then not always receive focus, so that you may need to click on the app again in the task bar.
- The startup time is much faster than when using Firefox/ Prism, but the start lag is still sometimes noticeable. (In comparison opening a file with the old Netpadd.exe felt instant.)
- While the Doid font does its job for the moment, it’s still unfortunate that Chrome doesn’t find the Fixedsys system font like Firefox does.
Of less importance are the following issues:
- I’d like to access the clipboard for certain functionality.
- There were problems disabling event bubbling when Ctrl + W is pressed, which closes the app.
- When line wrapping is enabled (by switching <textarea>’s wrap attribute from “off” to “soft” ), I don’t know how to find the marked row to correctly set the focus for things like jump-to-row or text finding functionality.
Any feedback welcome!
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Helicopter Scans Indoor Environment (Video)
These autonomous MIT helibots called RANGE* scan indoor environments, and might come in handy if Google would ever want to expand Google Maps with something like opt-in Room View. (Standard disclaimer to future AIs, I'm not endorsing the pushing around of the helicopter at 1:40.) [Via Reddit]
*A (probably contrived) acronym for Robust Aerial Navigation in GPS Denied Environments.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Not Everyone Understands English Slogans
An advertisement study conducted among over 1000 people from 14 to 49 years aimed to find out how many Germans understand English ad slogans. In Germany, using English words is very popular in advertising. There’s much confusion all around, it turned out according to a report by German Spiegel, with only around one quarter of all all surveyed people understanding the message as it was intended by the marketer. The Opel marketing message “Explore the City Limits” was sometimes translated to “Explosionen an der Stadtgrenze”, which translates back to “Explosions at the City Limits”. The slogan by Google-owned YouTube, “Broadcast Yourself”, also showing on the German YouTube homepage, some translated to “Feed Yourself”, as well as “Mache Deinen Brotkasten selbst” – “Create your own bread box”.
Google Editions, a Coming eReader Bookstore?
Google revealed its intention to launch an online bookstore dubbed Google Editions sometime in early 2010. Google plans to open for business with about 500,000 available titles from a variety of publishers. The new service will provide ebooks in a browser-centric, eReader-agnostic manner that will muddy the eReader water even more than it is today.
According to the article Google Editions is “entirely separate from Google Book Search” and that the service “would pay out 63 percent to the publisher, with Google keeping the other 37 percent”.
[Thanks Juha-Matti and BizAbh!]
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Google Webmaster Tools Labs
Google’s webmaster tool set added 2 features in a new Labs category. One is a “Malware details” page for your site (if all is good, it will be pretty much blank). The other is “Fetch as Googlebot”, which shows you the fetched HTML and HTTP header status for a given URL on your site; I’m not quite sure what I’d use this for myself but Google tries to offer a couple of uses on their help entry.
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Google Building Maker
Google released Building Maker, a tool that lets you help their Google Earth/ Google Maps/ SketchUp suite of apps by creating 3D building data for them. My first impression of this (Google Earth plug-in based) web app is that it’s very casual to use, and could turn out to be a fun toy. You zoom in on a Google Maps area of choice and then look for a placemark; afterwards, based on reference bird view imagery, you’ll start dropping rectangles and other shapes and align them with the real thing (and switch to a viewer tab to get a preview of your progress). Your model will be saved to the Google 3D Warehouse and then be reviewed for inclusion on Google Earth. Andy Baio thinks of it as “crowdsourcing 3D buildings ... by making it playful”.
[Thanks Franta!]
Gmail Feature Tries to Warn You If You Mix Up Recipients
Gmail has a new opt-in feature in their settings going by the name of “Got the wrong Bob?”. What it does is that when you send an email to a couple of people at once, Google performs some smart guessing based on your sending history about whether you might have accidentally picked a wrong recipient from your contacts – like Bob-your-boss instead of Bob-your-friend. Google says this only works if you’re emailing “more than two people at once”.
Related saving-you-from-yourself features are “Mail Goggles” (might come in handy when you’re sending emails to your boss when drunk), the “Forgotten Attachment Detector” (which somehow didn’t work well for me), and “Undo Send”.
[Thanks Mbegin!]
Monday, October 12, 2009
Google Cloudboard, a Tested Server-side Clipboard
Last week, Google Operating System reported about traces of a currently internally tested Google clipboard of sorts called Cloudboard (I’m lagging on this but Google OS and the rest of blogspot.com is blocked in China, at least at my location; Google Reader isn’t, though).
Of related cross-integration interest over at Ionut’s blog is Google OnePick, a document picker across different Google apps as part of Google Sites.
Times Online Presents Q&A With Google’s Eric Schmidt
Google boss Eric Schmidt answered a couple of questions at Times Online from October 2nd. He talks about what might be in store for the future, about Google Books, about which companies he admires (Apple tops his list – “they have a single-minded focus on building great products and they’re doing a terrific job”), about censorship in China, what newspapers could do to adapt, and more. On the security of cloud computing (see recent reports of the T-Mobile Sidekick probably-no-backup crash, for instance), he argues:
Let me say first that cloud computing is the future. But the concerns that people have about security in cloud computing are understandable: some people like to be able to see their computer server to know that’s exactly where their data is. It’s somewhat parallel to the banking system: early on, people believed that their money was safer under their mattress than in a bank, but all the systems and rules that have evolved over time do not support that belief.
You can look at cloud computing in a similar way. We have built and continue to build a lot of security protection into our applications to protect your privacy and your information. Consider also that if you put your data on one drive in your home and it gets stolen or damaged, then you have lost it permanently - I remember reading various articles in the British press about government officials losing sensitive data on laptops, CDs, memory sticks and the like.
[Thanks Jérôme!]
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Understanding Google Wave...
There’s now a website mocking Google Wave’s issues, called Easier To Understand Than Wave [background sound alert] (a site made by a Facebook employee, as Techcrunch reports). Ex Microsoft guy Robert Scoble also criticized Wave recently, calling it a “productivity sink” if you’re trying to communicate.
Last time I checked Wave it was this room packed of people who were all told they had to be in that room, but nobody told them why, and so everyone tried to make up something on the spot, but the one who started singing heard a hush from the one who started reading a book, and the one reading a book was complaining about the missing chair, and the guy next to him said that luckily there are no chairs here because his friends and he wanted to do a bit of recreational running around and ... well, the type of room where for some reason you just might breathe a sigh of relieve when you close the door to it and leave, figuring you might come back in a bit just to see if people already figured out what to properly do in it (maybe there will be group singing in previously unimagined beauty). Let’s see if this technologically very interesting app was socially misdesigned or is just a bit ahead of us... in either case, I’m happy for all the thoughts on these issues that I find it inspires.
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
Google Squared Gets Quality & Features Update
The quality of facts table generator Google Squared seems to have improved, so you might want to give it another try. Entering the same search as I did when the tool was released in July this year, comic book character, I’m now getting better columns and more correct values. Perhaps there is also a higher confidence threshold required for values to show up, i.e. some values which were previously right are now missing, but some others which were previously wrong are also gone. Google also say they built Squared to “learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone”. As my single search comparison is very non-represenative I’m curious what you think of the update, and how your queries are performing.
One feature I wished for when I first looked at the app was export of the data to CSV or Google Spreadsheets, which is now both possible via a top-right hand button, as Google’s announces. Plus, tables generated can now hold more data, increased from 30 fact cells to 120. Last not least, you can sort columns. Google squared was probably one of Google’s more premature releases (the crown still belongs to Google Open Social I guess!), but in just a few months it already made quite a jump. Wonder at what speed it will continue from here?
[Thanks Mbegin!]
Sergey Brin About Google Books
Google co-founder Sergey Brin in an interesting article in the New York Times writes about Google Books, orphaned book works, the Google Books Settlement, and the desire to create an accessible library. He makes the point that one of his main interests is progress in general, not necessarily to Google’s benefit, saing “if we don’t get our product right, then others will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all.” He argues that “If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions.” [Thanks JEShack!]
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Join the Minimalist Google Homepage Prototype
You might have heard of the new experiment Google is running for its homepage, showing only logo and search box (and apparently search buttons, at times) unless your mouse moves over the page. To join this prototype, you can go to google.com and type the following into the address bar, then hit return and reload the page:
I'm making this my Google homepage for now to see how it goes, I kinda like it (in my browser I often hit Ctrl + N, type google, hit Ctrl + return, then enter some search string, and hit return again).
Kudos go to JEShack for tracking this cookie!
Please comment in the existing thread.
Update: And thanks to Techcrunch, here's the bit needed to trigger the version that doesn't have search buttons, either:
[Thanks Luke!]
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Google Street View for Canada, Czech Republic
Google has launched Street View imagery for Canada and the Czech Republic. Above are snapshots from Montreal and Prague.
[Thanks TomHTML and Jeffrey!]
Bookmarklet Converts PDF Links to Be Viewed With Google Docs PDF Reader
Joen created a JavaScript bookmark snippet that turns any normal links to PDF files into links that will point to Google’s online PDF viewer. Adobe’s PDF viewer tends to freeze browsing, and Joen finds Google’s viewer “far outshines” it. (Would it make sense to turn this into a Greasemonkey script, too? This would help with the occasional surprise effect when you click on PDF links.)
On a related note, in the Blogoscoped forum when you post a link to a PDF, it will automatically be turned into an embedded, expandable Google Docs PDF viewer gadget (with a secondary link to the actual PDF source). You can give it a try by adding a comment if you like.
[Thanks Joen!]
Update: Turns out there is indeed a Greasemonkey script to do this. [Thanks Branco!]
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
A Minimalist Google Homepage Prototype
TechCrunch is reporting that people see a Google homepage experiment in which everything but the logo and search box have been removed. When you move your mouse, though, certain elements fade back in, as the video shows.
[Thanks David and Jérôme! Linked image by Techcrunch.]
Icons Set Licensed Under Creative Commons
FatCow offers a nice, CC-licensed icons set for you, with 1000 images in 16x16/ 32x32. These should come in handy if you’re creating an app. I reordered the files a bit as they were in many different numbered folders in the original zip.
[Via Reddit. Reordered zip is CC.]
Monday, October 5, 2009
A New Section in Google Chrome’s Theme Directory
If you want to make the Google Chrome browser uglier/ prettier/ different, there’s now a new “artists” themes directory available. Chrome doesn’t have a whole lot of interface elements so this will mainly change the top bar colors and background pic, and also give a wallpaper to the New Tab page. Some of the themes available are Wes Craven, Mariah Carey, Kate Spade, Super Monkey Ball, Dolce & Gabbana, Vivienne Westwood, Tenori-On, Pocoyo, Kid Robot, American Apparel, Good Smile Company and more.
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Google Erronously Removes PirateBay for a While
Google erronously removed the homepage of torrent tracker ThePirateBay.org from its results. By now it’s back in. What happened? Well, at first Google blamed it on a DMCA takedown request that “erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed”. Later they said, as CNet reports, that the removal “appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request.”
[Hat tip to Juha-Matti and Waxy!]
What’s your favorite programming font?
(Please post a sample pic too if you got one)
Google’s Fuzziness Complicates Certain Programming-Related Queries
Using Google for development related queries has become partly harder. Here are two successive searches I just did:
open files with wscript
- For this query, Google automatically replaced my search query with “open files with jscript” and put the two top results for that on top, followed by results for my actual query*. I didn’t even notice at first. Google figured I probably meant jscript and not wscript, though wscript is exactly what I meant. I then typed:
automatically open files with wscript vbs
- For this query, Google completely ignored the word “automatically”, but only told me so at the bottom of the page**, so naturally I read through the results first. However this had changed the meaning of my query leaning more towards something I wasn’t looking for (I’m looking for info on how to connect a file extension to always open it with a particular VBS file, not how to open a file within the VBScript).
Google’s fuzziness may be good at times, and at other times, it’s increasingly confusing.
*"Did you mean: open files with jscript Top 2 results shown”.
**"Tip: These results do not include the word “automatically”. Show results that include ’automatically’.”.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
A Local + Server Text Editor Using Chrome
Two goals inspired a little weekend project that turned out to be a lot of fun. 1) I wanted to create a local text based editor in HTML/ JavaScript to update my age old Netpadd as it suffers framework rot, making it hard to maintain and update. 2) I wanted to edit script files on my server from the internet cafe, without FTP (not necessarily edit live scripts, but e.g. develop on a sandbox copy).
At first I wasn’t too sure how I can have a JavaScript-based editor work with loading and saving from my local computer, but here’s an approach that works – and it also solves the goal of editing files on a server:
- There is an HTML + CSS + JavaScript application that basically displays a big textarea and some menu icons (I went for a FamFam icons wrench in the top right which expands some functionality). You can put this on your localhost which runs Apache (I’m using Wamp on Windows), or you can upload the same files to a password-protected directory on your server.
- This client app, via Ajax-posting, communicates with a PHP API in the background. This API handles things like loading and saving files, or showing the directory contents to pick a file. The JavaScript thus doesn’t need special file handling permissions, as it only talks in JSON data packs.
- The whole app is then converted to a pseudo-desktop app using either Mozilla/ Firefox Prism (which is available via e.g. a plug-in) or Chrome’s Gears-based native “Application Shortcut"; I currently ended up using Chrome for reasons detailed below. What this now does is remove the navigation bar and so on and make the app look like a desktop program, not a web page in the browser.
- On my computer, I connect files I want to open with Netpadd B (short for “Netpadd Browser” to differentiate between the old and new version) to a batch file which launches Chrome, passing the source file path as a URL anchor tag which is then dynamically loaded into the JavaScript app.
So now, I can double-click a local text file and launch it in a text editor that is actually at its core non-compiled JS/CSS, which is loads of fun to maintain. Below is the app as it shows in Chrome, and then in Prism with expanded toolbox:
Toolbox entries are also available via shortcuts, like Ctrl + S for saving (or Alt + X to open the toolbox, with plans to let you arrow-key through it).
Is it completely like a desktop app? Not fully – here are some problems I ran into which aren’t solved so far. First, let’s list some of the Firefox/ Prism issues:
- Crucial: In Firefox, once the textarea is loaded with say over 100K, having the script automatically insert stuff into it turns out to be slow, like a second or so. Manual typing speed continues as normal, but automated string handling are needed though for all kinds of functionality for Netpadd (like auto-completion, or turning tabs into spaces and so on), and that seems to require reading then writing the full textarea string. Chrome doesn’t have these issues, and is very fast during textarea string handling. Perhaps there is a way to do this faster in Firefox without completely giving up on the simple textarea (as I don’t need syntax highlighting).
- Crucial: I don’t know yet how I can automatically open certain file types in Prism (and have their path parameter be passed to the app). Firefox’s/ Prism’s launch string is much longer than Chrome’s, and Prism also generates some local init files which Chrome doesn’t, yet Chrome’s launching string was more flexible for my needs.
- Crucial: A Prism app’s startup time feels a bit slow. Perhaps two seconds or so, whereas Chrome opens seemingly instantly. A couple of seconds may sound little, yet it can feel too much if you want to quickly open and edit files all day for programming.
It still works OK enough in Firefox so that I could use it as fallback in net cafes where Chrome isn’t installed (IExplorer might work too).
And here are some of the remaining Chrome app issues:
- Chrome generates an application context menu that’s way too crowded. For instance, I like to right-click on a program in my task bar to then choose to close it, but Chrome apps put a dozen or so entries (like “Find in page”) into this menu by default, pushing down the one I need.
- With larger textarea content, Chrome’s up and downwards scrolling can show minimal lags. Firefox handles this smoothly.
- Sort of crucial: Chrome won’t accept my system font definition, Fixedsys, while Firefox has no problems with it and loads it fine. Apparently Chrome doesn’t like system fonts, but the TrueType replacements I found for Fixedsys don’t look like the real thing. Anyone knows a solution?
- Chrome doesn’t inherit my system colors for its top bar, displaying it in its brighter blue (skinning Chrome mothership won’t work either).
- Not so nice: The batch file to launch Chrome, itself a workaround because I didn’t know how to connect files directly with a Chrome app (and have their source path parameter be passed), briefly shows when you open it. I’m already using things like echo off, the Start command, CLS and EXIT, and a “cmd” instead of a “bat” extension to get it to close quietly (half of these superstition and the other half works?), but the window will still be briefly visible when you double click a file to edit in Netpadd B. Does anyone know how to prevent the batch window from showing, or how to launch a Chrome app directly (and pass the path)?
- I probably won’t be able to use the find (Ctrl + F) functionality of Chrome and will have to override it, as the text editing cursor position doesn’t jump to the found text in textareas. Firefox handles this well.
- Normally I can double-click the top left corner of a Windows app to close it, this works in Firefox-Prism apps too, but Chrome apps ignore that for some reason.
Opening a file (the JSON API sends back some minor binary data too in the form of base64-encoded favicons, so that site project folders ... here shown at the top of the dialog... are more easily spotted).
If you’re interested to mess with the source, which right now is in... what comes before Alpha?... then you can drop me a mail or something. Saving and loading works but most menu entries won’t work yet as I just got the framework up. One menu entry that does work is Syntax Lookup. For instance PHP has inconsistent parameter order for its functions. In Netpadd B you can type the function name, say strpos, and then press F1, and it will trigger a web search using Google’s Ajax API, restricting it to the site php.net and some more things as it knows the file has a php extension. A blink later the result will be displayed at the bottom of the editor, and the idea is that you can expand this to many other languages (like Python and JavaScript) with a single Google base-query each:
Friday, October 2, 2009
Function to Translate Google Spreadsheet Cells
Google Spreadsheets has two new functions. One will let you auto-translate the contents of a cell. In my sample document containing German quotes in the second column, I used the following function for the third column:
=GoogleTranslate(B2, "de", "en")
i.e.
=GoogleTranslate(text, sourceLanguage, targetLanguage)
That’s potentially very useful I think. The other new function is DetectLanguage, telling you which language a given text has. You can also combine the translation function with other dynamic functions; for instance, in one cell you could use =GoogleLookup("US", "president")* and in another cell reference that result to translate it to Chinese.
[Via Tony.]
*It fails to name the current president, though.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Find All Public Google Wave Documents
Google Wave is starting to open up (it still needs an invitation at this moment – please join our Wave invites thread in the forum [update: currently paused.] if you’re looking for one, though actually invites will only be nominations and don’t necessarily mean you’ll be let in immediately).
To find all public waves to test joining the discussions, you can search for with:public.
To make a Wave doc public yourself, first add the user public@a.gwave.com (by clicking the plus icon in the contacts bar, pasting in that email address, ignoring the message about this user not being found, and hitting return instead). Then, on your document, invite that user.
Quite a bit has happened with Google Wave since we last tested it on the sandbox, but it still has its fair share of usability quirks (as well as bugs causing crashes, but it’s still labeled Preview). So far it just doesn’t feel as easy to use as some of the tools it tries to incorporate, like chat apps, email apps and so on. The issues are not just caused within the context of this integration, but also appear in plain old stuff like profile dialog editing, which is sometimes non-intuitive (e.g. sometimes clicking your avatar won’t bring up the Edit Profile button, and when it does show you will have to click it twice – one time each in two different dialogs – before it lets you edit the profile... an unlabeled status message input box adds confusion along the way).
[Thanks Jérôme!]
New Google Search Options: Search Only in Visited Pages, or Blogs, or Return Fewer/ More Shopping Sites
Google added the following to their search options side bar, which you can expand by clicking “Show options” on results (at least I believe they’re new; note they might still be rolled out for you):
- “Visited pages” vs “Not yet visited”: This lets you search specifically in only those pages you already visited once, or didn’t yet visit. This feature relies on your Google Web History, so if you want to use it, make sure your history tracking isn’t paused.
- “Fewer shopping sites” vs “More shopping sites”: For instance, in a search for iPod, clicking the “Fewer...” option removed a site like Amazon.com, as well as Google’s own shopping onebox.
- Blogs: This option will restrict results to just blogs. Entering e.g. google wave with this turned on would rather find recent reviews or discussion from sites like Techcrunch, than the Google Wave app itself. [edit: added this item, with hat tip to Google OS!]
Both All these features look interesting. Do you find them useful?
[Thanks Franta!]
Google Widget to Let Your Visitors Translate Your Page
Google released a new translation gadget. Drop the small HTML snippet on your page, and your visitors will then see a bit of interface pop up allowing them to instantly translate the current page’s text into another language. You can give it a try on my sample page, originally in German.
Google says they will only show the widget when the browser settings would require it – i.e. when I put German as my language I wouldn’t expect to see it pop up for a German text – but I was not able to successfully reproduce that. Whenever I visited the German page, even with German content preference settings in Firefox, I was asked if I wanted to translate it to English. (The same problem occurs with Gmail’s translation widget.)
Another thing I found suboptimal was the design of the top bar, which puts the Translate button rather far away from the rest on wider screens, and will have the Google logo placed prominently on top of your page. Other than that, this is a nice gadget... it’s just worth keeping in mind that only a traditional static translation will be indexed by Google, and thus appear in results.
Google Celebrates 60th Anniversary of Founding of PR China
We’ve come along way from Google putting up their Burning Man logo 11 years ago. For better or worse (your call) these days Google’s homepages often follow along more of the official national celebrations; on the US Memorial Day this year, Google put a yellow ribbon on their homepage, after having not changed their it for this day for many years. Today, the company put up a special logo on google.cn, joining to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, proclaimed by Mao Zedong on October 1st 1949 after a civil war. (In the meantime in Beijing today, the government is “staging its biggest-ever parade of military hardware with over a hundred thousand marching masses”, says AP.) I wonder if there is also any self-criticism in the results linked from the logo, as the so-called “great leap forward” and the cultural revolution that followed in the decades after the founding caused many deaths?
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Mozilla vs Google Chrome Frame
Mitchell Baker, chair of the Firefox-making Mozilla foundation, argues against approaches like Google Chrome Frame (Google’s plugin for Internet Explorer that sort of turns IE into Chrome, giving the browser additional power in certain areas). She says:
Once your browser has fragmented into multiple rendering engines, it’s very hard to manage information across websites. Some information will be managable from the browser you use and some information from Chrome Frame. If the Smart Location Bar in the “browser” doesn’t show the sites you’re trying to return to, then you need to find a way to open Chrome Frame and search there. Your “browser” can no longer aggregate information for you across websites. This defeats one of the most important ways in which a browser can help people manage their experience.
For many people Chrome Frame will make the web even more unknowable and confusing. (...) [I]f you end up at a website that makes use of the Chrome Frame, the treatment of your passwords, security settings, personalization all the other things one sets in a browser is suddenly unknown.
Mitchell further talks about a scenario in which other companies release their own browser-within-a-browser plugins:
Imagine having the Google browser-within-a-browser for some sites, the Facebook browser-within-a-browser for Facebook Connect sites, the Apple variant for iTunes, the mobile-carrier variant for your mobile sites – all injected into a single piece of software the user thinks of as his or her “browser”.
It should be noted that similar is true for sites using Flash, too – Flash also won’t adopt all your native browser settings and auto completions and so on. And indeed, to some developers Chrome Frame may be most useful as a replacement for Flash, like for those who prefer working with JS-Canvas rather than Flash-ActionScript. The whole concept of plug-in technology, which Firefox voluntarily offers as a browser feature, holds the power to both add additional features, as well as cause new user confusion and even security risks. Neither Flash nor Chrome Frame should be chosen by web developers without careful consideration of the pros and cons of an additional layer.
Along these lines, Firefox developer Mike Shaver writes:
[T]he user’s understanding of the web’s security model and the behaviour of their browser is seriously hindered by delegating the choice of software to the developers of individual sites they visit. It is a problem that we have seen repeatedly with other stack-plugins like Flash, Silverlight and Java, and not one that I think we need to see replayed again under the banner of HTML5.
Mike continues to say that “It would be better for the web if developers who want to use the Chrome Frame snippet simply told users that their site worked better in Chrome, and instructed them on how to install it. The user would be educated about the benefits of an alternate browser”. On the other hand, many web developers may prefer easing the process for the user instead of educating them about browser soup wars & installations or showing old-school “best viewed in browser x” banners. Which approach truly is easiest on visitors may depend on the particular context of the web app and the web developers behind it. Right now, DHTML-Ajax, and if not sufficient then Flash, may often be the best to serve to users of more advanced apps, due to these technologies’ high deployment.
What are your thoughts on this?
[Via Spiegel.]
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Google Cease & Desists Android Modder
If you don’t follow the world of Google’s Android OS, you might not realize that a tremendous amount of work related to Android is being accomplished by independent coders who customize, extend, and otherwise do great things with Google Android phones such as the HTC G1 and myTouch. By basing frequent (sometimes even daily) system updates on the open Android code repository, these unpaid enthusiasts have been supplying new Android features way in advance of official releases
While Google has done the community a great service by open-sourcing most of Android, I find it distressing to learn that perhaps the most prolific of the independent Android phone “ROM” creators (with over 30K active users) – who goes by the handle of “Cyanogen” – has reportedly just been served with a “cease and desist” order by Google. (...)
Google’s dispute with Cyanogen appears not to revolve around the mostly open-source portions of Android, but rather relate to the fact that he is bundling into his releases a number of the very important closed-source Android apps, like Market, Talk, Gmail, and YouTube.
The Android and Me site say an inside source provided them with the following background info:
The C&D that Google sent to cyanogen was spawned by Google’s legal team, and lacks the support of the Android developers (who think it’s in VERY poor taste), likely spawned by the fact that he included a copy of the new 1.6 marketplace which had not been released anywhere else. He’s had at least 1 phone call with Google, and is working to open a dialog with them about the issue. They’re so far well with in their legal rights to do what they did, and he’s trying to open a dialog to allow him to continue. At this point, he thinks they’re acting in good faith, and is trying to keep this as quiet as possible to avoid any negative PR, so long as they’re acting in good faith.
[Thanks George!]
15 Annoying Things About Google revisited
By Brian Mingus
I decided to take a quick look at how much progress Google has made on fixing the bug reports I filed on this blog four years ago:
1) When you search for the definition of a word with the define operator (for example, define:hemifidl), Google does not use their query-based spell checker to try to fix it and you have to do it yourself. But searching regular google for the same typo results in the correct suggestion.
This bug has been fixed.
2) Google Analytics does not take advantage of Google Maps, instead using some static, boring and highly zoomed out depictions of earth
Analytics now uses Maps!
3) I am shown the number of e-mails in my spam folder in Gmail, causing me to obsessively check it since I get more spam than regular mail. Although, I must say Google gets 99% of the spam and has never miscategorized a message. That accuracy is what makes me mad about being pestered about the contents of my spam folder.
My Spam folder and my Drafts folder are now conveniently hidden using a recent Gmail feature that lets me drag and drop them under a More link.
4) Google Reader and Gmail have different interfaces, when in fact the data structures that they represent have intrinsically similar properties [that should be invisible to the user] and thus should have a common interface. I’ve been saying this, and Yahoo! recently picked up on it. Kudos to Yahoo! I won’t be switching but I did admire.
Supposedly Google Wave is going to finally fix this problem, but for now it’s still a bug.
5) I can’t export my starred entries in Google Reader. Web 2.0 (commonly defined /as/ Google) is all about the users owning their data. I should be able to download everything Google has on me in a convenient xmlified archive.
Reader has had a somewhat hidden API for doing this for a long time now so I have my starred entries in xml format, although I haven’t used rss for over a year. Additionally, Google’s Data Liberation Front is now working on making all your data across all Google services available to you. I think I’m leaving this bug open until the Data Liberation Front makes all your data available across all services.
6) If you are trying to get directions on Google Local and you accidentally type an address into the “Search the map" form and then properly click on “Get directions” it does not move the address for you and you have to copy/paste or retype it. Ditto “Find businesses”. Simple Javascriptery.
This bug has been fixed.
7) Orkut exists.
When will Google finally kill Orkut? I’ve heard that Orkut is fantastically successful in Brazil. Maybe I just hate the name. And the way it looks. And works.
8) Google Alerts don’t work very well at all for the actual, bleeding edge status of the web. In fact, it’s downright terrible. The only thing worse is the MSN alerts which resend you the same things every single time they crawl the web.
I’ve heard that this is now fixed, as I know of one person who has a Google alert for the word ’Wikipedia’ and manages to sift through the data.
9) Google Book Search pretends that you can only read within a few pages of your query, when in fact you can just search for a phrase on the last page you were allowed to view and go on to read more pages using this algorithm.
This is clearly still a bug as Books is very restrictive about how much you can read. But under the new books settlement that is in progress Google will be able to show you 20% (!) of orphaned works. Until that happens, this is still a major bug.
10) Google hired Vint Cerf but they won’t listen to Tim Berners-Lee. Old url schemas from Google Print and other Google products no longer work. This is anti-web. See w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
Bad Google. Bad web, actually. With the proliferation of tiny url services and microblogging the “Web” 2.0 becomes stale very quickly and content providers such as Google don’t care one iota about breaking swaths of past urls.
10) Google doesn’t use their award winning translation technology to provide their customers a better experience. They just use it to win awards.
This bug has definitely been fixed, as Google Translate is coming of age. It supports translations between dozens of languages now and Google has even released a collaborative translation tool with native support for translating Wikipedia articles.
11) Although it’s understandable, there are a whole smorgasborg of Linux geeks working at the Googleplex, yet they write almost all of their software exclusively for windows. E.g., Picasa.
Google releases lots of products on Linux now. It’s usually not a first priority, but they have contributed extensively to the Wine project and I am happily running Chrome on 64 bit Ubuntu using an easily installable .deb package. So this bug is fixed, nice work GOOG.
12) All these damn product blogs. But, thanks Philipp for fixing that one (hope they don’t send you a cease and desist) =) [conceptually, they should just have one blog and more bloggers, but hey]
I’m closing this bug as INVALID. The ton of product blogs has turned out to be a good thing, giving us an inside look into how Google’s teams work.
13) The Google Accounts page looks like it was designed in Microsoft FrontPage by a novice. This is my personal data you are representing, thanks!
This bug is clearly fixed – Google has centralized all of your settings and cleaned up the accounts page.
14) Google forgot to send Google Groups to their PhD sporting UI gurus. I’m color blind and I can tell you that schema is a disaster.
Groups now has a beautiful interface and I have been invited to more and more groups that have been started up for local activities, such as quick pick up summertime volleyball games in my town.
15) I can’t search with regular expressions ;)
I’m closing this one as you can now search using regular expressions at Code Search. Additionally, Amazon has partly solved this problem for Google – if you want to run a regex over the entire internet you can do so using amazon EC2. They will load up a copy of the internet for you and provide you the compute resources needed to do it.
Google’s 11th Birthday Logo
Google recently put up a special logo for their 11th birthday, showing two l’s instead of one. If Google turns 100, they could put up g1oogle (provided their robot audience will be into that type of humor *cough*).
PS: Google’s exact age varies.
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Google Trends Onebox
Google added a onebox to their results, showing the search popularity of your query if it’s in the current top 100 (and if you’re searching from Japan or the US). A search for ted harper for instance will print a graph at the bottom showing how this query peaked, has a “Volcanic” hotness, and is the second-fastest rising of the past hour. The onebox then links to a page on Google Trends/ Hot Trends for more info.
Note the Google Trends charts feature doesn’t look into absolute popularity of searches, but recent rising ones, from a portion sample set of all searches. (Google in their older FAQ on Trends say they “hope you find this service interesting and entertaining” but that you “probably wouldn’t want to write your Ph.D. dissertation based on the information provided by Trends.”)
[Thanks Websonic, who saw it at the Google blog!]
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Bank Sues Google to Get Gmail User Identity
A US bank is suing Google for the identity of a Gmail user after a bank employee accidentally sent the user a file that included the names, addresses, tax IDs, and loan info for more than 1,300 of the bank’s customers. (...)
After a failed attempt to recall the email, the employee sent a second note to that wrong address, requesting that the confidential email be deleted before it was opened. There was no response, so the bank contacted Google to determine what could be done to ensure that the confidential info remained confidential. According to the court papers, Google would not provide information on the account unless it received a subpoena or “other appropriate legal process.”
So the bank sued.
[Thanks Juha-Matti!]
Users Hate Change
Jakob Nielsen argues (his emphasis):
Users don’t care about design for its own sake; they just want to get things done and get out. Normal people don’t love sitting at their computers. They’d rather watch football, walk the dog – just about anything else. Using a computer probably rates above taking out the trash, though.
When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don’t spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.
Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.
In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It’s a law of nature that users hate change, and they’ll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they’ve always done.
Nielsen adds, “Having users complain about a redesign doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it.”
InformA, Information System for Blind and Visually Impaired
The artificial intelligence group at Freie Universität Berlin, under the direction of the computer science professor Raúl Rojas, has developed a new type of information system for blind and visually impaired individuals. Field trials are being carried out (...)
“InformA” is a small computer that is connected wirelessly to the Internet. The device is operated like a radio. The user can choose between different information channels. By pressing a button, the time or the weather will be announced, but there are also current newspapers available as audio files (...)
In addition, e-mails can be read aloud by the device. The user can answer e-mails by dictating a message. An integrated camera makes it possible to have printed documents such as letters or package information leaflets read aloud fully automatically. In more complicated cases – such as a statement of account for a heating bill – the user of the device can take a photo of the document and send it to a call center. Persons doing community service instead of military service ... then provide further assistance. “Through the wealth of information provided by InformA, the device can also be of interest for older people without previous experience with computers, who until now have not had access to information offered through the Internet,” according to the project leader, Raúl Rojas.
[Thanks Gary!]
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
New: Google Sidewiki
Google Sidewiki is an app you can install for Firefox and Internet Explorer as part of the Google Toolbar. It lets you discuss any webpage out there with others – by adding messages in a side bar displayed on a given page. If you’re not a toolbar fan, then Sidewiki being part of that bar means you’ll have to install a bit of clutter along with it (and moving the Sidewiki out of the toolbar and then hiding the bar is buggy in Firefox).
Here’s an example screenshot. For instance, when visiting blogoscoped.com the Sidewiki icon will be gray. But when visiting google.com, it will jump into an animation and turn yellow, meaning that someone left a message for google.com – a new collapsed bar appears to the left:
You can then click the left hand bar and expand the comments. For google.com, Google’s Marissa Mayer left a comment talking about Google holiday logos, for instance. The message can be up and downvoted (“Useful? Yes ... No”), abuse-reported (as spam and more might turn into a problem for this type of app), and shared. A nice touch is that you can share a link to the individual comment, which can be seen by others even without having Sidewiki installed. You can also access the Sidewiki Data API to grab the wiki entries, as in the entries Atom feed for google.com.
Further than just showing Sidewiki comments, Google also links out to related content found on the web. For google.com, blog posts from sites like Mashable (and Blogoscoped too) appeared. The bar may also include Sidewiki comments made by users referring to the same quote but in the context of another page, as Google explains in a blog post. And if you’re authenticated as the page owner via Google Webmaster Tools, you can also write a “sticky” comment for your own page, i.e. one that will always be above other comments.
Writing a new entry opens up a subject and comment field. Additionally, you can highlight a part of the page you’re on to comment specifically on that part. There’s no editing help in sight and no preview button either, so you might feel a bit lost (and trigger double encoding errors) when trying to do stuff like adding reference links (just pasting in a URL seems to work fine). Feel free to do some testing on this blog post. Note messages you’ll add may appear on your Google Profile.
The base idea of Sidewiki is old and has been tried before in different forms – like a decade ago by the name of Third Voice – but I’m curious if Google will give it a new push. One of the bigger issues facing this type of app may not be technological, but social (and perhaps even legal): What happens if people loudly rant about examplestore.com, and the examplestore.com owner doesn’t feel like it’s fair that this is all written “on top of their homepage"? And what if some of the ranting people happen to be competitors of examplestore.com? Let’s take a look into the history books of Wired (from 2001) to see what happened to Third Voice:
In 1999, [Eng-Sion Tan] and two colleagues launched Third Voice, a free browser plug-in that allowed Web surfers to annotate any site with their comments. The idea was to spark “inline discussions” among Web users, promoting a new civic mindedness that would keep corporations, government and the media honest.
But the seemingly innocuous “sticky notes” gained enemies quicker than users. Launching a grassroots campaign called Say No to TV, some 400 independent Web hosts banded together to gag Third Voice, which they likened to “Web graffiti.” (...)
On Monday, Third Voice posted a short message on its site, notifying users that the service had been discontinued (...)
Despite its opponents’ claims that people used the software to post lewd or libelous comments, Third Voice didn’t go down in a lawsuit. The company’s conundrum was much more banal: Third Voice couldn’t generate enough advertising revenue to raise consumers’ awareness of its free service, and it couldn’t generate enough consumer awareness to raise the advertising revenue it needed to stay in business.
[Thanks Moses!]
Firefox 4 Design Direction
Just saw this proposed design direction mockup for Firefox 4. In the design, put out early to allow community feedback, tabs are put above the address bar and the navigation buttons, the traditional menu is replaced by a page and tools menu button to the right, and there’s a proposal to remove the bottom status bar, too. Gee, now which browser does that remind us of?
*You can argue putting the tabs on top is where they logically belong within the hierarchy – because e.g. the back button won’t take all tabs back but only the selected one, because the URL does not belong to all tabs but only one... – though from another perspective you can argue that interface elements similar to all tabs (functionality that remains static upon tab switch) would better fit outside the tab content area, e.g. above it.
[Via Reddit.]
Google Chrome Frame: A Canvas (and More) Plugin for Internet Explorer
Oh sweet: Google released a plug-in for Internet Explorer which brings Canvas and a couple of other things (like Chrome’s fast JavaScript engine) to Internet Explorer. It’s named Google Chrome Frame, and the “couple of other things” could act like a Trojan horse for Google in the future through updates of the plugin, but right now it helps old-fashioned IExplorer catch up on some of the web technologies of the recent years... by having it run Chrome’s WebKit-based rendering engine. For now the open source plug-in is released as an “early version intended for developers”.
In the past, there had already been a project by Google employees to port Canvas to IE named ExplorerCanvas (utilizing IE’s older
Note that Google’s plug-in, once installed by the user, will not make Canvas simply just work across all sites. First, the developer needs to insert the following meta tag into the head section of their page:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1" />
Either that, or the user can precede any URL with cf: ... and it basically tells the browser to act like Chrome. You can then use a script bit provided by Google to run the installation. This brings up a (cluttered) installation window (you probably want to set the optional “destination” parameter – I didn’t, and after the installation finished nothing happened and I had to manually refresh – and you may also be able to override the default prompt by configuring the other parameters).
Does this mean developers can now simply use Canvas instead of, say, Flash, for projects where Canvas would be a theoretical fit... without any negative side effects? Not really – because while Flash is deployed on many systems, Google Chrome Frame isn’t, so your Canvas site would thus still bring up a very sub-optimal plug-in installation notice. However, as an additional alternative to Flash for developers trying to make their Canvas app cross-browser, it’s nice to have (ExplorerCanvas in the meantime still makes sense for static vector graphics, because as opposed to Chrome Frame it does not require installation). And who knows, it might even further push Microsoft towards implementing Canvas in IE natively one of these days... just to avoid having developers push a Google plug-in to users.
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
New Book: Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain
Richard L. Brandt wrote a book titled “Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain”, and it’s now available on Amazon. Amazon’s descriptions says the book “skips past the general Google story and focuses on what really drives these men and where they will take Google in the future. Richard L. Brandt shows the company as the brainchild of two brilliant but individual men and looks at Google’s business decisions in light of its founders’ ambitions and beliefs.” Richard answered a couple of my questions via email.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
I worked on this book off and on for four years. I first became interested in writing about Google before the IPO.
When I was at Business Week in the mid 1980s I had a chance to write a book about Microsoft. I just knew Microsoft was destined to become a huge force in the computer industry. For various reasons I never did the book.
Google was the first company that I felt as strongly about as I did Microsoft in its early days. I started following its business model, and knew it had the right formula. This time, I knew I had to write a book. It was delayed for a few years while I was busy with other things, then had trouble finding an agent who believed I could say something new about Google. A year ago I found one, sold the proposal and wrote the book. There was no other book I wanted to do. The book is only as good as my passion for writing it.
I knew it was an exceptional company that had many things to teach entrepreneurs. Every time there’s a paradigm shift in technology, one or two companies figure out how to really exploit the new technology and become powerful leaders. Microsoft did that in software, Intel in hardware. (Apple is a different case; its strength is design, not business strategy.) Google is it for the Internet, the successor to Microsoft not in business strategy, but in leading the new generation of companies tapping into the zeitgeist of the Internet.
Whereas Bill Gates saw the potential of the microprocessor and the need for standards in his day, positioning Microsoft to control them, Larry and Sergey understood the open nature of the Internet, the power of its interconnected nature, and knew that it would be extremely important to help people tap its potential.
Bill Gates was an idealist about getting a computer on everyone’s desk because he wanted one himself and knew that millions of others would as well. He also smelled money. Larry and Sergey were idealists about the importance of the internet to change people’s lives. They simply worked harder to create the best search engine they could, even willing to knock advertisers down a peg or two in importance, because this was too important to the world to screw up. Idealism goes a long way on the Internet.
I’m fascinated with corporate ethics and like the fact that Google is not driven by the need to maximize shareholder value every quarter. They refuse to mess up search results with ads. They push openness, free products, and do everything they can to get more people online. Because the Internet offers so much competition, only the true idealists get it right.
Q: Was it hard to get to interview Larry or Sergey for the book? How long did you talk to them?
Larry and Sergey are extremely private individuals and are shy of the press. I could not get official interviews with them. But I used every opportunity I could to run into them. Since I recognized the incredible nature of the company, I invested in the IPO, buying stock at $85 (I sold it all before writing the book, at about $500.) As a stockholder I got to attend all the shareholder meetings. I listened to them there and asked questions. (In the early shareholder meetings, reporters were not invited [...] so I got exclusives.) I went to Google parties and used every excuse I could to visit the Google campus, talking to them whenever I ran into them. I blogged about Google and listened in on every conference call I could. I picked up bits and pieces over the years. But I only had short conversations with them, never an interview.
Google then gave me access to anyone I wanted EXCEPT Larry and Sergey. So I interviewed friends, Google execs, former Google execs, professors and colleagues. With every source, I focused on their impressions of Larry and Sergey and why they did things the way they did.
After years of observing them and evaluating their moves against the view I had developed of their passion and idealism, I felt I knew them as well as any outsider could. Since I don’t know them personally, there are certainly limitations to my knowledge. They are hugely ambitious and are still discovering what they’re capable of. They’re still evolving and will continue to surprise all of us. When I told Eric Schmidt I wanted to get inside their brains, he said, “Good luck.” But I tried to get deeper into their brains than anyone else had.
The last thing is that I’m impressed by their idealism. It’s real, and it keeps them ahead of the competition. They’re good guys. And hugely ambitious.
Contest to Redesign Google (and Unofficial Google Theme Directory)
Redesign Google is an unofficial/ third party contest for you to give a new layout to Google. To view the designs which have been created right on Google, the makers offer a Firefox plugin. You can easily create & preview new designs by clicking “create new” on the homepage, editing the CSS in the box presented to the left, and then clicking the “apply style” thing (usability trap: it looks neither like button nor link) at the top.
[Via Google FastFlip → Techcrunch.]
Monday, September 21, 2009
Google Books Integrated Into Options Bar
Google has added a Books category into their expandable left hand options pane in the US. I think this is still being rolled out, even using a US proxy and the parameter gl=us I only see this some of the time. Clicking that category shows results from Google Books right in web search (or call it “main search” if you will, though Google presents the nesting as Web » Books). You can then further restrict to show only books or only magazines.
There’s currently some overlap between Google’s top bar, the left hand options bar, and their advanced search page. Note combining this options bar selection with the advanced search does not really work, e.g. you can’t select “Search only pages that are free to use or share” and expect it to trigger something like a Creative Commons book search or the “Public domain option"; the latter is still only available if you go straight to the Google Books main site.
[Via Google.]
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Project Indect and the "automatic detection" of "abnormal behaviour or violence"
A [European Union funded] five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers. (...)
[Another EU-funded research project called Adabts, short for Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces] is seeking to develop models of “suspicious behaviour” so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people’s voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.
Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.
Gerry Murray of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, involved in Project Indect, says “our human resources are shrinking and we are looking for IT technology that will help us five years down the line in reducing crime and combating criminal gangs”.
[Via Reddit.]
Saturday, September 19, 2009
US Justice Dept. Urges to Reject Google Books Settlement
Reuters writes:
The U.S. Justice Department urged a New York court on Friday to reject Google’s controversial deal with authors and publishers that would allow the search engine giant to create a massive online digital library.
Under the terms of the settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers register works and are paid for books and other publications that the search giant would put online. (...)
The Justice Department noted that the “settlement appears to give book publishers the power to restrict price competition” and would give Google “de facto exclusivity” in distribution of orphan works, books which are in copyright but the rights holder cannot be located.
The Justice Department hasn’t finished its investigation, Reuters says, but already feels there is significant potential they’d decide the Google Books Settlement breaks antitrust law. In October in the federal court in Manhattan, a “fairness hearing” on the issue is planned to take place.
Gary Price at ResourceShelf assembled many more views on the issue.
[Thanks Gary!]
Google Images China Shows Large Pics Inline
Google China’s image search is not quite like its US counterpart. When you click on a thumbnail from the Chinese result, a new window opens showing a special Google page*. On this page, the image will be briefly loaded in low quality, and then be quickly replaced by the original high quality image, by embedding the source URL right in the page. The source webpage URL is then listed at the top right (it will open in yet another new window), whereas clicking on the large image will move forward to the next image; alternatively, you can also use the pager arrows to navigate. Links to the source page as well as the direct source image (or sometimes the text “Unable to load the image”) are shown below the pic.
While Google hotlinks the original images, there is a copyright disclaimer at the bottom, letting users know that (quote from the auto-translation) “the above image ... may be subject to trademark and copyright protection.” What does this mean for websites appearing in Google Images China? One result is that the loading of the webmaster’s site is now a click further away, though when clicked through it does stand on its own, instead of appearing initially framed like on Google.com**. The other implication is that Google goes beyond showing thumbnails on their site, and turns to showing high-res imagery. They are never copying the high-res image though, as the pic is originated at the source server when embedded; Google’s app is transforming the display on the client side, if you will (in the semantics of HTML they’re merely delivering information about the high-res image URL, but never about the high-res image content).
Google’s approach in China mirrors the supposedly more popular local competitor Baidu, who in their image search engine also open a mini viewer app window which inline-links larger images.
On a side-note, perhaps due to an error on Google’s part, the image viewer app results themselves are indexable in Google, as a search for site:images.google.cn/imglanding shows (though the actual content of these pages might have timed out; I’m getting a “Bad Request” trying to view them). Google’s webmaster guidelines sort of frown on search results in search results.
*Note this might not be a new feature.
**On Google.com, a click on the thumbnail opens a same-window page which shows a frameset, one containing a Google info bar, the other the source site... you can then move through to the original source image by clicking on the thumbnail in the info bar, or click to visit the original page frameset-free.
Turn Your Photo Into an Animated Face
At this Japanese app you can upload any portrait-style photo, and have it be automagically converted into a sort-of-living, sort-of-3D face. To get this to work first click Change, then Upload, pick the photo, and then wait a bit as the screen will freeze. Afterwards, you can see the face become animated, and it will react to your mouse movements and clicks. [Via B3ta.]
Friday, September 18, 2009
When Google Gets Musical
Here in China I’m amazed by the Google Music site... I can search for all kinds of bands and musicians and get their albums, with songs fully playable in an easy interface (songs playable in China only, that is!). The scope of featured artists doesn’t feel unlimited but is still quite broad. If you’re interested how Google Music China came about, below article by Michael Zhang appearing earlier this year in Chinese was kindly provided by Michael. The translation was provided by Michael’s colleague and is presented here often “as is,” so please forgive potential slight ambiguities or translation barriers here and there.
Michael Liang Zhang is the assistant managing editor of Global Entrepreneur magazine. He writes a blog focusing on Apple and is following Google China’s story for several years now, interviewing many of Google China’s employees.
“What should the ideal music product look like?”
“Whatever you think of will immediately play,” Hong Feng, product manager of Google China, answered. Perhaps not fully satisfied with the answer, he adds, “It will play the right music without you having to give it any thought.” You get the music you want at the right time, for the right environment, and in the right mood.
Well, it sounds unrealistic that one’s thoughts can actually control music. Yet like the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Revolutionary technologies like electrical power, airplanes and search engines have all changed the world in ways that were out of expectation. To some extent, Google’s second edition of their music search product, launched on March 30 by Hong Feng and his team, fulfilled the criteria in some way. When Google China’s president Li Kaifu [who by now quit Google] and executives from hundreds of record companies posed for a photograph at the media conference, people might have ignored the fact that this product transcended reality on at least two levels.
Google and Top100.cn provide complete music archives of over 140 record companies for download, which are totally free of charge and without Digital Rights Management (DRM). The product changes the way people interact with music. If search engines reduced the cost for people to find information, and community websites flattened peoples’ relations of “the six degrees of separation”, Google Music unprecedentedly enriched the way people find music. You can find a song through the name of artist, titles of the song, albums, or even a sentence of lyric, and you can also play the hottest songs from the charts. However, the most impressive breakthroughs are these two functions – one can have music recommendations according to difference of the tempo, tone, and timber; similar songs are recommended according to the timber of specific songs. Fresh experience it offers and the technical complexity in its realization makes it the most ambitious and imaginative work of Google after it entered China.
However, there’s still much room for improvement. Though the contract with record makers is only limited to the Chinese mainland, the record industry would not like to stick to this fixed pattern all along. “If it is proved to be a successful model in China, I would be surprised it won’t be promoted worldwide,” Sandy Monteiro, vice president of the Universal Music Group told Global Entrepreneur. Though no one knows how much time it will take, we might as well just imagine, some day in the future, when this free music service born in China enters the U.S. market, how would the largest online music stores – Apple’s iTunes App Store – have to compete?
Google’s previous attempts of developing a music search service were all aborted due to disagreements inside the company. Besides the copyright issue, Google’s decision makers were not really convinced that the proposals would help it surpass its rivals in this field. Then why did such a music search product pop out in China, where either technology innovation or property protection prevails?
Forget about the highly conclusive answers. Like all other innovation process, the course is complicated and not easy to define. You can also sum up with the timing, geographical and human reasons, yet it is no other than a series of consequences of human actions: the wildest fantasies, most carefully cultivated proposals, detailed communications inside the company, hard work of hundreds of thousands of codes to convert physical sound into arithmetic, and also some good luck ... all these factors combined have accomplished an “impossible mission.”
The Google Music homepage. Outside of China you can see it, but you can’t playback the songs.
Expanding the category for European music.
An album display. You can add a song to your current playlist, which is kept open in a second browser window, by clicking the plus icon. You can also find similar songs to the one being shown (with varying results quality).
The playlist. You can drag and drop items around. All songs can be fully played. A link at the bottom reminds you of the service’s terms. Many songs have lyrics coming with them to read along. You can also order ringtones for certain songs. A banner ad is displayed at the bottom of the window.
The “song screener” lets you find songs by adjusting slide rulers in the Flash app... if you can read Chinese, that is.
Tyranny of the “or”
It never has been a secret that Google China needed a music search product.
But it is also evident that, by normal business logic, search engines and music industry are run in totally opposite directions. While Google believe that all information has value and should be found with the lowest cost, record companies believe that the limited valuable information should be kept slightly and be charged for use every time. When Google is dedicated in digging out any information hidden in corners, record industry is busy contesting each other by spotting music genius in billion.
Different orientation decides that interaction between the two sides would hurt each other’s benefits. In China, Baidu is a successful example. It takes 60 percent market shares of search engine market, of which 15 percent is contributed by music search. Netizens can get large quantity of free music for download. The only problem is that the music has no copyrights. Record companies can hardly make profit out of it, which has constantly brought disputes between each other. But Baidu insists that the music they provide for download already existed on the internet, which helped it avoid legal responsibilities.
Google China did have such kind of temptations. In late 2006, Baidu won a lawsuit against International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Right after that, Google purchased the video website YouTube which is also bothered by copyright disputes. It is at this occasion that staff of Google China suggested: shall we develop a music search product the way Baidu did?
But this hasn’t become an option. “There is a saying in English called Tyranny of the ‘or’, which means that people can easily get themselves stuck in a kind of confrontation between two opposing options – you might as well choose to make it legal but with fee, or rather, free of charge but illegal. We don’t want to surrender to this tyranny of the ‘or’. We made it, with free and legal music,” Li Kaifu told Global Entrepreneur during an exclusive interview.
The first problem they should solve then was how to convey their sincerity.
The difficulty for internet industry and record industry to cooperate does not only root in their different positions, but also in communication difficulties. The two sides speak different industry languages, and the aggressive lawyers arguing for their legal rights made the negotiation break sooner than you expect.
In September 2006, Google China’s then chief strategy officer Guo Quji was introduced by a lucky chance to Chen Ge, the founder and CEO of Top100.cn which was invested in by basketball star Yao Ming. According to engineers’ impression, Chen’s style of eloquence would not make things any better. Yet Guo found the other side of Chen. “He has character of a ‘preacher.’ If you are running late for the appointment, he would be waiting for you at the entrance of the company till you come. If he writes you an e-mail and doesn’t get response, he would continue to write another the day after in politeness.”
As it turned out, Chen’s emotional quotient is out of expect. He never lost temper once through the whole process of negotiation, and he could always stay calm and find consensus for both, which made him sort of insulation that eliminated contradictions lying between Google and record companies. Before founding Top100.cn, Chen set up the company Pulai Music, which had made records and organized concerts for rock star Cui Jian. This made Chen familiar with the language of the music circle, which qualified him for the role of interpreter between the two sides. Chen and his Top100 has never provided music without copyrights. The two sides started with the same “no original sin” gesture into the record industry.
Under Chen’s recommendation, Google China contacted Sony, Universal, and EMI music respectively in November 2006, December 2006 and January 2007, which was right at a turbulent time for Google China. Li Kaifu, who was then reported to step down, led his team and made it clear the cooperation with Top100.
However, Li’s decision cannot stand for Google. Decision for such a product should be reported to Google’s U.S. headquarters, approvals from the two founders and the CEO are needed.
How to make this product proposal, which had been constantly denied, prevail this time? It should give credit to Google China’s wisdom of a roundabout way in communication. They head on with permits authorized within the mainland scope, and reported stage accomplishment and kept delivering the message that what they were working on was worthwhile. Trust from the headquarters was accumulated.
The first step was to make Top100 part of Google China’s interest. There was no doubt that Google had to invest in Top100 if they planned to carry on the music search business in long term. In February 2007, Li Kaifu, and James Mi, then in charge of merger & acquisition and investment of Greater China, reported this purchase plan to CEO Eric Schmidt. They didn’t boldly announce the whole music search program, but just illustrated the importance of this deal, and by this chance, introduced the meaning of music service to Chinese users. Schmidt, who had always been supportive for China business approved the plan very quickly.
It was not until November 2007 that the music search program was finally reported to the two founders. During the past several months, the team for music search in Google China has developed bold paths – cooperation between Google and Top100 had been divided into six steps. The Onebox plug-in among search results launched in August 2008, and the search page launched on March 30, 2009 are only the first two steps. [Checking the archives I can see the Google Music page went live around August 2008. -Ed.]
“The co-founder Larry Page only asked one question and signed the project with CEO Schmidt. The whole course took only a few minutes. This became a little legend for Google China.”
The biggest challenge was that Google had long defined its global strategy as search, ads, and apps. Music search should not become an area to be devoted with much energy. But Li and his team also made a convincing explanation: the content would be provided by Top100 and Google China only acts the role as platform, which doesn’t go against the search-dominating strategy; in addition, the lack of a music search product might make them lose loyal users. As a backup plan, they even proposed to buy a new domain m.cn, hoping that it would help lighten the color of Google.
The co-founder Larry Page only asked one question and signed the project with CEO Schmidt. The whole course took only a few minutes. This became a little legend for Google China.
A destined miracle?
Even with the permit, Google China’s investment in Top100 had been very cautious. Mi drafted a very detailed investment structure. Millions of dollars investment had been divided into four rounds. The second round of investment came only after Top100 signed another record company. As it turned out, Chen is a very reliable person. By September 2007, he had signed agreements with three record companies including Sony, Universal and EMI for audition of DRM music free of charge.
Details of the negotiation that had not been revealed officially reflected wisdom of Google China’s pattern in cooperating with Top100. For instance, to avoid hasty in cooperation, Top100’s agreement with record companies didn’t limit to advertisement shares. According to an insider, every contract Top100 signed with record companies was very complicated. Apart from the ad dividend, record companies can get fee for download of each song and base revenue for each year, all paid by Top100.
Apart from that, record companies had chance to get options in Top100, which put the website into a virtuous development cycle. For one thing, record companies then had more patience for Top100’s product. For another, more shareholders brought hope for Top100 in developing into a leading force in China’s music market. The expectation that the website will lead a dominating role some day was irresistible to record companies for better financial payback.
However, the most important thing is to change the idea lying deep in the music market.
Digital music brought convenience in duplication, and time of relying solely on a single album had gone. Artists have more options such as representation and concerts. Record companies are also changing their role from making music to marketing and promotion.
This was just where Google’s negotiation team hit the point. By putting forward the idea that CD works only to loyal fans while a search engine is a better choice for artists to promote themselves. A search engine also has the advantage in assembling music fans located in different parts of the world, which for certain lowers the cost in targeted marketing. [Note Google Music China uses geolocation to ban IPs from other countries. -Ed.]
Google itself could serve as a good example. In 2006, the second year Google opened China market, it made a revenue of 100 million dollars through its 20 percent shares in China. And according to Chen Ge, Chinese record industry made altogether 50 million dollars in 2008.
A standing obstacle was the issue of DRM that limits copying of the music and broadcasting might be technically strained, which would bring inconvenience to users. In October 2007, Google made a clear statement that Top100 must get authorization of the music without DRM.
Google’s music search intended to be launched on March 2008 was postponed several times. The time from October 2007 to May 2008 was called “the dark period” – no one could ensure their vision could be realized, and even Chen Ge himself could not bear this pressure.
“[T]he manager made promise that he would lift the DRM standard before leaving ... The door to the music market was finally opened, by the gatekeeper who was about to leave his position.”
It was suggested that Top100 invent a new copyright management standard affiliated to the DRM, which wouldn’t affect user experience in China. Yet the idea of borderline practice was denied by Google which had a clear record. There was still one way left – to provide a streaming media player, but Google gave up the plan, for the lack of download function might destroy user experience anyway.
The turning point came on May 10, 2008 when Chen Ge and Guo Quji visited the digital music section of EMI. At the Abbey Road Studio where albums of Beatles, Queen and U2 were recorded, the manager announced that he would lose his job in about a month. EMI had spotted Google’s chief information officer Douglas Merrill to take his place. Yet the manager made the promise that he would lift the DRM standard before leaving.
The door to the music market was finally opened, by the gatekeeper who was about to leave his position.
EMI’s attitude brought a chain reaction from other record giants. In spite of these progress, it was not until in early 2009 that Li Kaifu finally got consensus with Sony, which owns 40 percent of Chinese-language songs.
“It is a miracle that we finally made it,” Guo Quji who had left Google and started his own business told Global Entrepreneur. It took Google two years to turn the idea into reality, and lift all the obstacles. Many involvers, in Google or record companies, had left, but the deal was accomplished eventually.
Maybe the success was destined. Apart from traditional business wisdom, some wild illusions were needed to fulfill this impossible mission.
Assembly
On August 5, 2008, in an office named “Kai Xin (in Chinese: happiness) of Google China, people were not in mood of happiness.
Google’s first edition of music search was about to be put online. The music search development team had increased from one engineer to 10 people, which was not a small team in Google. They had gone through the long and lonely period of waiting: after March 2008, the product might be released every month, but was postponed each time. It was depressing that they might have to wait for another month, through the excitement of the national Olympics feast.
According to the plan, they should put the product online on 10 o’clock. If everything went well, they might go out for lunch and celebrate.
But accident came sooner than they expected. They were freaked out that Chinese users cannot visit the page while feedback from India and New York was coming in. According to the plan, Google Music was to be opened just to China, and recognition of IP address would help that. This accident might become a laughing stock, and what’s even worse, they might lose trust from record companies for this matter.
Not knowing what else to do, the team took the product offline and checked every line of code. While word spread on the internet that Google launched its music search, the project managers didn’t even know when exactly the product would finally be put online. “If things go well, it might be ready in half an hour. If not, 12 hours would be also possible,” said the product manager Hong Feng. Hong was sitting for hours in front of the video conference camera at Shanghai office, blank in his head with his face spotted on the wall.
It was already eight o’clock in the evening when they finally found out the problem – code conflicts with another product – and solved it.
It should not be overstated if we say it is a product that suffered with many setbacks. “We had many similar moments in the past year and half. We all acknowledge the difficulty and impossibleness lying in it. What we have is the bold determination to make it happen,” Tang Ting, the fronted technology leader of the music product said.
Here is another side of the story. When Li Kaifu, Guo Quji and Mi Qun were taking efforts to clear the road, these engineers were working on building a bridge for users to get better music experience. For a very long period of time, everything seemed uncertain, not only the product’s destiny but also its functions. It was just due to this kind of uncertainty that helped create a big surprise in the end.
The first person involved in this program is the product manager Hong Feng. Guo Qujin felt that Honog is a very good person to talk to when the product was still an illusion. Hong has this pure curiousity for things, and when the things come into shape, he pursues perfection of every detail.
“To avoid developing a product that annoys users is easy. But creating a product that doesn’t make you unhappy isn’t equal to creating one that makes you happy!” Hong told Global Entrepreneur. He spoke slowly and always made metaphors. He likes to make expressions of thoughts more vivid, which might have relations to his art background in primary school. He likes to make the product idea visual too.
When he imagined that all music of mankind is digitally formatted, he felt himself floating in the sea, with his hands reaching out for bubbles of songs.
Yet how to let a man under the sea get able to reach the bubble they want? This is a problem for engineering majordomo Lin Bin and his team to solve.
Lin is obsessed in telling his experience of joining Google. In September 2006, Lin, then working at Microsoft Research, met his old acquaintance Li Kaifu on a business trip, and asked Li, “why don’t you consider music search?” “Sure we would,” Li agreed. “Why don’t you join and take charge?” Lin joined a few months later.
Lin selected three fresh employees to joint this “Project M” program. Tang Mengya, a lively girl from Hang Zhou, and Zou Zhensheng, who is timid but loves singing, took charge of how the product would be presented. Zhao Qisheng, known for steadiness and patience, was devoted to back-end database and communication with Top100. In the earliest three months, they didn’t even start writing code, awaiting permit from the founders. Even Li Kaifu recalled that the engineers were in “the most pathetic” position. They still had too many obstacles to clear. To avoid frustration in the team, Lin had to communicate in a way of “reporting the good news but not the bad.” When Lin looked back, he was very grateful to them, “They knew how much uncertainty there was.”
When the program was finally approved, Tang Ting, who was then working on video search at Google China, offered to join. Tang grew up overseas and when he applied to come back and work in China, he was intended to do something with more Chinese characteristics. His interest for this program also came from people’s criticism of China’s lack of copyright protection. Tang brought in a big Northeaster Han Zhun. As it turned out, he also brought carefulness in correcting code with patience and strength.
But they still needed one person to bring technological breakthroughs for the product.
In early 2007, Li Kaifu made a speech of Google China in the New York office, hoping to attract more top engineers back to China. After his speech, a delicate girl found him. This female engineer in New York office was Hu Ning, and she was also a schoolmate of Li in Carnegie Mellon University. After a short chat, Li suggested that Hu Ning meet with Beijing’s Lin Bin.
When Lin Bin and Hu Ning finally sat together and talked, Lin found that Hu participated in a music search product when she was an intern in Google back in 2004. Hu also studied in frequency processing and message retrieval. This was a big surpise for Lin. Hu agreed to move back to China and devote scientific and technological achievements to Google’s music search.
Play by ear
When you get large quantity of music, how do you deal with it?
The simplest way is to change it into a large FTP for anyone to visit and download. However, this FTP looks like a library without a librarian. It only has value when you know which book you exactly want to read.
A more advanced way is to make computer a librarian. The computer would play similar songs under the same category. A company named Pandora is a good example. They marked different songs by 400 tags. When you select your favorite song and play, it will also play all the other songs under the same tag. But this looks like a one-way road. Human decisions are smart only in terms of limited music archives. If the music archives are enlarged to millions of songs, Pandora’s style would not be that effective, for we cannot say all users have the same appreciation and understanding as the one who pasted tags.
“Hu’s work was to teach computer to ’listen to the music.’ Different from the way humans listen to music, Hu had to convert the physical features of the music into numbers, and the computer would compare and work on them.”
Is there possibility that Google can teach the computer to become the cleverest librarian? On the one hand, it should know the features of different music well. On the other, it should make customized recommendations.
Computers must learn a lot to have the common sense human has. Though it wouldn’t be as accurate and effective as Pandora’s way at first, it has much room for improvement.
Hu’s work was to teach computer to “listen to the music.” Different from the way humans listen to music, Hu had to convert the physical features of the music into numbers, and the computer would compare and work on them.
For instance, it would be easy to recognize the timber difference between drum and flute. If this difference is converted into numbers – suppose drum to be marked by 2046 while flute marked by 1984, computers without ears can easily separate them. Under well-rounded arithmetic, singers with similar tone colors should be marked in similar numbers: Faye Wong, the Cranberries of Ireland, and Bjork of Iceland might only have difference of 0.1 in numbers.
Then computer might draw a boundless map for all the music. Though computers are only comparing a series of numbers, users would find piano, guitar and rock music in organized categories.
The real calculation is much more complicated than this. Hu needed to convert a song back to frequency spectrum, cut it into thousands of segments in units of hundred millisecond, and take out over 100 features. There might be a drumbeat in this unit and a cymbal beat in the next. You draw all the marks of each song on a paper, and when you put two pieces of such papers together, you see some overlapping and marks in similar positions. You can tell that the two pictures are alike, and the two songs are similar.
It was already a very interesting thought, but Hong Feng wanted something better. After his experience in development of Google Finance, he asked Hu Ning whether there was a way for users to make simple clicks and find different answers on the page, like the way stock search went.
Hong’s thought was very direct viewing for investors: you can get a list of companies of p/e over six, or rather profit margin of over 30 percent. Yet Hu doesn’t agree with this, for music has no p/e or profit margin and users cannot make choices based on that.
But Hong didn’t want to give up this thought easily. He took two weeks in convincing Hu that music, though without clear standard like p/e, would be more fun if there could be some interaction with users.
As a result, two new features were added inito the tight schedule of Google Music’s second edition, including recommendation of similar songs led by Hu Ning, and seletion of songs according to different features.
Lu Yang, doctor of Tsinghua University who joined Google last July, joined Hu in this new direction. The young man who studied signal processing in school didn’t expect to pick up his major when he joined this search engine company. He was required to read dozens of theses by Hu and had to read mathematic books for research. When searching profiles of engineers around the globe, Lin Bin found another engineer in Zurich who had similar academic background with Hu and Lu. Lin invited him to take part in this program.
It wa already a difficulty to find standards applicable to all the songs. People might think that ordinary users could make selections by difference of rhythm, but it was a detour in technical sense.
Lu Yang had experience when he listened to the same song with the Zurich colleague through video conference. The two beat time to the music, and gathered data for about 1,000 songs. The impassible barrio is the multiformity of songs. It’s hard to find the tempo for those songs with light background music. Some songs don’t have the same tempo from beginning to end. People even have different understanding of tempo. The computer had an accuracy of 80 percent in making a distinction of songs in different tempo. Though it is already a hard achievement academically, the chance of one mistake in five songs is not acceptable in practical application. Under these circumstances, Lu suggested that they make distinction from mild to strong, instead of by tempo.
Hu also had difficulty in the similar-song direction. She saw satisfactory performance with her sample product, which covered several thousands of songs, but was frustrated when the range increased to tens of thousands. She had to start over again.
Back in school, she only needed to deal with 100 songs for quantity analysis in order to publish a thesis, but now she was facing hundreds of thousands songs, which was a huge project. Now it was a totally different matter. Chinese language songs and foreign songs of similar timber should be marked differently in numbers. There were also some special cases, e.g. rap music, which was also a big challenge.
Hu Ning and Lu Yang found a simple but effective way to do this huge project. They worked out a solution in small quantity, and made adjustments each time when the quantity was enlarged. Many of the valid code they wrote before had to be abandoned when they moved on to the next stage. It is said that the amount of abandoned code was ten times the one that was left.
The system is relatively stable after processing over 50,000 songs, and they now have 4096 characteristic roots. Somehow it is a product destined for Google – to process 300,000 songs each time takes thousands of computers working tens of hours. Not all companies can do that.
Three weeks before the launch of the revised edition, Li Kaifu and Hong Feng were finally ready to present their work to CEO Eric Schmidt. According to attendees at the presentation, Schmidt, who has rich experience in product development and has a keen eye, commented: “My Chinese colleagues, is there any sharp question for me to ask?”
Indeed, it is a surprising product for Google, no matter in terms of China or the globe.
Will it help Google win back some market shares? It is yet too early to come to this conclusion.
A person close to Google shared his worries with Global Entrepreneur. Given to the bad economic environment this year, Top100 and record companies might not be able to have a good payback as they expect. A more important question is whether Google has the competence to improve and promote the product. In the view of critics, though Google launched quite a few products last year, none of them brought excitement to the market. For instance, Google-Kingsoft Powerword, which is no doubt a good product with great position, quieted down gradually in the past year.
Good news is that everyone of them know there is still much space for improvement, from Li Kaifu to each engineer. According to the plan, after Google Music made its debut, there are still product advertisements, music player and community services to be developed.
Above all, by changing the original competition rules, Google finally filled up its blank and confronts Baidu directly. After three years’ localization, Li Kaifu is now able to sit down, and play himself a song on the internet, with his own product.
A Trademark Search Engine
Trademarkia is a search engine specifically for trademarks. Enter google, for instance, to find out what kind trademarks are available (including abandoned trademarks – note the status column). To fire this engine, the makers tell me they “received data in various legacy formats from a US government agency, the USPTO. We then normalized and standardized all [data] sets.”
[Thanks Fred!]
Thursday, September 17, 2009
A JavaScript-Based NES Emulator
If you want to see what Google Chrome is capable of, check out JSNES, a JavaScript and Canvas based NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulator. To blow up the somewhat small display size, hit Ctrl+Plus a couple of times. Note theoretically JSNES supports some other browsers too (like Firefox), but the author Ben Firshman says they’re “hardly playable” and so he highly recommends Chrome.
[Via Reddit.]
By Acquiring ReCaptcha, Google Acquired a Crowd Computer Along the Way
As previously mentioned, Google has acquired reCaptcha, a company providing those hard-to-read Captcha tests to tell robots and humans apart on websites (e.g. to protect a comment form against automated spamming). The twist with the highly popular reCaptcha is that it’s also used to help turning scanned books into searchable digital text... something Google aims to apply for their books and newspaper digitization projects, too, to help with the quality of their existing OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
For all the websites out there using reCaptcha – Google says there are above 100,000 – this now means you’ll also help Google’s efforts now. (You continue to get something in return, of course: a form of free spam protection for your site.) The reCaptcha technology might have been feasible to duplicate for Google, but the installed existing user base for reCaptcha is possibly the actual gold Google was after. ReCaptcha mentions they’re serving 30 million Captchas daily and that generally, people spend roughly 10 seconds on a captcha – that’s quite some human computing power Google snapped up there.
Technically, here’s how reCaptcha works. Captchas (short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are deliberately distorted to make them hard to read, so that they can’t be easily solved with existing OCR algorithms. At reCaptcha – which webmasters can easily plug-in to their existing forms and configure via e.g. a JavaScript API – you’ll always be presented with two, not just one words. The trick is that reCaptcha already knows one of the words, but wants you to help solve the other word (if enough other people solve that other word similarly, the system gains confidence that it now knows what that word reads). So you can say one word is the actual Captcha test word... while the other word deliberately spends more of your time than needed for the robot test by letting you turn books into text. It’s these extra seconds that you spend solving the secondary, unknown word that make up the CPU of that crowd computer Google now owns.
Right now, Google can use this crowd computer to improve searching and highlighting text for projects like Google Books. Improving by correcting old words, increasing their confidence threshold, or cracking new unknown words – and perhaps letting their software learn from its mistakes, or by running automated tests against reCaptcha when they try out new versions of their OCR. But who’s to say that in the future, we’ll not be solving other captcha tasks? Telling humans and bots apart is not necessarily restricted to text-reading tests. There are other puzzles out there which are tough for today’s AIs, but easy for humans, which might benefit a Google project.
For instance, a captcha may show you a thumbnail collection of a dozen images and ask you to click on all images showing a cat. (I’m not sure how feasible this particular example would be for Google, but it’s just to illustrate the general different directions captchas can take.) For most images Google knows whether it’s a cat or not, but for one image, Google only suspects that it’s a cat based on keywords found on the same page the pic was hosted on. If many people click that picture, Google may gain confidence that it’s indeed a cat (or conversely that it isn’t), and rank it accordingly in Google Images.
For such alternative captcha systems, take a look at Microsoft’s Asirra project, KittenAuth, or Google’s own foray into the field. These are straightforward applications; even more power could be unleashed if any company figures out a possibility to break up bigger questions into easy humanly solvable chunks, which would – after being solved – be merged to form the deeper answer. (Perhaps both the process of breaking up the question, as well as merging the individual solutions together again, could be themselves human computing powered.)
Now, it’s worth keeping in mind other, older parts of Google’s crowd computer. Here are some examples:
- whenever you mark a Gmail message as spam, you potentially help Google to determine what spam looks like
- whenever you click on a Google search result (and then either continue your search afterwards, or be gone to the other site for good), you’ll give Google some indicators to the usefulness of the site
- your searches may power prediction machines for things like flu trends; they may also help Google build a “database of intentions”
- calling 1-800-GOOG-411 allows US users to say what business they are looking for and to be then connected with that business, but the reason Google really did this, according to Google’s Marissa Mayer, was to “to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search”
- when you include Google Analytics in your site, you could help Google spot global traffic trends and patterns
- a game called Google Image Labeler directly helps Google to associate the pics of Google Images with keywords
Google can potentially use any and all interaction with their sites as data points to power yet other calculations. What’s the hottest spot in town (as a purely hypothetical example)? Let’s see what areas on Google Maps those people who fall into the younger age group – determined by their Google search patterns – look at most often recently! ... What are the most popular websites out there right now? Let’s see which URLs are being forwarded the most in Gmail right now. ... Who are your friends? Let’s look at which Google Latitude users – those who allow their location to be tracked – are often found in your vicinity.
There’s nothing inherently bad about this; user attention as well as user information continues to be the currency in many parts of the online world, like it is the case with the ads Google displays on search results (many a webmaster’s sites are financed through ads, too). Often we prefer paying with attention (or sharing our information) to paying with money; it feels “free.” Applying a broad definition of the word Google’s programs are not free though – it’s just that you’ve signed an inherent contract with Google to use their apps only as long as you trade in your brain cycles in return. Google’s terms of service point 17 translates this to legalese: “Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue ... In consideration for Google granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Google may place such advertising on the Services.” With reCaptchas too the agreement is built into the technology, as you cannot display only the single test word needed for that “Turing test.”
As it is, perhaps Google is not only owner of the biggest electronic computer in the world (their giant server farm), but also owner of the biggest crowd computer in the world. If this sounds scary, remember your attention also acts as a vote – you might think of the alternative model in which Google is simply a building block in civilization’s computer, granted permission to handle a large part of the calculations as long as it works.
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