Sep 25 2006
CNNMoney has an interesting read on Google and how they operate in Chaos by design. It also lays out the challenges for Google on with a 2nd act – right now it is a one-trick pony (albeit a very good trick one). 
The author for Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, works for Google as a Sr. VP of Business Operations. I have not heard of her or this book, but it seems interesting. Has anyone else read it? What are your thoughts on it?
(Thanks to Megha for sending this one)
Aug 24 2006
Google’s 3D Warehouse is a collection of 3D objects that were created for use with Sketchup and are meant to be used with Google Earth. You can see one of London’s most famous attractions the Big Ben or India’s world famous Taj Mahal.
[I'm rocking out to Heartbeats by José González from the album Veneer]
Aug 19 2006
Thanks to my colleague Rick Pollak for pointing this out.
Seems like Google has released Writely.com which is their answer to Word. Registration is open, and you can sign up. I used my Google account and got a confirmation email – however I was able to use the site before I confirmed.
My first experience was not good – as IE had crashed – well it was running at almost 100% CPU and eating all the resources (click the image to see details). Which meant at the end of the day I could not kill that process and I had to restart the machine. But, since I am running IE 7 (Beta 3), I am not sure if there is an issue with IE itself or if the problem is with writely.
I have not used this for a long time, so these are only the first impressions and so far I am more impressed with the collaboration tools than the editor itself. It has all the basic things you would expect – fonts, spellcheck, etc. There are also other a little more advanced features such as the ability to insert comments, manage bookmarks, table and image support. The image can be a maximum of 2mb in size.
The collaboration features seems to be quite impressive and it would be interesting when MOSS 2007 ships, what impact would it have on SharePoint 2007. I guess it is safe to say that almost all Enterprises will not be using this (you won’t want your document out there on someone else’s server now would you?). But, for most of us this probably is not too much of an issue. I know my Dad won’t have an issue for example. Also, the revisions is interesting – I have not used this. But it seems to be promising and might have helped in the WCF book I have been writing. All the back and forth between myself and the TE’s (Technical Editors).
The File > Save As menu is also interesting. As you can see as it allows one to save the document in a number of formats that you would expect such as HTML, Word, OpenOffice, PDF. And in a few that you won’t expect such as a RSS feed.
You can also tag the various documents (quite similar to the way you can to blog posts and photographs), and I can see the value in having something like that. This is of course similar to something that will also be in Vista.
Also you can directly publish to you blog. The blogs it supports “out of the box” are blogger.com, blogharbor.com, blogware.com, livejournal.com, squarespaces.com, wordpress.com. But fear not, if whatever blogging thing you use, you can use it as long as it supports one of the following API’s: Blogger API, MetaWeblog API or MovableType API.
If security of your document is important, then you will be glad to know they say they take security very seriously. Here is what they have to say about it, about how secure are the documents.
Very! We take security very seriously. A layered security architecture ensures that only people you authorize can view or modify a document.
Of course all this free. You can take a tour here and find out more details here and sign up for this here. I am excited about this, mainly because so many people I know do not have the budget to spend on the likes of Microsoft Office, and OpenOffice is something also a bit of an overkill or just too much hassle to download and install. So, as long as you have a stable and fast Internet connection this might just be a winner.
Having said that, I personally will not be saving any information that is important to me on their servers as I am a bit paranoid. Also the fact I already have licence’s for Microsoft Office is also a factor.
One question that does remain, would Adobe go after google now and ask them to remove the save as PDF functionality from this as they have rumored to have forces Microsoft in for Office 2007?
Aug 17 2006
Google just released a new version of Google Talk, that adds support to send files between users, allows you to leave a voicemail for the person you were calling and share with others what music you are listening to.
Aug 05 2006
It might not seem like a big deal, and actually if you were not keeping an eye out then quite easy to miss. But now you can save locations with Google Maps. If you are like me and are a heavy user, then this feature has been in the waiting for a while. Check out the link for Saving location on the top right corner when you are in google maps. You will need a google account where your locations are saved.
Feb 23 2006
You have have heard of Google Pages by now; if not check it out. I got a test page published just to see how it looks, it seems simple enough and seems to be a good answer to those who cannot afford some of the fancier solutions like Frontpage, etc. Now if only I could publish pages to somewhere else like my own domain.
Dec 16 2005
More news on Google, they have released two new extensions for Firefox, one is called Google Safe Browsing which detects any phishing and spoofing sites, and the other is for Blogger Web Comments – so you can see what others are saying about the page you are on, and even blog directly to your blog (running on blogger of course).
Dec 16 2005
You might have heard and seen this already, but GMail has has a few updates, now it supports RSS feeds and you can get it on your mobile/cell phone. Check out details here.
Dec 13 2005
Check out how Google managed things a few years ago. Thanks to Eli for the link. 
Dec 08 2005
While I like the new Google Transit and idea you can use public transport to get from Place A to B including getting very specific like what time to get to a certain place by, currently they have data for only Portland. I think this would have been a much better experiment for a European city like London where public transport exists unlike most US cities!
Oct 26 2005
I guess it was eventually meant to happen, Google has a database coming out soon called Google Base (which will be available at http://base.google.com), and their intent is if it can be posted online in any fashion then use their database. And all that information will be available through searches and can be integrated with google maps. Seems more revenue for them, and also they seem to be targeting the likey of eBay and Craigslist. You can read up an interesting post at arstechnica on the subject.
Oct 09 2005
Avi pointed out this one to me. Google has a rss reader called Google Reader which to me seems quite similar to Bloglines, why I would use one over the other is not clear to me.
