http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060516-6841.html

google notebook released. ars suggests its a del.icio.us killer. ehh, maybe.

5/16/2006 12:42:40 PM

1) i've installed/activated Notebook, but haven't used it much yet. But from what i can tell, it looks to be really cool. But the main brownie points come from the FireFox extension - http://www.google.com/notebook/download
this makes it insanely easy to access, edit, and add to your Notebook. First, whenever you highlight text in a webpage, after a 1/2 second or so you will get a little pop-up that says "note this" that you can click on and it will add a note to your notebook. This is nice, but I wish it was configurable. I have a little obsessive habit where I constantly highlight and re-highlight text as I'm reading a long page - this makes it so FF is contantly going back and forth to google to try to add my highlighted text to notebook. It will also install a little Notebook in the statusbar that you can click on and it will open a mini-browser of sorts where you can add to and edit your notebooks. Very slick - to be a del.icio.us killer, though, it needs better support for links and URLs specifically.

2) They've taken a play from Yahoo's playbook and added a Google Webtoolkit - http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ - this is a code library that allows you to create dynamic, AJAX based webforms. Here's a demo - http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/examples/kitchensink/demo.html - looks good so far.

3) Not so much innovation, but branding - the type that GOogle would get pissed at Yahoo or MS for doing something similar - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/in-my-day-we-thought-calculators-were.html - In short, the state of Maine is giving each of it's middle-school students an iBook (wouldn't you feel jipped if you got an old G4 iBooke when they jsut announced the hot MacBooks?), and Google has a deal with them to preinstall Google Earth and SketchUp Pro on each computer. It's unclear if this is the otherwise free version of Google Earth, or the $20 Google Earth Plus or $400 Google Earth Pro. But it is clear that they're giving away the otherwise $500 version of SketchUp Pro, which, incidentally, they just announced for the Mac earlier this week. http://www.sketchup.com/?section=education

4) Finally some updates to Google Video, which is, rightfully so, getting its ass handed to them by YouTube. They now have an online upload form - http://video.google.com/videouploadform - and videos will be available for viewing and embedding immediately (like youtube) instead of waiting for approval or whatever.

5/17/2006 5:19:18 PM

cool - Australia, New Zealand now have streets covered in Maps
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2006/05/big-news-google-maps-street-maps-for.html

so i guess that puts us at US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand covered in Maps.

5/18/2006 2:57:47 PM

ok so i dont frequent this thread but does google do anything about searching songs and actually playing them? thanks

5/23/2006 1:21:38 AM

you can do a filetype: search to look for songs on peoples websites, or if you search for an artist or song, you will get a "musicsearch" result that will lists all the albums and songs and stuff - http://www.google.com/musica?aid=rwDAhdphyiH - and it has links to buy music at B&N, Amazon, iTunes, Napster, etc, but you can't buy or play directly through google

..... yet. The Google Music Store is the "next big rumor" for a product launch, maybe within a couple weeks.

5/23/2006 2:27:28 AM

You'll soon start to see Google Flash Video ads, along side their text ads.
Unlike flash banner ads, they will be user controllable, and will work just like Google Videos. On page load, there will just be a static image with a play button underneath it. You can play the ad, skip forward, replay, turn off volume, etc.
As far as ads go, i think it's pretty cool. You'll probably start to see lots of funny ads. And this is excellent for advertisers because unlike basically all other types of advertisements up till now (TV, radio, newspaper, even regular internet banner or text ads), they know the exact number of people who view the ad, and the exact conversion rate who followed the link.

http://tinyurl.com/g4xjf
http://tinyurl.com/k3az3


and a vote against it
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/23/google-ppc-video-ads-im-betting-against-it/

[Edited on May 23, 2006 at 9:47 AM. Reason : .]

5/23/2006 9:38:48 AM

Sports are now included on google SMS. See an example on http://www.google.com/sms/

I'd really like to be able to view all the contents of all my gmail accounts without having to logout or switch browsers (Like you can send email from different accounts, it'd be nice to have a dropdown menu in the upper right along the lines of "view account", with your associated accounts listed)

5/28/2006 9:28:43 PM

google playing catchup with Apple and has a Movie Trailer page on GVideo
http://video.google.com/movietrailers.html

5/30/2006 9:02:14 AM

Google Spreadsheets
http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/tour1.html

Thoughts:
Google also bought Writely (a web2.0 word processor) a while back, so the full Google office suite, may not be too far away. If this happens, this could be Google's back-door into taking some pizzazz away from Microsoft Office Live!... just think about it, Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, (possible word processor) all with Google Talk integrated... it's the same office collaboration suite that MS has been working on. (though I don't think it will ever come close to Office 2007 Live realistically) But definitely would replace a lot of people's 'home' version.

[Edited on June 6, 2006 at 9:01 AM. Reason : .]

6/6/2006 8:56:46 AM

^ I just found that.

Might I say:

6/6/2006 10:11:24 AM

that is awesome. Just this morning 3 other guys and I needed that to help divy up some costs from a weekend trip. Instead of emailing the same spreadsheet around multiple times with version names, we could just use a shared online SS.

Philipp Lenssen got an early preview and took some videos - http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-06-n86.html
and the SpreadSheet help section is up - http://www.google.com/support/spreadsheets

6/6/2006 3:23:54 PM

Good Read:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/06/google-to-add-albums-to-picassa/
(Picasa to add albums - and commentary on Google's recent lackluster products)

[Edited on June 7, 2006 at 11:49 AM. Reason : recent]

6/7/2006 11:46:37 AM

I agree with this guy.

Quote :

" Google Spreadsheet fuss beyond belief By Stan Beer Wednesday, 07 June 2006 A few months ago a co-worker sent me a link to an Ajax based online word processor called Ajax Write with a message about how brilliant it was. I went to the site full of excited expectation and opened the word processor thinking to myself, "Ah Microsoft what are you going to do now?" Within an instant, I knew the answer. Microsoft does not need to do a thing right now about any competition coming from the online crowd. Leaving aside sluggish online performance, the so-called online word processor did not even have the functionality of Wordpad let alone Word. I pointed this out to my friend and he said, "But that's the future!" Maybe, but it sure isn't the present. Likewise, all the hype that has been generated about the new Google Spreadsheets is sheer rubbish. All the reports I've received from those "lucky" enough to sample the new product say that it does not even have the basic functionality of the very earliest versions of Excel. Google also owns an Ajax-based word processor called Writely. I wouldn't expect too much from that product in a hurry either. Heck, word processors and spreadsheets are complex applications. They're hard enough to build for the desktop let alone the online space. Just ask Microsoft or, if you don't believe them, ask the Open Office crowd. Office productivity applications like Word and Excel and their open source competitors are the product of years of iterative development. And still we grumble about how imperfect they are. Despite all of this, as soon as Google releases a rudimentary - some might even call it experimental - online spreadsheet, the world goes stir crazy. The media jumps on it and calls it the "Excel killer". One can imagine company book keepers and financial strategists taking a cursory look at Google Spreadsheets with a smirk and saying to themselves: "They're just kidding, right?" Just for the fun of it, let's suppose that this new Google product does somehow gain the functionality and performance to start matching it with Excel. Will that mean that Microsoft will lose many of its customers overnight? Not at all. Open Office.org has a free spreadsheet that is largely compatible with Excel and arguably almost as good. The same can be said for its word processor. Yet people still stick with their Microsoft Office products. They're just that little bit better and, for most users, that one per cent or two of incompatibility is not worth the hassle for a few hundred bucks, especially if you're a business that has years of intellectual capital tied up in your office documents. Even Google itself says that it's not trying to compete with Excel. The implication is that Google Spreadsheet is for the casual user. But how many users do you know who have ever used a spreadsheet casually? For that matter, what exactly is the purpose of having an online wordprocessor? Local storage is so cheap and small, why would we even bother trying to do online what we can do locally? This is not to say by any stretch that Google's online applications, besides its fantastic search engine, are no good. Many of them are great. Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google News, the new Google Calendar, even Google Talk are all good and potentially great applications that are more suited to the online space than the desktop. But putting office productivity tools online, for the moment at least, is like trying to launch an aeroplane into outer space. "

6/7/2006 2:16:26 PM

other official Google FireFox extension - "Google Browser Sync"
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/index.html

You can install the extension on FireFox on multiple computers and all your bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and persistant cookies are stored on your Google Account and synced between browsers.
Of course a lot of people will cry privacy concerns again, but i like the idea. What I would really like is a way to sync extensions across computers so i don't hvae to reinstall them all everytime i install FF somewhere else.

6/8/2006 3:36:06 AM

yahoo did that 10 years ago

6/8/2006 5:46:40 AM

yahoo created a firefox extension to sync firefox settings between computers.... 10 years ago....

6/8/2006 6:40:43 AM

^^^^

Quote :

"The implication is that Google Spreadsheet is for the casual user. But how many users do you know who have ever used a spreadsheet casually?"

I disagree with this. Maybe I'm in the minority, but just 2 days ago I was talking with my roommate about how it would be cool to be able to have an online shared spreadsheet that we could both access from any computer and put in the monthly expenses and see who owed whom and what amount. Then yesterday I heard about google spreadsheets, signed up, and in a few minutes created a simple little spreadsheet that was exactly what I wanted. I invited my roommate to be a co-editor, he signed in, made his additions and I can't imagine something that would be easier and work out better. Sure I could have created the same document in Open Office/excel and emailed it to him, but we now have an archived document that, come next month, we'll be able to click on a hypertext link, change around some numbers and be done with it. Yes, I'm not what you would call a power user in the slightest, but I really like google spreadsheets. It does exactly what it was designed to do.

6/8/2006 6:55:40 AM

i agree. People who are hailing this as an Excel killer are retarded. It is not, and it's not supposed to be. You won't find a bigger Excel fan that me - i certainly have no reasons to wish for its demise. But this is a solution to many applications that a small, lightweight spreadsheet could handle.

As far as casual users, i also think there are plenty. My wife uses Excel to track her training, which she shares with her coach, and another for expenses, which she shares with me. Her Excel expertise probably ends at using the =sum() function and formatting cells. Using a simpler version of excel online would be much easier for her to use and to share with others.


As a followup, i do agree that there is too much fuss given over every new google product, though. Maybe people like me are part of the problem, by posting on here 3 times a day everytime google makes the news, but I'd like to think i'm much more objective than a lot of the other google fanboys. Google has put out a lot of crap in the past year, and made a lot of stupid decisions, and their stubborn righteousness of keeping things "clean and simple", when in fact that hurts usability sometimes (see: Google Video vs. YouTube), really pisses me off, as does their habit of never updating their betas to full point releases, and continuing to roll out products tied to your Google Account, but with little or no collaboration or integration with other Google Account services. So, in short - I like a lot of new products like Calendar and Spreadsheet, but not to the point of unnecessary exuberance, and i'll certainly call a spade a spade when i see one.

[Edited on June 8, 2006 at 7:13 AM. Reason : d]

6/8/2006 7:07:20 AM

Whether you are the 'casual user' or not, I don't see any reason to use this spread sheet, while give up personal information, if you have access to MS Office, or Open Office.

6/8/2006 8:16:04 AM

Well that's your (very poorly worded) opinion. Obviously many people disagree with you.

6/8/2006 8:23:16 AM

Why do people always take person strikes at people here? Jesus.

6/8/2006 8:24:48 AM

It's like you're so close to speaking English here.

6/8/2006 8:26:29 AM

I pity for people who have to take personal strikes at people to compensate for a lack of maturity, and a leveled mind. I rest my case.



[Edited on June 8, 2006 at 8:35 AM. Reason : blah]

6/8/2006 8:28:08 AM

[Edited on June 8, 2006 at 8:33 AM. Reason : .]

6/8/2006 8:29:33 AM

Quote :

"I rest my case."

Lets all be thankful for that.

6/8/2006 8:30:34 AM

I mean he's right, if I had an alternative I wouldn't persist my spreadsheet data online with a search engine company.

6/8/2006 8:49:14 AM

don't you mean

Quote :

"I mean he's right, if I had an alternative I wouldn't persist my [spreadsheet, email, bookmarks, search history, credit card number, address, shopping list, website statistics, group affiliations, stock purchases, home videos, phone number, calendar] data online with a search engine company."

6/8/2006 10:21:48 AM

Three words + 1 word:

Microsoft Office Live + niggas

6/8/2006 10:39:13 AM

All I am saying is that the less personal information that you put on the internet, the better off you are.

6/8/2006 10:46:48 AM

Also, I like how the quality of Google products has been downhill since they released Gmail.

For some reason, the media gets a hardon everytime Google farts.

6/8/2006 10:47:50 AM

A lot of google products are just projects by their workers, not something set forth by the company itself - you can even look it up that google wants every employee to spend 20% of their work time on personal projects.

[Edited on June 8, 2006 at 10:53 AM. Reason : blah]

6/8/2006 10:52:56 AM

That's one marketing jingo

So basically 80% of the time the employee is doing something he wouldn't if he had the option?

6/8/2006 10:55:06 AM

I don't understand your question.

6/8/2006 10:56:58 AM

I thought google was just a search engine!

6/8/2006 11:55:53 AM

Quote :

"So basically 80% of the time the employee is doing something he wouldn't if he had the option?"

yeah, i mean what's your point. Are you saying you love your job so much, that if you could do anything 100% of the time, it would be the exact same thing you're doing already? If so, consider yourself lucky. Lots of us like our work, but in the end, it's still just what you do for money. And saying that if we had the choice to spend 1 day a week working on something completely different from our normal work.... shit, no question.

But apparently a lot of the releases lately started out as "20% projects", including Google Video. Rumor is that a few days after Video came out and there was total public backlash against it, Larry Page flipped out and yelled at a ton of engineers, and put serious restrictions on the 20% projects. I think he said no new projects could be started without high management approval, so if the employees needed a new one they would have to jump in on someone elses.
http://www.valleywag.com/tech/larry-page/larry-page-goes-nuts-156186.php

6/8/2006 6:51:29 PM

If you really wanna work on your thing 100% of the time, you'd join Microsoft Research

6/8/2006 6:53:56 PM

Google Earth 4 beta - http://earth.google.com/earth4.html
They revamped the interface to make it more native looking (although it's still a bit java-y), and redid the controls. The controls take a little to get used to, but they work nicely and I think you can get around with fewer clicks and mouse movements. Regrouped the layers and Places.

And apparently SketchUp built in, but haven't messed with it enough yet.

6/12/2006 5:08:47 PM

they need to get on a search so I can find words. Like when I search for g??gle I get the words google and goggle. Also a * would get me gooooooooooogle

6/12/2006 7:33:01 PM

nice, GMaps now includes support for previously Google Earth-only KML network files - http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/06/more_detail_on.html

I have to say, I don't use Google Earth as much as I would like. It's still just too heavy an application to fire up just to do a quick check of something. Being able to import KML files into Google Maps though will make Maps much more powerful, and you'll be able to do things much faster that were previously only available in Earth.

6/13/2006 7:35:30 AM

Picasaweb albums - http://picasaweb.google.com/

ummmm, weee? http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/14/picasa-web-albums-first-impressions/

that's weird.... the logo after you sign in says Picasa Web Albums "Test". Instead of "beta".

6/14/2006 2:30:10 AM

oh i would love to get in on that test

anyone have the install file at least for the newest version?

6/14/2006 3:41:18 AM

i'm in.
just go to that page and sign up for the invitation, and it should let you right in. No invitation involved really. Not sure if it's supposed to be like that or not. I can sign into the account, but haven't messed with the new picasa client yet.

btw - they give you 250MB and unlimited albums to start with. ....which now seems kind of skimpy given Gmail is up to almost 3GB.

6/14/2006 4:23:53 AM

nah it's not letting me in like that - just asks for my gmail ID so they can send an invite

6/14/2006 6:19:39 AM

hmm, i guess I snuck in before they closed that gap or something.

anyway, i got some albums up and running. I'm at work so I didn't use the new version of Picasa, but you can do regular file upload from the web - 1 file at a time. So just made a small album. Check it out here -
http://picasaweb.google.com/joelion

I actually like it a whole lot. I've never understood the alure of Flickr. I have an account and have tried to use it, but i just hate it really - it's hard to manage lots of photos, and i think the album or tag viewer or whatever sucks. I don't understand why so many people use it.
But Picasa web is really nice - the album view is great, the layout is very nice, and it's very very fast. For my personal website, I'll stick with using Gallery2 embedded into the site for now, but if they release an API for this where you can embed Picasa albums into other websites and style them appropriately, I'll seriously consider migrating.
here's some other first thoughts on it http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-14-n55.html
i do agree with one commenter that the service seems quite "ungoogle like". only 250MB free, then it's $25/year for more storage (6GB)? that's a bit weird.... considering we get almost 3GB free already in Gmail.
Now hopefully they will tie this into Gmail more closely too.

6/14/2006 7:20:03 AM

I tried it...seems like a flickr knockoff.

6/14/2006 2:07:10 PM

just got the beta test email for picasa web

6/14/2006 3:31:45 PM

Quote :

"it's hard to manage lots of photos, and i think the album or tag viewer or whatever sucks. I don't understand why so many people use it."

What are you talking about, man? You just gotta drag and drop. They have an excellent uploader software as well. The tags are damn awesome if you want to search for pictures tagged by a common keyword. So many people use it because it's the best photo-sharing service on the Internet.

6/14/2006 5:33:17 PM

picasa can't index my PC lol - it keeps crashing on hi-res print PSDs

6/14/2006 5:55:03 PM

is there a way to search only websites' names? and not just their content. for ex. i know some of the words in the title of the site but forgot what it was and regualr search isnt helping

6/15/2006 11:24:36 PM

^ well.... "website names" are really just part of the content of the site. There is no real way for Google to know the "name" of the website, except for the <title> tag for the index page, or if the site uses meta tags.
What might work for you though is using the intitle: search term, with the safe assumption that the main page of the site has the site name in the title.
e.g. search for "intitle:apple" will return only pages with "apple" in the title of the page.

GBuy is being released. apparently you'll start to see little green shopping carts beside advertisements, then you can purchase and pay directly through google
http://battellemedia.com/archives/002682.php

6/29/2006 4:49:08 AM