Thursday, June 04, 2009

17 Suggestions To Blogger

Image representing Blogger as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase

  1. Total integration with Google Analytics.
  2. The navigation bar at the top is so much wasted real estate. I want to run ads on there. AdSense ads.
  3. Search option also for private blogs. If I can search through my private Gmail account, why not my private blogs?
  4. Buy Zemanta and integrate it completely to Blogger.
  5. Buy Disqus and integrated it completely to Blogger.
  6. Take a Zemanta/Disqus attitude to the navigation bar.
  7. What if I want to publish a 30 minute video? YouTube only allows for five minutes. I miss Google Video.
  8. A way to display the most popular blog posts on the side bar.
  9. A self-generated site map.
  10. Let's get creative with templates, way more creative. Let's play with that rectangle, big time. Open it up like Android and Wave. Let the crowds hack at it.
  11. Allow for the creation not only of blogs but also blog communities.
  12. Do a better job with Links To This Post. My internal links are not showing, or at least not most of the time. Also true for external links.
  13. Show titled links to newer and older posts for each blog post.
  14. The blog is taking too long to download. Can you speed things up?
  15. Closer Picassa, YouTube, Google News, BlogSearch integration. I want all my blog posts to be multi-media. And I want to do it all from my Blogger Dashboard while composing my posts.
  16. Do not snuff out Google Pages. Google Sites is not Google Pages. Yes, this is related to Blogger. Sometimes I want to publish pages like regular webpages not blog posts that I can link to from my blog posts.
  17. Do not delete old blogs.
Product Ideas - Now for Blogger!

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Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Square Search


Square your search results with Google Squared Google Blog requiring you to visit ten, perhaps twenty websites to research and collect what you need. ..... I'd find roller coaster sizes on one website, heights on another, and speeds on a third. By manually comparing the sites, I could get the information I was looking for, but it took some time. With Google Squared, a new feature just released in Google Labs, I can find my roller coaster facts almost instantly. ....... As you remove rows and columns you don't like, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what you're interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add. ..... Once you've got a square you're happy with, you can save it and come back to it later.
Wolfram Alpha says it is an answer engine, not a search engine. Microsoft's Bing says it is a decision engine, not a search engine. Yahoo wants to "kill those 10 blue lines." Twitter claims to have real time search. All such premises are enticing because search is so raw still.

And now we have Google clamoring with Google Squared. Google would also like some of the search buzz. Can you imagine?

Raw search is great. I like to know there are a million pages on the term I am searching. And raw search should stay the center of the action. But maybe Google would like to service an alternate version on the side to face the reality that most users don't go past the first page of search, and most certainly don't go past page 10. So they should go find many interesting ways to display the first 10 pages of search results. That would not be Google Squared, that would be Google to the power of 10.

Google still has the best search algorithms, and I still prefer "those 10 blue lines" to any other search display formats that I have seen. I like to do my own exploring. But for the sake of the consumer maybe Google wants to work as hard on display options as it has on search. It has been super at search and it started out super at display. The simple search results page had and still has its allure. But Henry Ford stuck to his generic model, and competitors created new niches by designing fancier cars.

Maybe Google does not want to keep the search market to itself and give the display market to others, especially when display is where the interaction happens with the end user.

Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Distributed Search
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android
Hitting Number 4 For Google Search Results on Cupcake Android
Google Is Working On Search
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream



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Google Wave Ripples

Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

Microsoft's Bing - touting itself as a "decision engine" - was supposed to have all the buzz but then Google Wave came along. Is Bing an engineering marvel, or is it just marketing? One has to wonder. But Google Wave has the buzz for engineering, square and simple. The buzz is for being the next big thing.

The launch of Google Wave has been breathtaking. But I think when the developers around the world get to pounce on that Google Wave, the results are going to be equally breathtaking. Right now I don't know what to expect. I guess I will just keep my expectations high and vague.

With Android and Wave, Google has managed to suck the 2009 tech oxygen. When was the last time Google had this much buzz? When Gmail came out? When it went public? I think the current buzz - or, rather, ripples - are at new heights.

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.



In The News

Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful CNET News a more contemporary take on communications ....... a group of people can have an actual discussion in e-mail, in real-time if wanted, without getting bogged down in long multi-message discussions--or worse, in threads that end up forking so that different people are discussing different things. ..... Speaking of being overwhelmed, the first time I had two people replying to me in an individual message at the same time, in different places in it, my head almost exploded. It's a lot of raw information coming it at once, and it's very different from the old e-mail or the instant message experience. ........ Wave has no legacy support for old e-mail architectures whatsoever, and isn't bogged down by the old methods--like the practice of delivering messages to users and then severing the links to those messages. ........... Wave addresses look like e-mail addresses, but there's no gateway between Internet e-mail and Wave, so messages send from standard e-mail clients to Wave will bounce. ....... Wave is currently spam-free since it's not linked into the global e-mail system ....... technically a radical departure from e-mail, but for the end users it will still be used for a lot of the same things e-mail is. ..... there's no reason we should we need different applications--an e-mail client (or site), an instant messenger, and a collaborative editor--for variations on the theme of textual communication
Google Wave: Our First Hands-On Impressions ReadWriteWeb Google is indeed on to something ...... real-time email with a big dose of IM built-in, but even this only just describes a small part of what Wave can do. ....... you can pick a specific word or phrase and respond to that, instead of the whole message. ....... the Google widget, which allows you to very easily search Google and add a link to the wave ...... search YouTube and Google Images and embed videos and pictures ....... embed a map that you can extend by setting place markers and drawing lines. .... long waves with a lot of concurrent users can get a bit confusing. ...... as expected, it didn't work in IE but worked perfectly fine in all the other browsers. ..... could revolutionize the way employees in a company communicate ........ once you get into the flow of things, regular email suddenly feels stale and slow. ...... If you want a Wave to look more like a document instead of a conversation, Wave will work just as well as when you just want to use it as a chat room. ...... default messaging system.
Google Wave draws huge Interest I4U
Google Wave the next social media phenomenon and journalistic tool? editorsweblog.org chat and share documents including audio files, videos and photos in real-time. ... Google Wave is the brain-child of Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers who bought us Google Maps. They explain they wanted to "rethink what a single communications platform might look like if we started from scratch." ....start with a clean slate, rather than have today's Internet reality determine what could be possible in the future or even present. ....... project has been ongoing for two years ....... integrate and embed existing communications systems, including Twitter .... a chat function which allows one user to speak to another in one language and have the text appear in another. ....... Google aims to have Wave operating in 40 languages with translations being possible from any pair within the range. ....... an economical and effective new way for professionals to communicate across all sectors ...... lending itself to the way newsrooms around the globe are organised. ........ Wave is what news can be if we invent it today ..... we have a great relationship with many newspapers ... We paid 6 billion dollars to content owners last year." ......... for the first time, a news story will be able to grow and transform itself online as it does in the real world ........ Wave affords them the opportunity to concentrate on content and worry less about the platform
Microsoft May Bing Google as Wave Grabs Market Sci-Tech Today
Microsoft kicks off huge Bing ad push CNET News "When people don't get right search result they thing it's their fault."

Microsoft Launches Its “Google Killer” Bing Search Engine Jutia Group Bing will represent Microsoft’s third attempt at developing a go-to search engine in the last 10 years. ....... Bing Travel, which will predict airfare and hotel rates based on the time of year, ensuring users get better results. Microsoft gained this technology from its $115 million acquisition of travel Web site Farecast last year. ....... the campaign will pose a key question: Do current search engines really solve your problems? ....... Google will bring its Android operating system to “netbook” laptops in an attempt to take on Microsoft’s firmly entrenched Windows.
Could Google Wave Tip Microsoft's SharePoint Cash Cow? ChannelWeb a coming "arms race" of innovation in the enterprise collaboration space. ....... e-mail, instant messaging, document sharing, blogging and wikis in a single application ....... Google's real target isn't to challenge Microsoft SharePoint, but rather to push the envelope in the social networking space. .... Facebook is the more likely target
A Complete Guide to Google Wave BusinessWeek
Google Wave: A Complete Guide Mashable
Google's Wave Could Be an Internet Tsunami Motley Fool In 1993, I had no idea what an email address was. Two years later, I couldn't live without it. ...... now, Google wants to overthrow the whole email hegemony and replace it with something entirely new ...... Say hello to Google Wave -- the email killer. ...... Developed by a team of 50 engineers in Sydney ...... organic conversations between two or more people ....... "collaboration and communication" on a grand scale. ...... a completely new way of looking at online communications. ...... Open standards lead to open development and worldwide innovation, which is both cheaper for Google and better for the technology itself. .......... Wave promotes richer communications with more video sharing and higher bandwidth footprints. ....... a win for the networking guys, for Google and its ubiquitous ad platforms, and for upstarts with a great idea that doesn't quite fit in the Facebook or Twitter paradigms. One invention, plenty of winners. ........ what "email", "instant messaging", "SMS", and "Twitter" were, back in the day before Wave mashed it all up into a single service. ....... a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (BHAG)
Google Wave to be released later this year Examiner.com
Google's New Wave Reuters a grand messaging service ..... actual launch date is months away, which leads one to wonder if they bumped up the announcement to steal some of Microsoft's thunder.
Google Wave & Microsoft Bing Cnet Asia I was quite happy with snail mail until email came along. ...... When I discovered the convenience of threaded conversations, I went to heaven and have been there ever since. ....... Is there another level to the heaven I'm on? A sky lounge? I can't say until I try Google Wave for myself. ....... after a sneak preview of Microsoft's new Bing, I'm itching to get off my butt and make a permanent move to www.bing.com. ....... Other than turning in the link to Streamyx's main homepage and thousands of other sites hurling abuse at TMNet

Google won't run all the Wave servers CNET News Google has said it will "federate" Wave. That means it will make it possible for anyone to operate their own Wave server and have it communicate with other Wave servers. This is just how e-mail works today: Anyone can run an e-mail server that can send messages to and receive messages from any other e-mail system. ...... Wave will be based on (and extend on) the existing messaging standard, XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). ..... Google destroys entrenched markets.
Google Wave: Five Things You Must Know PC Magazine the evolution of Gmail, Docs, and maybe even Blogger ...... great for collaborative work in a corporate environment.. Google Wave is real-time: real-time search of Waves, real-time linking, real-time remote control object manipulation (say I embed a map in a wave, and then manipulate it remotely while you're looking at it), real-time translation. (Yes, on a character-by-character basis. Imagine a Google Doc translating your words into Spanish as you type.) ........ the air has just been let out of Twitter's sails. ........ Google is constantly improving its response time to get close to real-time results, but that real-time is an absolute that will be approached, but never actually met. ....... as more and more people generate and consume content while on the go ... the browser is indeed the OS of the future ..... waves can be embedded in Web sites
Google Wave: A new kind of mega-application Computerworld combines the myriad trends we've seen the last couple years on the Web into one application. ....... Tivo for Web content. .... some speculate whether it will cannibalize core web services (even some of Google's, like Google Docs or Picasa) ...... Wave's greatest asset could be that all this information can become more useful from ties to Google's core product: search. ..... companies desperately need a technology like Wave to help their employees collaborate in a more streamlined way. .... most enterprises remain years away from switching to this type of information stream, due to their current technology infrastructures ....... Today, employees must sort through messy "reply-all" e-mails to engage with content as a group. If you're working with a document in SharePoint, you must "check it in" and "check it out," making it hard for multiple people to contribute in real-time.
Google Wave: Gaming Impact Examiner.com it's going to revolutionize internet communications, and offer both individuals and businesses a number of new methods of connecting ....... I know a number of people I'd love to play with, but chat format games just lack a certain immediacy that Wave offers. ...... The beauty of Wave is that everything occurs in the browser, so you don't need a million complex programs to work congruently to play an interactive game.
The enterprise implications of Google Wave ZDNet egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009. ......... individual companies may be losing the capacity to drive the agenda for the world when it comes to establishing successful new Internet standards and technologies. ...... the ultimate destiny of Wave itself is far from clear ...... so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. .......... Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later ....... highly interactive document creation via the browser. ........ infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. ....... a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about ........ Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven’t changed much since ....... fundamentally social in nature ....... a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that’s a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information ........... an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology. ....... Google is expecting many more front-ends for creating and editing waves, depending on the individual requirements of various entities. Google Wave is their own front-end application for doing so and using HTML 5 in their wave client shows they are planning more for the future than present. ........ organizations will have to deal with business data in the Wave Protocol format in the future. ........ Twitter and existing social networks can play very well with Google Wave, enhancing the experience and allowing broader participation in a wave through other applications. Google Wave won’t (necessarily) replace existing apps like e-mail, IM, blogs, or wikis, and can actually make the latter two stronger through embedding. ........ a wave presupposes a bit more structure and situated use than the more tabula rasa blog or wiki. ...... while participants are busy typing and collaborating, a wave can be receiving support from back-end systems such as HRM, CRM, ERP, and so on to provide data, context, and other just-in-time support. ....... the convergence of our IT systems and Web 2.0 ...... ease-of-development for creating server-side extension ..... the premise of the product is also one of the dominant activities in the business world (enabling teamwork) and combined with the increasing consumerization of the workplace ....... organizations will need to understand how waves will make their organizations even more porous on the Internet ....... Gmail, Gtalk, Blogger to name just three, yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up. ..... clarity of purpose and design, Google Wave has a good shot at helping take Enterprise 2.0 to the next level in many organizations.
Google Wave Bye Bye To Bing Can Microsoft keep pace with Google’s thought leadership? .... It has taken Microsoft a decade to make its way to the battle ground, turning up late to a fight that has already been won, the victor having since turned their attention to loftier pursuits. ....... blogs and wikis and documents all at the one time. ....... the most radical new Internet innovation since the advent of the Web itself ........ e-mail, the most ubiquitous Internet application ........ The next big buzzword isn’t going to be bing. It’s going to be wave. I’ll send you a wave. I’ll wave that file to you. Your parents will wave you photos while on vacation. ..... It must be asked, has the grey matter gone out of Redmond? Love him or hate him you can’t deny Bill Gates was a strong driving force and steered Microsoft to its monolithic stature. His technical successors, Dave Cutler and Ray Ozzie, are far from household names. Cutler is still to prove Azure has cross-platform appeal and is an environment corporations can trust, while Ozzie's Groove is languishing in obscurity. ........ not only has Google already proven it can outpace Microsoft to market, but is showing it can outthink its shrinkwrapped rival.

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