(This article was first published on All Things R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Mash-up Airlines Performance Data with Historical Weather Data to Pinpoint Weather Related DelaysFor this exercise, I combined following four separate blogs that I did on BigData, R and SAP HANA.  Historical airlines and weather data were used for the underlying analysis. The aggregated output of this analysis was outputted in JSON which was visualized in HTML5, D3 and Google Maps.  The previous blogs on this series are:Big Data, R and SAP HANA: Analyze 200 Million Data Points and Later Visualize in HTML5 Using D3 - Part IIBig Data, R and HANA: Analyze 200 Million Data Points and Later Visualize Using Google MapsGetting Historical Weather Data in R and SAP HANA Tracking SFO Airport's Performance Using R, HANA and D3In this blog, I wanted to mash-up disparate data sources in R and HANA by combining airlines data with weather data to understand the reasons behind the airport/airlines delay.  Why weather - because weather is one of the commonly cited reasons in the airlines industry for flight delays.  Fortunately, the airlines data breaks up the delay by weather, security, late aircraft etc., so weather related delays can be isolated and then the actual weather data can be mashed-up to validate the airlines' claims.  However, I will not be doing this here, I will just be displaying the mashed-up data.I have intentionally focused on the three bay-area airports and have used last 4 years of historical data to visualize the airport's performance using a HTML5 calendar built from scratch using D3.js.  One can use all 20 years of data and for all the airports to extend this example.  I had downloaded historical weather data for the same 2005-2008 period for SFO and SJC airports as shown in my previous blog (For some strange reasons, there is no weather data for OAK, huh?).  Here is how the final result will look like in HTML5:Click here to interact with the live example.  Hover over any cell in the live example and a tool tip with comprehensive analytics will show the break down of the performance delay for the selected cell including weather data and correct icons* - result of a mash-up.  Choose a different airport from the drop-down to change the performance calendar. * Weather icons are properties of Weather Underground.As anticipated, SFO airport had more red on the calendar than SJC and OAK.  SJC definitely is the best performing airport in the bay-area.  Contrary to my expectation, weather didn't cause as much havoc on SFO as one would expect, strange?Creating a mash-up in R for these two data-sets was super easy and a CSV output was produced to work with HTML5/D3.  Here is the R code and if it not clear from all my previous blogs: I just love data.table package.###########################################################################################  # Percent delayed flights from three bay area airports, a break up of the flights delay by various reasons, mash-up with weather data###########################################################################################  baa.hp.daily.flights <- baa.hp[,list( TotalFlights=length(DepDelay), CancelledFlights=sum(Cancelled, na.rm=TRUE)),                              by=list(Year, Month, DayofMonth, Origin)]setkey(baa.hp.daily.flights,Year, Month, DayofMonth, Origin)baa.hp.daily.flights.delayed <- baa.hp[DepDelay>15,                                     list(DelayedFlights=length(DepDelay),                                       WeatherDelayed=length(WeatherDelay[WeatherDelay>0]),                                      AvgDelayMins=round(sum(DepDelay, na.rm=TRUE)/length(DepDelay), digits=2),                                      CarrierCaused=round(sum(CarrierDelay, na.rm=TRUE)/sum(DepDelay, na.rm=TRUE), digits=2),                                      WeatherCaused=round(sum(WeatherDelay, na.rm=TRUE)/sum(DepDelay, na.rm=TRUE), digits=2),                                      NASCaused=round(sum(NASDelay, na.rm=TRUE)/sum(DepDelay, na.rm=TRUE), digits=2),                                      SecurityCaused=round(sum(SecurityDelay, na.rm=TRUE)/sum(DepDelay, na.rm=TRUE), digits=2),                                      LateAircraftCaused=round(sum(LateAircraftDelay, na.rm=TRUE)/sum(DepDelay, na.rm=TRUE), digits=2)), by=list(Year, Month, DayofMonth, Origin)]setkey(baa.hp.daily.flights.delayed, Year, Month, DayofMonth, Origin)# Merge two data-tablesbaa.hp.daily.flights.summary <- baa.hp.daily.flights.delayed[baa.hp.daily.flights,list(Airport=Origin,                           TotalFlights, CancelledFlights, DelayedFlights, WeatherDelayed,                            PercentDelayedFlights=round(DelayedFlights/(TotalFlights-CancelledFlights), digits=2),                           AvgDelayMins, CarrierCaused, WeatherCaused, NASCaused, SecurityCaused, LateAircraftCaused)]setkey(baa.hp.daily.flights.summary, Year, Month, DayofMonth, Airport)# Merge with weather databaa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather <-baa.weather[baa.hp.daily.flights.summary]baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather$Date <- as.Date(paste(baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather$Year,                                                            baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather$Month,                                                            baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather$DayofMonth,                                                            sep="-"),"%Y-%m-%d")# remove few columnsbaa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather <- baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather[,             which(!(colnames(baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather) %in% c("Year", "Month", "DayofMonth", "Origin"))), with=FALSE]#Write the output in both JSON and CSV file formatsobjs <- baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather[, getRowWiseJson(.SD), by=list(Airport)]# You have now (Airportcode, JSONString), Once again, you need to attach them together.row.json <- apply(objs, 1, function(x) paste('{\"AirportCode\":"', x[1], '","Data\":', x[2], '}', sep=""))json.st <- paste('[', paste(row.json, collapse=', '), ']')writeLines(json.st, "baa-2005-2008.summary.json")                 write.csv(baa.hp.daily.flights.summary.weather, "baa-2005-2008.summary.csv", row.names=FALSE)Happy Coding!

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Google Translate has reached a milestone of 200 million users on translate.google.com. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t report a basic usage statistic like that, but this one deserves to be celebrated. Google's scale could someday make it possible for all human beings to understand each other. Here's how.



Translating the Web into every language on Earth, on the fly, is one of the most important missions in tech. It’s the key to a global society. We still have a long way to go. Online translation has been possible for years, but not in all languages, and results are often hilarious and unhelpful.

We might complain about that, but first we should appreciate how hard translation is to do.

Franz Och, a former DARPA researcher working on Google Translate, offered a brief history of the project on the occasion of the 200-million-user landmark. Google Translate began in 2001 as a machine-translation service with nine languages. It was state-of-the-art at the time, but the translation quality was still poor.

In 2003, a team at Google decided to get serious about translation, which is when Och got involved. The team quickly figured out that a data-driven approach - using vast amounts of language culled from the Web - could succeed at scale. But its first system was too slow. It took 40 hours and 1,000 computers to translate 1,000 sentences.

The team then turned to focus on speed. Google announced the new approach in 2006, beginning with Chinese and Arabic. In the six years since, Google Translate has incorporated 64 languages, many of which have little presence on the Web. But now Google Translate can help speakers of those languages reach the rest of the world, and hopefully that will encourage them to come online.

Google sees so much of the Web that it’s in the best position to perfect Web-scale translation. “In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books,” Och says. “What all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day.”









Language Is an Interface

It’s easy to forget this, but language is a fundamental part of a computer interface no different from graphical windows, avatars or follow buttons. Translation is not just important for abstract, academic reasons. It’s necessary in order to get the Web to work. If people can translate Web content into their own language, they gain access to parts of the Web they couldn’t reach before.

It’s easy to understand the value for Google in offering a free translation service. The more translation data Google can get and understand, the better its translations will be. With better translations, the Web is more accessible for more people. The more people with access to more Web content, the more money Google makes.

But it’s crass to suggest that Google is building Translate with ulterior motives. Google goes a long way to make Translate a great experience. Its native apps enable voice-to-text transcription, and it even contains a voice synthesizer to read translations back to you. Android users can even do speech-to-speech conversions out loud with other people!

We don’t need those features to get around on the Web, but Google built them anyway.

“We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it’s in, and no matter where it pops up,” Och says. This is an important case in which Google’s business goals are right in line with the best interests of users. With all the worries about privacy arising from Google’s new social layer, it’s easy to lose sight of this, but sometimes Google’s goal is just to help the world communicate.

Before we dip into the news that caught my eye this week, here's a thought-provoking excerpt from a new interview with Clay Shirky over at the Findings.com blog:

"Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word 'publishing' means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says 'publish,' and when you press it, it's done ... Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry." (Read the entire interview here.)

Now, here are a few stories that got my attention in the publishing space this week.

All-you-can-eat magazines

Ken Doctor over at Nieman Lab took a look at Next Issue, a newly launched Netflix-like magazine platform. He describes the venture:

"It offers single-priced, all-you-can-eat access to top-shelf magazines, including Time Inc's People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time; Conde Nast's Vanity Fair, Allure, and Conde Nast Traveler; Hearst's Esquire and Popular Mechanics; and Meredith's Better Homes and Gardens and Fitness. Thirty-two magazines in total, at launch."

Though there is some comparison to be found between magazine and newspaper revenue losses in the digital era, as both so far have failed to fully embrace the web for profit, this platform appears to be disruptive in a big-picture fashion. As Doctor points out in the post, the big difference here with newspapers — and I might add book publishing houses — is the five big magazine companies that together own Next Issue (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.) pooled their efforts to create the platform.

Doctor describes the pricing tiers and offers a nice analysis of how this endeavor might play out — it's well worth the read.

Also in magazine-related news, Zite is expanding its offerings, with the blessing and support of eight publishers (nine if you include its parent company CNN), with its new Publisher Program.

Tom Krazit at GigaOm took a look at the program and explains that though no money is changing hands, publishers will be allowed to place house ads at the bottoms of their sections linking readers back to their websites or apps. And though Zite initially had issues with publishers, the tension is waning. Krazit reports:

"... publishers are starting to realize that they can attract new readers through apps like Zite and build their brands, [said Mark Johnson, CEO of Zite] ... he said that content publishers have the same discoverability problem that small mobile developers have to confront, and that apps like Zite can drive traffic to those publishers that they wouldn't otherwise enjoy."

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Google's multifaceted ebook approach loses a facet

Google jostled indie booksellers again this week with an announcement that it will discontinue its ebook reseller program come January 2013. Scott Dougall, Google's director of product management for digital publishing, explains the situation in a blog post:

With the launch of Google eBooks in 2010, we introduced a multifaceted approach to selling ebooks: online, on devices, through affiliates and through resellers. One part of that effort — the reseller program — has not gained the traction that we hoped it would, so we have made the difficult decision to discontinue it by the end of January next year.

It's important to note that the separate affiliate program will not be affected. Jeannie Hornung, a spokesperson for Google, told Good E-Reader: "... booksellers will still be highlighted in the 'Buy this book' section of Google Book search, supported with our affiliate program and have access to free Books APIs."


Indies may not be left selling solo, however. American Booksellers Association (ABA) president Oren J. Teicher told The Next Web:

"... we have every confidence that, long before Google's reseller program is discontinued, ABA will be able to offer IndieCommerce users a new alternative e-book product, or choice of products, that will not only replace Google eBooks as it currently works on IndieCommerce sites, but that will be in many ways a better product."

The original letter the ABA sent to booksellers can be found here, and (hat tip to ShelfAwareness) the ABA is offering an FAQ about the situation.

People who e-read buy books

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a new study report on ereading this week. The report findings show a marked increase in the number of people ereading:


"... some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone."

Findings also show that by February 2012, 21% of adults in the U.S. had read an ebook in the past year — up from 17% in mid-December 2011.

And those numbers are likely to continue to rise in a steep incline. A post on the study over at Reuters notes that "Forrester, a consultancy, has forecast that nearly a quarter of Americans will own an e-book reader by 2016." The post notes Amazon's marketshare as well: "Online retailer Amazon.com Inc has about 65 percent of the e-book market, according to Cowen & Co estimates."


The Pew study, which was funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, generally focused on reading behavior, both print and digital. And the news for publishers looks very positive on one front: According to the study, readers — especially ereaders — prefer to buy books:

A majority of print readers (54%) and readers of e-books (61%) prefer to purchase their own copies of these books.

And some stats for publishers afraid of losing sales via library card holders: 14% of readers reportedly borrowed the last book they read from a library — however, 12% of those who purchased their last read started their search at the library. You can find a nice selection of the study's library statistic highlights at INFOdocket.

One of the more surprising areas of the study looks at the devices on which people are reading. I found the percentages for computers and, in the U.S., for cell phones notable:

42% of readers of e-books in the past 12 months said they consume their books on a computer.
41% of readers of e-books consume their books on an e-book reader like original Kindles or Nooks.
29% of readers of e-books consume their books on their cell phones.
23% of readers of e-books consume their books on a tablet computer.

You can view the report in full here. Lee Rainie, the head of the Pew Internet Project, also will be the featured guest on today's Follow the Reader discussion on Twitter at 4 p.m. EST. You can join in at #followreader.

Related:

Books as a service: How and why it works

What publishers can learn from Netflix's problems

For booksellers, the future is brighter than it seems

Publishing News: Survey says publishers continue to miss out on digital opportunities

More Publishing Week in Review coverage

Google has decided to make its simple search box into yet another thing. It's now a WebGL-powered 3D graphing calculator. If you type in a two-variable function, Google's search box on the desktop will graph an animated, interactive, 3D plot right in your browser.

Google is moving increasingly toward providing answers when they're faster than Web results. But putting an advanced graphing calculator into search is an obvious defense against Wolfram Alpha, which is notably Apple's Siri partner for math and science questions. Google search is fighting a two-front war, with Facebook and social search on the other side. How many things can Google search be at once?

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Google has had Universal Search for five years, but the landscape has shifted drastically. When Google added images, videos, maps and places to search results, it only secured its dominance over those verticals. Google's competitors freaked out, but Google pressed ahead.

This ill will is coming back to bite Google now. Yelp, the highest-profile company that objected to Google's Universal Search practices, is now going public and hitching its wagon to Apple. When iPhone 4S users use Siri to search for a restaurant or gas station, it will bypass Google altogether and use Yelp.

Likewise, Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for math and science questions. It's a "computational knowledge engine" built on the theories and proprietary programming language of Stephen Wolfram. Graphing isn't just built into it; it's a primitive concept of the language underlying it. Can Google compete with that?

Well, not until WebGL works on phones. But at least on the desktop, Google is still devoted to the idea of using search as a starting point for everything on the Web. It's contending with Wolfram Alpha on the side of computed answers, and it has Facebook's dominant social graph on the other side in personalized search. Facebook is reportedly building new search technology, too.

Time will tell whether the convenience of having all these disparate services in one place will win out, or whether Google's notion of search will be stretched too thin.

The new graphing capabilities work internationally on modern desktop browsers like Chrome and Firefox, as well as Safari, which Google's blog post unsurprisingly neglected to mention - if, that is, you don't have a "low-end" system like the most recent MacBook Air.

You can try it out by pasting this function into Google on your desktop:

sqrt(cos(3*x))*cos(100*y)+1.5*sqrt(abs(x)) + 0.8 x is from -1 to 1, y is from -1 to 1, z is from 0.01 to 2.5

Discuss

The Wall Street Journal reported today on some changes coming to Google search, but the article seems a bit confused about what they are. The lead item is that "[o]ver the next few months," Google "will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links," providing direct answers to questions instead. That's not new at all.

What is new is that Google's Amit Singhal and team are bringing semantic understanding to search queries. Instead of just parsing keywords in a query like a dictionary, Google will use machine intelligence to interpret the meaning of the query and use that to find the most pertinent results. There are no specific announcements from Google yet, but the implications of this PR messaging are profound.

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Outsmarting The Humans

This is bound to shake up the way today's keyword-driven search engine optimization works. The essence of the SEO game is tailoring page titles, URLs, topic tags and body text to the words and phrases people use to search the Web. Google only has to match the keywords in the query to the keywords on the Web using a lexical database. That's relatively easy, and it allows humans to game the system.

Semantic search would add much more intelligence on Google's side of the transaction. The specific wording of the query won't matter so much, because Google will be able to determine the intent behind it. It will determine the probabilities of various meanings of your words and phrases and decide on the fly what results make sense. The process that gets the user to her results will be much less subject to manipulation.

Google's New Kind of Relevance

This doesn't just have implications for SEO, though. Much of Google's existing business - its search ads - are based on keywords. But Google is in the process of shifting to new kinds of relevance signals across the board.

The purpose of Google+ is to create a layer of people, places and things - and a network of their relationships - that is visible to Google search. In order to stay ahead of Facebook and Twitter's interest graphs, Google wants to move toward those kinds of signals for ad relevance. Instead of showing you ads that just match the terms in your search, Google will have to match ads to your search based on your meaning, as well as your context, location, +1s, relationships and so on.

The Google+ identity layer also gives semantic search a leg up. With a more explicit understanding of the thing, place or person to which your search query refers, Google knows better what you mean. It doesn't have to do as much statistical guesswork when you type in a name if you can explicitly identify the person through Google+.

But Is This Really New?

Google still has a semantic search experiment called Google Squared, and as Google Fellow Ben Gomes told us last month, the search team has been working for years to incorporate signals from semantic databases like Freebase. Still, when the results of these efforts eventually result in a change to the very way the Google.com search box understands queries, the Google experience will change dramatically.

With a more intelligent search engine, Google will be better for users. It's not just the interpretation of queries that will improve; the quality of results will be better since they can't be gamed with keywords. This will change Google's ad business profoundly, but that change is inevitable. If Google doesn't become the most relevant, intelligent search assistant, Apple's Siri will.

Again, Google hasn't announced any specifics about the semantic search changes. But recently, the company has been remarkably transparent about changes to search. This week, for the first time ever, Google posted unedited video of a search quality meeting. Let's hope that trend continues.

Discuss

Or should that headline have been A/B Testing Comes to Google App Engine API? Google’s PaaS has quietly been rolling out a release every month. In its second release of the year, the App Engine team has focussed not just on its usual fixes, but a series of changes for the Administration Console and a platform features that are bound to make other PaaS vendors sit up and take note: support for A/B Testing of your web application.

App Engine 1.6.3 was announced at the App Engine blog and the A/B Testing support is a valuable addition for existing clients. A/B Testing, also known as split testing or bucket testing, is a popular technique in which you serve different versions of your web application to a different set of customers. It is particularly useful when you want to release some new features but want to test out the feedback via a selective set of users. For more information on A/B Testing, refer to the Smashing Magazine article.

The A/B Testing support is called Traffic Splitting in App Engine and can be configured in a simple way. You need to simply identify a non-default version of your application, specify the percentage of traffic it should receive and choose the type of Splitting i.e. by IP Address or Cookie. Keep in mind that this feature is experimental and is bound to change moving forward.

The other platform change announced is the support for DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) signature, which will be added to every email going out from a user of a Google Apps domain from a request originating on that domain, or from an app administrator with an account on a Google Apps domain.

In addition to the above platform changes, a bunch of changes have been added to the Administration Console, key among them being ability to shutdown an instance from the Instances View and specifying the amount of storage and duration of time for the logs. The first GB of Logs storage is free but additional storage will be at $0.24 per Gig per month.

The release has also seen several bug fixes for both the Python and Java runtimes. App Engine also supports the Go language runtime but there is no mention about it in this version. For App Engine 1.6.3 Release Notes, refer to the Python and Java sections respectively.

(Image Credits: Smashing Magazine)

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Google+ updated the Circles interface to make it easier to find people. The snazzy HTML5 circle controls now shrink down for smaller screens. The page now has a new left sidebar like the circles menu on the main Google+ page but with a few more options for managing circles.

The page now has a tab for the people who have you in their circles, as well as a tab for finding people on Google+ from Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, or you can upload your address book. The "Find People" tab also suggests related people or pages to follow. It's essential for a social network to help new users discover fun stuff to do, and Google+ is really cranking on this problem lately.

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Since Google+ users can share circles with each other, they've become extremely valuable. These groupings of people and pages by interests are hand-picked, so they have a human touch. Facebook and Twitter's automatically suggested accounts aren't as interesting, and even though both services let users hand-pick lists, neither has a mechanism for publicly sharing them like Google+ does.

Shared circles help influential Google+ users get very popular very quickly. That gives Google a strong sense of what their interests are based on who follows them and shares their posts. On top of that, Google+ scans users' posts for keywords, topics and mentions of other people and pages. That makes Google+ a pretty powerful discovery tool for people and things, and circles are human-organized places to put them.

The new circles page is a sensible place to go to find new things on Google+, but it's not the only discovery feature available.

The "What's Hot" section, which features popular posts from around the whole network, is now available on desktop, mobile Web and native apps alike, and users can now control the volume of What's Hot posts. If you really want to see what Google+ is talking about, you can turn it up and find new posts, as well as the people who posted them. If not, turn it off, and you can still discover new interests using circles.

Are you using Google+ to discover new interests?

Discuss

When RWW webmaster Jared Smith sent me screenshots of yet another change to Google's top navigation bar, I thought it was a bug. Then I got it, too. It's a weird hybrid of the old, black nav bar with plain, gray text and the new, light one with the icons and Google search box. Sure enough, just now, Google announced the change, so it will be rolling out to all users soon.

The black bar, sometimes called the "sandbar," only appeared in the middle of last year as Google began to redesign its interfaces, and the gray Google Bar was launched in November. Some users still have the sandbar, and others have the gray one. Now there's a strange hybrid appearing, and it's sort of the worst of both worlds.

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The New Google Bar:

Old Google Bar:

The black bar worked because it was simple. The text links were clear, and the important services were all easily visible, with a drop-down at the end for the rest. It wasn't pretty, but it was inoffensive and functional.

Old-New Google Bar:

The gray Google Bar was more visually intensive. When Google introduced it, it sounded like the point was to give the user back some space by removing the black band at the top. The gray bar contained a search box for the Google service you were currently using, and to navigate to other Google apps, you used this crazy dropdown menu:

The icons helped, but it still wasn't fast to navigate, because you had to open the drop-down menus.

New-New Google Bar:

What we've got now is some kind of hybrid. The search box is still there, but the black bar is back now, too. Instead of the drop-down under the Google logo, it's among the text links at the top, and the drop down is just a list of black words that descends in the middle of the screen.

This inconsistency is starting to get crazy. Google's navigation bar gets a lot of use, and it's impossible to form habits with it constantly changing. The changes are inexplicable, too. Now the Google Bar is bigger than ever, but it doesn't seem any easier to use.

What do you think of Google's new, new Google Bar?

Discuss

National Novel Writing Month comes to a close today and now that you have your 175-page near-masterpiece on paper, it's time to get to the process of editing. We've tallied up a few of our favorite tips from writers and some great apps for editing to help you along your way. More »

Google has replaced that ubiquitous black bar with a Google search bar that more closely matches the gray, red and blue design scheme that has rolled out across so many of its Web properties this year.

Instead of text links to the various Google services across the bar, they now appear in a drop-down menu under the Google logo. The new bar still displays the Google+ notification box and share button. There's also a search box right in the toolbar now, restoring Google's core product to the very top of all its pages. The bar lets you search whatever Google service you're currently using, offering voice search when available.

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Google Bar before:

Google Bar after:

Though there are some functionality problems with Google's new design on its more involved interfaces, these changes to the nav bar are for the better. The black bar took up space for no reason, and this bar fills that space with a search box to search the contents of whatever Google product you're using.

The drop-down launcher for the Google Web apps requires a click or two more for the most popular services, like Mail, Calendar and Documents, but it's still easier to navigate with the icons. Plus, it's more consistent with other Google products, such as Chrome's New Tab page and the new Google iPad app.

The new bar is rolling out today. Visit the Google Help Center for detailed instructions.

Discuss

Although Google+ is still only a few months old, there seem to be plenty of people willing to write it off as doomed, or close to it. Steve Rubel of Edelman says that he has given up on it, Robert Scoble says that its brand pages are a mess, and Farhad Manjoo at Slate argues that it is all but dead — killed by its failure to offer enough right out of the gate. While it would be tempting to agree that Google has flubbed yet another attempt at social networking, since its track record in that area is so famously underwhelming, there are good reasons to believe that Google+ will be around for awhile. If anything, it is only beginning to show its real power.

Rubel says that he has quit the network because there just isn’t enough going on there in terms of engagement, and so he has retreated to his Tumblr blog and to Twitter (Rubel, the head of digital strategy for the global Edelman PR agency, recently nuked his blogs and switched over to Tumblr as his main communications channel). Others, including Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have also complained that Google+ doesn’t offer enough to make it worth their while, and that the “signal-to-noise” ratio on the network is too low, despite Google’s circle-based follower system.

For his part, Robert Scoble says that Google’s rollout of brand pages is flawed in a number of crucial ways, despite the fact that the company has been working on this feature for some time, and has an obvious model for how pages should work in Facebook. Scoble notes that pages can’t be added to or modified by more than one person — which makes them difficult to use for companies with social-media teams — and others have pointed out that Google’s policies currently prevent brands from offering contests or promotions directly on their Google+ pages, which seems shortsighted at best.

Is Google+ fatally flawed? Far from it
Manjoo, meanwhile, seems to be arguing that all of these flaws mean that Google’s “beta mode” approach has failed them, and that Google+ is functionally crippled to the point where it will never be able to compete with Facebook. As he puts it:

Although Google seems determined to keep adding new features, I suspect there’s little it can do to prevent Google+ from becoming a ghost town. Google might not know it yet, but from the outside, it’s clear that G+ has started to die

I’m far from being the biggest supporter of Google+ (Scoble seems to be happy to claim that role). I’m still not convinced that enough “normals” — i.e. non-geeks — are going to adopt the platform, despite the fact that Google says it has more than 40 million users, and there are a number of things that have bugged me about the service, including the company’s steadfast refusal to allow pseudonyms until recently. I also haven’t found the signal-to-noise ratio to be all that high, despite my use of Circles — but then, it took me two years before I got Twitter to the point where it was providing a consistently high signal.

But the problem with many of these criticisms — as with Manjoo’s premature obituary writing — isn’t just that social networks take time to evolve, and users need time to find out what they are useful for and what they aren’t useful for (Twitter is a perfect example of that, since its own creators didn’t really know what it was for when they built it). The problem is that they are seeing Google+ as JASN: just another social network. So Manjoo seems to be saying that Google has no chance because Facebook is too well established, has too many features, too many users, etc.

Google has some powerful levers yet to pull

But Google has made it clear that it has a lot bigger plans for Google+ than just making it a Facebook clone. Chairman Eric Schmidt has said the company wants to make the network an identity platform for all of its properties — something it is already in the process of doing by integrating it into products like Google Reader — and is building support for it into search as well, with the launch of what it calls “Direct Connect,” which will allow users to go from a search result to a company’s Google+ page with a single click. Can Facebook offer that?

And that’s likely just the beginning: Google could easily extend the integration of Google+ into its Chrome browser, as some have speculated it might, and it hasn’t even turned on what could be one of the biggest drivers of adoption — namely, integration with Gmail. That’s hundreds of millions of people being connected to Google+ immediately from their email inbox, another thing that Facebook can’t offer (it has tried moving into unified messaging as a way of increasing its hold over users, but so far the jury is out on that strategy).

As Edd Dumbill of O’Reilly argued recently, Google is pretty well positioned to turn Google+ into a “social backbone” — something far more advanced and pervasive than just a social network. Obviously Facebook would like to fill this kind of function as well, but it is missing many of the crucial ingredients that Google has, and it is also a much more walled-garden approach, which could impede its progress. Facebook is more than happy to have you build apps and services that work on Facebook, but it is a lot less interested in being open than Google is, and that makes it a somewhat harder sell.

So yes, Google+ is noisy for some, and for others is a ghost town. Many of its features are raw and need work, like the brand page rollout. But Google is not just trying to build a place to share photos of your cat — it wants Google+ to be a social layer for everything it does, and it has some powerful levers it can pull when it comes to encouraging people to use it, such as search and email. The full impact of that integration remains to be seen, but it is far too soon to call the network dead or a loser. It’s barely even the third inning.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users World Economic Forum

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Google Plus has enabled locking and closing of comments on posts before sharing. Users can now decide not to allow commenting or resharing before clicking 'Share,' instead of rushing to change the setting after the post becomes visible to others.

Engineer Ebby Amirebrahimi says this feature was added by popular demand. With today's opening of the API for search, comments and +1s, it's important that users have control over the conversations they start.

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In his public post, Amirebrahimi says, "We've heard from many of you that you want these disable and lock options before you share, not after. So today I'm happy to say that we're doing exactly that." Here's his demo video:

Google Plus has offered extensive privacy controls since it launched, but it appears from today's update that users have been clamoring for even more. We found last month that Google Plus users are 2-3 times more likely to post privately than publicly. With the huge influx of traffic since the gates opened in late September, Google has to get user privacy right.

Do you feel like Google Plus has enough privacy controls?

Discuss

Just ahead of Facebook's f8 Conference, Google has announced nine new features for Google Plus, and there are some doozies. First of all, the social network is now open to the public. No sign-up required. Just go to google.com/+ and join the party. (New to Google Plus? Here's how to use it.) For the past 12 weeks, the network has been in "field trial" mode, but Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra says that it is now "ready to move from field trial to beta." Open sign-ups is touted as the 100th feature of Google Plus.

Hangouts - the video chat feature - have come to mobile, currently supporting Android 2.3+ devices, and iOS support is "coming soon." Hangouts also now have an "On Air" feature, which allows any Google Plus user to tune in and watch. Furthermore, Hangouts now offer screensharing, a shared sketchpad, and names for Hangouts. But perhaps the killer app is Google Docs in Hangouts, which will open up the possibility of live collaborative work (especially once Google Apps accounts get access).

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The big announcement for developers, following last week's initial opening of the Google Plus API, is the opening of a "Developer Preview" of the Hangouts API, which will allow third-party developers to implement the same basic set of capabilities as the existing YouTube integration uses. The announcement calls it a "basic set" of APIs, but it's a big step up from what was announced last week.

Finally, the update also adds native search to Google Plus, which turns up Google Plus content as well as stuff from around the Web for easy sharing.

Conspicuously absent? There are still no brand pages, and Google Apps accounts still can't use Plus. The latter is especially frustrating, since Google Docs in Hangouts will dramatically expand the possibilities of using Google Plus for work.

Which features are you most excited about? Tell us in the comments.

Discuss

Ever since last summer, the Internet has been awash in rumors of a Google social network. First, it was "Google Me" and later it was "Google +1". Last September, however, Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained that the company wasn't working on a stand-alone social network, but rather the interweaving of social elements. ""We're trying to take Google's core products and add a social component," said Schmidt.

Today, Google is doing just that. The company is updating its Social Search feature, which it first launched in 2009, and bringing a tighter, deeper integration of social connections to Google Search.

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We got a chance to chat with Mike Cassidy, Product Management Director for Search at Google, about the new product and he told us that today's announcement comes in three distinct parts. First, social search results will no long sit idly by at the bottom of your search screen. Instead, they'll be interwoven with other results and identified as social results. Second, these results will be pulled from a greater variety of sources, from social networks to blogs and shared content. Third, users will be given a greater level of control over what sites they link with their Google profile and whether or not they're publically displayed on their page.

Let's take a look at what these integrations will look like. First, there's the blending of social search results.

As you can see, the blog by Google's Matt Cutts is amidst other search results, rather than quarantined at the bottom of the page. It's a blog post that Cutts posted on his personal blog, which he links to on his Google profile. Next, you can see that search results will contain content that's shared, not created, by members of our social circle.

"Currently, Google social search is based on content your friends create," said Cassidy. "We're expanding that to content your friends share."

Next, we have the updated control over what you share and display on your Google profile.

As you can see, Google may find accounts of yours from around the Internet and suggest that you connect them. If you don't want to, however, you can make sure that the account is not publically connected.

So, Is This Part of 'Google Me'?

If the so-called "Google Me" is simply a social layer, then we'd have to say that this qualifies. Search Engine Land had an article this week about a report that found that Google Search personalization wasn't arriving at the expected results. That is, Google's personalized search wasn't acting based solely on previous search history and interests, it wasn't "subtle" as the company has promised, and it wasn't surfacing the long-tail results one might expect.

This, however, is personalization taken to another level. This is personalization in the form of looking at who you know, who you're connected to on various social networks, and ranking content according to who created it and who shared it. We were told that Google will even go a step further and look at content shared by friends of friends.

"All the content in Social Search comes from publicly available websites," explained a Google spokesperson. "For example, you can find content from a friend if that friend has created a Google profile and chosen to link publicly to other websites, such as Twitter or Flickr. You can also find content from public Picasa Web albums, public Buzz posts, and your own Reader feeds."

Your friends don't have to even have a Google profile for their content to show up in your search. If you're friends with them on Twitter and you connect your Twitter account, you can see what they share on Twitter in your search results.

Beyond the increased depth of these social results and how they're displayed, there's actually not much here that Google is doing any different than it has for the past two years. But it doesn't take much for a company like Google to have a big effect.

As Cassidy pointed out to us at the end of our conversation, Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." A move to create another, stand-alone social network would seem like folly to some, especially with the company's track record when it comes to social. This move, on the other hand, feels just right. Gather the information and use it as yet another signal on what is relevant to your search.

Discuss

Although there have been rumors of Google's new micropayment system for publishers for some, the timing of this morning's news couldn't be better. Following Apple's announcement yesterday that it was rolling out its new subscription service, a move that seems to have sparked debate, if not panic among publishers and developers, Google has responded today with a new option for publishers, one that seems to offer far better terms, control, and pricing.

Google has just introduced Google One Pass, a service that will let publishers set their own prices and terms for their online content.

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According to the announcement, One Pass will allow publishers a range of options with which they can offer their content - via subscriptions, metered access, freemium models, coupon discounts, or even single article sales. Existing print subscribers can be given access to online material. "We take care of the rest," says Google, including running the payments through Google Checkout.

Rather than the 30% cut that Apple will take with its new subscription plan, it appears as though Google is simply asking for the normal service charges associated with billing via Google Checkout (a 2% fee).

One Pass can be used for both Web and mobile content. So for readers, purchases via a One Pass publisher will give them the "buy once, read anywhere" - access to the material on all their devices via a single sign-on. (The devil is in the details, of course, as Google does say users can "access content on connected, browser-enabled devices and from mobile apps where the mobile OS terms permit publishers to access the web via the app for Google One Pass transaction or authentication services. Will that include iOS?)

Currently Google One Pass will be available for publishers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S.

Discuss

If you a hear a word in regular conversation that you don't know, it can be hard to look it up if you don't know how to spell it. Instead, just throw it at Google Voice Search to get an accurate definition. More »

Before you go getting too excited, know that this morning's announcement about support for Google Voice on the iPad and iPod Touch comes with one big "but" - you can't make any phone calls.

According to Google product manager Marcus Foster, the newest version of Google Voice has hit the shelves and it "lets you use all the features of the app on these devices, such as sending and receiving free text messages - except, of course, make cellular calls."

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While we're excited to see Google Voice arrive on the iPad and iPod Touch, we're left wondering - what is so "of course" about this? Why wouldn't we expect to be able to make voice calls over Google Voice on an iPad or iPod Touch? Both of these devices have the hardware capability of making a voice phone call over Wi-Fi, at the very least, so what's holding them back?

Moving past this point, however, Foster writes that you can basically play operator with your devices, initiating phone calls with any of your other devices with a "Click2Call" feature. "Simply click any 'Call' button in the Google Voice app on your iPod or iPad and then select which of your phones you want to ring. Google Voice will call your phone and then connect your call."

Beyond bringing Google Voice to the iPad and iPod Touch, the new version also comes with a few other bells and whistles:

When you enable Push Notifications, we will automatically disable Text forwarding for you, so you won't receive multiple notifications.
Want some quiet time? You can send all callers straight to voicemail by turning on Do not disturb in the Settings tab.
We made it easier for you to place calls from the address book by adding a dedicated Contacts button to the Dialer tab.
Sending text messages is now more streamlined since you don't need to press the OK button anymore.

Now, it's not that we really want to hold the iPad up to our face to make a phone call, but we have to wonder why the "of course" and where the restriction lies in keeping us from using your iPod Touch as a phone using Google Voice. After all, you can use Skype on both of these devices to make phone calls, so why not Google Voice?

We got in touch with Google to ask why this was an "of course" but we haven't yet heard back. We'll update the story as soon as we do.

Update: We got in touch with a Google spokesperson and they told us that it came down to the simple fact that Google Voice doesn't do voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and that neither the iPod Touch or iPad come equipped with cellular chips for voice call functionality.

In the meantime, you can download the new version and use your iPad to tell your regular phone to make a phone call.

Discuss

If Google was looking for a warm welcome for its Chrome OS and the new Cr-48 laptops it’s currently giving away to select beta testers, well then, it was wrong. The actual hardware has received a reception colder than Scrooge’s heart. Folks at TechCrunch have given it a verbal lashing that would make a drill sergeant proud. For past three days, I’ve been using the Cr-48 and here are my impressions.

The Mini-Review

First, the hardware:

The boot-up is extremely fast, and the log-on process is smooth and speedy, as long as one has a Google Mail account. (Google Apps ID doesn’t quite work.)
The screen is great, but the graphic capabilities are pretty limited.
There is a single USB port and a flash memory card slot. Frankly, having lived with the old MacBook Air with a single USB port, I don’t see much of a problem.
The trackpad is awful.
I love the dedicated Search button and would love to see it on all computers.
The laptop picked up most of the commonly used USB peripherals. Both a Logitech mouse and a Microsoft optical mouse worked just fine, without need for special discovery or driver installs.

Second, the User Interface/Experience:

The Interface is rough around the edges, and what you see is essentially the Chrome web browser.
It takes too many cues from Microsoft Windows, which is understandable, considering they are going after the mainstream and enterprise market.
The OS needs better font support, and reminds me of some early Linux distributions.
The user experience expects us to come to the idea of using browser tabs instead of apps, a weird notion, but not that strange if you’ve used the Chrome browser as your primary browser and are used to cloud-based services.
If you use Google Chat and Google Tasks, then you easily understand the idea of “Panels,” a new feature inside Chrome OS that runs in small, easy-to-access panes at the bottom right of the browser.
Even the best web apps currently available at the Chrome Web Store are a work in progress.
The biggest challenge for Google’s Chrome OS is going to be fighting against many life-long habits of using a desktop OS.

Now for the Cloud-based Services:

Despite being severely underpowered, there’s one thing the device does very well: let you use Google apps, especially Google Docs, Gmail and other cloud services (from Google) without a problem.
The YouTube experience is marginal at best, and Netflix doesn’t work.
Most of your browser-based apps will work, but Adobe Flash on Chrome OS is like a toddler learning to crawl. It will be a long time before it gets to the maturity of Adobe on Windows platform. Adobe has already stated that it plans to improve its integrated Flash performance in Chrome OS, essentially calling it a “work-in-progress.”

Bottom line: Will I use Cr-48 or something like it as my primary computer? It would be tough for me –I admit I have a life-long habit of using a full desktop operating system — to make Chrome OS my primary computing experience. That doesn’t mean I won’t keep an open mind, but for now, it’s a no-go for me. My more portable, 2.13 GHz MacBook Air is the machine I like, and even as I spend a lot of time inside the browser, I prefer a desktop with the Chrome browser and raw power. Plus my Mac has Silverlight, which lets me play Netflix and use third-party, native apps such as Reeder.

As Google stated very clearly, this particular device isn’t going to be sold in the market; its partners are going to make devices that consumers can buy. I hope they do a better job and come up with more attractive hardware.

The real story to focus on is the ChromeOS, what it really means and whom it targets.

So let’s do that instead.

The Rise of the Web OS

The growth of Google has coincided with the shift to the web. Google is a company that has been a believer in networked computing from its very inception. Since 2004, an increasing amount of our focus and attention has been devoted to the browser and what we can do inside the browser. The so-called Web 2.0 concept only helped enhance the inside-the-browser experience, thus slowly replacing desktop as our primary focus of attention.

Thanks to new technologies, ample bandwidth and Moore’s Law, the concept of a web operating system has become a reality. The web isn’t really an OS in the classical sense of the word, but instead is a platform to do things: for making phone calls, playing games, writing documents, sending emails, instant messaging and even photo editing. These are some of the tasks some of us old fogeys still do on our desktop operating systems using desktop software, but slowly and surely that desktop era is coming to an end.

Google last week announced its much-awaited cloud OS, the Chrome OS, which is nothing more than just a browser running on a stripped down version of Linux to capitalize on the hardware features such as audio and video. In the end, Chrome is about doing things on the web, inside a browser. Apple, of course, has taken a different tack for its cloud OS. The iOS which powers iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad fosters the idea of using small chunks of code for doing specialized tasks and embedding the browser inside these apps.

In a blog post this past week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote:

So we’ve gone from a world where we had reliable disks and unreliable networks, to a world where we have reliable networks and basically no disks. Architecturally that’s a huge change—and with HTML5 it is now finally possible to build the kind of powerful apps that you take for granted on a PC or a Macintosh on top of a browser platform. You can build everything that you used to mix and match with client software—taking full advantage of the capacity of the web.

The Enterprise

As a consumer, one is going to find Chrome OS very limiting, especially since have some pre-conceived notions about what a personal computer is supposed to do. In addition, the availability of smartphones and tablets makes Chrome OS less necessary form a consumer standpoint because they are more consumer-friendly and quite capable devices.

Google’s own Android OS is already in front of the consumers (in form of phones and tablets). It will be sometime next year when the first Chrome OS devices will come to the market, and it won’t be until end of 2011 when (or if) Chrome OS become a viable option in the market place. By then, as I wrote earlier, “who knows where Android will be?” If the early popularity of tablets is any indication, consumer computing is moving towards the tablet form-factor and for Android – that is indeed a good thing.

In comparison, Chrome OS is ideally suited for business environments that need lots of low-cost computers designed to do certain specific tasks cheaply and without much maintenance. Rolling out centrally managed apps minus security problems and maintenance hassles has been the Holy Grail for corporate computing. Chrome OS and HTML5-based web apps that run inside the browser are a perfect solution, as I argued in my earlier post.

Our GigaOM Pro analyst David Card agreed in his research note (subscription required):

Chrome OS also suffers from awkward positioning, both externally to developers and potential customers, and internally within Google’s own product line-up. While it’s true that PCs serve both companies and consumers, the value of the Network Computer premise appeals only to enterprise IT managers. Its manageability and simplified functionality play best in applications like airline reservations, point-of-sale terminals and ATMs, or in limited-application mobile devices used in shipping and store inventory management. Yet at least for now, app stores are purely consumer offerings. The apps Google showed last week all came from media companies (New York Times, NPR, Sports Illustrated), Electronic Arts and Amazon.

Google will be best suited to focus Chrome OS and all its energies on business buyers — call centers, retail outlets and airlines to start with — and forget about the consumers.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

Report: The Future of Netbooks
Google Takes the Open Battle to Apple on Multiple Fronts
Google Chrome OS: What to Expect

If you're not a fan of the social elements in Google Reader—like seeing the people following you and the content they're sharing—this simple hack will strip the social features out. More »

Although its copyright settlement with publishers is still in legal limbo, Google has announced that it will be starting to sell e-books through an online storefront early this summer. Like Apple and Amazon, Google's store would see it offer up in-print books obtained from publishers, which will retain their ability to set the prices for these works. But there's every reason to expect that the same storefront will be awash with out-of-print books the minute that Google can get a settlement for its ongoing lawsuit approved.

Google apparently dropped the news at a publishing industry event, sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group, and held in New York City. It has since been picked up by, well, just about everyone (many reports seem to be crediting a Wall Street Journal story for the announcement).






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Is there a tablet in Google’s future with a three-dimensional, multitouch user interface? It’s increasingly likely, given that the search giant has just acquired BumpTop, a startup whose unique software creates a 3-D environment where users can toss files and folders around as though they were playing cards, stack them in related piles and “hang” them on the virtual walls. If Google is working on an iPad-style tablet, as many believe that it is, a BumpTop-style interface would be dramatic departure from the typical 2-D app/icon approach, and could provide a significant alternative to the look and feel of Apple’s iPad.

A post on the BumpTop website on Sunday confirmed the acquisition, and said the company’s existing software (which was available for both Windows and Mac computers) “will no longer be available for sale [and] no updates to the products are planned.” Despite this, however, sources say the purchase of the company isn’t just another case of Google “acqu-hiring” some talented developers (something it has been doing a lot of recently).

Instead, they say Google is looking at the company’s 3-D, multitouch interface — or elements of it — as a potential addition to a tablet device. Mark McQueen at Wellington Financial also seems to see the potential for this, saying in his blog post:

Given the arm wrestling going on between Apple and Google over who will have the sweetest user experience, Bumptop’s cool desktop and underlying technology are a natural piece of Google’s user interface puzzle as they prepare to take on the current kings of all consumer electronics. The ones down the street in Cupertino.

There’s no question that the iPad is a revolutionary device in many ways, with its form factor and multitouch interface, but the look of the desktop is surprisingly boring, with tiny app icons spread out in a typical desktop grid. If Google is looking for something more dramatic to set its own tablet-type device apart from the crowd, BumpTop’s 3-D desktop would certainly fit the bill. As shown in the video below, icons representing files and folders can be flipped, stacked, fanned out, resized and manipulated in various ways. And perhaps just as important, BumpTop also holds patents on its interface.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but the Wellington Financial blog speculates that the price was in the $35-$40 million range. According to a recent profile of the company in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto-based company has raised $1.65 million from GrowthWorks Capital and Extreme Venture Partners, as well as angel investor and former Macintosh designer Andy Hertzfeld. According to Startup North, Canadian entrepreneur and angel investor Austin Hill was also involved in funding the company.

Speculation about a Google acquisition began with a tweet from someone in the Canadian startup community, which was noticed by TechCrunch, but then deleted (although StartupNorth got a screenshot). A post then appeared at the Wellington Financial blog speculating that the company had been acquired by Google, and the BumpTop website was later updated with confirmation of the deal.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Why the iPad is Right For the Enterprise

First of all, I should announce my editorship (starting
today)
of another blog, the
Android Developers Blog.
But at Google there are stories behind the stories.

Android Dev Blog
It’s been around since November 2007, way before I’d ever heard of Android.
In recent times it’s been used
somewhat like a press-release channel; each of the pieces heavily group-edited
into just-the-facts mode. Perfectly OK (if a bit tedious) when that’s
the kind of channel you want.

It seemed obvious to me that there was scope for a real bloggy kind of
blog, since there are a ton of interesting stories inside Android crying to be
told. So I said that a few times and I suspect irritated a few people, and
the upshot was I got the whole thing dropped into my lap.

Let me drive a stake in the ground: If you want to
know the actual technical substance of what’s being built here, or to read
inside-Android stories,
that blog is the place
to come, or rather
subscribe
to if you really care.

Blogging at Google
It’s hard, way harder than I’d realized. There’s this thing in the company
culture where everyone is very free with information, internally, and
expected to be very close-mouthed, externally. Within a few days of arriving,
my brain was bulging with more Really Big Secrets than I’d picked up in years
at Sun.

In fact, I now know how much storage we’re dedicating to support... hold
on, even mentioning what it’s being used for would probably get my ass
appropriately fired. And so on. There are a million stories around here and
a person like me who can’t not write is dying to tell them; but it’s really
hard to keep track of which ones are fair game.

To make matters worse, Google is interesting. Since I’ve come to
work here, my blog readership and Twitter follower-count have both ballooned,
and I’ve noticed that more or less anything we say, whether or not I think it
matters, is news.

Twitter follower count; I started at Google on March
15th. Statistics courtesy of
twittercounter.com.

On top of which there are many out there who are kind of scared
and nervous about Google, for a variety of reasons some of which are
perfectly reasonable. And there are those, including some who write for
large audiences, looking to pounce with glee on any whiff of evil or
hypocrisy. Fair enough, I suppose, since Google presents what we in the trade
call a Large Attack Surface.

Which means that Google in general and the Android project in particular
are careful, verging on paranoid, about what gets said in public.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve argued repeatedly that there are a lot of people
who would like to like us, and that there are lot of stories here
that would be good to tell; that the rewards of open-ness greatly exceed the
risks. There are people here, including some very important ones, who
are unconvinced. But they’re still giving this a chance. Let’s hope I’m
right.

Apple could be planning to expand its voice command capabilities on the iPhone thanks to the pending acquisition of Siri, which makes an iPhone app that lets users perform Web searches by voice command. News that the company was acquired first appeared in an FTC premerger notification (PDF) and was confirmed by Silicon Alley Insider and others.

For those who have already played around with Google's search app for the iPhone, Siri's voice search capabilities will appear quite similar, but it goes further than just showing search results. With the app running, users can speak what they're looking for ("What movies are playing nearby?" or "Make a reservation at Francesca Forno for two people at 6pm"). The app will then determine what service you need—a basic list of search results, a Yelp review page, a reservation through OpenTable, etc.—and list out your options along with maps and other data.

If Apple chooses to integrate Siri's technology into the iPhone OS, Google's Voice Search app would be redundant for many users—after all, if the OS can do it, why bother downloading an extra app that does less? That's probably the point. Considering that Apple may still have a Google Maps replacement in the wings, it certainly seems as if the company is making more of an effort to separate itself from Google, though both Apple and Google publicly insist that their relationship is still strong.



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About a year ago, Google launched real-time search suggestions that were tailored towards users in different countries. Today, Google is taking this one step further and is launching an improved version of Google Suggest that also takes larger metro areas into account. Now, Google Suggest will offer different suggestions for users in New York City and Portland, OR, for example. For the time being, this feature is only available in the U.S.

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Smarter Spelling Correction for Names

In addition, Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don't know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person's profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person's name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections.

This feature, too, is currently only available in the U.S., though Google plans to roll it out in other parts of the world within the next few months.

Auto-Correction for 31 Additional Languages

Google is also rolling out auto-corrected spellings for 31 additional languages. These auto-corrections kick in whenever a user misspells a common word. For uncommon misspellings, Google will still give you a link to the corrected search results behind a link that says "Did you mean: ReadWriteWeb."

Whenever Google feels confidents that the auto-corrected version is what you were really looking for, the search engine bypasses the link and just drops you off on a search results page that is based on the correct spelling.

Discuss

The question of how to print from wireless devices has been thrust once again into the limelight recently thanks to the printing-anemic iPad. Longtime notebook and mobile device users are quite familiar with the printing conundrum—cables, drivers and all.

Google has announced that it's looking to address this problem in the form of Cloud Print. Part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects, Cloud Print aims to allow any type of application to print to any printer. This includes Web, desktop, and mobile apps from any kind of device—potentially, this could be used on a BlackBerry, Windows machines, Macs, or even the iPad. (That is in addition to Google's own offerings: "Google Chrome OS will use Google Cloud Print for all printing. There is no print stack and there are no printer drivers on Google Chrome OS!" says the company.)





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Been asked a few times in the last few days about where my slides are from my MySQL keynote from *last* year.

Ooops.

Um, yeah.  Sorry about that.  Here’s a link to ‘The SmugMug Tale’ slides, and you can watch the video below:

Sorry for the extreme lag.  I suck.

The important highlights go something like this:

Use transactional replication.  Without it, you’re dead in the water. You have no idea where a crashed slave was.
Use a filesystem that lets you do snapshots.  Easily the best way to do backups, spin up new slaves, etc. I love ZFS.  You’ll need transactional replication to really make this painless.
Use SSDs if you can. We can’t afford to be fully deployed on SSDs (terabytes are expensive), but putting them in the write path to lower latency is awesome.  The read path might help, too, depending on how much caching you’re already doing.  Love hybrid storage pools.
Use Fishworks (aka Open Storage) if you can.  The analytics are unbeatable, plus you get SSDs, snapshots, ZFS, and tons of other goodies.
Use transactional replication. This is so important I’m repeating it.  Patch it into MySQL (Google, Facebook, and Percona have patches) or use XtraDB if you use replication.  We use the Percona patch.

Holler in the comments if something in the presentation isn’t clear, I’ll answer.  Apologies again.

Shameless plug - we’re hiring. And it’s a blast.

Flowcharts are a helpful tool for entrepreneurs and organizations alike, and there are a lot of web-based tools for making them. Two of them, LucidChart and Creately, have helpfully integrated into the Google Apps Marketplace, where they fit in nicely. More »

Uh-oh, Google Doc's offline mode is going...well...offline. Starting May 3rd, offline access for Google Docs, the Internet search giant's web office suite, home to an online document editor, spreadsheet editor and slideshow creator, will be disabled. Previously, users had been able to take advantage of the offline functionality provided by Google Gears, an open source browser extension which allowed for both the viewing and editing of files when an Internet connection was not present. Soon, the Gears-enabled feature will be no more. But have no fear - this setback is only temporary..at least that's what a company blog post says.

In the plugin's place, there will be a "new and improved" HTML5-based offline option which will replace the former solution, but its exact launch date is still unknown.

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Considering all the new features that arrived in Google Docs on Monday, including things like real-time edits, faster performance, collaborative drawing tools and improved document fidelity, it's no surprise that the mention of the improved offline mode (way down at the bottom of the post) was a bit glossed over in the rush by news editors to detail all of Docs' new functionality.

However, it's the introduction of HTML5 offline mode that may be the biggest and most important change of them all.

From Plugins to Web Standards

To understand why, you have to first look at how Google handles offline access now, a feature also found in Gmail and Google Calendar in addition to Docs. At the moment, these web apps go offline if and only if you've installed the Google Gears browser plugin. Unfortunately, not all browsers can properly run this plugin. For example, Mac's Snow Leopard OS and Safari 4 web browser introduced some features which were incompatible with Gears on newer Mac computers. Internet Explorer users could never view spreadsheets offline and users of "alternative" browsers, like the Mozilla-based Flock for example, had to jump through hoops to make it work. And Google Gears on the iPhone? Forget about it.

A better solution is HTML5, the next revision to the markup language used to code the web. The benefit to making this switch is obvious: HTML5 is a web standard, not a browser plugin. That means it will be supported across web browsers and operating systems, assuming users have updated to a modern browser instead of continuing to run IE6 (who are you people, anyway?!) It also means that Apple can't kick it off the iPhone and iPad the way they did with Adobe's Flash plugin. In fact, it means that Google doesn't have to worry about Apple's restrictions at all, the way iPhone and iPad application developers do. Google just has to build a mobile-friendly website using standards-based technology. The end result will be an Internet-based document creation tool and editor that can work anywhere, anytime, even when the Internet doesn't.

And that, in a nutshell, is the future of the web. Mobilized applications that behave like desktop apps, available with or without an Internet connection and that work on any device. Even the iPad. We can't wait to try it out.

No word yet on how long, exactly, we'll have to go without offline access in Docs before the HTML5 solution is ready, but Google's hosting a webinar next week to share more. Hopefully, further details will arrive then.

Discuss

Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat for a Q&A at the company’s Atmosphere event yesterday pitching its Apps platform to the enterprise. A couple of his remarks stuck with me today and I wanted to share them as well as a video of the session that Google has now made available to the public.

Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile. He was talking to the enterprise execs present but his statements were so absolute I think it’s fair to apply them more broadly.

“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.” He continued:

I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.

Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that: “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”

As the mobile Internet becomes central for both consumer and corporate users, the core product questions are interoperability, security and safety, Schmidt said. “What’s important is to get the mobile experience right, because mobility will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services,” he added, saying that Google considers phones, tablets and netbooks mobile experiences.

Lastly, to make good mobile, web and diskless computer (aka Chrome OS) apps, Schmidt had a platform recommendation as well: “From our perspective the single most important development has been the arrival of the HTML 5 standard.”

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

As the iPad descends upon us, it is fair to ask, "Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?" Depending upon whom you ask, the conclusions vary widely. The yin and yang of openness vs. integrated raises a fundamental question that underscores the battle being fought in the simmering industry battle between Apple and Google.

As the iPad descends upon us, it is fair to ask, "Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?" Depending upon whom you ask, the conclusions widely vary.

For example, RealNetworks' Rob Glaser forcefully argues that Apple's vertically integrated model "Must be stopped." He cautions: "If that's the way the industry plays out -- and there are a couple of vertical stovepipes that are closed -- A: we will have a much slower pace of innovation than we've ever had and B: there will be a tremendous loss in terms of value creation versus it being more horizontal."

Meanwhile, science fiction writer, blogger and tech activist, Cory Doctorow, recently made waves when he asserted in Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) that, "If you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue." He concluded:

The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it. If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you. If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you. If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.

And don't even get me started on the legions who dismiss Apple's end-to-end approach with an "Apple's Evil" slap, or more stridently, paint the story as "destined" to play out as things did in the PC Wars, with arrogant Apple racing to an early lead, only to get its head handed to it in the end.

I won't spend a lot of time bringing to the fore the masses that see the Apple model in more favorable terms, as the numbers speak for themselves across just about any metric that matters:

85 million iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads sold
185,000 applications built
100,000 developer ecosystem
4 billion application downloads
15 billion iTunes media sold
JD Power Award for Customer Satisfaction
Ungodly operating margins/cash flow

So how to reconcile the animus with the market's clear directional momentum? Read on ...

Progress and grumpy old men

The late Herb Caen, the legendary columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle, once wrote a piece about the worsening state of San Francisco and, in particular, one of its main arteries, Market Street.

In it, he lamented about how this thoroughfare was always under construction, how the city's charms and enduring traditions were getting swept aside by outsiders, and how the place was becoming less and less hospitable to locals and long-timers, forcing Caen to wonder if, perhaps, San Francisco's best days were behind it.

Ah, but Caen was setting us up for an unexpected upper-cut, as at the tail end of the piece, he reveals (I am paraphrasing), "Would it surprise you to know that I wrote this piece way back in 1954?"

Caen's point was that then, as now, every generation sees their generation as the Real Generation and the Right Approach, when in truth, progress just moves forward.


Hence, the locals of San Francisco, circa 1954, saw a city losing sight of its traditions and therefore, its magic. In truth, the city was just moving forward with the times.


Thus, it was unsurprising that 30 years later, today's locals would reach the exact same conclusions about the "good old days" being their particular generational approach.

I would argue that Glaser, Doctorow and a number of others (Daring Fireball's John Gruber covers some of the other disenchanted in an excellent piece, The Kids Are All Right) are simply guilty of confusing their truth with The Truth, a not so subtle way of saying, "My Way or the Highway."

A note aside, while I have heard plenty of grumpy old men lamenting about the continuing rise of the Apple approach and its dark implications, I have yet to hear a single female prognosticator confuse such attributes with real-world unfavorable outcomes. Perhaps, it's because women don't long for the "good old days" of Stone Age tools, techno-babble, impersonal computing and the like.

Me personally, my first computer was a TRS-80, so I understand the nostalgia of being able to tinker down to schematics and assembly code, and just the same, prefer the ability to apply my muscles judiciously to higher level problems versus lower level ones.

Hence, what I give up in terms of absolute flexibility, I gain in not having to worry about hardware abstractions, infinite form-factors, middleware, glue code, software distribution, marketplace and monetization.

To me, that is a more than acceptable trade-off, inasmuch as you would be hard-pressed to argue that the model is less democratic or even less web friendly (while Apple is clearly trying to create the best native experience possible, they have unquestionably also created the best mobile web experience and are key proponents of HTML5 and pioneered WebKit adoption).

Nonetheless, the yin and yang of openness vs. integrated raises a fundamental question that underscores the battle being fought in the simmering industry battle between Apple and Google.

Do we really need more inmates?

There are two bookends that gave me a grammar and narrative for thinking about software (and hardware) development and design. The first is "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks, and the second is "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper.

In "Inmates," Cooper makes the argument that too often the development process is driven by techies building the types of products that they would like to use, as opposed to really understanding the aspirations and outcome goals of their target user, let alone who that target user even is.

Worse, they often compensate for this blind spot by building products that address all use cases, including edge cases, and build a design interaction model that is a composite of that blob of functionality.

The end-result are products that are confusing, needlessly complex and that address all theoretical problems from a check box perspective, but few real problems from a specific outcome perspective.

Keep this in mind next time you are comparing the Apple product that seems to be "missing" certain features relative to the cheaper alternative on the other shelf. Nothing is free when it comes to product design decisions.

Margins, and who keeps which piece of what dollar

It's worth revisiting Rob Glaser's earlier comment about "stopping Apple," as it underscores the real reason many want to stop Apple.

Back in the days of the PC, the rise of Microsoft and Intel led to a horizontally organized industry. Microsoft and Intel kept the highest margin dollars for themselves, and could expand into adjacent segments as they saw fit. They also left a number of chunks of the hardware, software and infrastructure stack to third parties.

This type of loose-coupling worked because the PC was essentially a homogeneous platform, and the expectations of user experience were such that daily system crashes, recurrent performance lags and numbingly-complex "enterprise" software was considered the rule, and not the exception.

Now, of course, the two industry standard-bearers of the Post-PC Era, Apple and Google, respectively, have addressed the challenges of old very differently. Google, by embracing simpler, loosely coupled (read: horizontally-focused) cloud-facing solutions, and Apple, by embracing vertically-integrated, complete product solutions that marry hardware, software, service, developer and marketplace.

But make no bones about it; the real tempest here is who keeps the high margin dollars.

In the case of Google, they are happy to allow any and all to plug into their search and advertising gravy train, so long as they can disrupt any and all incumbent segments ripe to be broken up by their model.

In the case of Apple, they see user experience and control of same as central to their value proposition and "govern" accordingly.

Whether you see one as more open, closed, virtuous or evil depends upon your personal preference about user experience and choice, not to mention your particular economic self-interest.


But that is a post for another time.

Related:

Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
The Chess Masters: Apple v. Google
Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google
Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best
iPad First Impressions: The Good, the Not So Good and the Not Yet

Being the story of what I did last Wednesday.

As I noted in the
previous outing,
I have the peculiar fortune of working for a company that’s also a tourist
attraction; so I’ll do some tour-guiding while my eyes remain fresh.

I woke up before the alarm went off in the Google Apartment where I was
staying, not far off
Castro street in Mountain View. The apartments are comfy
but don’t have a lot of personality. Each has good WiFi, two bedrooms and two
bathrooms;
my flatmate was a taciturn Czech who worked on “data security”. Tim, curious:
“What sort of data security work?” Heavy Czech accent: “Every sort of data
security.” [Silence falls.]

I didn’t allow time for more than showering and dressing; headed out in the
morning cool from the Google Apartment to pick up the early Google Bus on Mercy
Street, didn’t Peter Gabriel write a nice song about that? An extremely
multinational sprinkling of fellow Googlers boarded with me, but at that hour
there wasn’t much chatter.
That particular route is circular, the long way around the circle on the way
in so I opened the laptop and did some morning input using the Google WiFi on
the Google Bus.

At Sun, my closest collaborators tended to be at points east, often across
the Atlantic, so when I woke up there was usually lots of email waiting for
me. Google is sufficiently West-Coast-centric that it’s not uncommon for the
morning harvest to be just routine mailing-list traffic; feels weird.
But this particular morning I had an early call with
Reto in London.

By the time that was finished, breakfast was in full swing at the Google
cafés; I favor one across the street from the building where I sit.
When breakfast starts they put on weird cheery eclectic music; cowboy stuff
last Wednesday. I lean to the Google bacon, fresh fruit, a little wee scoop
of hash browns, and Google coffee, which is perfectly OK.

I didn’t see anyone I knew, so I was one of the substantial proportion of
solitary breakfasters, reading
feeds and poking at the weird Java introspection hairball that I’d failed
to sort out before bedtime.

Wednesday was meetings nearly all day. I won’t go
into detail except that one of them was my first hiring-committee shift.
We considered seven candidates, rejected six, and brought one back for another
round of interviews. Urgggh. Google routinely tries to boil
five oceans before lunch, and here in my mobile-device corner we’re locked in
one of the most ferocious competitive head-to-head technology races I can
remember in my decades in the biz. A normal business would be bulking up the
headcount like crazy, and standards would slip. I’m in awe, and as with many
other things I see here, wonder if it can be sustained.

Another meeting was over lunch; my date took me to an out-of-the-way Google
café across a couple of Google parking lots which I’ll never find again. It
was good. They’re all good. The sushi is good and when someone
from Vancouver says “good sushi” you can take it to the bank.

Anyhow, at 4PM I was done with meetings and my calendar said
“Infrastructure upgrade”. By which I meant “get a new camera” since I’d
checked that Best Buy had a decent price on the
S90 and one nearby had
’em in stock.

I’d taken the Google-sponsored taxi from the airport to my Google apartment,
which meant that I didn’t have wheels. No problemo, because employees can use
these nifty Google plug-in Priuses at no charge, to encourage the use of the
shuttles, promoting green-ness and long workdays. So I whipped across 101
and back and still had time to buckle down and drag the Java introspection
millstone a few more yards up the hill before it was time for dinner.

Dinner works like this; whoever’s still there when it gets to be 6:30-ish
stands up and says “dinner?” and people join in, or not; during my two
aggregate weeks at the ’plex I’ve had I think one dinner alone.

The Google dinner, eaten that evening at some picnic tables outside the
café in the slanting California sun, was nice until the knifing California
breezes off the bay drove us back inside. An hour later I took the last
Google shuttle back to the Google apartment.

I’d had about enough Google at that point so I went for a walk to try out
the new camera in dim light, and really enjoyed having a couple of beers in a
random pseudo-Irish bar, watched baseball on TV and talked hockey with a
stranger. OK, I admit it, I also checked my Google email on my Google
phone.

Postscript: This is a little unfair. Normal people with
lives in the neighborhood, aren’t doing this every day or even most days.
And in fact the volume of really-late and really-early messaging is less than at
other jobs I’ve had. But, if you like your work, it’s sure easy to get
through a whole lot each day.

Google's newest acquisition is Plink, makers of a visual search application for mobile devices called PlinkArt. The app "recognizes almost any work of art," claims the app's homepage, "just by taking a photo of it." In addition to the visual identification aspect, Plink users can also discuss the art within the app, send images to friends or order prints of the artwork.

On its own, Plink sounds like an entertaining and educational tool, but one whose real-life implementations would probably be limited to a tour of an art museum or a late-night cram session for an Art History exam. But Google didn't just buy Plink for the art it can identify - that's just an added bonus. It's likely that Google bought the company more for the algorithm that powers the smart application and brains of those who invented it.

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According to a post on the Plink company blog, developers Mark Cummins and James Philbin, Oxford PhD students whose company was only four months old when acquired, will now join Google to commence work on the search giant's "Google Goggles" project. This ambitious, futuristic mobile search application is already available for Google's own mobile OS, Android, in a limited format. At the moment, you can use Google Goggles to take pictures of real-world objects like landmarks, logos, books, contact info, places, wine and - oh yes - artwork, too. The mobile application then recognizes the images and objects in your pictures and that, in turn, kicks off a Google search for whatever item it finds.

While on the one hand, it does seem amazing that a mobile application can "see" the world like this, the reality is that this sort of mobile search experience is still in its infancy. Unlike with Google's text-based search engine, there's no guarantee that the app will be able to recognize the image in your photo. Was the photo too blurry? Too dark? Or was it a building (book/place/etc.) that the app doesn't know yet?

But just as how the original tablet computers were heavy, clunky, inelegant devices that blazoned a trail that led us to the sleek and shiny iPad, a tablet some now claim will "revolutionize" computing, Google Goggles could one day lead to a world where everything we see - including people! - can be identified through the eyes of camera and an algorithm.

That's a somewhat frightening concept, but one that's also incredibly exciting at the same time, we have to admit.

Plink will now become a part of that effort, enhancing Goggles' artwork search engine while the engineers bring their talent and ideas to forward the project as a whole. "There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision," reads the blog post signed "Mark & James." "It's going to be a lot of fun," it concludes. For us, too.

(Originally reported via the Guardian)

Discuss

Gmail Labs, the "Settings" section featuring optional, experimental features for Google's webmail program has just received two new additions: "message sneak peek" and "nested labels." Now the sneak peek we definitely like - it lets you preview a message without opening it so you can take immediate action. Handy!

But nested labels is a somewhat curious addition. It turns Gmail's once-revolutionary "tagging" system into something that more closely resembles the traditional folder structure found in email programs like Outlook. So now you can drag-and-drop your email into these so-called labels and you can create hierarchies, too? Oh, c'mon, Gmail, let's just call them folders already and be done with it.

Sponsor

The Tagging Revolution

Wait! Before you rush into the comments and declare your love for nested folders, the option you've been waiting for since the day you got your Gmail invite back in 2004, hear me out.

I get it - nested folders are great. I'll probably even use them. (I am nothing, if not a Gmail filter junkie. Nearly everything get tagged upon arrival and a lot gets pre-filed, too).

The point is that these labels were introduced as a major improvement over folders because you could - Wow! - tag email messages with more than one label. That means mail could be tagged "Travel," "Coupons" and "Southwest Airlines" all at once. And wasn't that just amazing?

But the problem with Gmail's tagging system is that there's no easy way to surface the combination of these tags. For example, what if you want to see all mail tagged "Work," "From Boss" and "Project X?" Quick! How do you do it? (And don't tell me to type in some long, complex search query with colons and Boolean operators, either. Tell me how the average email user would do it). The answer? Most people don't know how. They're just going to enter a few search terms into the "search mail" box at the top of the screen. Or maybe they'll head over to the "From Boss" folder and then search for "Project X."

Missed Opportunity

Sadly, it seems that Gmail really missed an opportunity to take labels to the next level. For example: why can't there be an easy-to-use function somewhere at the top of the inbox to filter your mail by labels? Why isn't there an email intelligence system that learns how you label your mail and then starts auto-tagging it for you? Why can't Gmail figure out that if a particular message matches a filter you designed to label your incoming mail that means the message is not spam? 

No, instead of integrating a sense of intelligence into its filtering mechanisms - efforts that seem well within Google's capabilities - Gmail's labels are turning back into the ever-so-innovative folders they were meant to replace.

That's fine, I guess. I never really thought folders were that bad - it was filtering that needed an overhaul. (Have you used filters in Outlook? Gmail's are much easier.) But let's call a spade, a spade. Sure, you can label an email with 10 different tags if you want, but don't expect to find it later via some sort of advanced filtered search. Gmail's labels are folders. And tags, god bless 'em, are dead. 

Discuss

An anthropology professor from South Africa has successfully used Google Earth to find a new human ancestor.

To be exact, he found two partial skeletons, dating from between 1.78 and 1.95 million years ago, that belong to the species now known as Australopithecus sediba.

"Professor Lee Berger from Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg started to use Google Earth to map various known caves and fossil deposits identified by him and his colleagues over the past several decades," according to the Official Google Blog.

Sponsor

Berger developed a correlation between the appearance of caves in satellite images and the presence of fossil deposits.

He started with 130 cave sites in the region around the Cradle of Humankind area northwest of Johannesburg, and about 20 fossil deposits. Using Google Earth's high-resolution satellite imagery, he was able to identify 500 previously unidentified caves and fossil sites. It was at one of those sites he found the new hominid.

Discuss

Creating camera-phone-friendly QR codes with a goo.gl shortlink URL tweak is nice, but one of our readers took the next logical step. His bookmarklets creates a goo.gl link, automatically converts it to a QR code, and shows you the result. More »

Google just rolled out an excellent new two-pane Gmail interface for tablets like the iPad, and whether or not you're buying one, it's a cool big-screen version of Gmail some people may want to use on their desktops. Here's how you can. More »

Chrome only: Google Chrome extension Chrome Reader subscribes to RSS feeds in your Google Reader account with a single click, and even changes the icon for sites you've already subscribed to. More »

I’m one of those people who has a tough time trying to schedule meetings. What’s worse is that times change, mostly because of the ever-shifting deadlines that come with blogging. That’s one of the main reasons my calendar constantly descends into chaos. I turned to professional help, but if you are both like me and are a Google Calendar user, scheduling help could now be as simple as turning on a feature inside Google Calendar.

The new gadget, available in Google Calendar Labs, is called Smart Rescheduler. And it is dead simple. Once turned on, you can select an event and click “Find a new time” and the machine does the rest, offering up multiple options for folks to chose from.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.

“That’s a search type problem and so we looked at our search algorithms and said yes, we can adapt these,”Mistery said. He pointed out that this can be used by consumers who are trying to schedule say dinner parties.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.
David Marmaros, creator of the gadget, writes on the Gmail Blog:

[W]e decided to apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times. [...] You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated [...]

I just tried it out, rescheduled a meeting, and yes: it works as advertised. For once, I am not going to complain about a Google product. :-)

Additional reporting by Liz Gannes.