On May 15th, Hello, the picture sharing tool from Google (which was part of the Picasa acquisition) will be shut down. This piece of software was ahead of its time when it first launched, providing what probably was the best way of sharing pictures between friends in real time. Its specialized functionality will however turn out to be the cause of its own demise -- it never reached a wider audience (my short friends list below being an evidence of it) because it didn't quite fit the taste of most IM users. However, the functionality that Hello was offering could have been an excellent feature of a full-pledged IM client. (Yahoo eventually implemented something similar)This has been bugging me since the day it launched: the street labels when viewing Manila in Google maps is way off the mark. I wonder if Google is aware of this bug? Paging Miss Aileen Apolo, can you bubble this up to those concerned? It's really running the otherwise good user experience of using the Hybrid view in Maps.
To get this view, Go to Google Maps, locate Manila, then click Satellite. Make sure you check the "show labels" check box.
And it just keeps getting better...
Also, did you guys notice that Gmail storage is now in the 4Gig range? Again, the IMAP support is not available for everyone yet. I just checked my gmail and google apps and I still don't have it.
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Love him or hate him, but there's no denying that he writes very interesting stuff. "Robert X. Cringely" on the Google - Apple collaboration.
I wrote many years ago that the best start-ups are composed of symbiotic combinations of hippies and nerds. Hippies have the grand vision while nerds mind the details. Each is less without the other. Think of Jobs and Woz in 1976 and now Jobs and Schmidt (or, more properly, Apple and Google) in 2007. Apple is driven by design, which is entirely subjective, even emotional, while Google is driven by the almighty algorithm, which is only following orders
It just keeps getting better. Google Docs (formerly docs and spreadsheets) has now a presentation web app. See official blog post here and see initial review here.`
I didn't notice when this feature landed on Google Reader, but I like that they added it:This is all your app is: a collection of tiny detailsAs long as you don't forget about the big picture, I couldn't agree more.
Cambridge has a chocolate factory, and a Willy Wonka. The chocolate factory is Google's local research lab, located on the seventh floor of a Kendall Square office tower, and the resident Wonka is Rich Miner, a Google executive sometimes described as the company's vice president of wireless but officially a "technical staff member," according to a Google spokesman.Now I'm torn.
The golden ticket is a chance to see a prototype of Google's new mobile phone, which Miner has shown to a handful of Boston entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, some of whom have signed nondisclosure agreements and some of whom haven't.
You probably heard about the rumored Google phone / OS, since this has been blogged to death many times already. My hesitation to jump in though is that nobody was really sure if indeed there's a hint of truth to this. If I remember it correctly, the image on the left of what is rumored to be a Google phone showed up around the same time Steve Jobs announced his baby to the world.
Ey kids. Want to upload a video to your blogspot blog? Then go try Blogger in draft, featuring a direct video upload.
At long last the Reader team has upgraded Google Reader's Email this feature - my pet peeve. What used to be a non-formatted stream of words (without even line breaks to separate the title from the content) is now sent as an html-formatted email message. So the post you are emailing will appear (almost) exactly the same to how you see it in Google Reader.
