Category Archives: Google

Google Inc.

Open Social 0.6 – Not there yet

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Google released its Open Social 0.1 sometime ago with a promise to be something open and make life of a developer much easier. It has been a few months now and it is still not there yet. I have programmed on both Open Social and Facebook’s Dev program. Facebook’s APIs are much thought out and gives a developer a lot of power. On the other hand Google launched the half-baked hardly-alpha set of APIs. Implementation of Open Social on Orkut is nothing much more than framing pages (not literally though). Google’s Open Social will be releasing ver 0.6 on Orkut soon. Here are the release notes.

According to a Google employee

Orkut’s sandbox is going to be moving to version 0.6 of the OpenSocial API. The Orkut team has been working hard to complete this update and is currently aiming for a release of the new functionality late next week.

It seems like they have made the “framing” better.

Enhanced support for fetching remote content. Another addition to the API is the new opensocial.makeRequest method. This is an enhancement to the current gadget API IG_Fetch… methods. The opensocial.makeRequest method allows for POSTs as well as GETs, and you can specify whether you want your data fetch to be signed or even authenticated.

I am no longer wasting my time thinking about an Open Social app, at least till they come up with a solid program for developers.

Gmail’s labels need usability improvement

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I have been using Gmail for a long time now. I really love using the intuitive design and very good usability. I get about 50+ emails everyday in my personal gmail inbox. I use various filters and labels to sort my emails, but there are times when I have to label the emails by myself, without using the filters. I have more than 25 labels (I guess) and it is difficult to reach to the label starting with ‘P’ or ‘S’. I have to scroll down my huge list of labels, which is painful if I have to label a few emails.

When I was at Googleplex earlier this year, I saw a Google employee had a workaround to this problem. She added ‘_’ (an underscore) in front of the labels she wanted to see on the top. She added multiple underscores to labels depending what position she wanted it to show in the list. This work around is good, but not really a solid solution.

To begin with I would like to see ‘most frequently used’ labels on top. This will make life easier. Although a better solution would be to have an inline editing (think Google Calendar or Flickr) to add tag and as the user starts typing the label, the interface should suggest the labels.

It will be good to see Gmail team to make labeling emails easier!

Toy Hunt on Google Earth

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Google has started an interesting promotion for Google Earth. They will provide a clue everyday till 24th Dec. and solution of the clue will get you to “a toy hidden in a Google Earth satellite image”. The location of the toy will be revealed next day. Blog post on Google’s blog does not clarify if multiple people can get the toy.

I think it will be fun to solve clues, so I am gonna go for it. I haven’t used Google Earth, just saw it working on a friend’s computer, so I’ll need to know a bit more about it.

To participate in the toy hunt, you will need Google Earth 4 and Santa Tracker and Toy Hunt.

Good Luck with finding toys!

Update: Today’s location was Mumbai, when I reached there the toy was gone. I thought they ‘d have difficult clues, but I guess this is really for kids.

Google Earth Toy hunt

New Google Finance

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I am not a hardcore Stock Market observer, but do have a general sense of what is going on and what trends look like. I use Yahoo Finance most of the time. It provides a good service with the portfolio. Google Finance a fairly newer service has certain things that appeal to me.

Google does not punish me if I don’t know the symbol for a particular company. They simply provide it in the search bar using ‘suggest feature’. Yahoo on the other hand force me to click a link called ‘Symbol Lookup’ then search for the company to lookup the symbol then comeback to the original page and get info for that symbol. It is annoying. I am not a stock broker, I don’t need to learn these symbols by heart.

Google Finance also allows me add a number of shares in my portfolio. This is a good way to track total loss/gain. I don’t think I have seen this feature in Yahoo finance.

I thought Google Finance did not have international data, but I do see it right now (atleast Indian). This was the only thing I missed in Google Finance.

Today Google Finance got a facelift and some new features and data. Checkout the funny video released by them.

via TC

Google-Yahoo copying wars

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I was shocked to find out that Google copied a page from Yahoo. I was waiting for them to pull it off their website or change it and a response from them. They changed the page after a few hours, but have not released any official statement.

Matt Cutts from Google posted (unofficial) yet another interesting fact about the Google-Yahoo relationship. He pointed out that Yahoo has copied Google’s Adword design/layout multiple times.

On another note: Google open-sourced its Google Web Toolkit.

Is google safesearch really safe?

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I wonder how nobody noticed it? Most of us know that Google lets users choose Safe Search Filtering, but did we ever wonder if it works?

No, I am not talking about certain results that sneak in coz they can not be identified by Google’s algorithms.

Let’s try this: (warning: contains link to “explicit” content, user discretion advised)

1) Go to Google.com.

2) Click the preferences link, scroll down and choose the option Use strict filtering (Filter both explicit text and explicit images).

3) Search for the keyword “porn”.

4) Yay! you don’t see anything. Google is so cool that it shows “The word “porn” has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.”

5) You think that google in your browser is safe and you can let your kids search stuff, …wait a minute and click this link (Warning: “explicit” content)

6) It wasn’t supposed to show anything? isn’t it?

What I did was just add “safe=off” in the query.

If this was not it, try these:

7) Below the search query, google shows “SafeSearch is off” click this or the “preferences”

8) Google shows that you are using “strict filtering”.

9) Go back to google.com, by hitting your browser’s back button.

10) We just confirmed that we were using “strict filtering”, go ahead and click the search button.

You will once again see that the results for the term “porn” still show. I understand it is because we have “safe=off” in the url, but why google at the first place even fetching the settings for “safe” in the url when we are hitting the search button on our browser?

This is hard to believe that google overides the settings in the cookie (or however they set them for the computer) with a simple query in the url. This means, that a simple url posted somewhere can show you stuff, which you believe that won’t be shown to you, since you have “set” it on your system. Your kids are perhaps not as safe as you think. I think this can bring Google some unwanted legal trouble.

I have ran all these steps on Firefox (1.5.0.4) and worked for me, if they are not the way I described them in any other browser, please let me know.

Google Adsense API is here

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It is official now!

Here are the key features for the API:

What can I do with the AdSense API?

Using the AdSense API, you can enable users to perform a variety of AdSense functions without leaving your website, including the following:

- Create an AdSense account
- Manage an AdSense account
- Create and modify AdSense for content ad units and link units, AdSense for search boxes, and Referrals
- View detailed reports to monitor performance and earnings

How does the AdSense API benefit your site and users?

By making it easy for publishers to sign up for AdSense and generate revenue, the API offers another compelling reason for publishers to choose your service over a competitor’s–and remain loyal to you. The AdSense API is great for publishers who don’t want the hassle of setting up their own accounts or dealing with cutting and pasting HTML snippets.

How does this generate revenue for you?

Approved AdSense API developers will receive a share of the revenue earned by the publishers you’ve signed up. In addition to the revenue share, you’ll also receive $100 each time a new publisher you’ve signed up earns $100 in less than 180 days. This means that developers who currently charge for services can now use the AdSense API to offset some of the costs of your services–maybe even making it possible to offer your services free of charge.

Additionally, as the developer, you can optimize your ad’s placement, color, and format to increase your users’ earnings–and your users don’t have to do any additional work to display optimized ads.

I think this is not a good move by Google. An average Social Networker, networks for fun and to meet people. He does not care if he makes a couple of dollars in a week or so by his posts. Ofcourse, who doesn’t love getting extra money, but I think an average US visitor wouldn’t bother too much about the petty cash. Social Networkers from other countries, where a dollar holds a lot of value, might be the people who would love to earn some petty cash while having fun.

Right now Adsense is looking for web hosts, blog hosts, Wiki hosts, forum hosts, and web publishers to participate in the beta program and they should have atleast 100,000 pageviews a day. I think this is a great start, but thats it. The members posting/writing for these websites would be motivated to earn money and would write SEOed articles/posts. I don’t think an average Myspace user will be motivated enough to research on the topic. Find out the topic’s avg. CPM and then strategically place the keywords in the article. I think that Adsense API is not going to be a really big thing. It is good for pulishers but even better for Google.

I wasn’t expecting the API to be a revenue sharing model, but expected something that would help existing publishers track their earnings on a page basis rather than channel based stats.

I think if the publisher can insert some unique values into the Adsense code dynamically, he can track more efficiently. For example, if a blogger can insert the post’s id or title in the adsense, he can keep track of what posts are doing the best, which post has the max CTR, what topic generates Max CPM for him, so that he can concentrate writing on it..etc.

Google can further help its publishers by integrating Analytics with Adsense APIs. Then a blogger can find out that his post on “Travel to Asia” generates a lot of revenue from visitors in New York and San Francisco. This will help him to enhance his post by adding information such as, how is weather in Asia as compared to New York or SF, how long does it take to fly to China from NY and SF…etc.