Google Reader Review

I have spent much of the last 5 years designing news reading and data mining applications. I haven’t really mentioned work in this blog before but our NewsRaider application is a really smart bit of kit. But… its an installed application and so its days are really numbered. Its all going web.

What’s making its days even more numbered in my eyes is a newish service from Google. It isn’t google news – even though that would be the obvious choice. Google news is The Google's attempt to provide news that interests you. Its OK. Its not great. It searches over a trillion news sources (NewsRaider does about fifty) and doesn’t really come up with anything that particular to you.

The real innovation is Google Reader. Perhaps the most underrated of Googles stock. There are just about half as many RSS readers and websites as there are new feeds in google reader. So why anyone would bring out another is anyone’s google.

But google did, and its so much more.You access it from your normal gmail or google account page. And you fiddle with it… explore a bit over a few days. I started adding my fave sites. News. Podcasts. Mags etc. And they are all just there, in this one page, in this really well designed way. Its so easy to add new feeds and change stuff.

You can get feed pages and super-feed pages like netvibes, but if you like that interface purity and simplicity that gmail has or amazon shopping and you like news and info sites, google reader is groundbreaking

You know, it might be thought that I am a bit of a googlephile. I’m not in any significant sense - I’d like another company to come and really challenge google. But the extent to which google will effect online life really is astounding. Its getting like they own the roads and the power and the media…. And the literature of the online world. Right or wrong, I think it’s a fascinating topic.

With Google, we don’t know if we are in Germany in 1933 or Italy in 1500, in a tech sense.

I am Google’s Bitch

I have just this moment moved 133 of my Writley documents to my Google Account. Work stuff, Blog stuff, writings, notes, my book, short stories, legal contracts, CV, poems and top secret recipes for inedible foodstuffs.

Its time for a stock-take as to what Google now has under my account:

• All of My Mails. (Gmail)
• All of my photos. (Piccasia Online)
• My spreadsheets. (Google Spreadsheets)
• My browsing history and book marks. (Google Browser sync plugin for firefox)
• My notes (Google Notebook which is getting bigger)
• My search history.
• My Writings (Writley)
• My Calendar (Google calendar)
• My Address, Credit cards and Work Details (We use Adwords and Adsense at work)
• This Blog (Blogger)
• My newsgroup searches and posts.

There is probably more, stuff I don’t even know about me.

Should I be worried?

Here is my reasoning: For Google to survive long term it needs to preserve trust absolutely within its account holding community, ergo, be more than scrupulous.

This is the relationship, I think, in a nutshell:

“You let us manage and analyse all of your information. We will advertise to you more effectively (for both parties) than if we didn’t have this information. In return, we provide a system that increases the benefit to you within an integrated whole.”

No company on the planet needs to be trusted so much by it's users than Google. Not even the church. And for that reason, I am trusting them until I have reason not to.

Google Spreadsheets

So I wrote an early review of Google Calendar (Which I am loving still) and now I have an invite to try Google Spreadsheets.

Unless you operate way higher than the higest part of the tech ivory tower, (the bit where they land the metaphorical VIP Tech helicopters) you just will not be able to get on this beta. Unless that is you enter your name in the spreadsheets.google.com thing and hope they send you an invite. I just got mine.

Sign up here:

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

There it is, a spread sheet in my browser. In much the same was as Gmail is email in your browser or dig is news in your browser, this is numbers, aligned in rows and columns, in your browser.

After checking that yes "=23-3" does equal "20" I imported a big spreadsheet from my personal accounts. Its an excel sheet, a big one, with lots of numbers and sheets in sheets…. and lordy, lordy, it has opened fine. There it is in my browser.

Numerically this is surely technology that people will use.

There are glitches. I'm not going to demean anyone buy pointing them out – its just out. Programmers need breaks.

The fact is that this is so close to what you want from a web service. It doesn't have the slug of Writely (now owned by Google), but its early days and scalability problems might happen. As far as in browser spreadsheets go this is the spearhead…… but….

Spreadsheets actually are not that fun to play with. Nor are calculators. So I'm bored already, after seeing that it works and can load excel files and share them.

Its brilliant, but its a spreadsheet in my browser. In fact I'm only writing this post so that, because it will be one of the first Blog posts about Google Spreadsheets, I might get some more hits to this Blog for people searching for "Google Spreadsheets" or "Spreadsheet in Browser".

That's the only reason.

Hey, at least I'm honest. I just hope the Google folk are as they now know how much my house and wife cost to run, and so much more...

Google Calender

Google Calander

I haven’t been blogging since I left home, but I have come out of the tropical wood work to say that Google Calendar is out.

I’m signed up and using from this hot hot 'net cafe.

Its looking great. Simple, fast (even on this line - ohhh... ajax baby) and looking pretty feature perfect.

The only downsides I can see with it so far are:

1. It doesn’t seem to have tasks management, which surely every calendar should? At least any one I want to use.
2. There is no way to export the calendar. This is essential to have faithful use.

Aside form being a good interface and functionality it has this potentially wondrous thing:

Natural language entry

AT LAST – For many things we need to do on computers text is just the fastest simplest and all round best way to do things. GCal is the first mainstream system I have seen to use this well. There is a little link “Quick Add” which brings up a text box…

“Call john tomorrow”

“Complete blab la bla by Tuesday”

“be in Acapulco by next week”

You enter these and it instantly works out what your saying and the event is created. This is so neat. If it doesn’t get what you mean (“Call john in one month”) it brings up the normal event entry box. Which is a good fall back.

I’m sure over time this feature will just get better and better.

Google Calendar I think will be huge. Holistically bigger than Gmail because they are bound to become entwined. Good tech. Good tech.

Back to the sun and the big fish.

The Search for Wok

Google on censoring Chinese search results.

Was it good to do or bad? Are they evil or secret saints whose mission will emerge from the mire of post-communist decay? Can I really stop using Google when they have all my mails for the last few months on there evil servers?

I dunno, but here are the key points:

1. If Google refused to do this it is assumed that the Chinese’s dictatorship would just block them from China. Which would mean less information to the Chinese population.
2. Is it the job of companies to pressure governments? Isn’t that what governments should do? We (The west) trade with China, China makes our stuff, it’s the biggest growing economy. Can you really criticise Google if you yourself are tacitly supporting the Chinese dictator ship with your MP3 player and T-Shirt.
3. The main thrust of the media against Google isn’t against Google per se but against their claim to be a righteous doer of negative evil (Or “good “, as its known in some of the more “fairy” circles).
4. As Google say, to paraphrase, you cannot have perfect solutions in an imperfect world.
5. This guy:
   

These are all fascinating avenues for discussion. However, what it seems people have been over looking is that Google is also censoring the search results it provides for us – about many things CHINESE.

That is correct, Google is censoring both ways.

There are many secrets to the Chinese world, cuisine, history, culture and geography that Google is not allowed to tell us about... but the Discovery channel can and does:

How do you make 1,000 year old eggs in just an hour? What really is Tofu and why doesn't it taste like it should? What is underneath that big hill with the terracotta army standing guard? (Discovery channel was only partially certain on this one (rivers of mecrucry, yada yada)). How can a guy who is older than my dad, and looks like my gran, lift me off the ground with his forearm? (ibid. on the Discovery). How do you make trainers that cost as much in my supermarket as a bag of apples? (Not on the Discovery channel in any sense)

What does wok mean?

Gmail Spam Thought Bug

A “thought bug” is a bug in a bit of software or a website etc that is caused not by bad programming but by designers not thinking.

Here is an example of a thought bug.

If you use gmail , login, if you don’t, sign up.

Take the person you most commonly email and find an email from them and click the "Report Spam" button. They will now be sent into the spam folder, as will future mails from them. That’s the thought bug. Gmail should say "You have emailed that person 8,345 times, are you sure you want them to be CONSIDERED SPAM now?"

Everyone Makes Thought Bugs

Gmail Spelling

Gmail has just (Within the last 2 hours I am guessing) improved its spelling engine and it is much better.

It was way fiddly before, but now its much more easy to see what needs doing.

It still needs a user dictionary, Writley has one.

I am a man who needs a very good spell checker.