So today, I got all excited because gmail introduced this new facility where you can call phones from within gmail using their chat facility. I installed the necessary plugin and fired it up. Google generously credited me with a whole 10 US cents of airtime. I called my South African cell phone number, and it rang! So now all I needed to do was buy some airtime and I could start calling, and that’s where it all fucked out.

When I clicked the link to add airtime, google informed me that my country was not yet supported. So, there’s this wonderful VoIP facility right there in my gmail but I can’t do shit with it until google decides to get off its fat ass and take my money.

Check out the google blog entry.

Yesterday, Google reacted strongly to what it alleges is widespread surveillance by the Chinese government of the gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists all over the world.

According to a blog post on the Official Google blog posted on January 12 2010, Google detected “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their corporate infrastructure originating from China in mid December 2009. Google alleges that the cyber attack was successful in stealing intellectual property. In addition, Google discovered that 20+ other large companies had also been targeted by the Chinese attack.

Further investigation by Google has allegedly revealed that the Chinese cyber attacks had as its real goal the hacking of gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists. This led Google to discover that many such gmail accounts had already been comprised and were regularly accessed by (unauthorised) third parties.

It is clear from Google’s post that they feel the Chinese government has abused the trust they once shared, and as a direct result of that breach in trust, Google has now decided that it is no longer prepared to dance with China. Google has announced that they are now no longer willing to offer a localised Google.cn, which is censored, and if that means ending its operations in China, then so be it.

Perhaps, but it’s too early to tell.

Earlier this year in July, Google announced on their blog that they were building a new operating system, The Google Chrome Operating System, or ChromeOS for short. Yesterday, Google announced on their blog that they are open sourcing ChromeOS and they published a whole bunch of videos to YouTube describing their vision and released their source code to the public.

Google’s idea, in a nutshell, is that they believe there is demand for an operating system that is really fast, really secure and exists purely to facilitate Internet access. All user created data is stored in the cloud, in fact on Google’s servers. All applications are web applications. So the only thing installed on the computer is the operating system. Everything else is accessed via the Internet.

Is such an operating system competition for Windows, Linux, Apple Macs?

Well, for starters, Google’s ChromeOS is not going to be designed to run on any old white box pc, like Windows and Linux are. ChromeOS is going to have custom firmware and a narrowly defined hardware specification, because that is necessary to achieve its goals of fast boot and security. Businesses which deployed ChromeOS based workstations, would have to be comfortable with storing their data on Google’s servers instead of their own, unless Google builds a ChromeOS server, but that is not currently envisaged.

So the market for ChromeOS seems to be people who are prepared to accept a machine that is very locked down, runs a limited set of applications and is tightly integrated with Google’s online services.

Personally, it doesn’t hold much appeal for me because I want to be able to play games on my PC for relaxation. Yes, it is true that a lot of what I do depends on having an Internet connection, but not everything. If my Internet connection is unavailable, I still have access to all my data, which allows me to continue developing applications, for instance. It seems to me, that ChromeOS is so tied to the Net, that if it loses it’s connection then the box running it reverts to being a giant paperweight.

If ChromeOS was developed to run on a wider range of hardware, store its data on user chosen servers and allow continued productivity if the Net connection is lost, it would be of greater interest.

UPDATE:
This Wired article (Why Google Should Cool It With Chrome OS) agrees with me and suggests that Google ChromeOS should be engineered to co-exist with other operating systems on NetBooks so that people can enjoy a hybrid experience.

I’ve created application shortcuts on my desktop to directly launch gmail and the admin dashboard to this blog. Chrome brings those special windows up in an even sleeker format, discarding the Address Bar.

I created a custom search engine to search my own blog. All I had to do was right click on the Address Bar, click ‘edit search engines…’, click the Add button and fill out three fields: Name, Keyword & URL. The search URL for this blog is http://capetownnews.co.za/search/%s. The %s is a placeholder for the search terms.

You can search this blog manually by typing in http://capetownnews.co.za/search/search terms. That URL structure works for any WordPress blog with fancy permalinks enabled.

But in Chrome, I don’t have to type that long URL out. All I gotta do is type ‘cape search terms’ then select ‘Search Cape Town news for search terms” from the drop down list and hit enter, and my blog is automatically searched for those terms using the built in WordPress search functionality.

I’ve been using Google Chrome all day in lieu of my usual web browser, Firefox 3, and I’m pretty much hooked now.

Wow! Where do I start?

I downloaded the brand new Free Open Source Software Google Chrome web browser (it launched today) just a few hours ago, and I am simply blown away by it!

DOWNLOAD it now and come back and read this article using Chrome.

READ Google’s comic book overview of what Google Chrome is all about. Some of it is quite technical because it is instructive about the underlying software architecture that makes Chrome a whole huge step forward in the browser game.

Google has produced video demonstrations of each new aspect of Google Chrome, which must surely soon become a rival for the number one web browser.

It is FAST, it is slick, it is smooth, it is clean. So very very clean.

It’s actually quite hard getting used to such an uncluttered and clean interface.

Not everything works yet. Songza produces fuzzy text. The YouTube progress bar does not show the downloaded part.

It does not have any plugins or toolbars.

But it is a new toy and you should play with it and see it for yourself, so I’m not going to write a mini-review of it here. The objective of this article is simply to encourage you to go get it today!

Then come and write your own review of it in the comments.

The web has lit up with stories about Google’s release of its alleged Wikipedia killer, Knol, yesterday.

However, despite the numerous comparisons drawn between Knol and Wikipedia, upon investigation, it appears to me that Knol is a very different beast to Wikipedia.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how to classify Knol. One can describe its features and abilities, and yet still not arrive at a correct classification because ultimately to correctly identify what Knol represents to the web world it is not so much what it can do but how it will ultimately be used which is relevant, and that is so very very much dependent on us.

Will people adopt Knol in great numbers?

Knol’s stated aim is to be a repository of authoritative articles written by users with expert knowledge in the topic.

On Wikipedia a topic is covered by one article authored and edited by numerous users. On Knol a topic can be covered by numerous articles authored by numerous different people. Although collaboration is possible on Knol, by default any edits made must be approved by the article’s owner (the person who created the article).

Wikipedia’s editors work on a purely voluntary basis and receive no remuneration whatsoever. Knol, however, has a revenue sharing model whereby a Knol user can associate their Adsense account with their Knol account and earn ad revenue from their Knol articles.

Knol also allows articles of a commercial nature to be published, for instance, covering your own business interests. Wikipedia, by contrast, strongly discourages editors from editing articles in which they have a personal interest to avoid having to deal with the conflict of interest issues that arise. Wikipedia also demands that articles meet notability requirements. Those articles which do not are deleted. Wikipedia articles also may not contain original research. Knol makes no such demand.

So, it’s clear that Knol is a very different beast to Wikipedia entirely and I therefore posit that Knol will fulfill a very different function. It will not become an encyclopedic reference that Wikipedia is.

Personally, so far Knol does not appeal to me. For starters, there’s very little content on it as yet. There’s no active community to interact with. There are also no stats associated with Knols, so I cannot even tell how many times a knol I author is viewed. I want full metrics on all Knols I author, so that I can tell whether it is worth my while expending the effort on the site.

Google now offers so many publishing tools that I’m sure some may be getting confused as to which online publishing tool is best suited to them. Google also offers personal blogs, Google Pages, and Google Sites (collaborative Wikis).

FURTHER READING:
Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation

It actually doesn’t matter if Microsoft buys Yahoo! or Yahoo! buys Microsoft or they give each other to the other in holy matrimony because at the end of the day they are both very crap companies.

The big difference between them is that Microsoft still makes huge annual profits (last year it was over $16 billion) while Yahoo! is on a sharp decline. It’s share price has halved in the past two years down to under $20 from $40.

Google’s profits last year are also less than expected.

The only company doing really well financially still is Microsoft. Financially, Microsoft is very stable due to its Windows and Office products. Vista sales are up. The financial future remains rosy for Microsoft.

So if this is the situation, why does Microsoft want Yahoo?

I believe it is out of fear of what Google might do to undermine Microsoft’s core business in the future.

Fact is, Google is already undermining Microsoft’s Office product with its online Google Documents service.

If you compare Google’s online web 2.0 services with Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s then Google’s are superior except in one instance – Yahoo’s flickr.com is better than Google’s Photos (Picassa Web Albums).

Yahoo’s 360 and MSN Spaces are both shit blogging platforms. Blogger rules them. In turn, Blogger is ruled by self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Google’s gmail rocks Yahoo mail and hotmail into the garbage tip.

Anyone I’ve ever introduced to gmail has ended up dumping both yahoo and hotmail for gmail. The only hottentots who refuse to get with the gmail program are those poor technically challenged neaderthals who still crave their daily Microsoft Outlook fix. I pity those poor bastards.

What else you got? Search? Hahahaha!!! Yahoo and MSN are both useless at search and since they still haven’t been able to engineer a new search service that puts Google’s in the shade in the 10 years that Google has dominated the field, we can safely assume that they will never achieve that Herculean feat. It is simply beyond them. They have no clue how to build a better search engine. Or they would have done it already.

Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live both have more chatters than GoogleTalk has. GoogleTalk only does text chat and voice whereas both the former offer video as well. Thing is, based on extensive use by myself over the past few years, I can quite confidently assure you that you will get no better VoIP voice quality than via GoogleTalk. Even the much venerated skype is shit. For vid conferencing I find Windows Live the best at the moment. Thing is, Google is so good at producing quality services that I expect that when they do release a Vid service on GoogleTalk that it will knock the socks off all competitors.

I believe that the best company to buy Yahoo! is in fact Google, because Google knows how to make web 2.0 services work and be financially viable. Microsoft is clueless and Yahoo is trailing Google in its core competencies.

If this Microsoft buys Yahoo! deal goes ahead, Yahoo! will be obliterated by a clueless, clumsy and outclassed Microsoft.

Microsoft is a bad company with a lot of cash and an installed base that feeds it – for now. However, at some point, I believe Microsoft and ALL its technologies will be wiped out by better Open Source Software products.

I strongly believe that young people should not invest their time learning Microsoft developer technology skills. They should invest themselves in the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. Businesses building in-house software systems on the Microsoft platform will regret it.

This is becoming a big problem now.

You actually take the trouble to write original content and publish it on your blog, and then a bunch of sploggers come along and scrape your blog content and display GOOGLE ADVERTS next to the scraped content, and receive MONEY from GOOGLE for revenue derived from YOUR CONTENT.

Some bloggers have actually taken the trouble to complain to Google about this by clicking on the report violation link of the GOOGLE ADSENSE advert.

In response, Google sends the complainant a standard email telling the person that they need to make a sworn statement in writing and then either snail mail or fax the statement to Google. Google also cites the American DMCA legislation in its standard reply.

I don’t think Google appreciates the problem. It’s incredibly EASY to become a splogger. And if one splog gets shut down, another one can be created in a heartbeat.

So having to go to a whole lot of trouble to get a splog shut down and its adsense account terminated is enabling them to continue.

It must be easy to shut down a splogger. It must be easy to get their Google Adsense account terminated. The sploggers can then be blacklisted from opening another adsense account, making it DIFFICULT for them to earn money off OUR hard labour.

What do we need to do to convince Google to take this issue seriously and get serious about combating sploggers?

Perhaps a nude sit in on their business premises?

GOOGLE SUBMISSION can guarantee the inclusion of your site on the most significant and well-known search engine in the world within less than 15 working days.

The GOOGLE SUBMISSION service costs $199

I received spam from this scammer. Do not be taken in by these assholes. Adding your web site to Google is 100% free! No-one can even guarantee that your site will be added to Google’s index at all, nevermind within a given timeframe.

The scammer set up a paypal account to receive monies. I reported this abuse to Paypal and requested that they freeze his account immediately.

Here is the official Google URL for your to submit your web site:

Submit your web site to Google