More on Google Wi-Fi

Sorry, Joe….In San Francisco, Google proposed to build an IEEE 802.11b/g Wi-Fi mesh network that delivers 1 megabit+ per second of capacity throughout the city. Anyone in the city could get access free at speeds as high as 300 kilobits per second, and Google or third parties could sell access at higher speeds, possibly as high as 3mbps. The 300kbps free service could be reached at street level, in the front room of a home or business, and on the first few floors of a building. (Via PCWorld)

"We believe that ubiquitous, affordable Internet access is a crucial aspect of humanity’s social and economic development, and that working to supply free Wi-Fi is a major step in that direction," Google’s response said. "However, we also believe that there will never be either one form of online connectivity or one company that exclusively provides it."

San Francisco, VOTE GOOGLE!

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The official release for the upgrade to Mozilla’s Firefox, version 1.5,
was supposed to be released on Friday, October 28th. However, that has
now been pushed back. "We didn’t quite make it and this morning
there were a couple of regressions, a couple of newly discovered
security issues, and a couple of unfixed Update bugs," said Asa Dotzler, the coordinator of Mozilla’s QA program, on Monday.

I had installed the upgrade recently, but had to do a rollback when I
discovered the "saved form information" feature didn’t work. You don’t
know what you got, until it’s gone — I quickly learned that I could
not LIVE without this feature! I hope it’s fixed in the official
version!

I will probably do a cleaner install this time. Instead of installing
into the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox folder, I’ll install into a
subfolder (ie. "1.5") that I’ll create during the installation. That
should help.

Google announced on Tuesday that they are testing a new service called Google Base that would allow people to post and make searchable any type of content. Items that can be posted to Google’s server include "description of your party planning service," "articles on current events from your Web site," "listing of your used car for sale," and "database of protein structures." "This is an early stage test of a product that enables content owners to easily send their content to Google," said a Google spokeswoman. "Like our Web crawl and the recently released Google Sitemaps program, we are working to provide content owners an easy way to give us access to their content. We’re continually exploring new opportunities to expand our offerings, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time."

It sounds to me like this is much more than the future Ebay competitor. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. We bring the content to them? Maybe I need to re-read that article about the Google File System. But perhaps it is more like the clever commenter said over on the flickr page with the Google Base screenshot: "All your base are belong to us."

There are more screenshots of Google Base on seweso’s blog, a guy who happened to call this one a while ago. Good prediction! And Google Blogoscoped has even more info gathered from screenshots too.

I just read that, earlier this month, MSN Messenger had doubled the buddy capacity, now allowing you to have up to 600 buddies. 600! Wow. I don’t think I have 100 on AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN combined. Just curious…how many buddies do you have?

Similar to Slide, FilmLoop is free software that gives you the power to create "loops" or join existing loops. "Loops" are strings of images that move across your desktop…in a loop! Changes to a loop automatically update on the desktops of everyone in your loop. So once, you and your friends and/or family are in a loop, you don’t have to do anything to see their new pictures. To add pictures to a loop, you just drag and drop. It’s sounds like fun, huh?  I personally don’t like giving up my desktop real estate to much of anything. Still, this is at least worth checking out. You have to be "on the list" to try it out (is everyone doing invite-only now?). But you, my friends, can download it here.

How long has it been since I’ve posted about Google? 3 days? Long enough! Digging through Google Labs, I found that Google has extensions for Firefox! There is the Google Toolbar, of course, but they also have a Google Suggest extension, which is fun. However, the coolest of the three is the Google Send to Phone extension. This extension lets you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone. So you could text message yourself a phone number, an address, or directions that you find on the Web. I’d probably just enter the phone number into my phone, but I could definitely use this extension for texting directions. I’m so good at getting lost! Maybe this can help me!

Oh, and while I was in Google Labs, I also found this — an article about GFS, or "Google File System," which is the file system they use for their vast storage needs. Techy, but fun.

In case you missed it, there’s a new web browser out there and it’s called Flock. If you read my previous post, then you may have gone to their homepage and signed up to be on their announce list; and if you were on the announce list, then you should have gotten an email recently with a download link to the developer preview. If you didn’t do all that, and you’re dying to check it out, comment here and I’ll share my login with you.

So, what’s the big deal about Flock? Well, it’s really different. Flock is an open source browser designed to be *the* browser for bloggers. Its bookmarks are integreted with del.icio.us, so bookmarked pages are automatically added to your account there. It has a blogging toolbar that allows you to drag and drop text from a website into your blog. There’s a flickr toolbar that lets you drag and drop flickr photos into your blog post. Digging, around, I see things that remind me a lot of Firefox. In fact, it looks like they have plans to support Firefox extensions and themes. I didn’t immediately see if it had tabbed browsing, but, yes, it does (thank god!) In fact, there is so much new and cool stuff, I couldn’t even list it all here. Install your own copy and comment with your favorite feature. Just keep in mind this is beta, so no whining about the broken stuff yet. Just be a good tester and submit the error to Flock.

What the heck is Gada.be? It’s a tag metasearch, which means it lets you find content based on social tags. Yeah. That really doesn’t explain it too well for the average Joe, does it? Well, let me explain in plain ol’ English what this all means.

Why Gada.be? (Italics are excerts from their site):

If you’ve ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it’s a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and PSPs. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With "gada.be," you insert the query *AS* the subdomain!

In plain English that means if you want to do a search for Halloween, you type "halloween.gada.be" and get a page of results.

Then, there’s having to visit several sites just to get the results you want. Often, this isn’t feasible when you’re on-the-go. Even when you’re sitting with a laptop or chained to a desktop, it’s still a time-consuming process. We all love the individual search services, so why not bring ‘em together? Okay, that’s what we did.

Again, in plain English, that means your results page has results from many of your favorite search engines, and the links are categorized by the search service. So you will have Yahoo! results, then Google results, then MSN results, etc., all on one page.

Moreover, we dynamically output OPML which you can turn around and import into your favorite news aggregator.

Now, that’s just handy!

For your reading enjoyment, the entire BlogMad newsletter email, including screenshots, is in the post continuation below. All your burning questions answered. Well, mostly…

Read the rest of this entry »

Google updated its privacy policy. Via Yahoo! News: The new policy, issued Friday, states that Google may use personal information to display customized content and advertising, develop new services and ensure that its network continues to function. The practices aren’t new but weren’t explicit before.And while the old policy says Google restricts access of such information to employees on a need-to-know basis, the new policy stresses that those individuals may be fired or criminally prosecuted for violations.Google also reorganized its disclosures, bringing to the top details on information collected for e-mail, personalized search and other newer services that require registration.

How comfortable are you with Google having personal info on you? Personally, I’m okay with it. As long as their motto is "don’t be evil," I think it will be fine. Seriously though, if targeted ads are what paid for my free 2 Gigs of email storage at Gmail, then bring on the targeted ads!