the lake

great tip from brad fitzpatrick.

have i told you i'm a google bitch? here's the latest google thing i'm loving: protocol buffers.

not only this, but also i now have to click somewhere in the window to get "focus" after opening the page (google apps for your domain, but i don't remember it being any different from gmail, as joa~o implies) so it will catch the 'c' keystroke. whereas before i just cmd-tab'ed to safari, hit cmd-1 and c, now i'm forced to use the mouse, as a workaround for a bug.

well, at least we now have chat.

we've joined forces with twitter doesn't look like a big jaiku endorsement.

wow.

yesterday's news, but still.

just waiting to see if any of the usual pundits would retract from last week's irate posts... i better sit down and watch some movies.

all my questions were answered by this thread.

i wonder how that $15bn valuation is coming up.

a few days ago (last week?), google re-jiggled the pagerank algorithm, which caused a lot of major sites to tumble 2 or 3 points. most of the highly penalized sites were in blog networks doing a lot of cross-promotion (link exchanges in new clothes, basically).

the usual shouts were heard about the power of google, etc. etc. in portugal, particularly, paulo querido (who usually has a somewhat sane view of these things) whined about how that was simply unacceptable, and how google's shares would go down (they just hit $700 yesterday, btw) and how the world was mocking google and their stupid decisions. oh, and obviously microsoft 2.0 came up.

strangely, yesterday he posted a very reasonable article about anchor text. i wonder if he's been abducted by google and replaced by a googleserf.

the point is, what these link farms have been trying to do for years is to drive demand by controlling supply. we've all seen how well that works. never mind about the content, we'll just figure out how google works, engineer our sites so that they get a high pagerank and sell ad space. then google changes the way it works, and everyone whines about it.

so, to cut a long story short: if you've built a good readership base, they couldn't care less about your pagerank. if you depend on pagerank to sell ads and promote other sites, well, screw you, hippy. if you'd cared about content from the start, you wouldn't have a problem now.

p.s. i don't consider paulo's blog and the network it's in to be especially bad examples, i find the content on the whole to be more than satisfying. he just ticked me off because i was surprised at the tone of his initial posts, given his history and our conversations about this. i'm really laughing at the probloggers of the world.

dear google people,

please to be enabling imap in my domain. i will upgrade to a paid account the minute after.

kthxbai.

a day after the eu's 1st instance court upheld a commission decision to fine microsoft to the tune of $500m, google finishes its office suit (with the countdown to having gears working in gmail to provide an offline version of gmail - something it does perfectly in google reader and remember the milk, for instance) and ibm starts pushing something called lotus symphony (in fact, they prolly screwed it by tying it with that brand, but still) which is actually yet another iteration of openoffice. and sun made some noises last week or something. oh, and yahoo! bought zimbra.

now, google, yahoo! and sun (especially sun) might mean jack to joe bloggs in terms of software and personal computing. ibm? oh yes.

dear lazynet,

never having seen google desktop before, is there any reason to install it, given that i'm a heavy quicksilver user and occasionally use spotlight?

i can't see why google doesn't merge reader and mail together: your reader folders and subscriptions would merely be labels and everything would fit nicely in gmail. with the increasing number of people using feed-to-mail software these days, it's almost a no-brainer.

you can now choose a theme for your google personalised homepage.

see apple, now i won't be buying iwork when (and if) you bundle a spreadsheet. google spreadsheets has exactly what i need from excel. except it's faster and more easily accessible. way to go, google (and about time, too).

except outright lying.

so yesterday the world cried defeat for yahoo!, which conceded it.

a couple of weeks ago i had lunch with joão and among other musings, he talked about how it's better to be in second place: nobody ever burns down burger kings and you keep your employees motivated to get there. you get to go about your business without major disruptions or the world's eyes watching your every move.

case in point: google's kowtowing to china's government has been all over the web in the last couple of days, and today cnn and bbc spent the day airing their piece on it every 15 minutes. msn's closing a blog and yahoo! giving details about a user (who received a 10-year jail sentence because of that) were in the headlines for 5 minutes.

so, did yahoo! lose?

• google and rim announce google talk and google local for blackberry


• tello proposes to link business people with a mouse click. this one caught my eye because jeff pulver is involved.

i'm just posting this because rui is apparently offline. weird.

no maps for the uk, yet, only satellite. i'll stay with mgmaps. i also feel mgmaps is more intuitive to use than google mobile.

google reader (via joão)