For years now there have been gmail keyboard shortcuts. Finally enabled them. After 2 hours I can not wait to get more email so that I can handle it without reaching for the mouse. Extremely awesome.
Category: google
September 26th 2000 I started to count how many pages google had for specific terms. I am moving some data around, so while it was going by on a terminal window it caught my eye. Here some excerpts:
Peace
was: 6,290,000 today: 258,000,000 41x
War:
was: 16,000,000 today: 865,000,000 54x
Sex:
was: 24,200,000 today: 650,000,000 26x
Love:
was: 24,900,000 today: 1,500,000,000 60x
Apple:
was: 5,920,000 today: 342,000,000 57x
Microsoft:
was: 15,000,000 today: 503,000,000 33x
Linux:
was: 27,500,000 today: 301,000,000 11x
if you are a really good company then you can also outsave everybody. Just because you can, not because you need to.
Google had net profits of $1,480 million and spent not even 10% of that in Capex. Not bad.
Nicolas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid.
The question is provocative, the underlying mechanism interesting. His conclusions seem predictive and not very helpful I am afraid. Reading the title I hoped for the wrong article. One that would illuminate and much more interesting question: “How does google change the way we think”. It certainly does. I am amazed how quickly I find myself forgetting things. It was worrying at first. After all I make a living based on the application of knowledge. The foundation of knowledge was being able to remember things. I say was. And -actually- I think it is quiet ok.
The apparent loss of memory was frightening when I observed how I would google for things again and again. The nicest anecdote I mention frequently: Reading my own blog without noticing that I am fixing an issue following a recipe that I wrote myself.
Nowadays I think that my brain just realized that it is a waste of time to compete with the internet and google as it’s access if it comes to all those mundane details that make up my job. Once a decent phone book function comes along (be it as a book or function of the phones software) we quickly forget most numbers we used to be able to remember. Just how it goes.
Google mail seemed to have gotten a facelift a few weeks ago. But it also got more functionalities. Of the nice kind: I was working on an email exchange with a couple of people just now. While typing along there was all of a sudden a yellow message in the lower right corner. It informed me that somebody had added a message to the thread I was writing in. It’s this kind of helpful idea and feature that makes gmail the best mail app around these days. Very impressive.
Just got an email back that I had send. Or should we say that I supposedly sent. No, I have not switched to Windows and are victim of the usual malware. No I don’t think that just because somebody has put in my email address in the “From:” field that I have sent it. What just happened is much much scarier:
Only the tail of my email was what I sent. The start was spam. I send this email with gmail to somebody that uses SBC or pacbell and is pretty sure on a mac as well. If my email get mixed up with spam then they certainly have a hard time getting delivered.
Which is the scariest part of the whole story: I still assume that email works. I send something once, and if I don’t hear back then I do not bother people again. Which is a good way of communicating, as long god damn email works.
the slate sheds some interesting light on Copyright and why youTube might be in less trouble than everybody claimed.
the youTube founders came up with a ‘video’ for the occasion
“Two Kings came together” ?? wtf!
Honestly, I would rather not be in their shoes. Good for them that they cashed in like they did.
But not being a dork like they are: priceless.
It reminds of the “King of the World”.
Somehow the gluttening reference to royality is a sure way to make you disappear.
Didn’t google try their own video thing? If you have it, then you can pay 1.6 billion for making your own solution worse than the one coming out of a garage somewhere. The only problem is, that once you start doing this you loose the edge. Gmail was the last thing that google did that really worked. Search is still of amazing quality for them. Maps is decent,
but video they screwed up, and now they pay the equivalent of the GDP of Mongolia for their mistake. OK almost, that one is 1885 Millions.
google did a quick little game to let you add tags to images.
It’s actually quiet nice, since it seems to have a couple of innovative ideas and it does even work.