Category: Google

I have a Windows Home Server Vision

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

While I’m not that concerned about offsite backup for my Window Home Server. The problem has been dealt with in detail by a few fellow beta testers.

Check out a detailed look at the problem here and a further look at setting up IDrive-E with WHS ( the chosen solution) here.

Now, it seems pretty clear that an offsite back-up solution is a gaping hole in Windows Home Server. This is the case for one of two reasons. Either Microsoft deliberately decided that it was not going to bother ( possible, but unlikely in my view). or Microsoft has something up its sleeves ( if not for this first release of WHS, then then for the next one).

Now entirely by coincidence (sarcasm intended), Microsoft announced a limited private beta of its Live Folders service.

At the moment its limited to 500Mb of storage.

What if Microsoft integrates the two services together (Live Folders +WHS)? I mean, think of it.

  • Your OS files don’t need to be uploaded since Microsoft already has the original files (Since you are using a Microsoft OS). Only the Changes need to be backed up.
  • Microsoft products like Visual Studio, Office and Flight Simulator ( all three are the largest installed programs on my PC) don’t need to go since Microsoft already has the original files
  • This leaves us with your personal files. Once all your stuff is up, only changes need to be moved, making it much faster.

Once 20 Million households (the current MS estimate for the WHS market) all upload their data, Microsoft can literally organize the worlds data far more conveniently than Google.

Not that I’m being alarmist, but its a scary thought.

I can see Google coming out with a similar app, but in the form of a Universal Binary to reach a cross-platform audience (case in point – a friend of mine mistakenly reformatted a UNIX drive. WHS could not have been used to recover lost data. Any suggestions on recovering the data on the drive?).

In closing, Mary Jo Foley says, ominously:

Software+Services (S+S) is Microsoft’s alternative to software-as-a-service (SaaS). Unlike Google, Salesforce.com and other pure-play Web 2.0 companies, Microsoft is making sure that there’s both a services and a software component to all of its products, going forward. That’s the crux of S+S.

Scoble, Facebook and Zoho

~ rbonini

I’ve just been reading Scoble’s latest post. Its a long rant about Facebook (and maybe Social networking in general).

Now I don’t use any Social Network (Gasp!Say its not So! 🙂 )and its mainly because I prefer handling my friendships the old fashioned way – face to face. Any contacts go either on my phone, Outlook (Another gasp!! Outlook? OUTLOOK??? 🙂 )or Gmail.

But that’s not the point of the post.Its abut contacts in general. Outlook doesn’t do any sort of tagging. Gmail has tags. But not to the degree that Scoble suggests:

Let me define different behaviors for each tag. “LOVER” tag might go into one page with a password, for instance, that isn’t publicly available. That way Maryam and I could use a social network to send sweet nothings back and forth (I can’t use any of these networks for THAT kind of social networking). “BUSINESS ASSOCIATE” could have a form that includes why I care about that person, business wise. So I could put Fred Wilson there, add that he’s a VC, add his blog, add his Twitter account, etc.

Which is pretty clever.

They say genius is lightning across the brain. And as I read the above paragraph, a tool to do the job jumped instantly to mind –Zoho Creator.

Raffic Aslam, of Zoho, left this comment to my last Zoho post:

Dear User,

Thanks for your compliments )

I hope you would have checked out our scripting language – Deluge, which helps users to build powerful applications easily. I request you to try out Deluge Script and share your valuable thoughts.

Check out Deluge Scripting Video here –
http://static.zoho.com/creator/v2/collateral/delugescript/index.html

Thanks Again
~Raffic Aslam

 

The link is actually to a video of said scripting language in action, which you can view below (thanks to YouTube):

Its quite incredible. So this whole post is essentially a note to self reminding me to have a crack at this problem the next time I have a free afternoon. It’ll be more of a mashup than anything, but its a good idea to test Creator’s limits on.

Zoho Strikes Again

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

(via LifeHacker and Scoble’s link blog)

I’ve never seen something quite like this. I moonlight as an ASP.net Developer and this had me shaking my head in wonder:

Advice to Microsoft Corp. – buy Zoho before Google does (whatever the price, it’s worth it to beef up Microsoft’s web services). Imagine the power of Creator when merged with  SQL and Longhorn Server (err, Windows Server 2008), for example.

The Google PageRank

~ rbonini

This made me laugh:

Link Popularity vs. PageRank vs. Yoda

Not that I actually have an opinion on how to best rank webpages. To settle the debate, we’d have to see the actual algorithm that Google uses as well as gauge the ratio of legitimate links to pages (i.e. not from spam/link farms).

Not we’ll get to see the Google algorithm. The best idea is to come up with a comprehensive list of factors that influence a page’s popularity and usefulness that most people can reasonably agree on and write an open source version of the algorithm. As far as legitimate links are concerned, I haven’t the faintest.

What do you think?

Google Privacy Row – Roundup

~ rbonini

Since last night there’s ben a huge row over this report from Privacy International slamming Google over its user privacy policy/practices.

For a taster Mitch Ratcliffe has this to say:

Giving up our privacy for a little Web functionality and storage capacity is like handing over the mining rights to ancestral lands to the first guy who comes along with a better shovel

And he was responding to this :

It’s funny how they know so much about their horrible practices when they even admit Google didn’t respond to their request for information. Certainly that means their practices are the worst on the Internet.

Scoble weighed in by saying:

I was hoping this report was more factual than it looks cause we need to have a real conversation about privacy. If you read the privacy report you should read Danny’s blow-by-blow response to it.

That said, Google’s PR is really stinky. Google isn’t paying attention to what normal people think of it anymore and it’s getting a bad reputation because of that. I heard it slammed over and over again for street-level views on Google Maps and no one from Google responded in most of the mainstream talk shows I heard talking about it. They should have a full-court “feel good” initiative where they have normal everyday citizens come in and meet the engineers, and look at the privacy issues.

Danny Sullivan has a pretty good blow-by-blow account of the report (its a must read):

Overall, looking at just the performance of the best companies PI found shows that Google measures up well — and thus ranking it the worse simply doesn’t seem fair. But the bigger issue is that the report itself doesn’t appear to be as comprehensive or fully researched as it is billed.

Frankly, about the only thing saving Privacy International from many more companies or services being upset over this report is that they singled out Google as the worse. That’s almost guaranteed to make players like Microsoft and Yahoo shut their mouths and point at this silently as vindication they aren’t so bad.

To save itself, I’d like to see Google appoint a privacy czar, someone charged with, as I’ve suggested above, assuming the worst about the company and diligently working to ensure users have as much protection as possible.

All that said, Matt Cutts responds:

Google didn’t leak user queries

In this past year, AOL released millions of raw queries from hundreds of thousands of users. Within days, a journalist had determined the identity of an AOL user from the queries that AOL released. But AOL got a better grade than Google.

Google didn’t give millions of user queries to the Dept. of Justice

In 2005/2006, the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 different companies requesting users’ queries and other data. In fact, the original subpoena requested all queries done by users for two full months. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all gave some amount of users’ queries to the Department of Justice. Google fought that subpoena (full disclosure: I filed a declaration in that case). The judge sided with Google; no queries from Google users were given to the DOJ. But Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL got better grades in this report than Google.

Google will anonymize query logs

In March, Google announced that it would begin anonymizing its logs after 18-24 months. Google has continued to communicate on the issue, including a post on the Google blog in May discussing the reasoning behind that decision. In fact, we talk a lot about privacy, from blog posts to Op-Ed pieces in the Financial Times. To the best of my knowledge, no other major search engine has followed suit in a plan to anonymize user logs.

I Don’t think I can really add to all that. Other than the idea that Google is firewalking here. As soon as it makes I really, really clear what its policy is, in detail, and appoints a Privacy Czar, things may well quiet down. Google just has to get used to the idea that this is going to happen more often.

In the Name of Google….

~ rbonini

Shel Israel’s latest post had me metaphorically rolling on the floor with laughter:

1. If you ask God for enlightenment, you may never get an answer.  Google gives you one in just a few seconds.

2.  God may or may not help those who help themselves. But Google helps those who blog and blog often. Posting three times a day is likely to give you more quantifiable results than praying three times a day.

3. People seem to get into trouble when they start thinking their god is better or more powerful than other people’s gods. Google is even-handed.  it gives equally to all people who asks it the right question.

4. For an allegedly all-knowing being, some people seem to think it is important to flatter God all the time. Perhaps they think he/she/it is insecure. Google needs none of that. Like your mom and her homemade food, Google only requires that you visit now and then and you will be rewarded.

5. So far as I know, not a single person has ever been killed, or even assaulted, in Google’s name.

Quite right. Now, about Microsoft….

Desktop Search

~ rbonini

By spectacular accident today, both my keyboard and mouse died for some damned reason I still can’t figure out. Maybe it was the KVM switch? Maybe it was the tea that spilt over my desk and slowly dripped onto said switch?  In any case, I went out to buy a new keyboard and mouse since a headless desktop PC is effectively useless. While out shopping I picked up a new DVD drive to complement my other one that no longer plays DVD right. I got Nero Essentials 7 with it. I did a full install ( since I do have the drive space).

And lo and behold a desktop search box appears in my taskbar. Its called Nero Scout. I thought this was interesting since the Desktop Search space has already got Microsoft and Google bumping heads.

According to the Nero Website:

Nero Scout is a unique media database application that provides instant access to your media files from any Nero application, Windows Explorer, and many standard Windows applications.

Hmm… a media database???Right.

Now I can’t vouch for either of the the above mention desktop search programs since I haven’t used any of them yet (I do have Desktop Search installed on Windows home Server and Scout is still indexing), but this looks interesting. If it goes wrong, Scout has the potential to get really irritating.

Here’s hoping it goes right….

Two things I’d like Google to Do

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Just a short post while I’m thinking about this.

Number 1 – Integrate your winning search engine into Google Reader

The number of times I’ve read something and forget from which feed or when I read it is unbelievable. I have to go trawling though my feeds BY HAND!!!!! looking for it. Its a hit or miss affair with a less than 50% success rate. Very frustrating.

Thus I have to either post items to my Link blog ( you’ll see it in my side bar) or star it. Neither of which are substitutes for a good search facility.

It would do wonders for my blogging 🙂 !

Number 2 – Integrate Google Notebook into Google Reader

Again, a good tool for bloggers.

Right now I have a ton of stuff about Microsoft/aQuantive waiting to be blogged about. And it would do so much to help if the notes pointed to the original material instead of to Google Reader ( I use the Explorer extension to right click and add  the selection to my Notebook)

While we’re on the subject, Google might want to add a “Share” feature to post stuff from your Notebook to your shared Items feed. Its such a pain when you come across something worth sharing and its NOT in Google Reader

(this is turning into more than two things, but hey, I’m helping improve things)

Number 3 – Make it easy for bloggers NOT on Blogger to work with Google Reader

But this I mean the “Add to Google” button that bloggers use. Mine either flat disappears or doesn’t work. And I can’t remember the page where you get them from ( I DO remember that it took me an age to find in the first place).

Secondly, work with other blogging engine to get them to allow users to add a clip of their shared items to their blog. My solution at the moment isn’t nearly as good as what Google provides via JavaScript ( making it impossible to add to WordPress).

Number 4 – Allow us to see how many people subscribe to our shared items feed

For no reason than this would be really cool.

In fact, this plays into Google’s hands. the more people add an items to their link blog, the more popular the item is. And the more people subscribe to a link blog, the more authority  that link blog has, thus helping Google better rank items shared. In short, its the RSS/Atom version of their PageRank system.

Update 1:

Maybe Google should make a new acquisition:

Joke apart, Google Notebook is really an online yellow sticky, while Zoho’s Notebook is a full-featured multimedia application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily, be it text, database, spreadsheet, image, drawings, audio, video – you name it.  The only thing the two “Notebooks” share is the name, otherwise they simply play in different leagues.  I tend to agree with Read/WriteWeb:  “Zoho Notebook offered different things than Microsoft OneNote and more things than Google Notebook.“

Advertising

~ rbonini

From Tim O’Reilly’s Post What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?:

When you put together all the possibilities for the future of advertising, you realize how little we’ve seen yet as digital life truly spreads beyond the computer and becomes pervasive. As digital display surfaces proliferate, so too will portable sensors (and your cell phone is becoming one of those) and controllers (your cell phone is becoming one of those as well). As David warns, we’re going to need some public discourse about how much is enough. But there are also going to be huge opportunities for companies to do what Google did with its early, uncompromising stand on relevant contextual advertising rather than blaring display ads, and to find ways to use those new digital environments in a way that is consumer-friendly and ultimately empowering.

Just take a look at the way Youtube has just added Ad’s (take alook here as well).

I think Youtube has taken the path of least resistance when it comes to ads. I’d keep an eye out for the whole idea of the user choosing to watch the commercial  changing once people have gotten used to the idea. And on that note, I’d like to repeat what Tim said:

we’re going to need some public discourse about how much is enough