If you have a google account and allow Google to record your searches you can go to google.com/searchhistory/trends to view your own search trends. Interesting stuff though not wholly accurate as my top queries seem a bit wrong and I can’t ever remember searching for Teen Tigers (a porn site it turns out.)
Quintura is an interesting search tool. You enter in a word or phrase and it then clusters related words around it. e.g. Enter in Ruby and you get Rails (as in Ruby on Rails) as well as ruby the precious gem. In this case I wanted Ruby on Rails so I clicked Rails and now my phrase is Ruby Rails and any related words to that phrase are then shown. You can then hover over these words and further relations are shown.
The bit that I really liked was that Quintura doesn’t reinvent the search engine. It works off of your favourite one, be it Google, Yahoo! or a host of others.
The UI is slick and easy to use. Results are returned quickly. Installation was a breeze and overall it feels like a professional application.
I’d like to see a web-based version of this, something that sits inside my browser which would make following result links easier.
Nat on O’Reilly Radar does it again, this time explaining GData from Google in terms I get:
GData is just Atom/RSS for reading, Atom Publishing for writing, and A9 stored queries for searching.
Interestingly:
There’s a huge move within Google away from SOAP and even REST-style ad hoc APIs and towards GData instead.
and
They’re building APIs to your Google-stored data via GData
Lastely the architect of GData is the same chap who did Microsoft’s HailStorm.
I got invited to Google for Domains yesterday and have switched over to it. It offers you a GMail and Google Calendar instance for your domain. So I own the domain paulmwatson.com and can create multiple email accounts for it e.g. paul@paulmwatson.com. That will then have a login to a GMail interface and a GCal interface. This is just what I have been wanting for as I have had to forward mail to my GMail account which was a bit of a kludge.
The setup was dead easy, simply requiring my domain to have its MX records pointed at Google. You then get an admin account which lets you manage the domain, add email users and even create mailing lists. You can also customise it with your own logo (see the screenshot above.)
Even more brilliant is you get your own GTalk/Jabber system with this. So I can now have my GTalk address as paul@paulmwatson.com. No more paulmwatson@gmail.com
Couple problems though:
A small but nice feature would be a custom CSS file.
Something else I’d like to see is a link between my paulmwatson@gmail.com Google Account and my domain, even if it just links to paul@paulmwatson.com.
It is a good system though and I will be glad to remove the GMail forwarding headers from my emails.
You can share my Google Calendar with this URL or add me to your calendar using paulmwatson@gmail.com. Or view it online.
Google Checkout has launched and I like it. It is not a direct PayPal competitor as some suggested but instead provides a checkout system for online stores and central place to store payment and delivery details for shoppers. Effectively Amazon could outsource their checkout steps to Google. You could then use your Google Account to buy products from Amazon.
This idea has been floated before but the problem was one of reputation. Google though just may have the reputation to make the idea finally work.
Derek Lakin also made a good point about Froogle. With just one more component (an order-placing system from Google to the store) we could buy directly through Froogle without ever going to the stores website. Google would aggregate multiple store products, show them through the flexible Froogle interface and let you buy through Google Checkout. A common ecommerce interface.
UPDATE
And in another move Google has half-launched Google Account Authentication which is easily described as Microsoft Passport by Google. It isn’t quite the same and Google isn’t even saying it is (they say it is just for add-on functionality to their existing services like GCal and GMail) but you can be sure some sites will use it like Passport. IrishEyes broke the news to me.
How does one associate more than one email address with a Google Calendar? Can you?
The boss sent me a Google Calendar meeting request but sent it to my pwatson@tssg.org email account. However I am registered with paulmwatson@gmail.com on GCal. So when I try and accept the meeting request Google does not tie it up to my main calendar but instead asks me to register a new Google account.
All a bit confusing. I’d like for GCal to simply add to one calendar any meeting requests sent to a range of email addresses I control.
Google have released a browser synchroniser extension for Firefox. I was thrilled to read about it and quickly installed the extension. The idea is you install the extension on multiple computers and your settings are saved with your Google account. Then whenever you swap computers your Firefox settings will follow.
Sadly it is not quite all that I was expecting. It only syncs cookies, saved passwords, bookmarks, your history and tabs/windows. Synchronising cookies is useful as is saved passwords. But of the people who will use this extension how many still use bookmarks as opposed to delicious or BlinkList? I haven’t bookmarked a site in Firefox in ages. The history sync is useful for some but now that I am using the Attention Trust Recorder it is not going to change my life. The tabs/windows restorer sounds great but doesn’t work half as well as SessionSaver (it really only reloads the URL. SessionSaver will restore the state of the page including field values, tab history etc.)
So all in all not terribly useful. Not yet at least. I’d like to see Google extend the syncher to include extensions, themes, browser settings and layout. If they did that it would be a very useful tool indeed.
Google Spreadsheets is out in invite-only beta. While Techcrunch may not think much of it I think it is another example of Google hitting the right mark. I don’t use spreadsheets much but the ones I have tried online have been a bit clunky at best. Some are too complex while others are a bunch of table tags and a save button. GSpread (my name, awful isn’t it :-D) is much like Google Calendar in that it offers up the core features, some clever background functionality and a usable interface. You don’t have to be a whiz to use it but you won’t be limited either.
For friends, family, co-workers and the mentally insane* you can view my calendar on Google by adding paulmwatson@gmail.com.
* You have to be insane to want to stalk me. You’ll have more fun following a malva pudding.
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