Thanks to everyone commenting in the Google Wishlist thread. I’m illustrating a wish below. All screenshots shown in this post are my mockups & all descriptions are hypothetical, and any similarity to actual products, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

What’s Google Drive?

Google Drive (not to be confused with Google’s existing internal Gdrive project, code-named Platypus) is a web application to allow Google users – those with a Google account – to store their files, accessible everywhere. Let’s hand out 100 Gigabytes for starters, just to have some wow factor like when Gmail was released (and like Gmail, Google Drive ought to start out as invite-only Beta).

Other potential product names for this service are e.g. Gdrive, Google Files, Gfiles, Google Store, Google Zone, Google Data, Gvault, G:\, or Google Storage.

The main screen

After logging into Google Drive with your Google Account – the same user name and password used in e.g. Gmail – you’ll see a folder pane to the left, a file view to the right, a search box on top and some ads below.

The folder system

Google Drive can reuse the concepts of Windows Explorer, but bring the whole cabundle to the web. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, as people are already used to this interface, so they will have an easy time understanding the concept of this new tool. You can expand and collapse folders, open a folder and its contents, and upload new stuff to it, and view this stuff online (or offline, by downloading it again).

Folders come in three security flavors: shared with the world (the people icon), private (the keys icon), and shared with a group of invited friends (the people + keys icon). By default, everything is private, so it can only be accessed via your Google Account. (When someone hacks your password, you’re in even more trouble than before!)

Additionally, there’s a section for Google system folders. These are not user-created, but automatically filled by Google. For example, when you have a Blogspot blog and you create a new post, a new sub-folder will be added to your “Google services/Blogger/” directory. This new folder will contain all the post’s images as well as the content of the post as Rich Text file. The same for a Picasa Web Album (Picasa is likely called “Photos” by then), or your Gmails, and so on. The neat thing is that you will thus be able to backup all of your Google data – or parts of it – by hitting the “download folder” link below any opened folder. And of course, you will now finally be able to search for all your data stored across the different Google web applications you use.

Note that the Google system folder itself cannot be edited – neither its contents, nor its security settings – and files in it will be automatically linked to your Google data elsewhere. So as soon as you edit an older blog post, it will also be changed in this folder. Also, the Google system folder will count against your 100 Gigabyte free storage space, though individual other Google services will now have no more (specific) storage limitations on their own... meaning you can have e.g. 55 Gigabytes of Gmail data if you want, as long as there are 55 Gigabytes left on your Google Drive.

Handling files

When you open a folder, you’re presented with a list of the latest 10 or so files in it. You can then select a bunch of files to apply actions to them, like deleting, copying, moving and so on. You can also star files to better remember them, or tag/ label files with keywords like “work,” “fun,” “horse riding” and so on.

When you click on a file, you’re presented with a couple of options, like:

• View this file online, e.g. a Word document can be opened in Google Docs & Spreadsheets (this will open in a new window, which has a permalink you can share with others, if the folder is public – the new window will include ads too, by the way)
• Download this file to your local PC

If the file-type is an image, then you will also be immediately presented with a larger version of the image upon clicking the file (additionally, images will contain a small preview in the files overview). An instant preview may also be available for other file-types, such as text, MP3, WMV, XLS, PDF or Rich Text.

Other information may be available for files as well, like its size in kilobytes, its Google’s virus check status, and if it’s shared, a “times viewed” statistic and a list of backlinks to the document.

There is a special mode for Google system files (that is, the stuff stored in your other Google applications): whenever you click on Google system file, you will be additionally offered to be taken to the source of the document, e.g. an email in your Gmail account, or the edit mode of your Blogger blog for a particular post.

Searching your data

The search feature on top of Google Drive is quite remarkable because it will not only find any file you uploaded (in split-seconds), but also search across your existing Google data. If you created a profile in Orkut, your profile and the list of your friend’s names will be found. When you wrote an email in Gmail, it too will be found. The same goes for your Google Base data, your search history (if enabled), your blog posts, your Google spreadsheets, descriptions of videos you uploaded to YouTube, your Google Talk history, names of gadgets you included on your personalized Homepage, comments you wrote at Blogspot blogs of others (if you were logged-in to your Google Account at the time), your Google Checkout payment history and details, and so on.

The advanced search options on the other hand allow you to specifiy exactly what you’re looking for. You can search for documents that were recently changed, or search through your non-Google-system files only, or search for images only, or search for stuff you shared only, and so on.

Users in China, by the way, thanks to a Google self-censorship feature, will not be able to search their Google Drive for certain sensitive terms, like “human rights” or “falun gong” (neither will they be able to store files containing such terms on drive.google.cn). Google will argue that censoring Google Drive compromises their mission, but that failing to offer storage at all to a fifth of the world’s population does so far more severely. Other countries may have similar options built into Google Drive, depending on what is illegal or unwanted locally.

Uploading files, and making backups

Whenever you open a folder, you’ll see an “upload” button below. Clicking it will allow you to select a file from your local PC, e.g. a PDF, and upload it. There may also be import filters, say for all files hosted on an external website. Additionally, Google will offer you a synchronization tool – standalone, and as part of the Google Desktop suite – so you can opt to automate the folder creation/ updating process.

You can not only upload files, but download them as well, of course. When you hit “download,” a ZIP file download process is initiated. This ZIP will contain all files (and sub-folders/ sub-files) in this specific folder. Backing up all of your Gmail emails, for example, is now the same process as backing up your Blogspot blog, which is great because you don’t have to learn about specific backup procedures. And because “Google services” is a folder in itself, you can pretty much backup your whole Google OS with a single click. Also, using the Google Drive Synchronize tool, you can automate this process (e.g. set the synchronizer to download/ upload your data every 24 hours – when your computer is on, that is).

Now, the backup feature is not just a nice argument to convince people to use Google Drive. All of a sudden, all kinds of Google-connected applications will suddenly become more valuable for users, because there’s less of a lock-in. Ironically, this cross-integration has some interesting “Google monopoly” implications, because people will go like this:

<<"I want to start my first blog. Which should I use, Blogspot or TypePad?”
“TypePad has cooler features, but you better go for Blogspot... it’s integrated into your Google Drive.">>

I’m not saying TypePad is superior or inferior to Blogspot, but you get the point – with the release of a true Google Drive, all other web application competitors suddenly have “incompatible file formats" for the Google OS, making their services less useful!

Related advertisement

We can’t expect Google Drive to give away all that storage and service for free, right? The ads will be how Google makes money from this service. As opposed to traditional ad banners, these ads will be targeted to whatever files and folders you’re currently looking at. If your file is called “my-web-host-terms-of-service.txt”, then the ad below may read “$1.99 Domain Registration”.

Just like it happened with Gmail back then, some people will misunderstand this feature and be scared of it: “How does Google know the contents of my private files?" The answer is that as soon as you upload anything to Google Drive, it will of course have to be transferred to Google’s servers, so technically every Google employee with access will be able to read your files. On the other hand, Google’s incentive is not to spy on you, but make money from you, and their ads are targeted completely automated, so it’s nothing to be scared of provided you trust Google... and provided you trust your government, as they may be able to query Google for your private data behind your back (e.g. in the US).

Integration into other Google applications

Google Drive extends the scope of just that single website drive.google.com (or whichever sub-domain it will be). Because now, whenever Google offers to you upload something – say, you hit “add attachment” in Gmail – you will now get two choices from where to take the file... from your local drive, or from your Google Drive. This means when you store something in Google Drive, you can can access the resource from within a variety of Google products.

The nice thing about picking files from your Google Drive for “uploading” is that as the file is already on Google’s server, you don’t have to wait for the upload time to progress. Uploading a video to YouTube will be a matter of a second if you previously already uploaded it to Google Video (because you can access your Google system folder using Google Drive). Google just has to handle sharing local resources among its servers, and you don’t need to transmit any data... as long as you stay on the Google OS, that is.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google has updated their Google Images search result output a while ago. Here's a piece of PHP5 that screen-scrapes the result for your personal use (check Google's robots.txt if in doubt). This sample search engine grabs an array of Google image results using the getGoogleImages() function, and then outputs it again on a blank page; it will allow you to right-click a particular thumbnail to zoom into its full size, just to illustrate how you can use the different result properties:

<?
header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Get Images</title>
</head>
<body>

<?

$results = getGoogleImages('horses');
foreach ($results as $result) {
    echo '<p><a href="' . htmlentities($result['url']) . '">' .
            '<img src="' . htmlentities($result['thumbnail']) . '" alt="" ' .
            'oncontextmenu="this.src='' . htmlentities($result['image']) . '';return false;" ' .
            'style="border: 1px solid black" /></a><br />' .
            '<em>' . htmlentities($result['description']) . '</em>' .
            '</p>';
}

?>

</body>
</html><?

function getGoogleImages($q, $doSafeSearch = false)
{
    $results = array();

    $safe = ($doSafeSearch) ? 'on' : 'off';
    $url = 'http://images.google.com/images?safe=' . $safe .
            '&q=' . urlencode($q);
    $result = file_get_contents($url);

    $from = 'dyn.Img("';
    $startPos = strPos($result, $from);
    $endPos = strPos($result, ');dyn.updateStatus');
    $functions = substr( $result, $startPos + strlen($from), $endPos );
    $functions = explode('");dyn.Img("', $functions);

    foreach ($functions as $f) {
        $i = count($results);
        list($results[$i]['url'], $v1, $hash,
                $results[$i]['image'],
                $results[$i]['width'], $results[$i]['height'],
                $results[$i]['description'],
                $v2, $v3, $more, $extension, $domain) = explode('","', $f);
        list($results[$i]['url'], $params) = explode('&h', $results[$i]['url']);

        $prefix = 'http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:';
        $results[$i]['thumbnail'] = $prefix . $hash . ':' . $results[$i]['image'];
        $results[$i]['description'] = strip_tags($results[$i]['description']);
    }

    return $results;
}

?>

Instead of "normal" images, the Google HTML output delivers image information in the JavaScript portion. The nice thing is that it's very easy to split this up, because it's already in very structured format. So above, we can easily explode the string into its sub parts like description, original page URL, thumbnail and so on.

Feel free to run with the code, or see its output on a sample page.

Yahoo offers an actual API for image search. (Note that Yahoo image results contain a high quantity of unrelated adult images, though.)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Web design blog Bittbox has revealed the secret trick to find the best web freebies: Google + social sites.

Yep, it's true - you can find the best of the best out there just by aiming the "site:" operator at most any active social bookmarking site. For example, say you're looking for good WordPress templates. You could try this search string:

site:digg.com "wordpress templates" or site:

You're going to come back with some pretty good stuff this way for the most part, and since most sites search functions ain't that great, it's also a good option for unearthing the stuff you might not have otherwise. — Wendy Boswell

Gtalkr is a web-based IM client that communicates with the Google Talk service. There are a couple of things that stand out about Gtalkr aside from that fact that it's web-based. First, it incorporates indexing and searching of conversations. Second, Gtalkr is an IM client at heart, but it's meant to tie into other webservices such as Yahoo! maps. The Yahoo! maps example doesn't integrate into the presence and messaging infrastructure at the moment, but the capability is there. Flash developers will be able to add their own extensions that can make use of our and Google's infrastructure.

Above is a prime example of (search) power abuse: Ask.com integrated their anti-Google ad campaign “Information Revolution” right into their results, by showing a man on puppet strings when you searched for “google”, urging users to “use different sources to get information.” What were they thinking? That showing the world they abuse their search results by playing tricks on users somehow increases faith in their product? The only thing that will do that are better search results, and right now – as nice as it would be to have another equal competitor – Ask is simply playing in a different league than Google and Yahoo.

Now, Ask isn’t the first search engine to attack competition, or pimp their products, in their search results. Yahoo was once showing a Yahoo ad when you used them to search for “Google”. So did Microsoft at MSN. And a while ago, Google also abused their special results system “onebox" for often unrelated product links, but they reacted on user feedback and removed those links shortly after launch. Maybe Ask also already learned their lesson, because the puppet on a string above seems to be removed by now. Opinions of search engine makers are better left to their respective company blogs, where we expect editorials – on result pages, users have come to expect neutrality.

[Via Matt Cutts. Image Creative-Commons-licensed by Danny Sullivan.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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If you read my blog, you know I’m a Google Reader fan. Reader is pretty good with podcast feeds, because it lets you play the podcast right there in the browser.

But that’s not how I like to get my fix of the Daily SearchCast. I like to listen to Danny Sullivan and his co-host du jour in my car during my daily commute. To make that happen, I use Juice, which is a really nice program to save podcasts on your local hard drive. I’ve only used it on Windows, but it’s open-source (and written in Python!), so there are downloads for Mac and Linux as well.

Juice’s interface is clean, if not 100% intuitive. But the program gets the job done well. I made a directory called “Podcasts,” set Juice to download into that directory, and added the feed for the SearchCast to Juice. That’s it — it’s pretty much set and forget. You can set Juice to always run in the background, so it will check for new podcasts and download them when a new file is available.

When I’m ready to fill up with podcasts again, it’s literally less than a minute to walk away chock full of good stuff to listen to. My computer has a card reader, so when I’m ready for more podcasts for my drive into work, I pop an SD card directly into the card reader, copy all the previously downloaded podcasts onto the SD card, and remove the card. If you want to save your podcasts to one computer, I definitely recommend that you give Juice a try.

P.S. I got a chance to be a first-time co-host with Danny on the February 26th, 2007 SearchCast. I promise that I was much less snarky on that podcast, and even complimented Yahoo’s movie shortcuts.

This post has a snarkiness level of 6 out of 10. If your body can’t handle me being snarky on rare occasions, you should leave now. Because I noticed a few interesting non-Google tidbits in search news this week.

Barry found a claim that if you participate in Yahoo’s premium pay-for-inclusion program (say that five times fast), you get to submit your choice of “Quick Links” for your site’s listing in Yahoo’s organic search results. I haven’t seen an official confirmation from Yahoo about whether this is true.

Meanwhile, John Battelle uncovered a Microsoft offer for companies to install a browser helper object (BHO) on company computers to measure search usage, and Microsoft will offer service credits for deployment and training services from Microsoft:

Moderate and high promotions include “In-house training session on ‘how to get the most from web search’ using Windows Live Search,” “Remove all existing toolbars,” “Set Homepage to Live Search,” and “Email message of encouragement from CEO.” IE 7 is mandatory for the program, as one might expect.

The program has been confirmed by Microsoft.

What else? I feel the need to include something about Ask. Ah, here’s something. Ask funded an “information revolution” campaign. The site was advertised in the London Tube, for example, but going to information-revolution.org didn’t initially reveal who was behind the site. Well, a few people dug into it and the site was quickly tied to Ask in a variety of ways. The company behind the site wasn’t that big of a secret, because going to the UK version of Ask and searching for Google would show you a link to the information-revolution.org site, complete with a man on puppet strings, before a searcher would get any information or links about Google:

(That done-by-hand widget in Ask’s search results is called a Smart Answer. Ask appears to have pulled their “puppet” Smart Answer, so I’m using the image from Danny’s write-up.)

I can guess what a few people are saying: “Matt, why would this surprise me? I mean, the previous Ask ad campaign called me a monkey for not using them, right? So this seems like an improvement. Is there some additional, ironic twist that would make this more compelling?”

Okay, I’ve been waiting for someone else to notice this, but it’s been several days now, so I guess I’ll have to be the snarky one. The whole point of information-revolution.org is to remind people to try out other search engines, right? Well, I decided to see how well Ask had indexed its own ad campaign site. First, let’s see how Google did:

19 results. The domain only has a few pages, so that looks about right to me. Ask keeps pressing everyone to try them, so let’s try the same search on Ask:

Doh! Ask doesn’t have even a single page from its own ad campaign site, and Google indexes the “information revolution” much better than Ask does. So this entire advertising campaign puts Ask in an awkward position:
- If Ask crawls the domain now, it’s open to questions of search favoritism, e.g. “Did Ask do any special crawling for information-revolution.org that other webmasters don’t get?”
- If Ask doesn’t crawl the domain, the whole campaign may collapse in self-referential irony. Every time you see a TV commercial urging “search sleepers” to wake up or posters advertising the revolution, people may instead chat about how Ask did worse than most competitors on the domain that it created (Yahoo had three results when I checked today and Live had zero results).

Personally, I’m just thankful that Ask dropped its “you are a puppet” Smart Answer when you search on Ask for Google.

P.S. Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone, including my colleagues at the Dublin office in Ireland. You get to experience the day in the right place. I hear that the best cure for snarkiness is some green beer.

Update: It turns out that Ask doesn’t support using the “site:” command just by itself — you have to add at least one additional word. I learn something new every day. Doing the search [site:information-revolution.org information] shows that Ask has one page from the site, but with kind of a weird snippet. Hmm. Uh oh. In fact, it looks like Ask has an older copy of the information-revolution.org root page, and there’s some pretty strange stuff in that copy. Here’s one snippet:

And another:

And another:

Jim or Gary, I think you’re going to want to ask about the first version of the site that the agency put up. The first version of the site looks pretty interesting, judging from the snippets above.

A couple search interviews you may not have caught the first time:

I enjoyed doing this interview with Richard MacManus. I still have an email interview with a blogger that I’m trying to finish that started in September 2006, so in general I decline trying to do email interviews these days. Just about the only way I can find time is if we sit down to talk and then transcribe it. Gord stopped by the Googleplex for this interview, for example.

There have been lots of other interesting search interviews going on, of course. I enjoyed seeing that Eric Enge and John Marshall spoke about click fraud in a half-hour podcast. Found via SEW.

Personally, I’d love to see someone interview Niels Provos, the creator of SpyBye. It’s a tool that helps webmasters spot malware on their site. You set spybye.org as your proxy and then as you click around on your website, the proxy will download your pages and scan the pages for viruses/malware using an open-source virus scanner. And if you don’t want to set spybye.org as your proxy, you can download and run your own copy. Another nice tool from the same fellow who did ScanSSH, which is a nice open-source tool for securing your network; it can check for SSH servers, open proxies, etc.

I try to be sparing with installing Firefox extensions. It’s easy to get install-crazy and the next time you look, FF isn’t stable and you’re not 100% sure why. But here’s something that I totally want: an extension that converts my currently-open tabs to a list of links.

Why? Well, I have weekend-full-tab-itis. I’ve been reading my Google Reader feeds and surfing this week, and now it’s Saturday morning. Lots happened this past week, and I’d enjoy talking about several of these topics, but it’s a hassle to convert them into links. Here’s what my currently-opened tabs looked like this morning:

As you can see, there’s a lot of good stuff there, but it would take forever to craft those links by hand. Anybody know of a tiny, robust Firefox extension that does this? Ideally, it would even allow a blacklist of domains not to convert into tabs. For example, I almost always have Gmail and Google Calendar open, but I don’t need those converted into links because typically I don’t want to blog about them.

Anyone know of a small extension that does this?

Update: One of my favorite extensions is MakeLink, by Rory Parle. I wonder if it might be possible to convince Rory to add a “Make all tabs into links” option into MakeLink? I guess it never hurts to ask.

Update: Wow, Rory stopped by in record time — thanks, and I heartily recommend MakeLink! It turns out that there’s a delightful extension to do exactly what I want called CopyAllUrls (thanks for mentioning this, AdamM). With a right-click, you can save all your tabs to the clipboard in a very flexible format. I wanted multiple lines that look like this:

<a href=”https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/934/”>Copy All Urls | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation</a>

To get that format of “tab to html” output, I tweaked the output options of the extension slightly. Here’s the settings I used to export tabs in the format that I wanted:

I clicked the “Copy only url” option and unselected the “Line break between entries” and “Copy tab history” options. Finally I set the actual format of the urls here:

I selected HTML markup and checked the box to use my own custom mark-up. For the url itself, you can do any format and there are variables you can use (smart, very smart). So I entered <a href=”$url”>$title</a> for my markup format. It only took a few seconds, and now when I’ve got too many tabs, I can copy all my tabs in a nice format that’s ready to paste into a WordPress textarea box. Nice.

Things like this are why I love the Firefox community so much. It makes me want to go donate moolah to people who write extensions. I just did for Jürgen R. Plasser for the CopyAllUrls add-on. I went looking for a donation link on Rory’s site for MakeLink and just now saw that he’s joining Google soon. Sweet! I’ll wait until Rory’s on-board in a few weeks; there are ways to show appreciation to fellow Googlers.

Did you know that more than 75% of people in the UK use just one search engine to find information? The same search engine. The biggest search engine. The most popular search engine. Why? It's not that there aren't choices, it just seems that most people don't use them.

You can imagine we were rather curious about this, so we did some research and found that 62% of Internet users don't think about which search engine they use. We call that sleep searching, you probably call it 'getting stuff online'.

But statistics aside, if this keeps up, who knows what could happen? One company could eventually be your only source of access to information on the Web! Controlling your mind would only be a step away! Then they'll have you. All too easy...

But this is 2007, not 1984. So we're speaking up before things get out of hand. Raging against the machine kind of thing. The machine of conventional wisdom if you like!

Google has been very busy on the acquisition front lately, it was revealed today. This afternoon, Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience, announced the acquisition of Gapminder's Trendalyzer software. Trendalyzer is a data display technology for creating data maps and moving visual representations of data.

Mayer was short on detail of how the Trendalyzer application would be incorporated into Google's offerings, but it seems likely that it will be used to enhance the reporting capabilities of Google Analytics, or possibly as an addition to Google Apps. Trendalyzer's developers, previously based in Sweden, are part of the deal, and will join Google's team in Mountain View.

Later in the day, Google confirmed the long-rumored acquisition of in-game advertising technology provider Adscape Media.

In a post on the Google blog, new "dean of games" Bernie Stolar shared the news that he and his team will join Google to continue building the technology. An FAQ provides the reasoning for the move:
"In-game advertising is an area where we believe Google could add a lot of value to users, advertisers and publishers. Adscape Media's technology and talented team are a great addition to Google's current advertising solutions for advertisers and publishers."

Google also sees great value in video game advertising, according to the FAQ:

"Over the past few years, the video game experience has become richer and more interactive. We think this rich environment is a perfect medium to deliver relevant, targeted advertising that ultimately benefits the user, the video game publisher and the advertiser."

The big G, not satisfied with a single acquisition announcement per day, also announced that they acquired Adscape. This deal was rumored for a while now; Adscape Media is the company tackling the niche of in-game advertisement (think AdSense at the walls of your favorite 3D shooter, I suppose!). Google provides a little FAQ regarding the acquisition. From the FAQ:

<<Q. Will the in-game ads continue to be integrated into the game or will they become text ads similar to AdSense format?
A. As this is a recent acquisition it is too early to say what the ads will look like. We will explore a variety of options to determine what is best for the advertiser and user.

Q. Given the dramatic growth of the gaming market in recent years, how much advertising market share does Google hope to gain from this acquisition, both immediately and over time?
A. We don’t release specific projections but we think there is great value in video game advertising. As more and more people spend time playing video games, we think we can create opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences while maintaining a high quality, engaging user experience. That said, we will test ways of successfully implementing this form of advertising and Infinity’s technology will be instrumental in those tests.>>

Uhm, “Infinity"?

Join the ongoing comments.

[Thanks Haochi!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

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The Download Squad weblog posts 11 useful tips and tricks for getting more from Yahoo! Mail. For example:

Navigate your inbox the quick way - Ctrl + Shift + Up Arrow or Down Arrow let you jump to messages in the same folder that have the same subject line. You can hit Ctrl + Shift + Alt + Up Arrow lets you choose another factor to filter on (such as flag) when using Ctrl + Shift to navigate.

Along with several other keyboard shortcuts, the tips describe methods for quickly adding new contacts and organizing your inbox. We're all pretty gaga for Gmail around these parts, but that doesn't mean Yahoo doesn't have a terrific offering of its own. If you're living the Yahoo life, these tips should help you add an extra dash of productivity to your inbox.

The GCensus web utility lets you download and overlay census information on top of Google Earth maps.

Just choose your data source (GCensus only maps population characteristics like race and age, but more info like income are likely to come), pick your location, download the .KML file, and dive in, you data junkie. Unfortunately GCensus currently only has information for California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, so in the meantime, others might want to check out previously mentioned Social Explorer. In time and with a bit more data, GCensus looks like a potentially excellent research tool. And, of course, it's fun. — Adam Pash

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Windows/Mac/Unix (Firefox): The GoogleTagCloudMaker Greasemonkey script adds a contextual tag cloud to your Google search results.

By analyzing the text of your results, the tag cloud gives you a little insight into your results. Hovering over each tag re-sorts your results by matches, and if you want to focus your results in the direction of one of the keyword tags, just click the tag to perform a new search with that keyword added.

While I'd prefer that the interface were cleaned up a bit, and I wish I had the option to expand or collapse the tag cloud whenever I wanted (collapsed by default would be nice), this is still an interesting idea, and it could come in handy to give a little more context when you're searching on a new topic. GoogleTagCloudMaker is a free download, works with Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension. — Adam Pash

Google just announced they’ve acquired Gapminder’s Trendalyzer, a software that (quote Gapminder) “unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations.” This Gapminder site already existed on Google’s servers for almost a year now.

Will Google use this acquisition to spice up Google Analytics (a product with low usability for Google’s standards)? For now, Trendalyzer’s developers “have left Gapminder to join Google in Mountain View, where Google intends to improve and scale up Trendalyzer, and make it freely available to those who seek access to statistics,” Stockholm-based Gapminder says, and Google adds that Trendalyzer “will improve any function or application in which data might be better visualized.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Yahoo is planning on launching a Chinese Language version of Flickr which will be targeted towards Chinese Internet users.

According to Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Flickr China will first launch to the Taiwanese and Hong Kong audiences and then expand into mainland China.

This of course, brings about the question of where the Chinese version(s) of Flickr will be hosted and whether or not there will be a separate Flickr for Taiwan and for China.

Cashmore adds that Flickr is not currently blocked in China, but the move of launching a Chinese language version could stir up the controvesy pot a bit:

Moving into China is sometimes controversial: will Yahoo be faced with the same dilemma as Google - trading morals for the huge money making opportunity of the Chinese market? And will China change its view on blocking Flickr when it realizes that the site is full of soft porn and provides open access to politically sensitive images?

If you’re looking for an alternative to homepage creation tools a la Google Page Creator, you might be interested to hear that Jimdo.com is now available in English (this startup is not from Silicon Valley, for a change, but from Hamburg, Germany). When you register with them they’ll provide you with a subdomain, like for my test, blogoscoped.jimdo.com. At the bottom of that page you will find a “login” link, and when you drop you password into it, the whole page will switch into a WYSIWYG editing mode.

The editing capabilities overall are quite good, though the usability has some way to go yet. For example, it’s very easy to edit text – just click on it, and a Rich Text box below it will offer you to change it – or change a picture. Or if you like to, you can switch the complete layout of the page with a couple of clicks right on the page itself.

However, I found some important buttons not striking enough to be noticed, and didn’t immediately figure out how to add a new images to the page (it’s the gray plus button that appears when you click on stuff, Jimdo’s Matthias told me). And sometimes you wonder why new editing elements are popping up, instead of the tool allowing you to type right where the text or image or headline is located.

As another example: the close button for dialogs is not included in the top right, but at the bottom, and it doesn’t have an “x”, but an arrow icon. When you’re going head to toes against Google, it’s small things like these which may make users turn away. However, what I really liked about Jimdo is the navigation concept. Google Page Creator lets you start out on a site manager, where you can manage your documents, perform certain actions on them, and so on. With Jimdo on the other hand, you are placed right on “your” homepage, and as long as you remember the login button below, it’s more easy to understand the process – it’s like a wiki in that regard.

Also, because Jimdo immediately creates a whole site structure for you, this may be an interesting tool to create a new homepage almost on the fly. On the other hand, as soon as you want to play around with the site structure, the Google Page Creator approach will be easier to handle. For example, in the editing tools I didn’t find an obvious way to delete the page I was editing at the moment (I’m sure there’s a way, and that way will probably be easy in retrospect).

All in all, an interesting tool, though I think it might face some rough times in the day and age of an all-encompassing “Google Account” (Google Page Creator is part of a web office suite if you will and not a standalone product, and that brings its own set of bonus features – yes, and some additional security problems – for users), and an age where most casual websites simply start out as a (Blogspot) blog instead of a traditional homepage.

[Thanks Matthias!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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MySpace enjoys an overwhelming 80.74% share of the ever-expanding social web (in the US) according to a report released by Hitwise this week.

The share of total Internet visits to the Top 20 Social Networking sites grew 11.5% from January to February 2007, leaving social networking with a total Internet marketshare of 6.5%.

MySpace and Facebook usage grew at around 10% for each property and according to the study, other niche social networks are also packing on the new users;

“While MySpace is still by far the dominant social networking website, sites like Buzznet and iMeem are succeeding in building communities around music and other media” said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise. “The social networking category will continue to grow as new sites emerge with unique offerings.”

Yahoo! is listed under Yahoo! 360, which enjoys a .72% share of the Social Networking space according to Hitwise, but with Yahoo! Answers now becoming a social network, with its 18 million US based users, I wonder how that will influence the new study.

Here are the Top 20 US Social Networking sites and their respected US market shares: