August 24, 2005
It is official.
You can log in to the service using any jabber-based client and your Gmail account. However, if you don’t use Google Talk’s Windows Client, you miss out on its voice capabilities:
They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world. Google Talk offers you:
* Choice: Get in touch how and when you want to–over email, IM or a call
* Quality: Talk through your computer but hear your friends as if they were in the same room
* Convenience: Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded into Google Talk so inviting or talking to your friends is just a click away
More information is available everywhere.
The plan is to become federated with Earthlink’s Vling and Sipphone’s Gizmo Project, as well as the possibility to federate with others in the future (for their telephony service in Google Talk.
Loading ...
August 23, 2005
Filed under:
funny — emad @ 3:00 pm
Tired of having telemarketers calling you, reading off of their script?
Not satisfied with how Jerry Seinfeld handled it?
“I’m sorry, I’m a little tied up now. Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later. Oh! You don’t like being called at home? Well, now you know how I feel.â€?
Well, you can do what most sane people do in the US and use the National Do Not Call Registry…or you could use the anti-telemarketing counterscript.
Loading ...
Filed under:
links — emad @ 2:33 pm
Cool Color perception demonstration.
Loading ...
I have added a new feature in the geocoding API.
You can now geocode (as well as get city information) based on your visitor’s IP address. The API can either look them up directly from their request or you can pass in an IP address to use.
More info at the API page.
To try it out, check out the virtual earth or google earth geourl sites and click on the “Guess by my IP Address” link.
Loading ...
August 22, 2005
Filed under:
search — emad @ 2:08 pm
Looks like Google will be developing a “communications tool.”
In an article in the NY Times:
Google executives say they plan to unveil on Wednesday a “communications tool” that is potentially a clear step beyond the company’s search-related business focus.
While executives would not disclose what the new software tool might be, Google has long been expected to introduce an instant messaging service to compete with services offered by America Online, Yahoo and MSN from Microsoft.
It is unclear what “communications tool” means but it might be an IM client. This has been speculated about for years and, given this article about the stickiness IM creates, it may not be such a surprise…then there is also the possibility of having Google’s free wireless network.
Guess we can only wait and see now. Speculation from paid content.
Loading ...
When Mark Cuban didn’t like NBA officiating for his Dallas Mavericks, he spoke out and incurred $1 million in fines, over time.
Most people saw it as a waste, but it seemed as if he believed it was a necessity to get his message across.
Well, this time, based on his investment in Icerocket, he is getting his message across about Google’s Blogger. He said they were “splogging” too much (allowing too much blog spam…many for SEO purposes).
What makes the problem particularly frustrating is that it doesnt cost anything to setup a blog on what is probably the most common blog host, blogger.com from Google. Its fast, its easy, its free and it can be automated…Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they dont seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs. Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel. Can we get some help on this Google ?…Googles problem with splog isnt just a blog search engine issue. Its an end user issue as well. No splog detection algorithms are going to be perfect. Not only do we miss splog, but we take out innocent victims along the way as well.
If you are an individual blogger whose blog is hosted on blogspot.com, every day the chances of you being excluded from icerocket.com’s, and other search engines’ indexes increases.
Being called out and probably concerned about user experience and concern by real users over not being indexed by many engines, Blogger seemed to respond with word verification and flagging.
Loading ...
Forbes covered the Eight Masters Of Information in which Barry Diller, chairman of the parent company for which I work, was listed as one of them.
Many people may have heard about IAC’s purchase of Ask Jeeves but I found this comment interesting from the forbes article:
Now many Diller-watchers believe he is about to complete his transformation from TV titan to Web mogul by peddling off Home Shopping Network, which IAC still owns, to archrival QVC, controlled by John Malone’s Liberty Media. Home Shopping could be worth $4.5 billion–a nice windfall for buying still more Web sites.
If these “watchers” were right, it kinda makes your mind start to wander and think about what he would want to purchase with that kind of money…lots of medium-to-small sites, a few larger properties, or one very big one…and why?
Loading ...
Filed under:
fyi — emad @ 12:34 pm
I’m interested in checking out the Flock web browser.
It sounds pretty interesting.
I’ve signed up to check it out.
Loading ...
August 19, 2005
Interested in Technorati’s take on their performance issues? How about info about what they crawl/parse blogs? Or how about their take on tags and how they’re used?
Check out this interesting post by Molly E. Holzschlag:
Technorati described the “Devil’s Triangle” for their performance issues…Technorati should feel free to contact me should they need help 
There is also a quick explanation on how they look for certain items within blogs (such as blogrolling). This is a side benefit of having only a handful (i.e. wordpress or Typepad) of blogging software available and their use of standards (i.e. XFN). There is also a quick description of the importance of tags and how it plays into traffic (SEO) versus relevance to your blog.
Loading ...
Ask is looking for people to join the NTP Pool.
Your computer must have a static IP address and a permanent internet connection. The required bandwidth is really low
I’ve already added my server. If you can, please add yours.
Loading ...
