The Search Giant deserves its own category now.
What’s so great about Google+ Circles?
1 year ago
by Philip Cain
in Google
I think FB’s problem with lists was their approach. To them it was a privacy feature and like many of their privacy features it isn’t well communicated or implemented for the user.
Google seems to have this down. “You want to share something? Who do you want to share it with?” Done.
- Brent Mitchell, in a ChurchMag comment
Google Docs 404
5 years ago
by Philip Cain
in Google
That, my friends, is not a pretty site (pun intended). Google Docs and a 404 error. As of this post, I still can’t load it up.
Google Has Acquired YouTube
6 years ago
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special information update – Google just BOUGHT OUT YouTube for $1.65 billion. This is Google’s largest acquisition, and one of the largest Web 2.0 acquistions to date. Buy your Google stock now if you hadn’t already!!
YouTube is the most popular Internet video site, with more than 100 million videos watched a day, and Google’s own Google Video couldn’t even compete with that. Now it is assumed that YouTube and Google Video will merge content and features. This is BIG news, folks!
Update: That’s $1.65 billion IN STOCK, in other words, Google traded about 1.25% of its own shares for 100% of YouTube shares. And because such a massive deal is likely to make Google’s stock go up in value, they didn’t really even pay anything for the acquisition. Amazing!
Google Reader
6 years ago
I know I’ve already mentioned this in a few emails to certain people, but the word really needs to get out – the new Google Reader is awesome! I’ve been using Bloglines since 2004, patiently waiting for Google to release an RSS feed aggregator. When they finally did, the result was horrid. The first incarnation of Google Reader was difficult to use, as it utilized the coma-inducing river-of-news reading style.
(For questioning minds – What is an RSS feed?)
Long story short, I have continued to use Bloglines, patiently and faithfully awaiting the day when the Google Reader Team would wake up and smell the fresh feed juju. On Sept. 28, they finally did! And I finally switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. Now reading through my subscriptions list is similar in function (and as easy as) reading through Gmail (which functions as my email aggregator). If you feel out of touch or disconnected with the ever-increasing, ever-growing Internet (and its blogosphere), use your Google Account and sign in to Google Reader. Then start reading!
If you’re reading this on my site (and not in a reader), you’ll see a blogroll containing blogs of some interesting people. Here are some other sites I read daily (copy and paste feed URL into the “Add Subscription” box in Google Reader):
Tech News
Engadget – http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml
KDE Dot News – http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf
NewsForge – http://www.newsforge.com/index.rss
Slashdot – http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot
Wired News – http://www.wired.com/news_drop/netcenter/netcenter.rdf
Tech Blogs
Google Blog – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Lifehacker – http://www.lifehacker.com/index.xml
Planet GNOME – http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml
Planet Ubuntu – http://planet.ubuntulinux.org/rss20.xml
TechCrunch – http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch
Blogs
Boing Boing – http://boingboing.net/rss.xml
Pantano E-News (Pastors’ Blog) – http://www.pantanochristian.org/enews/rss.xml
PCC Creative Arts Blog – http://www.theworshipspotatpcc.org/TheWorshipSpotAtPCC.org/Blog/rss.xml
News
Arizona Daily Star – http://rss.azstarnet.com/index.php?site=metro
And don’t forget, this blog will always have an RSS feed – http://www.philipandjenny.com/feed
Writely.com: Amazing!
6 years ago
So…
I posted this from Writely.com, Google’s new web-based word processor, chock-full of AJAX goodness. Some features it has (and this is from me just using it in the last 5 minutes – I haven’t looked at the feature list yet):
- Upload Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org documents
- Save as Word, ODT, PDF, HTML, or publish to a blog – not just blogger.com, but several blog softwares are supported, including WordPress
- Real-time collaboration
- Automagic saving
- Support for 18 standard fonts
- Styles
- Tags (hey – they didn’t get the accursed Google “label”)
- Revision history
- World peace (okay, I made that one up)
I’ve already admonished Microsoft Word, and I still don’t like the clunk of OpenOffice.org Write. This is the answer to all my publishing problems. Now if only Google Spreadsheets worked well…
