Software

I was staggered to read on TechCrunch that Yahoo! Mail has 250 million users while the much younger and rapidly growing Google Mail (beta) service currently has a paltry 51 million users in comparison. I wonder what proportion of these users, in these impressive headline (marketing) numbers, actively use the respective services on a daily basis. However, I was not surprised at Yahoo’s offer of ‘unlimited’ email storage which gets a cheap headline and was pretty inevitable. A tiny minority will gleefully claim they really need infinite storage and think of inventive ways to upload the entire contents of their PC to a server. Yahoo! will then ban them for uploading copyrighted material. ...

Extracted the shiny new Dell PC from the tall cupboard yesterday. Pretended this PC was for ‘homework only’, would solely use Google Docs and wouldn’t connect to the Interweb. Lasted two minutes before yielding and plugged in Linksys USB wireless card. Briefly marvelled at the quality of the flat screen, then downloaded drivers for Windows Vista, followed the instructions on the Linksys technical support site and successfully connected to the burgeoning wireless network first time. ...

Curiously, after reading about the Picasa upgrade, a related article about photo management software popped up in Google Reader, courtesy of Robert Scoble’s excellent link blog. Robert Scoble had published a couple of podcasts featuring a product demo and an interview with Gibu Thomas, CEO of Sharpcast. Sharpcast is yet another photo management software tool and appears to offer a number of advantages over Picasa: Unlimited free storage Automatic synchronisation between PC and Web albums Original images are preserved The unlimited storage seems too good to be true and is very useful because, at some point in the near future, I am likely to exceed Picasa’s storage limit unless Google follow suit. Secondly, if I ever edit an image or perform any housekeeping, I will have to manually replicate those changes to Picasa Web Albums. As I am very lazy, that is unlikely to happen. ...

Google have increased the amount of free storage to 1GB (previously 250MB) available at Picasa Web Albums. This means I can now backup all of my photos comfortably (854MB) in one place. If you have lots of photos of your cat, $500 upgrades the capacity to 250GB.

Like most people, I store information in many different places. Lots of data is stored directly on my work laptop while yet more data is stored on my computer at home. Mail folders Address book Text files Corporate blogs Presentations Word documents Intranet resources Whitepapers Web history RSS feeds Photos Music Even more data is stored on external servers Gmail Blinklist Web site, blogs and mySQL databases at Bluehost Post-it on fridge Mobile phone Palm PDA My head (last resort) I first used Google Desktop a couple of years ago when it was first launched. Back then, the ongoing indexing process seemed to add a unreasonable load on my laptop, so I decided to uninstall the program and revert to old-fashioned searching in Windows Explorer and Outlook (and now Thunderbird). ...

Darren Prowse kicked off an interesting discussion asking what makes you unsubscribe from a feed. This prompted me to revisit my list of my inactive blogs in Google Reader. Normally, I tend to leave most blogs intact because I don’t religiously unsubscribe purely because an author hasn’t posted in a while. However, I find it useful to occasionally check the status of sleeping blogs to see whether the feed has actually died or migrated elsewhere and prune my subscription list accordingly. ...

This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donncha’s blog and awarding the article a (Gold) ‘Star’ in Google Reader. But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to ‘Friends/Ex Colleagues’. ...

Throw away that Mavis Beacon touch typing CD. This hilarious video shows that speech recognition is the key to (not so) rapid application development. Reminds me of working in tech support and the torture of spelling out Unix commands over the phone to customers.

‘OK. OK. I give in. Please stop hurting me, Brin. I now realise that resistance is futile.’ ‘Look I did what you asked. I have now converted to Google Reader. Please, no more. I will do anything you want. Please, Sergey - let my wife go.’ Even my son (newly hired Google enforcer) has now installed Google Desktop and is busy indexing the entire contents of the PC. Just about the only remaining product in the Google portfolio I don’t use is Adsense. ...

I am a big fan of Netvibes but also follow the ongoing development of Google Reader with interest. Increasingly, I find myself tempted to convert to Reader permanently. Speed - Google Reader has a set of keyboard shortcuts that make scanning a large number of feeds quick. Really quick. While Netvibes also offers keyboard shortcuts, out of habit, I tend to use mouse-clicks to navigate between tabs and articles. Flexibility - You can read related blogs that are grouped together (e.g. Oracle, Wordpress), read an individual blog or quickly skim over a river of news. Sharing - Occasionally, I want to save an article for future reference or potentially sharing with others. These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn’t necessarily blog about. The most obvious place to mark these items is right here in the RSS reader as opposed to a static bookmark. The list should (obviously) be visible as an RSS feed. Google’s shared and starred items make this easy (single keystroke). Flexible interface - I really like the full screen mode and the options for ’list view’ where articles are condensed apart from the current article and ’expanded view’ (all articles are expanded). Statistics - I can’t decide whether the trends page about your personal reading habits may actually be useful or just a gimmick. Here’s a Flickr set of annotated screenshots to illustrate the functionality in Google Reader and the flexibility of the interface. I think the recent addition of subscriber counts to Google Reader will show that Reader has a substantial and rapidly growing share of the RSS reader market. Stowe Boyd and Tom Raftery are already noting a Feedburner spike as a result. ...