Tag Archives | Google

Google Releases Google Voice App for BlackBerry and Android. Now Let’s Hope It Releases Google Voice.

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 15, 2009 at 12:08 pm

Google Voice LogoGoogle Voice just got more useful for BlackBerry and Android users: Google has released apps for both platforms that provide access to the service’s features. Sounds like the most significant aspect is that they make dialing outgoing calls using your Google Voice number a whole lot easier. (If you use your phone’s “real” number to call folks, they can use Caller ID to see the number and may add it to their address books, thereby making it a lot tougher to train the world to use your Google Voice number as your only phone number.)

Here’s a video from Google explaining the new apps:

iPhone users (like me) don’t have an app yet–we can access Google Voice from Safari, but only via a pretty basic interface. But over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington says that Google Voice’s Craig Walker told him that an iPhone app is in the works. Once it arrives,  I can try being All Google Voice, All the Time. (For business calls, that is–I’ll bet I’m not the only proprietor of a very small business who uses my phone-company phone number for personal calls, and my Google Voice number for work stuff.)

The most important remaining question about Google Voice remains the same: WHEN IS GOOGLE PLANNING TO OPEN UP THE SERVICE TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE WHO’D LIKE TO USE IT?!? Google still isn’t saying. But the fact that it’s rolling out these apps and steadily letting folks who requested invites months ago in is a good sign that the rest of world won’t have to wait forever. I hope. (I can’t think of another Web service that’s had such a high profile and received so many upgrades while remaining available only to a smalllish group of users.)

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Google Calendar Gets Its Own Labs

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 14, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Google LabsHas it only been thirteen months since Google introduced Gmail Labs? The warehouse of experimental features has become a defining aspect of Gmail’s personality, letting users pick and choose from dozens of features, including some that are utterly essential (like offline access) and some that are just plain weird (such as Mail Goggles, which aims to help you avoid sending drunken e-mail).

Today, Google Calendar is getting its own Labs. So far, it’s only got five features, and they skew towards the practical, not the wacky. You can display a wallpaper image behind your calendar; attach documents to appointments; view a world clock; jump to any date; see your next appointment; and see busy times for your colleagues.

If Google Calendar gets even a quarter of the Labs features that are in Gmail–the latter has nearly fifty at the moment–it’ll be a cool addition to what’s already one of Google’s cooler services. But a plea, in case anyone at Google is reading this: Please make Google Calendar’s Labs less of an undifferentiated heap than Gmail’s version. (These list of Gmail features you can turn on sits on one endless page, and is in no discernible order.)

Oh, and one piece of related news: Gmail’s Tasks manager, which is so useful that I forgot it was still technically an experiment, is now a standard Gmail feature. It had already migrated into Calendar.

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Is Google Apple…or Microsoft? Neither, I Hope!

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 11, 2009 at 6:53 pm

Your Potential. Our Passion.Google’s announcement of Chrome OS is causing observers to try and figure out which other gigantic tech company it most closely resemble. Brian Caufield of Forbes thinks that Google is “stealing” ideas from Apple, pointing out that both companies now make operating systems for PCs and phones, browsers, productivity suites, and e-mail, and bringing up the fact that Google CEO Eric Schmidt serves on Apple’s board.

I’m not convinced that Google is intentionally or unconsciously cribbing anything from Apple. In every case Caufield cites except browsers, Google’s products and Apple’s are wildly different. The two companies’ approaches to operating systems couldn’t be less similar: Apple’s OS is a rich, proprietary, decidedly traditional piece of software that’s available only on its own, premium-priced computers. Google’s Chrome OS is going to be a simple, open-source, Web-centric product that will show up on cheap netbooks from other companies, and Google plans to give it away. Remind me again exactly what part of this constitutes intellectual theft?

Beyond the fundamentally different personalities of the two companies–which Caufield does acknowledge–it’s also worth nothing that they seem to be steering clear of each other’s core businesses. Apple doesn’t do search; Google doesn’t sell music or video.

Then there’s Anil Dash’s comparison of Google to Microsoft. I can quibble with some of the examples he gives–he says that Google is focusing on Android at the expense of the iPhone, when in fact Google continues to produce some of the best iPhone apps and services of anybody. But the basic metaphor is apt, and worrisome–between Android and Chrome OS Chrome-the-browser and Google Apps and Knol and Wave and 11,342 other projects, Google is entering almost every market you can imagine it entering. So far, the results are more often good-to-excellent than disappointing. But there’s no way that Google can successfully be all things to all people indefinitely. (Lots of folks are excited about Wave, but it felt disturbingly Microsoftian to me.)

Of course, Google’s at its best when it’s reminiscent of neither Apple nor Microsoft, but is its own admirable self. May it continue to be really good at being Google for a long time to come…

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We Know Almost Nothing About Chrome OS

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 10, 2009 at 8:44 am

chromeosDaring Fireball’s John Gruber has an excellent post up on Chrome OS. He’s skeptical and critical. But most of all, he wants Google to put up or shut up: “I like facts, demos, and best of all, shipping products. I don’t like vague promises,” he says.

And that’s the thing about Chrome OS: Google announced it without telling the world enough to allow us to form coherent opinions about it. If it has a fresh, inventive, and useful interface, it’ll be a lot more interesting than if it’s a reduced-functionality knock-off of Windows or OS X. But we just don’t know. If it’s autonomous enough to stay useful even when you’re not connected, it’ll be a lot more interesting than if it’s crippled by the lack of an Internet connection. But we just don’t know. If Google intends to make it possible to install Chrome OS on a variety of hardware, it’ll be more interesting than if it only works on a handful of netbooks. But we just don’t know. And so on.

There’s no law that a company needs to wait to announce a product until it’s ready to discuss it in detail. Conspiracy theories abound about why Google started talking about Chrome OS when it did. I’m not hazarding any guesses about the timing. But I do know that the only bottom line on Chrome OS that makes much sense right now is “Well, it could be interesting.”

Oh, and another thing we just don’t know about Chrome OS: When Google plans to show it to us, rather than describe it in general terms…

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Google Maps Knows Where You Are

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 9, 2009 at 1:44 pm

Google Maps LogoOne of the nifty new features that debuted in Firefox 3.5 last week was support for the W3C Geolocation API Specification, a Web standard that can fake a GPS-like effect by using clues such as the Wi-Fi networks you’re near to figure out your location. The only problem was that the standard isn’t yet widely supported by the Web sites and services that could benefit from it.

Chicken, meet egg: Today, Google updated Google Maps to take advantage of Geolocation.  Click on a circle on a map, and Maps will do its best to determine where you are, saving you the time of typing in an address. (I almost never use hotel-room phones anymore, but still find them invaluable because they’re usually labeled with the hotel’s street address.)

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Google’s Chrome OS Security Claims: Idiotic?

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 9, 2009 at 11:37 am

Among the things that Google says about its upcoming Chrome OS is that it’s going to shine from a security standpoint:

And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

IDG News Service’s Grant Gross talked to security guru Bruce Schneier, who isn’t just skeptical about Google’s promises–he’s downright insulting:

Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer at BT, scoffed at Google’s promise. “It’s an idiotic claim,” Schneier wrote in an e-mail. “It was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible — not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible — to create an operating system that is immune to viruses.”

Like much of what Google has said about Chrome OS so far, its claims about security are pretty darn vague, which leaves us on the outside who try to fact-check them at a disadvantage. It doesn’t say that the OS is virus- and malware-free–just that folks “won’t have to deal with” these threats. I “don’t have to deal with” viruses and malware on my Mac in the sense that I’ve never been infected. But that’s not the same thing as the OS being invulnerable. And while Google might be confident that it’s building something that won’t ever require Windows-style constant patching, I can’t quite believe it’s saying that there are no circumstances under which Chrome OS might need a security fix, period.

We still know very little about just how much of Chrome OS and users’ data will reside on the netbook, and how much will live remotely on Google’s servers. Maybe the local OS won’t do much more than boot the computer and provide drivers and a rendering engine. Maybe all user files will be stored in the cloud. If so, it’s possible that Chrome OS will be radically safer than traditional desktop OSes.

Even so, Schneier’s surely right that it’s impossible to write an OS that’s 100.000000% impervious to viruses. As long as computing involves the fallible devices known as human beings, there’s a chance that somebody will unwittingly allow a particularly piece of software onto the system.

Here’s a way of looking at it: In the post I quote at the top of this story, Google makes reference to the Chrome browser when touting the security of Chrome OS. Chrome the browser is indeed well-done from a security standpoint, but that doesn’t mean that Google hasn’t had to patch up holes. If Chrome-the-OS is as safe as the browser, it’ll be a point in its favor. But it won’t give users a license to fall asleep at the wheel.

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A Little More Chrome OS Knowledge

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 8, 2009 at 4:43 pm

Google has published a FAQ on its Chrome OS project. It contains the minimum number of questions and answers necessary to qualify as a Frequently Asked Questions list–two. We now know that Chrome OS will be free (it would have been startling if it wasn’t). And we know that Google is working with Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. Presumably Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo will make Chrome OS netbooks; Adobe will make stuff like Acrobat, AIR, and Flash happen; and Freescale, Qualcomm, and TI will collaborate with Google on chip support.

The big news here is the lineup of major computer manufacturers who are on board. That doesn’t guarantee anything–Google’s Android mobile OS has been embraced by multiple major phone companies, and it’s still getting off to a somewhat slow start–but it’s still impressive. And given that it’ll be a year at the soonest before any Chrome OS netbooks show up, it’s entirely possible that other manufacturers will hop on board before launch.

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Whatever Became of GDrive?

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 8, 2009 at 10:45 am

No matter how cool Google’s Chrome OS turns out to be, chances are you’re not going to use it. The company says the OS will roll out on netbooks in the second half of 2010; even if said netbooks are major hits, the vast majority of us will go on using systems based on Windows, OS X, or Linux for a long time to come.

Which makes me wonder whatever happened to another Google big idea that could have a bigger impact much more quickly: GDrive. That’s the service that would give consumers a virtual hard drive on the Internet, letting them store all their stuff remotely. Google has never formally announced such a service, but rumors have persisted for years–here’s a Michael Arrington story from March, 2006–and clues that it’s in the works pop up every so often. It seems to be real, even though we don’t know when Google will release it–assuming it will someday.

There’s nothing inherently awe-inspiring about the idea of online storage: Services like i-Drive were around more than a decade ago, and Microsoft will give you 25GB of space in the form of a Windows Live SkyDrive right now. If GDrive is just another hunk of remote disk space, it would be no big whoop. But if Google gave you a lot of space and tightly integrated it with Gmail, Google Docs, and other Web apps, GDrive could look less like an old-fashioned online drive and more like an entirely Web-based OS that was reachable from any browser.

In pitching Chrome OS, Google says that people “want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.” That would seem to suggest that Chrome OS incorporates GDrive, or something like it. Maybe GDrive hasn’t shown up yet in part because it’s closely related to the Chrome OS project.

Which leaves me wondering whether Google could release a service that was, essentially, Chrome OS’s user interface and Web-based components–but in a form that work in any browser.  It could bring part of Chrome OS’s godness to the 99% of us who won’t be buying a Chrome netbook, and it could be really cool…

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