Not that much happening, apparently….
Windows 7 beta getting yanked.
The Dalai Lama wasn’t tweeting.
Another prediction of $99 iPhones.
iTunes gets digital Marvel comics.
Apple nixed Android multi-touch?
Microsoft’s ten thousandth patent granted.
Kaspersky’s customer database gets exposed.
[Note: This item first appeared in Technologizer’s T-Week newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.]
This piece was inspired by spending the past few days using the RC1 version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. But it’s really a sequel-of-sorts to a blog post I wrote for PC World back in March of last year, when the first beta of IE 8 appeared. That one was called Internet Explorer 8 and the Boring Era of Web Browsers, and the gist was that even though browsers mattered more than ever in this era where we spend so much of our lives on the Web, Microsoft and other browser companies seemed to be focusing on under-the-hood improvements (like better support for Web standards) and were short on strikingly new features that let folks use their browsers in new ways. (IE 8’s Accelerators and Web Slices, for instance, are its most significant new tools–and they’re just not that big a whoop.)
I’m not quite sure if I’m ready to declare Google Earth as Google’s most amazing product. But this seems safe to say: It’s the one with the most potential. Version 5.0, which Google unveiled on Monday with an usually high amount of hoopla (Al Gore! Jimmy Buffett!) is in many ways a spectacular piece of work. But as I’ve been exploring it, I’m as excited about its possibilities as its current version.
Here’s what’s new in 5.0:
Oceans. In previous versions of Earth, they were just a bunch of blue pixels. In 5.0, you can dive right in and learn about sea life, water sports, shipwrecks, and more, mostly through images, videos, brief informational tidbits, and links to external sites:
Mars. It’s the first planet other than our own to get the full Google Earth treatment–thanks in part to some wonderful NASA panoramic photos:
History. A new timeline slider lets you travel back in time by viewing imagery other than the latest stuff that Google has. In many cases this is not-particularly-different satellite photography from a few years back. But when it’s fascinating, it’s really fascinating. At the unveiling event, Al Gore used the feature to–inevitably–show us a glacier that was shrinking with alarming rapidity. And in at least a few cases, Google has added decades-old photos taken from airplanes. Here’s San Francisco’s China Basin in 1946 and 1987, not looking too different–and then again in 1987 (see if you can spot the new building that had arrived in the neighborhood by then!):
Touring. As you travel around Google Earth, you can record your wanderings and add a narration soundtrack, then save them as a file you can e-mail to other folks who have Google Earth.
All of Google Earth’s new features are impressive additions to a program that was already a knockout, but it’s easy to pick nits. Some are small: Tours would be cooler if you could easily share them with every other Google Earth user from right within the program. (There’s a “Share/Post” menu option, but when I choose it I get a mysterious message saying the feature has been temporarily disabled.)
Some are major: It’s a cinch to find anything on dry land in Google Earth, from the great pyramids to the Eiffel Tower to a coffee shop in your hometown. But its oceans still feel like uncharted territory: Google tells us that there’s stuff like the Titanic wreck and a 3D model of the Florida Keys’ Aquarius undersea lab in there, but you can’t just do a quick search to find them. (Google in Google Earth for “Titanic,” and it sends you to Titanic, Oklahoma.) You can find stuff underwater (and on land) by browsing through guides embedded in the program’s Layers feature, but it’s just not that quick or intuitive.
And some aren’t really nits at all. Of all the features in 5.0, the one that really speaks to me is the introduction of history. Right now, it’s there in a pretty basic form: For instance, when you slide the view back in time, place markers don’t change, so Google Earth still indicates where buildings are even if they don’t yet exist. But what if all Google Earth data was tied to a timeline? Google Earth community members could start uploading and positioning millions of historical photos and videos that could make Google Earth into something that’s not only the fanciest atlas the planet has ever known, but also an extraordinary visual history of the world. (This idea is so obvious that I’d be startled if it’s not on Google’s to-do list right now.)
Like I say, this program’s potential is vast. With most software, trying to imagine what it might be like twenty years from now is either pointless or depressing. (If Microsoft World is extant in 2029, I can’t imagine it’ll be radically different or better than it is now…unless it incorporates flawless voice recognition as its primary means of input.) With Google Earth, however, there’s so much obviously neat stuff left to do that I have no doubt Google could spend a couple of decades on this idea without exhausting its possibilities. Googe Earth 5.0 is pretty darn nifty, but if the program continues to improve at the same clip it has so far, Google Earth 50 could have a profound impact on how the world understands itself. Here’s hoping that this is one Google project that never, ever goes on the chopping block…
Lifehacker is reporting that Google is beginning to roll out offline capabilities for Google Calendar, hot on the heels of last week’s introduction of similar features for Gmail. The Calendar offline tools are apparently only available in the Google Apps version of the service, and not everyone seems to be getting them yet–by which I mean that they haven’t shown up in my Google Apps Calendar. I’ll be happy when they do…
I may be more excited about this than I am about offline Gmail access: Google has made a minor change to Gmail’s user interface that makes it–for some of us, anyhow–a far more appealing service.
Here’s the new Gmail menu bar:
What’s new are the “Move to” and “Labels” items. The latter simply moves the ability to apply a Label to an e-mail into its own menu, which makes it easier to get at the command. (Until now, you’ve had to burrow to the bottom of “More actions” to get at Labels.)
But “Move to” is the addition I’m so enthusiastic about: It lets you apply a Label and move an e-mail out of your inbox into Google’s archive with one click. Essentially, it duplicates the functionality that every other e-mail client on earth provides by allowing you to plunk an e-mail into a folder, thereby filing it away by subject matter and getting it out of your way. Kinda amazing that Google didn’t let you do it until now. (You’ve had to apply the Label and move the e-mail to the archive in two distinct steps–in theory not a biggie, but extra work is extra work. I’ve tended to ignore the problem, which means my inbox is bursting at the seams.)
Google has also introduced keyboard shortcuts and auto-complete functionality that let you label and move messages without touching your mouse; I’m not that much of a shortcut guy, so I’m less jazzed up about these. But some people will be very happy, I bet.
Unlike Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, I don’t think Gmail has reached perfection. And it won’t until it either improves the threaded-conversation interface or makes it optional. But between features that Google launches as Gmail Labs options (such as offline access) and ones it just rolls out for everybody (like the new Label interface), the company is improving Gmail at a dizzying rate…
A couple of months ago, Google brought a simple but effective task manager into Gmail, courtesy of Gmail’s Labs proving ground for new features. Now it’s brought the feature to the iPhone, using a Mobile Safari-friendly interface:
The desktop version of Google Tasks emphasizes simplicity and speed over features; the iPhone one (which you reach by visiting http://gmail.com/tasks) is even more basic. I wish that it, like the desktop one, were integrated with Gmail itself–when I’m in Gmail on the iPhone, I’d like to be able to bop quickly into Tasks, and to be able to instantly turn an e-mail message into a task. (On the iPhone, the two services are sepearate and unrelated.) You also can’t indent tasks on the iPhone.
But Tasks for Gmail is snappy and useful–and it’s especially welcome given that the iPhone still has no native task manager. For now, though, I’m sticking with the iPhone version of Remember the Milk. It’s part of RTM’s paid Pro service, which runs $25 a year, but unlike Google Tasks, it brings all the richness of its full-blown Web version to the iPhone. And I like supporting Remember the Milk, a very small company that consistently makes worthwhile products and does interesting things (like supporting offline access via Google’s Gears) before larger companies like Google get around to doing them…
My friend Andrew Leal points out to me that Google is trying to beef up its Knol user-generated reference work by promoting it on some of the most valuable real estate on the Web: At the moment, a Knol promo is running right below the search box on Google.com:
The last time I looked at Knol in depth was almost five months ago. Back then, much of it was an embarrassing hodgepodge of outdated Wikipedia plagiarisms, self-promoting gobbledygook, and religious tracts. I see that Google has redone the Knol home page since. But the first entry I checked, the first one returned when I searched for “Sarah Palin,” is still a ripoff of Wikipedia’s Palin entry–a bizarrely obsolete one that says there were rumors that John McCain might name her as his vice-presidential running mate, but it didn’t happen due to an ethics probe against her. (I’ll spend some more time with Knol in its current state and let you know whether it seems to have progressed much overall.)
Google is also running a contest to encourage submission of high-quality Knols, with a $1000 cash prize. Good idea, but the competition is called Knol for Dummies. Looks to me like part of the problem with Knol is that too many of its authors are dummies already…
Today, Google is partnering with the New America Foundation (a non profit that is chaired by Google CEO Eric Schmidt) and a group of academics to develop an open platform for creating Internet connection measurement tools.
Google says the platform, called Measurement Lab (M-Lab), will help researchers create tools that help determine the root cause of sluggish Internet application performance. Over the course of the yea, Google will deploy 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe as a distributed backing infrastructure. A limited number of users will be supported initially.
Data aggregated by M-Lab will be freely available researchers, according to a blog post co-written by Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, and Stephen Stuart, the project’s principal engineer. Google wishes for M-Lab to be a community-based effort, and invites anyone that wants to donate servers, tools, and other resources to participated, they noted.
“At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation. No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy. Transparency has always been crucial to the success of the Internet, and, by advancing network research in this area, M-Lab aims to help sustain a healthy, innovative Internet,” they wrote.
With companies such as Comcast (which prompted an FCC investigation) and Cox Communications prioritizing network traffic, this is good news for consumers and consumer advocacy groups. M-Labs could be a valuable research to help detect bandwidth throttling and let people confirm that they are truly getting what they are paying for.
The Official Gmail Blog bears good news this afternoon: Gmail’s “Labs” experimental-feature proving ground is adding offline access, letting you read and send e-mail even when you don’t have a live Internet connection. Once you turn it on, you can choose between an online mode, an offline mode, and a “flaky connection” one that behaves as if you were online but synchronizes mail in the background as possible.
The blog post goes to pains not to raise folks’ expectations too high: “Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don’t be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven’t been completely ironed out yet.” And truth to tell, Gmail already plays nicely with e-mail clients that support POP and IMAP, so it’s already easy enough to use Gmail even when you can’t get to Gmail. But I’m still looking forward to trying out the new feature (which hasn’t been enabled in my Gmail account yet, although Google says it should show up shortly).
Offline Gmail uses Gears, the Google technology for offline browser access that Google Docs also takes advantage of. Docs uses Gears to provide a pretty skimpy subset of the online version’s capabilities–you can only edit word-processing documents, and lose a lot of features–but Google’s blog post says “Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you’re using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server.” (One question which the Google blog post doesn’t appear to answer: Can I download every kilobyte of the gigabytes of e-mail that sit in my Gmail account to my hard drive, so there’s truly no distinction between Gmail’s online and offline flavors?)
Gears is an exciting piece of technology, but it seems safe to say that it doesn’t make building offline apps into a cakewalk: It was introduced back in May, 2007 and there are still only a handful of services (from Google or anyone else) that take advantage of it. At first, I assumed the launch of Gears meant offline Gmail was imminent; then I forgot it might even be a possibility. And now I’m pleased to see that it’s been in the works all along.
At the pace that major Web services are figuring out how to go offline, I think it’s possible that Internet access will get close to pervasive before offline access can be assumed. Once you can get on the Net from an airplane or the boonies, you might only care about offline access for those rare moments when your connection (or Gmail itself) has temporarily conked out. Even then, it would still be handy…
Like me, WebWorkerDaily’s Judi Sohn uses Google’s GrandCentral phone service, which sports an array of fancy tricks like auto-forwarding to multiple numbers at once. When Judi logged in this morning, she found her browser telling her that GrandCentral’s SSL security certificate had expired. She uses that as a springboard to fret about the future of GrandCentral in general: It’s been in closed-beta limbo for eons, and Google shows no signs of readying it for general release. She ends with the ultimate vote of no confidence: a request that Google shut down GrandCentral and help people transfer their phone numbers elsewhere.
I didn’t have the certificate problem myself, but I’ve wondered what the heck is going on with GrandCentral in these quarters before. Confession: Despite the fact that GrandCentral is beta, I use a GrandCentral number as Technologizer’s main business phone number. For the most part, I’m happy with it. But Judi’s skepticism that GrandCentral will ever emerge from beta has me paranoid that it may go away, and that I’ll be sorry I handed out all those business cards with a GrandCentral number on them.
If nothing else, I should probably be worried about the fact that GrandCentral’s home page no longer trumpets the slogan “One Number…for Life” (here’s what the tagline looked like back when it was there, plus some additional promises about the service’s permanence):
I guess “One Number…Until Google Decides to Direct Its Attention Elsewhere and Quietly Shutters the Service” doesn’t have the same ring to it…
To be clear, Google hasn’t said that GrandCentral is at risk. Actually, it hasn’t said much of anything about the service since it acquired it. It’s conceivable that it’ll add new features and/or take it out of beta any day now. And I’ll choose to take it as a good sign that it wasn’t among the services that Google did kill or scale back a couple of weeks ago.
For now, I’m still using and liking GrandCentral, and I’m certainly not willing to join Judi Sohn’s call for Google to euthanize it. An encouraging word or two from Google would be nice, though–especially if the gist was “we’re investing in GrandCentral and intend to roll it out to all comers as soon as we think it’s ready.”
