TechnoCloud

The Gmail outage that started and was resolved yesterday seems to have set a new bar for media hype over very little.

From the inevitable mass of hysterical Twitter activity, to an explosion of blog posts, to mainstream media pouring over the story (even making the front page of London’s Metro newspaper), it seems an incredible fuss over two and a half hours downtime.

Web-based email goes down sometimes, even the best ones.

Let’s move on, shall we?

In a nice piece of publicity for Google Earth, Google responded to speculation that the fabled Atlantis had been found just off the coast of Hawaii.

Update: looks like I lost it too, it’s actually off the west coast of Africa, only it’s not if you see what I mean…

The ordered lines certainly looked man-made and it turned out they were - in a way.

A detailed explanation from the scientists involved with the project confirmed that in fact the lines were ’ship tracks’, showing the limited area covered by the ships echosounding the bottom of the sea - a lengthy and labour intensive job as it turns out.

The denial makes a nice story and will encourage others to explore the new Ocean service looking for further anomalies. Nice story, but even nicer piece of marketing.

My post on the launch of Google Chrome was one of the top 10 posts of 2008, so I should follow up now Chrome is out of beta.

There remains much to admire, but still much to come until this gets nearer to replacing my current browser choices.

The biggest of all remains the lack of an extensions platform that make Firefox such a useful browser. As they said at launch and again coming out of beta, this remains in the pipeline. Given its importance to browser users, it might have been a better time to come out of beta when this platform actually launches - even better when the Mac and Linux versions were ready.

Flash also remains inconsistent in Chrome for some (hardly unique to Chrome though) and given its near 100% penetration is an important consideration, particularly on older versions of Flash which many locked down corporate users are forced to use. Finally, as Google admit, better RSS support and auto-complete for forms would be welcome and is on its way.

Certainly a step forward, but as yet no world-beta (ouch)!

In a sudden rush of originality and inspiration, I’m going to share surely the first ever list of 2008’s most popular posts!

10. Gearing up for something more useful
The awful pun in the title didn’t stop the traffic as this look back at Google Gears’ first year scraped into the top 10.

9. Google will see you now
One of my pet topics, visual search, made it into ninth as Google joined the innovators trying to unlock this most difficult and potentially lucrative of challenges in the search marketplace.

8. Adding Google Adsense on Wordpress.com
The painful move away from hosted Wordpress and then back again, did at least have some benefits. A list of handy advice for those contemplating similar folly and a coveted position in the top 10.

7. Google searches related to
Clearly I wasn’t the only one wondering where that appeared from…

6. Wii want cricket
Well, beach cricket did arrive only to disappoint, leaving one of the big questions unanswered for 2009 - when is the massive cricket diaspora going to get wii cricket?

5. Google plays the April fool
Always a ratings winner, this year’s April fools were mixed in terms of amusement value, but not in traffic value, cracking the top five.

4. BBC News video embed
It may be a post on a woefully out-of-date experiment, but with BBC iPlayer embedding still to appear the Google searches keep delivering the punters to this old post.

3. Build your own supermodel
Can there really be that many fans of Weird Science trying to build their own supermodel? It appears there are, as this old post continues to deliver.

2. Review of Chrome - the good, the bad and the too early
No surprise to see one of the stories of 2008 high up the list, as this not entirely postive review of Google’s Chrome browser made the top 2.

1. Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics
Everyone’s looking for them and Google keeps sending them to Technocloud to find them, helped no doubt by the catchy title. This post bemoaning the lack of decent social networking statistics, while offering up some of my own, pipped even Chrome to the top.

It’s been an interesting, challenging and exciting year. Best wishes to all for 2009.

This morning’s check of my RSS feeds produced a pleasant surprise. Google Reader’s previously rather ugly design has had a winter spring-clean with the heavy blue backgrounds toned down or replaced with a sprinkling of seasonal white snow.

Changes in design to heavily used sites or applications are not for the faint-hearted and are a common way of upsetting your most loyal users. RSS feed consumption is about speed and familiarity of the layout, but the redesign has addressed many of my grumbles.

Collapsable menus to decide what’s important to me on the page, not to Google. A cleaner, simpler design, easier on the eye. More white may be a design cliche, but it works.

The only real remaining grumble is that the ‘home’ page still looks cluttered and an area where Google of all people should know that less is more. I’d like to be able to configure the homepage to remove the recommendations, collapse the starred/shared items and select which feeds appear as defaults on the page.

Google has unveiled its SearchWiki product which adds a familiar social media flavour to Google’s clean search engine results page.

When signed and opted-in, the changes recall elements from Digg, StumbleUpon and most strongly Wikia search, the community-powered open-source search engine from Wikipedia. It allows for comments, influencing of the results (personal rather than community in Google’s case) and the good old rate up/down.

It’s no bad thing to use social media technology, but my gripe is with the clutter on the page. Google has made a fantastically successful search business on the back of its clean, uncluttered pages, that deliver you (usually) where you want to go with a minimum of fuss.

Google is always testing tweeks to their page results and this is a rollout of one such test, but the clutter to Google’s simple formula seems a test too far. Time will tell how univeral that opinion will be.

As an update to my previous post, Google has announced the details on their blog and provided more details on the Lat Long blog, complete with some rather cloudy stills.

Note to Google: wait for a sunnier day, as it looks like there’s a stage in England after all…

Google’s Street View has crossed the pond and is winding its way down France’s streets.

Although the coverage is far from universal, they have taken the inspired decision to start withthe Tour de France route, including sections of Paris, Saint-Étienne and Brest. It certainly opens up the possibility of some excellent mashups of live Tour data to enhance coverage.

Fortunately, the route allows me to take my own tour down memory lane to re-enact my old walk to work down the Champs-Elysées and to revisit an old holiday destination by taking a tour inside the city walls of Saint-Malo. Picture quality is perfectly adequate. To protect privacy, but not perhaps vanity, faces and number plates are obscured.

You can view it here (make sure the Street View button is selected). It’s also available in Google Earth.

Yahoo have followed up their initial trial with Google’s search technology in signing a non-exclusive deal to carry Google ads on Yahoo properties in the US and Canada. The deal also includes moves to improve interoperability between the companies respective instant messaging services.

Understandably the move has provoked a huge reaction in the blogosphere given the background of the failed Microsoft deal. It is sure to attract the attention of the regulators given the two company’s positions as the top two in search, even if it is non-exclusive.

For Google this gives them access to Yahoo’s massive traffic and for Yahoo a big potential revenue stream and a clear strategic move after the failed Microsoft takeover.

Interesting to read that the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have collaborated on standards for Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) - in simpler terms, the code you use to tell search engines not to spider a particular page or section.

The full details are available here.

Similar to Google’s guidelines for Webmasters, it would be helpful to have a set of consistent standards for the basics of search engine optimisation across the search engines. Obviously each search engine has its own closely-guarded algorithm that determines rankings, but with consistent guidelines on sitemaps, use/abuse of keywords and clear do’s/don’ts would be a big help in putting the emphasis firmly on supporting white hat practices.