TechnoCloud

So, Gmail is to open up to all users worldwide bringing to an end one of the great viral marketing campaigns of recent times.

When Gmail’s email service was first launched, it was invite only and I can remember the scramble among the early adopters to track down others with an account. Accounts were offered in the comments of blog posts, desperate people even bid for them on eBay.

All the while, the buzz about Gmail grew turning something that for most is a relatively dull part of their digital lives - email - into something to talk and even brag about.

Few realised at the time that they were witnessing one of the great pieces of viral marketing.

No doubt the release strategy also helped Google rollout their product gradually, as they went about improving the storage and adding fuctionality, benefiting from the goodwill of their ‘privileged’ group of users.

Having secured one of the early Gmail accounts, I gleefully gave out my Gmail invites to digitally ‘under-endowed’ friends, but stubbornly hung onto my Hotmail account hoping the extra storage would come and the interface would improve (they largely have). I have to access my Gmail account from time to time as part of accessing certain Google services, but am still not a full convert.

When it comes to email, some old habits die hard, no matter how good the viral.

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Google has been steadily been building a suite of products tied into a single Google identity - think Gmail, Adsense, Google Video, Groups etc.. Now Google is taking further advantage of those user accounts (as well as trying to create a few more) by adding more personalisation to searches.

Now when you are signed into your Google Account, Google is offering a combination of personalised search recommendations and the personalised homepage, to bring, duh, a more ‘personalised’ search experience.

The goal is that it learns from your search history and preferences to bring you more relevant search results. So, when searching for ‘Saints’ it will focus on my footballing interests rather than my religious ones.

Those searchers that may have more ‘private’ search queries can sign out of their account, but for the rest of us it should result in a more satisfactory search experience, as it learns more about our personal preferences.

More loyalty to the Googleverse and better search results - they hope it will be a winning strategy.

P.S. Sorry for the rush of Google-related posts, but they have been doing some interesting things of late (plus I’ve re-subscribed to their blog).

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Google have used their blog to reveal more about the proposed direction and integration of YouTube and Google Video.

Far from killing the golden goose that is YouTube’s audience, YouTube is to remain its own identity, but with increasing use of Google’s monetisation tools. YouTube delivers the traffic, Google monetises it.

Naturally, Google Video will start including more results from YouTube, although Google will retain its catchall independence by adding as many sources of video as possible. How long before video is added to the hallowed homepage tabs in the UK along with images, groups, news, etc.? (Update: it is already in the US)

Interestingly with video content proving increasingly pervasive online, Google Adsense are running an Adsense video test as it attempts along with many others to find the sweet spot in terms of monetising video often played outside the host site through embedded media players such as YouTube’s.

More about this on the Adsense blog.

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No, not Weird Science 2, but instead Google has invited contributors to submit their own 3D ’super models’ to appear in Google Earth.

You build a 3D model of your chosen building in Google SketchUp, geo-locate it, upload it to the 3D Warehouse and then open up Google Earth to see if it’s made the cut.

An interesting ’open source’ way to expand the Google Earth offering using the power of crowds, as well as increase the loyalty of the contributors.

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That man in constant motion Robert Scoble points to Quintura, an intriguing search engine based on refining your search through a tag cloud.

It boasts a clean interface, accompanied by a helpful one minute tour, and I found it simple to use. You type a query, related search terms appear in a tag cloud which you can add to your search by clicking on them, refining the search results below. You can roll your mouse over related search terms to see hints for additional search terms or click on an ‘x’ symbol to remove that term from your cloud.

It’s an interesting way of quicky refining your search results for ambiguous terms, e.g. spears (Britney or weapon?), something that Google and others have looked to address through predictive search ‘did you mean’ links within the search results.

The search results state that they are ‘Powered by Yahoo XML’ suggesting that Quintura technology can be built on top of other existing search services.

The service tries its best to include the relevant Web 2.0 must-haves, starting of course with the obligatory blog. However, ‘Share it’ at present just emails a link to Quintura to a friend rather than an extended social network of recommended sites. Likewise ‘Save it’ just shows you how to save a link to your search rather than any kind of social bookmarking. 

These elements of course can be developed over time and this is at present a ‘beta’ (what isn’t these days?). Their corporate site indicates there’s more plenty in the pipeline, so this is one to watch.

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After many, many months using Bloglines, I was tempted by the hype about Google Reader and decided to give it a try to find a better way of managing my feeds. A weekend or even a couple of days holiday meant the backlog of articles soon built up to unmanageable proportions and I didn’t find the Bloglines user interface an efficient way of processing that information.

Despite my grumbles I was so used to Bloglines’ quirks that even the improved user interface of Google Reader took quite some time to become comfortable with. The ‘river of news’ available on the ‘All Items’ link is particularly helpful in managing the information overload. I like being able to consume bite sized chunks of articles rather than having to read all new posts on a feed in one go before they are lost. The number and variety of keyboard shortcuts have also proved useful once mastered.

However, today presented the first bug within Google Reader. As per the image below, on accessing my stories the article preview boxes were blank. If I rolled my mouse over them to automatically ‘mark as read’ the content appeared (see second image), suggesting the bug is related to the ‘mark as read’ mouseover functionality. It was the same issue whether reading the river of news or an individual feed.

The problem appears limited to Internet Explorer (I’m running version 6.0), with Firefox working fine.

Having had a fruitless quick search for others with the same issue, this may be a local javascript error, but I’d be interested if anyone has experienced anything similar.

Image 1: Viewing all items (no mouseover)

Image 2: mouseover a single item and it appears

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No self-respecting site or service can be without a widget these days it seems. A ‘widget’ is a suitably loose catchall that is now so pervasive that it has achieved the true Web 2.0 cachet of being ‘mashed’ into new service names, such as Nokia’s WidSets for mobile phones.

Little surprise then that Google has continued the move to the wild world web by making its desktop and in-house widgets available for use outside the Google family. The full list of currently more than 1200 widgets can be found here, although Google adds a ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ note about the open source origins of its widgets:

“Much of the content in this directory was developed by other companies or by Google’s users, not by Google. Google makes no promises or representations about its performance, quality, or content.”

So, let’s see one in action below and what better one to decide who is king of the widgets than GoogleFight - for example try typing in ‘Google widgets’ vs. ‘Yahoo widgets’.

They are certainly easy to use bar the odd sizing grumble and just require the addition of some script to your HTML code, no big ask for the networked generation. Expect to see much more of this over the coming year.

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