This is a great tip for N95 users from Symbian-Guru.com, the iPhone Google Reader site really does look nice on the Nokia N95. I would add my own advice, and suggest using the Nokia browser rather than Opera Mobile (if you have that), for some reason it didn’t load in Opera for me, but worked well on the built-in browser.
Archive for the 'Google' Category
Quick answer: I imported too many feeds into Google Reader
Long answer: Well I found an old OPML file. I think it may have been something that combined a load of my old feeds with what Robert Scoble was reading at the time, so I suspect it was from 2005 or so. I then noticed a couple of others such files, so I thought it might be fun (note to reader: I have an interesting definition of fun on a personal level, please do not try to apply your own or indeed any dictionary definition of the word here) to put them all together, see what was going on, who was still blogging, if I was missing out on any good feeds.
To begin with, I didn’t want to mess up my reading list, so I thought I’d import them all into Bloglines. Approximately 1400 feeds later, Bloglines was not happy. It was taking an age to load, just didn’t seem to be coping. However I could export from it, so I assumed that Google Reader would be able to cope.
And it didn’t. Page errors all over, massive loading times, and something of a pain to undo too. What I found through trial and error was that it was still flaky with about 800 or 900 feeds, and then once you slipped under that number it was fine, just as good as if you only had a couple. So worth noting if you are an obsessive feed reader like myself that if you’re really stacking up the number you read, it may be worth a prune sometime.
So now Google Talk within Gmail has support for AIM. Google ask that other networks get in touch with them if they are interested in being included. Well what about the networks and systems that are available already? How about Jabber as a whole? Seeing as Google Talk is based on Jabber, surely this would be easy to offer? And for a bigger ask, what about IRC for us oldsters that have been around a while?
I’m hoping against hope for Jabber and MSN to be added. I’m really not counting on the latter happening any times soon, but it would be so good. I currently use Meebo to be logged into my IM accounts on my browser, as it seems to do this the best out of the things I’ve tried, but if Google Talk could add a few more systems for me, I’d be very tempted to move over.
First off, robot names for projects are a good thing. Okay, I’ve got that out of the way. Android lives, and it seems like some of the more conservative guesses about what a Google Mobile OS should be are mainly right. It’s an application platform, not a piece of hardware (although reading into some of the announcements, it’s not entirely ruled out for the future). Its SDK will be available from the Android site in about a week, and the first new devices with it pre-installed with be on sale in the second half of 2008.
What is perhaps just as interesting is that it is the product of The Open Handset Alliance, which has a very intriguing list of members. Big players in terms of mobile carriers, and some big names in handsets, but no Nokia, or obviously Apple. If you then look at Opensocial, the Google-led social networking API, and the companies involved with that (basically Myspace and all the big players bar Facebook), that is a huge swathe of development that are now committed to doing things the Google way. Are there any more announcements due like this soon? These are not big things just yet, but insidiously they are both going to become rather important.
For a very good discussion of what Android might be, and why it might be so important, I’d strongly recommend listening to the latest episode of This Week in Tech. You’ll also find out why Robert Scoble’s wife left him.
Well I’d just finished writing the previous post, just went to flick through my feeds, and found this little gem. Google Maps is going Social. They’ve now added a profile section to Google Maps, so that any maps you chose to share will also now have your profile attached to them. I checked this out, and sure enough, I’ve already got my avatar and website in there already, from some other Google service I’ve used.
It’s very likely this is going to slip into the Google Apps family over the next few months. I suspect that it would go nicely into Gmail, so that you could find out more about anyone who mails you from a Gmail account.
This is going to be Facebook by stealth. Rather than a launch of a rival, they will add the profiles in. Rather than adding apps to a social networking app, they add the social networking to their existing apps. Google has Google Groups (formerly known as Usenet, in a way). They’re even a step ahead of Facebook by having IM and voice chat in place too. It’s starting to fall into place.
It took me quite a while after my recent holiday to catch up on my RSS feeds (I had a mere 7500 posts to work through, with more coming in all the time), so I had to be quite careful not to miss things of interest to me over the past few weeks. And there has been a lot in the area I write about here.
The Google phone has been intriguing for several months now. It sounded like an odd idea, and quite brave. The initial idea, as it was put forward by many news sources, was that it would be Google’s own phone, with it’s own OS and applications. It’s one thing for say Apple to move into the mobile phone arena, there are a lot of complications compared to other areas of hardware, it’s quite another for a company like Google who of course have the money to tackle the problems, but just haven’t operated in such a field before. A fair comparison may have been to Microsoft with the original Xbox. They got a lot wrong before they got a lot right (I’m slightly regretting giving mine away, as I have got a fondness for it, but then it went to a good home, so I’m fine about it really).
However, the New York Times broke some new details about Google’s plans. They suggest it is not a phone, but a phone OS. It will be built on Linux, be designed as a competitor to Symbian and Windows Mobile, and will be licensed for free to phone manufacturers. Now this sounds a lot more interesting to me. For one, it seems like the idea would be to get it on as many manufacturers phones as possible.
Further reading and speculation throughout the tech news blogs suggests it might even not be an OS, but an application designed to run on the major mobile platforms as if it were the phone’s OS, just wrapping together existing Google mobile apps with some new functionality. This seems like the most sensible suggestion yet to me, and mirrors the work they’ve done on the desktop. You can now use a whole suite of applications within the browser already on Mac, Linux and Windows, which is what I do at the moment. They just move onto the mobile platforms with similar, optimised for mobiles. Not such a huge leap, but instantly moving onto many mobiles at once, and doing the important jobs for them of having their applications used wherever their users are, and also pushing adverts to them.
Changing tack slightly (I’ll be coming back to that), the next day Mozilla announced they are working on a version of Firefox for mobiles. I’ve been crying out for this, I do like Opera Mini, but I’ve used Firefox for a good few years on the desktop, and it just works for me. I like being able to add in functionality to the browser as I need it, and see the best of that functionality rolled into the browser itself over time. Mozilla aren’t committing to any particular phone OS at the moment, but there has to be a really strong possibility it will be on both Windows Mobile and Symbian. They are promising extensions, built in the same way as the main version.
Now again, a lot of speculation about this in the tech news world. It does seem remarkably close to the news about Google’s plans for mobiles, Firefox is the favoured browser of Google (they bundle it with Google Desktop, with the Google Toolbar installed and also produce a few very useful extensions for it). So the suggestions are that both projects could be in some way linked, or at least will end up being complimentary in some fashion. A Google OS for mobiles will need a browser in some manner, and one would expect that if this was going to be written by Google themselves, they would have already shown off a desktop version. They haven’t, they seem very happy with Firefox as is.
Google have been rumoured for many years to be working on their own desktop OS. Usually a form of Linux, containing all their applications as the installed software. As with the Google browser, this has never materialised. Instead, they have slowly trickled out a series of apps within the browser, until now you have a wide-ranging set you can use individually, or set up in conjunction with a set of desktop based apps you can download in a bundle with third-party software such as Firefox and Adobe Reader.
Since the two announcements I described earlier, there has been a steady stream of updates to the existing Google mobile apps, and the launch of new ones as well. There was the 1.5 release of the Google Mail app, the launch of Google Calendar optimised for mobiles, the new Google Maps application, and today a new mobile version of Google Docs. All this leads me to believe that we aren’t really waiting for Google Mobile OS after all. We’re getting it now, just like we did with the dripfeed of Google applications on the desktop. In time, we may get a bundle of everything in one unified interface, but all the main elements seem to be dropping into place right now.
One of the reasons I think this is a good thing is the usability of Google products. Sometimes it can be very frustrating using Symbian, it can seem like it was designed by someone who just loves clicking dialogue buttons, and typing extra characters much more that I do. Why do I have to type "http://" so much? Where is the cut and paste? Why can’t I move information between applications? I’m not suggesting Google Mobile will solve everything, but one of the first signs I have seen is in the new version of Google Mail, where although the app is designed to do email, I can go into my contacts, and call them directly (if I’ve put their phone number in). That’s the start of the sort of functionality and usability I want on my mobile. It’s going to be very interesting to see where this all goes in the next few months.
Google have recently launched Shared Stuff, a sort of competitor to del.icio.us. I’ve had a look at this tonight, and it’s quite nicely done. You drop a bookmarklet onto your toolbar, and if you want to save a page, it launches a new window, in which you can edit your description of the page. This then saves to your own shared page (with an RSS feed of course) and your profile. The whole thing works very much like del.icio.us, particularly when used in conjunction with their Firefox extension (where you get to add tags and your description).
The Google version definitely looks nicer, but I’m used to del.icio.us, it works well, the tagging is a very nice way to navigate your bookmarks, and I’ve been using it for so long I’m just loathe to consider moving elsewhere (have a look at my own del.icio.us page just to see how much I’ve got stored there).
I’ve also been looking at a Mozilla project, Joey. This is a similar idea at first, except it is designed specifically for sharing content from the web to your mobile phone. The idea here is that you can clip parts of pages, so text, images and even video, so that you can just download the element you need on your phone.
Having tried this out, it’s apparent that it is very handy for storing a bit of a timetable, or directions that you can call up from your phone. One thing it doesn’t work on yet is Google Maps, which is a shame, as that would be very handy. That is down to how the maps are generated, rather than being a single image, they are several squares which are patched together on your screen. Joey won’t let you grab them yet, but I’m sure in time they might get it figured out. It is very beta at the moment, but worth a look.
I’m just starting to update the presentation of the blog, so it may look slightly ropey for a couple of days. Hopefully won’t be too long.
As a quick aside, there is a strong rumour apparently that Google are looking to buy up Godaddy. Which would be fantastic for me, I’d love to integrate my Google web tools with my Godaddy accounts, so I’m crossing my fingers. Apparently the rumours have backing in the fact that the owner of Godaddy hasn’t said anything about it, whereas normally he has an opinion and quote to offer on every topic going.
If you’ve been using Google Reader for a while, you probably know about using J and K to go forwards and back through stories. Well this is what I use, along with the list view, to read a lot of stories at speed. I audition them for my attention, if they don’t grab it, I’m onto the next. There is one more shortcut though, that I like for this purpose. The humble U.
U removes the list of folders and feeds on the left-hand side of the reader, giving all of the screen space over to the actual stories themselves. I normally tend to view all, rather than view folders individually, so it lets me see more of the stories in one go to make my value judgement without having to scroll. To get the list of folders and feeds back, just tap U again.
I’m picking up on the post from Lorelle on her Lorelle on Wordpress blog about testing your blogs development. She lists a set of links you can test your blog on, and see what sort of results are returned. So without further ado:
Live Google PageRank - Results
An average pagerank of 2.7, which considering that when I started the blog a few months back, pagerank was essentially 0, is not bad going. Pagerank is one measure I would like to test on again in 6 months time and see where I stand then.
Visual PageRank - Results
This is a good tool, shows the pagerank of every single link on a page. I note that I don’t seem to be quoting many major sites in terms of links in a post generally, if I was wanting to live by pagerank alone, I should have more links, and to higher ranking sites. I know that is by no means the only path to improving pagerank, but this tool does highlight the relative merit of your links.
Google Cache Tool
This checks to see what internal links have been cached by google, having read through the front page of the blog. According to this, 3 out of 7 have. Not sure if I would need to get the rest cached, but it is caching the main url of the site, which is what I would want.
Spider View - Results
Okay, as a topic I’ve discussed several times on here, I checked Ubuntu as a keyword on the site. This showed that I’ve mentioned it 18 times on the front page as it stands.
Alexa - Results
3 results here. I’ve found personally that Alexa is a bit sniffy in some senses, as they profess to only be interested in the top 100,000 websites, rather than providing information beyond this. Also, their ratings depend in part on users installing spyware, which isn’t really the ideal way forwards.
Search Position Checker - Results
I know from a little while ago that one of my most successful posts on this blog was a simple little explanation of how to install realplayer on Ubuntu. I was getting at one point 20 hits a day direct from google for the post. So I used this tool to search for the keywords ubuntu realplay edgy, and see where I am ranked. It shows no results for google, which suggests it may be a bit borked, as a manual search shows I am #2 for that search on google. It does show me as 5th on MSN and 11th on Excite.
Link Popularity Checker - Results
Important to remember here that I am only searching on graemehunter.co.uk, not www.graemehunter.co.uk, which does get very different results. Note that google shows no results at all for the www version. I use google sitemaps to submit the version without the www, but have been meaning for a while to sort out with www. This underlines it needs doing, and that each can be treated very differently by search engines. At least 3 search engines there see over 100 results with the www.
Keyword Analysis Tool - Results
This shows the frequency of words throughout a page. So for the front page of here, as I had guessed previously, Ubuntu was the most regular, followed by Wordpress and product. Again, if I was targeting a particular audience, I would want to up this count in certain areas.
Google Webmasters Site Status Test
This confirms that I am included in the Google index, and that I was last indexed on the 9th February. I can get a lot more detail once I log into the Google webmaster tools, and I may well do this as a seperate exercise to blog on here soon, going through the results and seeing what they show.
So there are a good range of tools here to check how search engines view your site. Do note by the way that the results I have referred to will change once I publish this post.
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