Vorg google blog| When Did This Happen?! | | LIFE Magazine's complete photo archive available free on Google Images. | |
| Sneaky | Go to google.
Search "world cup".
Tons of good info is listed at the top.
Make sure you scroll to the bottom. | |
| Straatview | I previously wrote about Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau, a tiny town in Holland with a few dozen parcels of land belonging to Belgium. International borders run haphazardly through the town, dividing streets and buildings, like so:
View Larger Map
Well, it seems that Google maps has Streetviewed all of Holland and none of Belgium, resulting in Streetview stopping and starting at near-random intervals through Baarle-Nassau. My favourite part is that some of the Belgian parts have little parts inside them that belong to Holland. These tiny strips of Dutch land, some no bigger than a front yard, are streetviewed, while the Belgian parts are all cut off. | |
| Don't Mess With The Bull | | Google thinks China might be fucking with them | |
| For The Smart-Ass In You | | Awesome | |
| Oh Dear | | I have no idea what to make of this. | |
| Platforms to Stand On | My company currently makes games for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
The first 2 have a good business case. Lots of people run Mac OS X and Windows, and buy games to play. (Thank you to all the customers who keep us small developers alive.)
Linux doesn't have as good a business case for us. Not very many people buy the Linux versions of our games. But, I foresee Linux continuing to grow in leaps and bounds on the desktop. And our codebase is in Java, so it isn't that much extra work to make Linux versions.
Going Mobile
The mobile OS wars are warming up fast. In the past we've gotten some scattered requests for PocketPC or Palm versions, but it hasn't seemed worthwhile. Apparently there was good money to be made selling Palm apps in the past, but greedy distributors (hearsay says Handango) and a decaying platform have destroyed it.
J2ME and BREW cellphone apps are making money, but only for a few big companies (at least in North America). The carriers have been very greedy distributors, and locked down their platform tightly.
Apple's iPhone is fresh mobile platform coming on strong. They've publicized their app distribution rate as taking a 30% cut. That's a lot better then most desktop games distributors (Yahoo Games typically takes 70%). Apple has been tremendously successful at iterating the iPod from version1 to perfection. They're following the same process with the iPhone, building a mobile platform from the ground up. I think the iPhone will be one of the long term mobile platform winners.
Google Android is the other mobile platform I'm keeping an eye on. Open-source and available for carriers to build on. Apps are written in the Java language, but using G's own VM and libraries. (A nice end-run around SUN, straight to Java developers.) It hasn't launched on any real phones yet, but I think it has huge potential. The first Android phones are supposed to be available "soon."
You already have a computer in your pocket (your cellphone). The big question for software developers is: what platform is your next one going to run? | |
| Flickr feature requests |  I use flickr to publish my photography online. It's a good service, but not perfect. Here are my feature requests to Flickr:
1. On individual photo pages, the meta description and keywords should be about the photo, not about Flickr. Yahoo runs a fricken search engine, you'd think they would get this right.
2. Give me a nice view into the referrer logs. Where are people coming to my photos from? Who's inlining it into webpages? What photos got viewed the most recently? etc. This would be the perfect place to build a Google Analytics competitior.
3. Expand the API to include sets. And keep expanding it from there.
4. Enable HTML links in photo descriptions on my photostream pages when they're showing small photos. Why don't they work here?
Finally, a flickr-related feature request directed to Google: Get an API or scraper set up to read the title, description and tags on flickr photo pages. Then use the info in your Google Image Search algo. I've started searching for images at flickr first now, because experience has shown I often find better images direct from there. | |
| Google Alert feature request | Google Alerts are a good way of tracking things on the internet. Set up a watch on a word and google will tell you whenever it finds a new page using the word. I have some set up for "Sillysoft", "Lux Delux", etc.
Here is my feature requests to google to make their alerts even better:
- Let me set domains for my alerts to ignore (to avoid Sillysoft alerts whenever a new sillysoft.net page goes up).
- Give me a link in the alert email to report the page as spam or phishing or content theft.
Thank you, oh mighty Google. | |
| Google Maps misses the park | I noticed that the version of Vancouver seen on Google Maps is missing a bunch of parks that the real-life Vancouver has. Comparing it to the map from the Vancouver Park Board, I made a list of parks missing from Google:
Harbour Green Park
Barclay Heritage Square
Marina Square
Cardero Park
Portal Park
Discovery Square
Cathedral Square
Victory Square
Wendy Poole Park
May & Lorne Brown Park
Helmcken Park
Creekside Park
Sutcliffe Park
Granville Loop Park
Willow Park
Choklit Park
Some of them are small parkettes, but many are not. Harbour Green, Creekside, and Sutcliffe are all quite large. Added up, that's a lot of local green space that Google isn't showing. I only compared the downtown and false creek areas, so there are surely more. Maybe Google is missing your local park? | |
| A human giant is coming at you | MTV is in search of some cred and they are trying their luck with the new sketch comedy show The Human Giant. I like 'em. Funny guyz Paul "Babyface" Scheer, Rob "OliveGarden" Huebel, Aziz "Wonderboy" Ansari and director Jason "Smartguy" Woliner have made a name for themselves on the 'net but Thursday, April 5th, 10:30EST is their American TV debut.
The first free episode is on iTunes. There are lots of short films, leaks and clips around. They tend toward the weird and wacky (lots of wigs and oddballs) and have an background in improv, friendship, and being funny. | |
| Power users, unite! | Google Cheat Sheet
I've been waiting for this for a while... | |
| Google trends | Google released a funky new tool yesterday: Google Trends.
It lets you see a chart graphing the frequency of a particular search term over time. Plus you can compare terms against each other. For example, here's slashdot vs digg vs flickr. | |
| Google Sightseeing | | Google Sightseeing is a weblog that's posting links to some cool views on Google's new satellite imagery. The motto is "Why bother seeing the world for real?" | |
| Google UI | | Here are some interesting crib notes from a talk given by a Google lady about user experience. | |
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