We Say IT Magazine

Google Calendar Gadgets Appearing

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:04 +0000

Andrew Pariser emails in a surprise finding in Google Calendar (if by any chance you’re able to reproduce this – I’m not – please comment):

Opened up gcal today, to find an interesting new “Gadgets” link under the google logo. Clicking it opens a right side pane that introduces a gadgets menu and a selection of gadgets to choose from:

Add Tasks

Add Googler Search

Add Jump to Date

Add Next Meetings

Add Time Zones

Add Where Are My Friends?

I also have a nice “INTERNAL ONLY” tag at the top of this menu, even though I’m not and have never been a google employee. (…)

Most of the gadgets (tasks, jump to date, time zone) are pretty obvious. Next meetings shows the next event scheduled in your calendar. Googler search presumably allows me to search the employee database, although I think it’s disabled for me. Where are my friends allows you to add friends and it displays their availability information as decided by their google calendar (provided they keep this information publicly viewable).

[Thanks Andrew and Tony!]

Update: As noted in the comments, you can try disable all CSS on the page (e.g. in Firefox, hit View → Page Style → No Style), then click “Gadgets” to the right, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Now you may see the text “INTERNAL ONLY”. Clicking in these parts of the page will lead to (supposedly internal but accessible) feedback forms, or (inaccessible from the outside) Google intranet pages.

The source of the Google employee search widget, “Googler Search” (facewall.xml), is also available, albeit it probably only runs from within Google. For instance, thumbnails for the search are stored at https://moma-api.corp.google.com/[prefix]/thumb (where prefix is an employees name as appearing in their email). The server search returns a JSON profile of an employee, and the codename “Woodstock” appears (perhaps denoting the Google intranet info API, I’m not sure).

[Thanks WebSonic!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Calendar Gadgets Appearing | Comments]

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If Google Were Your Roommate… (Video)

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:04 +0000

[Thanks WebSonic, via Digital Inspiration!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: If Google Were Your Roommate... (Video) | Comments]

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Dear Websites, Please Follow These 10 Rules.

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:04 +0000

Dear websites! Here are some general rules I’d like you to follow. Please, just to make me happy. It’s not that hard!

Open pop-unders. Pop-ups were those additional advice windows containing helpful information or contests allowing you to grab music players for free. Since a while, evil browser vendors hide them from my view. (Firefox does not want you to have a free iPhone.) However, clever programmers out there found a technology that still gets me the information I want when I want it: pop-unders that are triggered on click. Use them!

Come on, bundle it with a little extra! You know those boring programs you can download that don’t exceed your expectations? They just do what you believed them to do. One word: boring. When I download an app, I want it to come with a bonus that shows customer’s king and all. Programs like Java, which by default comes spiced up with the really helpful and neat Yahoo Toolbar, are reasonable distribution patterns your app should follow too.

Long click paths help us relax. Don’t let me get to your product or offering too fast – make it a multi-part route. Have you ever heard of mandalas? That’s the ancient art of sandpainting that helps us humans get into trance. Well, if you put your download or order form right on that first page where I’m looking for it, how do you think I’m going to reach the next spiritual level? It’s like producing a mandala using a laser color printer: fast, yeah. Trance, meditation, finding the meanings of life – no!

Use smallish, protected images when we zoom in. We all hate to click on a thumbnail of a product, or a pic on some blog, only to discover there’s a really hi-res photo of that pic opening on us. Why? Because most of the time, that squelches our imagination and disillusions us. Instead, as a webmaster, ensure you’re opening a picture that’s basically the size of the thumbnail plus around 6 – 8 pixels. Extra tip: Put a fat watermark over the zoomed pic, and when we right-click it, show the message “Don’t steal this pic, ’cause if you do it will be gone and no one else can look at it.” (And sheesh, if by any chance you have a Creative Commons license on any of your content, get rid of it… that stuff is worse than communism.)

Make that Captcha harder. When you solve a picture to submit a form, you’re expecting a riddle worth your attention. No patronizing please, we can handle it. Rule of thumb for captchas: If you can read it, it’s probably too easy. Websites in the last years made great progress in this area – follow their lead.

Spread the article across several pages. Have you ever come across a news article or blog post that had all of its content on a lengthy, scroll-intensive, single web page? That sucks, for obvious reasons: the mouse scroll wheel hurts our fingers; the page takes longer to load; we only get exposed to one blinking banner. So, rule number 6: please put your article on around 5 – 7 pages, depending on length. You’ll probably wanna shoot for around 2 paragraphs per page. (Note the loading time between the individual pages should give people time to reflect on what they just read… around 10 – 15 seconds should be fine.)

Inform me via email! When you have a website, please email me about it – even if I didn’t opt in to that. After all, how should I have opted in at your site? I didn’t even know it existed! As a general guideline, people are most interested in steel abs, buying cialis, replica design watches, and dubious business offers from other countries, so if your website is about any of those, bring it on.

Use PDF files. HTML is a lousy format to transmit information. It does not properly fix the layout on the receiving end, allowing us to mess it up in all the wrong ways. Instead of freezing the browser for a bit it loads too quickly, ruining all excitement. It contains ugly brackets, like this one > and this one <. The PDF format solves all these problems, so please, use it wisely, i.e. wherever you can.

Be the mystery guy. This one is for all the blogs out there who have their Contact and About info just a click away from every page: please. Stop it. No one cares about you, and by revealing who you are, you’ll spoil the mystery. Have you ever read a Sherlock Holmes book that would start by showing us who’s behind the killings? Have you ever watched a Columbo episode that starts by revealing who the murderer is?

Lie. That last one may be obvious, but I’m listing it here anyway, for completeness: lie. Don’t tell me all the nasty details about your service. Don’t let me know about the secret program running in the background of the program I installed. Don’t disclose who’s paying you. Don’t keep to your privacy policy. (Note: if you can’t lie straightaway, then at least stretch the truth a little, bend reality, be a tad dishonest, or keep quiet about the stuff I would like to know. It’s not ideal, but better than no lying at all.) Without lies, life would be boring indeed: a game of poker where all cards are on the table. Who wants to play like that?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Dear Websites, Please Follow These 10 Rules. | Comments]

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Google’s Cloud Contest… With an Odd Twist

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:04 +0000

Google has a US contest going on in partnership with airline Virgin America that’s aimed to promote “the cloud” (that is, moving your stuff online and then working on it using web apps). Ironically, by the way the prize is set up, it almost promotes the risks of that cloud. Here’s what happens when you win: Along with a notebook and some other stuff, you get 1 Terabyte of data! Whoopee? Not quite – after 1 year, you have to give the prize back (i.e. the 1 TB offer ceases), and if you want to keep the extra storage, you’ll need to pay for it. As Drtimofey in the forum suggests… you may end up spending 6 months to upload your data, and the other 6 months downloading it just to keep it.

In the cloud, things aren’t fully yours… not even contest prizes?

[Thanks Mrrix32, Drtimofey and Jason!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's Cloud Contest... With an Odd Twist | Comments]

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How Facebook Uses Your "Skipped" Webmail Contacts

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:04 +0000

Yesterday, Facebook suggested two people to me through its “Suggestions” feature which usually includes friends of friends, co-workers and people I used to go to school with. The odd thing about these two suggestions was that although I knew both of them – I had made contact with them years ago because they are my third or fourth cousins – we had no friends in common, we had never worked at the same place, we even lived in different parts of the world. So how did Facebook know that we knew each other?

I’m sure all you Facebook users are already aware that you can enter your Gmail (or other webmail) username and password to import a list of your contacts into Facebook to see if any of them are already registered based on their email address. This is something I have never done as I don’t like to enter my Google Account password on third-party websites. Even if I had done this, I knew for a fact that I had never used my Gmail account to email these two people.

But what if Facebook had used my friends’ imported contact lists to suggest their profile to me even though they didn’t add me as a friend? I am now pretty sure that’s what happened here. Here’s how I proved it:

My friend added my email address to his Contacts in Gmail.

My friend signed in to his Facebook account and imported his Contacts from his Gmail account using the “Find People You Email” feature.

My friend chose to skip the friend suggestion it was making based on my Gmail address.

I signed in to my Facebook account and saw that my friend’s Facebook account was being suggested to me.

In summary, it seems that even if you choose to skip the contacts you have imported, Facebook will still store your relationship with those contacts. Not only will it continue to include them in your suggestions, but it will also alert them to the fact that you previously imported their email address and that you are registered on Facebook. Facebook clearly states that it will not store your password, but it doesn’t tell you that it will store all your contacts even if you chose to skip them.

Admittedly, your account will only be suggested to others if your privacy settings allow your profile to be returned in search results, so anyone could search for your profile themselves, but is it right for Facebook to suggest you to the people that you have chosen to skip? Also, does this mean it’s possible to force yourself into someone else’s suggestions list by simply adding their email address to your contacts?

[By Tony Ruscoe | Origin: How Facebook Uses Your "Skipped" Webmail Cont ... | Comments]

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XKCD on Google Latitude

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:03 +0000

[Cartoon by Randall Munroe, CC-licensed. Also see Google Latitude. Thanks TomHTML!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: XKCD on Google Latitude | Comments]

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YouTube Increased Privacy of White House Videos

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:03 +0000

The Electronic Frontier Foundation yesterday writes:

When the Whitehouse.gov website launched in January, including embedded videos from YouTube, privacy advocates raised concerns that without extra privacy measures, YouTube would be improperly tracking visitors to the government website, including recording which videos were watched and combining that information with the ever-growing amount of information that Google and YouTube have about internet users, through YouTube’s use of cookies.

In response, The White House first made sure that YouTube’s cookies were not served merely upon visiting the website (…)

Now YouTube says that they have taken a second step urged by EFF: essentially ignoring their account cookies for videos viewed on Whitehouse.gov. Ordinarily, YouTube maintains a record of every YouTube video you’ve ever viewed, associated with your YouTube account, through use of the YouTube cookie. Now, they’ve agreed to exempt videos embedded on Whitehouse.gov from this logging.

The EFF says this is a good step. Now, they say, they’d like to see similar approaches being taken beyond just the White House website. “Human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking.”

If you like what the EFF is doing, you can donate to them.

[Thanks Juha-Matti!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: YouTube Increased Privacy of White House Vide ... | Comments]

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Picasa With Creative Commons Search

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:03 +0000

Clicking “Show options” in the upper left expands settings like sizes, aspect ratios, or licensing.

Google’s photo album service, Picasa Web Albums, now allows you to show options during your search. As Ionut noticed, as part of these options you can tick the “Creative Commons” link, which will only return shareable pics.

The amount of images is not all too bad either, at least for some queries: a CC-only search for the keyword google shows 276,529 pics, according to Picasa. A search for obama returns 43,510 pics right now. For comparison, the same CC-only obama search yields 127,858 results on Flickr. (Naturally, someone claiming that a pic is CC-licensed does not necessarily make it so, as the original person may not have the copyright to begin with.)

[Via Ionut!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Picasa With Creative Commons Search | Comments]

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Tell Google When You Moved a Site

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:02 +0000

If you’re changing from one domain to another for your website, it’s good practice to use a permanent redirect header for all the old pages. Added to that, you can now let Google know of the move in a new Webmaster Tools section called “Change of address”. “This will help us update our index faster and smooth the transition for your users,” Google says.

A theoretical problem with configuring settings like these in the Google Webmaster Tools is that other search engines are locked out of your preferences, unless you’d mundanely repeat them for all search engines which would want to support them. Formats like robots.txt or Sitemaps.xml are more open in these regards – though probably also tougher to agree on, if you’re looking for standards to apply across all major search engines. (For this particular setting, permanent redirect headers may be the standard here already; however, even unauthorized sites could point a redirect to your site.)

Back in 2007, I moved this domain from blog.outer-court.com to blogoscoped.com… after a couple of months, I were able to check in on some of the results.

[Thanks WebSonic!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Tell Google When You Moved a Site | Comments]

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New From Google: Fusion Tables

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:44:02 +0000

The tables overview…

A single table is displayed, 100 rows at a time.

Map visualization of data. (Google Spreadsheets has a related feature via Insert → Gadget → Maps.)

The Google Labs have released a new tool called Fusion Tables. It lets you view, visualize, merge & discuss large tables of data. In the tables gallery right now, there’s data like baby names, or Academy Awards by country.

Somewhat confusingly, this product seems like a set of features that already is, or seemingly could become, integrated in the existing Google Spreadsheets. Creating a new product just to manage more data seems like the opposite of consolidation efforts – merging products into a larger one instead of creating multiple related ones at separate locations. Google’s Marissa Mayer said in 2006 “It is hard for people to remember more than 5 or 10 products from a particular company. If we can take each of the products we have and make them even larger and more meaningful to people, I think there’s a lot of benefit that could be had by both the users, because they don’t have to remember quite as much”.

In the Fusion Tables FAQ, Google addresses the issue of how this product is supposed to be different from Google Spreadsheets:

The goal of Fusion Tables, as with other database systems, is to manage larger amounts of data than spreadsheets typically do. This size difference leads to a focus on a different set of functionalities. For example, Fusion Tables focuses more on bulk operations on the data (filtering, aggregation, merges). These operations are typically not necessary for smaller collections of data stored in spreadsheets. In contrast, spreadsheets preserve complete flexibility in managing data – you can put any value you want in any cell and work carefully to format your spreadsheet to make it look nice. Fusion Tables requires that the data be tabular with column headers and types for each column.

As far as size limits are concerned, Google in their help elsewhere says that each Google Spreadsheet “can be up to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, or 100 sheets – whichever is reached first. There’s no limit on rows.”

[Hat tip to Hebbet and Ionut!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: New From Google: Fusion Tables | Comments]

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