• Integration with Gmail is both very great and very bad.  I like only having to stop at once place to check both my email and read through some recent buzzes.   On a larger scale, however, this restricts buzzing to only those who have Gmail accounts.  Most people who don’t currently use Gmail won’t want to sign up for a Gmail account just so they can buzz.
• Location resolution in the mobile buzz app quite accurately describes where you are.  That may be fine if you are buzzing about your experience at a particular store or business, but sometimes I would like to share my location more generally so that I can communicate to people that I’m in Fort Collins, but without telling them my exact location.
• Commenting and liking are great features that allow my buzzes to be more social and invites more discussion.
• Better APIs need to be shared so that developers can allow third-party applications to help a user buzz.  I hear this is coming, but it should have been available from day one.

It will be interesting to see Buzz evolve over time, but hopefully we won’t ever see any “Which movie character are you?” or “Be my Farmville Friend” buzzes that have plagued Facebook.

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However, today we learn that the deal is going bust because too many government regulators and advertisors had concerns that this agreement would give Google too much of an advertising monopoly.

The problem is that Yahoo as a company is in trouble.  After the failed Yahoo takeover by Microsoft, Yahoo’s stock is off by 60% of its high this year.

Without this deal, could Yahoo be forced to shrink or even die?  Is killing off Yahoo really worth the risk of a Google monopoly?

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I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

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I find myself logging into the AdSense site frequently, just to see how much money I’ve made by publishing your advertisements. It would be very convenient if you would place much of the Overview information into a Google Gadget that I can have on my iGoogle page.

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Recently I’ve decide to open source some more code and templates that I’ve written. I could either share that code from my own website, or I could share it on Google Code, being able to make use of some of the other features they have there. The biggest advantage to providing the code from my website is that I’m able to collect on any advertising revenue, which in the past has been around a dollar or two per thousand views. If Google could provide me a way to generate similar revenue by hosting my code on their site, not only would I consider hosting my code their, but I would find more incentive to write open source code projects.

The only major problem with this might be abuse. If I wanted to make a few extra bucks, what is stopping me from “forking” someone elses project just to host their code under a slightly different name on Google code and profit from the visitors I would have stolen from the more legitimate site.

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There is perhaps one product which is little known that I consider as having changed the Internet forever. This app has never really seen daylight outside the lab. In fact, its been a part of Google Labs for the last three and a half years. The product of which I’m referring is Google Suggest. If web applications were a family tree, Google Suggest would have been the grandfather of the so-called Web 2.0 apps we have today.

Google Suggest makes use of a web browser feature called XmlHttpRequest. This feature allows the browser to connect back to the web server and download additional content after the web page has already loaded. Today we see this feature used all around the web, but when Google Suggest was first released, few people ever knew that it existed. Post-loading content from the server was so revolutionary, that it has seen incredible adoption all over the net. So although most people never really knew about Google Suggest, it has indeed been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 firestorm.

Today Google released a new product platform which may be listed among the great revolution products from Google. Google App Engine (not to be confused with Google Apps for your Domain) is a service which allows web application developers to host their applications on Google’s servers, using Google technology.

Google App Engine solves the single biggest challenge in web application development: hosting. Having a web host that is well configured, well connected, and well tested is usually expensive, but it seems that Google will be providing at least some level of hosing for free. This really gives developers a whole new level of freedom for creating apps, and I think this will foster a whole new level of web application creativity. Who knows, this might be just the beginning of something called, Web 3.0.

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• 33/3
• pi dollars in euros
• 1 mile in furlongs

One thing it doesn’t do is date calculations. For example, how cool would it be to type in today + 155 days or 12:59am + 10 minutes?

Please Google, help me calculate dates!

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I thought an appropriate label for these types of messages would be Voicemail.

When I tried this, it returned the following error message:

System specific names are not allowed. Please try another name.

I don’t understand why Voicemail would be a system specific name, unless Google has something special coming to Gmail.

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Every once in a while Google exports their Pagerank values into a database that can be accessed by the Google Toolbar (also available as a bundled download with the Firefox browser). When Google performs such an update, people can see the Pagerank value for a particular site or page.

The latest export is currently underway, and I’ve noticed that the new Pagerank values for some of my sites and pages have been kind of disappointing. For example, I was excited when my main blog was promoted from a 4 to a 5 during the last Pagerank update, but has now fallen to a 3. This technical blog has fallen from a 3 to a 2, and my other blogs have stayed at about a 3 or 2.

I blame the lack of freshness of my blogs. During the last Pagerank update, I was blogging a new post almost every day. During the last three months, this has slowed down considerably, as blogging isn’t as important as it used to be for me. As a result, my Pagerank is down. This is too bad, but I’m not devaluing my life because of it.

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Please have lots of fun exploring Portland, Oregon.

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