Hey Google – where are my flappin’ videos?

is this google’s idea of a graceful exit?

Google recently sent the users of video.google.com service a notice saying that it was discontinuing this service, and urging them to migrate their videos to YouTube.

forget one-click migration to YouTube, my videos have disappeared altogether, and there’s no one to talk to.

I had a couple of dozen of videos on google video. when I logged in to download and move them, they simply weren’t there. oh well, I thought, momentary glitch. but no – they haven’t re-appeared. support? google have closed down all the google video forums, so you can’t post any issue.   Strangly enough, even the service termination notice doesn’t appear on  video.google.com or any of google’s official blogs. For lack of alternatives, I posted an issue on the YouTube support forum. I haven’t received any response.

Ok, google has the right to shut down a free service it has been providing for years. A bit of a longer notice period would be nice, some migration tools would ease the pain. But that’s up to them. However, this goes way beyond reasonable behaviour. Can I please have my videos back?

I’m on da map

Search web2.0 in London on google maps. What do you get?

I kid you not.
But you can hack your own.

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Blackadder kicked out of Facebook, John Wood drafts the spec for the worker’s social net

Derek Blackadder has been kicked out of FaceBook again. This time for good – his account has been deleted. I’m not going to pose a protest ban on FaceBook, because I already did that. And came back, and got bored of the whole thing.

But this incident leads John Wood to a very pointly analysis of why FaceBook is good, why its bad, and what the ideal social network for social action would look like.

Now here’s what I think. With current platforms such as google app engine, open social, ning and the lot, it should be possible to hack something useful in a few weekends in the garage. Who’s game?

geek delight

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Hey guys, look what I found in Israel

So Sergey hops over to Israel for a couple of days, and the next thing, what do you know – Google.org announces an investment in BrightSource Energy.

Arnold Goldman, Founder and Chairman of BrightSource Energy, Inc., was also the founder of Luz International, Ltd. (no longer in operation).

Luz II, Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of BrightSource, provides product development and engineering, project engineering and management, and solar field manufacturing and supply services.
Luz II is headquartered in Jerusalem, Israel.

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surveys for the people

Google is king. My latest discovery is their sweet forms gadget for spreadsheets. Need to collect some data? Get the vibe? Enlist troops for a cause? Here you go.

gmail+firefox memory leak?

I’m running FireFox 2.0.0.11 on Win XP. Since Friday, every time I launch gmail, my browser freezes. A quick look at the windows task manager shows two(!) instances of firefox in the applications tab, one linked to the firefox process, the other to an explorer process. The firefox process continues to chew up memory until I kill it.

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FaceBook is evil.

FaceBook’s strategy may be genius, or it may be bonkers. I’m betting on bonkers – and praying for it too. Yes, privacy is dead, it has been for a while now. But this is taking it to an extreme. There an old line from an old radio sketch that comes to mind: yes, everyone pisses in the pool, but they don’t do it from the top of the jumping board.

Google has been serving me ads tailored for my behaviour for ages. Whether it’s adsense or the little clips on my gmail. Amazon tells me that people who bought this book also liked that one. The big difference is that whatever is personal, stays personal. No one tells my friends what I bought unless I do.

Mr. Zuckerberg thinks we’re ready to cross that bridge: hand over whatever is left of our dignity to the noble cause of making corporates richer. It kinda makes sense with the MS deal. Funny, how the same people who will go to great lengths to protect “their” intellectual property (read: DRM) are so eager to violate ours.

The irony is that FaceBook will fail, but not because the masses will awake. It will fail for the same reason that Friendster, Yahoo360 and so many of its predecessors failed: our short span of attention, and our low tolerance of bad products. And let’s say it once and for all: FaceBook is a crap product. Don’t give me the 800M users can’t all be wrong. They’re not. They came, had some fun, and will soon move on to something new. Why? Because FB gives you very little in terms of actual social value. Ok, you threw a fish at me, I joined your save the penguins cause. Now what? What does FB give me, in terms of managing my life, that email doesn’t? In fact, in most cases – it’s just a pain compared to email. Even the big API hoo-ha turned out to be an embarrassment. The only FB applications that carry any weight are those that point you to external services, like Zoho. Believe me, I’ve tried them.

Now google, that’s a different story. I can communicate with my friends with gmail, share document and edit them collaboratively, coordinate social activities with my calender and mailing lists. And you know what? I don’t mind their targeted ads, because their targeting actually works: most of the content that gets pushed my way is actually of interest (compare FB: I’m still getting dating ads. Please someone tell them I’m in a relationship, been happily in one for decades. Oh – that’s on my profile).

Mr. Zuckerberg is a genius social engineer, but as a software engineer he sucks. He was smart to start with college kids and expand upwards. He rode the wave of carnival for a year, now the party’s over. Which is why he’s resorting to hysterical business strategies.

(originally posted as a comment on

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/11/dont_tap_on_the.php)

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Jew on this

Two friends have alerted me today to a petition demanding that google delist a certain hate site which comes up when you search for the word Jew. That site is clearly a poorly done, pathetic obnoxious hate site. Yet I have a problem with the idea of tampering with search results, even in a case like this. Google have added a note on the top of the page, which I think is just about as much as they should do.

But hey – this is the age of participatory media right? we are the internet. we can change the search results easily. All you need is Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew!

I want night googles!

I was reading on Slashdot that -

“Recent commentary at Nature Climate Change describes an on-going debate about the energy savings associated with the background colors used by high-traffic websites such as Google and the NYTimes. A back of the envelope calculation has suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created. However, other calculations by the Wall Street Journal suggest minimal energy savings.”

And I’m thinking, what could be easier than for google to put a ‘night vision’ checkbox on iGoogle? Or in the preferences page? iGoogle is my home page, and my personal portal to the web. So I spend a lot of time there. Also, the setting could be applied to gmail, docs, etc.

And if not google, then maybe someone could make a firefox extension for this?