Tag Archives: google

Apr 30

Google Glass source code now OPEN.

Now I am very convinced that this a pet project that Google doesn’t care about in terms of making money out of it. Google makes two types of products, one for themselves to make money out of and the other just to disrupt or balance out the market and make end users their product for their advertisements. Google directly makes money out of Google apps, Google search, Youtube, etc. Their other products(Open Source) such as Android, Chromium, WebM etc are just out there with a reason claiming a reason of giving back to the community, but in reality Open source is the key word they use to conceal their inabilities to create a success story out of the product and there by asking the world to make it better and a success. Can’t Google make their own hardware with a partnership and sell just Google phones? No, clearly that won’t succeed against apple at the same rate as android has grown over the past couple of years with the support of Samsung,LG,HTC,Motorola,Sony etc. Same is the case with Chrome/ WebM. It will be the case with Google Glass as well. Google Chrome, Android are out there to show and market Google’s products and Ads to End users like us. Its a yet another platform for making us the product. Now with Google Glass “Open Sourced” the entire geek community is now going to tweak Google Glass and make it even better in turn making the adoption a little more evident, without which it would just disappear like the Google phone(oops had forgotten it was called Nexus) in oblivion.

When the Google glasses hits the market I predict it will just be mediocre and have similar sales figures like the Google Nexus. It just won’t be a revolutionary product like the iPad.

Apr 15

Whats up at Google

Very interesting insight into how things have changed in Google and what made James Whittaker move back to Microsoft. The entire post of his summarizes how things are at Google and whats up at Google these days and how it has changed from old times.

Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s? No company has ever done that for Google and Google took it personally.

Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.

Interesting how times change and how being on the helm of innovation is so damn important for companies like Microsoft,Google and Apple. Doing the right things at the right time can’t be discounted either. Google still has an edge, but i guess too many cooks are spoiling their broth.

He sums it up quite nicely here.

Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. You have to admire a company willing to sacrifice sacred cows and rally its talent behind a threat to its business. Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Google+ and me, we were simply never meant to be. Truth is I’ve never been much on advertising. I don’t click on ads. When Gmail displays ads based on things I type into my email message it creeps me out.

Clearly show whats exactly happening at Google HQ and why things aren’t working well with Google, and whats making important people quit Google.

Mar 26

Google Grave yard

I never knew good had buried so many products already. It doesn’t matter anyways, I haven’t heard about most of them, so thank god i don’t need to find alternatives like for Google reader.The Google graveyard is really very big and I can say, it will only grow. :)

via Marco

Mar 12

Google Admits WebM infringes h.264 Patents

This might seem a harsh from Marco about google, but trust me it is just the truth.

Open” has very little to do with anything they do. What they’re really doing most of the time is trying to gain control of the web for themselves and their products. If they really cared about being so “open”, they’d open up a nontrivial part of their business that hasn’t already been commoditized, like their searching or advertising algorithms.

As usual, “open” is just lip service. And it works. It works damn well.

One can’t agree more with that statement.. They want to have the web under the control. Google created chromium (opensource), but how many of us get to use chromium as it is.The chromium site gives a download link to chrome and not the chromium, atleast for windows users its google chrome that they can get their hands on instantly and not chromium. So why is chromium so hard to download from the chromium site? Is there any stable build of chromium available? No.The reason is very simple, they want us to use the google branded version, so that they can keep tabs on the web and most importantly US. Why is Gmail still free? Why chrome OS, when there is open source linux? Why do they need to create Google+ rather than partner with Facebook for social search.

I can go on on ranting, but you get the point. Its very simple they want to own as much of the web as possible, keep everything under their control and they don’t care how they do it. They will do it by hook or crook. Well that stinks.

Feb 2

I went through the policy completely and all i could think of was, Google could be evil, but this policy ain’t. Ben Brooks sums it up nicely. My advice if you are on Facebook, you just can ignore the changes made to the policy here, because you are giving a lot more of personal/ behavioral information there than here that you should worry about first.

Jul 4

Google, Plus – My Thoughts

Yet another attempt by Google on breaking into the social networking domain after a failure with Orkut and Buzz. After almost 5 days using Google plus, I can say that this time they have managed to stand by the expectations people have on a company like Google. Plus one is indeed a plus one site to be on for now. Plus is  Facebook with a pinch of geeky Google. The key differentiators from Face Book being the following 1. Group people into a list/ circles and each circle is private from the other. i.e What you share with circle A(friends) is not visible with circle B(colleagues) until you explicitly say so. 2. You get to follow pretty much anybody who has a plus profile, which is cool. It saves time for popular people like Scobleizer, Guy Kawasaki, Vic Gundotra, etc. Eg:- All those who want to follow Scoble (In 6 days he already has 11k people following on Plus)  can’t friend him on Facebook, if they did his profile would go for a toss, and nothing on his wall would remain personal. So he needs to create a Facebook page and keep updating that for his followers, But here on Google plus its simple, They let everyone follow every one, and with a couple of clicks you decide who see what updates. This way it seems like a middle ground between Twitter and Facebook. 3. Sparks is a stream of links to articles/videos from Google search based on your interest. So you are always engaged with latest information of your interest. This seems more a filler now, till people start getting active. Since I don’t have a lot of updates flowing in real time, I also keep checking sparks of my interest to see if some new stuff has happened in my area of interest. This way they are keeping me on Plus for some more time before I get bored and move to check Facebook :) . This might seem pretty simple and might not get an attraction that much, but it has a huge value to Google moving ahead. Imagine a couple of years down the lane when Plus has a couple of million users, at least a third of those people will drive traffic to websites from these sparks and it would give the edge back to Google from Facebook as the number 1 traffic generator. 4. Huddle is a mobile feature where people can send text to one another like chat messages, where group texting as well is possible. I haven’t been able to play around with this feature, given I am on an Iphone in India. The introductory video looks interesting none the less. 5. Video and voice chat called Hangouts for groups is the most compelling feature of Plus.. This is just crazy. Imagine a Video chat with 10 people for free. BTW I like the way it highlights the person who is talking is really cool. Most of my stream ( i.e equivalent to the News feed in FB) is with very little real time data, vastly due to the reason that the amount of active friends I have on FaceBook is way more than what I have now on Google Plus. What is best about Google Plus is the privacy seems to be implemented to perfection so far. The settings provide ample options for one to decide who see what of the data you share. The iPhone still doesn’t have a native app like android, but the web app on safari works perfect and is well implemented. The UI animations are cool and feels like you are on desktop rather than on the web b. Over all Google plus seems to be a bit geeky as of now at least thats how it look like with all the geeky guys getting invites.  Hope the geekiness won’t last really long else, it won’t help Google keep up in the social wars. So do I think it will beat Facebook and become the best social network. I don’t think so. It has a potential and it has a long way to go, and i don’t think Facebook will just  sit tight and watch.  We definitely will benefit with Google having a check on Facebook  and Vice versa. It will take ages for a lot of grandpa’s and Grandma’s to Sign-up to Plus and very hardly will they signup if at all, given they already are on Facebook. Its just a good beginning for Google So far, it all depends on how they pan out.  I just hope they allow all my friends to signup before i get bored looking at a stream that hardly flows.

Apr 8

Protecting users from malicious downloads

For the past five years Google has been offering protection to users against websites that attempt to distribute malware via drive-by downloads — that is, infections that harm users’ computers when they simply visit a vulnerable site. The data produced by our systems and published via the Safe Browsing API is used by Google search and browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to warn users who may attempt to visit these dangerous webpages.

Thanks, Feels good to hear that you still care for us.