The transition from Google Groups over to the new forum platform was never quite cleared up as to why, though. Is Google Groups becoming obsolete? It had a number of outages in July of last year. But still, Google has not come out and publicly declared that they will be closing down Google Groups any time soon.

But, I suspect that we will see Google Groups to be seeing its final days very soon.

If you have your support, mailing list, or anything using Google Groups, I can only recommend that you quickly find a new home. Based what we are seeing Google do, it’s best to follow suit.

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Google News Help Forum

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Post tags: Google Forums, Google Groups, Google Help

Full URL

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Matt Mullenweg on the Future of WordPress

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Post tags: Daily Clips

Let’s take a look at a little excerpt from the article which is really the core of the accusasion.

In fact, Google Apps isn’t even as popular as the free OpenOffice.org. In “Study: OpenOffice five times more popular than Google Docs,” Eric Lai cites a study last month from market research firm ClickStream Technologies PLC which found that 51% of U.S. Internet users over age 18 use Microsoft Office, while 5% use OpenOffice.org, and only 1% use Google Docs.

The upshot? Google has a long way to go to catch Microsoft Office. Given that Office will be available on the Web in the coming year, I’m betting Google will never even come close.

Let’s give some context to what Preston is saying with some history of the products.
(...)
Read the rest of PC World Thinks Google Apps Will Never “Catch On” (453 words)

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Post tags: Google Apps, Google Competition, Microsoft

There is an application called ReadAir, which is an Adobe AIR version of Google Reader.

But, it’s not quite perfect, yet.

I’ve noticed, as of this version (0.3), there are still a number of major bugs in it. The first bug that I’ve noticed is that when you click on a primary group folder, which has several feeds underneath it, it does not display all of the feeds from all of the blogs beneath it.

Secondly, I’ve noticed that not even all the feeds will show the items in the feed. It’s been hit or miss using this version and overall I’ve been very disappointed.

I was really looking forward to using this app full time instead of using the web-based version of Google Reader, but alas, I will still need to use the web-based version as this desktop version will not suffice for my needs.

If you want to take a look at it, head on over to Google Code to check out the ReadAir project.

So at this point, I cannot recommend that people use it. But it’s there and might be worth a moment of your time to check out.

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ReadAir: Google Reader on Your Desktop

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Post tags: Google Reader

But, in the past couple of years, we have seen various roll-outs of new functions for users to choose from. Above is an example of what kind of options we now have when we’re searching for images.
One item I really wish that Google would add to Image Search is the ability to search for images or photos based on a Creative Common license. Philipp wrote an extensive article about Creative Commons and Google early last year which gives an awesome break down between Creative Commons and Google.

From what Philipp actually talks about, I think it very relevant today still. Nearly 2 years later, Google has still done absolutely nearly nothing with Creative Commons, at least nothing that we can visibly see. Google’s competitor Yahoo! has done quite a bit with it at Flickr.com, but despite competition, Google has yet to show anything for its usage and integration with Creative Commons.

Article got a little sidetracks, but the point is that Google has new ways to use Image Search, but still has a ways to go before it’s really a prime time powerhouse.

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New Ways to use Google Image Search

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Post tags: Creative Commons, Google Images, Google Search

Joshua dives into how he feels that he is a better flash designer now than when he was when he started. This should hopefully be a point for anyone to hit home when you’ve been at a job for X amount of time.

He also talked a little bit about how daunting it was designing the flash player for YouTube’s homepage because of the large amount of traffic it would be receiving.

Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H382FP4CVas

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Life at Google Friday: Joshua, Flash Designer

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Post tags: Life at Google

Website: Facebook.com
Browser: Firefox (v3.0.4)
OS: Windows XP

Here is where you need to be before you can begin.

Windows 95/98/ME
c:\windows\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\[profile-name]\[#s].slt\chrome\
Windows NT
%UserProfile%\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\[profile-name]\[#s].slt\chrome\
Windows 2000/XP
C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.tea\chrome\
*NIX
~/.phoenix/[profile-name]/[#s].slt/chrome/
Mac OS X
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[profile-name]/chrome/
(...)
Read the rest of How to Kill Facebook Ads in Firefox (236 words)

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Post tags: Facebook, Mozilla Firefox

Let’s take a look at what Google is doing.

 <url>
  <loc>http://www.google.com/base/br.gif</loc>
  <priority>0.5000</priority>
 </url>

What I really found most interesting is how much of a priority they are giving images in general. These images are not changing, not even on a yearly basis — the images probably will never change, ever.

So why shouldn’t they get a lot lower of a priority to give other files/pages that actually do change, a more frequent exposure priority.

Side note, it’s also interesting that Google’s sitemap.xml is nearly 4mb in size. 4091382 Bytes = 3995 KB

Update (12:25pm EST): According to John Mu, images are ignored in the sitemap file.

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[Google's] Best Pratices for Your Sitemap

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Post tags: Google Sitemaps

His Life at Google story talks about being involved with multiple team members from various ethnic backgrounds. One of his team members on a specific project had dual citizenship, which simply shows the diversity alone within the Google organization.

Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQmLTN0KT8Y

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Life at Google Friday: Christian in Zurich

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Post tags: Life at Google

Taking another look at the google.com robots.txt file, you can see this in the footer, Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml. After viewing that file, you can see that this file specifies a number of other sitemap files.
(...)
Read the rest of How Google Uses Sitemaps (183 words)

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Post tags: Google Sitemaps