Yahoo! The Sleeping Giant

Published on September 4th, 2007 14 Comments

Last week, screenshots of Kickstart, Yahoo’s lastest foray into social networks surfaced. Not surprisingly, Kickstart is targeted at recruiting, helping college student find an “in” at companies where they want to work and helping companies recruit students. I like this approach, as long as they can keep it clean by ensuring the students are really [...]

All Your (Oracle) Blogs are Belong to Us

Published on August 27th, 2007 7 Comments

So, about a month ago when I released the Oracle Blogs search engine plugins, Carl asked a very valid question. Why can’t I search all the blogs listed at blogs.oracle.com, regardless of whether they are hosted by Oracle or not? I thought about this, contemplating creating a Custom Google Search Engine and a plugin against [...]

How to Search Your Reader Feeds

Published on August 27th, 2007 1 Comment

I have returned from the land of home improvement projects to bring you this tasty Monday nugget. We at AppsLab are all big fans of Google Reader. You can find our OPML files on the About page, if you’re interested. They’re nothing like Scoble’s 600+ feeds, but each of us has a pretty hefty list [...]

From the “Don’t Be Evil” Department

Published on August 21st, 2007 4 Comments

As we all know, Google’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil”. I’m a huge fan of the ideals behind the statement, but I’m also a huge cynic. IMHO, by going public, Google essentially changed the motto to “Let’s not be poor.” Not that all the hardworking Googlers don’t deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. [...]

Cage Match: Google vs. Facebook

Published on August 20th, 2007 6 Comments

While Yahoo has spent time and energy over the past year and a half trying several times to talk Facebook into a merger, Google has been curiously silent. Until, they recently snagged Brad Fitzpatrick from Six Apart. Fitzpatrick, known for founding LiveJournal and selling it to Six Apart, wasted no time laying down the gauntlet [...]

Google Apps Suite Plows Ahead

Published on July 18th, 2007 5 Comments

Business Week has an article today about Google Apps. The suite looks more complete every day. Witness the Postini acquisition, the anticipated release of presentations (a combination of Zenter, Tonic Systems and probably some homegrown mojo too) this summer, the integration of JotSpot features and now, enterprise YouTube. This one jumped off the page for [...]

Tune Your Browser with Custom Search and Plugins

Published on July 16th, 2007 7 Comments

Lost over the weekend was a del.icio.us link from Rich to PeopleSoft Search. ChiliJoe has put together a sweet combination of a Google Custom Search Engine and OpenSearch plugins to make it easier to find PeopleSoft technical content. Eddie Awad has a custom search engine for his OraNA news aggregregator as well. A Google Custom [...]

Odd News

Published on July 10th, 2007 Leave a Comment

In case you’ve been wondering, I collect these stories, and when I get a few, I dump them. Like it, don’t like it, tell me in Comments. Details on Taser’s XREP electric shotgun shell emerge From Engadget, cool and frightening all at once. Chinese Youth Killed By Cell Phone Battery Blast It’s supposed to be [...]

So Much for the Backup Plan

Published on July 9th, 2007 Leave a Comment

Maybe Eric Schmidt was reading this blog over the weekend. On Saturday, I observed that Eric was being coy when he called the enterprise an agreed that the enterprise was a backup plan for Google, just in case that whole advertising thing doesn’t pan out as planned. Today, Google announced it is acquiring Postini to [...]

Too Many of Me, Part 2

Published on July 8th, 2007 Leave a Comment

Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System has a post about Socialstream, a new kind of social network, created by a project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and sponsored by Google. Don’t the already have a orkut that’s kind of a big deal in Brazil? Anyway, the feature [...]

Google’s Backup Plan

Published on July 7th, 2007 2 Comments

I read today that Google Apps will soon include the features acquired from JotSpot. Not that big a surprise, but adding wikis and web site building capabilities to Google Apps will make them even more compelling in comparison to Microsoft Office. I hope Docs and Spreadsheets will be graced with these features, too. Anyway, it [...]

Is a bar chart really the best we can do?

Published on June 30th, 2007 5 Comments

I recently caught a demo of Hans Rosling’s software which provides a pretty amazing visualization framework for understanding relationships between data.  In this demo, Hans analyzes, by country,  infant mortality vs GNP over the course of about 100 years.   Like all great presentations, if forces you to re-think how you view something – in this [...]

Bigger Big Brother, Part 2

Published on June 15th, 2007 4 Comments

Thanks to Eddie and Steve for weighing in on the discussion I started yesterday. I think fundamentally, we disagree about who has more damaging information. I say Amazon does. Eddie and Steve say Google. My argument is that purchase history (even without exposing credit cards) can be more damaging than search/email/feed reading/documents. I say that [...]

Who’s the Bigger Big Brother, Amazon or Google?

Published on June 14th, 2007 10 Comments

I’m a paranoid guy, always have been. Last week’s report by Privacy International that slammed Google as “hostile to privacy” got me thinking about Amazon vs. Google, which knows more about me and how I feel about them. I happened to be downloading Smokin’ Aces (any good?) to my Tivo from Amazon Unbox, so I [...]

Googleforce.com Coming Soon?

Published on June 2nd, 2007 7 Comments

I can’t keep quiet anymore, so I’m whispering into the blogosphere echo chamber. I think, wait for it . . . Google’s acquisition frenzy isn’t over yet. Nothing like going out on a limb, stunning prognostication. Which company you ask, assuming you’re still reading? How about salesforce.com? How does that strike you? This isn’t a [...]

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