Google Talk Buddy List AWOL

So today I signed in to Google Talk as I do every morning, only to find that my entire buddy list had vanished. Completely gone. I logged out, and signed back in again, but it still wasn’t there. It wasn’t even as though it just so happened that everyone else was offline – I viewed offline names and there was still nothing there. Upon further investigation, I discovered that I am showing up on other’s lists as “Invited”, but having not yet accepted the invitation to join GTalk.

This has evidently happened to quite a few other people in the past few months. I think it’s ridiculous that such a problem can exist and not have been addressed. Am I going to wake up one morning and discover that everything in my GMail account has disappeared too?

What’s worse is that there’s no easy way to contact Google about the problem. I’m still looking, and in the meantime have sent an email to every address I can find.

Tags: google, googletalk, gtalk, jabber

Google / dMarc

A while back (Jan 17, to be precise), Google announced their acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting. I was reminded of this today in a USA Today article covering the expansion of Google’s advertising machine into the “old”-media space.

In case you didn’t already know, dMarc’s software automatically inserts adverts into radio station’s unsold ad space, based on information about the station and its demographic. One thing I haven’t seen anyone else mention is that this sort of system could (it seems to me) be used to automatically insert adverts into podcasts...

Tags: google

That's Vaguely Interesting, Though Not Surprising

It seems that when you send a GMail invite to a Hotmail account, Hotmail tags it as being spam.

I did warn you that it was only vaguely interesting…

Gibber Gibber

There seems to be a swell of interest in the fact that Google could introduce an IM client built on top of Jabber, all of which have some interesting ideas:

• How Google Could De-Throne AIM
• Industry Jabbers About Google’s IM Product
• GIM on the horizon?

Here are some links from earlier in the year which I found as well:

• Instant Messenger Protocol Stupidity Continues
• Geodesic working on Google IM

As Bob Wyman pointed out in a comment on this post though, Google already picked up an IM system with their acquisition of Picasa, so why would they change over? I’d argue that they’d change to Jabber because the protocol/s are more advanced than Hello, and there is a lot of flexibility which I’m sure Google would take advantage of in some cool way.

As Jim reports here, Jabber needs a very easy-to-use client to enhance take up (and for me!), especially regarding the transports across to the other IM systems. The fact that these bridges reside server side is a huge advantage for Jabber clients since the user doesn’t need to download a patch when Yahoo decide to modify their protocol slightly. Will Google introduce that?

Of course, an even more astonishing move would be for Yahoo to switch…

Gibber Redux

Back in April, I wrote about the Google Operating System meme that was doing the rounds, and I invented Gibber, which I described thusly:

an Orkut integrated IM client (desktop and mobile) which records your conversations so you can search them later on.

I’ve been thinking about IM clients a fair amount recently, as I’m starting to use it more and more, and of course one of the things I’ve discovered is that it really is a major pain to have people distributed across a whole series of non-interoperable systems. I’ve also been running the Google Deskbar since it was released last year. Deskbar is an obvious prelude to how Google’s desktop search technology (codenamed Puffin) might work.

So here’s what I’m thinking: what if Google combined Deskbar and Puffin with an IM client? And what if, instead of having Orkut, the social networking was built into this client (with complete FOAF integration of course)? What if you could search IM conversations as easily and as well as you can search email (across the conversation and across the metadata)?

And what if Google took every GMail account and turned it into a Jabber user ID as well?

That would turn a few heads, I think.

Google == Ultimate Insta Company?

Further to yesterday’s Google posting, it strikes me that Google may well be the ultimate insta company, as defined by Om Malik. They use off-the-shelf hardware to build what is probably the world’s most advanced data-centre(s), with all the smarts being in the software they use to monitor and run everything.

As an aside, Google’s OS research lab seems to be well on the way to being the premier institute for doing such research. All those cheap CPU cycles…

Google Operating System

Via Kottke, a great (and long!) article by Rich Skrenta on Google as being the ultimate Internet operating system.

Although the article is by Skrenta, Kottke himself starts the gears ticking for me with this seemingly throwaway sentence:

Mobile devices don’t need big, bloated OSes…they’ll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS.

So now your address book/contacts backs up straight into Orkut, which doubles as your mail whitelist, all your phone created content, such text and media messages and camera phone images, all become searchable. In fact, how about automatically sharing any (specified) pictures you take with an Orkut community (i.e., without manually moblogging them)? I’m pretty sure any company (and especially one with decent search technology) could do a better job at telling you where the nearest ATM or well reviewed restaurants are than any of the systems currently offered by mobile operators. Get Web Alerts and News Alerts to your phone (as a WAP Push message). Froogle takes on whole new abilities and meaning in this context (moreso than what they’ve already done). Voice Search becomes useful when it speaks back to you. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before we get Gibber, an Orkut integrated IM client (desktop and mobile) which records your conversations so you can search them later on. And of course, don’t forget the GMail client for your handset.

Not so much an operating system as operating services.

Google Calculator

Yes, I know everyone has already mentioned this, but: this works. Not that huge a surprise, I guess.

But it doesn’t know the question...

:-)

Google Browser

Simon Willison on Anil Dash: The Google Browser

I vote for that!

Try Before You Sell

Meant to post this a few days ago, but the Google Weblog has a form where you can preview what ads Google’s new AdSense system will serve to your site. Just click here.

A New Tab For Google's front page...

Yahoo! News – Google CEO Has No Near Term Plans for IPO

Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs

That makes 6 tabs, then… And also removes the problem that Russell Beattie noted about blogs getting in the way of real research.

Google Phonebook

raelity bytes

The thought of having one’s online life so directly connected to one’s front door is (or should be) a real concern.

I wasn’t even aware that they had this search type, but I really think that they should pull it. I was thinking that maybe they could allow it for businesses only, but even that might not be a great idea.

I remember the days

Wired : Inside the Soul of the Web

Workers here at Google were once fascinated to watch the queries climb up and off the screen, two per second, 173,000 per day. But they rarely stop to glance anymore.

I remember when I used to watch the searches on Excite, back at uni. If anyone ever wonders why there’s so much porn on the Web, it’s because there’s a lot of people asking for it…

Google Snippets

A few interesting Google stories this morning:

The Google Death Penalty: an investigation as to what sites Google is removing, and why they are doing it. In the US, this seems to be largely down to the DMCA; elsewhere it seems to be governments (Germany, for example).

NYT Google Profile: The Google Weblog links to a story in the New York Times about Google, and also to the website of one of the engineers mentioned in the story.

Google Notes

Found a couple of links about a talk that Marissa Mayer, a product manager at Google, gave at CMU:

• Micah Alpern;
• NeemaNet Daily

What I found cool is that Google’s ‘Snippets’ system is very much like one of our own internal tools with the exception that ours is daily, rather than weekly. Not sure ours is as effective as Google’s, though…