google » Skunkworks

Information Overload

Sep 282009

“ From your 202 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,055 items, starred 28 items, shared 30 items, and emailed 0 items “ . This is what Google Reader trends say about me. What this means to me is that from what I read I consider valuable and worthy to be shared less than 1% of all the posts.

From the 202 subscriptions most of the noise comes from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Scobleizer’s Twitter Favorites, my own alltop page feed and my own readtwit feed.

Subscription	Posts per day	Percentage read
Digg	134.5	3%
Reddit	72.6	4%
Delicious	46.8	5%
Scobleizer’s	68.7	8%
My alltop	149.7	3%
My readtwit	22.4	5%

What annoys me most are the low percentages that I get from Readtwit and Alltop. I would have thought that if I choose my domains of interest (websites on alltop) and people I follow ( on twitter ) carefully I woud get a noise to signal ratio a lot bigger. It doesn’t seem to be the case.

From all the websites (services) that are trying to improve the situation (noise to signal ratio) it seems to me that only Postrank and Feedly are having a little bit of success (I do use these 2 services on a daily basis). The others such as Lazyfeed, Daily Perfect are still far behind.

I see a possible solution to this mess and I will try to describe it below.

I am pretty sure that Postrank filtration algorithm can be tweaked on a per person basis, but I am almost sure Postrank doesn’t have the resources right now to support this.

I am sure that the aggregation (clustering) technology that Google is using on the News site can be used on the Google Reader but I am also sure that Google has no interest in doing that since their scope is to have their ads displayed on as many pages as possible.

I imagine that Feedly which takes into account at the moment what I shared on Reader and what I twit in the last 30 days to decide what it’s more important to me could base their recommendations also on what my friends on Google Reader network and on Twitter promote.

Now if somehow someone could integrate all these 3 technologies together I know I would pay that company a small amount each week in exchange for a much better signal to noise ratio.

It took me a while, but now I have a very good and I hope future proof solution for keeping all my information that I gathered in the last few years. Below you’ll get a succinct account of what I had to do.

Google Notebook Is No More

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Jan 152009

This morning I got the news that Google will close many services. The one that affected me was Google Notebook. I had a lot of information in it and even if Google says that I can still use it and add information to the notebooks, I do not feel at ease with that. So, I decided to export all the information out of Google Notebook and import it in Scrapbook . I don’t think is the best option, but I know the information is on my hard drive. The export was relatively easy to do, and once the export was finished I realized that the amount of information that I have on Google servers was minuscule (less than 70 MB archived).

For the moment this service closing is just a minor annoyance, but should be an alarm signal. Trust is something that is very difficult to build and very easy to loose. Probably in the higher levels of Google hierarchy they decided that the amount of information that the users are storing in the notebooks does not improve the relevance of the adverts served to those users in Gmail or in the Google search pages. So they decided that Notebook is not needed for their plans. Once Google chooses to close some services, it’s obvious that if the situation is going to be even worst they could choose to close other services. I know the service was free, but I would have like to have a better export option at least.

On the other hand something else to take in the account. Because Microsoft is making a lot of money with their offline software (Server, Windows, Office and so on) they can afford to loose some money with the online division, so they are able to still offer a lot of things for free. The most interesting to me is the 25GB Skydrive storage space. I start uploading some non vital files for testing purposes and it seems to work pretty well. Once Microsoft announced this some months ago, I expected that Google will match this, but nothing happened. This was my first alarm signal that maybe not everything is nice and dandy in the Googleplex.

Now I am looking for an offline RSS reader that would match Google Reader capabilities and if I will find one, then Gmail is the last thing that still has me linked to Google Services.

I know I can replace Analytics and Feedburner anytime with other options for skunkworks.ro

It appears that all good things are coming to an end. And I am sure now that in the next months a lot of free services from other Web 2.0 companies will dissapear. Probably is best to start thinking offline software again and somehow find the means to maintain the collaboration level and community feeling that the Web 2.0 services are offering

Today I installed the out of beta Google Chrome to see if they improved since I’ve looked at the software. It seems to me that Google Chrome is in a worse state than before. Continue reading »

Google Advertising and Me

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Dec 092008

Last week, I used GMail from a computer that allowed all the adverts from Google. So I’ve read around 50 emails which exposed me to maybe 250 adverts. To my surprise I ended up clicking on probably 15 links that were interesting to me. The interesting bit is that the links were not related to the content of the email, but somehow the datamining that Google does, payed off because the links were interesting to me. After around 3 years of using Gmail, Google Reader and all the other services it seems that I am a very open book to them. I was trying to anonymize my broswer habits using different Firefox extensions but I am not sure it’s worth the effort anymore. As long as I am using Google Reader and Notebook, I have a cookie from Google for as long as the session is open. For the time being the cookie is sweet and I will enable the adverts in Gmail. I am not sure if in the long run I am at ease with this “lack of privacy”. I know it was my choice and in my case an educated one.

Today, Microsoft launched Azure which is the Microsoft OS for the cloud. I am not going to enter into technical details or compare Azure with AppEngine or Amazon Web Services. Something else grabbed my attention. Continue reading »

I am using a lot of products from Google lately : Gmail, GCal, Reader, Docs, News, Analytics, Adsense, Picassa. One thing that annoys me a little is that the login page for each of these products is different. I understand the need for the different text in the page, but I would like to get the login box in the same position all the time. And also I would appreciate if the layout of the login page would be identical across the different Google products. It’s a very small touch that can be easy implemented and can make a difference. It’s one thing when your products are geared towards geeks, it’s a different thing when you want that everybody use your products. This lack of attention to detail is annoying when you deal with Google.

Everybody would say because the customers want it. After I have seen a demo of the Google services page optimized for Iphone I am sure that Google is the real reason. Is clear that by using the same web browser like Iphone (webkit) any Android based device would have access to any Iphone optimized site the same way the Iphone does. Apple had to release an SDK to try to match Google efforts in this area.

Google Android Explained

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Nov 122007

Google isn’t launching products anymore, is launching platforms. Last week Google launched Open Social,this week Google launched Android. These two platforms have two things in common:

both appear to be not ready yet and rushed to the market. Probably this has something to do with getting the value of the shares as high as possible. If these technologies would have come from any other company, most probably would have been treated as possible vaporware.
both are based on open source technologies.

If Open Social is Google’s move in trying to beat Facebook (it seems that Facebook is going to be able to target the adverts in a much more precise way then Google), Android is potentially a paradigm shift in computing experience. Is not clear to me yet if the software stack is based on Java or J2ME but Google will have an OS that will be able to run on any computing device from mobile phones to standard desktops PC. I can’t wait to have a device similar with Asus 399$ notebook or OLPC or something similar with the Ipod Touch or Nokia Tablet which will run Google OS and access Google or google compatible web services. (you should try to remember “google compatible”)

Slowly different pieces of the Google master plan are seeing the light and it seems that they are executing their plan almost flawlessly.

The most interesting thing of these 2 announcements is actually going to be the reaction from Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and Facebook. Is obvious that Google is forcing these companies to play it’s game and these companies are in reacting mode which diverts important resources from trying to create something new and force Google to play their game.

If the game continues like this probably sooner or later the EPIC story will become true. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Page 1 of 2 1 2 Older Entries

Information Overload

Google Notebook Offline Replacement

Google Notebook Is No More

Google Chrome vs Firefox

Google Advertising and Me

Google products login page lack of consistency

Why an Apple Iphone SDK ?

Google Android Explained

There is something about Google

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