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.

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.

After I saved all my Google Notebook information as complete web pages (one webpage per notebook), I ended up with around 70 MB of HTML, CSS and images which were indexed by Copernic Desktop Search but I was still lacking the functionality that Google Notebook provided to me. So I downloaded:

• Autoit (for some small scripting that I needed)
• Tag2find (for all the tagging needs)
• TextMaker Viewer (for a fast open document format viewer)

I created a folder list using this small autoit script:

Dim $year , $month , $foldername
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script Start")
$year = 2004
While $year <= 2009
    $month = 01
    Do
        If $month < 10 then
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & "0" & $month
        Else
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & $month
        EndIf
        DirCreate ($foldername)
        $month = $month + 1
    Until $month = 13
    $year = $year + 1
WEnd
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script End")

The script is self explanatory. I used it in order to avoid manually create all the folders that I need from the month of 200401 to the month of 200912.

Then I used copy paste extensively between Firefox and OpenOffice and saved all the individual articles from Google Notebook as OpenOffice documents. The documents were saved in the folder corresponding to the month of their creation. Also in each folder is a document called bookmarks that contain all the bookmarked sites from that month. After I finished with Google Notebook I saved all my Scrapbook information in the same format.

Probably using Autoit someone could automate this step also. I preferred to do it manually because I wanted to see what I am going to keep going further. So far I spent close to 100 hours doing this and I ended up with almost 1.5 GB of articles (more than 4000 documents)

Now I am tagging each document with the appropriate tags using tag2find .  Probably at the rate that I am doing it is going to take me probably another month. After that I will have a complete tagged database of information which is portable, offline and backed up. Is good to know that the entire taxonomy from tag2find can be exported as an XML file and the actual files are in ODT format.

Now I am still using Scrapbook for capturing web pages that are of interest to me, but I will spend probably 2-3 hours each month moving information from Scrapbook to the offline repository that I created.

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

In both browsers I opened Google Reader, Notebook, Gmail, Docs and Calendar.

As you can see the Chrome processes are using a total of around 167 MB of memory and almost the same amount of Virtual memory.

Firefox and Firefox Portable use around 120 MB of RAM and around 140MB of virtual memory.

When I have 3 GB of RAM on my Windows XP computer, these differences are nothing more than just a little annoyance, but I really do not like the fact that Google is going the Microsoft way of doing software. And when you think there are people that are saying that Firefox is bloatware since version 2.0

It seems to me that Google rushed the product. Not sure the reasons behind, but Chrome is still a long way from being a Firefox replacement or at least competitor and for the time being Firefox is the browser to beat.

Again like the first time I uninstalled Chrome in under a hour since installation. Now I am waiting for the Google Update process to kill itself .

Take a look at these two links AppEngine and Azure . Is so easy to read and understand Google’s language and so annoying to read the corporate language of Microsoft.

An excerpt below to prove my point.

What Is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

What is the Azure Services Platform?

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. Azure simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications.

Both companies are presenting similar services, but somehow Google language is easier to read.

• 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.