Connecting the dots ...
The Germans beat them to it, 40 years ago:
If the colors are a bit funky, that’s because this is a re-colorized version of the 60’s black & white series, Raumpatrouille Orion, or Space Patrol Orion. Here’s a b&w English language trailer of a movie based on the original TV series:
(Cross-posted from CloudAve)
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Two seemingly unrelated items:
Today Hitwise reported on how Google Maps is catching up on Mapquest, which once was the king of online mapping.
Perhaps more important than just the numbers is the source of traffic: 61% of Google Maps traffic comes from links placed in organic Google Search results. Contrast that to Mapquest, where 8 out of 10 hits come from searches on the Mapquest brand itself. Translation: Mapquest is only used by its already dwindling user base, while Google Maps gains steadily, since Google owns Search. The writing is clearly on the wall.
The second story: Google Gmail Within Striking Distance Of Hotmail – reported Information Week a few days ago. Wait, wasn’t Gmail supposed to be email for the geeks only, lagging behind the masses of Yahoo and Hotmail users?
Between September 2007 and September 2008, Gmail’s visitor total grew 39%, from 18.8 million to 26 million, ComScore figures indicate. Windows Live Hotmail during this period saw its visitor share decline 4%, from 46.2 million to 44.6 million.
If Google’s Gmail growth rate rises to, say, 46% over 2009, it could reach approximately 43 million unique U.S. visitors by the end of the year. And if Windows Live Hotmail continues to bleed visitors at a rate of, say, 3%, it will finish the year with around 42 million unique visitors per month.
So Gmail may overtake Hotmail by the end of this year, and if the trend continues, it might overtake Yahoo by the end of 2011, concludes Information Week. Note, these are site visits, not account numbers, but account numbers include all the throw-away, long forgotten dormant accounts that both Yahoo and Hotmail has in abundance. All these email systems being web-based, visitor stats are a better representation of actual usage.
The third story (yes, I promised two, but can’t stop now): The Google Power Meter., currently being tested by Google employees. These are smart devices you plug in all around the house, they will report back to the mothership and you get a nice dashboard aimed at helping you making the right energy choices.
I would certainly like to know just how “smart” they can be – any chance of bi-directional communication? I can’t help but remember the mail campaign from PG&E, my utility company. They are handing out $25 to anyone who allows them to install a smart thermostat free of charge. The catch? At times when consumption reaches peak levels, the utility company can remotely throttle back your air conditioner. So now you see why I’m hesitant about these Google electricity meters. Could they be switched from passive reporting to regulating one day?
The fourth story (gee, I really have to stop soon): An opinion piece on Bloomberg discusses how the health provisions slipped into the stimulus bill will effect every one of us in the US:
Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors. But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446).
Ouch. I’m all for electronic medical records, but I don’t want them to be turned into a Big Brother function. And I don’t want a computer program to decide on my medical treatment. But I’ve just complained about the Sorry State of Health 2.0: neither Google Health nor Microsoft HealthVault are up to the job yet. I want them to get there, and I trust they will (at least one of them). I don’t want them to run my health care, just help me and my providers manage it – but fear of potential misuse won’t stop my desire for progrees.
Do you see the trend here? Google is unstoppable. They want to manage all data, but our life is increasingly all about data and what we do with it. The former Borg in Redmond is now a toothless veteran, slowly dwindling away – Google is the New Borg. Resistance is futile. We’re being assimilated. And we like it. Enjoy the video: (better quality if you click through)
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(This post originally appeared @ CloudAve. To stay abreast of Clod Computing, SaaS news and analysis, grab the CloudAve feed here.)
Today’s joint IBM – Google announcement about enabling personal health monitoring devices to send data directly to Google Health gave me the grand opportunity for a (not-so) quick rant that’s been boiling in me for a while.
Ever since I started actively managing my parents’ health care I’ve been a heavy user of electronic health records and communication systems, and I am immensely frustrated. Frustrated at the paper-based world we’re facing in the 21st century, but also at the current attempts to change all that. Grand ideas, alliances, announcements, but they all feel like IT-talk, losing sight of the very people these systems supposed to serve: patients. That’s you and me and our relatives who have health issues.
Chances are you got scared away from visiting a webpage this morning by Google’s malware warning:
Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!
Suggestions:
- Return to the previous page and pick another result.
- Try another search to find what you’re looking for.
Or you can continue to http://www.google.com/ at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.
For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.
If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.
Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with the site you are looking for. Google give false warnings on ANY site today, including their own. Here’s the Google search result for the keyword Google:
If you try to click on the diagnostic page, you get a Server Error. So go ahead, ignore the warnings – or perhaps limit your browsing to “known territories” until the error gets fixed.
(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay on top of Cloud Computing news, analysis and just our opinion, grab the CloudAve Feed here.)
Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service is down, lost all their user data and they don’t know if / when they can recover.
This is as bad as it can get for any Web 2.0 service (and more importantly for users), and the backlash against Cloud services has already started. My first reaction is taking Stowe Boyd’s approach – a quick overview of how safe my own data is.
Update: also read Krish’s post @ ClouDave: Magnolia Effect – Should We Trust The Clouds?
First time I beat TechCrunch was in July 2006:
…their Feedburner subscription base grew almost 100% overnight. But it pales in comparison to my 2.5million % growth rate … yes, I went from 200 or so to 51k. Jeff Clavier did quite well, too, at 56k, but hey Jeff, I am catching up!
Too bad it was due to a Netvibes glitch, and once they fixed it, my readership fell back to – well, normal levels.
Today I am winning again: TechCrunch has 0 –yes zero – subscribers, while I have 1141. 
This time the culprit is Feedburner, which chucked the subscriber stats to zero for many blogs, including TechCrunch, while I lucked out, and only “lost” about half my subscribers. Over @ CloudAve we were less lucky, the migration to Google’s new setup cost about 85% of our subscriber base, but that still beats zero…
Yet it’s a Pyrrhic victory, which I hope won’t last – Feedburner (Google) needs to pull their act together.
Feedburner started as a cool new blog feed management/reporting service a few years ago, and quickly became a de facto standard. A quick scan of my Feed Reader shows hardly anything but Feedburner. Since Google acquired the company almost two years ago, we haven’t seen a lot of new services – but that does not change the almost monopoly status. Feedburner rules the market, and I’m no exception.
A few months ago Google started to migrate accounts – first only those who wanted to run Adsense in their feeds. Since I don’t care for advertising, I did not bother first, but knew the day would come: the final deadline is February 28th, but anyone can move to the new servers on their own schedule.
Seeing all the negative buzz on Twitter I was planning to wait – but then I “lost” 70% of my subscribers even with the old setup, so I figured I might as well take the plunge. And here it is now: a shiny, brand new (old) feed @ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/zoli.
Google says (FAQ) the stats will “recover” in about a week. Funny thing is, the one service entirely missing from the reports is Google’s very own Reader. I certainly hope this “loss” is only in the stats, and readers are receiving our feed without interruption. If you are, you don’t have to do anything, the old Feedburner URL will continue to be redirected, says Google. Then again, if you’re cautious (like I am), or perhaps are not following our feed yet, you might as well grab the new feed here.
Either way, thanks for reading my Blog.
One down, one running better than ever. Thanks to the irony of TechMeme, the two news are juxtaposed almost side by side:
Stopping development on Google Notebook – as several blogs point out, this does not mean Google Notebook is dead. You can continue to use it as your scratch-pad, just don’t expect any further development. (Update: you won’t be able to use the web-clipping Firefox extension anymore.) Or if you’re cautious, start migrating your notes.
of enhancement on the very same day Google sent theirs to the deadpool. Kent Newsome calls it Zoho’s Lucky Day.I’ve never considered these two Notebooks comparable, despite the common name. Google’s one was your web-based post-it notes, barebones, easy to use. Zoho’s version is a full-featured multimedia application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily, be it text, database, spreadsheet, image, drawings, audio, video – you name it. It offers a lot more, but may be “too much” if all you want is the yellow stickies. The two apps serve entirely different needs. But I don’t want to focus on the products here, did it before: Not All Notebooks Are Created Equal.
Let’s talk about the economics: Google is simply ditching some of the money losers which is clearly the right strategy in a recession when it saw it’s primary revenue source, advertising drop radically. A while ago (before the economy collapsed) Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu provided great insight into why getting into applications does not make much financial sense for Google, whereas it is Zoho’s primary business. Today we’re seeing that logic in action.
Of course Google is not the only one, we’re seeing startups shut down service, or give up the free-for-all principle and start charging for their services. Over at CloudAve we’ve discussed Jott as an example, but there are many others. We may have enjoyed all these free services, but deep down had to predict this bonanza would not last forever. It’s time for rationalizing business – after all, it’s all about making a buck.
Update (1/20/09): Surprise, surprise! (not really). Zoho came out with a tool to import your Google Notebook data into Zoho Notebook.
Update (1/22/09) Two days later here comes Evernote with an import process. Who’s next?
I’ve written about Zoho Creator before – being techno-challenged myself, the key value for me (and I suppose for millions of potential users) is the ability to generate database driven situated applications without the need for any programming. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu made an interesting statement back in April:
In principle, it would be possible to layer Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine on top of Amazon EC2.
Well, it’s no longer just in principle: today Zoho announced the ability to use Zoho Creator to generate applications which are then deployed on Google’s AppEngine. Here’s a short video explaining the process:
The video focuses mostly on the process of how to create an app, convert it from Zoho’s own Deluge scripting environment to Python, then installing it on the Google AppEngine. You will get more detailed explanation elsewhere, let me just focus on why I find this an important step.
Zoho essentially expands Google’s reach, making it available to users without programming skills. It’s a perfect marriage: Zoho brings the ability to create programs without coding in a user-friendly graphical environment, while Google brings security for those who might worry keeping their apps and data with a smaller provider: now they can use the Zoho-generated apps in the safety of GoogLand. .
The other important aspect is portability, and to quote Zoho’s Raju Vegesna, first they let data be free by releasing CloudSQL, and now they let your applications free.
We’ve already seen Zoho adapt Google Gears first, even before Google Apps; this is now another example of friendly coopetition with Google.
(Disclaimer: Zoho is the exclusive Sponsor of Cloudave, my main blogging gig.)
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Error 403
Ouch … this is not what you want to see in your Gmail Contacts. Weird… and not fun, not even on Sunday.
It’s not system-wide, appears to be specific to one of my accounts – crazy log-in-log out sequence produces occasional access, but mostly the error. 
Update: apparently (thanks, Charlie), this is a more wide-spread problem than I had thought…
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
I do most of my business blogging there, with occasional asides here. More...
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