Thursday, May 11, 2006
Some New Google Toys
I love (official) Google Blogs. Funny, isn't it, to think that one of the largest and most important technology-related companies in the world today has various employees post to a blog to relate to "advanced" users/developers?
Just yesterday, they posted another useful entry outlining and linking to some new services/products they're offering.
To start, there's Google Desktop 4, which apparently has added full Konfabulator/Yahoo! Widgets-esq "gadget" support. I'll be interested in seeing whether it's in any way an improvement over Yahoo!'s offering to see if Google is just interested in me-too'ing the idea or if they see the larger potential hidden in that kind of product... (my guess is: the latter)
I don't fully understand what Google Co-op is (and clearly, neither do they), but the idea of letting users share expertise effectively has a lot of obvious potential.
Finally, it's interesting to see Google publish a more end-user-oriented interface for gleaning some information from their vast databases about search trends. Hence, Google Trends may be well worth a look. (compare "games" to "movies" or "red sox" to "yankees", for example)
Just yesterday, they posted another useful entry outlining and linking to some new services/products they're offering.
To start, there's Google Desktop 4, which apparently has added full Konfabulator/Yahoo! Widgets-esq "gadget" support. I'll be interested in seeing whether it's in any way an improvement over Yahoo!'s offering to see if Google is just interested in me-too'ing the idea or if they see the larger potential hidden in that kind of product... (my guess is: the latter)
I don't fully understand what Google Co-op is (and clearly, neither do they), but the idea of letting users share expertise effectively has a lot of obvious potential.
Finally, it's interesting to see Google publish a more end-user-oriented interface for gleaning some information from their vast databases about search trends. Hence, Google Trends may be well worth a look. (compare "games" to "movies" or "red sox" to "yankees", for example)
