Archive for the 'Google' Category

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The Web is Broken v.02

Published on 28 December 2008 in Facebook, Google and web. 0 Comments

‘Portals’ as they were have died:  iGoogle & Facebook have placed faith in the tab.  More than merely a user-experience metaphor, the tab allows apps to take back the browser from the platform, and in doing so affords the user a higher performance, leaving behind all those clunky multi-layered flash/js/iframe flashing lights, a la MySpace.

Except that Facebook’s performance seems to have gotten worse since it’s renovations.  The umpteen ajax updaters located at various points around the page seem to wind the browser response down to a gradual, slow, painful death.  Adding that to Gmail and Ebay in the list of pre-Alpha sites intent on destroying my browser window.

 And I’m also adding a 2nd Adobe ‘platform’ to the blacklist of general technological cancers killing off the interwebs.  Yes that’s right Acrobat Reader, global standard for electronic document stalling.

And Google now have the temerity to add a link to Gmail claiming to speed up the browser!

Noob converter…

Browsers are getting faster and better at running web applications like Google Mail that use browser technology to its limits. In order to get the best experience possible and make Google Mail run an average of twice as fast, we suggest that you upgrade your browser to one of the fastest Google Mail supported browsers that work on Windows.

Automated Google PR Generator

The Web is Broken v.01

Published on 12 November 2008 in Google and web. 4 Comments

I use Gmail for email.  I use Google Talk to chat.  Now I am being forced to use Gmail to place a video call.

Perhaps I had better switch from Google Talk to Skype…

Let me explain my reasoning, I use Gmail currently with chat disabled.  This improves my browsing performance especially when I have multiple tabs open.  The web’s performance these days is bad enough with the proliferation of enormously cpu-intensive and memory leaking flash sites.  I cannot run two youtube.com tabs simultaneously without my browser having a heart attack.  Until developers like those in charge of Gmail realise the web part of the internet is not for bloated (and highly questionable in terms of usefulness) webapps, my user experience of this part of the net is no longer as smooth and productive as it used to be.  And others like me.

And just after posting how much better web based email is compared with SMTP clients too, sigh…

8000 Unread and Counting…

Published on 12 November 2008 in Google, Tech Labours and web. 0 Comments

unread and counting

I *love* not having to delete emails.  Scanning my gmail is so much quicker than my old work’s outlook, with it’s puny single Gig of space and all those useless powerpoints flying around.  That’s the work powerpoints that is.  I quite enjoyed the viral ones.

Chromed

Published on 3 September 2008 in cool, Google, javascript and web. 0 Comments

I arrived late last night to the news that Google has entered the browser wars.  First impressions for me – something needs to be done about the slowdown/freezing that js-heavy webapps such as gmail create on IE and Firefox.  Having multiple flash based sites open causes similar non-responsive issues.  Chrome’s js engine, known as V8, responds favourably in benchmarks - although Firefox minions are countering this.

It would be nice if respective browser teams could fix these issues and quit with the endless ergonomic tabbed browsing memes.  No one cares where you put them…

 I’ll not be changing from Firefox (2!) anytime soon though.  I’ve got too many plugins to drop – Chrome has no framework in place yet.  And besides, Chrome is very much beta…

Machine Readable Google News

Published on 8 July 2008 in computer science, Google, machine learning and newsflow. 0 Comments

Wired yesterday reports on a health site service that tracks disease outbreaks using news feeds such as Google news. A nifty bayesian-based machine learning algorithm is used, filtering out noise with some kind of intelligent phrase indexing -

For instance, key words like “mysterious” tend to pop up in outbreak stories, but not, say, in coverage of vaccine programs. Another common feature of outbreak stories is a small number in the headline, usually to denote a number of people infected or killed.

The site has actually been up & running since 2006 as this gmaps mashup blog records.

More detail on how it works can be found here.

I would like to create something along these lines for financial data, with buy/sell signals replacing the gmaps visualisation.  Google News, owing to it’s concentration on news aggregation, does not currently capture stories quick enough for it to be used as part of a beat-the-market type event trading system.  It’s aggregation nature would however lend itself perfectly to a more long term trend alerting mechanism.  The smarts to be built on top of it would I imagine be pretty similar to what goes on in HealthMap above.

Industry talk on news flow algorithms seems to have disappeared after a bit of buzz a few years back.  It may have went the way of the Neural Networks of the 80s.

Nasdaq realtime for free

Published on 6 June 2008 in Financial Markets and Google. 0 Comments

I see Google has got it’s long trumpeted wish to show realtime stock quotes – from Nasdaq at least. Trouble is, everyone else gets it too, so it’s not quite deserving of the fanfare they probably imagined fit for the Robin Hood of the world’s information

$ 150k a month max. Well I’m not paying

24/06/08 Edit: NYSE stocks are now ‘realtime’ too

G Finance Api

Published on 25 October 2007 in Financial Markets and Google. 0 Comments

Good news!

Google finance finally has an api to it’s market data.

Drawbacks – not an open api, only licensed for gadgets on Google sites. And still not a real time feed. I know they’re working on this though, fingers crossed…

Read Google thoughts here

01/07/08 Edit: Now an official gdata api for universal consumption. Although the ‘portfolio’ concept sucks.

Wow cool Google Spreadsheets more powerful than I thought

Published on 7 August 2007 in Financial Markets and Google. 0 Comments

Didn’t know this, but you can get delayed financial data from Google finance imported into their spreadsheets via built in functions.

One (big) limitation for me: No support for querying historical data, or at least some kind of time series logic for shifting data at end of day. Oh well, can’t have everything. But it does open up Google Finance to real programmatic querying (ie no screen scraping) via the spreadsheets API.

As good as this all is, still took me 2 days to work out they want decimal points expressed as commas…

Also a bug noted – multilanguage support all well & good, but I created my spreadsheet at work and our exit point to the interweb is in Germany, prompting Google to spew out text to me in the wrong language. Even forcing the matter with ‘&hl=en’ appended to the query string doesn’t work on the spreadsheet error msgs (I guess the ajax updates obviously don’t include what I stick on the page url).

Do I get a prize?

Update: Seems someone else wanted historical data too.  I’ll do a bit of digging tomorrow…

Patent News

Published on 4 August 2007 in Google. 0 Comments

Seen this a while back. Google’s patent search is my first dip into the primary evidence in this hotly contested topic, and after a few minutes browsing was a bit surprised at the apparent scale of some patents.

Reminded of it by an SEO article on Google’s new patent for it’s Timeline search made public this week, although the search has been available for use from Google Labs‘ Experimental search page for a while now.