Google’s Next Moves: Director’s Cut

Here is my take on Stacy Collett’s Google’s Next Moves article (ComputerWorld), posted to digg.com by Burento. Stacy makes some good points, but I do not agree with all of them, and have a few ideas of my own.

1. Buy WordPress.
Give every WordPress and Google user the ability to use a custom GoogPress blog as their home page, and change the iGoogle buckets to Widgets/Extras for ALL themes to access. Users would be empowered to edit, create, and share GoogPress themes… ALL for free… well, almost. In return users would allow Google ads on a portion of their page (user decides how much ad space Google can control, and user can utilize remaining ad space for their own Google ads to make some cash).

2. Buy Skype.
Add Skype features to free Google Apps accounts. Plus extra features for Google Apps Premiere users, like SkypeMeet (up to 32 users at one time), SkypeBoard (sketch for all to see), SkypeLine (diagrams/org charts for all to see), SkypeScraper (scrape things off the web related to meeting in realtime) and SkypeCam (see users who have cams and allow viewing).

3. Buy Pixelmator.
Turn Pixelmator into a web app, and add limited version to free Google Apps accounts, and expanded version to Google Apps Premiere users. Then there would be a decent online image compositing tool.

4. Rest.
Take a break from the company acquisitions, retooling, recoding, etc. and focus on small, incremental improvements to usability of Google Apps suite. What the world needs now is usability and stability (not love sweet love) if web apps are to succeed and replace desktop apps.

WWDC: See the Future

June 11. 10 a.m. The anticipation is over. The WWDC Keynote is about to begin. Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. cofounder and CEO, takes the stage to deliver a speech that no one expected… and no one will soon forget.

You see, while all of the buzz about the iPhone has swirled through the internet and the blogosphere since MacWorld 2007, Steve Jobs has been crafting the moment that WWDC early birds are about to witness. Sure it will start with the usual state of Apple Inc., and how iTunes has delivered X amount of movies and music to happy customers around the globe, and maybe some upgrades to processor speeds in the MacBook and Mac Pro lines. But there is a piece to Steve’s puzzle that will blow the crowd away. There always is. It’s what Steve does best. But no one saw this coming. No one could have imagined this.

If you Google the word iPhone, it returns about 16,900,000 English pages over the past 6 months. Ars Technica has over 150 articles that mention the iPhone since Macworld 2007. A Digg Search for iPhone reveals 477 pages of stories that mention the iPhone dating back to 2004, when Engadget started talking about the Motorola/Apple partnership, which ended up being a Motorola phone (Cingular) that synced with iTunes, but not the actual iPhone from Apple.

Where is all this going? With all of the stories about the iPhone, there is still something that doesn’t add up. Why would Apple close the phone from developers? Apple has always been a big proponent of developers extending their software. Developers have always been able to come up with creative solutions to run on Apple systems. Sometimes the products were so good Apple just had to own them. So closing the iPhone just does not make sense. I believe there is still one more thing…

Apple Developers to Write Software for the iPhone
There was a reason that Apple would not partner with Verizon (other than the fact that Verizon wanted to put their V-Cast crap on the iPhone and ruin it). I think Apple had bigger plans, and Cingular/AT&T were willing to step up and be only a service partner, and leave Apple to the hardware and software. Apple does want the iPhone to be closed to telcos, but I believe Apple wants to give developers the opportunity to write software for the iPhone, and that Steve Jobs will announce this during the keynote as one of the final items.

Apple Ready to Spend Lots of Cash
If Apple really wants to be as serious a player in the telco market as they are in the mp3 player market, what is to stop Apple from bidding on the upcoming FCC auction for frequency spectrum? After all, owning the deed to that spectrum could put Apple in a better position than Verizon and AT&T. From Wired.com:

For the same reasons, a broadband wireless network operating in the UHF range would be far more powerful than the municipal Wi-Fi and WiMax networks now being built by Google, EarthLink and other companies. Such a network would be cheaper to build as well. Because radio waves in the UHF band travel much farther than the high-frequency signals used for Wi-Fi and WiMax, a single tower could cover as much as 10 times the area.

And because this will be the last auction of unused spectrum for the foreseeable future, it represents the final opportunity to create an alternative to the major carriers. The FCC grants auction winners a license to use spectrum for a number of years, but as these licenses are almost invariably renewed at no additional cost, they are effectively deeds of ownership for the winning bidders. No surprise, then, that the fight has already gotten intense. Read article…

Apple could change the entire face of wireless access in the United States by purchasing the spectrum. They could even lease some of the spectrum back to others — Google, Skype, Vonage, aetc. — and make a decent chunk of change by undercutting the prices that AT&T and Verizon are charging for going through their access gates. An announcement of this magnitude would send Steve Ballmer into a chair-throwing frenzy. Apple’s success doesn’t come from playing the game. It comes from changing the game.

I believe this is Steve’s One More Thing moment of his career. Does Steve Jobs have the huevos to pull something this large off? Buy some AAPL stock, a ticket to the WWDC and get there early if you want a seat.

Update (From AllThingsD 2007):

Q: All indications appear that the iPhone is closed, we’d love to develop apps…

This is an important tradeoff between security and openness. We want both. We’re working through a way… we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.

I’ve used 3rd party apps… the more you add, the more your phone crashes. No one’s perfect, and we’d sure like our phone not to crash once a day. If you can just be a little more patient with us I think everyone can get what they want.

See what I mean? Steve is letting developers know that 3rd party apps development is coming to the iPhone.

Kevin Rose Dissed by G4’s AOTS

Is there a feud between G4 and Revision3? How about letting fans in on Olivia Munn’s recent disrespect of Kevin Rose on AOTS’s ( Attack Of The Show) In Your Pants segment?

The beautiful Anna David, a MILF, sex columnist who has written for Maxim and Playboy, sits down with the lovely Olivia Munn to field questions from fans about sex. On the show posted January 31, 2007, the first fan to ask a question is… KEVIN ROSE?!

With a rather retarded voice over, the voice asks, “Is it possible to have so much sex you lose interest?” Not only is the voice obviously not Kevin Rose, but the sound does not sync at all with the video clip. Maybe Kevin can shed light on where he might have been that day, wearing a green sweatshirt and green cap. It appears to be an elevator, but only Kevin knows for sure.

Either way, Kevin is “Bored Silly” (words on screen during the shot), and has lost interest in sex.

The conversation between the ladies after the question leads me to believe that these two are having a lover’s quarrel. Olivia says,”Well, I don’t know who is having sex with YOU… but I am sure she has lost interest in you, personally.” So why does Olivia use the word personally?

So is there a feud between the two companies? Or maybe Kevin and Olivia hooked up and she is pissed because he stopped calling her? Or maybe there is lots of bad blood between Kevin and his former mates at G4? Digg this up to the front page, and maybe Kevin can respond.

Update: Here is the iTunes link to the show. It happens in the first minute.

technorati tags:kevin, rose, olivia, munn, anna, david, AOTS, sex, disrespect, fued, G4, Revision3

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Digg Dies: Sad State of Affairs

BREAKING NEWS: San Francisco, CA.

It is with a sad heart that I report the death of Digg.com. It has jummped the shark today, and will forever be in a downward spiral toward the abyss.

Tonight, the story of Anna Nicole Smith’s departure took over the site overwhelmingly, and the story about Turkana Boy — a REAL news story — was blown out of the water.

For the amount of good that Digg.com provided for its users, there was also an element of evil at work behind the scenes. From Kevin and Alex’s recent pre-taping of old news on Diggnation, to the infamous Top Digg Users list controversy, it seems Digg.com will not be the next YouTube to be consumed by giant meadia conglomerates for large sums of money.

I will forever remember you, Digg.

Digg.com… dead at the age of three… Rest in peace.

technorati tags:satire, Digg, Digg.com, Alex, Kevin, Diggnation, Rose, Albrecht

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Gates bristles over Vista v. OS X comparisons; Makes ‘Apple’ Freudian slip

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates talked with NBC’s Today Show host Meredith Vieira about the launch of Windows Vista this morning, but the interview led in with a segment that talked quite a bit about Apple.

In the interview, Gates lies straight off the mark with, “An operating system has never had parental control features before…”

read more | digg story

Multi-touch like shortcut in OS X on MacBook trackpad

After purchasing a new MacBook Pro recently, I was attempting to Control-Click-Drag in a popup menu to delete a file when something strange happened: my screen acheived a zoom in. Now I know that zooming is possible by holding Option-Command and typing 8, and then using Option-Command – or + to acheive zooming in and out respectively. But I had mistakenly used two fingers on the trackpad. So not only can you scroll on a trackpad using two fingers, but you can also zoom in and out holding the Control key while doing so.

So if you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, try the above sequence. Apple technology never ceases to amaze me. Who knows? Now if Apple can allow users to use the trackpad to scale images in iPhoto ala multi-touch on an iPhone…

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Gmail Dashboard Not Secure

While listening to the most current Security Now (Episode #65: Why is Security So Difficult?), I was intrigued by a discussion between Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson about how some online web mail apps — such as Gmail, hotmail, etc. — have users log into the system securely, but then once you are in, the session is no longer secure while you read, transfer and compose mail.

So I tested my gmail.com account, and sure enough I can log into https://mail.google.com securely and stay secure during my session, but when I log into http://mail.google.com, my session is briefly secure during login, but not secure after login.

These days, I use Google’s own Gmail Dashboard to check my Gmail account. However when I do this, the session is not secure! For some unknown reason (probably just an oversight by the developer), Google did not make the Gmail Dashboard client secure. But do not worry. You can secure the dashboard client with a little sleuthing and all you need is a text editor that can read a javascript file.

Step 1: Open the Widget directory at ~/Library/Widgets
Find the one named Gmail.wdgt, and right click on it to Show Package Contents.

Step 2: Inside the Scripts directory, you will find a file named GmailInteraction.js
Open this in a javascript text editor, like Dashcode, TacoHTML Edit, or even TextEdit.

Step 3: At the top of the document, you will find:
// The base URL to open.
// TODO (bonneau): Internationalize URL.
Gmail.gmailUrl = “http://mail.google.com/mail”;

Simply change the http to https, and save the document. You can also close all of the Package Contents windows that you opened to unclutter the Desktop.

Step 4: Go to the Dashboard. Find your Gmail dashboard and, while holding down the Command key, click the “X” to close it. Now reload the Gmail dashboard by clicking on the “+” sign in the bottom left corner to bring up your installed dashboard apps. Find Gmail, and drag it to a location on your Dashboard. Now enter your Gmail handle and password, and go to your Inbox.

You should now be able to sustain security during your Gmail sessions. And just in time for the holidays!

UPDATE: The Google Toolbar for Firefox (and possibly others) also has this problem, however I do not have a fix for it at this time. Contact Google to ask them to secure the Gmail functionality in the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

technorati tags:Gmail, Google, Dashboard, Apple, Security, Now

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Google ToolBar for Flock

I recently tried to install Google ToolBar for Firefox into Flock, but received an error message, “Incompatible Extension Detected” and goes on to state that it is not designed for Flock and if installed could damage the application. Neither of which is true. If you decide to install it anyway, you will get the next error message: “Incompatible Extension – Google Toolbar for Firefox 2.120060807M could not be installed because it is not compatible with Flock.” Which – again – is not true. I am not sure why Google is doing this other than to keep users from switching to Flock, or perhaps go BACK to Firefox if they switched to Flock previously. But why should they care?

Seeing as how I want to stick with Flock, I decided to find a way to make it work, damage or no damage to the Flock browser. Plus I figured I could reinstall Flock if I had problems and delete the Google Toolbar for Firefox extension. So if you like Flock and want to use Google Toolbar, here is what to do:

Google ToolbarBar for Firefox
(available on the web from Google, but only as a web install, NOT a stand-alone installer):

1. Install the GoogleBar into Firefox.
2. Quit Firefox.
3. Locate your Firefox extensions directory (inside ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/profiles default directory).
4. Locate the Google ToolBar directory (Trial and error: keep opening directories and using TextEdit to read install.rdf files until you find the one with Google in the text.)
5. Copy the Google ToolBar directory to Desktop.
Open install.rdf file inside that directory.
7. Add the following code in the target applications section (also available from Flock developer wiki):

<!– Target Application – Flock –>
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{a463f10c-3994-11da-9945-000d60ca027b}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>0.7</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>1.0</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>
8. Move this directory into the Flock extensions directory (inside ~/Library/Application Support/Flock/profiles default directory).
9 Launch Flock.

Click to zoom into Google Toolbar for Flock.

Voila! Now just set up the preferences you would like for Google Toolbar and you are ready to use Google Toolbar for Flock.

Why the World Went Windows and Why It Could Happen Again

1990-1995: Why the World Went Windows
The reason Apple’s Macintosh survived into the 90’s–escaping the fate of a variety of other unique platforms that were slaughtered by commodity PCs–was largely because of the tight integration Apple could provide between its hardware and software. Apple wasn’t primarily selling RAM chips, a processor, and an OS; instead, Apple was offering a richly engineered and consistent experience. Smaller competitors, from Commodore to Atari, couldn’t match the enormous development efforts Apple was investing in its platform. Microsoft employed the same principle of integration in its software offerings. Rather than seeking to build an integrated computer solution like Apple, Microsoft assembled a series of integrated software platforms that created networks of added value for users.

1990-1995: Why the World Went Windows

Source: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/

If you read the article carefully, you will see that Microsoft is at it again. There are plenty of FUD articles out in the wild about OS X vulberabilities, security, etc., while Microsoft is working feverishly on their competitor to OS X, Vista, which has been vaporware for a couple years now while they try to keep Apple at bay until its release. Vista will be an inferior product, but Apple can gain significant marketshare if there are more migrations to OS X prior to Windows Vista being released.

This series is excellent, and I would recommend that everyone read the series to help understand the history and politics of computing. Thanks, Roughly, for this in depth look at the computing landscape.

technorati tags:Apple, Microsoft, Windows, Computing, FUD, Vaporware

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One phone number to rule them all

GrandCentral is a brilliant new web app that lets you consolidate all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone, work phone, home phone) will ring. And then it gets interesting.

If you don’t want every one of your phones ringing each time someone calls your free GrandCentral number, you can set rules by friends, family, work, and others, defining where the calls should be directed. When a user leaves a message, you can listen to it online or directly on your phone. The remaining set of features on GrandCentral are a little mind-blowing, in that “I’d never thought of that, but how am I now living without it?” sort of way.

When you pick up a call that’s been forwarded with GrandCentral, you can choose to answer it, send it to voicemail (which will be done automatically if you don’t answer), or send it to voicemail and listen in on the message as it’s being left in real time (just like you’re listening to someone leave a message on an answering machine). You can interrupt a “ListenIn” message at any time and join the conversation by pressing star (*).

If you’re on a call and you decide that you want to record your conversation, just hit 4 at any time. You can also record personalized greetings based on contact groups and upload your own MP3s to be played in place of your ring.

All of this can be done with GrandCentral’s free account, though there are a few limitations to the free account (none of which severely hinders the service). As you can tell, after spending the morning playing around with it, I’m pretty impressed with this service. The only problem I’ve had with GrandCentral so far is that making calls from the online interface (which, similar to Jajah, connects to your phone, then the phone of the person you’re calling); it seems like a simple part of the functionality, but who knows – maybe I’m doing something wrong (I’m not).

I’m not ready to tell all of my contacts to start calling my GrandCentral number just yet, but I may in time. If you give it a try, let us know what you think about it in the comments. Thanks Nick! — Adam Pash

GrandCentra [via TechCrunch]

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