Posts Filed Under ‘Cloud Computing’
Forbes on Google Apps in the Enterprise · "Google now has 1,000 of its 20,000 employees working on enterprise products, largely Apps. Four hundred are engineers; most of the rest are involved in sales and support, a high proportion at engineer-dominated Google. The enterprise is still dwarfed by Microsoft, which makes $19 billion from the office suite. Still, 2 million businesses have signed on to use Google software in its short life, drawn by cost, speed, collaboration and control." · December 11th, 2009, 2 comments
Google: “Faces are objects that can be recognized” · Now that you can point your cameraphone at an object and get Google search results back about that image, what about photographing a stranger and getting Google results back for his or her name? With facial recognition in Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, that doesn't seem far-fetched. Today Google confirmed that the search engine could recognize faces based on photos, but they decided not to enable that functionality until they "work through issues of user privacy." (These quotes may not be exact; pulled from Danny Sullivan's liveblog of Google’s Web Search “Evolution” Event today.) · December 7th, 2009
See whether or not your ISP's DNS server is faster or slower than other alternatives like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS with Namebench. This free benchmarking tool pits your current DNS servers against alternatives and generates handy charts and recommendations for which of your DNS choices are the fastest. Using either your browser history or Alexa's top 10,000 global domain names, by default Namebench runs 200 tests to see which resolve most quickly using regional DNS servers, public services like Google's and OpenDNS's, and your current DNS services. Here's what some of the benchmark results look like.
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Now that both Google Public DNS and OpenDNS offer an alternative, public DNS services anyone can opt to use instead of their service provider's DNS servers, the question is: how do you know if your DNS service isn't working properly and if you should switch? Reader Nicholas has the answer. He says:
The easiest way to determine if your chosen DNS servers are down, you can use nslookup or dig command line tools. Open a command line prompt (Select “Start > Run” and type “cmd” on a Windows machine, “Applications > Utilities > Terminal” on the Mac) and type:
dig google.com
or
nslookup google.com
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Yesterday on This Week in Google while I was complaining that Google's acquisition of EtherPad should have been handled much more gracefully--by, you know, notifying EtherPad users before they shut down the service--EtherPad was doing an about-face. The collaborative text editor service will now stay online and open for new pads "at least" until the creators open-source the code, to ensure "no or minimal service disruption in the future." This is exactly what they should have done in the first place.
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Google Public DNS Service at Lucky IP 8.8.8.8 · Today Google launches their new public DNS service, which aims to speed up the time it takes for your browser to find web sites. To use it, set your DNS server address to 8.8.8.8--a lucky IP address, at least in Chinese culture (thx @blam). DNS aficionados already know that OpenDNS has offered a free, distributed DNS service for years. In response to Google Public DNS, OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch says OpenDNS is still a better choice because it offers more options and ways to control your web surfing experience. · December 4th, 2009, 6 comments
Testing Chromium OS · Finally got to try out the developer version of Google Chrome OS (Chromium OS) on my Asus Eee PC today. Booting from a USB drive is a much faster experience than running it in a virtual machine, but you've got to have the right hardware to do that. Over at Lifehacker yesterday, I ran down the two main ways to try out Chromium OS and what you need to have and know before you start. Here's The Human's Guide to Running Google Chrome OS. · December 4th, 2009, 3 comments
Configure Google Apps For Your Domain · There's always lots of interest in posts about Google Apps, a lesser-known way to put Google services behind your domain name. This morning at Lifehacker I ran down some of the most important Google Apps settings, and how to do things like map multiple domains to one account, create users and groups, and configure your catch-all domain email address. Here's more on how to Trick Out Google Apps for Your Domain. · October 28th, 2009, 2 comments
Secure Your Laptop in Public Places · Over at Harvard Business Online this week, I ran down a few best practices for keeping your notebook computer--and its contents--safe when you're out and about. Here's how to secure your laptop in public places. What did I miss? · October 6th, 2009, 1 comment
If you're one of the lucky folks who got into Google Wave this week, your excitement probably turned to "Now what?" when you logged in and realized you had no one to wave with. If anyone on your Google account's Contacts lists also has Wave you're set--but for some folks that's no one, or just one person. I've gotten a few waves from people saying "I have no one to talk to, and you're the only one on my list."
If that happens to you, it's time to break out the first search command every Wave newbie needs to know: with:public, which returns a huge moving sea of public waves anyone can read and update. There you can dive in, meet other wavers, see what's possible with Wave, and ask how to do stuff. Wave documentation is building up fast and furious inside Wave, and since everyone's new to it, everyone is asking questions and lending each other a hand.
Once you're tired of your inbox crawling with public waves? Save a search for waves just to you by using the in:inbox to:you@googlewave.com to pare down your list.
Google's inviting 100,000 people to the Google Wave beta today, which means Twitter is already awash in people asking about and begging for entry (hello, trending topic). For what it's worth, my sources tell me invites won't go out until later in the day U.S. time--remember the Wave team is in Australia. Update: There's no source link, but the Twitter trend explainer in Brizzly says re: Google Wave:
Google has announced that it will be sending out more than 100,000 invites to Google Wave. Each of those 100,000 invites will come with 8 invites to invite other people. The release time for these invitations (originally 16:00 GMT) has been moved back to "late in the day US time on Sept 30".
In the meantime, you can sate your Wave curiosity without an invite. Check out my in-depth high-res screenshot tour of Wave over at Lifehacker this morning. Like I said in the post, Wave is only as useful as the people who are in it, so if you get an invitation and the privilege of giving out invitations, do use them very wisely. For background, see also my previous Wave posts: The Google Wave Highlight reel, and Google Wave Q&A.
Google Wave First Look [Lifehacker]
Twitter's new geolocation support was supposed to launch for developers at today's Twitter Conference in LA (which I'm attending), but it wasn't quite ready yet. Still, Twitter's platform lead Ryan Sarver announced several details about how it will work, at least initially, in a developer session. In quickly-jotted bullet points:
- Twitter will soon be able to store location data--that is, latitude and longitude coordinates--on a per-tweet basis, and for your user profile.
- Including location information in your tweets will be opt-in only. You will have to visit your Twitter account's settings page on the web site to allow Twitter to store that data. It will not be enabled by default. Even if your Twitter client sends lat/log points along with your status update, if you didn't explicitly opt into including that information, Twitter will drop it at the point of entry and it will not be stored or published.
- Users won't see any new features on the Twitter web site when geo launches except for the settings page where you opt in. Twitter is giving API developers a head start to display and transmit geo data in tweets in their apps first.
- In practice, expect to see your Twitter client include a checkbox below the posting area labeled something like "include my location with this tweet." If you check the box when you send a tweet but you haven't given Twitter permission to store your location data, you'll have to visit your settings page on the web site to do so.
- Interesting: Twitter will scrub geo-data stored in tweets more than 14 days old to avoid subpoenas about a user's location. They will outright delete the location information from their database, not just anonymize it.
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After "countless hours" of work, the Google Wave team has thrown up their hands and decided not to make Wave work in Internet Explorer natively. Instead, they released Google Chrome Frame, an IE add-on that puts Chrome's backend inside Internet Explorer. Next week another batch of Google Wave invitations will go out, and IE users will have to install Chrome Frame or switch to Firefox or Safari to try Wave. (The screenshot is the prompt IE users will get when they try to log into Wave.) Google explains why Internet Explorer just doesn't have what it takes to run Wave:
Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology.
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Should You or Shouldn’t You Host Your Own Webapps · One of the smartest people I've ever met, Maciej Cegłowski, says you shouldn't self-host web-based software like WordPress or Fever or eventually, Google Wave, because it requires you to "devote half your life to learning and understanding [server] administration." Go with a hosted service or generate flat HTML files of your blog posts that you upload to your server automatically instead, he says. While Maciej's argument may apply to some (ok, most?) folks, I disagree: When it comes to a project you care passionately about, doing it yourself is much more educational and satisfying (and won't take half your life). Sure, most people should just buy instead of build, but they'll never get something that's exactly what they want and unlike any other. · September 21st, 2009, 13 comments
On each new episode of This Week in Google (details) I’ll highlight a tip for using cloud/Google apps smarter, faster, and better. I’ll document those tips here.
If you've upgraded your Mac to Snow Leopard (10.6), it's now dead simple to synchronize iCal with your Google Calendar. While in Leopard you had to either know detailed CalDAV settings or install a helper application, in 10.6's iCal you can just open up the Preferences pane. Under Accounts, click the + button to add an account. Enter your full gmail address (you@gmail.com) and your Google Account password, and iCal will detect and configure the CalDAV settings for you. This is full two-way sync, so changes you make to events in iCal show up in GCal and vice versa.
Pro tip: Google Apps account users, iCal won't automatically detect you're using a Google Account. From the Account type drop-down, choose "Google" and then enter your full email address and password to get your GCal in iCal. This also works for Yahoo Calendar, Exchange 2007, and any other CalDAV server as well.
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