Tag Archives: google

Google Goggles Magic

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Last night a friend complained about a curry recipe gone wrong, so I decided to offer up the one I used to make with a certain amount of frequency. It’s from a 1970s Time Life cookbook that I vaguely remember swiping from my friend Jehan in college. I took a picture on my cell phone to send it along.

Chicken Curry Recipe

 

The page is sufficiently stained with turmeric to realize how often it was made.

A little while later I noticed a Goggles Alert on my cell phone, it had scanned the image, and returned the following URL as a hit: http://littlechefapp.com/recipes/144571-chicken-curry-authentic#.UOGjR2JQCoM

Dead on. The future is pretty awesome some times.

The Nexus program – lead by example

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2 years ago Google created the Nexus program for their Android phones. Vendors were off screwing around with things like dual screen android phones, 3D android phones, all the weird gimmicks that marketing people loved, and actually people hated (especially on a 2 year contract). The point of Nexus was to lead by example, and get out ahead of the vendors enough that they’d realize there was a better way to do this, and stop screwing around on egregious differentiation that had no real value.

I consider the Samsung S3 to be the natural child of the Nexus program. A non-Nexus device from Samsung which is gorgeous, wonderful to use, and has only minimal tweaks off the base UI. My wife and I just flipped to Verizon and got a pair of these last week, and my love for this device only gets stronger by the day.

I really think of Google’s new fiber project as a Nexus program. Google is demonstrating that there is a better way to do broadband, and that the economics are there for fiber to the home if you look at it systematically. A rethinking of how to roll out a network. I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t actually want to be an ISP, any more than they want to be a phone manufacturer. But by leading by example, they are going to change the nature of home connectivity.

Copyright in APIs

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The Jury in the Oracle vs. Google case has decided that Google violated Oracle’s copyright in implementing the Java APIs. Now, that’s actually not too bad of news, because the Judge in the case told the jury to “assume APIs are copyrightable for this decision” but that he would eventually decide that independently. Given that the EU just ruled they are not, I’m hoping the judge in this case comes to the same conclusion.

If APIs are ruled copyrightable, this would break all kinds of interoperability that we take for granted today. As always, groklaw has the best coverage of this legal action.

What’s your Google footprint

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Last night, after the Drupal Meetup, we were having many interesting conversations at the bar. One started as a question about why I did so much open source activity. There are a lot of answers there, though mostly at this point open source is just in my DNA. If I do something, I open it, because that’s what I now do.

But I posed as a return question for everyone to think about what their Google footprint was. If you search for your name, what comes up? how much of that is you?

“Sean Dague” in google returns: About 652,000 results (0.14 seconds). I am sure 99% of that is me.

Page 1 is (in order): my blog, my twitter account, my linked in profile, my directory entry in android market, a comment I wrote on greenmonk blog, my github, my old (long dead blog), my quora account, my meetup profile, my CPAN account. Some of that is current and used, some of it isn’t so current, but because google ranks the communities important, it bubbles up.

If you start going through pages you’ll see contributions to projects I’ve done, bugs filed, mailing list posts, presentations at conferences, retreads of my listings in twitter and android market on 3rd party sites. A public life on the internet that dates back to about 2001 (there may be earlier stuff, but that’s when I started being consciously active in the open source world).

I can live with that, it’s a reasonable picture of who I am, that future friends, associates, employers can all use and see for background. The amount of content I put out on my blog means that it will remain hit one for my name. It also means that I’m always on the front page of “Dague” in google as well. Having an uncommon name is actually an incredible boon in the 21st century if you want to build a reputation. Something that I hated as a kid, is something I’m very pleased about now.

Much like your credit score, your google footprint isn’t ever completely in your control. But you can be very deliberate about putting out content, in code, comments, emails, blog posts, public social network artifacts, which will shape that footprint to be some representation of you.

Take a minute today an look at your Google footprint, and see what picture the internet gets of you.

I’d love to hear stories, challenges, or completely new ideas in comments, so please post. And just think, that will also add to and shape your Google footprint.

Tip of the Day: Google Maps styling

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Tip of the day: If you are trying to embed Google Maps in a website, and things look horribly wrong, make sure that the following css style rule exists for your map div:

#whateveryourmapdiviscalled img {
   max-width: none;
}

Google maps makes really interesting abuse of width for it’s layout. I’ve got img max-width at 98% for the rest of the site so that images scale down correctly in the responsive design, but for google maps, that just causes chaos.

Is Google+ just another Chrome?

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I’ve been really frustrated with Google+ slowly consuming all the rest of Google services, because I find it so deficient compared to Twitter, and even Facebook. My long form content lives here, on my own server, in my own blog. Both Twitter and Facebook make it easy to also have that content live a life in their platform.

Google+… not so much. We’re more than 6 months after launch, and still no API besides scraping public posts. As such, I spend little time over there, and largely disdain the system, which doesn’t loose much, because there are so few people generating content there anyway. With the launch of their “Google+ your world” search yesterday, I was even more frustrated. G+, still with no API, is now infiltrating the search rankings. Grrrr.

But this morning, I read this, and it occurred to me, what if G+ is another Chrome. By that I mean a project that isn’t meant to be a market leader by itself, but one that’s meant to shape a market to keep it fluid. Twitter and Facebook have a pretty epic duopoly on content right now, and they are both working to make it harder to consume outside of their bubble. This summer they both quietly killed RSS feeds off. You can still consume via their API, but even in that front Twitter’s been waging a bit of a war on their API consumers, retaking the Mobile UI.

So maybe G+ was really a reaction to a trend Google was seeing, that the gated communities were throwing up more and more restrictions to making their content searchable in Google. Instead of bringing lawyers, bring technology. Make a competitor that is searchable, and get the gated communities to now really want to be included in the results. Make the market fluid again.

Maybe. I’m not sure I’ve even convinced my self of this. But it would explain some of the areas of focus in G+. It would also explain why public posts API is the only one they’ve released so far. At the end of the day, the social giant fight matters little to me, as long as I can syndicate into them, which is why the lack of G+ write API (and associated WordPress plugin) is my biggest concern. So while this softens my feelings on G+ a little, I really do wish they’d actually make the platform way more open. Then I might feel it was worth investing in content and discussions there. Until then, you can find my quick bits over on Twitter, and the long form ideas here, with Disqus, which makes it really easy to comment or converse outside the duopoly bubble.

Steve Yegge and the Google Platform issue

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Steve Yegge is one of the most insightful people on the internet. I was really bummed when he stopped blogging, because his posts were always well thought out, funny, and really got to the heart of some key issues in software development.

Last night he posted publicly, by accident, Google’s current biggest issue, a complete lack of a platform. He’s really dead on.

I hope Google internalizes that post and does something about it.