Archive for the 'Google' Category

Page 3 of 15

New beta YouTube layout

Published on June 14, 2007 in audio-video and Google. 1 Comment

This is what a YouTube clip page looks like now:
YouTube layout: now

And this is what YouTube is developing as a new ‘beta’ version:
Youtube layout: beta

  • they got rid of the large banner (” Use Quicklists!”) which was basically a waste of space.
  • all clip info is now under the video instead of to the right. All info on and action on a video are now in one place. I like it.
  • Youtube likes you to check out other videos. Most newly freed space is dedicated to thumbnails of other (‘related’/'promoted’) clips: you now see 13 of them on the frist page instead of 5.

Creating a tango calendar

Published on April 25, 2007 in Google and Tango. 3 Comments

Resurrection of milonga.be

BTF Sunday 086 When I started dancing argentine tango, there were two sites that gave you an update of where and when you could dance tango in Belgium. The first one was tango.be, with a frame-based layout that I don’t find the most user-friendly nor visually pleasing, and the second www.milonga.be, with a Flash-based agenda that was quite easy to use. Unfortunately the editor of the latter had to stop the site due to lack of time. Two weeks ago I noticed that he had even let the domain name expire and it was free again. Five minutes later I was the new owner of milonga.be. My goal: to make it again into a comprehensive overview of where to take tango courses and dance tango in Belgium.

WordPress again

Oh, what can I say, I know WordPress so well now, I use it wherever I can. So yes, it’s a WordPress site, with the K2 template, but with (currently) only static pages and no posts. I’ve divided the site into 2 parts: where to follow classes, and where to go dancing (practicas, milongas, salons, workshop). I’m obviously going to sprinkle some Web2.0 gold dust on the project. One example of this: Google Calendar.
Continue reading ‘Creating a tango calendar’

Twitter: watch your mouth

Published on April 12, 2007 in Google. 6 Comments

Whether Twitter will turn out to be a conversational revolution or a giant waste of time, I’m still not sure about. Sometimes it feels like instant messaging (chatting *with* someone), sometimes like just changing the subtitle of your MSN/Gtalk (just a shout, no specific destination), sometimes it’s more like talking to yourself. But make no mistake: you are not just talking to yourself!

Thanks to its huge geek-appeal (over 145.000 backlinks in Technorati), Twitter is well on its way towards a respectable PageRank 8. Twitter also uses pretty URLs, (twitter.com/[user]/statuses/[messageid] ), which Google likes a lot. Twitter also generously links from one account to the other (Twitter Friends). And Twitter has a LOT of (small bites of) content. As a result of that, whatever you say in Twitter may come back to haunt you through Google.

Exhibit 1: Pietel
Twitter exhibit 1: Pietel
When you do a Google search for “Pietel”, his Twitter account shows up as result #4 of 226.000. Being the good boy that he is, he just wrote that he finished his work assignment at home. But if his last remark would have been: “stupid job, silly colleagues, moron boss“, would he like that to show up on Google?
(depending on what Google server you fall, your results might be different, but the Twitter result has a good chance of ending up on the first page of results).
Continue reading ‘Twitter: watch your mouth’

Gmail will disappear

Published on March 21, 2007 in Google. 2 Comments

UPDATE: it appears that I got the new “Google Mail” logo because for some reasons Google maps my IP address to Germany, and so I got the German branding. I still think it would make sense for them to switch to a branding they can use anywhere, and thus get rid of the Gmail name. When, is anyone’s guess.

google mail Now that Google changed the logo in my webmail client, I think we can say that Gmail is close to disappearing from Google’s (European) pages. They’re replacing it everywhere with the even less sexy “Google Mail”.

This might be due to the following legal hassle Google has in Europe:

The latest legal developments arrive just weeks after a European Union trademark office denied Google the rights to register the Gmail name across all of its member countries. Company representatives maintain that the EU ruling has no effect on its use of the trademark Gmail in countries other than Germany and the U.K. and that user experiences will be the same regardless of the service’s name.
news.com.com

They use the URL http://mail.google.com (no longer gmail.com or gmail.google.com) and on the welcome page there is no mentioning anymore of any “Gmail”. On the Google product overview page it’s still Gmail. Same thing for Google Talk: I see hardly any mention on “Gtalk” anymore.

If they’re gonna use common names for all their products, then maybe Froogle will become “Google Shopping”, Adsense/Adwords maybe “Google Ads” and Picasa “Google Photos”.