Tag Archives: Google

Google Plus

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I’ve been trying out Google+ for about three weeks now and so far I like it better than Facebook. There are a few things I like about Google+ over Facebook and there are a few things I’d like to see Google+ implement that Facebook already does.
What I do like:

  • Group friends/acquaintances into “circles” instead of groups so status updates can be targeted appropriately
  • Group video chat (I personally haven’t tried this but it’s nice to know it’s there). Google+ calls this “hangouts”
  • Better control over profile privacy
  • Integrated with Picasa (rumored to change the name to Google Photos), which I already use as a backup to my Flickr account. I might even get rid of my Flickr account all together since storage on Google is cheap
  • No annoying posts about what games people are playing cluttering up your feed (or stream as Google+ calls it)

What I wish Google+ did that Facebook does

  • Allow for vanity URLs. It’s easier to tell someone to visit plus.google.com/your.name instead of plus.google.com/103067558420705101928
  • Have fan pages. The closest thing (and it’s not that close) would be “Sparks” which seem more like Google News filters
  • Condensed comments. I was very surprised to see that Google+ didn’t already have this implemented fully. Some comments on my stream are condensed (it’ll say there are 30 comments and let me choose to expand them to view all the comments) yet others are fully expanded out without giving me the option to condense them down. This makes my stream a lot longer than it needs to be. Hopefully Google will correct this soon.

What I wish Google+ did that even Facebook doesn’t do yet:

  • -1 something (the Facebook equivalent would be Dislike). People have been complaining that Facebook lacked this feature and Google should’ve listened to that and incorporated it into Google+ to one-up Facebook even more.

What I wish Google+ would copy from GMail and other social networking services:

  • Color coded commenting (similar to GMail)
  • Color coded stream entries (by circle, user configurable preferably – similar to labels in GMail but applying them to the person’s name)
  • A better @/+ mentioning system. It should default to showing me people I’m already following and not everyone in the Google Directory.

I think in about a year or two from now, Google+ will do to Facebook what Facebook did to myspace; even Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is on Google+.

 

Google Chrome

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I’ve been using Firefox for the last five years and have been very happy with it (other than being a bit of a memory hog if left running for a long period of time). It allowed tabbed browsing long before IE. I’ve tried other browsers in the past, yet always came back to using Firefox. I even tried Google Chrome when it was first released. I didn’t care for it then but lately I’ve decided to give it another try.
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a lot more minimal than Firefox is. There isn’t any menu bar or bookmarks bar. There are tabs across the very top and directly beneath the tabs is a combination address and search box. Chrome also doesn’t have a title bar, which allows the browser window to show more of the web page being visited.
Mozilla Firefox
It is possible to turn off the menu bar in Firefox but it does make certain tasks (like disabling or uninstalling addons) more difficult without the menu bar. Firefox has two separate boxes for web addresses and searches. Firefox also has a title bar, which can’t be turned off without going “under the hood”, which make the viewed page smaller.
After Firefox 4 is finally released, I’ll try it and see if I’m willing to stay with Firefox or if I’ll make Google Chrome my default browser.

 

Google Browser Sync

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I was getting caught up on Digg.com and came across an extension for Firefox that allows anyone to sync your browser settings across multiple computers.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

I just think this is awesome. It’ll help me keep the same bookmarks on all 5 computers (home PC, home Mac, home laptop, work laptop, and work PC) and the copy of Firefox that I have on my SanDisk U3 USB Drive.

 

Google Blog Search

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Google has launched a blog search.

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

I tried it out and it works pretty well. Under the name of the link, it tells you when that entry was made. If it’s less than 24 hours ago, it’ll tell you how many hours ago. If it’s more than 24 hours ago, it’ll tell you what date it was posted but not the time. You can get your results as an RSS or Atom feed with 10 or 100 results so instead of going back to Blog Search and searching for something months from now, you can subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed, and see when it gets updated.