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Many people theorized that when Google rolled out the Chrome browser a year ago, that it would only be a matter of time before they announced some sort of operating system.  It made sense given their forays into office documents, email programs, etc.

Officially, the company has announced plans for Chrome OS.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Which is all well and good, but Google also has a history of launching products and then letting them die on the vine, so to speak.  Even Chrome, which was launched to much fanfare has made little headway in browser share.  I don’t think I’m alone in saying that Microsoft’s bloatware has got to go, especially when they are still charging an arm and a leg for it.  Chrome OS is going to be an open-source platform, in the vein of Linux.

The announcement is intriguing, but it’s still just an announcement.  [via]

Google rolls out yet another web app, and it’s ambitious.  Google Wave.  It looks to be a blending of email, IM, and several other things; they claim it’s the logical evolution of web communication. 

It’s good that they’re thinking in these terms because basic email, IM, et al. haven’t really evolved much over their respective existences. 

From Tech Crunch:

Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree. Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale. The much better comparison is coincidentally the company started by another group of (former) Googlers, FriendFeed. But Wave is a different product for a number of reasons, and seemingly has loftier goals — all of which I’ll touch on below.

Here is the app in action to give you a better idea of its potentiality. 

Patent 7508978 is responsible for Google’s scanning technology.

How was one to go about scanning a book quickly and efficiently without destroying it? It was a problem that vexed book scanners for years until Google came up with this solution.

Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner.

New Scientist has more on this patent and it’s breakthrough scanning technology.

I’ve never fallen in love with Chrome, to the point where I thought ditching Firefox was a good idea.  But I will admit that it has some great features and design ideas that I think Firefox would be unwise not to implement.  Regardless, this commercial makes me want to love Chrome more than I actually do.  [via Waxy]

Google has rolled out three new products, which seem to be pretty barebones right now.  But all three make sense.  Almost surprised they haven’t rolled these out sooner. 

1. News Timeline is another way of presenting the news as if it were a calendar.  I’m not exactly down with the interface, but the concept of presenting news as a visual day in and day out story is fascinating.  For some, I would imagine, it makes connecting the dots and seeing the relationships a bit easier.  Also, Google News now has a timeline feature on the right of the story aggregation page. 

We’ll see if this thing catches on, or whether or not they can improve upon the concept.  Because right now, the concept works, but the execution does not. 

2. Similar Image Search attempts to improve upon their image search functionality by grouping like photos together.  It doesn’t exactly work perfectly, but I would think down the line this is where their image search function is heading once the web becomes a bit more semantic. 

3. Profiles seems like web 1.75 or whatever, but this will pay dividends for users and Google alike down the road.  For Google they have yet more specific information about a person to taylor adds and content, etc.  For users they can set up a profile to their liking which will become the de factor first thing anyone sees when searching for them.  In other words when perspective employees go trolling, instead of Myspace of Facebook, they’ll see a respectable Google Profile.  

From the Google Blog: “To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we’ve begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We’ve also added links so it’s easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.”

Google finally got around to doing something with its 2006 acquisition of Grand Central.  That something is Google Voice (announcement).

David Pogue raves about it in the Times.  For people with complicated lives, Grand Central was a breath of fresh air.  Now, he says, Google Voice takes that to the next level. 

Still, you can’t imagine how much the game changes when you have a single phone number, voice mail transcriptions and nondeleting text messages on every phone. Suddenly, your communications are not only unified, but they’re unified everywhere at once — the cellphone, the Web and the e-mail program. And all of it free — even ad-free.

There may be some fallout as a result; I’d hate to be a company that sells voice mail transcription or conferencing calling services right about now. But that’s life, right? Every now and then, a little revolution is good for us.

Essentially, Google Voice, is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  It gives you one phone number that can access all your numbers, whether they be cell, home, mobile, and work numbers; the Voice number stays the same, as many of your other numbers change over the course of a  lifetime.

TechCrunch breaks down some of the features you can expect. 

Text Messaging: Google wants people to use their Google Voice phone number exclusively (and in fact it’s the only way to use it properly). A problem with the original service – it didn’t allow text messaging, so you had to tell people your mobile number as well if you wanted to send and receive text messages with them. Now, Google Voice will accept text messages and forward them on to your mobile phone. You can respond to those messages as well. Google is using the existing Gateway technology (which is used by Google Chat) to power this feature.

Voicemail Transcription: Google also added a nifty transcription feature (which is using the same subscription service as Google 411) for voicemails. All voicemails are transcribed easily saved into the system and searchable. Users can add notes or tags to voicemails and each transcription details how confident Google is about the success of voice transcription; Google Voice highlights word in lighter color that they are not confident were subscribed properly. And transcription takes about 30 seconds to be seen in the system from the end of a voicemail. All in all, Google may have unkilled the dreaded voicemail.

Friend Settings: Google has added new settings that allow users to route calls from specific people straight to voicemail, or your mobile phone, etc, instead of having to state their name and then be forwarded accordingly.

New User Interface: The primary user interface for Google Voice is through your phone via an audio menu. But users can also log in to the website to administer the account and view activity. This interface has undergone a makeover – It now looks very much like a comprehensive Gmail inbox with tabs for Voicemail, SMS, Recorded calls, Placed calls, Received calls and Missed calls. And the Google Voice is easily integrated into the list of links to Google apps at the top left of each application. All SMS and transcribed voicemails are searchable and taggable, which is very useful and will change the way people interact with these messages. Google also says that full integration with Gmail is coming, but won’t say when. Personally, having all my email, SMS and transcribed voicemails in a single inbox could be life-changing. You can also respond to text messages from the interface and initiate phone calls, which then calls your designated phone and then the recipient.

Conference and International Calls: Google Voice also added a conference calling feature allowing conference calls of up to six participants and recording abilities. International calls can also be made through the system at very reasonable rates. For example, voice calls to France are $0.02 per minute, to France mobile phones $0.15 per minute, and to China $0.02 per minute. These rates are about the same as Skype’s international phone rates.

I don’t have multiple phone numbers, thankfully, but if I did then I would certainly want to use this.  No more deleting text messages or voicemails, etc.

I’m not sure how launching a site dedicated to music videos would kill MTV, since they gave up on the format 15 years ago, but that’s YouTube’s intention with Vevo. 

Universal Music Group and YouTube want to change all that. The two media giants are working on a deal that would launch a YouTube sister site that would be a music video cornucopia, according to sources cited by CNET. The intended sister site, tentatively called Vevo, would be “closely linked” with YouTube and thus attract billions of viewers, and, hopefully, big advertising dollars.

 

Universal is the nation’s largest recording company, and with a little help from its friends, Vevo hopes to attract all of the major labels to create a one-stop shop for music videos. Also planned are “editorial content, merchandising, Webisodes, or artist-generated videos,” sources close to the negotiations told CNET. This kind of content would truly be culling from the YouTube’s philosophy of giving audiences reams of content from a variety of sources.

MTV recently launched mtvmusic.com, but all they did was put up a website, slap some advertising on it and package their videos. It was pretty lame.  I’m not even sure anyone turns to MTV, first and foremost, for music videos.  Or if anyone even cares about them as a marketing gimmick. 

Still, Vevo has Google dollars behind it, which means it’s chances of success are pretty high.

Everyone is anamored by the search prowess of Google. One trillion pages indexed, and all that. 

The web pages that Google indexes are just the tip of the iceberg.  What Google helps you do is find information, but what it doesn’t help you do is search databases.  You can’t search Google for “the lowest airfare from Portland to Boston,” I mean you could but it would be a fruitless search. 

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

It is that stream of data that the next evolution of search engines are working to acheive.  In a manner of speaking, they are trying to solve, what Google claims, is the final 10% in the search equation. 

“Most search engines try to help you find a needle in a haystack,” Mr. Rajaraman said, “but what we’re trying to do is help you explore the haystack.”

That haystack is infinitely large. With millions of databases connected to the Web, and endless possible permutations of search terms, there is simply no way for any search engine — no matter how powerful — to sift through every possible combination of data on the fly.

To extract meaningful data from the Deep Web, search engines have to analyze users’ search terms and figure out how to broker those queries to particular databases. For example, if a user types in “Rembrandt,” the search engine needs to know which databases are most likely to contain information about art ( say, museum catalogs or auction houses), and what kinds of queries those databases will accept.

That approach may sound straightforward in theory, but in practice the vast variety of database structures and possible search terms poses a thorny computational challenge.

“This is the most interesting data integration problem imaginable,” says Alon Halevy, a former computer science professor at the University of Washington who is now leading a team at Google that is trying to solve the Deep Web conundrum.

One such search engine that is striving to advance web search is Kosmix.  Has anyone used it, or familiar with it?  Having only a cursory spin through the site, I like that it integrates information from Twitter, catalogues, news sites, blogs, etc.

But Google’s solution to the problem indicates that we’re moving to a semantic based web.  Google is spidering databases via search queries and then building database models from this. 

Google’s Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms — “Rembrandt,” “Picasso,” “Vermeer” and so on — until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.

That, of course, will make the Ubiquity Firefox extension that much more useful and the true future of web interfaces.

Word is these overseas directions are based on actual human feats.  Try a few, because if you’re lucky they will tell you to swim from say New Zealand to Japan, etc.

(click to enlarge)

Don’t think I’ll be kayaking from Seattle to Hawaii anytime soon.  [via reddit]

This is the first I’ve heard of this, but it is a scary proposition and certainly not exactly net neutral – a stance that Google supposedly prides itself on.

Posts containing music files have been disappearing from Google’s search index, but all relates to the Google owned Blogger platform.  Many music blogs began on this platform before Google owned it.  The article is slightly misleading, since Jeff Weiss makes it seem that the posts are being removed entirely from websites and not just the search index.  I would think Google wouldn’t just outright delete posts, but then again, I’m not exactly willing to give Big Brother the benefit of the doubt.

But none of this explains why Blogger is deleting year-old Elliott Smith songs that can be legally accessed elsewhere. All arrows, however, point to an unacknowledged switch in Google’s corporate policy. Though its corporate brass declined an interview with L.A. Weekly, Andrew Pederson, a spokesperson for the Mountain View–based company, explained via e-mail, “When we are notified of content that may violate our terms of service, including clear notices of alleged copyright infringement, we act quickly to review it, and our response may include removing allegedly infringing material. If material is removed, we make a good-faith effort to contact affected bloggers using the e-mail address they set up when they signed up for Blogger. This is in compliance with the DMCA, which requires that users receive notification after material has been removed.”

Indeed, nowhere in the fine print of the DMCA does it state that any agency is required to notify bloggers prior to the deletion of their posts. Meaning that in the five years since purchasing Blogger’s parent company, Pyra Labs, Google has been extending warnings as a common courtesy. Now, it just sends an obituary notice. Which raises the question: Did Google finally get fed up dealing with unruly bloggers? Was there some sort of back-office conversation with the RIAA? Does it just really hate MGMT?

Whatever the answer, a lot of bloggers are jumping platforms. “I’m switching to WordPress immediately. The RIAA, or Google, obviously doesn’t seem to know what the labels are doing,” says Heather Browne, the writer of the popular I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, which was recently named one of the U.S.’s five best music blogs in a Stereogum poll. “Most of the tracks posted are provided to bloggers, and nearly all are willing to take a track down if contacted. Sometimes, people just make a mistake. Cracking down on a couple blogs will never stem the problem of illegal downloading. This is how things have worked since blogs started five years ago. The labels just need to embrace it at some point.”

Comcast is my internet service provider and I loath them with all my intellect.  When I suspected they were throttling my traffic and I called them about this they accused me of having a faulty wireless router.

It’s almost like the higher ups give the customer service reps canned responses for this sort of thing.  Anyway, it’ll be nice to finally switch to an ISP that adheres to net neutrality.

And thanks to Google, consumers will be able to better equip themselves against their ISPs.

Google will provide academic researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the United States and Europe to analyze data, said its chief Internet guru, Vint Cerf, known as the “father of the Internet.”

“When an Internet application doesn’t work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP (Internet service provider), the application, your PC (personal computer), or something else?” Cerf wrote in a blog post.

The effort aims to uncover the problem for users, Cerf said. Cerf is widely known for his work for the U.S. government in designing the Internet protocol in the 1970s and 1980s.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t indicate whether or not Google will make this information  widely available or if they’ll make an application for individuals to test their ISP.

Update: In fact, they are making applications widely available.  Among these tools are: the Network Diagnostic Tool, which tests your connection speed and gives you a diagnosis on speed issues; Glasnost, which tests whether your ISP is blocking or throttling BitTorrent connections, and Network Path and Application Diagnosis, which helps you find problems that usually plague last-mile broadband networks. All of this is part of their Measurement Lab, a set of tools (some already working, some upcoming) for network diagnostics.

According to Mashable: “Before, tools such as these have been reserved for network administrators, hackers and other experts; now, Google is trying to introduce them to a wider audience. It’s not really that important if this wider audience will actually use these tools; what’s important is the fact that Google is taking a stand, saying: we’re going to help you fight for net neutrality even if the ISPs don’t like it.

“It wasn’t an easy decision to make, even for a giant like Google. If these tools were coming from another source, the ISPs would probably simply employ measures that render them useless. However, it’s much harder to block a service if Google stands behind it. On the other hand, even Google doesn’t want to anger every ISP that’s throttling network traffic in some way – and many of them are doing it. Net neutrality has just received a huge push; probably one that will ultimately turn the tide to its favor. “

Google is hosting the Life Photo Archive, which for photo nuts is pretty special considering the two archives worth having access to would be Life and National Geographic.  The photos and etchings date back to 1750 and each photo has it’s own page with additional information, including the name of the photographer, date and location. Once the archive is fully digitized, it will total around 20 million images.

I would prefer these photos to be on Flickr, like the Library of Congress, so that they could be tagged, anotized, etc.  The layout here is pretty nice – you can search by decade or subject or person, etc.  And beggers will not be choosers.

This is the best thing you’ll discover all week.  [via Kottke]

Jason Kottke has rounded up a nice little history behind Google’s supposedly new browser Chrome dating back to 2001.� There aren’t any working demonstrations of it yet and there is no indication that it will conflict with the new three year deal they just signed with Mozilla to essentially fund Firefox, however Google has created a browser.� It’s called Chrome and supposedly it rethinks the way that you use a browser.� This is better than an operating system since most of the work people do on computers is through a browser and most of computing will be in server clouds within a few years.� It also means there is little reason to use Internet Explorer, right?[Kottke]