The new web browser that everyone is talking about and not using, Chrome, just got an update to it. This update is kind of unusual though in the fact that you now have a choice of how beta and unstable you want it to be. If you are into trying out new things, reporting bugs and getting fresh updates daily or every few days, this is for you. If you use Chrome on a regular basis though, the update is kind of mandatory as it
fixes bugs with areas including Microsoft’s Silverlight software, tab behavior, video playback with YouTube and other Flash players, and scalable vector graphics, and it suppresses full-text indexing of sites accessed with encrypted Web connections
Cnet News has all the information on how to do the update, to me the killer is you can’t even update from the software itself, you need to go to another website. Then you have to choose which updates you want to receive, Beta or Dev, and then watch as it updates. I have no problem with software being released and not being finished, it happens all the time, but with Google’s track record of keeping apps in beta for years and years, why put so many users through the growing pains of both Dev and Beta versions? Me thinks Chrome should have been a private invite only release like Gmail was originally to get most of the issues flushed out in the first place.
Chrome is nice, it has a lot of cool features and has everyone who uses the internet interested, but as reported earlier, no one is really using it and no one on a Mac can even start to use it. It pains me when major companies rely on the free labor of their own users to finish building and fixing software that shouldn’t be released yet, much less make them jump through hoops to get the update.
Just announced today, the new Android phone is set to release on Monday, October 20th. This much anticipated release is expected to change the face of mobile phones, similar to the expectations prior to the release of the first iPhone.
Expected specs for the phone were released back in August and can been seen on the TechCrunch website here. Currently this full featured phone is set to be released on the T-Mobile network, similar to Apple’s partnership with AT&T. This exclusivity is sure to give T-Mobile a significant boost to their market share, and their profits will be sitting pretty too if this phone delivers all that is expected.
iPhone users are might be sitting pretty right now, but soon Android might be the next “in” phone to have. Is Apple worried? Only time will tell once this phone hits the market. Already tech pundits and gadget fans are preparing their long stay on the streets over that weekend. I’m interested to see just how much more powerful this Android phone will be, with the support of Google, there’s no telling!
Here at Crenk we have been making a lot of strides in the last few months. Today is no exception, I just received an email from one of our readers confirming that we now have sitelinks within Google. Woohoo!
Last week I gave a first 5-minute impression of Google Chrome, the new browser that is supposed to be faster and better than anything else out there. A week later and what seems to be a hundred thousand reviews in the blogsphere later, everyone seems to like it, and no one seems to be using it. Less than 1% of Crenk readers are using it, more people are using Opera belive it or not.
What’s so great about it? Well it’s new and shiny, has a minimalist look and feel to it and consumes about 75% less memory than Firefox does, at least for me on my Windows XP box. Google really seems to have done their homework with regards to chewing up your CPU cycles and there appears to never be a memory leak. Additionally, you just need to type something in what used to be known as the address bar, as it now functions as a search bar and many other things. It’s also fast, but how fast? My seat dyno says slightly faster than Firefox, but to a normal user, it might only feel faster because it’s new.
What’s not so great about it? Well first and foremost, Windows only. As a Mac user, I once again feel like someone put me out in the cold. Lack of any add-ons that I’ve come to love with Firefox is also missing, but if you were coming from Internet Explorer you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about anyway. Dedicated search box is something I miss. Why you ask, since Google answers all questions on it’s own? Because it simply doesn’t. I’ve been using a Firefox add-on called OpenSearchFox for more than a year now; it allows you to add a drop down in Firefox to search any site that has search enabled on it. That means, rather than going to say Netflix and then searching, I can select Netflix from my drop down menu in the search bar and type in my query there. My other gripe is the lack of a status bar. I understand how important screen real estate is, but I like it, I’ve been using the status bar for more than 10 years in browsers, I’m used to it. Lastly, Chrome doesn’t work with all websites yet. One site that I order digital photos from requires a Java plugin, to upload the photos. I have the plugin installed in Windows but the browser doesn’t pick it up. I’m sure small kinks like this will iron themselves out but it’s still an inconvenience.
One of the most interesting Easter eggs is kind of a joke in Chrome. In the address bar type about:internets – then sit back and chuckle, at least someone around the Google camp has a sense of humor. Chrome is interesting, but it’s not a killer app for me yet, nor do I plan on switching. For now, I will use it to beta test website design and other various things on the Internet but Firefox will continue to be my primary browser.
Digg has to be one of the biggest web properties currently on the internet, with one of the most loyal communities. However, they seem to be able to grow the community, add on new features, turnover good revenue figures and get millions of pageviews, but they simply can’t sell their company to anyone!
Digg has been trying to sell for the last 6 months and yet no one is actually biting. They currently have a Microsoft as an investor and running their ad campaigns, plus they have been in talks with Google for an acquisition, but how come they cant finalise anything?
Is it because the $300 million price tag they are after, it just too out of reach? Is it because the big conglomerates aren’t too sure how they are going to fit the Digg technology into their search engines or portals? Is it because Digg has such a strong community base, any acquisition will just kill the site?
Im hoping to find out why the average person think Digg cant sell.
Yesterday Google’s new browser, Chrome was announced so today I downloaded and installed it onto my work Windows XP box to see what all the fuss is about and check for cross compatibility on sites we work on. I spent about 5 minutes poking around, if I can’t figure out how to use a browser in 5 minutes, it’s too complicated for anyone but the most 733t 1337.
Download was very small; it then opens an applet and downloads the rest of the software. Installation requires Firefox to be shut down so Chrome can import all your bookmarks, favorites, history and passwords; this goes quickly and rather painlessly. Next you get a TOS about reporting options for crashes, I denied their request and the install was complete.
Upon launching Chrome for the first time an unusual question is asked, “Do you wish to keep Google as your default search engine?” It’s unusual in that, it’s a Google product and the first thing about this new killer app is to strip out Search, the one thing Google does very, very well. I selected to keep it.
All my bookmarks and history imported, what didn’t was my homepage. I’m a long time iGoogle user and rely on the RSS feeds to get me caught up quickly at a glance to what is going on with the sites I follow. Not there. Instead six white boxes stare at me. A little note tells you that these are your most visited sites. Nice idea, but not for me. I easily look at 50+ sites in six different tabs of iGoogle. There is no apparent way to set a traditional “homepage” only what Google wants you to see.
The other thing lacking is an option to show the status bar. I rely on the status bar while at work and home to see where any link will take my, by hovering over it. There are also several add-ons for Firefox that sit in my status bar that I’ve come to love, from what I can tell in Chrome, there is no status bar option.
On the plus side, it is fast. How fast? I don’t have scientific numbers or pretty pie charts, but it really feels fast. One site that I know uses a fairly common Java plugin to run an app wouldn’t work and there was no option to install it but everything else on the dozen or so sites I quickly browsed seem to work.
Is Chrome the next killer app? Hard to say now, Firefox has such a loyal, loving fan base to it, but I think this could compliment it very well.
Google to launch a web browser today to 100 countries, and it will be named Google Chrome. There is a lot of buzz already about this new product and Im sure you have probably already read about it on Techcrunch, AllthingsD, Sizlopedia and more.All of this was just a rumour until it was confirmed by theOfficialGoogle Blog.
For a long time now there have only really been 3 key players in the online browser market, IE, Firefox and Safari (MACs). I’m very interested to use this product today and see how it compares to all these other browsers.
For a long time also Google has been funding Mozilla by paying to have their search engine as default in the browser, so if Google Chrome becomes popular and out grows Firefox, will they still pay top dollar to be the default search in Firefox?
For a while now I have been running Adphilia and we are only a small site representation company that is slowly growing. We have spent a lot of time trying to source the right Advertising server to meet our needs, but we still haven’t been able to find the right one in my mind. We have toyed with using free ad servers like OpenX or Google, as well as corporate ad servers like Right Media or Doubleclick. This is a post which just outlines what we have found within the company.
Free Ad Servers:
Open X – OpenX is an amazing piece of software that allows medium and large website to control their inventory. It is cost effective because the software is free, however you need to think about the implications advertising will have on your hosting servers, because huge amounts of ad serving can mean very large bandwidth costs. I also find OpenX a little hard to understand when you are first using the serving, plus I’m sure the larger your sites are the more complicated it becomes.
Google Ad Manager – Google Ad manager is a great product but it is built specifically for small publishers. It has a great design and easy to use. The first issue is that you can only use this ad server for small sites, because it is not compatible with any larger ad servers, and you have to put ad code straight into the header of your site. Additionally, I really don’t like the fact that when you deliver your first campaign you have to set it all up the day before it is allowed to be start. Small but bloody annoying.
Corporate Ad Servers:
Zedo – Zedo is very professional company with some great customer service. However, with them we got caught on the first hurdle, cause they were very expensive compared to all the other companies. Possibly, this is due to the great customer service and the results they can bring your sites. However, if you don’t have a great sales team to match what they can offer, there isnt too much point.
DoubleClick – This company just amazes me. Doubleclick seems to be a mish mash of several individual sections of software that has been mashed into one tool. Instead of Trafficking, reporting, billing and account details all in one sections, they seem to have segmented them, thus making it very untidy. However, they are the worlds best ad serving tool and the most used.
Atlas – Atlas, I tried to contact 5 times and they have never even responded to the messages I left. So I didn’t even get past the pricing stage let alone using their service. Typical Microsoft!
After all of these experiments it didn’t really bring me to finding the ad server solution that I was after. Im wanting a piece of software that is easy to understand and us, which doesn’t cost the earth, preferably free and web based. Does anyone know of a solution that I should try?
This is a simple loophole that is now out in the open. Thanks to JohnChow and Techcrunch for letting everyone know about it. Im not even going to try it out now, cause im sure it will be fixed within 24 hours by Feedburner.
Searching is big business. Those listings on the right side of any Google search are there because someone paid money to advertise there. Same goes with the top 2 or 3 links. Google makes a lot of money off of these paid placements, which are there based on their dynamic search technology. Google has also come under fire for the way in which it ranks sites, called Page Rank, it is a top secret way they calculate what search results should be at the top for any given term, based on their algorithm that, some have suggested, is based on the number of in-bound and out-bound links from other sites.
Google is the killer app of this decade, no one is doubting that. It is so popular it has become a verb, people just say, “Can you Google this for me?” which is almost impossible to do with anything anymore. So what if a new search engine comes along and tries to flatten the playing field?
That is exactly what Cuil (pronounced Cool) is trying to do. They claim to index three times the number of sites Google does and display them in a three-across pattern. That alone is kind of unique for searches, as they have always gone vertically. They have also implemented tab searches, a kind of, well maybe if you were looking for camera you might also want to look for digital camera. The search engine works, that really isn’t a question, but why should I use it?
Google does so many things now, like simple and complex math problems, fast weather look-up, package tracking from UPS and other services, all the way to stock quotes and word definitions. For me, it has eliminated the need to go to specialized sites if I can just put a special query in the Google search bar in Firefox. Cuil is also missing an image search function, something even Microsoft and Yahoo have worked into their site.
Cuil has some cool features, like roll overs, drill-down menu’s and the tabbed feature mentioned earlier. They are taking on the proverbial 800 pound gorilla by going after Google too. My two cents say that Cuil will have a small cult following for a while but ultimately, this will only make Google stronger.
Over at Royal Pingdom they have a great article on the wonder things that can be found at Googles online store. Some of this stuff is a little strange, but why not try to cash in on your good brand as much as possible.
Google Knol has officially launched and some already say it may be the Wikipedia “killer.” Google has defined the “knol” as a unit of knowledge. How long before this little item become a staple in our society’s day to day vocabulary? Webster’s anyone?
Google Knol is where YOU get to create your own “wiki” like page based on your expertise. The site’s definition is “an authoritative article about a specific topic.” For starters I’m not quite sure how authoritative an article can be if it’s written by the common user, but credential aside, there are a few aspects that may bring writers into the light.
For starters every Google Knol user is identified by their google email login, secondly, their posts are only editable by the user. Unlike Wikipedia where multiple users can change the same page, Knol relies on one editor per created page, and thus cuts down on the randomness of changes from others. Still it begs the question how long will it take before someone can game this system, and unreliable articles start to appear at the top of search results?
Currently users can create knols, but there are only a few to speak of. Trying to search for topics may prove less than stellar due to the lack of substance on the page, but I expect Google Knol to expand very quickly. There are those that dislike Wikipedia simply because the “everyman” can be an expert on anything as long as they create an account and are willing to spend to the time to edit another’s page.
Can Google overtake Wikipedia? Give Knol a try and share your comments here.
The new web browser that everyone is talking about and not using, Chrome, just got an update to it. This update is kind of unusual though in the fact that you now have a choice of how beta and unstable you want it to be. If you are into trying out new things, reporting bugs and getting fresh updates daily or every few days, this is for you. If you use Chrome on a regular basis though, the update is kind of mandatory as it
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