Slashdot Mirror
Google Weather Service And GMail Improvements
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google has added US-only weather forecasts to their web search. Type e.g. "weather palo alto, ca" (zip codes work too) and you get a small illustrated weather forecast on top of the search result. (Yahoo has been providing a similar service for quite a while.) You can also send your query as SMS to 46645 (GOOGL), as the official Google blog reports." Relatedly, Shachaf writes "Looking at my GMail account, I see that Google has added two new features: integration with Picasa and plain HTML support. Now you can 'Log in to Gmail directly from Picasa and send the photos from your Gmail account', and view your email from any web-browser."
Does this mean the command line is making a big come back?
I mean, those retro Windows and Apple fans would be clicking on a spinning a globe and zooming into to a graphics presentation of "rain early, clearing later".
I'm sorry, but if you're living in the US and you don't know fahrenheit, then there's something wrong. Either the schools you went to growing up were absolutely terrible, or you immigrated here and need to learn more of our culture.
This should be even more interesting when they integrate it with Google Maps :)
Am I the only one who dislikes having to do a search to get some information? Of course it can be bookmarked but it just feels a little weird. Maybe it's just a matter of habit...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
There are folders. They're called labels, and do everything folders do, plus some more things (a message can belong to several labels)...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I don't think that's quite true. You log into a portal and all that crap is surrounding what it is you really want to get accomplished. Google, on the other hand, is a simple and elegant interface where you only get what you ask for. If you're not looking for the weather, it's not going to clutter your screen with it. Now if only they could make my weather report accurate (it says we're having thunderstorms all day, but it's sunny and clear - typical forecast).
I don't like the method of well-meaning interference with a search. When you enter "weather east podunk, NY" they first give you the current weather - with very little knowledge that this is what you are looking for. It's just as likely you are looking for historical climate data, or your friend Karl Weather living in Podunk. This clutters up search results, and adds another kind of meaning to the search words. It has all the disadvantages of in-band signalling, and the signalling isn't even defined for the user.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
Or maybe the US could start trying to use standard units. Hey, if it's bad for someone is just you guys, especially the scientists and engineers...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Well, you wouldn't have to think about two scales when you were doing some decent scientific or engineering work...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
You know, I prefer GMail's "labels" metaphor for mail to the "folders" metaphor used by most mail clients (and IMAP). I find it easier to organise and find my emails through the GMail interface than through Thunderbird.
It's interesting that Google is taking the CLI approach, which gives a lot of functionality without adding clutter to the interface.
Slashdot users, as a whole, might be more comfortable with that approach than the GUI approach, like Yahoo.
At what point does Google make a Yahoo-style frontend for the "newbie" users, just as an option, of course.
Seriously, this isn't a troll. Why are such trivial features of google search such a big deal that they make the front page of slashdot? The poster even points out that Yahoo! already has this feature.
No no no no no.
One of the reason google has stomped all over the competition is they keep their interfaces simple. Adding that stuff would multiply the size of the front page. Furthermore if you really wanted that feature, it would be pretty simple to hack up some php that use the google apis or just scrape the relevant pages for the data and format it however you want.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Google has never shown much interest in validating code.
Even the Firefox Start page they host doesn't validate.
They probably save untold gigabytes just by not putting a doctype, type attributes, alt tags, etc.
That is such an American-centric view that I feel compelled to comment. Remove the "USA! USA!" from your comment for a second. A minor fraction of the world (5% if google is right) uses a temperature scale. Fine. Now, should the other 95% need an excuse to not know that 5%? I mean seriously, can you not put aside your patriotism and realize that just because the good ol' US of A uses it doesn't mean everyone else should be obliged to use it? If I set up a temperature scale based on how long it takes a lamp to reach a certain temperature, would I be justified in saying "Just because we should switch doesn't give people an excuse to not know how we currently do things." Think about that for a second.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
This allows Google to build a huge "degree of separation" database between people and use it for data mining.
Invites as a method of controlled growth is much more plausible. Think about all the hype over GMail when it was first launched. Not even Google could withstand the load if everybody who wanted to signed up at once.
And personally, I don't give a damn if it's "valid code" or not, so long as it works in every browser.
I just checked GMail with my *preferred* Netscape 3.04 (js and images off) and it worked great, plus was much faster -- and considerably more *readable* (the JS version has some annoying width errors that force sidescrolling in Mozilla).
I can now recommend GMail to my visually-impaired and hardware-challenged users, with every expectation that it will work fine for them.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Look at a results page, for example. They could eliminate over 1K per page load simply by moving the CSS and Javascript into external resources.
I'm sure you're thinking "but the client has to download them anyway". Not from Google. Google is that popular, and the resources change that infrequently, that virtually every shared cache in existence would keep a copy of the resource, meaning Google would effectively cease serving it from their servers almost entirely.
Even if that weren't the case, Google would still come out ahead in the bandwidth stakes for every visitor that loads more than a single page, as the presentation would be shared across multiple pages, yet only downloaded once.
Embedding the CSS in the (not publically cachable) HTML documents means that every visitor has to download the unchanging presentation for every page load individually.
They already use CSS. They could save even more bandwidth by dropping the <font> elements, which would mean that Internet Explorer 2 and Netscape Navigator 3 wouldn't be quite so colourful.
not anymore scary than what everyone already knows about you already... talk to your bank, your credit card company, your insurance company, your doctor, your mortgage company, your landlord, your employer, your airline of choice, etc.....