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Google's Rasmussen on Google Maps
jbp1337 writes "During a presentation at Sydney University last week, the lead engineer behind Google Maps, Lars Rasmussen offered an interesting insight into how it all came together. Rasmussen is working on a number of AJAX applications that provide a rich desktop-like interface to the end-user from within the Web browser. Other interesting things include a Linux port of Google Earth, the company is opening a new engineering center in Sydney, and Google's design philosophy is based on end-user loyalty - not money. On the rumor of a Web-based office suite from Google, Rasmussen said he is unaware of one 'but there are 3000 people that work for Google'."
Is XUL part of AJAX? I know it has the XML component, but I'm unclear on this one. Can anyone shed any light on what AJAX is and how it differs from XUL?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Google map:
You are here ------> Rasmussen.
Does the map update whenever he moves. Could be quite a security risk if someone wanted to bomb him.
"and Google's design philosophy is based on end-user loyalty - not money."
Wow, I figured it was all based on dollars..
Next time there is a MS story posted, be sure to note how MS brings clarity into the world
http://www.microsoft.com/
~jennifer.k~
CmdrTaco loves web technology which is too sophisticated for him to use.
Does anyone else feel that the released Google Maps is worse than the beta? Interstate names are missing, printing via the print button doesn't work right, the list of streets to choose form is on the left which is awkward. The first page take 5 seconds to load often, which is not very Googlish. If you have half of your street info typed in and the page finally finishes loading, it erased your typing so far...
I also have trouble using is from Mozilla 1.7.x but it may be because of adblock or flashblock. But this has been going on in the beta too.
Google's design philosophy is based on end-user loyalty - not money.
When you sell ad space alongside your applications, end-user loyalty is money.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Obviously Mr. Rasmussen needs to spend more time on Slashdot and he would know that he has in fact preparing to release an office suite.....
Like CSS. :D
Gmail is another AJAX application, and it has immense possibilities. I wrote this comment using Gmail, checked my spelling with its spellchecker, saved it in Draft, and it is stored on Google's server, which is safer than my own hard drive.
Web-based applications are here to stay, and if they are from reputable companies like Google and Yahoo, you know your files stored on their servers will remain there for a long time, if not forever.
Sun and Fun
Google have the one thing almost no other advertiser have. User loyalty and brand identity. Who the hell *loves* ClearChannel? No one. I bet even most people that use their services would say they loved them. People never stop saying how much they love Google.
*Everything* Google do is a way to make people look at more adverts. Providing services for users just makes more users look at them. Perhaps this is why they are the largest advertising agency in the world?
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&m=1121 98633625636&w=2
This explains it very simply and easily. Basically you have the backend deliver content on-demand, and the frontend is a single HTML page powered by JavaScript which queries the backend for the necessary data. Just like a desktop application.
What about ethicists? How many of the people at Google are in charge of considering the impact of what they do, or do they all just assume the spread of knowledge is unconditionally good? (It hasn't necessarily worked out that way in atomic energy, for example. And even less auspicious technological advances like reverse-indexing the phone book have had mixed results sociologically. Not to mention search engines themselves, which haven't been 100% positive in their privacy impact.)
Knowledge is not Wisdom. The Ability to do something is not the Right to do it. Were it so, terrorism would be utterly defensible because it pretty uniformly involves the use of knowledge and ability to take some action that serves the selfish or thoughtless need of the person doing it. What stands between terrorism and righteous/respected power is not ability but ethics--not the knowledge of how to do something, but the wisdom to know when not to do something.
Note that I have not called the Google folks terrorists nor said they shouldn't do what they do. I'm just tired of seeing stories about what Google can do, and I'm interested in seeing more stories about how Google itself decides what is good and bad for it to actually do. Is it really mere lack of engineers that is holding them back from doing arbitrary things? Or do they factor in issues of privacy, security, morality, etc. into their basic design. I'd love to see some stories about that because in stories like this one here, it always seems to be a lacking element. Is profit motive and national law all that the world needs to adjust in order to assure that our collective sensibilities are not violated? If something is not illegal, is that an invitation for Google to do it (ready supply of engineers permitting, of course)?
I don't think they only need engineers. I think they also need ethicists. What I don't know is whether they think that.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
If you know spanish and like web games like OGame, you may try a new XUL app for OGame, its a XUL shell to play OGame seamlessly. Read about XELL
-Woof woof woof!
It took them forever to switch to the Mercator projection. The fact that they didn't initially start with the Mercator projection sets an upper bound on the IQ of Rasmussen.
Too bad the only thing going for Google maps is that it is pretty (antialiased graphics, map can be as large as you want) and lets you pan. That's really the ONLY thing that is innovative about it- not even the "use google maps for displaying stuff from your site" is innovative; Yahoo and Mapquest have been doing this for years.
Funny thing, but MS Streets has NONE of these problems- it's not perfect, but it is FAR superior to Google Maps in useability and features people need; it has a nice way of compressing the map into a page, it's high resolution, saves addresses, does a near PERFECT job of finding "what's within the radius circle I draw", and it uses both route numbers and the uncommon road names. Nothing sets Google Maps apart from its web-based cousins, either- except for the basic map display. It certainly hasn't revolutionized online maps.
Please help metamoderate.
It's the only mapping service to get me in the wrong place. Streetmap.co.uk is fine, multimap.com is fine, the MS one whose name temporarily escapes me is fine...just Google. Wonder where they're sourcing their data from?
Cheers,
Ian
This page has SIX linked style sheets for various aspects of the page, as well as for print and handheld media.
Looks to me like Slasdot's gone to CSS school.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
You misspelled AJAX. It is supposed to be spelled j-a-v-a-s-c-r-i-p-t. What you memers call "AJAX" is some company's rebranding of existing javascript functionality that's been around for years. Please stop.
Speak truth to power.
No offense, but it doesn't really matter right now. If a result of Google serving it's advertising customers is a bunch of good stuff for me, I'm generally happy. I mean, there is a risk that the advertisers could then have so much power over Google as its "customers" that they force Google to do things we don't like. But given how that is possible in other industries where the customer-company relationship is traditional (i.e. TiVo), it doesn't seem like any sort of negative change.
Yep...we've doubled the rate of the google articles on slashdot. Seems, that there's now one "google is awesomers!" post, and one "google is so popular it is making corrput governments worried post."
Hi, you must be new here.
Slashdot only implemented proper CSS within the last couple weeks.
It's spelled e-c-m-a-s-c-r-i-p-t, or even better, d-h-t-m-l.
And I agree-- 'ajax' is a marketing term. Even those guy who coined the phrase admitted it (see the Q/A at the bottom).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Quite aware of that ... and they did a fine job of it too.
;)
My point is that your post is a couple weeks late, since CSS is no longer a technology that is too advanced for Cmdr Taco to implement on Slashdot.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
>Rasmussen said he is unaware of one 'but there are 3000 people that work for Google'.
He is wrong about the latter, so he must be wrong about the former as well! Maybe he discovered something that he wasn't supposed to, so he left some mental hints lodged deep in his brain to remind himself of what he is aware of.
See, Google is much cooler than Microsoft.
Except, I'm pretty sure all he did was implement it. I don't keep up on the goings on of slashcode, but I seem to recall that others had cleaned up and fixed the CSS stuff in slashcode long ago and they just got around to actually activiating it on Slashdot itself.
.. it just might work!
So what is the next technology Malda needs to implement? And remember, it'll be a good six years before it actually happens. I'm thinking some sort of dupe-detector that does a quick link/headline search of previous articles and forces the editor to see a list of them after submitting the article, but before publishing. It's revolutionary, but .
All this stuff is just about giving up responsibilty on the simplest things. Like storing your own files and making backups. Why should i want a "web app" that technically simply cannot compete with a desktop app? ... so Google gives how many Gigabytes of Mail memory, and has database search and threading ... well i have a 120 GB harrdrive here and Opera mail. Computing speed and storage was never cheaper, easier, more portable or saver than now, great free software in beer and speech is behind every corner and exactly at this very moment all these "web apps" are becoming a success. I think this is plain weird.
I didn't notice anything of this end-user loyalty when Google switched from the old Google Groups to the new layout & design. The old, loyal user base cried out against this move but Google didn't listen.
Why can't I find a particular business listing in Google Local?
Where does Google Local get its information?
Aside from the ms remark (can't comment on that), the rest of your points are quite valid. So everything that google touches doesn't turn to gold, what a relief.
I've seen a few articles on it but what I'm really interested in is how they do the scrolling. I'd like to build a slideshow based on the same priciples: load only the image the browser is currently showing and when the user scrolls the image left or right, load the proper image and get rid of the older ones. I've seen all the buzzwords (xmlhttprequest,dhtml,xml, ajax, etc.) but not any actual examples of code.
Cheers.
I'm doing a test on this, if you report it through the proper email addresses it gets filtered, you get that 'we welcome your feedback' crap from their Google *bots* in customer relations. If you mention it on a discussion board that the programmers read it will get fixed, quote the response number.
/dev/null ?"g gestions_-_d.html
So describe it now in response to a Google story.
Read "Suggestions ->
http://www.nigeljohnstone.com/archives/2005/10/su
(My blog, so its full of half assed ideas).
For Google I've been doing the numbers, if you explain your comment or suggestion here, you get a much better response rate than their email addresses.
And if you want a fancy interface map.search.ch does a much better job of it anyway (try turning on their webcam overlay, or their train station overlay, and hover over the resulting symbols, for instance)...
Too bad Google Maps isn't very accurate.
In regards to your Boston comment... look at your elected senators, the average Boston citizen isn't all that bright.
thats all i have to say about that...
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
It might be stupid, but it a hell of a lot easyer to tell your boss your gona use ajax for a project then telling him that your gona use a javascript that talks to whatewer backend which returs the neded data as xml which the javascript then can use to dynamicly update the page.
www.aleo.no
It would be nice if Google stopped adding
crap and used all those PhDs to figure
out a way to efficiently support regular
expressions in their searches.
Google's projection simply f#&%ing sucks!
I can't stand it, it looks ridiculous and almost unrecognisable compared to both the world as I know it and other maps (OS, etc) that I've already seen.
That guy mentions a lot his crystal ball in the interview. What a poor chap.. I hope his other ball is real.
does multipoint routes. Was very useful when we were house hunting
and looking at 4-5 houses every day.
Let's be clear, this guy had nothing to do with the keyhole Google Earth stuff. He's one of the 2D browser based mapping guys.
There was innovation on the AJAX front, although said innovation was mostly "clever hacks" of a kind that I don't particularly admire (because they rely on implementation-specific behaviour, not web standards). As far as I'm aware, they were the first web-application that let you grab the map with the mouse and drag it around. They also managed to preserve "back-button" behaviour even though you never navigate away from the main page -- a hack that involved the use of invisible IFRAMEs.
I stuck with Netscape as long as I could out of hatred for m$. Eventually, I could not sustain the ideological position in the face of facts, IE was better. NS sucked. I changed.
Then when Mozilla was plainly better I switched. Then I switched to Firebird/fox.
OK, I can't decide which I want, the slick GUI in MSN Virtual Earth or the color satellite photos in Google Maps, while MSN still only has B&W in places. I've spent some time comparing the map data in MSN and Google, and I think there are places where each is better than the other, but no clear winner in all cases. At least I like that Google Maps is asking its API users to submit error reports. But I also like the 'scratch pad' feature in MSN compared to the ballons in Google maps. Oh well, freedom of choice is better than no choice at all, right?
Software freedom...I love it!
Lars must be doing the rounds in Sydney. Just the other week he did this same presentation at Macquarie University. Rob Pike was there too.
There's a few hidden warts under the pretty veneer.For example, Google Earth uses a sphere instead of a proper coordinate space, making it silly to try read absolute location values. I am also (from first hand tinkering with the maps API) a bit dubious of connectivity via published standards (aka WMS, WFS).
My fear is that we'll lose a bunch of basic functionality in the rush to get pretty user interfaces.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
You can't visit continental Europe.
While you're waiting for Google to figure out how to port Earth to Linux, you should try the WW2D project (Java-based derivative of NASA's open-source .NET application WorldWind):
/plus/ you get more control over the data sets (satellite and aerial photos in different spectral bands, all sorts of layovers, etc.) than Google Earth offers. It's pretty fast, too, especially for a Java app.
http://ww2d.berlios.de/
Does just about everything Google Earth does (although it's stuck in a Mercator projection instead of the cool spherical mapping),
Except if you live in Brazil, which mean you would have to explain your boss why you're using soap (ajax - a soap brand) on a project.
What, do I need a sig now?
> Too bad the only thing going for Google maps is that it is pretty (antialiased graphics, map can be as large as you want) and lets you pan. That's really the ONLY thing that is innovative about it- not even the "use google maps for displaying stuff from your site" is innovative; Yahoo and Mapquest have been doing this for years.
Unless you consider the innovation which sprung up around it - adding nearly all of those features through client side javascripts (usally through browser extensions like greasemonkey) or other websites with modified versions of the Google javascript. Yahoo and Mapquest may have let you display stuff from your site, but all I've ever seen is the standard maps they already provided. Not all of the improvements and new data sources people added to Google Maps. I think the easy hackability is really what made Google Maps as popular as it is, as much as the simple easy-to-use interface.
Feature #2 is the only one I haven't seen added. MapQuest _used_ to have this feature, but got rid of it quite some time ago. I think it was at the same time they got rid of the "big map" feature (which still wasn't as big Google maps can be, but made the forms based interface not quite as annoying.) Ah, how I used to love MapQuest, before they castrated their site...
BTW, Google just added a limited version of your first feature a week or so ago - you can now set your "Home location".
-- OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.com