I have seen numerous people claim that Google is starting losing focus or take their eyes off the prize (ball, etc) but I have yet to see any conclusive evidence. The truth is Google has an insane number of smart people working for them and each one is supposed to be using 20% of their time to work on a pet project of sorts. Every so often these projects get released as betas and add to the growing package of google "apps". While many of these apps are still imperfect and unpolished (as befits the beta title) they are all at the least interesting additions to their respective categories. People see this endless flow of new google releases and think they are spreading themselves thin when in fact each "app" is probably being developed by a small group of programmers who are interested and devoted to the project.
My points are these:
The fact that google is releasing so many products does not mean they have stopped thinking about search. In fact PageRank was tweaked once again just a few days ago. They probably still have a hugs number of employees devoted entirely to search.
While their competitors are starting to catch up, Google still has a big lead in the search arena and is far from losing it if only because of mindshare.
By releasing so many products in so many areas Google assures themselves of not being left behind in any area of the web. They are testing the waters of RSS (Google Reader), Web Acceleration, VOIP, soon micro-payments and now structured data storage and classifieds and whatever else Google Base will become.
In conclusion Google has their foot in every door and whichever ones lead to higher revenue they will follow. I think it's a solid business plan.
If you click on the Read Items link in the top "toolbar" then it displays headlines from all your subscribed feeds.
I actually find Google's Reader to be quite nice, mostly because it allows you to navigate using the keyboard. Furthermore the one killer feature that in my mind improves on Bloglines is the ability to read one post at a time. Bloglines on the other hand opens every unread post when you click on a feed and marks them all as read, so that if you dont want to read everything new you either have to click keep as new for all the posts you didnt get to, or mark all as read leaving all the posts you already looked at as new.
Please RTFA before reeling off a standard Microsoft bash. It really looks like the team in charge of IE 7 actually cares about standards compliance and beta 2 looks to fix most of worst bugs that currently exist in IE 6. Of course we will discover the truth when the FINAL version of IE 7 is released but quotes like the following give me hope:
"I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers."
Lets hope that pressure from browsers like Firefox keeps Microsoft's ass in gear.
This game never made it to the big time but will always remain one of my favorites. It's fairly simple, doesn't take a whole day to play (just 45 minutes to an hour), is a good mix of luck and strategy (all the best games are), and can create some hilarious moments. It also has endless possibility for "modding" through the creation of new cards, boards, etc. A new edition has been in the works forever now and may never happen but it would be a fantastic ebay find.
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My points are these:
In conclusion Google has their foot in every door and whichever ones lead to higher revenue they will follow. I think it's a solid business plan.
If you click on the Read Items link in the top "toolbar" then it displays headlines from all your subscribed feeds.
I actually find Google's Reader to be quite nice, mostly because it allows you to navigate using the keyboard. Furthermore the one killer feature that in my mind improves on Bloglines is the ability to read one post at a time. Bloglines on the other hand opens every unread post when you click on a feed and marks them all as read, so that if you dont want to read everything new you either have to click keep as new for all the posts you didnt get to, or mark all as read leaving all the posts you already looked at as new.
Please RTFA before reeling off a standard Microsoft bash. It really looks like the team in charge of IE 7 actually cares about standards compliance and beta 2 looks to fix most of worst bugs that currently exist in IE 6. Of course we will discover the truth when the FINAL version of IE 7 is released but quotes like the following give me hope:
"I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers."
Lets hope that pressure from browsers like Firefox keeps Microsoft's ass in gear.
This game never made it to the big time but will always remain one of my favorites. It's fairly simple, doesn't take a whole day to play (just 45 minutes to an hour), is a good mix of luck and strategy (all the best games are), and can create some hilarious moments. It also has endless possibility for "modding" through the creation of new cards, boards, etc. A new edition has been in the works forever now and may never happen but it would be a fantastic ebay find.