Even though Apple seems to be doing great with DRMed AAC files on iPods, iPods would have totally failed if they didn't support mp3s to begin with. I wonder if the video iPod will be able to gain traction without supporting the large collections of TV episodes, music videos, and movies that users already have in their collection in Divx format.
I've used this pretty extensively and find it does a much better job recommending music than other services. You do need to start with an artist, but it will create a station that has surprising similarities. What I found most striking about the service is that around 3/4 of what it recommended was new to me, which almost never happens with other services. When an artist is really unique, it can come up with some great recommendations. For artists that aren't identifiably unique, its recommendations don't usually capture the magic that made you like that artist though.
I'm surprised Google Local isn't more useful yet
on
Google Maps Graduates
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· Score: 1
While the Google Maps interface and satellite imagery beats other maps products hands down, I feel like the local search aspect of the Google Local product still feels pretty anemic compared to Yahoo Local, which I find beats Google Local hands down in terms of usefulness. And I'm surprised to see Google taking Local out of beta without making it less anemic. While Google's interface is sparser that Yahoo's, that seems to be a deficiency since its mainly due to its lack of lots of features I use nearly every time I do a Yahoo Local search. While I'm glad local products no longer sort solely by distance, its hard to imagine using a local product that doesn't give you this option and I can't believe Google still doesn't. And there are so many other refinements that I can't imagine living without: category, neighborhood, distance, and even refining by first letter (for those times when you just can't remember anything but the first few letter of that great Mediterranean restaurant). And even the extra bells and whistles added a couple months ago have been surprisingly useful (search history, view history, neighborhood events) And unlike some Yahoo products, Yahoo Local has always managed to have all these features in a very slick interface. I do think the Google's aggregation of web reviews is very cool though. But I'm just surprised that after being available for a little longer than Yahoo Local, Google hasn't come close to making Google Local nearly as cool as Google Maps or Yahoo Local. I'm sure Slashdotters probably use Google Local more than Yahoo Local as a good fanboy should, but I'd be interested to here if/how people actually find it more useful. I guess I mainly use Yahoo Maps because its integrated with Yahoo Local, even though YM is not as nearly cool as Google Maps, so maybe a lot of Slashdotters use Google Local solely because it is integrated with the kick-ass Google Maps.
While it seems a lot of advanced users on Slashdot seem to love being derived of features by our Google overlords (more in response to Google Talk than GMail), the plethora of features in Eudora were the most appealing reasons I still use it and I'm glad WSJ is recognizing Yahoo for its new interface and features.
Whenever I checked my mail remotely in the past with either Yahoo or GMail, I would always reminisce about how fluid the process was at home with Eudora. Scanning email by opening new pages for every email with old web interfaces was quite frustrating, even with GMails quicker load times. The new web interface on Yahoo is actually making me consider finally leaving Eudora.
So, I for one am glad to see Yahoo head in the direction of both panes and continuing to focus on adding useful features (and unlike some products, doing it without ads or clutter). Improving the initial load time would probably be enough to get me to make the transition.
Is this the reasonably well known site to offer (or promise to offer) mailed audio-cds? While I can definitely see why the RIAA would be a lot more pissed off about audio-cds since they are much easier to copy and are listened to much less often than DVDs are viewed, I don't see what has stopped someone from doing it (besides the local libraries)?
Is it currently illegal to rent out a physical product without getting a license to rent it? It seems if the local library can rent out audio-CDs it got donated, I don't see why some ballsy company wasn't loaning out audio-cds years ago?
Depends on what I'm doing. If I am checking my messages frequently then checking and opening a few new ones is much easier. But if I've received tens of emails since last checking, I find the preview pane in Yahoo makes everything much quicker after the initially slower load time.
While I agree the act of turning this information over is quite bad (especially if those who turned it over knew what the accusation was), but I'd be interested to know who actually authorized this decision. My guess is it didn't make it very far up the chain.
More likely, the execs probably should have pushed down more strict policy so that what ever individuals in the Hong Kong office gave this information over, would have to know a lot more before providing this information and refuse the information for certain "crimes" like this one.
Even though I find it annoying that Slashdot could easily be confused with the Google Blog or the Unofficial Google Fan Page, you have to admit that the huge number of comments that usually follow a Google article mean people are still interested.
There's a huge category of spam that cannot be affected by legislation, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't enact laws that traceable/enforceable companies must file as well. Even if legitimate companies aren't responsible for the most egregious emails, there are still many companies who use inboxes and email addresses in unethical and/or obnoxious manners that are still legal. I think the original posts suggestion was a good addition to the set of options that can improve the situation for companies that have to play by the law and shouldn't be disregarded just because it won't solve a large percentage of the problem on its own.
Why woud this be a stupid idea? Its providing users with useful information that in no impinges about marketers ability to send email. If a website is providing user's emails to another company, it is very hard to hold the original party responsible in any way. But if people started getting tons of solicited emails from different companies that all came from signing up at another site, that other site would have a strong disincentive to not give out users emails.
While obviously this will only apply to sites that want to obey the law, there are probably lots of legally legit sites passing around their customer's emails, using the fine print as a legal shield.
I think the term items was used because Yahoo's figure included pages, images, and multimedia. They made a claim about pages as well as items. The 20.8 billion figure was a combination of pages (19.2b), images (1.7b) and audio/video (50m)
http://www.detnews.com/2005/technology/0508/12/0te ch-274198.htm
Yahoo's MyWeb offers this feature for signed in users. You can click on a Block link and the offending site will never show up again. I don't think Yahoo uses this to affect relevance for all users (since it could easily be abused) but I think if you use MyWeb for social search it might influence the results of people you specify as friends.
While Google certainly does a better job of creating a sparse interface, Yahoo does offer http://search.yahoo.com/ for users who want to use Yahoo Search without all the links on the home page.
How is it that "years ago, Google passed Yahoo's ability to display relevant results" when Yahoo's results were coming directly from Google up until earlier 2004? It seems like very few people who express negative views of Yahoo Search have actually used it.
Personally I use both, but I primarily use Yahoo since I am happier with the results I get. I used Yahoo when it returned Google results since I was already using Yahoo for other things (mail, maps) and stuck with it when I was still happy when Yahoo transitioned off Google.
Instead of just presuming all my biases are correct and then stating them as fact here, I'll see over the next few weeks whether it seems I'm getting more comprehensive results or not.
Sounds funny, except that's not what I get at all:
I get:
1. Google Open this result in new window
2. Google Image Search
3. Google Maps
4. Google News
5. Google Toolbar
6. Google Blog
What URL are you getting these other results?
While having a large marketshare is surely more important than having a large developer mindshare, its not insignificant. If 90% of developers are using FireFox, that means a lot more testing will be done in FireFox, making pages more likely be having IE problems than FF problems (besides IE being uncompliant). I think losing the N% of users who developer websites is much more significant than losing any other N% of users.
From the discussions in the/. post "First Google Maps Hack Takedown" ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/08/203208 )
it seems pretty clear why Google shut down just that site. While their service was cool, they were doing a extensive dump of lots of image data for users and then reselling that data. Since the image data doesn't even belong to Google, I'd assume they'd be violating their agreements with the providers if they let that site stay up. I think they'll stay supportive of almost all of these projects.
I'd heard that employees need to get manager's approval before doing a 20% project and that a good deal of engineers never get this approval. Has anyone heard from a Google engineer if this policy is really practiced as universally as its presented in the Google-culture articles?
Speaking of Stanford, that photo looks suspiciously like it is on the Stanford campus, near where the Stanford solar car project is housed. Maybe its also where the truck that was used for the Stanford CityBlock project is stored. It would explain the origins of the photo without all the mystery.
Here's a Google Earth image of what I think is the garage (lower-left) with the road and parking structure in the upper half of the photo.
Maybe they are using this project's equipment. Or maybe this little garage is Stanford and Google's headquarters for plans of world domination.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though Apple seems to be doing great with DRMed AAC files on iPods, iPods would have totally failed if they didn't support mp3s to begin with. I wonder if the video iPod will be able to gain traction without supporting the large collections of TV episodes, music videos, and movies that users already have in their collection in Divx format.
I've used this pretty extensively and find it does a much better job recommending music than other services. You do need to start with an artist, but it will create a station that has surprising similarities. What I found most striking about the service is that around 3/4 of what it recommended was new to me, which almost never happens with other services. When an artist is really unique, it can come up with some great recommendations. For artists that aren't identifiably unique, its recommendations don't usually capture the magic that made you like that artist though.
While the Google Maps interface and satellite imagery beats other maps products hands down, I feel like the local search aspect of the Google Local product still feels pretty anemic compared to Yahoo Local, which I find beats Google Local hands down in terms of usefulness. And I'm surprised to see Google taking Local out of beta without making it less anemic. While Google's interface is sparser that Yahoo's, that seems to be a deficiency since its mainly due to its lack of lots of features I use nearly every time I do a Yahoo Local search. While I'm glad local products no longer sort solely by distance, its hard to imagine using a local product that doesn't give you this option and I can't believe Google still doesn't. And there are so many other refinements that I can't imagine living without: category, neighborhood, distance, and even refining by first letter (for those times when you just can't remember anything but the first few letter of that great Mediterranean restaurant). And even the extra bells and whistles added a couple months ago have been surprisingly useful (search history, view history, neighborhood events) And unlike some Yahoo products, Yahoo Local has always managed to have all these features in a very slick interface. I do think the Google's aggregation of web reviews is very cool though. But I'm just surprised that after being available for a little longer than Yahoo Local, Google hasn't come close to making Google Local nearly as cool as Google Maps or Yahoo Local.
I'm sure Slashdotters probably use Google Local more than Yahoo Local as a good fanboy should, but I'd be interested to here if/how people actually find it more useful. I guess I mainly use Yahoo Maps because its integrated with Yahoo Local, even though YM is not as nearly cool as Google Maps, so maybe a lot of Slashdotters use Google Local solely because it is integrated with the kick-ass Google Maps.
While it seems a lot of advanced users on Slashdot seem to love being derived of features by our Google overlords (more in response to Google Talk than GMail), the plethora of features in Eudora were the most appealing reasons I still use it and I'm glad WSJ is recognizing Yahoo for its new interface and features.
Whenever I checked my mail remotely in the past with either Yahoo or GMail, I would always reminisce about how fluid the process was at home with Eudora. Scanning email by opening new pages for every email with old web interfaces was quite frustrating, even with GMails quicker load times. The new web interface on Yahoo is actually making me consider finally leaving Eudora.
So, I for one am glad to see Yahoo head in the direction of both panes and continuing to focus on adding useful features (and unlike some products, doing it without ads or clutter). Improving the initial load time would probably be enough to get me to make the transition.
Is this the reasonably well known site to offer (or promise to offer) mailed audio-cds? While I can definitely see why the RIAA would be a lot more pissed off about audio-cds since they are much easier to copy and are listened to much less often than DVDs are viewed, I don't see what has stopped someone from doing it (besides the local libraries)? Is it currently illegal to rent out a physical product without getting a license to rent it? It seems if the local library can rent out audio-CDs it got donated, I don't see why some ballsy company wasn't loaning out audio-cds years ago?
Depends on what I'm doing. If I am checking my messages frequently then checking and opening a few new ones is much easier. But if I've received tens of emails since last checking, I find the preview pane in Yahoo makes everything much quicker after the initially slower load time.
While I agree the act of turning this information over is quite bad (especially if those who turned it over knew what the accusation was), but I'd be interested to know who actually authorized this decision. My guess is it didn't make it very far up the chain. More likely, the execs probably should have pushed down more strict policy so that what ever individuals in the Hong Kong office gave this information over, would have to know a lot more before providing this information and refuse the information for certain "crimes" like this one.
Even though I find it annoying that Slashdot could easily be confused with the Google Blog or the Unofficial Google Fan Page, you have to admit that the huge number of comments that usually follow a Google article mean people are still interested.
There's a huge category of spam that cannot be affected by legislation, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't enact laws that traceable/enforceable companies must file as well. Even if legitimate companies aren't responsible for the most egregious emails, there are still many companies who use inboxes and email addresses in unethical and/or obnoxious manners that are still legal. I think the original posts suggestion was a good addition to the set of options that can improve the situation for companies that have to play by the law and shouldn't be disregarded just because it won't solve a large percentage of the problem on its own.
Why woud this be a stupid idea? Its providing users with useful information that in no impinges about marketers ability to send email. If a website is providing user's emails to another company, it is very hard to hold the original party responsible in any way. But if people started getting tons of solicited emails from different companies that all came from signing up at another site, that other site would have a strong disincentive to not give out users emails. While obviously this will only apply to sites that want to obey the law, there are probably lots of legally legit sites passing around their customer's emails, using the fine print as a legal shield.
I think the term items was used because Yahoo's figure included pages, images, and multimedia. They made a claim about pages as well as items. The 20.8 billion figure was a combination of pages (19.2b), images (1.7b) and audio/video (50m) http://www.detnews.com/2005/technology/0508/12/0te ch-274198.htm
It does rock: http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/
Yahoo's MyWeb offers this feature for signed in users. You can click on a Block link and the offending site will never show up again. I don't think Yahoo uses this to affect relevance for all users (since it could easily be abused) but I think if you use MyWeb for social search it might influence the results of people you specify as friends.
While Google certainly does a better job of creating a sparse interface, Yahoo does offer http://search.yahoo.com/ for users who want to use Yahoo Search without all the links on the home page.
How is it that "years ago, Google passed Yahoo's ability to display relevant results" when Yahoo's results were coming directly from Google up until earlier 2004? It seems like very few people who express negative views of Yahoo Search have actually used it. Personally I use both, but I primarily use Yahoo since I am happier with the results I get. I used Yahoo when it returned Google results since I was already using Yahoo for other things (mail, maps) and stuck with it when I was still happy when Yahoo transitioned off Google. Instead of just presuming all my biases are correct and then stating them as fact here, I'll see over the next few weeks whether it seems I'm getting more comprehensive results or not.
Sounds funny, except that's not what I get at all: I get: 1. Google Open this result in new window 2. Google Image Search 3. Google Maps 4. Google News 5. Google Toolbar 6. Google Blog What URL are you getting these other results?
While having a large marketshare is surely more important than having a large developer mindshare, its not insignificant. If 90% of developers are using FireFox, that means a lot more testing will be done in FireFox, making pages more likely be having IE problems than FF problems (besides IE being uncompliant). I think losing the N% of users who developer websites is much more significant than losing any other N% of users.
From the discussions in the /. post "First Google Maps Hack Takedown" ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/08/203208 )
it seems pretty clear why Google shut down just that site. While their service was cool, they were doing a extensive dump of lots of image data for users and then reselling that data. Since the image data doesn't even belong to Google, I'd assume they'd be violating their agreements with the providers if they let that site stay up. I think they'll stay supportive of almost all of these projects.
I'd heard that employees need to get manager's approval before doing a 20% project and that a good deal of engineers never get this approval. Has anyone heard from a Google engineer if this policy is really practiced as universally as its presented in the Google-culture articles?
Speaking of Stanford, that photo looks suspiciously like it is on the Stanford campus, near where the Stanford solar car project is housed. Maybe its also where the truck that was used for the Stanford CityBlock project is stored. It would explain the origins of the photo without all the mystery. Here's a Google Earth image of what I think is the garage (lower-left) with the road and parking structure in the upper half of the photo. Maybe they are using this project's equipment. Or maybe this little garage is Stanford and Google's headquarters for plans of world domination.