One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Official Google Blog: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: "You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon"

Whoa, how could you miss it?! It's the technicolor yawn of favicons ...

Google Spreadsheets Become Wikis

Google Spreadsheets Become Wikis: "In other spreadsheet-related news, you can now embed forms in a web site by just copying some code, there's a new option to duplicate questions and users can add their own answer to a multiple-choice question."

Yay, Google dropped the awful invite to spreadsheet and even the need for a google account. Shocking and most certainly the right thing to do.

Google Friend Connect

Google Press Center: News Announcement: "Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community."

Google Friend Connect

Google Confirms Friend Connect

I was able to talk with Google engineering director David Glazer to get some more details. The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to “, give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built up somewhere else.” So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs


The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday).

Google Friend Connect Previews Tonight

The user experience is simple. When a user comes to a site in the Friend Connect program they can sign into any social network that is sharing their data. Their data is not actually shared with the site. Impressively Google is supporting OpenID and OAuth in addition to their own standard OpenSocial.

Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social

Those hard questions are the ones that these companies are supposed to be working on together through the Data Portability Working Group, though. The Group has published best practices documents tackling a number of difficult questions already.

Welcome to the social mess?

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, OpenID, DataPortability: Managing a bunch of different log-ins and passwords suddenly seems easy and straightforward.

Heh, Interop dead. Backlash at 11.

Now we need a WWE-style smackdown between the beasts ...

Interesting times ...

Google Reader

Official Google Reader Blog: Share anything. Anytime. Anywhere.: "Share items with a note - If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader"

gReader now has 'share with note' which is a great idea but the cartoon bubble on the web landing page has got to go.

And a new bookmarklet (not the forgotten old Google Share bookmarklet) that feeds into the gReader stream, only what you highlight, though, and you have to allow javascript on the page that you clip. Now I have to figure which to use, Friendfeed, Social|Median, gShare, or bloglines ...

Also: I Am a Google Reader Shared Links Ninja

via Friendfeed RSS Post to Google Reader

Changes at the World’s Top Company Cafeteria � Food Gal

Changes at the World’s Top Company Cafeteria: "Yes, that would be at Google in Mountain View.

Executive Chef Josef Desimone is jumping ship to become Facebook’s very first executive chef."

Whoa, they're even running off with the chefs.

Blogger as OpenID provider

Blogger as OpenID provider: "As we hinted before, we’ve been working on making Blogger an OpenID provider. With our latest Blogger in Draft release, we’ve done just that. You can now use your blog’s URL as an OpenID URL on any website that accepts OpenID 1.1 authentication."

Yay! I've been using this dumb dump blog as a landing page for years. Perfect to use it as a login for the many places that point here ...

Bloglines | My Feeds (638) (8)

89/814. It never stops!

Now, about that 1000+ over in greader ... I am enjoying Google Reader trends, though.

Google Reader/Share

Updates from Your Gmail Contacts

Ah! Finally found shared stuff. It used to be on the same page as Google Reader - Shared, but, guess it found a new home when Profiles came along. Still finding it quite odd to have feeds in the reader via chat.

Google Reader - Ashub

Google Share - Ashub

Google New Year's Logo With Easter Egg

Google New Year's Logo With Easter Egg: "there’s a sort of easter egg hidden in the Google-colored confetti at the bottom of the logo. If you look closely, you will notice it reads SYN SYN/ ACK ACK"

Sweet. Plenty of Google Doodles to choose from!

10 Google Feeds You Should Subscribe To

10 Google Feeds You Should Subscribe To: "Stay up on all the official Google posts easily by getting the feed. Read posts to the All Official Google Blogs Feed here; get the actual feed here.

Nice! And here I've been trying to collect them all.

Google’s goal: to organise your daily life

Google’s goal: to organise your daily life: "Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off."

Ah, Total Information Awareness is so benevolent ...

Make your own gadget

Make your own gadget

Haven't seen many of these out in the wild. Seems like a fine idea, though.

Google’s Personalized Search Features

Google’s Personalized Search Features: "Google’s new recommendations features will allow you to add a new tab to your start page, name it “recommendations” and you’ll get some nifty search results based on your search history."

You have to let the GooglePlex Id your search history ...

Google Video xpost

Google Video: "Please provide the following login information."

Whoa, Google Video asks for remote logins to xpost to blogger, lj, myspace, or typepad. I've seen the 'gimmie your address book' jive, but, have been seeing a lot of these xpost requests recently.