The “Facebook Login” Quandry

Mrgan on what happens when people google “Facebook Login” and assume the first result is… the Facebook login page:

What’s apparently happening here is, Facebook users are googling for “facebook login” (because how else are you going to log into Facebook?), clicking the first result (which is sometimes a story about Facebook, on an unrelated site), assuming that the site itself is Facebook, scrolling to the bottom to get to the comment form – still thinking they’re on Facebook – and using the comment form to complain about how this, a wholly different website, is a terrible redesign of Facebook.

Honestly? This doesn’t strike me as a problem, necessarily. Yes, it’s unfortunate that people are so dense they can gloss over an entire website to find the comments section and post an angry letter about a different website they mistakenly think they are on… but the location bar is dead. Long live the location bar. This is just how (possibly a majority) of internet users… use the internet. It works for them, most of the time.

Google’s Nexus One Censors Text-To-Speech

“Don’t be evil” apparently doesn’t cover censorship of words that hurt people’s delicate sensibilities. Pretty clear-cut case of nannyism.

Price of The One True Google Phone?

According to this: “$199 unlocked in stores. $100 rebate online if you have an active and old Google account.”

Sounds like the gloves are off.

Google DNS Will Probably Be Fine, Guys

I have a feeling Kottke’s analysis is pretty spot-on: every tenth of a second longer a site takes to load, Google is losing revenue from ads. That might seem nuts to you or I, but Google isn’t exactly in the same ballpark, scale-wise, the stuff you and I work on:

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

For the Google behemoth .5 seconds is a serious problem, and with Google DNS they’re trying to whittle that down as much as possible. Do I trust them? Not really. Do I need to? Not really. I can change my DNS whenever I want, and so can you, and Google’s DNS privacy policy seems, as Gruber put it, utterly reasonable.

“Google waving goodbye to Gears, hello to HTML5″

In other words, full-steam ahead for Chrome and HTML5,, and I’m glad.

Chrome OS User Experience

Sketched and screenshotted examples of what the Chrome OS (the open source project is called Chromium) is going to look like. The goal is a noble one: An OS that boots super fast (under 10 seconds), gives you instant access to a modern web browser (WebKit) and gets the hell out of your way.

I am on board with that.

Rupert Murdoch Still Threatening To Pull WSJ, Other News Corp. Sites From Google

Please, Rupert. I’m begging you. Do this. See what happens. Here’s a tip: Google (and the rest of us) don’t need you. You need us. We’re your audience.

Weekly World News on Google Books

The venerable American institution in what looks to be a complete archive on Google Books, going back to January 6th, 1981.

Google+Growl 3.0

Waffle Software brings out a major update to it’s Google Notifier plugin. Jesper lays down some specifics in this blog post, and has posted a tech profile here. The new page for G+G is just beautiful.

Eric Schmidt “Dropped His Resistance” to Chrome OS

Finally relenting to Sergey Brin and Larry Page after six years.

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

The big news of the day. There is a lot of talk that Chrome OS may be what powers the CrunchPad, but I am not so sure.

Gmail, Google Apps out of “beta”

It only took five years.

Google Releases “Page Speed”, A Web Page Performance Tool

It looks like Google’s version of YSlow, but apparently it’s used in-house at Google. At a company where Engineers Rule, I’d bet it’s pretty precise.

Bing Refuses Search Term “Sex” In India

Searching for “sex” returns the phrase “the search sex may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms.” Meanwhile, according to Google Trends, nobody searches for “sex” more than India.

LuckyImage

LuckyImage is a Mac OS X service that replaces any given text with the first result on a Google Image Search, inline. It works in pretty much any rich text area. Works great for iChat sillyness.

Bing

Microsoft’s new, absurdly-named, search engine has launched. Two things: How is this better than their own live.com, and how is this better than Google.com? It seems to bring nothing new to the table aside from the little popups on the right side of the results (which I’m sure is where “bing” came from. Bing! Bing! We’re lucky they don’t have a sound effect with them. It plays in my head, regardless.) and that isn’t super useful. It’s cramped, and boring at the same time.

The text-search engine space desperately needs some serious competition. Something like TinEye is doing for image search. The question is: What else do you do to search? I have a feeling the answer is not going to look anything like Google or Bing or even Wolfram Alpha.

Ego 1.3 Now Uses Official Google Analytics API

So announced Garrett Murray on twitter. The API was launched by Google today. Glad to see it.