Google Reader in Gmail

Mihai Paraparita, employed at Google and responsible of Google Reader, has released in his personal blog a Greasemonkey script that blends google’s rss reader into Gmail.

Even though he says:

I can’t really say what, if any, our integration plans are, but enough users have asked for something like this that I thought writing the script was the most expedient way to provide this (unofficial) feature.

suggesting that a final integration might not be done, the fact that the Greader’s list view looks quite exactly like Gmail’s GUI proves that this will be a goal in the near future.

Anyway is nice to see this feature provided like this instead of a private beta or a gradual roll out.

Perhaps this step leads to another where each item will be treated like a Gmail thread, where the responses will be either posts discussing the original one (opens a huge door to trackback spam) or we will have the option to track blogs converstaions like in Cocomment

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GTDGmail 1.3 sneak preview

Andy Mitchell (creator of Bumble Search) was kind to give me last night a testdrive of the new release of GTDGmail (first review over here).

After a few small releases, this one is a leap forward on the right direction and focuses more on GUI and usability. Among the enhancements brought:

• Collapsable GTD Labels - my favourite. Now you can add more projects to your Gmail without the fear of having to scroll too much to locate a specific one
• Collapsable GTD Labels - for quick access now you have a dropdown menu on top of your mails that helps you select GTD items. Perhaps an option to customize this menu would be great to see in a future release (show only projects for example)..is already implemented
• Conversation Notes - allows you to use at the maximum the threaded feature of Gmail and permits the user to add notes (reminders or to do lists for example) in a conversation. Useful for those that have reactions to some emails but just want to through in notes without actuall sending an email to the conversation partner(s)
• Now you have a button for composing tasks and you don’t have to hit compose. Useful for those that missed this neat feature on previous releases
• Keyboard shortcuts - even though I am not a big fan of those I’ll bet that there are lots of power users that will be happy to have them

More about this release on the GTDGmail blog.
Keep in mind that this powerful extension is donationware now and the developers really deserve your support for their great work.
The official release will be available to the public on 23rd October, but if you cannot resist the temptation you can have it if you become a suporter and donate. As for how much…I’ll quote Andy:

That is your choice! However, we would politely ask it is a ‘worthwhile’ amount to cover sundries like fees and handling (getting you setup for early release)

Note: GTDGmail works by default (no hacks needed) on both Firefox and Flock

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Google Private Videos

Perhaps in an unrelated move with yesterday aquisition, Google added a new feature to their own video service: private videos.

If you have a video you’d rather not share with the entire world, you can choose to restrict access to it by marking it as “unlisted”. Similar to an unlisted telephone number that isn’t available in public phone number databases, videos that have been unlisted are not accessible through Google Video search results. This option is especially useful for family videos. Just set your video to “unlisted” and email the link to your family and friends.

Link

This way, more and more users might become attracted to the unlimited file size and storage offered by them, and whi knows maybe next year premium accounts will be available.

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No Comment

Well is the first time I am not able to give a title to a post (is early in the morning anyway).

Now check this out:

We have had phenomenal response to the new version of Yahoo! Site Explorer we launched two months ago. Thanks to the many of you who have come by and used the new interface, authenticated your site, and asked us questions on the forum. We have been answering many questions on the board, and there are a few common themes that we want to respond to in more detail.
….
For those who are unable to upload our authentication key as a text file, we have updated our key file to be HTML with a .html extension.

Source

Now…how dumb do you have to be to do something like that?

Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool for webmasters and its similar to Google Sitemaps. When Google Sitemaps launched they had a similar problem with webmasters of sites hoted on free providers (as blogger for example).Those couldn’t authentificate the site through a file because they had no upload possibilities. Now Yahoo! has this problem but they want to be original and instead of adding a freaking special meta tag, they make me the great service of letting me upload an HTML file.

HELOOOOOOOOO GENIUSES…..NO FTP RINGS A BELL?

P.S. While writing this I figured that the only users that are going to be happy by the new release are the geocities users. If this service is only for them well, hello and bye bye.

Posted in Yahoo | 2 Comments »

Psychology and user interfaces

Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.” “What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.

…

Fastness of recognition: The faster we recognise something (heuristically) the more attractive we judge it to be and if the image match prototypes the faster the processing.

How this translates to user interface design? Simple. When you design a UI pay close attention to your maket segment and demographics. Try to find out what your users are using on a daily basis and have a close look to your most successful competitors. Try to mimic them without being a clone and you’ll have instant satisfaction.

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Google Maps/Earth updates

Googlified announced that Google Maps and obviously Google Earth got updated.

I can see that Romania got the main roads listed . Perhaps also other “uncharted” areas got updated.

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Supplemental Results…again

Is it just me seeing a lot of “Supplemental Result”s in SERPs? Especially on the site:www.domain.com comand

EDIT:
Is weird. I did a reality check to calm down my paranoia and seems to be true…
On site:www.techcrunch.com amd site:www.cnn.com are a lot of supplemental results. More than that site:www.amazon.com serves only 3 pages. What a hell? Somebody at google spilled a glass of water on a server and they use backups now?

EDIT 2:
Looks like the cache date of supplemental results is from July 2006

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »

Supplemental Result and Blogger

If you have a blogspot blog and you post more than usual, a captcha will appear when you create a new post. If this happens, submit your blog to editorial review by clicking on the question mark near the captcha. Not doing this will cause your blog to be sent into google’s supplemental results and obviously you will loose significant traffic. Another side effect it will be that you will not receive (less significant this time) traffic from the “next blog” feature.

Obviously if you are a regular spammer (errrr SEO Black Hat for those who like titles) you can forget about it.

Question:

Is the “next blog” feature functioning like traffic exchange systems? I mean is there a direct relation between the number of persons that leave your blog through that and the number of persons coming from that? Has anybody tried to manipulate that?

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