Q4: 1.29B, or $1.54 a share. Wall St. consensus was 1.29B and $1.76.

The stock gets sheared, but Wall St. called the revenue numbers exactly right. The earnings difference seems to be caused by tax rate increases from 30% to 41%

Ouch.

The stock only going down by 15% seems like a very muted reaction to me...

¶ 1/31/2006

These days, if you are a cool blogger, you are doing it text-only.

Brett Tabke is running a blog in his robots.txt file: http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt

and Danny Sullivan's got one in SEWs .css: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/blog.css

Of course, for true old-skool, you gotta go back to John Carmack's .plan files (finger johnc [at] idsoftware.com)

¶ 1/29/2006

I've been busy the past couple of weeks, and don't feel like saying much about Google China. However, you don't need me. Just go read Henry Blodget's blog. He's got a fun "group-think" earnings prediction for Google that sounds good to me. He also likes the China move.

Good stuff from the infamous Bubble-maker. Just keep scrollin'...

PS. Quick quiz: Henry Blodget and Philipp Lenssen - what do they have in common?

¶ 1/28/2006

Philipp has detailed reporting on the Google China censorship issue, and shows on how Google already censors results in Germany and France. He then makes some blistering suggestions:

So, Google, if everything is shiny and happy in the Googleplex, please hand over the list of banned words or sites for every country. It’s a gray zone for sure, so we need transparency. Put that list on a public server in the US, where freedom of speech prevails.

And while you’re at it, please, offer every other country in the world – never-mind its economic size or internet market share – an easy way to ban their own things too in Google. Now that you’ve set the moral precedent, that would only be fair, and algorithmically balanced, wouldn’t it? It would prove that you’re not changing your morals depending on the size of a market, and it would allow every dictator, every repressive regime, and every government restricting human rights to work with you. Your market share would be growing even more, and by your argument, you’d be making positive contributions at the same time.

Note the sarcasm slowly bubbling into anger...

¶ 1/25/2006

The Street.com has an article called: "Click Fraud Just Another Maguffin." The article requires a subscription or free signup, so I haven't read it. But I'm sure it's exactly right.

Early last year, I was all over the click fraud story - too early, apparently. Now, the likes of Kedrosky are jumping on the CF doom band wagon.

So it's obviously the perfect time to move to the next phase. And calling Click Fraud a Maguffin is the perfect phrase for that next phase.

¶ 1/25/2006

Reading InsideGoogle, I found a Tom Foremski interview with Sun's John Loiacono, who suggests that Google would consider outsourcing it's computing infrastructure.

Ha! Someone is high here. Either Loiacono is trying to make news and is talking out of class, or the people at Google who think this is good are not in tune with everything Google-y.

As I've written before: Larry and Sergey are the kings of rolling their own. You'll know Google is in trouble when they buy off the shelf. Furthermore, Sun is just not relevant to Google, despite Schmidt connection. I'd short Google if I found out that they were serious about this, but I think it's just noise.

¶ 1/21/2006

Shorter (term) answer: not good enough.

From CBS News' nice wrap-up of the Yahoo Q4 earnings:

Revenue for the quarter totaled $1.5 billion, a 39 percent increase from $1.08 billion in the comparable 2004 period.

After subtracting the advertising commissions that Yahoo paid to other Web sites, the company's fourth-quarter revenue stood at $1.07 billion, in line with analyst estimates

Yahoo has 429 million unique users, more than 200 million active users and 12.6 million unique paid relationships with users who subscribe to online music and other services, Chief Executive Terry Semel said in a teleconference with analysts. "This year we are poised to surpass 15 million paying relationships"

And this honest admission from Terry Semel:

"Frankly, Google has done a better job than us," Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel acknowledged during a Tuesday interview.

Maybe if Yahoo execs spent less time listening to Hollywood producers pitch online reality shows, and more time kicking the underachievers at Overture in the pants...

Semel has been promising to introduce improved advertising algorithms later this year, a pledge he reiterated Tuesday. But he stressed it will be a gradual process that's unlikely to have a significant impact on Yahoo's earnings until 2007.

So Overture is targeting 2007 to get its ad system up-to-par with Google! What have they been doing for the last 18 months!? Terry should send Kevin Sites into that Hot Zone and find out!

And my prediction about Google's dominance being enhanced by the splintering of MSN inventory away from Yahoo Search is spelled out in financial terms here:

In 2006, Yahoo expects to lose about $120 million in ad revenue from affiliates, mostly due to Microsoft's MSN planned move to its own ad network in June, Decker said. MSN's revenue contribution is expected to drop from $75 million to $25 million for the first half of 2006

In other news, Lloyd Braun is still at Yahoo...

¶ 1/17/2006

Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle has this to say about the Google Video launch:

So, the Google Video Store is live, and, ehh. Nothing special.
[ stuff deleted ]
One thing we know about Google: It doesn’t bother them if they get it wrong the first time. Hopefully they’ll fix this one faster than they usually do.

Botched. Totally botched.

Next time, tell us how you really feel Nathan.

But in the middle of that [ deleted stuff ] was a really fun section, proposing an auction / popularity based pricing model:

Even better, I would have just used a bids-based system, like Google AdWords uses. Except, instead of prices set automatically by top bids, it would be set by views. The prices would all start at $1.99, and rise and fall based on how many people view the video. If the video is unpopular, the system would lower the price a little to see if it improved overall revenue, while if it is popular, it would go up in price, dropping back down if the new price turned off too many buyers.

Now that would be cool. How come no one seems to be copying the AdWords auction + relevance market model for digital goods besides ads and leads? Seems ripe.

¶ 1/16/2006

However, if you want to hear Larry Page outline his vision for how marketing and advertising will evolve you must check out Google Podium.

Here are some samples from Larry Page's talk at Google Zeitgeist that jibe well with what I've been writing about, and the stuff Robert Cringely has been predicting in relation to Google's grand scheme:

[Meanwhile], people have a lot of choices about how to spend their time. One of the things that I’ve always been confused about when I watch television is that I see the same commercial maybe 20 or 30 times. And you know, it’ll be really polished and it’ll be kind of cool the first three or four times. And then, after the 20th time you get pretty sick of it. In fact, we learned today that 70 percent of the people with a TiVo skip the commercials, which I thought is a really interesting statistic. (I assume the other 30 percent are like in the bathroom or whatever.) That’s my own experience using TiVo. And I don’t think the solution is to make fast-forward buttons illegal or impossible – it's really to make the commercials better integrated with the shows and in a way that actually serves people’s interests. That’s what we try to do very hard [in our business].

...

Now one thing I wanted to bring up, I know a lot of you guys are big advertisers and partners of ours, as we’re really sending you customers. Imagine we send you a customer and they look at some low margin item – an MP3 player, say, and then they decide they really want to look at a diamond ring. And they don’t actually buy that ring, but they just look at the ring. Now the fact that they’ve done that is probably worth money to your business. Currently we don’t collect that kind of information – we only collect information really on who clicks on ads, and occasionally we get from you when people buy things, which is very useful. The thing is, people think about buying things a lot more often than they actually buy them. And that’s very useful data for us to do the optimization, to send you better customers.

So I think you’re going to see much, much more data of this type. Maybe you have too many of a particular item, or maybe you have some extra guys standing around in the shipping department that don’t have anything to do, so maybe it makes sense to lower the prices a little bit while they’re sitting idle. I think you’ll see there are very sophisticated online companies like Amazon starting to do things like this with us – they have programs that talk to our ad system. You’ll see much, much more like that in the future.

These presentations are available in audio format on Google Podium - and are a great resource for all Google watchers.

¶ 1/12/2006

Google says their mission is to "Organize the world's information". Great. What does that mean?

It means you catalog and understand relationships in all the world's data. As a side effect, you get a huge amount of attention from all the world's people. People come to rely on augmenting their knowledge and memory with the vast Google repository.

So, if you have all the data, and you have all the eyeballs, what can you do? Simple. You can become the connector between consumer and merchant. You know what people are looking for. You know what others have. For a small fee, you can connect searcher to seller.

Of course they do this today on a small scale - for those searchers that actively look online for products and information. What they don't yet do is reach the people who aren't actively looking. And they don't reach the people who aren't sitting in front of a computer all day.

Slowly but surely Google is going to move their battleship in position to use their:

• Worldwide supercomputing infrastructure
• Database of all the world's online info
• Payment system
• Uploaded merchant inventory data
• Media distribution system

One way to envision the result is to recall the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. In the future, you can't go anywhere without being under surveillance, and you are constantly being bombarded by targeted advertising. Video screens everywhere hawk every possible product at the moment you're mostly likely to need it.

Over the next 3 years, that's the direction Google can move in. They'll know what you like, and when you are looking for something, they'll know what's for sale, and they be able to insert targeted ads into all sorts of media - video, audio, 'print', 'online', 'broadcast', etc. Google will also be able to handle the transaction for you.

Note that 'print', 'online' and 'broadcast' are meaningless distinctions within 3 years. Every source of information will be TCP/IP connected: TV, radio, news, movies will all be programmable / customizable.

So as a by-product of organizing all the world's information, Google will change the way advertising works - and they will be the most efficient market for buyers and sellers to reach each other.

At least that's what I'd do if I were them.

¶ 1/07/2006

According to Cringely, traditional printed publications are doomed because online ads are stealing their main source of revenue. What's unique about his analysis is how he compares the ad real-estate differences between print and online:

Here's a part of the problem that has been for the most part missed by media and business analysts: A website is not really an electronic magazine. It can contain all the stories of its print equivalent, but IT CAN'T CARRY AS MANY ADS.

For magazines to qualify in the U.S. for shipping by Second Class Mail, they must have a measured advertising-to-editorial space ratio of no greater than 75 percent. Second Class Mail is the difference between life and death for a print magazine, and to qualify for it, they carefully manage that ad-to-edit ratio so that just slightly less than three times as much space is taken for ads as for stories.

Now compare this to the edit-to-ad ratio for most web pages. The densest web page will have one banner ad at the top, eight to 10 Google ads down the right side, and maybe another Google ad or two at the bottom. That sounds like a lot, but on a strict real estate basis, it is very hard to exceed an ad-to-edit ratio of 50 percent, and most web pages have three times as much editorial content as ad space -- the exact reciprocal of the experience with paper publications.

Good stuff. And Cringely gets even wiggier with it in this week's article - predicting Google building a targeted TV advertising system on top of their search data. Basically, Google will build the ad system from the Tom Cruise future-movie Minority Report (on top of the "Skynet" datacenter infrastructure from Terminator.)

Say what you will about these rantings, but I think Cringely understands Google's mindset better than Battelle.

¶ 1/06/2006

InformationWeek has a long article covering the quality issues with the Firefox 1.5 release. Basically, lots of users have memory leak problems, hangs and display problems. Not to mention all the extension incompatibilities. I've seen a lot of these problems too.

Do NOT upgrade to 1.5 unless you have some very good reason to do so. Wait for the patch releases to come (in February).

However, I worry when I read quotes like this from the Mozilla execs:

"We have more than 10 million downloads of Firefox 1.5, and the overwhelming feedback we've received ... has been positive," engineering VP Mike Schroepfer says. "We have heard some reports [of high memory use]..."

That's PR-speak. I hope that they are much more serious behind the scenes. Don't think that Mozilla doesn't have the resources to handle the QA problem much better than they are. Mozilla has more cash lying around than they know what to do with.

Even though it's kept secret, it's likely that Mozilla gets more than $30M / year from Google alone. They also have deals with other big companies like Nokia.

That could buy a lot of QA. And Firefox needs it.

¶ 1/06/2006

Marketing Sherpa has a good article for business who have merchant accounts and process credit cards - "6 Tips for Minimizing Chargebacks" (free access til Jan 15.).

What strikes me is how similar attitudes toward online credit card fraud (specifically fraudulent chargebacks) and click fraud are from the perspective of the retailer.

“The credit card infrastructure is incredibly opaque from the merchant’s point of view.” says Gene Hoffman, CEO Vindicia, a credit card fraud protection service.

'Incredibly opaque' certainly describes the AdWords system as well.

Here are some of the myths in the Sherpa article about Chargeback fraud. See if you can make the analogous statements concerning click fraud instead of "Chargebacks".

• Myth #1: Chargebacks are just a cost of doing business
• Myth #2: As long as my chargeback rate is below 1%, I can ignore them.
• Myth #3. Chargebacks are from stolen credit cards.
• Myth #6. Bank rules are clear and always followed.

It's not hard to find similar sentiments about click fraud. Moreover, the suggested remedies are also analogous:

• Best Practice #1. Categorize and analyze the chargeback.
• Best Practice #4. Fax response to merchant processor.
• Best Practice #6. Gather results of disputes report and analyze.

In AdWords terms, measure and report back to your Google rep.

If you suffer from click fraud, look at where you buy your clicks. The simplest way to minimize the effects of fraud it is to monitor your ROI.

Another option is to turn off the source of the fraud - usually the content network clicks. Often the click fraud is coming from the content network (i.e. AdSense) and you can and should separate out bidding for the content network. Make sure your content network ROI is similar to your search network ROI. If it's not, spend more on search and less on content ads.

¶ 1/05/2006

"Daddy, is it true that Googleplex is an imaginary number? Is it like infinity?"

Of course he's asking about that au courant 2nd grade topic: a googolplex. I only hear the word as "Google-plex"...

¶ 1/04/2006

JavaScript will start to predominate in 2006. Web pages will include much more JavaScript behaviour - from personalized home pages to giant corporate web sites. Flash will also rise in usage. A major search engine will get all AJAX-y.

JavaScript will become mainstream. People will get over their aversion to Flash. Examples of what will become more common: Kayak - travel search engine (JavaScript) and Etsy - find handmade goods (Flash)

In other words, the days of the static web page are over.

The downsides of this AJAX explosion?

• More headaches for Google in determining who's using Javascript to game their index
• More problems for non-power users not used to newfangled Javascript and Flash gizmos

The upside is that the web user experience gets faster and more interactive.

¶ 1/03/2006

Last week I posted the first part of an interview with Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen. Here's the whole thing. If you missed the first part, you can expand it inline below.

Philipp, when did you decide to start a blog mainly about Google?

That was in around May 2003, while staying in Malaysia. I was reading Elwyn Jenkins' Google Village blog at that time and greatly enjoyed it, but it didn't have enough daily stuff to satisfy my information hunger, so to speak... so I created just the blog I was looking for to read at the time.

What did you do before you were a blogger? Was it related to 'outer-court.com' or was that just a domain you had for fun?

In my "job life", I've always been a programmer, even while mainting my blog. Outer-court.com was just a domain name to host my first "homepage". I started out at (gasp) Geocities in 1997, then moved to Tripod, and a bunch of other free homepage providers. Finally I got so annoyed by them introducing ads and popups, so I got my own server. I guess only when you pay for something to you have the right to expect really good service.

As for the name itself, I was looking for court.com which was taken, so I chose the next best thing. I sort of imagine an "outer court" to be a meeting place kind of thing, so I liked it. It didn't have any specific meaning so it gave me the freedom to put online whatever I felt like at this domain, which later on included my blog at a sub-domain. Nowadays, I wish I would have chosen a domain instead of a sub-domain, but at that time I didn't know how important the blog would become to my life.

When I work on a project, I always like to have the domain name. And I think you have several cool domains, like 'feeeds.com'. In fact, I'm surprised that you don't own 'googleblogoscoped.com'. Why not?

OK, I guess I already answered that one now in the previous questions. The only bonus I can think of really is that with a sub-domain, people aren't linking so much to both www.blog.outer-court.com and blog.outer-court.com. Maybe that's the only bonus of this approach. Today, I believe moving is too much hassle for my visitors because they have to adjust bookmarks, RSS readers, etc. I could just do a forwarding from somedomain.com to my blog, but then again, I'd end up with several URLs people link to, and I like to keep it extra simple.

About how many domains do you own? Do you still look to buy domains, and do have a strategy when you look for new domains?

I don't buy domains unless I have a clear idea what I want to do with them. But I guess due to the experience with my blog, I'm more willing to quickly register something for a new project, just so it's easy for people to enter the URL. There's one thing that's a pain to change later on in a web project, and that's the address.

So let me check... I have 18 domains, plus a bunch of sub-domains.

Philipp, you mention keeping things simple, and many of your posts deal with simplifying the user experience on the web. You even have made several suggested redesigns, although I can't find the post where you simplified CNN and Yahoo and others.

I suppose you're referring to the ultimate reduction usability test, in which you remove everything which you don't use from a given site...

So I'd think that you were a UI designer at one point? Is that right, or are you mainly an expert hobbyist in that area?

I'm just a hobbyist in this area, though I can use this at my job as well. I did design work and usability work in my past. I don't think there's such a thing as "usability engineer" or "interaction designer" in Germany. Often, the job descriptions are split up into concept, graphics, management and programming. I actually prefer the synergy of overlapping teams and skills in a job. Usability really is common sense, but often people don't trust their instincts and this results in overtly complicated sites... or they're just not users of their own system.

Usability to me starts with the layout, the way forms and links are set up (As Spolsky says, every time you're presenting a button or link or checkbox, you're asking the user to make a decision), continues to the way a page loads (what loads first? what will be displayed while loading? will the loading progress look smooth?), and then down to the level of HTML and CSS.

I believe there's a paradoxical difference between something that looks good and cool and professional, and something that's usable. Take the Google logo, for instance... every designer will tell you it looks like crap (pardon my French), a very amateurish design. And I agree it's kind of childish, kind of amateurish. At the same time, people love it. Sometimes simplicity and some imperfection in design can lower the psychological barrier for starting interactions. I believe if you would have presented a flashy portal to someone in 1998, and you would have presented him the Google homepage, the portal would have appeared to be much more hip, cool, and technologically interesting to people. Of course recent internet history tought us a different lesson.

Do you think the web overall is improving, in terms of simplicity?

There are different trends. While some sites are putting effort into making things simpler -- apparently inspired by Google's success -- there's also a trend more towards portalitis. Ironically, Google now is starting to be part of that trend (just think of the Google Personalized Homepage, and its new API). But overall, I think the trend is towards simplicity. For example, there's search.yahoo.com, there's a new simpler Amazon product layout (I believe it's still in a test phase).

Still, not every company is "getting it". You might think it's obvious that simplicity is great for users, but then just go to look at the web reality and compare Yahoo products with Google products. If you analyze every link, every headline, every button, you will quickly see that only one of the two companies is completely user-focused at this point.

Another area of design you seem to be very interested is in digital chararcter design - especially sprites and small logos. I'm thinking of the the characters in your chat room and the little logos you create for some of your frequent commenters. I also remember that you gave away logos just to test the services that create logos on the web... Can you tell me more about digital characters/logos, and your interest in them?

I like to design and draw. Logos are one way to be creative on a website. I also like to draw comic book characters, cartoons, stuff like that. When I was younger, I used to read a lot of comic books. I read Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" as a teen, and that made a big impact on my thinking... you can even apply his theories on usability, or programming. This comic book on comic books is really a great read, and it has a broad perspective, going back to social interactions of cave men. Really, you can apply everything to anything. Painting, programming, making music, and whatever.... these are all different ways of expressing ideas. Sometimes out of the synergy of these different areas, you get new ideas, which might turn into new sites or products. Show/Hide Part One of the Interview

Part Two: Interview with Philipp Lenssen

How does a typical day go for you - you seem to have many interests, how do you allocate the time you spend "working/earning money" vs. "creative thinking" vs. writing vs artwork etc.?

I quit my day job a few months ago to try and pursue all of my projects (which are often team projects) full-time. At the moment, I'm trying to turn some of my hobby projects, including my blogs, into an actual job, but there's still a few steps to be taken.

Sometimes, there's just a routine you go through, for example I spend about 1-2 hours blogging everyday even if nothing important happened, just to go through deleting comment spam, checking email tips I get, reading up on blog news along the subjects I blog about. If there's a breaking news then I take half an hour or an hour to write it up, so with several breaking news that might turn into several hours of blogging everyday.

At times (you can ask my girlfriend!) I'm a bit absent-minded, and that's because I'm thinking about new ideas very often through-out the day. You can look at anything around you and get new ideas, get new content, or approaches. And once you got something, you can become very restless until it's implemented, written, drawn etc. I guess to allocate all this time you need a healthy dose of disinterest in things that don't fascinate you, that you don't deeply love. I really love blogging, programming, drawing, creating, etc.

I know you like PHP, but what are some of your other favorite tools for creativity?

For layouts, I use Corel PhotoPaint, since about forever (their software hasn't improved much in new versions, either). For pixel-based jobs, like cartoon sprites, I use PaintShop Pro 4, which is really old but really great for small stuff -- like 64x64 icons and such. If you want to do pixel-based work in PhotoPaint, the first thing you'll do is disabled dozens of brush, feather, transparency etc. options and then it's also just not as precise. In fact, PhotoPaint has quite a few "off by 1" bugs. You just can't be precise in it. At one time I learned Photoshop but didn't really like it, mostly because it doesn't follow any Windows OS interface standards.

As for programming, I'm using everything that comes along or is available and that doesn't break my brain. PHP, Python, Java, ASP, ASP.NET, like C#, and so on. If I'd have to pick a favorite it'd be Python because it scores in terms of "syntax usability"... it's almost like pseudo-code, and at the same time very powerful. It's a very beautiful and elegant language, even though it's not perfect... it breaks its own syntax simplicity approach in several places by bringing back colons etc., which are not necessary and clutter the code.

In other syntaxes, I often wonder... you know, hey compiler, when you can show me an error message like "semi-colon is missing in line 12", then why don't you fix it yourself? PHP error messages, by the way, are often highly cryptic. Still, at the moment I'm using mostly PHP (5), simply because it has the best deployment/ support in common server packages, and also because it has a great giant library for lazy people. PHP5 has great HTML screenscraping capabilities, and great XML capabilities.

How much time per day do you spend in Photoshop? Are you an expert at it?

Guess I answered that one above...

And, along the same lines, how big is your monitor(s), and what is your main computer set-up like?

19" monitor, Win XP, along with a Wacom table, a scanner, and no printer.

"I often wonder... you know, hey compiler, when you can show me an error message like "semi-colon is missing in line 12", then why don't you fix it yourself?"

I think that quote says a lot about how you think and work. And it leads me to one of my favorite leit-motifs of yours - writing the future. You've done several posts where you imagine that you are in the future (trademarks of the future, blogging from the future, etc), and you look back on events. Your recent interview with Larry Page in 2038 was a tour-de-force. I think that takes a lot of creativity, and most people just don't have the patience to work it all out.

Maybe you should be a highly paid futurist strategy consultant? I'm imagining that you have become a highly paid future-sultant, but can't keep up with all the business coming your way, so you've decided to train a team of smart people to be 'future thinkers' - what would you tell them?

I suppose I'd tell them to think different, to look into the past to understand where we are now and might go, and to put things into a bigger perspective. I once read about something, like, aliens watching our planet through their telescope... and they would make totally wrong cause & effect assumptions. Like, they might assume that when people have an umbrella, that this will cause rain... I suppose it was Douglas Adams who wrote this, he wrote a lot of stuff in this direction. I guess futurists are a bit like those aliens, watching humans from afar and making assumptions, and only some of them will turn out to be right. Lucky for futurists that judgment is passed long after they're dead...

Alright. Back to terra firma. What is it like sitting in Germany and observing Google (80% of the time)? Do you think that many of your casual readers would even guess that you are German, and are rather far removed from Silicon Valley? I guess I wonder if you think it is remarkable and if there are any specific obstacles to being an international blogger?

Sometimes my time zone is a bonus, sometimes it's not, depending on the time Google releases stuff. I'm covering Google with a focus on the web sites, not the company. To me, the recent Billion dollar AOL for example is an interesting footnote, but I find it far more exciting to hear about a new Google service. Because that's the stuff we can use, and mostly it doesn't matter where you are, and that's the stuff readers of my blog can immediately play around with.

Of course, sometimes it does matter where you're located. For example, Google Maps is far less exciting to me because it doesn't contain any noteworthy details for my country. Google Video is completely disabled, unless you use the Google Web Accelerator. These things make my life a little bit harder, but then again, I also gain a valuable perspective. I guess it's kind of hard to tell what it would be like to be blogging from the US, I can't really compare as I've never done this. Naturally if I'd live next to the Googleplex I'd visit more often (if they'd let me in). I did blog in Malaysia, and it wasn't much of a difference. I guess the web is truly global. The world slowly adapts.

You implied above that Google's user interfaces show that it is more focused on the needs of its users than Yahoo. What else do you think sets Google apart? And what do you think they need to change in order to stay on top?

What else sets Google apart? Well, they don't announce things. Take Microsoft. They announced IE7 ages ago (in web time). Google doesn't announce, they just release. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, check the web for news, and I realize Google released yet another service over night, seemingly out of nowhere. This makes it a lot of fun to have a Google blog, even when it's often the hectic kind of fun.

Maybe a few months ago I would have added that their services always scale and are faster than the rest, but that's not true anymore. The recent Google releases have almost all been slow, sometimes to the point you couldn't use them. Before this only happened with Orkut, which was more of a "powered by" thing than a real Google product. But now, it's happening with core Google products. There's a phase of release frenzy which hopefully is followed by a phase of consolidation, or if they can pull off both at the same time, even better.

What else? Maybe that they're kind of following their own vision without caring too much of what the rest does in terms of web technologies or trends. They sort of kickstarted Ajax with Google Maps, Google Suggest and so on, and then everybody follows them. Naturally that's no way to win the competition, to look at their current tools and then build on the same to be released in 1 year... because in 1 year they might have the next big thing. (Look at Gmail, and how competitors like Yahoo then updated their mail clients as a result.) They also get a lot of stuff wrong, no doubt, especially when it comes to W3C, semantics and so on... they kind of just released a spec for homepage widgets which contains some very "short term" limited scope syntax details (the "title_url" attribute, for example). But in general, I think Google is really a long term company, without thinking too much about today's web competition. If they will be successful with that, and keep that vision, who knows...

¶ 1/03/2006