I’m at Google I/O ( IO2009 ) this week checking out sessions, taking photos and Twazzuping thanks to App Engine via Twitter. Assuming all goes well, (AT&T 3g network is available) I’ll also be submitting articles a few other places. Really looking forward to a great week here in SFO. Be sure to say hello if you’re one of the 4,500 estimated attendees….
News
Google PowerMeter
Google PowerMeter is a soon to be launched Google product intended to help educate users about their own power usage via the internet. This is but one of Google’s ongoing projects to help save power and the environment.
According to the soon to be launched page at Google.org:
“To get started, we’re working on a tool called Google PowerMeter which will show consumers their electricity consumption in near real-time in a secure iGoogle Gadget. We think PowerMeter will offer more useful and actionable feedback than complicated monthly paper bills that provide little detail on consumption or how to save energy.”
According to the site, PowerMeter is in prototype but will receive information from utility meters and energy management devices to provide users with access to their own energy consumption directly from their iGoogle homepage.
Google No Longer Suggests Directory Submission
While Google has condemned buying and selling links that pass PageRank, they’ve encouraged listing in paid directories like Yahoo for years. It seems that era may have come to an end earlier today. The following bullet points have been removed from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines Webmaster Help Center*
- “Have other relevant sites link to yours.”
- “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”
Does this recent move reflect a renewed emphasis on rooting out paid links passing PageRank and/or low quality links by Google?
*As mentioned, the bullet points above have been removed from the US version of Google’s Webmaster Help Center. Other versions may not yet reflect this change.
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UPDATE: Hat tip to Barry Schwartz who noticed John Honeck’s post in Google Groups where Google’s John Mueller comments on the change. Barry provides a full recap at SERoundTable.com and SearchEngineLand.com.
Google News Interview
As mentioned on Blogoscoped.com, I did a radio interview this week with Jeff Horwich about Google. It was a lot of fun and thanks again to Georgia Public Broadcasting as well as Minnesota Public Radio for making me sound so good!
“The Week” September 12, 2008 from In The Loop. (My interview starts about 14 minutes into the show and is available at npr.org/…)
“* Congress back in session: Will they actually get anything done? We talk with Kathryn Pearson of the University of Minnesota.
* Trouble naming your baby? Sarah Palin’s here to help.
* Brian Ussery of Blogoscoped.com joins us for The Week in Google (it was a big week)
* The Wall Street Journal’s Vanessa O’Connell on new employee management software
* "Too Big to Fail"…sounds like a John Prine song to me”
Google Chrome Browser
Google has done it again, who says you can’t launch a new product via a commic book? As first reported by Philipp Lenssen Google, recently sent out comic books by Scott McCloud announcing their latest offering. Not so incognito perhaps but, very cool!
According to Google’s “Google Chrome (BETA)” for Windows FAQ (which wont be available until launch), “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.” A few of Chrome’s features include thumbnails of favorite pages, shortcuts for applications and “universal” one box functionality. Google Chrome offers webmasters built in “desktop” style features designed to deliver a better experience to end users. In addition to Google tools and APIs built-in, Google’s use of JavaScript engine 8.0 in Chrome should speed up “AJAXy” web applications. Also worth pointing out, Chrome is built on WebKit and uses the WebKit rendering engine. Thanks to WebKit, pages should look the same in Google Chrome as the appear in other WebKit based browsers like Safari. Also worth noting, Google’s new Chrome browser already supports CSS3 features even though the standard hasn’t officially been released. According to Google Chrome’s EULA “If you’ve tested your website with Safari 3.1 then your site should already work well on Google Chrome.”
Google Chrome offers several tools for webmasters including “Web Inspector”, “Task Manager” and “JavaScript Debugger”. When it comes to meta data, Chrome offers shortcuts similar to those found in Google Gears Desktop API meta data (meta tags), application-name, description and application-url for example. When it comes to search results, “By providing an OpenSearch description document (OSDD), you enable Google Chrome to include your site in the list of search engines in the browser.”
In addition to Google Chrome’s tools for webmasters, Google introduces “incognito mode” for users. While in “Incognito mode” Chrome “will not store basic browsing history information such as URLs, cached page text, or IP addresses of pages linked from the websites you visit.”
OTHER NOTES:
- Not including encoding information could prevent CSS parsing.
- User agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.X.Y.Z Safari/525.13
- Google Chrome will percent-encode query parameters within a URL.
THOUGHTS:
While Google Chrome is a great new product, I feel like privacy advocates may not like Google Chrome recording “snapshots of most pages you visit (except for secure pages with “https” web addresses, such as some bank pages)”. Even in incognito mode snapshots “…could still be stored elsewhere on your computer…”.
