Google is undisputedly my favorite company ever. I was excited when i read about two cool news about the Google.
1) GPhone is coming
TechCrunch pointed out to a news article on Rediff, that mentions that the Google Phone (GPhone) might be out in a fortnight. The article also states that Google is in talks with a couple of Indian mobile service providers, which is absolutely fantastic. And, for this reason, GPhone may hit India before iPhone does and will be more popular than iPhone among Indians. This is what makes Google different. They see India as a potential market, whereas the others don’t.
2) Orkut ReDesign
This one is more official than the GPhone article. The orkut blog announced today that there is a redesign under the works. They will be releasing it to groups of users in the coming weeks. This is awesome too. As everyone knows, Orkut is the most popular social network in India and Brazil and i’m a fan of it too. But, why ? It has a more of an Indian touch. I don’t know how else to explain.
This redesign is definitely going to be a successful one. So far, the comments about the design are positive. UPDATE : Google Discovery has more pictures of the new design. Vinay claims thats the new design has been enabled for him. He has some screenshots on Flickr. Can’t wait to have it on my account.
Today i found something really weird. I was making a small change to this theme (actually made Pings and Comments separate) and wanted to test out in all the browsers. So i opened up my Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, Opera and the recently launched Safari for Windows. After checking everything in all the browsers, i presses Winkey + M, which is meant to be a “Minimize All” command. But, the Safari windows was still maximized. All others went down to the taskbar. I tried few more times. The same happened. I am one dumb man when it comes to System bugs, so, i thought “Might be due to the fact that Safari looks different from other Windows ?”. What a crazy doubt. Anyway, to clear this up,i opened my Pownce Adobe Air application. It obeyed it very much.
So, might this be a consequence of the never-ending MS-Apple war ? Who is to be accused for this ? Lol.
YouTube have today, launched a new feature called “Custom Player”. With this, users will be able to create their own customized video player. They can choose the name, descriptions, content, color theme and layout of the player. There are two types of layouts available currently. One is the usual player and the other is a wider one with the related video being displayed on the right. The content feature allows users to include their own videos or other videos from a YouTube Favorites List or YouTube playlist. This new custom player feature can be accessed via www.youtube.com/custom_player.
Here is an example of my favorite video played in the player that i created to follow the color scheme of GotChance.
Today, Google System repported that Google is sponsoring a new social network project at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute whose initial goal was to “rethink and reinvent online social networking”. Google seems to be doing this mainly due to failure of Orkut, which is popular only in India and Brazil. I’m a great fan of Orkut.
The network, titled Socialstream, is able to “draw content from a variety of sources. Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them.”
Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user’s online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.
I posted a bit of information on Powncerecently. And after reading Aidan’s comment, i visited his review on Pownce. It was a nice read and it also lead me to posts on Center Networks and Mashable. There was a video review of Pownce on Center Networks, and it looks very nice. And i can’t wait for the public version of it. It going to be very useful for many.
Kontactr is a simple service, which provides you with personal, spam-proof contact forms. It also provides simple tools to embed the form right on your own website.
