Online Observations

Google finally gave way to massive requests for PDF support to be added to Google Docs. There were a number of users who felt that this was a sorely missing feature in Google’s offering. I guess you don’t have much of a choice if you get comments such as this one asking you to give this feature:

"If you’re listening O Great Google Demi-Gods, we supplicate
thee for PDF storage!!"

While this is a welcome feature, it is still far away from being a full-fledged module of Google Office. Currently, you can do the following:

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CopyBlogger issued a challenge to the world. Write a piece of literature which is exactly 140 character, not more not less. Why 140? Because this was a Twitter Writing contest. And a lot of people took the challenge. Winners got iPods and a whole lot more. The winning entries are below:

First Place:

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

Second Place:

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I reviewed Zemanta quite a while back as a very decent idea but with still a ways to go on proper implementation. Today I happened to read a review on one of my favorite sites, The Web Worker Daily. And their verdict is the same as mine. the images just don’t cut it yet.

To remind everyone, Zemanta installs as a browser plugin and adds a nifty little feature which suggests to you images and links for the post that you are typing based on what you are typing. An excellent idea, if it works.

It has been all over the Internet: the complete integration of SalesForce and Google Apps. But here’s a little bit which is not so well known. SalesForce actually first wanted to integrate with Zoho and were well into development doing so. However, they played a dirty card and offered to acquire Zoho instead, which Zoho of course refused.

This entry on the Zoho Blogs by Sridhar gives out the details about this engagement. It also gives details on how helpful Google was to allow integration with Google Gears.

Google announced yesterday that the Google spiders will now fill out forms to access dynamically generated pages which till now were inaccessible to search engines. This gives Google the ability to start indexing the Deep Web.

Google promises to follow “good Internet citizenry practices”, but then again not a lot of people trust Google:

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A large number of Flickr users are protesting the release of video support on Flickr. There are petitions on the site asking for Flickr to roll back the service. I do understand the reasoning behind these protests as will anyone who has seen the mess youtube is.

As mentioned earlier, Flickr has put a limit of 90 seconds on the uploaded videos, but that is still enough to produce a lot of trash. I doubt that Flickr will roll back the feature.

Here are some protests from around the web by people who don’t like the idea of Flickr video:

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Phenomenally popular photo sharing site Flickr, today announced that they are going to allow video sharing for their pro users - normal users can view and comment of course, but only pro can upload. What’s the twist? Well read on:

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Every one is talking about it and so I have to as well. After all, this blog is about observing the Internet. Google has finally launched their version the cloud computing infrastructure offering that Amazon has. It’s called the Google App Engine. It is dubbed to be a developer tool that allows you to build web applications that will run on the same infrastructure as Google’s own applications do - in two words, this should translate to scalability and availability.

However, having said that, it is to be seen how ‘available’ the platform actually remains. Amazon has been having a bad time with the uptime of their services. Ok, so what’s new and different about the Google App Engine:

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Feedburner (a service I use to publish my RSS feeds) has a feature which allows you to embed a feed count as an image in your blog or anywhere you want. The image looks like this:

However, I have been noticing that all the blogs I visit no longer show the feed count, where they previously used to. Here are some screen shots from some of these blogs.

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I posted about Adobe Photoshop Express earlier as the new kid on the block for online photo storage (really, it’s not a serious photo editing tool and calling it Photoshop is probably insulting). It’s still nice. Anyway, I digress.

There is a big problem in the terms of service:

As can be seen in the above text captured from the TOS, by posting your photos on the service, you basically give up all rights on it. Adobe is simply saying that they can do whatever they want with the photos posted on their service.

I am thinking that most people should basically hold on till Adobe works this out. Thanks to Aaron Hockley for pointing this out.