“groovy mother...”

Really insightful post on what stinks so badly about Google Buzz. Slamming it into Gmail was just such an ugly, out-of-place, hacky move for market-share — no different than the approach that cluttered up the homepages of Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc.

This is a cool prototype — Take a photo of some forrin text, and Google’s servers can OCR and translate it to English. Potentially wicked handy tool for travelling.

Hadn’t noticed this — Google Chrome has built-in support for Greasemonkey user scripts. Chrome has been my default browser for a while, so it’s great to have my favourite tweaks back.

Handy open source tool from Google to analyze DNS servers and see if it might be worth switching away from your ISP’s default.

Clever Google hack to inject the Chrome/WebKit rendering engine into IE on a per-site basis. If users can be convinced to install this, it could make life easier for webdevs — but the implementation would have to be pretty seamless before I’d use this on a consumer website.

Google question 50 people in Times Square. Reminder to the nerds: Users don’t know what a “browser” is.

If you don’t have time to watch the Google Wave presentation video (1h20m), read this, Andy Ihnatko’s piece on why it’s got so much potential.

A beautifully incendiary post about “Google’s Aspergerian nerds” and their complete misunderstanding of visual design.

This is good: The underlying goodness of OpenID, used in a way which completely hides itself from the user.

New browser plugin from Google that runs “native” libraries in place. Lazy hacks are no doubt currently sharpening their “Flash killer” typing fingers.

Awesome — a more polite version of justfuckinggoogleit.com!

Benevolent data-mining of Google’s search logs — but it does raise the question of what else they can predict… Does Google have “insider trading”-esque omnipotence for the whole stock market, for example?

YouTube implements a feature that featured in an xkcd comic last week. In response, current.com is looking into including velociraptor protection in our next patch release.

In celebration of their tenth birthday, Google have resuscitated their search index from January 2001. Ah, the good old days, when “ROD BEGBIE IN VIRGIN SNOG SHOCKER!” turned up on the second page of results for my egosurf.

Technical details from Google (in comic-book form) for their upcoming browser. Some good ideas in there (splitting out tabs as separate processes definitely makes a lot of sense), but does the world really need another web browser?

Never spend money on a foreign phrase book again — translate phrases on the fly with Google Translate.

Google has a first stab at making video content searchable, across a selection of political speeches. Will be interesting to see how well this works.

New Radiohead video was shot without cameras, instead using lasers to get 3D data which was visualized. Chunks of the data are available from Google, so you can have a go at processing it yourself.