“Groovy Motherfucker”

Behind-the-scenes look at Google Wave - more around the struggle of big teams than about the product itself.

“Instead of shaving one Yak, you’re shaving the entire Yak pen at the Zoo, and pretty soon traveling to Tibet to shave foreign Yaks you’ve never seen before and whose barbering you know little about.”

GOOGLE COOKIE MONSTER T-SHIRTS!

kho’s excellent piece on the Google acquisition of Slide. For the most part, I’m keeping my big mouth shut for fear of saying something I shouldn’t, so I’ll just link to this and say: “Hurrah!”

10am: “Google Voice for everyone”

UPDATE 10.53am: “Google Voice is still limited to everyone in the U.S. for now”

Interesting perspective from Ben Ward on Android.

“I’ve just endured a week of reading Google’s ‘opener than thou’ harping, with ever increasing levels of irritation, and all along Android is locked in to their services? What bullshit.”

As a geek who cares a bit about openness, I live with my iPhone, but wish Android was a real competitor for my affection. It’s clearly getting to a stage where HTC can produce a quality smartphone — fast enough and featured enough to keep most people happy.

But, strangely for Google, I feel that my geeky desires are being ignored. Unless you buy the single “Google phone”, you’re not buying a particularly geek-friendly device. Due to Google’s Apache licensing, the phone makers and cell companies have enough control to ensure an experience where I have *less* control than with my iPhone.

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.