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Google’s Trip to Israel

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t heard the news. Google’s not just for searching anymore. It’s got a lot more going on, like maps, Youtube, an online library, a new browser of its own, a rival to the iPhone store, and 16 million lines of open source code in four years. So how does the new Google see itself?

“If you’re asking for a mission statement, here it is,” replied Chris Dibona, Director of Open Source Code at Google World Headquarters. “We want to harness the world’s information and make it useful.”

Such was the atmosphere among computer folk at last week’s Google Development Day (GDD), held at Airport City. There were seminars and talks on how to use the tools Google has developed (or acquired and made their own) for the organization, digestion, and presentation of that information.

The computing society is moving on-line, converging from three directions – print, television, and computer media. Print’s problems are well-known, with the long-term erosion of its audience (due to the internet and poor worldwide reading standards). As far as television is concerned, that. too is showing its first signs of cracking under the strain of competition with the Web: In last week’s election, pollsters found that more of the 18-31 set got their information about Barack Obama and John McCain from the internet than from TV. And media, such as disks, CDs, and even DVDs, have long been losing out to on-line storage, digital MP3 music and video files, etc.

So it’s not just information that Google is organizing: It’s online electronic information, which Google hopes will become the medium for storage and transfer of most forms of information, like books,
video, documents, databases, etc. Naturally, the company develops tools to allow developers and users to manipulate that information.

But Google can’t be everywhere all the time; it can’t provide all the information it would like to in all possible forms. But it can help developers do so – and in order to make things easier for them, Google provides numerous APIs which they can plug into the applications or services they are building, many with minimal programming required; much of the “heavy” programming work is done on the Google back end, so if you don’t need to modify the default API too much, you won’t have to dedicate too much effort to integrating it into your product. Thus does Google win hearts and minds in the developer community – by making available to them easy to use and integrate components that make their lives easier, all for free!

Google sponsors its Developer Days in 16 countries around the world – including Israel, which has, according to the Google folk at the fair, one of the larger GDDs, thanks to the large number of internet application and service companies here. The truth is, lots of these companies would probably use the Google API as components in their applications anyway, because they’re there, easy to use, and free. So, it’s awfully nice of Google to put on a nice party, complete with snacks and lunch – thus promoting good public relations, as the company realizes that the true way to the heart of internet programmers is through their stomachs.

And, according to the company execs who presented at a press conference during the program, Google is always innovating, looking for the new products to roll out to developers. “Seventy percent of Google’s work is in the search engine and applications, 20A% is in emerging products – where we come up with major new ideas that eventually go ‘mainstream,’ like Google Docs – and 10% is what we call the ‘crazy’ stuff, which may or may not ever get out of the lab,” Dibona said.

Google’s two newest projects – Chrome and Android – were much on the mind of Google staffers. Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome), of course, is the new browser the company has released, with Google hoping to garner market share from Internet Explorer and Firefox users. Why bother with a browser? According to Bill Hesse, who works on Chrome, the company wanted “a faster browser with fewer buttons and more space on the screen for display, as well as being more compatible with increasingly complex Google applications.” The browser is completely open source, and according to http://tinyurl.com/5zzz9q, Chrome doesn’t collect information about your online activity, and doesn’t even hardcode its own search engine into the browser (unlike IE, where, if you leave MSN as the default page, you can’t even touch the screen until the MSN site loads).

Android is an even more ambitious project – an operating system and software platform for mobile phones, also open source, free, and completely flexible for development purposes. The phones themselves are made and offered by cell phone manufacturers and service providers (especially T-Mobile in the U.S.), and cost roughly the same as other smart phone; the idea is to let developers run wild, taking advantage of all the features of both phones and Android code, letting them come up with the next “killer app.”

Naturally, the Google Israel people had what to say as well. Yossi Matias, head of Google’s Tel Aviv development center, and Yoelle Mark, head of the company’s Haifa development center, discussed the Israeli contribution to Google worldwide. Far from just rendering Gmail and Google Maps into Hebrew (and a fine job they did on both), Israel is also the main development center for several Google products, such as Trends (http://www.google.com/trends), Youtube annotations (http://www.youtube.com/t/annotations_about), and Youtube contests (http://www.youtube.com/contests_main). Thus Israel, too, pulls its weight in the Global Google Information Empire. And we couldn’t be happier!

Browsing the News at Google

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Hard as it is to believe, there’s news in the browser wars – and the news is not just about Google’s new browser, Chrome. Would you believe that, as far as Google is concerned, Israel is finally “on the map?”

Oh, of course the news is mostly about Google Chrome, available currently only for Windows XP/Vista and released a couple of weeks ago to a not exactly browser starved public. Even if you’re happy with your current browser choice, it’s worth a try, because it gives a refreshing take on searching. Whereas Firefox can be considered a power search program (with the extra power coming from the thousands of add-ons you can implement to squeeze productivity out of the browser), Chrome, still a beta program, is more about simplicity, with iconic representation of recent searches in new tabs, and the automatic searches (via Google, of course) of any term you type into the address bar (here known as the Omnibar).

It’s also fast, and introduces an important innovation in the world of browsers, in which each tab is treated as a separate process. This is important, according to the little comic book presentation on the Chrome home page that attempts to explain Chrome’s technological innovations (you have got to see it!), because Web pages sometimes get “stuck” on a tab (often when your browser is trying to run a poorly-behaved Java applet). By separating the processes by tab, essentially running the tabs as separate programs, you don’t have to trash all your tabs when one goes bad. For Firefox users who are often the victim of such problems, that in itself is a reason to consider using Chrome.

There was a bit of a flap when Chrome was first released, with its end user license agreement requiring you to basically agree that all the information you typed into Chrome for searches belonged to Google. The original EULA, since toned down, read “By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to” do whatever Google wanted with the content. That put a quick damper on Chrome download enthusiasm, prompting the company to allow that the user retains his or her own copyright to what they type into the browser.

Perhaps to make amends for this gaffe, Google announced last week that it would “anonymize” its user logs – remove information like IP addresses, etc. that could be used to identify individual users – after nine months, instead of the 18 months that had previously been its policy. Actually, if you use Gmail, Google Docs, or any of the other freebie Google services, you’re placing personal sensitive information in the trust of the company’s servers anyway – in other words, Google already knows (or can know) all about you, if they want to.

Anticipating perhaps the hesitation on the part of some to entrust even more information – this time, on what they do in their browsers, and not just what they search for if they’re using Google – Chrome includes an “incognito” mode, in which Chrome does not record information (cookies, archived pages, etc.) on sites you visit (note that this is a feature in the also still in beta Internet Explorer 8, and even Firefox, according to http://tinyurl.com/6rgk9j). As such, it is possible, according to http://tinyurl.com/6pgfu5, to run two different Gmail accounts at the same time, something that you cant’ do in any other browser. Another nice plus for Chrome users!

As I mentioned, Google doesn’t need Chrome to build a personal profile on you, if it were so inclined – it already has more than enough dope on you from Gmail. When you think of the tens of millions of people using Gmail and the billions of people in the world, and the fact that Google only has about 10,000 employees (about 20% of whom are probably out to lunch or on a coffee break at any given time), you realize that there is no way they could keep up with the minutiae of our little lives without working way overtime (which they can’t be doing, since Fortune Magazine has several times named Google as the best company to work for). Given all that, it seems highly unlikely to me that Google is running a deep cover spying operation on users, for – what purpose?

Besides, there’s no money in keeping those kinds of records. But there is lots of money in figuring out what we’re interested in spending money on. Like Gmail, Chrome is clearly another “service” by Google to help the company better hone its advertising methodology, which, as a capitalist, I have no problem with. But if you prefer to err on the side of caution, check out http://tinyurl.com/5nt9uu, which tells you how to increase your anonymity in Chrome, and http://www.imilly.com/google-cookie.htm, which tells you how to rein in Google’s cookie, the agent that hunts and gathers information on you and your surfing habits.

But, in the final analysis, a browser is just – a browser. But a new online map of every street in Israel – even if the directions part of the system isn’t ready yet – is really big news. The fact that Google Maps (so far, just the Hebrew version, at http://maps.google.com/?hl=iw) realizes that Israel actually has roads, highways, streets, and neighborhoods, is a huge step ahead, and the day when we can use the easy to use and easy on the browser Google Maps to plan road trips in Israel (as opposed to the memory draining current choices that insist on super duper flash, Activex or java to work properly) can’t be far.

Google Maps for Israel does indeed show every street in every town – and even shows every town, including those on the “other side” (of the green line), complete with parking lots and even some businesses, such as gas stations and bakeries, in the big cities. One of the charms of Google Maps, of course, is being able to search for the kind of business you want and get a listing on the map, complete with links to web pages, directions, and photos, and this clearly preliminary version of the Israel map already has some of these features for businesses in Tel Aviv. The new system came on line rather stealthily a couple of weeks ago, apparently, and replaced the previous version, where Israel was just a flat plain of land with no marked roads or highways on its map.

Currently, all the features described can be seen in the Hebrew version only, although apparently changes are coming to the English version as well, since you can see blank streets (awaiting someone to update the English map database, I guess) on the Israel map in http://maps.google.com. You can search for businesses in Hebrew already, but the information is still limited (“Pizza” results in about seven or eight entries, all in Tel Aviv). But it looks like they’re adding more businesses every day. When I checked it out, it didn’t appear that there was yet a method to add your own business in Israel, as there is in the U.S. and most of Europe, but that may have changed already. But don’t worry – soon Google Maps Israel will have all the information you need to find what you’re looking for – using the same freebie tool everyone else is using, too.

A G.ho.st. of a Chance

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:24:18 +0000

You’ve heard of – and probably played with – online word processors and spreadsheets, a la Google Docs – but are you ready for the “on-line computer?”

Huh? What’s that again? A computer that exists in cyberspace? Sounds very George Jetson-ish. Unfortunately, our society is nowhere as advanced as the cartoon world, so out virtual computer is certainly much more primitive than old George’s – since all he would have to do to connect is flip open a virtual screen and give his name and password.

We, on the other hand, would need a computer to connect to our virtual computer, which sort of defeats the purpose of having one.

Or maybe not, it the idea is to have the same interface, and access to the same documents, storage and applications, no matter where you are connecting from. Imagine a scenario like this: You connect to the Internet via a low maintenance Linux desktop OS or thin-client, which is stripped down to the bare minimum, with few, if any, applications and services installed – except those needed to get on-line. Once you connect, though, you log into an online operating system, chock-full of your favorite programs, games, and entertainment items (games, Youtube videos, etc.). You could use this OS at home, and there would be a chain of kiosks at airports around the world where you could use the same system to connect to your “virtual computer.”

Of course, you would have to have a great deal of faith in human nature to work like this. If the people running g.ho.st. and similar services are serious about turning their virtual OS into a true alternative to desktop operating systems and encourage users to store their work on their servers, they’re going to have to come up with some way to reassure clients that nobody is going to be peering into their documents and files. After all, this is their computer we’re talking about!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. G.ho.st the Global Hosted Operating System, is one of several online operating systems/computers that promise to free users from the shackles of the desktop. G.ho.st. works on any platform, and operates independently of your computer’s OS. It includes a number of games, Google style widgets for games, weather, news, etc., and other accessories and utilities. Being that it’s still in Alpha, (Beta is expected sometime this summer), g.ho.st doesn’t have any real applications in the desktop sense of the word – although it does have a basic word processor, a basic Outlook-style calendar and, very cool, a program to send free faxes from stored documents to many countries in the world. Word processors and such are expected soon, and in the meantime you can use the g.ho.st. browser to connect to Google Docs or some other on-line service. Although online Google Docs would work from any computer, platform or OS, too, obviating the need for something like G.ho.st., the point of the system is to present a complete environment which can be built upon for the future.

G.ho.st. isn’t alone in this latest iteration of online software – or, rather, operating systems – as a service. There are lots listed over here, and of course, there’s that new one announced by some small company whose claim to fame is a search engine (and a browser… and a method to monetize everyday words… and lots of other stuff!).

G.ho.st., however, is much more interesting – because it’s developed and managed right here at home (more or less). The CEO of the company, Zvi Schreiber, lives in Jerusalem, while the servers are in, of all places, Ramallah. In various interviews, Schreiber has described a vision of using computers to bridge the gaps between cultures, and says he has pledged 10% of what he makes from G.ho.st to “promoting peace in the Middle East.” Of course, he admits, it may be awhile before he can follow through on that promise.

Using Gh.os.t. in recent weeks, I was enamored of the potential – but I have a philosophical concern. Will g.ho.st. be able to work as advertised, as a true substitute for a desktop OS? While the g.ho.st. site (as do the other services mentioned here) makes much of future plans for growth in its FAQ, one detail that was noticeably lacking was a discussion of security issues. Of course, security concerns hasn’t prevented Google Docs from taking off, but Google knows everything there is to know about everybody already anyway, thanks to its incessant data gathering. And I would imagine few people would put sensitive security (or personal) documents online anyway, just because its online. We’re not concerned about Google Docs because its a service that has its place.

But G.ho.st. and its comrades are aiming for the whole package, at least for some users, such as students, travelers, and those who can’t afford a laptop but want access to a desktop and document storage. Theoretically, one could (or will be able) to do all of his or her computing on G.ho.st., which means that security now becomes a major issue.

By security, I don’t necessarily mean some employee taking a peek at my documents. Rather, I mean potentially corrupted files, a dead server, or any of the other plagues that could be visited upon me – with little ability on my part to control the environment. The same thing holds true for a traditional desktop OS, too – a hard drive can die, the kids can accidentally delete a file while playing a game, etc. To avoid that kind of problem, you make a backup. Which you could do with g.ho.st. – but that would mean you couldn’t strictly rely on your on-line OS. Philosophically, something is askew, and unless you were to sign up for numerous accounts with on-line operating systems, I don’t see how you can use this system to back up your documents. If online OS’s are supposed to help travelers or students away at university who aren’t even working at their own computers, how are they supposed to back up their data?

Two words: Flash drive. You plug your drive into the USB port, download the document to it, and you’re set. But that brings up yet another philosophical problem: If you wanted a portable, go anywhere you go operating system, why not just get a U3 USB flash drive, with its own OS that piggybacks onto Windows? Isn’t that what online OS’s like g.ho.st. are doing anyway? After all, you do need a working OS to get online, at least currently. And with your own U3 drive, you’re in charge. Personally, I think G.ho.st. and the others in this crowd are a great idea – I just haven’t figured out where they fit in with the great scheme of things just yet.