Paul O'Flaherty

Google Hasn’t Built A Twitter Killer: Goolge Buzz

FYI: I started writing this before the Google announcement today and am writing it as I watch it live and as a product GBuzz looks great.

Google doesn’t want to build, nor is it trying to build a “twitter killer”. What Google wants is your information in order to better target advertising.

Every time you send an email, update your status, chat on Goggle Talk, share an item on Google Reader, post a video to YouTube or a picture to Picasa, Google gets a little bit more information about you that it can use to better tune the advertising you see in the hope that you will click on one of those ads.

Information like your status updates disappear as soon as they are used but by offering timelines where you can see the status updates of your friends Google  can keep you on in their service a little longer and in front of their advertising a little longer.

By associating Facebook and Twitter id’s with your Gmail contacts Google learns a little more about both you and your contacts. They have already announced that you will be able to import RSS streams from other services, connect with twitter, and there was a hint of facebook connect. It was driven home that the platform will be made as open as possible and noted that if you tweet and it gets imported into GBuzz then it could end up on somebody elses recommended list.

GBuzz is shaping up to be a wonderful looking social experience, but it boils down to being a content gathering service. It will allow you to pump information into Google from all your other services, consume information there and ultimately spend more time in from of Google advertisements while providing it with the information necessary to fine tune those advertisements to you and your friends.

At the end of the day it all boils do to gathering more information about you in order to target advertising. They don’t need to build a Twitter killer. Twitter and Facebook already do a great job creating the information that Google wants.

What they have built however, is a marvelous looking social experience for those people who already use Gmail and Googles mobile services and given them the means to pour information about themselves and others into Googles servers.

The Future Of YouTube Channel Customization?

Interactive User Channels?

Google launched a new page on YouTube to promote the new set of “Artist Themes” for Googles browser Chrome.

The page itself features a fairly cool short video depicting the differences between bland ordinary browsers and Chrome, but the real fun doesn’t start until near the end of the video where it seemingly expands beyond the confines of the video player and takes over the entire page.

Once the video is ended it continues to scroll through images of the themes changing the background of the page accordingly.

While this is a great way to demonstrate the range of skins available for Chrome, I also wonder if Google aren’t letting us see a possible future feature of user channels, where you can have the background of the page change according to triggers in the video.

Much like setting annotations now, a user could set triggers to alter the background or some other element of the screen as you watched the video on their channel page?

YouTube has PMS

Well that explains everything. Sara sent me a couple of links a few minutes ago to YouTube videos to check out for posting on Daily Shite.

Strangely, none of them would load, then I looked down at the bottom left hand corner of my browser and everything became clear:

Waiting for pms.youtube.com…

4 steps to the ultimate Google search

There’s nothing like a quick Google search for bringing information from all over the web to your eyeballs in an instant.  However as great as Google is, it doesn’t always give you the complete picture.

Help is at hand and with this collections of greasemonkey scripts and Firefox plugins, I’ll show you how to have the latest Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube results displayed every time you do a Google search.

Okay, first things first, scoot your ass on over to the Firefox addons page and download “CustomizeGoogle”.

CustomizeGoogle is one seriously cool extension that allows you to add a lot of extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) to the search results as well as allowing to to remove unwanted stuff like ads.

There are literally hundreds of options and tweaks for most of Google’s services available in this extension, but to be honest, unless you want to go turning off the ads on the sites then the extension is pretty much configured perfectly out of the box.

Next up you’ll want to download and install the Greasemonkey extension.

For those of you unfamiliar with Greasemonkey, the extension allows you to run small scripts (bits of code) automatically when you visit certain websites and can be used to do everything from tweaking the appearance of a site to adding new functionality.

Once you have Greasemonkey installed (and your browser restarted) you’ll be able to choose from literally 1000’s of available scripts over on UserScripts.org but today we’re only going to be looking at 2 of them.

First up is “Google Search Sidebar with YouTube, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com and Flickr Results”.

This über imaginatively named script does exactly what it says on the tin. Every time you do a search using Google the results will come up as usual but now you’ll also be treated to an extra sidebar on the right hand side displaying the associate Wikipedia entry, Flickr image and YouTube video results for that query as well as a Dictionary.com definition (if you happen to have used a single definable word).

To install the script simply click the big black “install” button on the top right of your screen and click install on the resulting Firefox popup. To test the script in action just head off and do a Google search..

Finally we want to install the equally functionally titled “Twitter Search Results on Google” script.

This little baby displays the 5 most recent Twitter search results for the query just above the Google search results, allowing you to have both real-time Twitter and indexed Google results on the same page. Awesome.

Again, install the script and head off and do a Google Search but before you hit that search button be prepared for the instant information overload you’re about to subject yourself to!!

(Massive thanks have to go to Sara for introducing me to the two Greasemonkey scripts mentioned in this post! Thanks darling!)

Because video is scary

It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on make up artists, plastic surgeons, lighting technicians and air brush the final result, video can and will make you look like a complete tit!

I spotted this on the “Most active videos” part of YouTube today! (I added the zoomed picture of course!)

What can I say, “Shakira never looked so sexy?” ROFL

Maybe she sat down without looking to see where the microphone was?

History of Predictive Text Swearing

This one came to me today via FriendFeed. Thanks Veronica!!

The history of predictive text swearing!

Meet-ups and events for 28th of April – 5th of May

I’m starting to keep the length of my videos down on BlogTV so that I can cross post them to my YouTube channel.

This is the first one that I recorded this morning which is essentially a run down of what’s going to be happening the week of 28th of April – 5th of May.

It’s essentially a video recap of my previous post.

leave next Monday for London for Internet World which and will be there, live streaming on Fuelmyblog TV, with Kevin on the 29th in Earls Court.

Speaking of streaming, we’ll be doing a lot of stream next week.

On the Monday evening we will doing the Blog2Print Comedy Captions show from somewhere in Hertfordshire.

Tuesday we’ll be streaming from Internet World.

Wednesday will be from Heathrow Airport and Chicago.

On Thursday we’ll be streaming from various random locations around Chicago as well as from the Fuelmyblog Bloggers meet-up on Thursday night.

Friday will be more randomness as well as the opening cruise for SOBCon08.

On Saturday will be more SOBCon and to wrap up the week we’ll probably broadcast from the various airports as we travel back to England and then onto France and Denmark.

Hoover Hack

This video contains a simple little "hack" for getting dust off of your suit jackets.

It’s just something that popped into my head the other day while I was playing with Ustream.

As a matter of interest.. I couldn’t get this video to upload properly to YouTube. Anybody else experiencing issues with uploading Ustream videos to YouTube?

StarCraft 2 is coming. There goes my life!

I’m blatantly stealing Blizzards byline for the StarCraft II CGI announcement video but “Hell it’s about time”.

I seriously doubt that there is anybody reading this who doesn’t have at least a passing knowledge of StarCraft so I’m going to save you the back story and just give you a quick run down:

StarCraft II continues the epic saga of the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. These three distinct and powerful races will clash once again in the fast-paced real-time strategy sequel to the legendary original, StarCraft. Legions of veteran, upgraded, and brand-new unit types will do battle across the galaxy, as each faction struggles for survival.

Featuring a unique single-player campaign that picks up where StarCraft: Brood War left off, StarCraft II will present a cast of new heroes and familiar faces in an edgy sci-fi story filled with adventure and intrigue.

Features of StarCraft 2 include:

• Fast-paced, hard-hitting, tightly balanced competitive real-time strategy gameplay that recaptures and improves on the magic of the original game
• Three completely distinct races: Protoss, Terran, and Zerg
• New units and gameplay mechanics further distinguish each race
• Groundbreaking single-player “story-mode” campaign
• Vibrant new 3D-graphics engine with support for dazzling visual effects and massive unit and army sizes
• Full multiplayer support, with new competitive features and matchmaking utilities available through Battle.net
• Full map-making and scripting tools to give players incredible freedom in customizing and personalizing their gameplay experience

Make sure you drop over and visit Starcraft2.com for all the info including some downloadable artwork, desktop wallpaper, screenshots and videos.

On a side not, the videos that you download from Starcraft2.com use the “Blizzard Downloader” to download. This is the same client as used for updating World Of Warcraft.

Here are some StarCraft II videos I found on YouTube which show one of the cinematic intro sequences as well as some actual gameplay footage.

What little free time I had up until now will be completely gone once StarCraft 2 is released.

Computer sees rubiks cube and solves it

Check out this cool video of CV Rubik a computer app written in C++ as “looks” at a Rubiks cube using a webcam and then proceeds to solve it.

CV Rubik is a C++ application that solves a 3×3 Rubik’s cube. It uses a webcam to “look” at a Rubik’s cube and generate a step by step solution in 3D graphics. CV Rubik draws on knowledge from different fields of computer science such as Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Graphics. The following steps are performed by the program at runtime:
1. The user holds a scrambled 3×3 Rubik’s Cube in front of the webcam.
2. Using the OpenCV library, the live video feed is processed to locate the cube in the input image and determine the 9 colors of the frontal face.
3. The user rotates the cube 5 times for the software to capture all the other faces.
4. Using OpenGL, a 3D cube that matches the original one is created and displayed on the screen.
5. The cube is solved one step at a time using the solution published in 1981 in the DER SPIEGEL magazine.
Note: If no webcam or cube are available, the software gives the option to generate a random cube.

Domino PCs

I nearly cried at the though of the potential hardware damage. Still looks cool…

Hey guys, how about next time you want to get rid of some PC’s you just send them to me?