Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 27 Apr 2006 20:33:00 GMT
and I’m going to have to pay the piper eventually.
I just noticed I am sitting at 32% capacity, up from about 6% that I was at 6 months ago. With all this limitless space and measly ability to only delete 50 things at a time I can see a point in the near future when I will be totally screwed.
why? well.. I have about 6000 ‘conversations’ sitting in email.. some are important, some aren’t I just use ‘search’ to find the old stuff.. it’s great. I hardly delete anything and I have a couple of mailing lists going into it which I skim through.
but what happens when my gmail gets full (probably at the end of the year) am I going to have to go on a massive diet, or will I switch my alias to another gmail account and start filling it up? . and then switch everything over to that.. talk about a PITA.
By making it so hard to delete email and discouraging people to delete them google has is going to have a whole heap of unhappy ‘fat’ inboxes in 1Q 2007.. unless it keeps on giving away more disk space.
Have you thought about what you will do when you reach 99% capacity?
when I have a spare day I’m going to just suck it into mail.app and wipe it.. diets are good!
Posted in General | Tags gmail, google | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 01 Mar 2006 16:49:00 GMT
wow.. I wonder how it feels to lose at least 7 Billion dollars by just opening your mouth.
NEW YORK (AP)—Google Inc. CFO George Reyes ruined what could have been a perfectly uneventful trading session on Tuesday when he commented at an investment conference that growth at the Web search company is slowing. His comments sent shares of Google and a slew of Internet stocks on a precipitous drop down.
oops
7billion == Market Cap before was 116B, now is 107B.
Posted in Business Related | Tags google | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sat, 11 Feb 2006 23:13:00 GMT
They might have a bunch of propellor heads churning out the cool infrastructure, but it seems google has hired some excellent marketing/business development people as well.
By leverging people’s gmail’s accounts with a silly web chat interface, and releasing it in dribbles, they have created a huge demand to check out this ‘cool’ new application.
I’ve already had a couple of people ‘trial’ it with me by sending silly messages like ‘test’ or ‘ping’, and I can see with my chat client that most of them just leave it up now that they have it, and it seems like if a person has me in their address book I can see if they are online or not, further increasing the chance I’ll use it (instead of the other networks)
While I said in a previous post I said I wasn’t going to use it until it has interoperability.. I was forced to use by a lecturer who only gave out his ‘gtalk’ IM.
and sadly, I am still not sure what the advantage of ‘owning’ a IM network is.. I use adium and to me all networks look the same. (the only network adium can’t see is skype)
the only ‘cool’ thing is that it uses’s jabber’s open protocol, so I can start writing notification applications using jabber instead of email.
Posted in General | Tags google, gtalk | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:48:00 GMT
I was having a discussion on IRC about google print, talking about how the publishers are crazy not allowing them to index all the content.
People couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t be leaping at the chance of monetizing the long tail (in web2.0 speak).
but then it struck me..
and
the answer to the first would be people who would have bought a new book instead, so the industry as a whole would not be better off, and might in fact be worse of, as the margin on ‘fresh’ books would be bigger, and scarcity is a good thing if you are a seller.
The answer to the second is no-one. it wouldn’t be economical to hold copies ‘just in case’. This would lead to some kind of ‘print on demand’ service or electronic purchase of it, resulting in lower value versions (but maybe higher margins)
Until the publisher has the infrastructure to print on demand, or demand for ebooks rise.. I just see a cannabilization of existing sales.
Or worse a monopoly of the electronic content owned by google (not the IP, just the asset itself) putting them in a very pretty bargaining position when it comes to splitting up the procceeds of a sale.
Posted in Business Related | Tags economics, google, print | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:48:00 GMT
It was a pleasure working on the Summer of Code, and the T-Shirt I just got for mentoring is cool too. Of the four graduates, one has become active in the httpd community Congrats Sam!
I wonder how many are active in the other projects.. guys??
Posted in General | Tags google | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:43:00 GMT
I just read the recent blog post of Jen Sense which explains how google pays different amounts to it’s advertisers depending on if you actually purchase goods or not. ie.. if the ad is successful google charges more from the advertiser and rewards the publisher.
Fantastic idea.. I’m all for better measures on how effective ads and publishers are for showing those ads.
But I’m just wondering if it is being used on the flip side? by that I mean if you the viewer click and spend money on digital cameras. Will google show you more camera ads when you surf? or display higher value ads because you actually spend money on the net? or even perhaps google will share the information with the publisher, and allow ‘high-value’ viewers access to premium areas of the site.. it definatly does open some doors not currently available.
What if it determines your a lousy mark^h^h^h not a person prone to actually purchasing goods.
Will it select against you (and the publishers you visit) by showing you low-value ads, meaning your publisher suffers?
I actually think this is a good thing. publishers get more money if they are more effective for their customers (The advertisers are the ones paying.. they are the customers.. not you the viewer)
I just wonder is this data all sitting in some data warehouse somewhere tracking all the purchases I’ve made in the last year? I wonder what the legal rights of them collecting this (or not collecting it) are.. I don’t remember signing a usage agreement when I viewed the ads. (I’m sure the publishers and advertisers have, but not me. the one they are tracking)
Posted in General | Tags google, marketing, privacy | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:36:00 GMT
What was Microsoft thinking when it announced this deal?
If you belive the AOL buyout rumour where microsoft and Google+Comcast and potentially Yahoo are all vying to buy it this announcement makes no sense.
AOL currently has a 50m IM subscriber base, where both Yahoo and MSN has ve 25m a piece, and Google has 1m if it’s lucky.
So let’s imagine your a Google exec. you have a nice ad-revenue stream, and this GTalk thing is going to be a nice little earner if it could get some legs (user base)
Then on the grapevine you hear that AOL is up for sale, and MSN is interested.
now.. you think to yourself.. ok I could lose a bit of revenue, and the gtalk thing will be a bit harder now (Metcalfe’s network effect and all) but it is still doable…
and geess.. if we partner up with comcast we could make a offer as well, and get those 50m IM subscribers over to the ‘good’ side and they wouldn’t hurt our email user base either.. (and we can give the content stuff over to comcast who could make good use out of it). These users would make our dream come true.
So they make a matching bid. and the stories fly.
Now.. Imagine this exec’s horror when he finds that Yahoo + MSN are going to co-operate with IM.. He is seeing all his gtalk dream sink.. No one would be interested in it if Micrsoft buys AOL. They will all be using the other guys IM service and whatever VOIP solution they come up with..
All of a sudden this AOL deal got a lot more important for him. now it isn’t just a matter of losing 2.5-10% of it’s revenue base.. It is threatening it’s entry into the telco market. It NEEDS AOL even more now.. and it going to fight tooth and nail to get it.
If you were Microsoft why in heavens name would you want the other potential bidder to want AOL even more than it currently does?
Unless of course Microsoft + Yahoo don’t really want AOL in the first place, and are trying to get Google+Comcast to buy a really large lemon for a even bigger price.
Posted in Business Related | Tags aol, comcast, economics, google, microsoft, yahoo | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:34:00 GMT
in Daring Fireball John talks about how google is not a ‘web os’, but a advertising company. Which I agree with, Google’s customers are the advertisers. But in order to grow at a rate they want to, and to protect their core business they need compete against the other search possibilities… which are Yahoo and Microsoft otherwise these companies could out-manuver them and make Google irrelavant in the medium term.
Google competes directly with Microsoft with MSN, MSN-Messenger, and HotMail. The largest threat (IMHO) to MS if Google develops some kind of office lookalike which will start affect sales. If I were Google, I would donate a couple of their staff to work on Star Office to make it a better product. (or fund some of the existing star-office developers to achieve the same thing).
I see the largest threat to Google from Microsoft is Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop. While people currently do searches from their browser and have choice on who they use, imagine if searching was more deeply integrated into the desktop, so that direct searches are no longer done, but they are done indirectly (commoditizing the search so that no one cares which engine serves the results).
Google also indirectly competes with them for staff, they even set up an office in Seattle to attract the softies over. How can you develop the next big thing if you don’t have the rocket scientists building it?
So this is why Google is offering more things that Yahoo and Microsoft currently do, and will continue to do so, and why Yahoo and Microsoft will continue to try and improve their search, as well trying to make it more of a commodity at the same time.
Personally I hope all three of them keep each other in check all releasing brilliant things and giving me the surfer more choices, and my work the content-provider more traffic. I think the worst possible outcome is if we have a winner, as it would mean less innovation overall.
Posted in General | Tags coopetition, google, microsoft, yahoo | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sat, 17 Sep 2005 15:30:00 GMT
I created this mainly for myself, but thought the whole world might like it.
A plugin in to all allow you to search googles new blog search in your firefox toolbar.
right now it still uses the default google image.. I’ll try my artistic hand soon and make it into a ‘B’.
once again comments/flames are welcome.
Update: The ‘B’ is there. 
Posted in blogging | Tags blogging, firefox, google | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 14 Sep 2005 23:52:00 GMT
with googles blog search being unwraped (thanks Ugo )
I think the valuation of the RSS search companies has been reduced to about zero.
you can do nifty things like link searches which is what icerocket is good at.. and you can naturally do searches much faster than technorati.
oh.. things like trackbacks, or pings aren’t required either anymore either.. but of course you’ll still get lots of comment spam as people try to link their page rank.
Hey Google.. if your listening..
Does api.google.com have access to this search?
pretty please!
Tags blogging, google | no comments | no trackbacks