KSFO's Web Wanderer

The Links for September 2, 2006

Google Talk - Santa Rosa Steve

Santa Rosa Steve found Google Talk.

From the site: Google Talk is a downloadable Windows application that enables users to quickly and easily talk or send instant messages to their friends for free. Calls are made through your computer using the latest voice technology; all you need is an Internet connection, a microphone and a speaker. If you don't have a speaker or built-in microphone, you may want to consider buying a headset, which will also provide the best voice quality when using Google Talk."

You can also use it for voice messaging.

"Google Talk also supports standards-based communication clients, which means that Gmail users can access the Google Talk service and exchange instant messages using other clients that support the standard XMPP protocol, such as Trillian, GAIM, iChat, Adium, and Psi. This allows users to access the Google Talk service for instant messaging from all major platforms, including OSX, Linux, and Windows."

Google Writely - Santa Rosa Steve

Santa Rosa Steve says: "Google late Thursday re-opened its Writely beta online word processing application, which the search engine acquired in March. Because the service was being transitioned to Google's servers, it was not accepting new accounts until today."

"Writely offers document authoring and collaboration capabilities within a Web browser through the use of advanced scripting and AJAX."

Some features:

Ability for multiple people to work on a document in real time
Secure storage that saves a document every 10 seconds
An easy-to-use interface that mimics a desktop client without the hassle of a download
Create new documents from scratch, upload them from most popular file formats (including Word), or e-mail them into Writely in batches
Organize your documents by tags, or click to star the important ones. You can see at a glance who last edited a document and when.
Download your documents in batches for safe - keeping (in HTML), or save them individually in PDF, RTF, ODT or Word format.

Thanks, Steve!

Google Notebook - Solinas

From Wikipedia: "Google Notebook is a free service offered by Google that provides a simple way to save and organize thoughts when conducting research online. This personal browser tool permits a user to clip text, images, and links from pages during browsing, save them to an online "notebook" that is accessible from any computer, and share them with others."

"Google Notebook is an interactive scratch pad for every visited website, offering a single online location to collect web findings without having to leave the browser window."

"Sharing functions permit a user to have public notes visible to others."

"A mini google notebook is available through a browser extension (available for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer). That allows clipping information from the web without leaving the displayed page using a quick "note this" function available within the context right click menu from anywhere inside a webpage."

"Announced on May 10, 2006 and made available May 15, 2006. The latest version of the extension is 1.0.0.5."

Google Dodgeball - Solinas

Here's an odd one.

Dodgeball is a social networking site built specifically for use on mobile phones. Users text their location to the service, which then notifies them of crushes, friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby.

Here's more on it from an article when Google bought Dodgeball a little over a year ago:

"The search giant has acquired Dodgeball.com, a free text-message service that lets users tell a list of their selected friends their location at any moment."

"A user "checks in" at a given location, sending his or her location information to other Dodgeball-using friends who happen to be within a 10-block radius."

"The terms of the deal were not disclosed when Dodgeball announced the deal Wednesday. Calls to Google were not returned."

"As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken Dodgeball about a far as we can alone," Dennis Crowley, founder of the New York-based text messaging service, wrote on the company's Web site."

"The brainchild of recent New York University graduates Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, Dodgeball also offers a "crush" service that allows users to contact five people whom they are interested in."

"When the crush walks within 10 blocks, they will be sent the user's location, a brief message saying who has a crush on them and a photo."

Google has apparently done nothing with this after the takeover. It'll be interesting how the technology will be used in the future.

Wikipedia's list of Google Services and Tools - Solinas

I've bookmarked this page. It's the page on Wikipedia that lists all of Google's services and tools.

This page seems to list everything - even the tougher to find things like Dodgeball and Writely. Most have links to other Wikipedia pages that details the history, features, Google acquisition, links to similar tools, and external links.

Google Patent List - Dan in Vancouver, Washington

Dan in Vancouver, Washington found this one. It's a list of all of the patents owned by Google.

For each (and there's a TON), you get the title, a brief description, and a link to the patent.

Browse it, and you can see some of what they are up to, or stuff they did, like:

Voice Interface for a search engine
Techniques For Inline Searching In An Instant Messenger Environment
Rendering Content-Targeted Ads With E-Mail

Google is grabbing IP like crazy. Check this out.

Thanks, Dan!

Free For All!

"Free For All" picks are hot, FREE items or services. It can be software, online services, you name it - but it's got to be free, with no strings attached.

JotSpot Family Site - Santa Rosa Steve

Santa Rosa Steve turned me on to JotSpot, a site giving you space for a free family website.

Here's how it works:

Sign up for a free site
Set up a family site in seconds
Invite your family
Everybody adds content

Some features:

blog
family calendar
create as many pages as you want

Looks cool. Check it out.

Thanks Steve!