Afterweb

Google took a big step from generic search to customized and personalized one with the announcement of Official Google Blog: Personalized Search for everyone . Do we like personal attention? Sure! What's the price? Privacy. Since technology is relying on tracking user behavior from cookies embedded by Google. Privacy advocates, I am sure, will be furious over the "big brother" watching every step and move. As for me, I think, privacy battle is lost for general Internet user. Those who care should be using anonymizer software and other tricks and tools. So what's next? I think - personalized recommendations. Google is sitting on the top of goldmine of ratings and reviews crawled from the Web, extracted and normalized from RDF and microformats ( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html ). And that will be a huge step for the giant - whoever can tinker with recommendations can control user buying behavior. And as you can guess, ho...

Even in this job market companies should be creative to attract star programmers: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/1246353621.html Great job hunting for great talent!

As an act of unprecedented generosity (or desperation) Google decided to give gPhone to every attendee of Google IO conference. While I can certainly applaud Google for the move (as a direct benefactors, of casue) a few red lights start to flash on my technology-navigation dashboard: 1. Does gPhone lost so much ground to iPhone (in terms of applications) that desperate and costly measures are required? 2. If (1) is true, users will flock to iPhone and whatever Google trying to do to mitigate the situation will fail – iPhone will remain dominate cell phone technology(like Windows in consumer OS market) for a long while 3. If (2) is true, open source approach once again has to yield to commercial interests Regardless of the Google motivating factors, the decision to give gPhones to Google conference attendees is flawed for a bunch reasons: - Google IO attendees are Google fans already, they know about gPhone platform - Conference attendees either write gPhone apps already or do not have ...

Thanks to the right star alignment and generous invitation from my co-worker I was lucky to be in the audience of the OnLive service announcement. After 7 years of secretly developing (can not imagine how anything related to game development could be hidden from public eyes and ears for so long), absolutely mind-blowing OnLive gaming service was finally announced today to the crowd of game developers. It is hard to believe that high-end gaming experience will be available soon for most of the mortals who have simple PC, MAC, or TV with a small adapter. Technology is, basically, high end game servers hosted in the data centers with low-latency compression boards and light-weight clients. Client could be either small (1Mb) browser plug-In on PC/MAC or game adapter for TV that connects to home-grade DSL/fiber/cable modem. Why OnLive is great? (at least on the demo, need to test myself at home): unprecedented performance approaching realism access to high-end games + games deve...