Work Smart

I’ve been explaining this to people over and over again and I reached the point where I just want to point them to a web page to read through before we can talk some more about it :p

So here it is, in a nutshell, the whole deal about Google and Facebook competing to hire the best engineers and develop the ultimate social network. This is also the deal about Google Buzz, Google Wave and Google whatever other products they pimp these days… including personalized search and maps.

What Facebook and Google want, is to get as much personal information as they can to better profile you as a consumer.

Ideally, they’ll try to do that by looking good. For example: they don’t really push you to volunteer info about your age, place of residence, etc. Instead they merely let you share your thoughts about getting married, or going on vacation, or buying a new car, or considering a new diet, or what not with your friends… but don’t kid yourself, all these status updates, they are basically strings of very meaningful keywords… and they are being analyzed! Right Now!

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Remember when DSL internet access started to come with unlimited data transfer plans? This is when everyone started using for the web for all kinds of things: this is when people actually started surfing the web!

The reason behind that is that flat rate removed the dis-incentive to surfing we had when every page we loaded added up on our bill!

The exact thing is now happening with the mobile web. Mosts carriers are now offering unlimited data plans... well at least in the US. Combine that with browsers that are actually usable like the one on the iPhone and we've got everything we need for the mobile web to thrive.

I for one, have been using the internet on the iPhone like crazy since I got it. Everytime I stand in line somewhere, I get a little netfix ;) Don't you?

Interestingly enough though, I use connected iPhone apps just as much as the actual web browser. It doesn't change the cause though: without flat rate pricing I wouldn't use any of this.

Now the interesting thing with the apps compared to standard web pages is this: it's a new business model for the mobile web! Even if it's poised to become a nightmare when trying to support more platforms than just the iphone... (

Btw, the iPhone is the most used mobile web browser, but do you know who's #2? No it's not the BlackBerry! It's the Motorola RAZR...

Everybody's talking about Apple's release of their Safari web browser for Windows.

And everybody's speculating about how Apple needs to convince Windows developers to make their sites iPhone compatible (the iPhone includes Safari) or how Apple wants to extend towards the PC users...

Oh please!

Come on! There is one single reason above any other for Apple to release Safari on Windows: Google gives them a commission each time they send someone to Google through the embedded search box!

Firefox is making millions by sending eyeballs to Google (and their ads). Why wouldn't Apple? Especially since it can't hurt them...

Or... can it hurt them? Hackers suddenly finding vulnerabilities in Safari...

Google.be 28-sept-06

Everybody’s been saying lots of things about the Google.be case, especially that the Belgian newspapers should have used robots.txt to tell Google what not to index. And that the fact they did not use robots.txt clearly show all they were interested is in getting money from Google…

Well, friends, I’m no lawyer or legal expert of any kind, but I’m French… and that lets me read and “almost” understand the terms of the ruling… I guess…

I think the ruling makes it pretty clear what the Belgian newspapers want, and I think this has been mistunderstood:

• The papers welcome Google to index and display their news as part of Google News! (or at least they don’t care)
• The papers’ particular online business model is that news are free, but access to archives require payments. Example here.
• Once an article falls out of the news category and into the archives category, it should not be freely accessible any more.
• Google, via its world (in)famous Google Cache, often makes the content available forever, or at least for a very long time after is has gone off the official site’s free area.

I guess that’s it: what the Beligian paper really want is a way to get the content out of Google News once it is no news any more.

Now, I’m no robots.txt or Googlebot expert either, but from what I understand there was no convenient way for the papers to tell Google that it is okay to index some content for, let’s say 2 months, but not keep it in cache after that delay.

Goggle made some general comments on the case on their blog, but:

• They are not allowed to comment specifically on the ruling, so it’s not that useful;
• They failed to show up at the trial, which is quite unbelievable… but would make it almost believable they fail to understand the real issue that has been raised… :roll:

Note: again, I’m no legal expert. Just trying to make a little sense of all this noise…

"If your page is just for you, and it's useless and bad, but you like it, that's fine. Keep it at http://localhost. It'll load faster."

-Unknown