There are two things that would not make me move anytime soon:

1. Google Apps. Unless Facebook let me use my own domain for mail, I will not use it seriously.
2. Priority Inbox. It has become a tool I cannot live without. I’m not particularly fond of Gmail’s web interface, but their Priority engine made it more than bearable.

That being said, it certainly cannot be ignored. It makes perfect sense. If and when you visit Facebook, you can check in on mail as well. They also have the opportunity to be very clever regarding the integration which could make it a winner. I will use it, just not in a professional capacity.

If I was Google, I’d be worried. This is one I’m looking forward to. Whether or not it will be executed properly, remains to be seen. I hope so. I really hope it won’t be a “oh, we just got to do it, so let us put something out there” job.

Two things on the side:

1. The owner of the domain Fmail.com is either going to get bullied or be able to make some money.
2. Is it going to look as bland as Facebook itself looks? We really need a funkier, uncluttered mail interface compared to Gmail. We can hope…

Ps: Facebook should look after their mail service. It would quickly be dubbed #failmail should there be problems…

The good news is that all is good on Afrigator now. All blogs that are using some form of Pubsubhubbub service will be realtime in no time.

If you’re running on WordPress (not WordPress.com) and you have not yet installed PuSHPress, please do so soon!

On the Mac and OS X Chrome does not disappoint one bit. It is as intuitive and nimble as we’ve grown accustomed to. I don’t know how it behaves on Windows, but it just feels so native and good in OS X. Well done Google. It is FAST! I hope the speed does not degrade over time, but the first couple of hours have been a noticeable speed improvement even compared to Safari.

Stability is key. If you consider that Firefox brings an entire system down if you have more than 10 tabs open at a time. (Okay, I may be exaggerating… but Firefox irks me these days!). Chrome does it well enough. I’m impressed so far. Funny, it loads a new helper for every tab open, so technically it should kill your system, but it just keep going and going. They did it properly, I assume.

If you’re used to Safari and its developer tools, Chrome would feel right at home. Since both are powered by Webkit it uses the same developer tools. Now, here I do miss Firebug, still, Firebug alone won’t make me forgive Firefox!

What also impress me is how intuitive the search functionality behaves. You won’t see a seperate search box like in other browsers. That is because you don’t need it. You simply enter your keywords in the address bar and it defaults to a Google search for your keywords. Very, very slick.

It has been a bloody long wait. I can honestly say, the last time I’ve been this excited about anything was after I installed Leopard. Unfortunately Slow Leopard was a big let down, but since I spend most my day in the browser, Chrome makes it great again! I hope I won’t have to retract most of what I’ve said here. Time will be the true test.

Go is not a scripting (a.k.a. interpreted) language, but a compiled language like C or C++. It looks very, very simple compared to C/C++ and according to them it was born from their frustrations with said languages. This has potential to become popular should they drive it sufficiently.

The syntax of Go looks like a mix of Python, C, Java and Pascal. Have a look at this:

package main

import (
    "os";
    "flag";  // command line option parser
)

var omitNewline = flag.Bool("n", false, "don't print final newline")

const (
    Space = " ";
    Newline = "\n";
)

func main() {
    flag.Parse();   // Scans the arg list and sets up flags
    var s string = "";
    for i := 0; i < flag.NArg(); i++ {
        if i > 0 {
            s += Space
        }
        s += flag.Arg(i)
    }
    if !*omitNewline {
        s += Newline
    }
    os.Stdout.WriteString(s);
}

I can say this: It looks friendly! I like the sugar.

Some of the features makes a lot of sense and I hope this will evolve successfully. Just look at the names behind this little experimental project and you’re bound to get excited! I’d love to know what C and C++ stalwarts think.

PS: Love the origin of the name:

“Ogle” would be a good name for a Go debugger.

I concur.

“It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be,”
and
“However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.”

If one thinks about it, it makes a lot of sense what Google is trying to do. It would (should?) be a far less complex system. The apps you’re used to use will live online and will be rendered and displayed using HTML5. It can be done. It is, IMHO, a good idea. Yes, connectivity and bandwidth issues plays a big role, but we all know thats the two things that is growing and not declining. I can see the potential and the practicality of it. I’m not convinced that it would be adopted on Enterprise level, but it would be something that could work for me and what I would use it for.

There are two things that bothers me:

1. Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome. – Techcrunch
Why would this be seen as a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft? C’mon Techcrunch, thats a bit sensational wouldn’t you agree? It would be YEARS before big corporates and Windows users would ditch their Microsoft investments for Chrome OS, so I do not think they are sweating yet. In fact, they have more than enough time to build a competitive product IF they are clever. I’m not so sure they are as clever as they are arrogant. Be a bit more realistic and less sensational, please!

2. Why is Google riding this Open Source wave with so much enthusiasm?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is absolutely fabulous, I’m just wondering “why”? Surely they have or at least can get the best of the best, no? So why make such a big deal about it? I’m not sure. I guess I should be thanking Google instead of questioning their motives, right? If they are so passionate about OSS then why not release everything? Why not Gmail, Google Search, Adsense/Adwords, Google Docs, etc? Maybe I’m just not thinking this strategy of theirs through properly. Maybe they simply don’t pay enough to rope in and retain the badass ninja coders. I cannot really say with conviction, but would love to know.

Kudos to André van Rooyen who saw this coming when the Chrome browser was released when I did not. I’m starting to see the light and catch his drift.

Sadly, I cannot say the same for everything else… I started reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and finished the first book, so I thought I’d go to the library and get me the second book in the series. I know where the library is, but wanted to check up to what time they are open on a Saturday. Not a problem! I’ll hit Bing.com and simply check. Typed in “Durbanville library” and…

…Mother of Mayhem! The first result is shocking! Well, I suppose it is good for my friends running Capestay.co.za, but it is not at all what I had in mind… Durbanville Accommodation – Highlands lodge. WTF?!

Google on the other hand produced it bang on target. Guess that proves you cannot abandon Google just yet.

Why? Why is it so great with technical searches and so utterly crap with everything else? I don’t know yet. They better sort this out quickly while people are still willing to look at them. It is hard convincing users to try again once they’ve made up their minds that it sucks. And they’re dangerously close at being labeled that way. Look at Cuill… People want a Google competitor, but do it right, for heavens sake, or not at all.

In fact, I’d go as far as saying it is pretty good. Yes, I’m not getting the same love for this blog from Bing as I do from Google. In Google I rank higher for certain terms than I do for the same terms in Bing. Now I’m not hung up on traffic like the SEO experts. I can imagine it would be a real issue for them. I honestly don’t mind or care.

I was a little taken aback when I searched for linux and rugby on Bing and it returned a bunch of results from Australia while I’m in South Africa. Not ideal. On a rugby front we’re not the biggest Aussie fans, you know! Ok, thats not too good…

Then I did searches for “python concurrent programming” on both Bing and Google. The results were almost virtually the same. Ok, so it is not all crap then for technology searches. I did a couple more and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was little or no differences. In fact, Bing returned more helpful stuff higher up than Google!

Then I hit pay dirt… I compiled Stackless Python and ran into some system issues. So I copied and pasted the error message into Google (like I would normally do) and nothing really helpful. So I tried Bing and BADA BING BADA BANG! Not one, but a couple of helpful results which solved my problem virtually immediately! Needless to say, I’m impressed… I could have been lucky, true. Thing is, I’m going to use it from now on for technical issues, since it helped me once and I hope it would help me again.

Forget all the fluff around Bing. By fluff I mean the related searches and funky video/images stuff. That is all superfluous bullshit. What Google gave the world was simple search that delivered reasonably good results. Until now, there was nothing that could really match Google. It pains me to say, but well done Microsoft.

I do shiver at the thought that Bing is powered by a bunch of Windows servers. That leaves horrible mental images… I tried to check what it runs on, but their headers don’t say, so I assume.

My initial thoughts were “Bloody hell! Brilliant! Just what the world needs. A long awaited email evolution!”. Then I started rationalizing my thoughts and it sunk in. Maybe it is not what we need… Then I got more confused as suddenly it didn’t look like email at all! Then even further, if this replaces email, I’m going offline since I cannot bear the thought of live email…

Yes, it makes sense. It is the next logical step, no? No. It is cool. It will probably get an uptake by early adopters. The determining factor will be how Google promotes and sell this. How they plan to get adoption. By the looks of things, they haven’t given it much thought. In fact, they were so scared of Microsoft’s Bing, they announced it completely prematurely.

Google said they’re releasing it later this year. They said the same of Chrome for Mac. Yet we wait… Open Sourcing it? Brilliant. We can all work for Google for free nowadays! Got to love that strategy. It is a strategy that gets my gears turning…

My current opinion? Bloatware

Internet users are increasingly looking for answers to their search questions, not just a list of sites in response to a query.

We’ve grown accustomed to knowing how to optimize our search queries, simply to get the best result. Then you have to deal with the overeager SEO experts who have optimized the least ideal sites for the highest result, resulting in frustration. Lets not go into that other than saying searching is not finding answers.

To find answers, the best place to go is probably a social network. You ask a question, you find answers or at least the best route to the answer. If the humans on the other end of the network don’t know, they normally know of someone who does.

This is what happened to me on Twitter the other day. I was looking into the Groovy programming language and although Google returned a myriad of absolutely great results, it was not a quick answer to my question. In fact, Google’s results raised much more questions for me, so you can understand my frustration :/ As if I need more questions :P Instead a friend of mine on Twitter @geniusboywonder said I should talk to @aslamkhn about Groovy and suddenly I’ve got immediate and relevant answers to my n00b, dumb questions without reading through tons of sites. Exactly what I was looking for! I’m happy.

The interesting part of all this is Google realizes that this is a trend in search behavior. Who could have ever thought that there would come a day when the almighty Google have to be concerned about their search product. Whether you think they are concerned or not, they did raise the issue, which indicates that they are taking it serious. It should be really interesting to see what they come up with :)