The Good NET Guide

Archive for December, 2009

Hold on to your hats, folks! It’s a doozy.

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Acer’s Aspire One officially gets a little spec bump

Pardon me, miss? I’d just like to tell you that I think your hat is fly.

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Unassuming cap sports hidden camcorder

It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our “TenYears” list.

We already did the biggest losers in the tech industry but why not talk about the biggest product flops? Here are a few of the biggest failures of the decade, starting with one monster release from a fairly well-known company.

Remember the last time Samsung went more than a few days without launching a new phone? Yeah, neither do we

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Rumor: Samsung Mobile to launch absolutely nothing at CES?

There’s no shortage of web-based interactive toolbars to choose from. This week, a new Israeli startup, Wibiya, is publicly launching its compelling web-based, customizable toolbar to publishers.

Wibiya’s toolbar for blogs and publishers integrated services, social media sites, applications and widgets. Everything is customizable, giving publishers the ability to add Facebook Connect, enabling Twitter alerts, and more fairly easily. The toolbar has a fairly in-depth integration with Twitter, Search, latest tweets, Tweets about each page and more. Publishers can also bring their Facebook Fan Page stream to the toolbar. Interestingly, Wibiya has an “app store” of sorts, where publishers can customize their bars with a variety of apps, including Google Translate, YouTube, games and more. Unfortunately the app store is limited with only 25 apps at the moment.

Wibiya also has deep integration with TinyChat, which lets publishers have their own video/text chat feature on their sites. As users login to chat, they can Tweet out the URL to the page they are in, helping publishers build traffic. Of course, Wibiya is still not as feature-rich as some of the other toolbars but it’s certainly off to a good start. But it’s a competitive space with Conduit, Meebo, MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others in the game.

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Last year ’s Satellite Radio Awards were a smashing success, so let’s do it again! Only this time I’m throwing out the idea of handing out awards to the whole of satellite radio (and these awards are obviously just for fun), and instead will focus my energies on the channel that I spend 99 percent of my time tuned into: XM Channel 202 The Virus. If It weren’t for 202 I would have killed my subscription some time ago.

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Recognizing XM Channel 202’s excellence, 2009 edition

Ever wonder what stories of 2009 the people of the Internet found most interesting? I can’t really help you there, but I can tell you which stories on MobileCrunch got the most pageviews. Now, you might assume that most of our popular stories involved the iPhone, but — well, actually, you’d be right.

The iPhone isn’t alone on the list, of course; Android makes a handful of appearances amongst our most popular stories, including one that I never would have seen coming.

Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>

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A few weeks ago we wrote about a mysterious Easter Egg on Google’s homepage that we dubbed The Google Countdown. After clicking the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no search query entered, the page would display a countdown timer ticking down the seconds until… something. A little trickery with our computer clocks revealed that the timer was counting down until January 1, 2010 at 12:00 AM (the New Year, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention). But nothing happened once to timer reached zero.

Today, Google has flipped the switch on its New Years surprise. No, it isn’t an amazing new free web service. Instead, it’s a cheesy digital fireworks display that overlays the classic Google homepage with multicolored stars and ‘Happy New Year’ banners dancing across the screen. I can’t help but be slightly let down, but then again, it’s only five more days until the rumored launch of the Nexus One. And it is kind of funny.

If you’d like to see the fireworks for yourself, head over to Google.com and adjust your computer clock to midnight (note that this could possibly mess up your Email or other programs). Hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no search query, then sit back and enjoy the show.

Thanks to Michel for the tip

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Good old John Gruber. While the rest of us are panting , he sits in the corner, calmly stroking his luxurious beard. He thinks the Tablet is real, the “leaks” and “mock-ups” aren’t real, all of his best sources say Apple’s best designers are incognito, and that Steve loves the project

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Gruber on the Tablet

Many bloggers take December 31 each year to do a recap of their year in blogging. Google is no exception.

The multi-billion dollar company has a post today patting itself on the back for a solid five years worth of blogging. More notably, they talk about how the amount they’re blogging has increased significantly over the years. In 2009, Google had 423 posts on the Google Blog, which is just one of dozens of blogs they run. That represents a 15 percent increase over 2008. They also note that just about 14.5 million people stopped by the blog this year, which is a 21 percent increase over the previous year. Make no mistake: Google is taking its blogging very seriously.

So what were Google’s most read posts this year? By far, their post about Chrome OS was read the most. Over 2.5 million people read it, and it contributed over 12 percent of their total unique page views. In second was the post about Google Wave. And in third was one about Google Voice. All of this makes sense as these are arguably Google’s three most potentially disruptive products. And these stats are also pretty much inline with what we saw at TechCrunch this year in terms popularity among posts about Google. (Though Nexus One is quickly catching up.)

Google also takes the time to note how committed they are to using Twitter. Since starting to tweet in February, Google has sent over 1,000 messages (almost all of which are self-promoting, like any good Twitter user). And while their account isn’t quite as popular as Lady Gaga’s (something which they bemoan), they do have about 2 million followers of their main account now. Oh, and they’ve set up some 75 other Twitter accounts for their various properties (they actually have a directory) — something which we poked fun at in July. Even CEO Eric Schmidt finally joined up.

But perhaps the most interesting stat that Google shares is that Twitter was the biggest non-Google referrer to its blog in 2009. Google notes that this is “a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.” That’s a nice big wet kiss to a company it was supposedly in talks about acquiring earlier this year.

Something else I’ve noticed about Google’s 2009 in blogging is that they’re actually getting better at it. It used to be that we would summarize company blog posts (which, naturally, I’m doing here) because they were awful at getting their point across. Or, as a colleague of mine who shall remain unnamed put it, “thanks for five years of cheesy headlines, meandering and grandiose ledes, and self-serving misinformation about openness.” But this year, it seems that Google (and a number of other companies) are getting better at using these in-house blog posts to announce things. And I’m all for that. Not having to re-explain something that’s already out there frees us up to do better posts as well, such as deeper analysis about what the companies are announcing.

That said, the point about Google’s self-serving posts remains an issue as we saw very recently. But not to worry, we’ll still be here to call BS on those posts when we see them.

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