Google

The cloud Webkit Google Chrome OS I just saw a facebook friend wall page: BTW, I applied too. So Google actually started his Google Chrome computer test program. There’s just one thing I don’t understand here. The iPad (I’ll buy the next version) is centered on the usage: Your read your mails, play and stay informed on your couch. Android is about making better phones to reduce the gaps between the iPhone and the stupid phone constructors OS. Desktop computers are here, well because we sometimes do have to work. ...

Dear Google Analytics, or dear blog readers (if any). I just read the google analytics stats of a site and noticed a totally new source of traffic: “Other”. What do you think it could be ? Somehow it reminded me this blog post of a graphic designer (who seems quite talented and very creative) :

I thought about this service as soon as Google released the Google Latitude service : “It would be great if they could save data so that we could see where we were at a specific time.” And I very quickly published some code to get my position (you could be tracking me right now with it). I thought they would never release the history saving feature as people would have feared for their privacy and things like that. But they did it. ...

Update 2011-06-25 A lot of people still contact me about this project. I received this mail today, just in case you’re getting interested by the project, you should know that it will die pretty soon: Dear PowerMeter User, We first launched Google PowerMeter as a Google.org project to raise awareness about the importance of giving people access to their energy information. Since our launch, there’s been more attention brought to this issue, and we’re excited that PowerMeter has helped demonstrate the importance of access to energy data. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would have liked, so we have decided to retire PowerMeter. ...

The browser I’ve always been on the Bêta version of Google Chrome. And the current bêta (soon to be stable I guess) now supports plugins, the most interesting ones are AdThwart which blocks ads and Gmail Checker which displays the number of received mails. Making some chrome extensions seems to be really easy, it’s entirely based on javascript. The other very interesting thing is the developper tools. They are very close to Firebug, it’s now really easy to debug JS and CSS within Chrome. ...

Google innovation chick, Marissa Mayer, says in her stanford show : Innovation: Not instant perfection. Launch early and often get to the market. Share everything you can: Information is KEY and powerful. You’re brilliant, we’re hiring: Hire generalists than can speak to all areas of your organization. Specialists create silos. A license to pursue your dreams: Give people a choice us to where they would like to invest their time and thinking. Ideas come from everywhere: The power of many wins. Don’t politic: Use data. Consensus of data wins not power or hierarchy. Creavity loves constraint: Stay in the sandbox and focus on direction/output. Users and usage are key: Money will follow. Don’t kill projects: Morph them. Adjust or tweak and more on. I really like what she says even if I don’t feel very concerned by the two last points. ...

The code to access your Google Latitude position is even simpler in PHP than it is in .Net : <?PHP header('Content-Type: text/plain'); $userId = '5616045291659744796'; if ( $_GET['user'] ) { if ( is_numeric( $_GET['user'] ) ) $userId = $_GET['user']; else exit('This isn\'t a valid user id.'); } $url = 'http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user='.$userId.'&type=json'; // We get the content $content = file_get_contents( $url ); // We convert the JSON to an object $json = json_decode( $content ); $coord = $json->features[0]->geometry->coordinates; $timeStamp = $json->features[0]->properties->timeStamp; if ( ! $coord ) exit('This user doesn\'t exist.'); $date = date( 'd/m/Y H:i:s', $timeStamp ); $lat = $coord[1]; $lon = $coord[0]; echo $date.' : '.$lat.' x '.$lon; ?> This program is available for testing here. It requires PHP 5.2.0 to run the json_decode method. ...

When I saw that Google Latitude now enables you to access your data by a JSON feed, I decided to make it communicate with a little GPS tracking project of mine. I’m really found of all these ways we now have to make anything communicate with anything. You can build interfaces from any system to any other system really easily. This code enables you to automatically get your GPS position (or the position of a friend) from your JSON Latitude feed. To be able to do that, you have to enable your KML/JSON feed. ...