Tag: Google

Gmail glitch – an example to follow

Once again Google demonstrates the proper way to handle issues.  Due to their software update, some users temporary lost access to emails.  Instead of hiding and silencing, Google published a blog post explaining the issue, as well where and when more information would be available.  Not to mention that loss of service is an extremely rare occasion, and loss of data is even more so.  This time, it seems, all data is recoverable from tape backups.  All it takes is a little time.

Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we’re making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.

In times like that, keeping your users up to date is vital.  All the press releases and marketing newsletters in the world won’t buy you a fraction of the trust that a simple blog post during the downtime will bring you.

Google TV is coming along

Google TV website is launched.  As is the official Google TV blog.  Not too much to see there yet, but it’s good to know things are moving along.

I am excited!  An open source television platform based on Android, with its own application store – these are just great news.  Not to mention partnerships with HBO, Universal, Amazon, and Netflix.  It sounds like there is going to be a lot of content and plenty of new interesting ideas on what to do with it and how to process it.

The only thing that worries me is access to this content for us, outsiders.  As in people who live outside of the United States of America.  Until now we’ve been quite limited with the exception of Apple TV.  I wonder what’s going to happen with Google.  But given company’s global strategy, I have my hopes.

Via Download Squad.

On technology revolution

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, on technology revolution:

“There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” Schmidt said, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing…People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.”

I’ve spent a lot of time with non-technical people lately.  People from different industries – shipping, real estates, and even music recording.  Most of these people are just getting into the whole technology thing.  Sure, they use Google to search the web.  But that’s not what I am talking about.  They are just getting started with using technology for their business.  And most of them are so far behind, that paper seems to them like the only working solution.

Talking to these people, there is a whole variety of subjects that have to be explained to them.  Even aside from technology.  Things like data consistency, workload scalability, process automation, backups, security, and more.  Consider for example a website.  Most of these people see a website with 5-10 pages to be an huge amount of work.  It’s almost like they need to hire a separate person to handle that.  For most of them, the fact that I have a personal blog with more than 4,000 articles in it, is mind-blowing.

When they are introduced to online tools for handling emails, documents, accounting, or project management, most of them need to pause for a couple of weeks, to process the information overload.  When they hear that blog posts and social media are more effective ways to communicate than press releases, they feel shaken, lost, and scared.  When they realize that most of the things they’ve learned in college are not too practical anymore, they get really stressed.

And these are people who are already familiar with Google search.  I know that there are layers and layers of people behind them, who have no knowledge of computers at all.  And those people will get online soon.  And they will need to change the way they think and the way they work.  And I have to agree with Eric Schmidt here, that most of those people are not ready yet.

But I think it will happen anyway.

Google services via command line

I don’t know how I missed the announcement and why there is no noise around this release, but here it goes.  GoogleCL is a tool that you use from the command line to access Google web services.  I just installed it on my Fedora 13 laptop and its awesome!

Here is what you need to do to intall

$ sudo yum install python-gdata
$ wget http://googlecl.googlecode.com/files/googlecl-0.9.7.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf googlecl-0.9.7.tar.gz
$ cd googlecl-0.9.7
$ sudo python setup.py install

Here are some of the things that you can do.  And I guess more is coming shortly.

The first time you’ll connect to any of the Google web services using this tool, you’ll need to authenticate and grant access to the application.  After that – it’s all pure honey.