Finally I've had a chance to test Google's latest installment in the long-running series of half-baked betas, Google Chrome. Honestly, I will not rant in this post about how Google is taking over the web or whatnot, but I will ask a series of questions that I would like answered honestly and without any marketing gimmicks that are supposed to live up to Google's do-no-evil-we're-cute hype.

• Let's start with the license. A lot of people have noticed that the Google Chrome fine-print contains some really dodgy items (examples: CNet and read write web). The offending bit is this:

  11. Content license from you

  11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

  11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

  11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

  11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.

  Ominous, no? This prompted Google's Matt Cutts to "dispel" this conspiracy theory. He went right to the heart of Googleborg and got a straight answer:

  In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.

  Gee, Google, I didn't know we can pick and choose terms and conditions to apply to some products and not to others. That's just not the point of a license: either it applies as a whole or it doesn't. It says so in the terms and conditions themselves:

  20.2 The Terms constitute the whole legal agreement between you and Google and govern your use of the Services (but exclude any services that Google may provide to you under a separate written agreement) and completely replace any prior agreements between you and Google in relation to the Services.

  So please, stop playing around and provide the true license.

• While we're on the license: Chrome is Open Source, yet the license isn't. Why not use an OSI-approved license? Yes, even for the binary. Without this, you can't claim that Chrome is really open source. Unless...

• Suppose Chrome isn't open source. Suppose you can get the code but the binary comes (or will come) with lots of other gadgetry that Google approves of. Let's, oh, take an example of no way to block adverts. But it's open source! Well yes, it's open source if you care to download the code and know what to do with it. To the rest of us, the average Google user really, having access to the source code is irrlevant. So Google can bundle whatever it wants and no one will know the difference.

• Speaking of licenses and adverts: what is section 17 for?

• The interface: I don't like it personally but it's OK. It's like it doesn't want you to do anything - don't you dare find the Under The Hood options. Also, I find using the window's top frame as the tab bar to be very confusing and wrong on so many levels (the tabs are part of the window not *the* window!). The question here is: why? What logical argument places an interface element in the window border?

• Really, when does Chrome contact Google? Matt Cutts posted about this and also Twittered to a quick privacy review that gave Chrome a thumbs up. But let's quote Matt:

  If you are typing a search or url in the address bar, Google Chrome will talk to the current search service to try to offer useful query/url suggestions.

  Search suggestions are fine - great actually - because they help me search. Querying Google (the default search service) about URLs is off limits. Let's not mince words here: some URLs *are* private. What kinds? Flickr protected albums for one. To share a private album in Flickr, it creates a unique URL that you share with your friends. No one else knows it so it's a decent enough protection for this scenario. Why does Google want to know? And does Google log it? Will the data be magically incorporated into Google Website Trends or Analytics?

So until Google figures out its license, and until Google gives us straight answers, Chrome is uninstalled from my machine.

What do you think? Comments below please.

OK, Google, I've had it with your excessive stupidities. I'm talking about the monstrosity that's your AdSense login system.

I posted about this over on Cre8 back in February. The summary is this:

• I have an AdSense login, let's call it abc@xyz.com.

• When I logged in back in February, it said migrate your account. So I did, but, silly me, I didn't want to change my login address so I entered abc@xyz.com as my address. It worked... until the next time I logged in.

• Since then, so for the past 6 months, AdSense kept asking me to migrate my login, which I already did! Not only that, as the image below shows (from the Cre8 thread above), it has a message in the yellow box: The message says: "Are you one of the following people?" and the list below the answer is abc@xyz.com, which is the email address I just used to login.

• The answer to this question is yes, I am abc@xyz.com, and so I follow its request to "Return to AdSense" and login using abc@xyz.com. When I do that, I enter an endless loop: I login and I get shown this error.

• But there is - or was until earlier today - hope! See, I could skip this stupid wizard and continue to see today's crappy earnings. I've been skipping the wizard for the past 6 months. And today, they are forcing me to migrate my account.

• And here is the kicker: I cannot tell this stupid system that I want abc@xyz.com to be my new Google Accounts login for AdSense. Why should I have to create another account? Listen, Google, if you want to inflate your accounts count, I'd be very happy to create a few more for you. I even won't tell your stockholders if you don't.

• So I thought I'd ask for help. The link in the top right ends up here and I click through to Contacting AdSense, then to Do you have a customer support telephone number? which says "no" (surprised?) and suggests that I check out the AdSense Help Forum which 404s. Tada.

So let me say this as politely as possible: I find it disgusting that a company that creates products with such a crappy user experience is considered a leader in our industry.

Oh yes, finally a way to tell the algo-borgs at Google/Doubleclick and Yahoo! that they should not track your behavior to deliver "more relevant" ads. You do that by visiting a page on each of their websites and click a button which sets a cookie that tells the system to not track your behavior.

Google also links to another page from the Network Advertising Initiative which lists quite a few ad systems you can opt out of.

The pages are:

• Google's at http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
• Yahoo's at http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/details.html.
• The NAI's at http://networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.

While I'm at it, does anyone else find Yahoo!'s page to be much better than Google's? Think about the usability: it tells you if you've opted in or out and explains that it's per computer rather than per user (very important!!!). I'm just saying that as a landing page supposedly to help consumers, Google's is a mess compared to Yahoo!'s clean and to the point page. The NAI's is very good too.

Note: some details in this post have been skipped or generalized to be a bit vague to protect the identity of the Google Streeview driver.

Sometime in the past few weeks, I was walking with a friend when we spotted a very funny looking car. We both immediately knew what it was and as the car drove closer by, our suspicions were confirmed: it was a Google Streetview car outside London. Feeling naughty, I shouted at the car as it drove by something along the lines of "there are privacy laws" and to my surprise an old man across the streed did the same! It was very funny how both of us knew what a Streetview car looked like!

Then it hit me: the road we were on that the car was driving into was a dead end road. Picture time! So I dropped my stuff and asked my friend to watch them while I set up my phone and found a good spot to take some photos as the car drove back out again. So I watched as the car reached the end, did a U-turn and drove back out again. However, as it got close to me, the car pulled up into an empty parking spot and the driver came out. He shouted at me saying "I know you want to take pictures but I don't want to be in them." I obliged.

While taking the photos, I talked to the driver a little bit. Here are some details from the notes I scribbled afterwards:

• Google has a centre in Milton Keynes where this operation was based in. The drivers just showed up for "a driving job" (his words) and didn't know it was for Google until the arrived to pick up the cars.
• The drivers were given training to use the computers inside the car. It's not hard: it's a large-ish touch screen (I guessed about 17in or maybe a 19in when I saw it) with a record and a pause button.
• The screen is to the left of the driver in the passenger seat with a large server at the back in the trunk. The back seats of the car were removed - it was just a big space. The connections into the server were just power and ethernet. The ethernet seemed to be going up to the camera but I'm not sure if it ran to something else.
• The camera is rain sensitive. It collapses in a very funky way and has to be covered. The drivers are under strict instructions to do so.
• This particular driver was very sensitive to the privacy issues. He was having a personal conflict about the whole thing and was stopped by (his words) "10 people" that very day. Why? Because only recently had the BBC published an article about Google Streetview starting with Google's plans to launch a mapping tool in the UK could be referred to the Information Commissioner". No wonder the driver didn't want to be in the photo!

Now some photos of the car with notes:

The car from the front.

The car's camera. The hexagon Octagon at the top is I think is the camera set itself (so 6 8 cameras in total). The yellow box seems to be the communication/processing circuitry; the yellow box is on the back side of the car and so the white box thing at the right hand side of the image points towards the right of the car. This white box thing seems to swivel up and down but this is just a wild guess.

The car's camera kit as seen from the rear of the car. Just guessing what each bit is: Yello box at the top, as above. White boxes to the left and right are the (potentially) swiveling bits - could they be cameras? The yellow disk at the bottom: a wireless communications dish? It could be a GPS receiver.

Update: Looking through some of the other images I had after someone dropped a hint on GTalk to me, the white boxes under the hexagon of cameras are laser range finders. Sure enough, I have a photo that has a warning that it's a "Class 1 Laser".

Update 2: Thanks for all the comments. Yes I couldn't count: there are 8 cameras not 6; that's fixed now. Also, a lot of people wrote about the type of laser range finder and why you'd need it - see the comments below. Finally, lots of people noted a certain irony in the driver not wanting to be photographed. Point taken, but the guy was very conflicted about it. The BBC article was still in memory and clearly some people like me caused his some fuss on that day. He was talking a lot about wanting to quit this job. Deep down I think he did but of course I cannot know.

Update 3:Yes some rain droplets is visible in a photo. It wasn't raining while we were talking but it had rained earlier that day. When the driver parked, the camera hit some trees (you can see that in the photos) and the droplets are from the tree. It's hard rain that gets the equipment as I understand it, and that's when the drivers are supposed to cover up.

On twitter, I'm following someone who I cannot un-follow due to a bug in Twitter. Why? Because said person changed their settings I'm only giving updates to friends - I see the message "I'm only giving updates to friends.". Visiting the person's home page, I cannot see the Follow/Unfollow button because the interface only lets me ask the person to allow me to see his updates.

But I can easily see his updates.

Here is how: browse twitter using a mobile phone. Yes the mobile interface shows you these "private" updates but the web interface shows me the message "I'm only giving updates to friends.". I discovered this bug by accident while browsing using my mobile phone, but using a couple of extensions, you can pull off this trick in Firefox.

The screenshot below illustrates the bug. It's basically the mobile version and the full normal version of twitter side by side. The lines map corresponding updates, with the yellow/orange one highlighting the bug.

Download full sizes of the screenshots used to make the image above:

• Full size normal Twitter
• Full size mobile Twitter

I've filed a bug report with twitter.

Various reports of Google being down (including for me) here in the UK. It seems to be a few datacenters so it works some times but mostly not. Reports also talk about G Docs, Mail, and YouTube. Sometimes a redirect to google.co.uk works, but mostly even that fails. Some people can get to google.co.uk if they browse to that directly. I've been logged into GMail since last night and it works OK.

Seems to me that there is a DNS issue at play here in that if your browser requests a fresh IP resolution, it works, but the IP addresses fail. If your browser has an IP address cached it seems you're fine.

Reports:

• Summize, which is a live Twitter search engine: Search for [google down].
• Over at Cre8asite Forums, there is a discussion thread.

Anyone else seeing this?

A little context where this review is coming from: Given the recent, ummm, "uptime challenges" at Twitter (My profile: pierrefar), there was a massive flurry about another service called Plurk. So much was Twitter down and so many cool people moved over to Plurk that I joined the fun and set up an account.

A few days into this exodus of sorts, Brian asked who was still around on twitter, and I replied that I didn't like it so was still around. Surprised, Brian suggested I give Plurk a second chance and so I agreed. Plurk got a second look, and I promised Brian a review. This is the review.

In short: it's bad, and not only that, I think they won't make it as a company with the product with its current interface. Here is why.

What is Plurk?

Plurk is a service for engaging in conversations with other people. It is centered around a timeline, a very cool looking scrolling interface that maps conversations as points on the timeline. The conversations start with someone posting some text and the replies come in attached to the original reply. A screenshot is below:

The timeline's 'now' is at the left, and the past is going to the right. When you're browsing past conversations, you scroll left to go to later ('future') posts. At first pass, this is very counter-intuitive: for some reason I expect the future to be to the right and you go back in time by scrolling left - i.e., the reverse of the Plurk arrangement. I've seen other comments along those lines but I can't for the life of me find them. However, this is the best arrangement for a timeline written in English, and Plurk either are genius designers or extremely lucky people. Why? English is written left to right and so as you scroll the first thing you see of a new conversation is the starter's name and the first few words in the sentence of the conversation. If you were scrolling right to left, you would actually see the last few words in the conversation's start's sentence. The Plurk arrangement works much better.

The conversations themselves are shown as little rectangles. You click on the rectangle and it expands to show the full conversation and replies. The layout is a forum thread layout with avatars, usernames, time stamps, and icons. The rectangles are placed along the time line in relation to when the started, and plotted at randomly in the vertical position.

Plurk also has karma, that eternal currency of Web 2.0. The more you use Plurk (start conversations) and the more people you invite, the more karma you get. And the more karma you have the more icons you get. However, if you don't use Plurk for a day, the karma starts dropping. I peaked at 20+ karma about 2 weeks ago and now I'm under 8 karma. It's an interesting twist to an age-old way to foster user engagement.

Why is Plurk Bad?

Plurk is a bad service because the timeline arrangement is the worst implementation to show conversations. There is absolutely no need to have conversations plotted in a timeline. A simpler listing (the extreme of which is a forum-index type of listing) would do much better. Right now, the timeline mars the usability relating to the fact that Plurk is about conversations and not microblogging like Twitter is. It's a gimmick and an annoying one for that.

To know just how annoying this is, try not going to Plurk for a few days and come back. Heck, go to sleep and check it in the morning: you'll have dozens of conversations that have either been started or updated and you can't just seem them and quickly browse them. No, you have to scroll, click each one to expand it, and then read. And there isn't any obvious way to see which conversations were ones you engaged in previously to see if there are any new replies. Nope, they're all lumped together. Raise your hand if you simply just gave up and marked all conversations as read because you just can't be bothered.

And what's with the karma loss? Listen, I try to have a life outside the internet and certainly won't center my life around Plurk. If I don't visit for a day or two, I should not feel like I'm being punished. This is the first time I see anyone implement a karma loss over time idea. Karma should only be deducted if other members of the community feel that way, and even then, it should be implemented carefully - there is no easy answer for this question, but Plurk's implementation is definitely wrong.

Finally, a pet peeve from a marketing point of view: I get an email every time someone wants to follow me so that I can authorize them. Ummm, I love it for people to follow me and they shouldn't ask permission. They should come and go as they please. Twitter called it spot on: people follow you and stop following without intervention, but there are two options: you can lock your conversations or you can use direct messages which are private. That covers pretty much all shades of having an open to private conversation. Having a single blanket permission system by default is weird.

So all in all, a very crappy implementation of a potentially good idea. I've written it off for now but I'm sure my network of friends on Twitter and elsewhere will let me know if things improve or not.

Yes, that's right folks. Step right up. We have a new buzzword to hide the fact that we're scraping content and sending trackbacks to the original content. The new word is... Linkosphere.

So, pray do tell us Pierre, where would you come up with such a silly name? Why I'm glad you asked. It's the service that's been spamming me blog for the past few months, hosted at the one and only ectio dot us. See, them scrapers have a serious claim: "Find something to read, guaranteed!" I believe them given all the scraping they're doing.

And thus because I am in the mood to return them the favo(u)r, I hereby declare them the prototypical scraposphere service. Beat that!

The screenshot below is from my AdSense account. It seems I have reached the pinnacle of optimization as no new optimization suggestions have been recommended since February.

Is this a bug or account specific? Each of the reports I see are different.

That's right folks. Today I decided to actually do something about my Twitter account. Follow me at pierrefar.

The question is *what* will I do with the account? It may be a few days before I dive in properly See you @twitter

Hint: Look at the source code...

Seriously folks, why isn't Google's adopted child, the Apple's iPhone, not part of the Open Handset Alliance. And Microsoft?

Anyone want to take bets that MS and Apple create their own alliance? That would be fun.

Today is a great day to be... not Google. As someone who's spoken out many times against Google and its practices, I'm very happy today. This is not a simple ranting post, so please bear with me as I explain away the smile. Two reasons to be smiling:

• Google slapped their most vocal supporters in the face. Actually, they kicked them in the groin and when they went down, Google took a big stick and hit them on the head. Yes, it's the PR "downdate" (getit?) of today. I'll explain why this is a stupid move (if it's not a glitch).
• Google lost out to Microsoft today. Ironically, it just proves that as prying as Google wants to be by targeting ads to users, there are others willing to be even more 'evil' (for the lack of a more descriptive word). It really does seem that old-skool pre-Web companies may still be able to teach G a thing or two.

First the PR update. There is no evidence to suggest that this is due to link selling. There is no evidence to suggest it's a vandetta against people who've spoken against Big G. It could be a glitch, but my favorite theory: ALL toolbar PR will drop to zero. Why? The publicly visible PR has always been a thorn in Google's back: everyone watches it, people use it to assert authority, people try to manipulate it, and worst of all, it created a market because it's in a finite supply.

I also think the visible PR kick-started a mentality of not linking. When it started, it was "I don't want PR to leak" and so people said "leak it for $$$". People saw that this was working well as a money source and worth it as an investment for both traffic, PR, and rankings. So Google responded, half-heartedly, by delaying the publication of the true PR but a few months. That was annoying but it worked. What it also meant that on some (most?) valuable sites, getting a link was virtually impossible without forking over some cash.

Next came the mangling of nofollow. It first started as this innocent anti-spam measure. Yeah, right. As if that was ever going to deter spammers (just ask the email spam filter companies). If anything, that made spammers get more creative and we're still happily getting spammed. So now we had this kinda useless tool until some genius figured it out: it can manage the flow of PR in a site. Heck, I can now even link out to other sites I wouldn't have because I can tell Google to ignore the link. Think about that: I am actively linking to a website while at the same time sending a message to Google that I don't trust said site. Hypocrisy at it's finest, all thanks to Google.

As you can imagine, this is not a stable situation. Eventually, a drastic measure would be needed to fix it. The most obvious one? Kill the visible PR. Take out the symptoms and the disease. What happens if you make all PR in the world zero? It will become useless. You take away the commodity that's being traded. And hopefully, you'll save the net from the mess you created by freeing people about worries of linking to each other again. The corollary to that is nuking nofollow, which I honestly believe is also required. However, let me be the first to note there is no evidence of this happening. None.

So let us for a moment assume that today's PR update (which hit eKstreme.com, by the way) is not a glitch. Let's assume it's a planned move, which would include a PR algo update. What does it mean?

• One possibility is that all PR is going down to zero, as I think it eventually will. Only time will tell if this is true or not.
• Another possibility is that Google is penalizing people, either with a biased algo update or with manual intervention. If so, why on Earth hit the people who speak about the company the most? In all markets, especially techie ones, there is an adoption curve: there are the pioneers who are the most addicted to your product, who will speak about you in holy terms, and who will infect everyone around them to use your product. Successful startups sell to these people first, and established companies make sure these guys and gals are happy. Keep this free loud-speaker marketing channel happy, and you'll be happy. Google just made this group of people unhappy. Google has stepped over the line. People are furious. Google will pay. How? We will start seeing Google for what it really is: an ad agency out to make a buck - a boring company! - not some "not evil" librarian out to index the world. This is the first step to people switching away from Google. This is the first step to Google losing its grip. And you know what? The competition would be willing to take on these refugees.

Anyway, I've rambled on this too much. On to the Google-Microsoft-Facebook love triangle.

Microsoft was always the most likely winner since they already had a partnership with Facebook. As TechCrunch put it, it is the path of least resistance. Also, we should note that this was never about the money: it's a political win and a winning of mindshare. Also, whoever won would officially become the most spying, prying, ad agency on the web - in the world! Google's stated goal is to target advertising based on search history and other personal data. They call it 'personalization'. Everyone kicked up a fuss about how naughty this is, so much so, that when Google wanted to buy DoubleClick, the cries became louder: Google has too much creepy oversight over us.

Still, whatever info Google had, it's nothing compared to what Facebook has - in relation, Google's knowledge of me is harmless compared to what I have in my FB profile. Imagine an ad agency: would you like to target 25-30 year old males in a relationship with a woman and having liberal political and religious views? Facebook will say "Sure! We got some of those!" Google has nothing to say about that.

The level of targeting can be ridiculous: wanna target people who may have missed someone's birthday? How about those who were recently in a relationship but are not anymore? What about those who just entered a relationship? How about accurate geotargeting? All this info and much more is readily available through Facebook, and now Microsoft has access.

So all in all, it's an exciting and eventful day, but looking at the potential privacy worries, it doesn't bode well for the future. Whatever happens, today is very likely to go down in history as a turning point for both Google and Microsoft.

While I'm rambling, I'll finish with some predictions:

• Facebook is already the home page for many people. They will add web search from Microsoft. Ooops.
• Google will fight back with some serious innovation in AdWords. This will be good for the advertisers but not so good for users.
• Google will win the EU antitrust hearts and be cleared to buy DoubleClick. All they need to do is point at the MS-FB deal.
• MS now has Digg and Facebook. Who's next? Federated Media (the ad agency) comes to mind.

All thoughts welcome below

The NY Times has just announced that Google has acquired a strategic stake in NASA. Described as a "partnership of equals", the move sees Google paying $1.3 million a year to NASA. In exchange, Google founders Page and Brin get to park their private jet on a federally managed airfield 4 miles down the road, as clearly shown by the map below:

View Larger Map

In return, NASA gets three new airplanes to help its non-existent fleet of air-borne experimental platforms. Additionally, it was confirmed that all future NASA missions will be powered by Google Sky, Google Moon, and others. NASA's JPL will be tranformed into a real-time PageRank calculation datacenter.

So Donna tagged me with the task of listing the people I would choose for my crack team of SEOs. The point is to list up to 7 people. Team building is a great exercise to make you really think about mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive skills and personalities you think can work well together. So in no particular order...

• Aaron Wall and Michael Gray for their unrelenting accurate reporting of Google's hypocrisy and arrogance. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm 100% in agreement with them. Of course, no one could wish for better SEOs on the team than both of these gents.
• John Mueller: a very smart guy who recently sold his soul to the devil joined Google. He's an expert experimenter with a true passion to figure out the SEs. In life you don't need to know everything, but you do need to know how to figure things out.
• Matt Webb. Generally expert SEO and smart guy. He likes Linux a lot, so would useful for his server admin skills.
• Kim Krause Berg for the ultimate resource in website usability.
• Chris Winfield as he knows social media inside out.
• Finally, we need some advnaced/darker-than-white SEO tactics. Eli from Blue Hat SEO wins on this front. Why Eli? For generously sharing and explaining in simple terms some clever tactics. Very useful for new-commers.

And this completes the seven. If I had more space, there are a few others I'd like to have join up . So now I get to tag some folks, so come on Kim, John, and Chris.

I just found my invite to the new BBC iPlayer beta service. I got very excited to (finally!) be part of a major piece of online video history and man oh man is it bad. It's so bad, it makes Windows 3.11 look awesome.

Just how bad? Let's start at the top.

• I copied over the link to a new Firefox tab and it asked for my log in details. It uses standard HTTP authentication, so I got a modal window that I cannot make go away interfering with me. Why do I want it to go away? Because I want to copy my username and password. Just so you understand why this is necessary, my username is FBArbkNad (actually, I changed one letter only for security, but that's pretty much it). What kind of username is that? They can at least use the email address as a username. I notice that in the top right hand corner, it has a 'sign in' link. Surely it knows I've signed in, no?
• Fine, I manage to login after a copy/paste shuffle with notepad. Great interface. Very shiny, very sleek, a piece of art. Well done on that front. Browsing through, I picked a program at random and I was offered a download link. I click that, and errr, ummm, an error message. Remember Firefox? Yeah, it's not supported. The service requires Windows XP and IE and Windows Media Player. I scored 2 out of 3.
• Fine. Sheesh, I'll load up IE. Again, copy/paste the URL and neatly, I was browsing at the correct page. At least the URLs are emailable as they point to the correct episode pages. So I click download and it asks me to login again. It's a different server (download.bbc.co.uk instead of www.bbc.co.uk) and it's a setup file. Fair enough, a player is needed. Save it and install it.
• True to any bad installer, it tried to register something for startup in the registry. No, thank you (but thank you Spybot S&D), just run. When the player opened, it tried to register the same thing again. Does this remind you of RealPlayer and why it's so hated? To make it worse, the name of the file it's trying to register is "koh", making it completely obscure that it's related to the BBC iPlayer. Rename the file, willya? As my friends' resident geek, I get to deal with a lot of spyware and adware. You could at least help me by naming the files properly.
• Hey, the player works. Very informatively, it tells me that my library is empty (remember, I asked to download a specific episode). Handily, it offers a link to the iPlayer home. Click that and a new IE7 starts. Now I'm angry: it refused to let me download the player from Firefox only for the player to turn around and start a new IE window? Why can't the player be downloadable from any Windows browser (it is Windows only as far as I can tell...) and then open as many IE windows as possible. This is very bad usability, not to mention annoying.
• So now I'm on my third tab of the iPlayer website (the Firefox one, my IE one, and the iPlayer-started one). Fine. Just let me see a stupid episode. I browse around and click one at random... Oh, I need to log in again. Oh flippin' 'eck. I copy and paste the username and password again... and it says my password is too short. Umm... it your freaking password!

So I give up and decide to write this rant review. Honestly. I've seen alpha software that's better quality than this. Sorry Beeb. I love you, I love your site, but the iPlayer is broken.

Technorati Tags: BBC iPlayer

Time Magazine published a nice article by Bill Tancer (of Hitwise fame) talking about the top 10000 keywords searched for that contain the word 'free' like [free games] or [free myspace layouts]. The analysis is very interesting for anyone into keyword research but amusingly, he found that no one is searching for [free lunch].

It's not long, and well worth a read.

Technorati Tags: hitwise, free, keyword research

A press release just made public covering research by Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology. It's a very succinct write-up, so I'll just quote bits of it:

Researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.

The whole premise of the press release is that this observation is the result of brand power for both Google and Yahoo!. It's an interesting observation, and certainly makes sense, but I'm still not 100% convinced. The sample size is too small and as the researchers noted, "many of the participants said they used Google to search". The very next thing they need to try is to recruit MSN/Live users to do the experiment. If their hypothesis is true, the MSN/Live users would rate MSN's results top.

Regardless, an interesting note that could explain a lot of the momentum behind the top SEs.

Technorati Tags: search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, research

This is NOT a paid review. I say this because I've done paid reviews before here.

I managed to get a Joost invite from Last 100, giving me a chance to review what the fuss is all about.

What is Joost? To quote their website:

The new way of watching TV

All the things you love about TV, fused with the interactive power of the internet – just the way you want it. Enjoy the ride!

...which doesn't say much. Really, it's a P2P based TV channels distribution network. Think Kazaa but instead of delivering MP3 files, it's actually streaming video. Very neat way to solve the technical problem of serving huge amounts of content.

Does it work? Well, sort of. The picture quality is on the low end of what you can achieve with TV. It obviously uses up a ton of bandwidth on your end, and so it's very sensitive your connection settings. On a wireless broadband here in the UK, it worked acceptably well, but it was definitely choppy at times, and the sound quality suffered. Interestingly, the video would keep running but the sound would grable or jump. I'm guessing that perhaps the Joost software gives higher priority to the video stream (if video and audio are actually split). Also, when a new channel starts playing, the quality is terrible but quickly moves up to good.

Also, the software is very - let me say this again, VERY - demanding. On my dual-core 1.8GHz computer, the whole computer seemed to slow down. The mouse would jump, the screen would take a while to refresh and all other symptoms of high CPU usage. Task manager showed that Joost is using 60% of the CPU all the time.

Content-wise, it's a bit thin, at least for what I'm interested in. Randomly channel surfing, I came across some kind of UK users generated record breaking channel where ordinary folks decided to break world records. I decided it was not good after watching the first segment featuring five men on all fours racing like greyhounds, on a dog race track, chasing the same rabbit the dogs usually chase. Thank you, but YouTube is already filled with such crap. However, this seems to have triggered a bug because everything I would watch afterwards was a repeating cycle of ads: a car, HP, then Nike, then Intel, then back to the car advert and repeat.

The interface is also a bit... mysterious. Lots of buttons and animations but you really have to hover over everything to figure out what it really does. Coupled to the general slow-down I mentioned earlier, I routinely double clicked everything early on because I thought my first click didn't register. The interface looks like it was designed in Flash. However, the controls are small enough not to distract too much from the actual content, a major plus.

By default, Joost wants to run in full-screen mode, and some features demand full-screen functionality. I don't know why it is so picky, but at least you can watch in a window and snap in and out of full screen occasionally. I wouldn't watch full screen given the low quality video.

So big picture: is it a Good Thing? Yes. For all its technological and user experience shortcomings, Joost will undoubtedly grow to be a major force in online video. If they decide to allow ANYONE to broadcast content (like YouTube), then they really could change the game. Can you imagine stringing a bunch of video blogs and creating a channel? THAT would be awesome - your own personalized channel. They would need an API to simplify subscriptions and easy manipulation of channels, but it's not much of a jump given what they've already done.

So: watch this space (if you'll excuse the pun).

Finally: if anyone wants Joost invites, drop a comment below and I'll send one to your email address. I have to do the invites manually, one at a time, so if a lot of people ask, please be patient :).

Technorati Tags: joost, online video, youtube

I saw it on the Internet. It must be true.

So Michael tagged me with the latest meme going around: taking a nerd test to get a score (of course). And my score? Let me use the test's words: "I am nerdier than 92% of all people.". That's right folks, I know my periodic table inside out and can recognize photos of great scientists who passed away hundreds of years ago. I even get a badge:

Apparently, this beats the highest score Michael knows about. If you'll excuse me, I need to go have a walk or something.

So now I get to choose some people to have a go at beating me. Let's hear it for:

• Joe
• Sophie (wonder if switching to a mac has affected her)
• Kim