Today Google announced its long-ignored RSS app Google Reader is getting an update. Most notably, it’s getting a fresh new design along the same lines as Google’s other products, like Docs, Maps, Search and Gmail. While I’m not entirely thrilled about this change (I prefer the utilitarian look for the service), I understand Google’s need to maintain user interface consistency across its online products. What really bothers me, however, is Google’s casual decision to remove all of Google Reader’s “social” features, including friending, following and shared link blogs. Look, I get that there’s probably only ten of you out there reading this who care much about changes to Google Reader. For mainstream news consumers, that Google is now streamlining and beautifying this neglected product is probably welcome news. But for those of us who use Google Reader regularly as a utility – as a place to track, follow, archive and search dozens of sources of information from favorite blogs to company feeds and more – any change to Reader has the equivalent impact as an overhaul of Gmail. In other words, proceed carefully or prepare for an earful. And in this particular case, here comes the earful: I’m going to miss the “social” features Google Reader delivers. Wait, don’t laugh! To be clear, I don’t really consider or use Google Reader as “social” product like Facebook, Twitter or Google+ (hence the quotes). I don’t comment much on feeds, or friend and follow dozens of users. But I do enjoy reading the shares from a select group of heavy-duty RSS consumers who are consistently sharing interesting items. When I’m behind on the day’s news, all I have to do is read TechCrunch, TechMeme and this carefully constructed “human curated” list of shares. It is, and will be up until the day it disappears, one of the most regular and enjoyable news consumption behaviors I engage in every day. Although there are many other services out there that promise to bubble up relevant content based on my interests, the best product I’ve used to date was the human curation of my Google Reader friends. Not only did my group consistently share the top tech news I’d want to read, they also share those oddball but interesting stories from outside of tech, including humorous cartoons, popular videos, space and science news, parenting tips and other news completely unrelated to tech, but still compelling. Of course, there were probably only a handful of us really using this feature, so of course, like all those other services Google is shutting down, it’s getting axed too. But Google, if you think I’m going to “Circle” this group in order to continue reading their shares, you’ve got another thing coming. You can’t force me into using Google+ by stealing pieces of Google Reader. That’s not how that’s going to work.
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Posted to google.com
Google Reader Getting Overhauled, Removing Your Friends
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/NJ4pTmrEXts/
October 20 2011, 9:38pm | Comments »
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Posted to google.com
Google Maps For Android Now Lets You Download Maps For Offline Viewing (Hallelujah!)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/sX8tj4_Rsqo/
No matter which side of the smartphone wars you’ve landed on, it’s hard to deny that Android’s Maps application blows iOS’s out of the water. And this week it’s getting even better. Yesterday Google highlighted a new feature that’s super handy for anyone who uses above-ground public transportation on a regular basis: turn-by-turn navigation for transit, which helps make sure you never get off at the wrong bus stop. And they’ve just pointed out another great addition that I’ve been yearning for for ages. Say hello to offline maps, thanks to a new feature in labs called Download Map Area. To activate the feature, you’ll first have to visit the Labs section of the Maps application, which you can access using the Menu button. Enable the Download Map Area option, and from then on when you browse to a Place page and hit the ‘More’ button, you’ll see an option to locally store a map of the surrounding area. And it’s a big surrounding area — Google will download local copies of the map tiles within a 10 mile radius of that venue. Which means that you can easily download the entirety of SF or Manhattan in a single tap (the download itself took about a minute for me over a Wifi connection). Then, next time you fire up a map but don’t have a data connection, you’ll still be able to pan and zoom around the city all you’d like. The feature is made possible by the fact that Google Maps on Android uses a vector-based system for displaying map tiles, rather than the older image-based system (which is what the iOS version of Maps still uses). The vector-based tiles use much less data (around 1/100th), which means they are quicker to download and can be stored locally without using too much storage space. Google Maps for Android has actually been caching mapping data automatically for some time now — the difference this ‘download maps’ feature brings is that it lets users explicitly choose which areas to store locally. It’s a great start, but it’s still clearly a work in progress. You can’t look up transit maps while you’re offline, and you can’t run search queries for venues and addresses that appear in the map areas you’ve downloaded. But these are pretty obvious features, so hopefully they’re in the pipe.
July 7 2011, 4:24pm | Comments »
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Posted to google.com
Did /dev/fort Just Hand Over Astronaut Listening Data To The WWW?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Sn3297SibW4/
Everyone is rightly very excited about the upcoming mega-hackathon at Disrupt New York. At last count, the event will host around four hundred billion hackers, working on some eighty five trillion projects. Luckily, as at all TechCrunch events, there’ll be rock-solid wifi and wired Internet for all those billions of people to use. And yet… on the other side of the Atlantic, a merry band of hackers is providing that you don’t need to attend a record-breakingly-large hackthon to produce a seriously cool app. In fact, you don’t even need Internet access. /dev/fort is the brainchild of London-based developers James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis – and provides an answer to the age-old question: what happens when a bunch of developers and designers lock themselves away in a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney, without Internet access, and decide to build a cool app. As attendee Hannah Donovan explains.… “…[there's] no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you’ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set.” (If Donovan’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because she used to be Creative Director at Last.fm. In fact, the most recent /dev/fort was like a Last.fm reunion camp, with former Systems Architect Russ Garrett and ex-Head of Web Product Matt Ogle also in attendance.) The result: Spacelog, which hacks the original transcripts of early space missions to tell the stories of Vostok 1, Mercury 6, Apollos 11 and 13 – and more – as they happened. Each transcript is broken down into (ahem) small steps for man-ageability, and also sorted into timelines and phases so readers can follow each mission in, effectively, real time. It’s as if Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin et al were on Twitter. Or actually, given there are photos from the Apollo mission too, it’s as if Armstrong Aldrin et al were on Twitter and Twitpic. Who knew that astronauts could be funny?
Sadly, in space nobody can hear you laugh. Of course, alongside all the jokes, there’s also plenty of space jargon in the transcripts. Fortunately, though, rolling over key phrases provides a translation for the benefit of non-astronauts who might not know that, say, PTC means Passive Thermal Control. Spacelog would be a cool hack in any circumstances, but the fact that it was conceived and built in an isolated mid-Channel castle in 36 hours tips it over into the realms of awesome. As Donovan puts it… “The weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process.” (You can read more about that process here) As with all good hackday projects, Spacelog’s development is ongoing, albeit constrained by the team members’ day jobs. Says Aylett, “Apollo 8 would be the next one, but there’s a fair bit of work to get it out”. If you’d like to help them out, there are details on how to get involved with Spacelog here.
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May 8 2011, 12:48am | Comments »
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