Archive for category Services
Google Maps Labs
In true Google fashion, they have recently extended the reach of their ‘labs’ experiments by releasing a Google Maps Labs – a place for the Google Maps team to experiment with new features that may or may not be ready for mainstream use within Google Maps.
The latest extensions available from within Google Maps Labs are:
- Drag ‘n’ Zoom
- Aerial Imagery
- Back to Beta
- Where in the World Game
- Rotatable Maps
- What’s Around Here?
- LatLng Tooltip
- LatLng Marker
- Smart Zoom
I really like the implementation of the Drag ‘n’ Zoom experimental feature and it is something that I think I’ll definitely leave enabled. The two LatLng lab experiments are going to be very useful to people who use Google Maps a lot and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Smart Zoom make its way into Google Maps as a default feature going forward either.
To enabled any of the currently available Google Maps Labs experimental features, look for a link in the top right hand corner of Google Maps beside your user links such as My Profile, My Account, Help & Sign Out.
Google Fusion Tables
Google have recently released a new labs product known as Fusion Tables. Google Fusion Tables allows users to merge data from numerous data sources, to deliver compelling easy to understand comprehensive visualisations of the merged data set.
The announcement for Google Fusion Tables notes that it is releasing the API for it, which integrates with a number of existing Google products such as Maps, App Engine, Base Data and the Visualisation APIs to allow for motion charts, timelines, maps with all the data running on Google’s infrastructure.
The Google Fusion Tables example video provided showcases an incredibly easy to use interface, which interleaves numerous existing data sources with custom data from the user on the fly. While that might be fine for static data sets, Google Fusion Tables also allows for dynamic data sets as well – where data can be synchronised into Fusion Tables in real time as the data is changing.
Recently Microsoft Live Labs released a similar product named Pivot, which provides similar functionality with a completely different user experience. The upfront effort for implementing Microsoft Pivot appears to much greater than Google Fusion Tables, as at least at this stage there doesn’t appear to be a way to simply upload, merge or link data together without providing that data through the Pivot architecture.
Watch this space, I suspect there are going to be some incredibly innovative uses for both products.
Google Webmaster Tools Displaying PDF & Word Document Links
Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to explore the internal links and external links or backlinks information for a given domain, instead of relying on the infrequently updated and wildly inaccurate link: operator within a Google search. Traditionally the link information within Google Webmaster Tools has displayed links, that were sourced or crawled from, what would otherwise be considered standard web formats such as HTML.
For a long time, Google has been indexing numerous non-web specific file formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF and Macromedia now Adobe Flash file formats. While they were indexing and ranking those documents to show up in search, I have never seen anything to suggest that Google was counting either links or plain text URLs within those documents as a ranking indicator specifically. However, while viewing backlink data for a domain recently I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting backlinks from Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word documents.
If you’re in the business of generating a lot of documents to provide to third parties, a certain number of your clients will put the document on their web site for their users. If that happens, you’ve just gained additional inbound links to your site using the link text of your choice. If it turns out that Google is counting PDF, Word and other file format links as a ranking indicator – a savvy marketer might even recommend to third parties that they upload the document to their site – for any number of reasons, least of which is search engine optimisation.
Favikon, Favicon Generator For The Masses
Stumbled onto a simple but useful free online service last week named Favikon.
As the name suggests, it is related to the small but often memorable favicon or favourite icon. For those that don’t know what a favicon is – it’s the small icon shown in the address bar to the left of the domain name, in your bookmarks and serves as a visual way to remember a domain or web site.
The Favikon generator service is dead simple:
- choose an existing image already on the internet by URL or upload one from your computer in PNG, GIF or JPG file formats
- use the web based cropping tool to highlight all or part of the image
- download it and be impressed with your masterful graphic ability
I realise that it isn’t mind bending, however I found it so simple that I actually bothered to create a favicon for my personal site – which I haven’t bothered to do in 5 years!
Enhancing Dopplr “Add Trip” Functionality
I recently signed up to the fabulous travel service Dopplr, which lets you share your travel plans with friends, family and colleagues. While adding in a trip from the Gold Coast to my home town of Chinchilla, Dopplr got a little confused about my destination and suggested that the Chinchilla I was referring to was Chinchilla de Monte-Aragón in Spain.
When creating your account with Dopplr, you’ve got the ability to provide the service with a certain amount of information about yourself. Among the information is a setting for your home town, which I have set as the Gold Coast in Australia. Given that my country and home town are set, I think it is possible for the Dopplr service to make slightly smarter choices when a user isn’t explicit about a destination.
For this particular trip, I left on the 20th February and I’m returning on the 22nd February. I didn’t specify that this trip was not originating from my home town, so it should assume that I’m leaving from the Gold Coast. Given that Dopplr knows where you’re originating from (even if it isn’t your home town), it’d be possible for them to calculate a relative distance between it and any destination. If they cycled through each of the 12 possible matches for Chinchilla that they provided – they would have found that one of the Chinchilla’s listed was in the same country and state as my home town and was approximately 350km away. To a human reading that sort of information, it becomes immediately apparent that since I’m only on the road for three days, I’m leaving from the Gold Coast and there is a Chinchilla approximately 350km away that it’d be the sensible choice for the destination.
I think that small improvements such as the above are one of the key types of enhancements to a product that really sets a service apart from its competition.
Twitter Performance Problems, The Root Cause
The performance and scalability problems of Twitter have been covered to death, so I won’t wax lyrical about the different reasons that the micro-blogging service has had performance and uptime problems over the last year.
With the advent of cloud computing and inter-connected web services, the requirement to have a good quality API has just about become a must have. One of the things that an API allows is new and creative mechanisms for users to consume and repurpose your service – which by and large is fantastic. Every now and then though, people will find a way to exploit a service to their advantage – usually financially driven.
In the case of Twitter, clever folk are using the service to ‘watch’ what discussions are happening on and around the internet about a given topic. Case in point this afternoon, I mentioned the phrase “WordPress” in a tweet and I suddenly received 10 new emails notifying me that random people I don’t know are now following me.
The fact that random people are following me isn’t the concern, it is that they automated that based on what I was disucssing in a Twitter conversation. The knock on effect is that those users will no doubt be following hundreds or thousands of other Twitter users.
From an architectural point of view, this problem quickly spirals out of control as now every message that I write, generates a notification to be sent to those users. If they had a legitimate interest in following me, no problem at all but more than likely it will go completely unnoticed and the only thing that it has really achieved is increasing the load on the Twitter infrastructure.
If users continue to abuse this type of functionality, inevitably the Twitter folk will further tighten the screws on how many people you can follow per account. Of course, then the users abusing the service will start creating multiple accounts so they can get what they want – always looking for a way to side step the restrictions.
Improve Your Site Using Live Search Webmaster Center
Virtually every webmaster has heard of Google Webmaster Tools and use it regularly to check on the health of their site, unfortunately very few know of Live Search Webmaster Center which complements Microsoft Live Search.
Recently I wrote about the significant improvements that Live Search Webmaster Center has gone through, which has really boosted the product. To put the new enhancements through their paces, it seemed like a good idea to compare what it was displaying versus what Google Webmaster Tools was showing.
Live Search Webmaster Center showed that I didn’t have anything wrong with my robots.txt file, nor was I suffering from long and complex dynamic URLs – however I did have a handful of 404 errors through the site. Live Webmaster Center had picked up that I had linked to another site without the http:// in the href attribute, like:
- <a href=”www.domain.com/important/article/”>important article</a>
which when clicked, was delivering a 404 error on my site with a URL like:
- http://ifdebug.com/article/my-article/www.domain.com/important/article/
To my surprise, when I explored that same information within Google Webmaster Tools – they had not picked up that I had linked that article incorrectly.
Moral of the story, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. While Google hadn’t picked it up or had just compensated for my mistake – simple mistakes like that may have an adverse effect on less capable search engines.
Google Analytics Mostly Streamlined Login Process
This week Google Analytics received a small upgrade – specifically related to the login process.
Until now, no matter how often you use Google Analytics, as a user you were forced to login every time you returned to the site. It frustrates users so much that if you use Google Analytics quite a lot, it became a habit to leave a window open with Google Analytics logged in just for the simplicity.
With the latest update, the Google Analytics team are saying that you no longer need to login and that the process has been streamlined. I’d argue that only part of that statement is true, you do not need to authenticate – however it isn’t streamlined.
The majority of other Google services, once you’ve authenticated once and subsequently return – it reads in your Google Account information and you immediately have access to the service. For some reason, the Google Analytics team have chosen against a consistent authentication progress that is common amongst many other Google services and the user is forced to click a button to enter.
The process won’t be streamlined until it functions like Google Mail, Google Reader and so on. I welcome the improvement – at least I no longer need to type in my account information all the time – however since they already know that I’m authenticated, I shouldn’t need to click again to re-enter the application.
Live Search Webmaster Centre Drastically Improved
In the last few days, the Live Search Webmaster blog have posted about two significant improvements to the webmaster center, how Live Search crawls your site and more detailed backlink information.
Live Search Webmaster Center now supports the following four items, which are a great help in identifying problems with your site and how Live Search is spidering your content:
- File not found (404) errors, a straight forward date stamped account of the HTTP “404 File Not Found” errors that Live Search encountered when crawling the site. Conveniently, this includes broken links within your own site and sites that you are linking to.
- Pages Blocked by Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), reported when Live Search has been prevented from indexing or displaying a cached copy of the page because of a policy in your robots exclusion protocol (REP).
- Long Dynamic URLs, reported when Live Search encounters a URL with an exceptionally long query string. These URLs have the potential to create an infinite loop for search engines due to the number of combination’s of their parameters, and are often not crawled. I haven’t come across one of these yet and so far I haven’t seen any documentation of what ‘exceptionally long’ means, so clarification on that point would be handy.
- Unsupported Content-Types, reported when a page either specifies a content-type that is not supported by Live Search, or simply doesn’t specify any content type. Examples of supported content-types are: text/html, text/xml, and application/PowerPoint.
In 2007, Microsoft removed the ability for users to drill into backlink data within Live Search. It took a long time, however that functionality has now been replaced within Live Search Webmaster Center and is looking quite promising.
Common functionality shared between the crawl information and back link data, is that Live Webmaster allows you to download the information CSV format. Possibly the best feature for a large complex site though, is that each of the above options can be filtered (search style) further by entering in a subdomain and/or directory to restrict the results to. The backlink interface additionally supports a top level domain in the search box, allowing you to isolate only back links originating from an Australian site by entering in .au.
Future Improvements
The interface doesn’t support paging of results, in case you want to step through a few pages without wanting to export information in CSV format. If you do want to download more information, there isn’t an option to export all information in a hit – you can only retrieve 1000 lines of data. I can appreciate that they don’t want to provide an ‘all’ option or that they want to limit how many can be fetched at once, however there isn’t a way to set 1000 items per page to download them and then go to the next page and download them. The other issue with the 1000 lines of data, is that there is no information on how the 1000 lines are selected. As an example, the backlink section uses the language ‘Download up to 1000 results’ – however there isn’t any indication of how the 1000 are selected.
Promising
While there is still room for improvement and really, when isnt there, I’m personally encouraged by the changes that Microsoft are making to Live Search Webmaster Center. The sooner services from Microsoft start to catch up to other services offered by the leaders – the sooner more businesses and webmasters will spend investing time into the Live Search product.
Bitbucket, Hosted Mercurial Source Control
Bitbucket is the latest project by Jesper Nøhr. If the name looks familiar, it’s because I wrote about a Jesper in March when he used Django and Python as a rapid development environment for an indy advertising product named Indiego Connection.
This time around, Jesper has moved gears to provide a hosting for a popular distributed version control system named Mercurial. I haven’t started drinking the distributed version control kool-aid just yet, however it has been gaining a lot of attention lately via another open source product named Git, developed by Linus Torvalds – the creator of the Linux kernel.
The Mercurial hosting provided by Bitbucket comes in a few different flavours, one of which is free and allows up to 150Mb of storage. I really like the fact that they are not attempting to offer a completely free service, if they were – I suspect that it’d be under enormous pressure. The cost of using Bitbucket to host your Mercurial repositories is very reasonable, starting from $5/month and stepping up to $100/month which includes 25Gb of storage.
Bitbucket provides a very convenient interface for interacting with the Mercurial repositories. As with most web interfaces to source control management packages, you can browse through different repositories, see all of the changes flowing through them and compare them if you like. A couple features that simpler products don’t support that I like is that you can ‘follow’ a repository, create queues for patches related to a repository, download the repository at time x in zip, gz or bz2 formats and it provides an easy to understand visual linking between changesets.
If you are looking for Mercurial hosting, I would definitely investigate whether Bitbucket is a suitable candidate to store whatever you need versioned. The service certainly looks the goods and from what I’m reading online, it is getting really solid reviews already.