Sam Davyson

This is big news, I can’t believe it hasn’t been picked up as much as it deserves. Google offer lots of things. And they like to make them free. For instance Blogger had a pro service when Google bought it, now it is all free. Keyhole was only available for big money when Google bought it, Google brought a good version out for free. Same with Sketchup. I admit there are still paid versions of Earth and Sketchup available but they are very much not needed to enjoy the service.

Now Google set a new standard giving away 1GB storage for email totally free. There is still no paid upgrade available for this, but it has increased to ~ 2.7 GB. But today for what I would really say is the first time Google are charging for a service upgrade that many people will require. It is Picasa Web Albums (sort of like an antisocial Flickr, or like a Yahoo Photos clone) and you only get 250 MB for free. That is simply not enough for people who might want to seriously use this service. I thought perhaps they would have it at this gimmicky level for the test and then pump it up to something sensible (really I imagined no limit) when they properly launched.

But no. By the look of it the idea is to charge for anything more than this 250 MB. And already in place is a system to upgrade for $25 a year for 6 GB of additional storage. This is not what a very hardcore user needs. This is what a standard user needs. This is the first time that Google is charging for a something you need to make a service useable. Flickr has limits unless you are willing to pay. And the free limit works out very similarly to this one, and the paid limit is significantly more open (2 GB per month).

Google need to change this I think. Think big, think free.

And we all move forth. With Flock.

It has just been released as a public beta. It has been kicking around as an alpha for a long while, but this is their first step towards making a disciplined and stable release. And I have downloaded and installed it and I am very impressed. Flickr has never been so accessible. And it adds (or in fact removes) a whole step of the del.icio.us posting model that I use to get things to the links log. This is definately something to check out, I am even blogging direct from Flock for this post.

Time for a new design on the blog. And this one is rather different. I took the old theme which was a slightly modified commonly distributed theme (Blue Horizon if you want to go get it) and deleted the stylesheet. What resulted was largely what you see in front of you now. I junked the sidebar of course, and deleted more code that I didn’t need, streamlined the comments and changed the way the permalinks worked. The text hovers 20 px from each side of your screen. If you have a widescreen monitor (or just a large screen) this will be substantially wider than other blogs which tend to be fixed width to maintain fancier layouts.

I am all Times New Roman now too. Which is great to complement the rest of me site. This blog is almost ready for blending into the rest of the site. But the final merger will need the next version of the main site to blend with! So what is coming up for this blog. I am going to be posting a full beginners review of Mac OS X Tiger in what will probably be a five or so part story. I am going to reviewing 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google (first post) which I got today through the post. I also have lots of coding bits and bobs mainly in PHP that I have created recently that I want to share.

And that is not to mention more news on Otavo, why Yahoo Mail Beta is teribble, why Odeo fails, why iTunes is better than Windows Media Player, and a huge piece on my classification of web services, into those that improve our lives and those that only serve to help with the mess the internet makes for us.

Today Philipp Lenssen releases his first book, 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google.

For those who don’t know Philipp has been tracking Google for some years now as it has evolved into the huge global company it is now. He documents everything on the Google Blogoscoped blog and discussions continue in the forum. From this huge stock of information he has selected 55 fun things related to Google. Philipp is one of these people who does everything by hand. His blog is super popular, is it WordPress? No. His own build. His forum is super popular. Another own build. For this book he built a wiki too (one chapter is edited by the public I believe). There is no doubt it will be a brilliant read.

Buy from Lulu.com, or spread the word at Digg.com.