I had been using Google.com/ig ever since it was released. But since my default browser has switched to Safari I find that Google’s homepage doesn’t quite cut it for me. Also in the recent Mashable Social Networking awards I noticed that a lot of other start pages were getting a lot of attention. I tried Pageflakes, but couldn’t quite take that, and then played around with Netvibes.

Here is what some of it looks like:

This is pretty much the first non Google product I am using in a space where Google has got a decent product already. And it feels kind of good to do. I thought that I would have difficulties with my calendar (which is managed and edited in iCal but broadcast to Google Calendar) and my email etc. since they are all on Google. But no - thanks to open standards I was able to pull off all the data to this independent service.

There is one module/gadget/widget that I can’t find a replacement for. And that is the Google Reader one. Netvibes is great with RSS - it is basically built with RSS completely at it’s core - but it doesn’t have one module that will serve me up all the new items from all of my favourite feeds. I have to have a separate module per feed. Luckily Netvibes is pretty fast loading and I keep all of the feeds over on one tab so it is ok, but it is not perfect. However on the flipside, still in the area of RSS, netvibes does have one advantage over Google - it has an ultra lightweight feed display function for viewing full posts. Very simple, but very good. Just what I want.

Speaking of the tabs - they are one area in which Google’s homepage really doesn’t perform well. Switching between them seems to involve a request being sent to the server and correspondingly it takes far too long. With Netvibes you can choose to have all tabs load at once - or just the the first tab to. I have all of the tabs load at once so it is lightning quick to change between them. The final highlight for me is that Netvibes counts up all the new items that you have on your page and displays the total in the title of the page. So if I keep it open I will know when I have something new to see to. Whether that is a podcast has been released, or I’ve got an email, or there are new photos from my friends on Flickr, or a new post on a blog, or … Netvibes can handle it.

Picasa Web Albums seems to be smart at preventing image hotlinking. They have this embed feature that provides a link back to Picasa Web Albums and that works fine. But if you just try and take the image URL and embed it I find it breaks pretty soon.

For instance here is an image embedded using the Picasa Web Albums code that is available from the left hand bar in Picasa Web Albums:

The above code snippet straight from Picasa Web Albums uses this URL for the image: http://lh6.google.com/samdavyson/ROm95iJ2ABI/AAAAAAAAAFM
/ZpTxZPsUuIA/flower.jpg?imgmax=288. If you just use this URL and not the link back to Picasa it still seems to work. Here is one just using the URL:

But when you remove the thing limiting the image’s size (?imgmax=288) it breaks.

As you don’t see the image above it has clearly broken. The clever bastards. So lets see if it will work with another value of imagemax. So lets try 576 (2 x 288):

No. That doesn’t work either. So at the moment you can only hotlink in the 288 size. I hope Flickr doesn’t start using similar technology soon.

Updates - See bottom.

Everyone has seen Google Maps. That lovely AJAX interface that reinvented online mapping. Dragging maps… it is unbeatable. I had never actually used the maps for directions until last week when I used them for a trip to France. Somethings in the system were great and very Googly. But there were major flaws. Lets just say I got lost a few times.

What’s Good

The layout of the maps for printing is very neat. They offer the option of having little maps by the side of the instructions, and the small images that it uses for left and right are very clear. Overall it just looks nice. It is plain and simple. Unfortunately that is where the positives end.

What’s Bad

The instructions are not nearly sophisticated enough for actually using. Or at least for long distance travel I thought. As you drive in your car they just can’t be used to get you to your destination. The phrase “Turn left at such-and-such a road” is very common. Well the positioning of road names, at least in Europe, is almost exclusively such that you can’t see the name of the road until you are on it. And even then it is difficult to see it if you are trying to drive at the same time. You definately need a few observant assitants to be looking for the typically small signs that indicate road names. It is clearly not practical to park at each turning or junction to survey each of the road names that can be chosen from at the junction. Instead it needs to say “Take the 6th left” or “Take the left signposted as towards such-and-such“. Then you could use the instructions to get to where you wanted to go.

There is no cumulative column for milage provided by the service. So you can’t glance down to see that you have done 100 miles or whatever. You would have to manually add up all the previous components to get that figure. So working out how far you have progressed in relation to the total distance you have got to travel is not easy. The distances seem to be in the units standard to the country that you start in. Moving from England to France you move from miles to km, but it stays as miles throughout the journey. I’d really like a choice of being able to display one of the other throughout or display both in seperate columns. When you are in a country where all the mileage (or kilometreage) information on signs is in a different unit to those on your instructions it doesn’t make things easy. It would be nice if Google could offer choice in this area.

The printout gives time values for significant steps (more than 1 minute) but it doesn’t say how this is calibrated. I don’t know if it takes into account the grade of the road, and the speed limit on it when it works this out. It certainly should do. There should be some information about this conversion clearly on the instructions. When it says “289 mi (about 6 hours 28 mins)” I would like it to say what speeds it has assumed for that.

The lack of sophistication is really important when it comes to things like vias, avoiding toll roads, taking the shortest route over the “quickest” etc. Google Maps doesn’t offer any of these things. For vias you have to just input the locations in seperate sittings, which is really not what I want to have to do. If you dont want to go on non toll roads getting a map out and plotting your own route is the only way.

And finally it is unpolished. I have never heard anyone call a roundabout a traffic circle before, but that is what the instructions insist on saying. Sometimes it will choke on the instruction and have an instruction that just says “Continue” which just splits up the distance for one step so you have to add up the bits yourself to find out how far you need to go on a particular road.

Solution: Maps 1.0

There is only one way round this right now. It is to use one of those old mapping 1.0 services to get your routes. Say Multimap or the AA. They have all the sophistication that you need to actually get from A to B. Although they aren’t fast loading, and they don’t have maps that you can drag or maps that seamlessly zoom they have much better services for directions than Google Maps at present. Trust me when you are lost in a foreign country the last thing you care about is if when you were printing out the route the map available was draggable. Ironically functionality over looks is what Google is famous for with their “ugly” homepage that is so so useful. But with their maps they have gone the other way.

Updates

A German language blog, GoogleWatchBlog, discusses the issue. Some commenters point out other problems with the maps, whilst others disagree with the points made here.

Gary Price of Ask.com points me to their mapping service. Whilst not available in Europe it’s US version offers some of the sophistication I wanted. It can do vias but its printed version, units options, toll/non-toll options, and actual nature of the directions is lacking.

Yes finally today one of the longest rumoured Google services had been released. And the good news: it isn’t even a beta, this is straight away a full product. I think this is probably something to do with the nature of the product. Google is a huge brand name, it is very trusted. But people may be a little skeptical about entering their credit card information into a beta service. So what is this thing? It is almost identical to PayPal. It allows you to pay for goods at a variety (and I imagine an ever increasing list) of stores using your Google Account login information. So you only have to fill out your credit card information once, and then you just need your Google Account login, and you can buy your stuff.

It also offers a few nice things like it claims that it will track the shipping of the products, although I personally would be hugely surprised if the shipping service they gave was accurate or up to date. I find whenever dealing with delivery the further you are from the original people who are posting it to you the more and more out of date the information gets. But we will see on that one. There is also an order history which I suppose is nice, and there is a way that you can review the people you have bought off.

The real killer for this service is, like so many of Google’s new services, its integration. Particularly this time with Google Search. If I can search for “Laptop” and have a product page with “Buy Now” buttons which use the checkout service that would be great. I can’t see this integrated into Froogle right now but that seems totally stupid so I imagine that it is, but just somehow subtly. The other key thing is how many companies take it up. I am not sure how this will work out. Google is becoming well known for good but unpopular products (I am not going to quote that Finance figure again), and this one looks good, so popular?

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.