Earth

Google's Special Results for the Football World Cup — Google started to show a special OneBox for the FIFA World Cup, the international football tournament that will start Friday in South Africa. If you search for "world cup", you can see a list of the teams and the upcoming matches.


At the bottom of the page, Google replaced "Goooooooooogle" with "Gooooooooooal!", at least for the first page of search results.


Google Street View is now available for South Africa and you can see the 10 World Cup stadiums. Google Earth now includes 3D models of the stadiums and of the 9 cities that host the World Cup.



{ via John Mueller and Websonic }

Thanks to everyone who made Google I/O 2010 a success! We always look forward to this event each year as a chance to speak one-to-one with developers from the Maps and Earth API ecosystem and this year did not disappoint.

Last week at Googe I/O, we made several announcements about updates to our tools for geo developers. I wanted to give you a closer look at one of those updates -- Styled Maps for the Google Maps API v3. You now have more control over how to style the base map within Google Maps API implementations. Styled Maps gives you the ability to change and customize various features of the base map, like changing the color of the water or removing roads altogether. This new styling feature gives you full control to display and customize the parts of the map that lets your data on the map shine. Take a look at this Styled Map Wizard and make the map your own!

My top tweets in a JavaScript include —

Shared by Bud
This gets you your most popular items. More interesting is to know who of your readership is resonating to you.

As you may know, when I find something interesting on the web, I push a link through Twitter in such a way that the number of click-throughs can be counted.

Every few minutes I build a page that ranks my 40 most recent tweets by the number of times they've been clicked on. It's kind of a crude method of determining relevance.

I've always felt this information should be displayed in an abbreviated way on scripting.com. I've now got it working. See below:



It's done using a "JavaScript include," by adding this little snip of code to a page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.scripting.com/misc/topdave.js"></script>

Nothing earth-shaking, just "nice to have."

Filed under: Internet, web 2.0

Google has just launched a new service -- Location History -- that keeps track of your movements.

Before you get your panties and/or beard in a twist, you can delete your location history at any time. It's private, too: neither your friends or the public can see your location history.

Now, with that out of the way, are you grinning like a fool at the prospect of how awesome such a tool is, or petrified of the potential privacy issues? The paranoid amongst us will point out that government agencies could request your location history -- but at the same time, if you're innocent, you have a rock-solid alibi!

Then there are the value-added features: not only is it kinda cool to see where you've been, but you can also revisit your travels via Google Earth and Maps. You can also check at a glance where you were on a given day, which can be handy if you're one of those busy people whose days seem to all merge into one.

Finally, with Location History bonding to Latitude (it's a Latitude app, in fact), you can have Google send you a notification when you are physically near to a friend. Because Location History knows your regular locations, you can set it so that notifications only trigger when you are in an unusual place... such as a large park... at night... in the bushes.

Google Latitude + Google Location History = very cool and kinda scary originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 27 May 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google - Google Latitude - Google Earth - Download Squad - Privacy

In What if the Earth had Two Moons?, astronomer Neil Comins imagines tweaks that might make our cosmic neighbourhood subtly – or hugely – different

Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight —

Adobe, no one seems to want to say this to you, but I will. Stop it, you’re embarrassing yourselves.

You’ve just spent God-knows how much money on an ad buy that blankets much of the technology press (including this site). It’s a strange passive-aggressive message that just makes Jobs’ aggressive-aggressive post from a few weeks ago seem even more forceful. And it’s transparent. But worst of all, it won’t work. You must know this.

On the face of it, the ad is an attempt to convince people that you’re the good guys in this fight. “We Love Apple” — the problem is, you don’t love Apple. Why on Earth would you? They’re completely screwing you right now. Everyone knows that. You’d have to be crazy to love Apple right now.

So what you’re really trying to say with this ad is “We love choice, and if you love choice too, put pressure on Apple.” The problem with that is, it won’t work. As they’ve made it abundantly clear over the years, Apple doesn’t listen to any outside input. Hell, they don’t even have focus groups. They do things their way. We’ve seen this recently with the App Store. Thousands of blog posts (including plenty here) condemned Apple for being too closed, and in some cases hypocritical. Did they open the store up? No. They just perfected their closed system.

The only way your ads can have any impact is if they convince people to stop buying Apple products. But that won’t happen either. The side-effect of making quality products is that people want them. They want them even in some cases if they don’t like you, or agree with certain actions. And the fact of the matter is that despite these ads, most people won’t have any idea what all of this is about — nor would they care if they did. They’ll just buy what they consider to be a quality product.

So that leaves your only real hope: the government (ugh). And you’re trying to make that happen. But again, that’s not going to work. While Apple may control a significant percentage of the mindshare in the market right now, they do not control a majority of the actual market share in computers or smart phones. They do in MP3 players, but that is a dying industry. As for the iPad, tablet computers are much too new of a category for the government to even think about regulating at this point.

So where does that leave you? Well, to be frank, shit out of luck.

On one hand, there’s an urge to feel bad for you. You really are getting screwed here. On the other hand, you really did it to yourselves.

When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, had there been a great, lightweight version of Flash for mobile devices, I bet that Apple would have almost been forced to use it. They offered it on their desktop browsers after all, and this new device was supposed to be putting the Internet in your pocket. It was no sure thing that this device would succeed at the time, and giving it every chance to (by including something like Flash) would have made sense. But there was no version of Flash ready that would run on the device (presumably without massive performance/battery hits). In fact, only now, three full years later, is a version of Flash running on mainstream mobile devices being shown off.

You gave Jobs three years worth of solid data (massive iPhone sales) to prove he didn’t need you. And now he’s using that knowledge in the iPad, the device which may or may not be the first step in the future of computing. And now others are rallying to his side because he grabbed the position of power.

And that’s not all.

You also screwed yourselves several years ago, when you couldn’t have possibly known you were doing it. To quote a passage from Jeffrey Young and William Simon’s 2005 book iCon Steve Jobs:

“When Steve returned to Apple in 1997 he invited the executives of Adobe over and asked them to help him create a version of their video editing software for Mac. Even though it had been Steve and Apple that put the company on the map twenty years before, they now refused.“

Whoops. You then followed that move up with nearly a decade worth of under-supporting (or simply not supporting) the Mac. I’m hardly the only one who has noticed this.

Sure, you had your reasons. The Mac had tiny market share and the focus was on Windows. But a decision was made, and now you have to live with it. And you can’t pretend none of that happened and write things today like:

“We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs.”

Um, where were you in 1997 for the Mac? What about 1998? 1999? And so on. There were plenty of Mac users out there that weren’t able to “freely access their favorite content and applications” — because of you.

Selective memory is great — until it comes back to bite you in the ass.

But all hope is not lost. There is something you can do to win this fight. It’s something so simple that I find it hard to believe you’re wasting your time and money on these embarrassing ads.

Make a killer product.

If you make a great enough product, you’ll force Apple to accept you. It has to be good enough that people will refuse to buy Apple products without it. A tall order, sure, but shouldn’t that be the goal of any product you make — to be the absolute best? Flash is not that product. Not right now anyway. Apple’s sales figures have already proven that.

But maybe you can use your growing relationship with Google to build a better version of Flash that runs on Android phones and soon their tablets. You have their growing platform, use it. Prove Apple wrong. That’s the only way this fight ends well for you.

You brought an advertisement to a gun fight. Poor choice. Time to rally. Apple once proved you wrong. Now it’s your turn. Or not. Victors. Spoils. Etc.

P.S. When you’re leaving notes all over the web trying to convince people how open your technology is, maybe leave out the Registered® Trademark® logos next time.

[images: Paramount Pictures]

Why On Earth Does Google Buzz Think I Am Chris Messina? — Google is weird. I mean seriously weird. Or maybe it's just Google Buzz. With all the Facebook privacy issues going on right now I thought I'd go and check out Google Buzz. I'd heard a rumour you couldn't delete your profile. On the face of it, it would appear you can. At the bottom of the Edit Profile page, there is a link to deleting your Buzz profile which says "This will disable Google Buzz integration in Gmail and delete your Google profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and unfollow you from anyone you are following." Fine, that's good enough for me. It may well be that Google retains data whether I know it or not. I pretty much assume Google keeps everything. That's not what caught my eye. What got my attention were the other profiles Google was "suggesting" I add to mine.

The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors —

Access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate, and made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors -- that has to change.

It’s like deja vu all over again.

Two years ago, Twitter used to be down all the time. It doesn’t seem like this should be a major issue, but it actually is quite annoying during conferences when so many rely on the service for information. And, back in those days, people used to rely on it to know where everyone was going drinking afterwards.

Today, those same people now use Foursquare for that purpose. And that’s why when its down — as it has been tonight for the past couple of hours — it matters. How on Earth am I supposed to know which Web 2.0 Expo afterparty to go to without Foursquare?

Half-kidding aside, I was hardly the only one echoing this sentiment after Web 2.0 Expo this evening. Foursquare went down soon after the conference concluded, and at least a half dozen friends and colleagues I bumped into on the street were running around like chickens with their heads cut off not sure where to go without the aide of Foursquare. Yes, it’s kind of pathetic, but this is the age we live in.

So what caused Foursquare to go down? Apparently, an outage in Amazon’s cloud services — in Virginia to be precise. Supposedly, it’s in the process of coming back on, but Foursquare is still very much down.

Worse, this is the second time today that Foursquare has gone down. Earlier, they were up and down for a few hours, attributing the down time to “growing pains” — again, sound familiar? On the plus side – Foursquare is doing a great job at communicating with users (appropriately, over Twitter) about the downtime. Back in the day, part of the problem with Twitter being down is that no one in the company would say a word about the problems (of course, they obviously didn’t have the luxury of tweeting out updates).

Most of the comparisons between Foursquare and Twitter are silly (though, maybe I can be accused of starting that trend). They’re two completely different services. But tonight they found a very common link in some major downtime. And look, Foursquare even has its own Fail Whale now: the Emo Mayor.

Update: And they’re back.

Ally Bank wants its customers to invent their own personal secret questions and answers; the idea is that an operator will read the question over the phone and listen for an answer. Ignoring for the moment the problem of the operator now knowing the question/answer pair, what are some good pairs? Some suggestions:

Q: Do you know why I think you're so sexy?
A: Probably because you're totally in love with me.

Q: Need any weed? Grass? Kind bud? Shrooms?
A: No thanks hippie, I'd just like to do some banking.

Q: The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men.
A: Go forth, and kill. Zardoz has spoken.

Q: What the hell is your fucking problem, sir?
A: This is completely inappropriate and I'd like to speak to your supervisor.

Q: I've been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from my employer, and I don't care who knows it.
A: It's a good thing they're recording this call, because I'm going to have to report you.

Q: Are you really who you say you are?
A: No, I am a Russian identity thief.

Okay, now it's your turn.