Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:
I saw some speculation in the news that Google's Larry Page might have the same "voice problem" that I had, called spasmodic dysphonia. I will add to that speculation because it fits what little we know about his situation. I'm not saying he has spasmodic dysphonia, but it fits the few facts I know.
Talking to your glasses is the new talking to your headphones.
Marketing Land:
On March 1, Google has a new privacy policy and terms of service that goes into effect. Anything you do on Google, under these new agreements, can and may be used to target you in a court of Google, so to speak.
Ars Technica:
Google CEO Larry Page trotted out an impressive statistic during last week’s quarterly earnings call: Google now has 90 million users, double what it had three months ago. Even better, 60 percent of those users are engaged daily, and 80 percent weekly.
But those users aren’t necessarily engaging with Google . Any action taken during a logged-in Google session—whether it be searching the Internet, checking Gmail or using Google Docs—counts as engagement under the statistic Page used. Google has refused requests from journalists and interested bystanders to reveal exactly what percentage of those 90 million signed-up Google users actually view Plus content each day, week or month.
Lockergnome:
Drinking? While working? While you might crack a beer on your desk at 4 p.m. on a Friday, drinking is just part of the job at Google. The software engineer even revealed that “some managers even pressure their teams to drink.” Googlers also celebrate a “TGIF” every Friday, where even more booze flows freely.
This sounds terrible, and no, I’m not being sarcastic. This makes me worry on many levels.
Ina Fried for All Things D:
On Tuesday night, Android chief Andy Rubin noted that Google is now seeing 700,000 daily activations of new devices using its operating system [up from] a 550,000 activations-per-day figure touted in July and the 300,000 per day figure mentioned a year ago.
We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.
“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.
I’m just relieved to know it’ll be “mutually beneficial.”
We’re adding fine-grained controls that will enable you to “graphic-equalize” and fine-tune your stream. When viewing the stream for a particular circle, you’ll now see a slider at the top that lets you adjust how posts from that circle should be blended into the main stream. That way you’ll never miss a post from that special someone, and you can tweak these settings to form your own “perfect stream.”
Oh yes, the much coveted perfect stream.
Marco Arment, my Build & Analyze co-host elaborates on an idea he mentioned in our last episode:
All it would take is a deal between Amazon and one of the big handset manufacturers to preload the Amazon Appstore, placed more prominently than Google’s Android Market, on all of their phones for a little while. Amazon knows how to play the retail game — it’s their business, and they’re incredibly good at it.
Shocking news from Google’s Android camp:
Google has just confirmed with us that [not having Flash Player installed and not having access to a download on the Android Market] is normal and that Flash support will only come once Adobe makes the call to update the mobile version for Android 4.0.
I can’t believe it.
Breaking news from the Google Analytics people:
Our design team chose not to build individual “path analysis,” which can quickly become complicated. […] Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.
I have no idea what this actually means. Nobody does. But here’s a screenshot of the new feature. Looks neat.
The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but if you’re a heavy user of Google services, it can be a little confusing to set up your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts to sync with iOS. The default method’s no good. Here’s the better way to do it.
Be sure to read the comments, which address a number of potential issues not covered in the article.
If [people] use an Android phone, they can’t use Apple’s store or locker. So now they can use Google’s. And while it will be theoretically possible for iPhone users to use Google’s store and locker, it will involve some kludgy sidesteps that won’t appeal to mainstream users.
