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Goggles 0.9 – Google Maps-Powered Flight Sim

We love it when people adapt Google Maps to create fun new applications, and the “Goggles Flight Sim” is one of the best we’ve seen for a while.

Created by London designer Mark Caswell-Daniels as a piece of viral marketing (it’s working, Mark!) for his Flash-scripting talents, the flight sim uses aerial images loaded in from Google’s mapping service.

After selecting your city from a drop down list (which currently offers London, New York, Paris, Toyko and Washington DC), you find yourself in charge of a cartoon biplane flying over a rolling landscape created by seamless Google Maps images.

The controls are pretty rudimentary, with keyboard arrows controlling direction and height, letting you sweep and soar around cities – and plunge earthwards in a kamikaze crash if you feel so inclined.

There are – not surprisingly – some rough edges, the most annoying being the inability to climb very high.

Without an accompanying map overview or sign-posted landmarks, this means it can be hard to work out where you are, which can be rather frustrating (we found that following railway lines or major rivers usually got us to the centre of cities in the end).

Still, as an office timewaster it’s second to none, and well worth a go.

We emailed Mark about his flight sim and he told us that it was still in beta at the moment, and that it wasn’t actually meant to be released quite yet.

He explains, “a mate interpreted ‘don’t tell anybody about it’ as ’email all your friends with a link’ so the cat got out of the bag before I finished it!”

Still, Mark acknowledges that, “all publicity is good publicity,” and we’ll look forward to playing with the finished version soon!

Nice one, Mark!

www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html

Yahoo Messenger Goes Collaborative

Hot on the heels of Windows Messenger Live comes Yahoo’s new upgrade to their own Instant Messaging service, offering plug-ins to let users share more information.

Currently residing in beta, Yahoo! Messenger with Voice (version 8), will let users embed collaborative programs into their Messenger experience.

The Yahoo Messenger update will let users run some software packages simultaneously, so groups of chums can all settle down to watch movies together, or get all interactive on each other’s Yahoo Calendar listings while yakking over the messaging system.

Early reports suggest that the service will also allow up to 1GB for file transfers, with the maximum number of contacts available to punters reaching a dazzlingly popular 1,000.

Widgets and Plug Ins
Yahoo is looking to add competition-crushing extras to their new service by getting third party developers to create mini-applications (or ‘widgets’) to let users do groovy things like combine Yahoo Messenger with Yahoo Music, News, Finance, track and share wish lists on Amazon or keep their beady eye on an eBay auction.

With this new ‘plug-in’ approach, Jeff Bonforte, the big cheese in charge of Yahoo’s instant messaging products, reckons that future innovations on Messenger will most likely come from these new widgets rather than complete program upgrades.

Of course, there’s nothing new to all this embedding malarkey, with the industry boys – Microsoft, Google, AOL and Skype – all falling over themselves to make desktop-based applications shareable over IM services, but Yahoo are hoping that by opening up Messenger to become more of a distribution platform they’ll be able to attract punter-luring new services.

Yahoo Messenger is currently number three in the chatty world of Instant Communications, with eBay’s Skype in the second slot and AOL’s AIM still ruling the IM roost.

Yahoo! Messenger

Wikia: Wikipedia In Disguise?

What’s the difference between a Wikia and a Wikipedia? Trivia, mostly – but also, Gil Penchina (pictured below). Penchina has spent eight years running eBay as a general manager and told me it was “like a whole career with any ordinary company, and I want to stop.”

So Gil has started his own gang. He’s the new CEO of Wikia, which is (at first sight, anyway) exactly like Wikipedia, right down to being founded by the same guy – Jimmy Wales – but it’s designed to relieve the pressure on the main site to cover trivia like soap TV shows.

The company announced itself in a Wiki entry on its own site saying: “Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia.”

But it’s not all Star Trek, as you might deduce from that. Try “Archaeology” for example: “The archaeology Wikia is for any archaeology related content, and for the archaeological community to share ideas on this topic.” Why isn’t that on Wikipedia? or “Astronomy”? – “The astronomy Wikia is for all astronomy topics.”

But a little roaming around exposes the difference: it’s a “community thing.” According to the Astronomy Wikia, “The wiki was started with a focus specifically on topics related to the Mid Atlantic Star Party and will include reports from MASP attendees.”

Is there a real need for this? Gil thinks yes, definitely – but the way he talks, it’s not altogether clear who exactly is needing it. For example, try the “Buffyverse” Wikia which was founded on 15 October last year.

That’s got to be a goodie, right? Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the spinoff, Angel, are two of the most cult-like of cult-media TV shows. It’s not only got meaningless violence by cute, tight-busted teens, but also supernatural demons and Powers That Be – and any true Buffy fan will also assure you, a line in wry comedy that rivals anything the best of British TV comedy could offer.

And despite all that, there’s nothing there. Hit the button “article” for and all you get is: “You have followed a link to a page that does not exist yet. If you are here by mistake, just click your browser’s back button.” And off you go, kid; you’re effectively going to found the Buffy Wikia.

Why would you do that? In Gil’s view of the future, of course, it would be to prevent the more serious Wikipedia from being cluttered with Buffy trivia. Too late, surely? – but even if it isn’t, is “good for Wikipedia” the same as “good for Wikia?”

Out in the real world, of course, people run fan sites without feeling any need to use a Wikipedia entry. If they think a Wiki is a good way to do a fan site, the software for running a Wiki is available – many are free. All you need is a nice URL like (say) BuffyGuide or BuffyWorld and in that case, the “community” can create advertising and subscription and screensaver revenue – and you get to keep the money, not give it all to Gill and Jimmy.

Gil accepts that the financial success of Wikia isn’t yet assured. He’s not pouring cash into it. It’s not flooded with expensive staff; it’s going to grow as it grows, he says.

On the other hand, lots of people have made lots of money out of supporting groups and communities. And a lot of people have been pouring scorn on the trivial content of the Wikipedia – and saying “it’s not a Real Encyclopaedia, is it?” in mocking tones – a criticism that deeply offends Jimmy Wales.

If the Wikia concept does catch on, it looks like it may be slow. As one disappointed visitor to the “Doom” Wikia complained: “wow, I just came to the main page of this wiki and got excited to read about Doom, it’s got coverage of the games, the mods, everything I’d want to know. Then I got to the end of the paragraph on the main page, and had no idea how to access any of this cool content. how about a link or two on the main page to get people started? a table of contents or something perhaps? there’s just nothing there.”

Doom isn’t the only empty cupboard. There are some obviously promising Wikias, but far more that are not yet.

Gil just nodded and smiled. “I’m not looking for instant frenzy,” he conceded. “I was really thinking of retiring, but Jimmy said this needed doing, and it may suit me after the stress of eBay for the last eight years…”

Google, The Next Dark Empire?

Google, a name synonymous with Internet searching, is now permeating the desktop. Currently it’s the PC (i.e. Windows environment) they’re moving into, but Apple Macs and even Linux are the likely next moves.

Microsoft (MS) has traditionally owned the operating system (OS) and many of the applications, but Google’s new tools allow searching in that space without having to directly access any of the aging empire’s software directly.

Google Desktop Search
The newest version (2) has the option of a sidebar or deskbar and searches can be entered directly into these. It also installs a search bar into Outlook. It’s possible to directly search items using these without ever going through the Windows “Start” menu. Whereas MS has had tools such as Lookout (actually produced by another company, which MS bought) which allowed searching in Outlook, it’s no longer needed as Google does a better job and searches more file types.

There are potential privacy concerns as Google will search Email, Chats, Web history, Media files, Text, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Journal and other files and send relevant info back to Google, however that can be turned off.

Once Desktop is started it sits there a while locally indexing the info and then searches are very fast, new files are indexed as they are created or arrive etc. Google Talk
Though Google Desktop (ableit in an more limited form) has been around for a while, Google Talk is new and is their take on the Instant Messaging world.

The client is quite basic, it currently supports simple chat and voice. You need a Google Mail login to use the service (GMail accounts now support 2.5GB as standard) and it can check your GMail inbox. Chats can now be logged into the Google Mail system.

The voice quality is superb, Google have licensed some pretty good codecs (the software that translates analogue voice into digital form or vice versa) and it’s as good as Skype if not better.

Google Talk actually uses the XMPP open protocol (better known as Jabber) so any Jabber client can be used with Google’s server (including Gaim for various platforms and Apple’s iChat for Macs), though voice functionality is currently only available with their own client. However, that’s about to change as Google have released ‘libjingle’ a programming library which implements their voice services so others can incorporate them into their IM clients.

Jabber allows server connectivity to other networks and sure enough Google have just enabled this feature, so Google users can chat with Jabber users on other Jabber networks (if the other network connects).

Since the client is only v1, new functionality will be added as time passes, one can only wonder what but it’s likely they’ll be some form of search capabilities, maybe even adwords based on the conversations that are taking place.

Jabber itself has a lot more to offer itself, like conference rooms, which Google are sure to implement.

Google Mail
Another service that’s been around for a while (and again sparked heated privacy debates) Google Mail or GMail now offers 2.5GB of mail storage. The premise is you never delete mail, but just keep everything. All mail arrives in your INBOX, but then it can be sorted using various criteria and moved to various folders.

This concept isn’t new, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, now long gone) had this idea with their Altavista mail service, whereby all mail arrived in your INBOX and the client just put everything in the right place. Google just got it right and made it a Web service.

Some people will use all their space, but many struggle to use even a small percentage of it. An enterprising developer has made an application that allows Windows XP users to utilise it as a remote file store with drag and drop capabilities. There’s no guarantee it will keep working as Google can alter their systems at anytime. There’s a link at the end of the article.

Part two of this article will be out tomorrow.

GoogleMail
GoogleTalk

PayPal Exclusive Wallet On Yahoo: Wide-ranging Deal

PayPal is to be the exclusive online wallet across Yahoo’s product and services. In a wide-ranging, four component, business arrangement announced today, eBay and Yahoo will be stroking each other commercial departments.

In their words, PayPal will be “deeply integrated on the Yahoo! site and will receive prominent positioning when users purchase Yahoo! services.” Beyond this PayPal will also be offered to Yahoo’s merchants and publishers, including the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo Merchant Solutions and other small business services.

Yahoo exclusive graphics ad provider to eBay
Additional details of the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” big dollar deal include Yahoo being the exclusive provider of graphical advertising on eBay.

Interestingly Yahoo will also be offering sponsored search for complementary products on some eBay.com search results pages in the U.S.

Click-to-Call Advertising “being explored”
As we’re sure you know, Click-to-Call will let the user click on an icon on an advert and speak directly to the advertiser, without touching the phone.

For us, this part of the announcement is a bit of a strange one. Yahoo has Yahoo Messenger with Voice and eBay has Skype, so who would provide the voice services in which circumstances is pretty unclear, and we would have though, an area for friction.

What they’re saying about it is, “Yahoo and eBay do not expect this relationship to have a material impact on their financial results in 2006. Both companies will incorporate any financial impact for 2007 and beyond when they deliver their business outlook for those periods.” Make of that what you will.

Google Web Toolkit: Analysis Of Its Impact

Back on Tuesday Google released their latest offering, the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). For those who didn’t catch the news at the time, it’s a downloadable application that lets developers write Java code that is translated into Javascript.

At first glance this appears a pretty strange concept, outputting JavaScript from Java, but code is the near-mythical AJAX code, heavily assisting the production of Web 2.0 applications.

You’ll know we think AJAX applications are special, not for the buckets of hype that’s surrounding Web 2.0, but because the taking up of AJAX marked the death Microsoft’s dominance of the interface. It’s the point where using an application through a Web browser became less tiresome because information is updated without the Web page having to be refreshed.

Google slowly remove the gloves
Google’s attacks on Microsoft have been consistently more intense. Early moves like the extended beta of Gmail chipping away at Microsoft’s Hotmail service.

The moves on to the Windows desktop via Google Desktop Search (GDS) stepped it up a gear. When we saw the release of GDS, we advised our friends to buy Google stock. This was the point where users no longer needed to use Windows Explorer to locate the documents that they had created on their machine. A Google application became the route to documents on ‘their’ platform. The vice-like grip in place for so many years was starting to weaken.

The interface – Now they’re ready to box
We see the release of the Web Toolkit as Google’s most direct pop at Microsoft yet.

There is still a mystique around creating AJAX applications, primarily because most of the people who are trying to make them are not programmers, but are enthusiastic amateurs, designers, or people who have never learnt the basics of programming logic.

While GWT still requires programming skills in Java, there are more programmers around that know the inaccuracies that each version of browser requires, to have the interface working consistently.

It’s not just Microsoft that is getting a bloody nose from this, it’s also quite an aggressive move against Java, effectively removing its usefulness as a Web interface language. If this tool gets wide usage – and given the buzz (real or otherwise) around Web 2.0, it’s likely – it’s going to be pushing Java to the server, although many would argue that it doesn’t have much benefit there either.

Summary I’ll leave you with the key point – Google Web Toolkit gives people the tools (literally) to write applications that work in any Web browser, circumvent Microsoft’s crown jewels, the Windows interface.

We know an AJAX toolkit won’t be a surprise to Microsoft, but it will be a big blow.

Google Web Toolkit

News Corp To Sell 24 Episodes on MySpace

It comes as no surprise to the more cynical amongst us, but MySpace is set to offer downloadable digital content for sale from its sister company, Fox.

This move is very significant clearly showing the direction that Murdoch is taking MySpace in. It’s going to become a great shop window to its 75 million users, of all of his other diverse types on content.

Episodes from series one to five of the hugely popular ’24’ series by Fox will be made available for download for $1.99 a programme, courtesy of a Burger King-sponsored deal which comes branded with the fast food giant’s tagline “Have it Your Way.”

(We know which way we’d like a Murdoch/Burger King deal, but it’s unprintable here).

MySpace, which is owned by media ubermensch Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has more than 75m registered users worldwide, and according to Nielsen/NetRatings recorded 19.4 billion page views in March – dwarfing the 13.7 billion page impressions at Google for the same month.

To entice users to fork out for the full service, Burger King will be offering free downloads of each of the first episodes from series one and five of ’24’

Building up a formidable synergetic head of steam, Gillian Smith, senior director of media at Burger King, effused: “We know our customers spend a lot of time [on MySpace]. The important thing for us as an advertiser was to make sure we were providing content that resembles entertainment more than advertising.”

The Burger King/Fox/MySpace love-in reflects the growing power of MySpace as a new distribution platform and advertising magnet, leading Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch to wonder what might happen if MySpace developed a search engine of its own

MySpace

Google Splashes 4 New Tools

Google took the opportunity of their annual press briefing at the Googleplex to inform the assembled hacks of four new applications. The theme they were trying to push was ‘honest we _are_ a search company.”

In no particular order, the new apps are …

Google Notebook
Yet to be launched, but supposed to be making an appearance next week. Used when you skip around Web sites and want to gather bits and pieces from them such as text, URLs and graphics. These will then be stored online and you can choose to make them available to others.

Google Trends
Ever wanted to have access to the information that Google gathers on all of the billions of searches that flow through their simple search box? Yes, you’re not alone, we’d love to as well. This is the closest that Google is going to let you get to it. Type in a search term and you’ll get a plot of how popular the term has been with peaks highlighted on particular news stories.

There’s also a feature to compare two search terms, our favourite so far being good vs evil (glad to see good winning). Breakdowns that can be further explored are cities, regions and languages.

Google Co-op
Adds user knowledge to the power of Google’s search engine. Individuals or companies will add their particular knowledge to sites or searches that they share with people who subscribe to them. Those who you do subscribe to, will appear in your google search results.

This is what we’d long imagined. It’s an expansion of the idea of blogging where people gather knowledge and share. Could become the most significant announcement of the set, marking the next stage in search.

Google Desktop 4 & Google Gadgets
Not surprisingly the fourth release of this app that indexes all of the content on your machine, including what you get up to online. When this first came out, we realised that Google had beaten Microsoft as they’d become the way to locate your document on your PC, side-stepping Windows Explorer.

Everyone and their wife appear to be knocking out different versions of Apple’s Dashboard or Desktop Widgets. For examples Yahoo bought Konfabulator (arguably ‘the original’) and then gave it away to the Yahoo-faithful.

Like Yahoo, Google are making them programmable, so code-fanatics will be able gain global fame.

Either this is a me-too product, which is pretty unlikely, or one step further into Google taking over Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop, by placing apps on the desktop.

Google Trends
Google Co-op
Google Desktop 4

Yahoo Tech Shopping Site Launches

Search engine big-boys Yahoo have unveiled a shopping site for consumer electronics backed up by expert advice and user-contributed reviews.

Shoving their size nines into a market long dominated by CNet Networks, the new Yahoo! Tech shopping and advice Website will offer hundreds of thousands of products with user ratings and reviews.

Spod-free advice, no anorak required
Yahoo is hoping that by offering a site free of the spoddy techno-jargon of gadget enthusiast sites, consumers will warm to their no-nonsense, straightforward approach.

“What we are trying to do is to make it simple to choose and use the technology that is easiest to use,” said Patrick Houston, general manager of Yahoo! Tech, formerly editor in chief at CNet.

“We built Yahoo! Tech for people who might not have the time nor inclination to learn about bits and bytes,” he added.

The magazine-style site will use Yahoo’s tried and trusted community tools to help users find information about products and prices and share their opinions with friends, family and other consumers.

Using an attractive and simple interface, products can be sorted and filtered by price, brand and expert rating with the option to compare online prices for the best deal.

Where consumers are looking to spend money, advertisers are always ready and willing to slap up enticing banner ads, and Hewlett Packard, Verizon Wireless and Panasonic have already signed up.

Content
Yahoo will be populating the site with content from “trustworthy publications from around the Web who may or may not be official content partners,” as well as their own staff editors and writers, and Yahoo! users.

A weekly video clip called ‘Hook Me Up’ will dish out ‘geeky wisdom’ to haul heel-dragging technology Luddites into the bright electronic age, aided by Yahoo’s ‘Emergency Makeover Technicians.’

The company is also reported to have licensed reviews from the “Dummies” series of How-to books, Consumer Reports, PC World and PC Magazine.

The new Yahoo! Tech is currently focussed on the U.S. market, with Houston saying that there are no imminent plans to expand into other countries.

http://tech.yahoo.com/

Skype Scoops Up EMI Music Deal

Uber music giants EMI Music Publishing have announced a deal with hotshot VoIP upstarts Skype to sell music on Skype’s new retail website.

Skype’s new international digital music service will make tunes from EMI’s hefty catalogue legally available on a worldwide basis.

When it comes to songs, EMI – the world’s largest music publisher – has tons of the puppies (we’re talking over a million copyrights), including drunken karaoke favourites like ‘New York, New York’, ‘Singing in the Rain’ and ‘Over the Rainbow.’

The deal includes downloads, ringtones and subscriptions, with EMI Music Publishing being employed as a music consultant for the new service.

The deal is significant as it’s the first major online music deal to be agreed on a global basis – previously, music retailers had to laboriously license songs individually on a country-by-country basis.

Roger Faxon co-CEO of EMI Music Publishing was ready and willing for some Monday morning gushing, dishing out the kudos to Skype, EMI and composer royalty collectors the MCPS-PRS Alliance for their help.

“We could not have better partners than Skype and MCPS-PRS in our ongoing effort to break down the barriers of online licensing of music. EMI is committed to bringing the best music in the world to all the consumers of the world and this deal is a major step in fulfilling that goal,” he gushed.

Skype is yet to set a launch date for its new online store.

Skype
EMI Music Publishing