Computers

Some of you are reporting that Gmail is now showing almost 9 gigabyte (9,030 MB, to be exact). I can’t reproduce this, I’m currently at 2,886 MB. Who else is getting this?
[Thanks Brad and Luka! Image by Brad.]

Update: Many are speculating right now that this increased Gmail storage is reflecting the overall storage for those who have a Picasa Premium account. A Google Picasa Premium account starts at 6.25 GB for $25/ year. 6.25 GB + the normal 2,886 MB I’m seeing adds up to 9,286 megabytes, which is at least in the range of the 9,030 MB number. At the same time, another forum thread discusses the apparent removal of the Picasa upgrade option. However, not all who say they received the “Gmail upgrade” are also Picasa Premium users, so it’s still unclear what happened. [Thanks everyone!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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In 2002/2003, I earned some spare-change answering questions at then-new Google Answers. It was fun, but back then we were already slightly frustrated at how little we felt Google promoted the service. In November 2006 Google Answers shut down completely. Many of the researchers who worked at Google Answers switched over to create a new site, Uclue.com, which I’m often using myself to ask research questions these days. John “Sublime1” at Uclue last weekend got the question, “Why did Ask Google shut down?”, and here’s his answer (HTML’ified), from the perspective of an ex-Google Answers Researcher. It’s not the only valid answer, but it does supplement other answers given on the web so far.

There has never been a detailed, official explanation for the closure of Google Answers, though there has been much speculation by the web community, but if you put together statements by various Google staff, and combine that with the experience of the Google Answers Researchers (GARs), you can surmise the essential truth behind the decision.

The predominant assumption by the web community was that Google Answers fell prey to the rising success of Yahoo Answers, as reflected in this representative post, titled, ’Yahoo’s Big Win’ at TechCrunch.

But many people, including GARs, noted that the two services were so completely different as to defy comparison, ultimately undermining the popular belief that the rise of Yahoo Answers contributed in any way to the demise of Google Answers, as expressed in a comment by Folletto Malefico in response to the article cited above:

<<I can’t [stop] thinking that Google Answers and Yahoo Answers are two DIFFERENT services, with different targets and users.

Even if they share their name and there are people answering, the similarities ends there. One is an expert service where you pay for reliable and good quality information. The second one is a people service where you get anything, from the silliest answer to the most detailed one.

To me, it’s like comparing Wikipedia and a forum.

The only problem is that the Google Answers target was unsuccessful. And that’s all. It’s good to reflect on that, but theres no “big win" to compare.>>

For more of the web community’s discussion of the theory that Google Answers’ demise was due to Yahoo Answers success, see these search results.

The “official” statements released by Google Answers and the staff who worked on it seem to confirm the idea that the closure was unrelated to Yahoo Answers, and that it was simply a very early experimental product which ultimately wasn’t as successful, in their view, as a Google product should be, and which didn’t fit in with their evolving focus on other priorities.

The Google Answers FAQs page has now been modified to note: “Google Answers was an experimental product for users to get help from Researchers with expertise in online searching.”

A post about the closure, by the software developers behind Google Answers, on The Official Google Blog, noted:

<<Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time – and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people’s minds.>>

Of course, for the GARs, and the customers of Google Answers who used the service regularly, the project seemed successful to the extent that many Researchers were earning a living there, or at least adequately supplementing their income sufficiently to continue answering questions. And customers continued to seem happy with the answers, providing high ratings and tips.

Nonetheless, the site did not generate the kind of traffic and profit one might reasonably expect from a typical, successful Google product, at least from a corporate viewpoint.

The GARs who remained until the end, and put up with the failed email notification system (which was supposed to notify customers of activity on their questions, but stopped doing so), and who watched with disbelief when Google took their primary link for Google Answers off of their list of ’More’ services, felt that Google Answers might fail simply because it was not only not being promoted and well-maintained, but the opposite seemed to be occurring. Repairs to the system were slower in coming, if they were made at all. Communication between GARs and Google Answers administrators dropped off as newsletters decreased in frequency and responses to email consisted increasingly of only canned replies.

So, in the long run, it seemed clear to the GARs that Google Answers failed precisely because it was increasingly a non-priority for those who had developed it, and they were putting their attention elsewhere. It seemed that it was no longer the shiny, new experiment of two new and excited software engineers, but a now-familiar distraction from new and different projects, which simply wasn’t worth the time and effort to repair or maintain.

This perspective seems to be supported by statements made by other staffers about Google in general, as in the comments by Marissa Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience, in this article in Business week, who:

<<...estimates that up to 60% to 80% of Google’s products may eventually crash and burn. But the idea, she says, is to encourage risk-taking and let surviving products truly thrive. ’We anticipate that we’re going to throw out a lot of products,’ says Mayer. ’But [people] will remember the ones that really matter and the ones that have a lot of user potential.’>>

There are currently 43 former Google Answers Researchers registered at Uclue. And realistically, that represents most, if not all, of the Researchers who remained active to the end of Google Answers.

I hope that more than satisfies your interests in asking this question. If anything is unclear, please post a Request for Clarification and I’ll be happy to respond.

[By John Sublime1 | Original post | Comments]

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(InfoWorld) - With airlines in the midst of their worst summer (performance-wise) in decades, it seems unimaginable that anyone would recommend that other industries adopt their business practices – especially overbooking. Yet that's exactly what McKinsey has done in a new research report, "Improving Field Service Productivity."

If you work in IT and have anything to do with systems that support remote personnel, read on. Because McKinsey is saying that IT can take a lead in making field service much more productive than it is.

The central thesis of the research is that field service staff (cable and telecom truck-roll guys, couriers, and so on) are "invisible" employees, and that management gets only post-facto, rearview-mirror reports and metrics about how they use their time. If management could get more transparent, real-time information about their activities, however, and combine it with statistical analysis on service demand, productivity could go through the roof, increasing utilization by 30 to 80 percent, according to the report.

Translation: The field service guys are spending too much time sitting (or driving) around and chasing canceled appointments. If they were scheduled better, IT would be the hero. The field service guys, of course, will not necessarily like this. You'd be cutting into their "banana time" (longish lunches and coffee breaks; early quitting or late start times) and making their treadmill spin faster.

But if your company doesn't do this, your competitors will, and the technologies involved are not rocket science. They include, according to McKinsey, intelligent real-time routing software (UPS, for example, has a system that minimizes left turns to save time and fuel), autodial call-ahead software to reconfirm appointments, wireless handhelds to reduce paperwork, and GPS to track wandering workers.

These technologies can enable key changes in long-standing business processes: empowering dispatch centers to adapt to changes more quickly, rethinking booking policies (such as overbooking) to better utilize capacity, and leveraging more sophisticated models (including, say, the impact of weather) to predict customer behavior (it's nice outside, so more customers decide to blow off appointments).

The point of all this is that there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit in terms of creatively using IT to improve the business. (Just don't watch "The Cable Guy" before you volunteer for this particular project.)

CIO talking heads dept.
Now that I'm officially addicted to HBO's "Entourage" (via Netflix), I can't resist posting a link to one of my own videos, in hopes that someone in Hollywood will see it and I'll get picked up. It's a session I did recently at the Churchill Club with the CIOs of McKesson, Google, Hasbro, and Levi Strauss – talking about their priorities and how they view everything from Web 2.0 to globalization to the iPhone.

I think a CIO reality TV show could be a big hit on HBO – don't you?

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I’m happy to tell you I’ve started writing a book with O’Reilly’s Maker Media group, currently titled Google Office Hacks! The book will not focus on search, but on the existing & growing applications suite Google provides. It will provide tricks to get things done with Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, iGoogle, Google Analytics, Maps, YouTube, SketchUp, Presentations (if Google decides to release it!) and more. In particular, my editor Brian Jepson and I will focus on hacking the Google office “into shape" for tasks where there is just no official Google menu entry, setting or button to do this in any “normal” way. Also, hacks will show advanced program uses, or just give you ideas for creative workarounds. For instance, yesterday I wrote a chapter on how to automatically add a linked Table of Contents to your Google document using a bookmarklet.

For this book, we’d love to get your hacks in it too. What we’re looking for are both problems and solutions. A problem could be, “How do I do X and Y in Google Spreadsheets?”, and that’s great input because it might inspire a solution. A solution, on the other hand, is a hack you saw somewhere or invented yourself that solves one of these problems in the “Google OS.” For that purpose, please use this post’s comments thread for any suggestions, or email me links or ideas at info@blogoscoped.com. It would be cool to have many experts in the book. Naturally I’ll keep scouring forum threads or Google news, and keep looking out for hacks in places like the great Google Operating System blog, to name just one.

On another note, I’m writing this book in Google Docs. I actually started the outline in Word until Brian – who blogs at O’Reilly’s Hackszine, another great source for Google hacks – suggested to do the obvious thing and write in the tools I’m writing about! And if you’re not working on an imported Word file (which can be a pain to edit in Google Docs), it’s actually a lot of fun. When I wrote a chapter draft, I invite Brian to the document, he gets an email, and can then make his edits on the same document. Then I can check the revision history and his comments and if needed, edit the chapter once more.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google News USA is rolling out an experimental feature that lets people or organizations who are part of a news story add a comment to the news. “Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we’ll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as ’comments’ so readers know it’s the individual’s perspective, rather than part of a journalist’s report,” Google writes in their Google News blog. This feature was foreshadowed in internal Google documents that leaked in 2006.

To participate in this program, you can start by searching for your own name in Google News. For any story you find that you feel deserves a second view, you can then write to news-comments@google.com, including your comment, a link to the story, your contact details, and information how your contact information can be verified. For instance, if your organization is Coca-Cola and www.cocacola.com/contact includes the email address peter@cocacola.com, then a verification might consist of simply checking if someone received the reply sent to peter@cocacola.com. This verification process is slightly atypical for Google as it’s very manual, meaning it may also need a lot of workers to handle this as it’s not automated.

I’m curious to see how this Google News process will work out; it’s an original, fresh way to look at news aggregation. News reports already often interview “all sides” of the story, but they don’t always do – and they might also use selective quoting to skew an issue, either to push through an agenda of the publishing house, or just because the article’s author was keen to make a certain point. And the news report might not have a comments function of its own. In that situation, individuals who have no access to large publications (nor much time to ensure their view is printed in the publication) will now be able to push their view right on Google News. And even if you don’t want to correct an article’s statements, if you were involved in the news you might have additional first-hand information that add new perspective. “By commenting to us you can help us increase the number of diverse and meaningful points of view on the news,” the Google News comments help reads.

On the other hand, this feature might also aid to dilute news reports; imagine, say, an Associated Press reporter who researched some weeks to come up with an incredibly fact-checked piece about food poisoning with Acme Inc’s products. Acme Inc, trying to prevent an image scandal, now issues a factually wrong but well-written counter-statement to Google News, who will put it next to the news bits. Readers might now figure, “Oh, AP got it wrong I guess, there’s the counter-statement right there, I’ll move on to other news.”

Google News, in any case, can use this comment feature to position themselves even stronger as the access point for news reports. It can turn the site from a read-only news portal to a read-write news meeting point, if people make use of this feature and the Google News moderators verify submissions speedily and rather objectively.

News comments each have a permalink, and clicking on “More” will expand the full text. A link points to the commenter’s homepage, if any, and a disclaimer below reads, “The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Google Inc. or its employees,” pointing to the help pages for more information.

If anyone spots a News comment in the wild, please add a link in the comments! Here are two examples already.

[Thanks Search-Engines-Web.com!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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