why google did unity

Nicholas Deleon talks about the new Unity venture being pursued by Google and a bunch of other companies which will increase the bandwidth capacity across the Pacific. He says:

“One quick thought I had: how often do you, average American Internet user, connect to Asian servers? Unless YouTube or Wikipedia has servers there, it does seem weird to me to suggest all this Trans-Pacific Internet activity when I’m mainly browsing CNN and Drudge and other U.S.-based sites.”

I think Nicholas misses the point.

If this were about the average user using the internet, then the communications companies would be building this pipeline on their own. Google’s problem is that it has so much information. I am betting a lot of that information gets moved around all of its servers globally, whether that is Google pushing data out from their US servers or vice versa. The amount of information they have is increasing exponentially and will continue to grow.. so now they need to work with the telecoms companies to sate their own need for bandwidth. Not just users.

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Reading Dylan Fuller’s post on AOL CEO, Andy Fulco, talking tough:

“I hope they beat each other’s brains out over search and leave the display market to us,” he said to the Interactive Advertising Bureau annual conference. “I think it’s a mistake. But I think Napoleon said never interrupt your enemy when they’re in the middle of making a mistake.”

Dylan is right there are some cool products being talked about. But this is how to lose users.. go along to the Xdrive website and click the link for more info about their new ultra cool Xdrive Desktop Lite app - a 404 error.

So I download it instead.

I already have an account.. I can log in via the website just fine - but I just get a login error via the Xdrive Lite app. I know it is in beta still but surely they can do better than this?

AOL are lucky Google’s Gdrive is not out yet and Microsoft’s version (Skydrive) is currently unusable - you have to select individual files to upload to their online storage - thats great when I have a few thousand files.

[update] ah - they fixed the link now and updated the front page design entirely - much better, there is also no advert either on the front page interestingly. For me though, the product still just doesn’t seem to work as advertised. I selected a directory and dragged it to the app. It should sync right? Well the list of transfers shows all the files but after it syncs some files, it just seems to get stuck - files are no longer being uploaded. I don’t know why.. some form of error message of status bar would be useful! Incidentally this was the same issue 4 months ago when I last tried Xdrive

Bubblegeneration wrote a post criticizing techcrunch which may or may not be true - I’ll leave that for others to figure out for themselves. At the end of the day we will all know when techcrunch is going downhill - we’ll all stop visiting

Anyhow, the interesting comment bubblegeneration made was that he thought Etsy could be the next Google. I just dont understand why he thinks this- yes it’s a great site - it allows individuals to buy and sell items they have made. So I see yes it possibly could be the next ebay (though I think they might be more likely to buy etsy). But the next Google? Why?

Check out ReadBurner by Alexander Marktl. It shows you the popular shared items on Google Reader and even more interestingly shows you who is sharing your items, therefore indirectly telling you who is reading your blog. Very interesting. Make sure you look for your link on the statistics page after you have burned your link blog.

I would surely have expected Google to roll something like this out - maybe integrated into Google News.

A rapid fire post on the past week having been away from it all in Atlanta.

FAST is being bought by Microsoft - Dylan Fuller, formerly of FAST has a good run down on it. I do think it is interesting that Microsoft bought it rather than Google - it’s an obvious fit for Microsoft in the enterprise search space where it is strong but I thought Google wanted more of this space - is it that they think they can do it themselves? or does it not fit with their “everything in the cloud” philosophy?

Xobni launched its beta. Scott Voigt saved me the trouble of installing it right now by giving me a preview. It looks nice enough and gives you some interesting information about your inbox but it doesn’t aid your productivity. It will be interesting to see if this can evolve into a “Email 2.0″ plugin for Outlook, creating a social network through which it prioritises your email. Very early days right now though.

CES happened, the only highlights I heard about were Yahoo Life (integration of the various Yahoo services to give a better user experience - more in a later post); great looking TVs (very thin, bigger..) and Bill Gate’s disappointing keynote looking more at what we know Microsoft is doing rather than anything new. Still it was his last one..

Finally.. Newsgator went free. Finally. The question is whether it is too little too late for them.