I love Google, And customisation & personalisation.:-)

I also love my privacy, and every once in a while there's a bit of "Ohmigod, how can I let some company know this much about me" flapping, but all in all, I love Google!!
The other day I was at home at my (personalised & custom built) computer and I fired up my (personalised) browser (Firefox with a ton of really good extensions - oops I forgot, I also love Firefox), which automatically points to my (custom-made) browser start page which has my most-used links, rss feeds and search boxes and all kinds of goodies so that I can start my internet quest without having to think what page I need to start with, and without having to settle for someone else's page to start my browsing with (even though that used to be Google :-) sorry).

But I'll have you know that Google gets centre stage, and my browser focus is pulled to the Google search box onLoad(). So anyway, I was at home and I clicked on the Google news link from my customised homepage. This, as you can imagine, takes me to my customised & personalised Google News page, which starts with the top stories, then has 3 headlines which have been recommended for ME, and then carries on with exactly 3 stories each from about 5 topics, and 5 stories each from all the news relating to 3 keyword phrases that I've told Google I'm interested in... and then a bunch of stuff I put on which goes at the bottom, but I never look at. I'll talk about my personalised Google home page some other time - suffice it to say it's got the weather in a couple of miles-apart timezones, some puzzles, quotes and other bits.

So ANYWAY, I browsed through my personalised news, saw an article that looked interesting, clicked on and read it. I then did various other things which aren't important to this post, and eventually went to bed. 2 days later, I was at work, and I wanted to look at that article again. I couldn't remember the name of the company it was about, and I tried retracing my steps through the (customised) news pages, but the world changes a lot in two days, and that news was gone. I tried searching Google News, but there were so many stories with the same keywords that I was totally lost.

And then it struck me - I found the page through Google, and Google's not some massive faceless company, right? Google's my friend, and my old friend will remember me! Basically to cut the crap, I went on to the Google homepage, and since my home & work computers are both set to stay signed into Google, I just clicked the search history link at the top right, and voila it shows me a list of the searches I've done, sorted by date, with non-clicked searches at the bottom, and a little calendar widget that I can use to choose the date I want to look at!

As easy as that, I go back two days, find my article - and I'm done. I love it.

Functionality v. Privacy - short term v long term? after all, the functionality is a big thing, but very short term. I'm going to get very agitated that I can't find the information I want, but it'll probably disappear in a day or two. Whereas if at some point I find that my private data.. my searches, surfing habits & details from my google account.. along with my IP address, all the results you can get by Googling me, and keywords from my gmail and everything else that Google can dish up on me has been sold or released or 'slipped' to some unscrupulous third party, or if Google decide to start doing 'evil' things with my data, I could be seriously inconvenienced for a LONG time. Fortunately I'm not doing anything illegal, so it'll probably stop at being an inconvenience rather than go into the realm of something with a lot more impact. That's until they figure out that with that much data, they could probably have a LOT MORE impact on anyone at all, legal or illegal. There goes the dream...

This Is Broken

This Is Broken

:-) Amusing :-)

What's new with Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger (8.0.0792.00) is miles ahead of the last windows messenger, in terms of appearance.. Hopefully this is the unifying product, I couldn't understand why they had 2 separate apps that run on the same service, one with a modern interface & one that looks crap! It's obviously replaced msn messenger for me, and some of the new features are quite nice:

I like the concept of LiveCall.. integrating a phone app is smart, although I wish I had a single VOIP-based phone app that could integrate with EVERYTHING... including my Outlook, Exchange, Sharepoint, IM contacts etc in real time. And then intelligently choose what protocol to use when making calls... if it's a contact with a VOIP phone, then call it voip-voip and make the call free. If there's only a landline number (or voip isn't showing as signed in), then call the landline.. and actually for most countries, that's free too. And the last resort is the mobile... except in the case of American mobiles, coz yup, they'd be free too (at least skypeout & voipcheap offer free VOIP-mobile calls for the U.S.)

The shared folder feature is nice too, and makes sharing a bunch of files much easier.

And the "Search" button in the chat window is just weird... why would i want to bring up random, unpredictable & often sponsored links in a chat window... unless I was just bored... it's certainly an interesting application, tying msn search or live search into the IM app - the whole "search from anywhere" concept I agree with, but not the way it's currently implemented?? You click search and it sends out a message full of links? I'm not so sure about that.

The instant search in the main window (just above the contact list) is a feature that I can see the point of - and it's a good point - but I just don't see myself using it. I don't have a million people on my IM list... I only have about 50 contacts, and they're quite geographically diverse, so they're never on all together... and that means about 10 - 15 online, about 20 mobile and the rest totally offline - so I don't really need to trawl through hundreds of contacts and millions of contact-related fields to get to some info... Like the way I need to (and appreciate the point, if not the actual efficacy of Instant Search) in my Outlook Inbox..

But unless I'm mistaken, apart from these things and a couple of links to live.com & the messenger team blog, there's not a lot more there... and I was really expecting a lot more with the whole "Live" hype. Maybe there are more features waiting to be rolled out? Or maybe I'm just greedy :-)