Cleaning up for Honeycomb

It is year-end, December 31, 2010.

While everyone at Google enjoys the holidays, someone is still working late at night to gear up for Honeycomb.

Who could it be?

Notice the cleaning bucket that hard-working little Android is using. Yes, it is covered with those distinctive Erlenmeyer flasks that Google Labs was so fond of using.

Nostalgia

This predated the closure of Google Labs by nearly a year.

Cleaning up for Honeycomb by Evoreto UG (haftungsbeschränkt):

Our 3D Android is based on work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.
This is no official ad and neither related nor endorsed by Google.

Music: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under CC/licenses/by/3.0/.

Google Maps: Foreign affairs and social skirmishes

Google Earth and Google Maps are probably the most popular, free online cartography reference tools for the public.

Map markers away! Fighting the cartographic unknown

Foreign affairs

Popularity is not the same as authority[1]:

The lines that Google draws on maps have no government’s imprimatur.

How an online map almost caused a violent conflict

If Google Maps show borders or place names that are different from official or long-established usage, they can confuse, offend or worse[2]:

On Nov. 3, 2010, a Nicaraguan official justified his country’s incursion into neighboring Costa Rica’s territory by claiming that, contrary to the customary borderline, he wasn’t trespassing. For proof, he [cited] Google Maps.

Google should not be involved in geopolitical disputes

Google DOES try to offer meaningful, accurate maps.

What On Earth Is Google Doing With Orkut?

Reblogged from TechCrunch:

Just spotted in Orkut, Google's also-ran social networking site: a new Google+ badge, one of the first integrations between the two services. Orkut members who also have a Google+ account are now being rewarded in the form of a badge reading "Google+ user," which they can choose to make visible on their Orkut profile. No, it's not a big deal in terms of the feature itself (

Read more… 639 more words

TechCrunch seems perturbed by Google's decision to maintain Orkut as a distinct entity from Google Plus. I'm uncertain why though. Orkut has been Google's most successful social network, for a very long time (in a web frame of reference)! Orkut even grew its user base in Brazil during 2011. Orkut remains the third most popular social network in India. I recall an Orkut Blogger post last year that showed Orkut having an audience of over 65 million ACTIVE users, primarily in Brazil, Paraguay, Pakistan and India. There doesn't seem any reason to merge Orkut out of existence, into Google+ or any where else!

Legends of logo design and WebGL

Today’s post is a short, silly follow-up to my earlier, equally silly post, Legends of Google Chrome Logo Design. That was a “proof theorem lemma” sort of parody.

Corporate Math(emetics)

Click on any image to “embiggen”

This image looks like it was screen shot, downloaded, then uploaded about a zillion times, using a far lossier compression algorithm than anything that is even a memory today. But that adds to its charm. Maybe? I don’t know why Ant decided to title it like this, but I liked it.

See vast numbers of other epic fails, via Cheezburger.

Better yet, go visit Ant’s strange, fun, almost-sweet website, Ant’s Quality Foraged Links.

WebGL Showcase

Google Maps street view coverage

I nearly forgot the entire point of this post! Google Maps offers various practical views such as satellite, hybrid street map over laid on satellite, street-level (“street view”) and even a photographic view inside businesses that participate in Google Places. Google Maps Street View coverage as of 2 March 2012 is represented by the blue shaded areas in the friendly map to the right.

Mapping fans have created some amazing special effects by combining, or layering, Google Maps with other Google services and capabilities, Panoramio and WebGL, respectively. Google Panoramio is a high-quality photograph sharing application, acquired and still owned by Google since 2008 or so. WebGL is an image format supported by Google Chrome browser. Street View Stereographic by NotLion showcases WebGL capabilities, Panoramio and of course Google Maps. If the details on Github are too sparse, or technical, see the Google Maps Mania post about viewing any Google Maps Street View as a stereographic projection.

A Special Kind Of Proxy

GoogleSharing is a special proxy service that doesn’t hide what you are searching from Google. Instead, it obscures where the requests are coming from. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize traffic. It is exclusively intended for certain aspects of your communication with Google. So there are no “alternative” websites to visit. Your use of the web need not change at all.

How does it work?

How does it work?
The GoogleSharing system is a custom proxy with a Firefox Add-on.

The proxy

The proxy generates a pool of GoogleSharing “identities,” each containing a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several browsers.

The add-on

The Firefox add-on watches for requests to Google services from your browser… and will transparently redirect them to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of identifying information and replaced with a GoogleSharing identity. Then this request is forwarded to Google, and the response is proxied back to you.

If your next search is given a different identity,