So its been about a month in which I’ve owned my Motorola/Google/Verizon Droid phone. And I have to say that I am just loving this phone. But I don’t even think it can be called a phone, because the phone function is just one of many applications and features that the device runs. I’ve found the Android OS very easy and intuitive. The applications that I use are very well engineered and designed. There is deep and intuitive integration with social sites like Facebook and Twitter. When I first got the phone from Verizon, I didn’t have to deal with transferring information or setting up my contacts. I simply logged in with my Google Username and password and instantly, all my information was there ready to go. One of the slickest features is that whenever I see someone’s “icon”, I just long press on it and all the different ways I can connect with them slides into the screen – wether its email, IM, Facebook, or where their address is. Its pretty cool. And the Droid’s much publicized killer app is its GPS Navigation application. It is just fantastic and just as good as any TomTom, or Garmin product (Note to each of them: be afraid, be very afraid). The Navigation app is fully integrated with Google Maps and Google Street View. I’ve used it several times and I have been nothing short of impressed. Since its open source, I’m hoping some enterprising soul adds an app so you can choose different voices for the Navigation’s audio.

With all the positives, there are a few items that I’d love to see them address:

• With the Audio player, they should not allow two audio based applications to run at the same time. A few times I’ve had podcasts running and have hit music songs by accident and then had two things playing at once. If Podcasts are playing, you should not be able to play music and vice versa
• The camera could be improved a bit. And the button to take pictures is on the screen, not on the hardware itself. So if you are taking a photo and you can’t see the screen/button, its not the easiest thing in the world to do.
• Whenever I connect it to my computer, you always have to click on a button to enable it to sync with your machine. There should be a setting to just do that automatically.
• The Keyboard is just ok. It could be improved, especially with its alternate characters and numbers.

I’m not going to go out and call this an iPhone killer…yet. But the Droid does everything I need, its easy to use, and its on the Verizon Network where you can actually make phone calls. In fact, the other day I left my iPod at home by mistake and I did not miss it at all.

So yesterday I downloaded onto my wonderful new Googomotozion Android phone Google Goggles. No, its not an application to optimize drunken hookups. It is visual search. Basically, you fire up the application, take a photo with your phone’s camera, and Google will scan the photo and look up information on that item. I gave it a quick test run yesterday and I have to say I was blown away. But its Google, I would expect as much. I took a quick photo of my work Laptop, which is a Lenovo, and ran it through Goggles. Not only did it spit out information on lap top computers, it actually delivered results specific to Lenovo!! Impressive to say the least. So similar to the Barcode Scanning applications for Android and iPhone, this app has a wide variety of possibilities from commerce and product comparison, to just looking up something that you encounter in your travels. I look forward to trying this out on other things to see how it performs.

Three straight posts on Google, but they appear to be in product release mode these days.

I was adding a few appointments to Google Calendar this morning and saw that they have released some new and very slick features to their Calendar product. Now, when you set up an appointment, there is a mini calendar view that enables you to quickly, visually, see your calendar and what times you have available. You can then add the other people you want to invite to this view and see their availabilities, to find the best time that works for all people attending the event. It appears that the “attendee” has to have their calendar synced with Google Calendar in order for you to view their calendar, but this is ideal for Small Businesses or groups that are using Google Calendar and everyone in the organization uses the application. As you move the translucent “event preview” area (the blue striped area in the screen grab below), it changes from striped to a clear display depending on if there are any conflicts for the meeting time. Very slick. Here is a screen grab of it:

From Techcrunch, it appears that Google will be launching extensions for the Google Chrome browser.  I am a huge Firefox fan however from a web development perspective, Chrome is amazingly fast.  I can edit an area of my site and while it takes Firefox a few minutes for it to pull the update from the server, Chrome does it instantly.  Its a significant difference and much faster.  If the Extensions for Chrome as as good and useful as they are for Firefox, this could get very interesting.  Google is taking over the online world!

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Check this out. I got a direct mail piece from Google, offering me $100 coupon for AdSense. The poster child for the Internet and all things online and digital is using the old fashioned, dreadfully offline, less than 1% response rate channel of Direct Mail to drum up business. Oh, the irony.

One piece of feedback: I’d advise them to actually know the recipient’s name rather than addressing it to “Adsense Customer”.

Interesting. Google’s Tim Armstrong was named AOL CEO today. I guess there is still life over at AOL. This will be very interesting to see how this plays out not only at AOL but within the overall online advertising/portal marketplace.

This is a very interesting post about how Twitter search is dirupting Google from Silicon Alley Insider.

…time and time again disruptive business confuse adjacent innovation for disruptive innovation. They think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger — the real disruptor to their business. The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, its often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD. With the AOL story now unraveled — I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL…

Obviously, Twitter is still in search of its business model, while Google is one of the most profitable companies in business. But the idea that something like Twitter could truly disrupt Google is a fascinating concept.

Google wants its own HOV lane on the information superhighway so they can avoid doing more evil.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.
The contentious issue has wide ramifications for the Internet as a platform for new businesses. If companies like Google succeed in negotiating preferential treatment, the Internet could become a place where wealthy companies get faster and easier access to the Web than less affluent ones, according to advocates of network neutrality. That could choke off competition, they say.

The above quote is the critical one here. Providing preferential treatment to specific companies on the Internet completely flys in the face of the principles in which the Internet was created. The internet is a series of tubes…no, sorry…was created on the principle of open standards for communications. Its the great equalizer. After all the opportunity that the Internet has created, and is still yet to create, giving preference to bigger organizations would be a monumental step backwards. Come on folks, lets not screw this up.

You Tube is testing out some long form video. Its added several episodes of Star Trek, Beverly Hils 90210, and MacGyver in a very “tech-geek” influence choice of programming. Similar to other online streaming video, the episodes will have pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ads.

Now I’m not terribly surprised by this move, you knew they could never make a decent dollar on user generated content. Advertisers avoid this like the plague. I do find this interesting for several reasons:

• Google has been testing out digital TV advertising and reporting via Dish Network. Obviously, this is the next extension of that
• The obvious popularity of watching video online and the digital convergence of over the air and digital TV. The fairly strong debut of Hulu, the joint venture from NBC and 20th Century Fox Studios, along with Joost is proving this out.
• The challenges they have had in finding a viable revenue stream for YouTube.

If this ends up working, then the implications of this are wide and deep. Google has been dabbling in original content partnerhsips and I am sure this may give them some leverage in dealing with the studios.

Google announced that it has indexed one trillion pages. Dr. Evil would be proud. Oh, wait…they don’t do Evil.

People do vanity searches. Its part of the dark underbelly of the Internet.

So, this evening I was checking my site’s traffic/stats and I noticed a decent amount of traffic to the old site. So for a goof, I did a “vanity search”…you know, searching on your own name…just to see where I ranked and to kind of get a sense of why people may be visiting my site.

Well, it appears that I am now the most popular Stephen Clark on the Internet At least, that’s what Google and Yahoo say.

Being ranked on this lofty perch brings immense responsibility and I can only hope to live up to the expectations of all those “stephen clark” searchers. It also means that there’s only one place to go, and that is down. Yeah, the next Stephen Clark will come along with his new CSS driven, standards compliant site, and knock me off my perch.

But until that happens, I’ll guess I’ll enjoy my new spot on top of the Googleplex.

Is it getting hot out in Redmond? Is the collar feeling a little tight? OK, so lets not get too carried away…Microsoft is still an immense power in the business, computer and software worlds and they are not going anywhere. In fact, I fully expect them to observe the market, make adjustments, and then come roaring forward to protect their core software businesses including MS Office (exactly what they did with Netscape).

But it is immensely interesting to observe the online marketplace these days and all the amazing web based products and innovation, taking dead aim at Microsoft’s cash cow desktop applications. And I know this is nothing new, as several of these apps have been out in the marketplace for a while now, and they have been written about often.

The item that motivated me to write this post is Gilffy, which is a neat browser based version of MS Visio. So in addition to this, you have Google’s Spreadsheet, Calendar and Gmail, all of Yahoo’s similar services, 30Boxes (Calendar), Writely (and all the other Web based word processing apps), Basecamp from 37 Signals, and Thumbstacks, and Eric Meyer’s S5 slideshow apps, to name a few. You are all set. No need to buy a $500 piece of software in a box full of air.

The only concern is that by using all these web based apps, all your information would be housed on someone else’s server/computer. But most to all of the aforementioned apps give you the ability to download local copies, so that should not be a big issue.

Its quite an interesting time to be a consumer and to be in Redmond. :-) I’ll be interested to see Google and Yahoo’s next steps.

Now this is pretty funny. Google Idol is running head to head competitions of people’s videos that are submitted to Google Video. Somehow, two girls singing Aretha Franklin are crushing The Back Dormitory Boys widely publicized and very funny “As Long As You Love Me” lipsync by a margin of 3 to 1.

Found this on Diggnation…a Google Maps version of the New York City Subway system. You can plot out where is the closest subway stop to any address in NYC. Pretty slick!

Google delivered a new IM client today called Google Talk. Maybe its a good think I left AOL and the IM world. I mean, I’d definitely be up for the challenge, but Google is becoming quite a formiddable foe in the online world. There were some interesting articles in the NY Times this morning discussing how Google is becoming “very Microsoft”.