Web Concepts

Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

That’s according Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, in an interview with Network World. And this is not some pie-in-the-sky idea — they’re already doing it.

This week we heard a lot about Comet Tempel 1, into which NASA smashed a probe a few years back and to which it returned via the Stardust probe. What we didn’t hear was that Stardust’s mission partner, EPOXI (formerly called Deep Impact), has apparently been updated with these new InterPlanetary protocols, and Google has tested it at 80 light-seconds.

Cerf explains that Google realized as far back as 1998 that space-based Internet has problems that don’t face the traditional Internet design — speed-of-light communications are instant on Earth, but at interplanetary distances, that’s slow, and can cause problems. An interplantary network could help overcome these problems.

The approach uses delay-tolerant networking, or Bundle Protocol, as distinct from Internet Protocol. The International Space Station uses Bundle Protocol, which defines blocks of data as a bundle, each of which contains enough information to avoid processing interruptions even in a delay.

This year, Google wants to standardize the interplanetary protocols and make them available to all the space-faring countries. As he tells Network World: “Potentially every spacecraft launched from that time on will be interwoven from a communications point of view. But perhaps more important, when the spacecraft have finished their primary missions, if they are still functionally operable — they have power, computer, communications — they can become nodes in an interplanetary backbone.”

Ghost spacecraft reincarnated as an interplanetary Internet to support the next generation? Seems worthy of a little evangelizing.

[Network World]

The extension, called Personal Blocklist, lets users bar sites they deem to be worthless or untrustworthy from future search results using an extra button embedded in each search result. Anytime Personal Blocklist scrubs results from a page of search results it notes their removal at the bottom of the page and gives you the option to unblock them.

That doesn’t just empower users to customize their search criteria--it also provides Google with a strong indicator of what sites its users would like to see pushed down in their search results, helping Google refine its own search parameters. The extension won’t kill the content farm, but with a little help from users (like you!) it should help push them down so more relevant cream can rise to the top.

[NY Times]

Google Art Project has rolled the same tech it employs in its famous Street View cars through 17 famous museums including London’s National Gallery, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, gathering 360-degree navigable imagery that lets users take a virtual walk through some of the world’s great art institutions. Missed the State Tretyakov Gallery last time you were passing through Moscow? No sweat.

The Art Project doesn’t allow you to tour all the museums in their entirety—that’s for paying patrons—but using a pared down Street View car known as “the trolley,” the mapped more than 385 rooms across the 17 galleries, collectively representing thousands of works. Many works have been individually imaged, allowing for a better resolution examination of individual works that allows users to zoom around a canvas.

Moreover, each gallery selected one work to image with extremely high-resolution “gigapixel” tech, allowing users to zoom in on features and details not even visible to the human eye (it’s a very Ferris-Bueller-at-the-Art-Institute-of-Chicago kind of experience). Indulge your cultured side here or check out the visitor's guide below.

[Google Blog]

Learning a new language is hard. All those new grammatical rules, the new spellings, new tenses, irregular verbs--it's a serious pain. Luckily, Google Translate just issued an update to enable what Google's calling "Conversation Mode." Basically, it translates a multi-language conversation in real-time, spitting out a translation just as soon as you finish speaking. Now you can quit those painful language classes!

Translate, available in the Android Market for all Android phones with at least version 2.1 (read: almost every Android phone), now packs conversation mode. It's meant to simulate the duties of a translator: After each person is finished talking, the app translates and regurgitates the translation on the fly. It only works with English and Spanish at the moment, though as Translate supports 53 different languages (!), if Conversation Mode is a success, Google will probably bring it to more languages.

In my quick tests, Translate worked exceedingly well half the time--Google's skill with English voice commands is pretty much unparalleled, so it's no surprise that Translate can interpret English and spit it out as Spanish fairly easily. The other side, Spanish to English, gave the app more problems, though I'm not sure if it's the app's fault or my fault for reading Spanish news articles in what I'm sure is an offensively awful accent. Either way, it got a lot of my Spanish wrong, though if you're careful to ignore the nonsense words that litter the translation ("Bluetooth" and "cowboy" popped up repeatedly for some reason), you can get the basic gist of what's being said.

This isn't the first app to attempt this kind of on-the-fly translation; in fact, the U.S. military is testing a similar app, and Google's own Goggles app can do something similar with text. But it's one of the more intuitive ways to translate real-world conversation we've seen, and it's freely available to millions. Just search for "Google Translate" in the Android Market.

[Google via Gizmodo]

As far as handy Web apps go, Body Browser is pretty neat; a sliding scroll bar allows you to peel away layers of the body, starting at the skin and moving down through the muscles and bone/organs to the cardiovascular and nervous systems. It allows you to zoom in tight (with nice resolution) to get the name of a specific bodily bit. Clicking on anything produces a handy label that identifies what you’re looking at.

Then there’s the search function of course, which allows you to locate any part of the body by just typing in the name. Like your usual Google search, the drop down is self-populating, so even if you’re not quite up to speed on the spelling of “anterior cruciate ligament,” the app will still help you find it. Perhaps best of all: no plug-ins. No Flash, no Java. The application runs right in any WebGL supported browser. It can still be a little cumbersome – if you’re not zoomed to exactly the right level in some cases (navigating the brain is a good example) it won’t always let you click on the right object – but overall it’s a pretty smooth experience.

Of course, not every browser is WebGL-enabled, but Chrome 9 Beta and Firefox 4 beta are, and both are available for download. Body Browser hasn’t landed in Google Labs just yet, but you can take it for a spin around your insides now through the Google Operating System blog. Barring that, you can get a somewhat rough tour via the video below.

[Google Operating System Blog]

Ten reasons apps are better than bookmarks

Click to launch our tour of Google Chrome's first great apps

The Chrome Web Store is an interesting beast, in that many (maybe even most) of the apps are essentially unchanged from a typical website. This is especially noticeable for Google's own offerings, ranging from Gmail to Google Maps to Google Reader, but there's a pretty reasonable explanation for that: Those "sites" were always web apps. Until now, there just wasn't a central repository of them, but that's no reason to radically change the near-perfection that is Gmail just so the app looks different than gmail.com.

On the other hand, just because it makes sense doesn't mean it isn't a little boring. Of course Gmail and Google Maps are amazing, but it's much more interesting to look at the apps that are either dramatically redesigned or entirely new. You can keep on using your Gmail bookmark as usual--there's no particular reason to download an app, at least at this point. Once Google releases Chrome OS sometime next year, users of that new, browser-based OS will rely more on apps. But for now, your everyday Windows or Mac user of Chrome can restrict themselves to the more exciting apps in the Web Store. Check out our gallery above for ten of our early favorites.

"Google's cool," privacy not so much

The victims are part of the 3 percent of German residents, totaling almost 250,000 people, who chose to have images of their homes blurred from Google’s Street View map feature. Google uncharacteristically offered Germans the chance to opt out of the system before it launched after German government officials voiced concerns about privacy rights and Google’s data-collection method.

The identity of the person or persons who used Google's tool to track down the spotlight-shunning opters-out and vandalize their uncool homes is unknown.

Google responded: “We respect people’s decision to opt out and by no means consider this to be acceptable behavior.”

[Deutsche Welle]