Category Archives: google

amazon, google

No more Amazon income if you are in North Carolina. Who next?

The easiest way to make money on the web is by signing up as an affiliate for Amazon.com and/or Google (Disclaimer: I have both). Although most affiliates achieve only small and occasional income, it is possible to earn significant amounts. With Amazon, you can create your own specialist online store and make it a viable business.

If there is anyone in North Carolina in that position, they have woken up to a nasty headache. Amazon has sent out emails telling them:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

Affiliate James Barrett remarks:

This is absurd! No Legislation has passed and been signed nor does it appear it will … The lack of notice on this so associates could take action shows me Amazon has no respect for those sites it has been getting low cost referrals from.

My knowledge of North Carolina politics is limited; but what interests me is what this says about the Internet economy. A few giants dominate; they can afford to do without your business and you have little recourse if one day they change their terms to your disadvantage, or as in this case, cut you off completely.

The issue of how to tax online stores is important, of course, and I suspect Amazon’s move is part of a strategy to oppose taxes which will impede its business – but implemented, apparently, with scant regard for its affiliate partners.

google, search, security, windows

Search for virus help highlights lack of authority in Google, Wikipedia

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A contact suffered a trojan infection on his Windows XP machine the other day. He was alerted to the infection by Windows Defender, but the Remove or Quarantine actions offered by Defender did not work. If he removed the trojan, it reappeared on the next reboot. The installed AVG security suite sat there unconcerned.

I am not sure exactly what path he took, but he did some clicking of links and ended up at a site which offered software that promised to fix the issue. The software was called SpyHunter, from Enigma Software. He purchased and installed SpyHunter, which proved no more effective than Defender. At this point he asked me to look at his machine.

A person who has discovered a virus on their PC will be anxious about the attack and its unknown consequences, and will want to fix it urgently. That makes them vulnerable to ill-considered downloads and purchases; and searching the web for assistance with a virus can be like trying to cure alcoholism with drinking. That said, there is good advice to be had; but assessing the authority and reliability of the assistance offered is critical.

My advice in general is only to visit sites that you know to be trusted, such as official Microsoft support, major security software vendors, and only those community sites with which you are already familiar. It is difficult advice to follow though, particularly for non-technical users.

The best course of action after a confirmed infection is to flatten and rebuild the operating system. Larger organizations do this efficiently by restoring a pre-configured image to standardised hardware, but this too is difficult for individuals and SMEs who want to get on with their work.

I digress. My first question: was SpyHunter bona fide, or could it have made the problem worse? The only quick way to find out: back to the search engines, source of all good and all evil. The top entries for SpyHunter on both Google and Bing are the official company site and a Wikipedia entry. Bing has Wikipedia first, while Google puts the company site top.

Note the large role Google (or your favourite search engine) is playing here, both in leading users to possible solutions, and in assessing their value. Although the high placement of the company site is somewhat reassuring, in that Google would probably try not to give a high ranking to known malware, it would be a mistake to rely entirely on a detail like this. Google makes no guarantees concerning the content of the sites it indexes.

Naturally I was more interested in the Wikipedia entry. The entry is annotated with warnings that the article is near-orphaned (though the search engines find it readily enough) and that it reads like an advertisement. There is little detail and it is out-of-date. Further, the language seems strange:

In early 2004, SpyHunter was blamed for producing false positives and using aggressive advertising techniques. This resulted in a lot of bad SpyHunter reviews published. Some of them were harsh, but fair, while others were simply ridiculous. We confirm that SpyHunter was promoted aggressively by some affiliates, but all of them were eventually banned by program makers in late 2004. Early SpyHunter versions had some obvious drawbacks. The product’s version 2.0 resolved all these issues.

This is a quote from a supposedly independent review on a site called 2-software.com. I don’t like the site, which seems (as are so many) dominated by its affiliate links.

SpyHunter is probably harmless, though ineffective. I used the Sophos command-line tool to remove the trojan, and deleted some rogue registry entries; the machine seems OK now though that might just mean that the other trojans are doing a better job of hiding. I also removed SpyHunter of course.

The state of security on the Internet remains lamentable, and security software is a partial solution at best. What interests me here though is the combination of two things:

1. The inadequacy of Wikipedia as an authoritative source, particularly in its less trafficked topics.

2. The high ranking accorded to seemingly any Wikipedia article by the leading search engines.

It is a dangerous combination – not only for virus victims, but for kids doing homework, or anyone researching anything.

cloud computing, exchange, google, microsoft, windows

Google Apps add-on breaks Outlook features in email wars

Google has released an add-on to Outlook that apparently breaks Outlook search. Google Apps Sync synchronizes Outlook email, calendar and contacts with Google Apps. Google recommends it as a transition tool for people migrating from Exchange, or for people who prefer the Outlook UI. A premium version of Google Apps is required.

Unfortunately it breaks some Outlook functionality. In particular, Outlook search no longer works correctly. There are also potential issues with the Hotmail connector and, according to Google, the Acrobat PDF Maker toolbar and the Outlook Change Notifier.

Although uninstalling Google Apps Sync should restore the features, this wasn’t working in early versions of Google Apps Sync. So the somewhat counter-intuitive advice is to upgrade Google Apps Sync to the latest version and then to uninstall; or tinker with the registry yourself according to Microsoft’s guidance.

Let’s reflect a bit on what is happening here. Google is encouraging its users to install an add-on that damages the functionality of a rival product. Understandably annoying for Microsoft; but it is explained in the documentation if you read it carefully. I doubt it is deliberate sabotage; on the other hand, it highlights the fragility of desktop versus cloud applications. Google’s technical advice on the subject is pretty much a shrug: if you don’t like it, uninstall it.

Another perspective on this is that if you are happy with Outlook with or without Exchange, be wary of third-party add-ons, especially from companies that want to migrate you to another product. If you are making the transition to Google Mail and just need to export your data, of course, breaking Outlook a little will not worry you.

The broader reflection is that many third-party add-ons for Windows, though claiming to make things better for you, actually make things worse.

adobe, cloud computing, google

Adobe’s cloud office takes shape, gets spreadsheet, goes commercial

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Adobe has announced a spreadsheet-like product for its cloud Office suite at Acrobat.com, along with commercial terms for business users of Acrobat.com conferencing and document collaboration. Acrobat.com itself is now out of beta. The new product, called Acrobat.com Tables, is available to try at Adobe Labs, where it joins Acrobat.com Presentations.

First impressions of the Tables application is that while it looks great, it is rudimentary; and this is why Adobe has called it Tables and not Spreadsheets. Unlike Presentations, which seems immediately useful, Tables looks more like work in progress. That may partly be lack of documentation at this early stage. For example, I cannot see any way to format the text in a cell. Cell referencing is limited at the moment. In a formula, you can reference the current row in another column, but not yet an arbitrary cell. You can sum an entire column in a summary row, but not a range of cells in a column (as far as I can see). You cannot yet import or export the table. No charting yet either. Still, this is in Labs and these features will be added later. Everything is Flash, of course.

The underlying reason for the inferiority of Tables versus Presentations, I guess, is that Presentations has a natural synergy with Flash and is design-oriented (Adobe strength), whereas spreadsheets lack that synergy.

The big feature of Tables is collaboration. By default, changes made by others to a shared table appear to all users in real time. This could get confusing if other users change the layout, for example sorting by a different column, so you an enable “private view”, which means you have control over your own layout though data changes are still saved and shared. ,

In the press briefing, Adobe emphasised its collaboration features. Erik Larson, director of product management for Acrobat.com, spent a lot of time reminding us how inefficient it is to revise documents by sending out email copies. The point is well made, though there are other ways to avoid that, starting with the humble shared network folder. Web-based collaboration is undoubtedly the future, though I suspect there are downsides to real-time collaboration on a document – chaos, for example – but in the right context it will work well, and in practice asynchronous changes are likely to be more common.

Adobe’s cloud office

Clearly Adobe is serious about mounting a challenge to the likes of Google Docs and Zoho with its own cloud office. It has now announced business terms, though these are mainly focused on conferencing and are initially for the USA only. For $390 per year or $39.00 per month you get 20 person meetings on Acrobat.com, telephone support, and unlimited file downloads (the free offering is limited to 100 downloads per file). There’s also a Premium Basic offering for individuals, at $140 per year or $14.99 per month, with meetings up to 5 participants and phone support. The free option remains, with meetings up to 3 persons. There is 5GB of storage at all levels, from free to premium.

Larson says 5 million people have signed up to Acrobat.com, with new registrations at 100,000 per week, and that these are 70%-80% business users rather than consumers. Many of these accounts may be dormant; Larson says “hundreds of thousands use it every day” but could not be more precise on this aspect.

Big changes are planned for the autumn. “We’re going to bring all these products together in a single user interface. We’ll also bring them together into an online AIR application, so that you can have a seamless experience available from the desktop. At that point we’ll also offer Smartphone access. We’ll add team workspaces in the Winter,” says Larson.

Unfortunately there are no immediate plans for offline document access, though Larson concedes it is “absolutely important”. Having said that, according to Larson “for our actual users, the internet has become so pervasive that lack of offline access is for a large percentage of people more of an irritant than a requirement. Things like charts, importing from PowerPoint, and an actual spreadsheet as opposed to just tables, those things are absolute blockers.”

Personally, I’m not in that large percentage. When Acrobat.com has an AIR application that works online and offline with the same documents, I will find it more compelling for everyday use. The advantage is not only availability when out and about, but also the security of knowing that if Acrobat.com goes offline, you will still be able to reference your documents.

Another aspect of Acrobat.com is a range of collaboration and document services APIs. This enables you to add features to your own applications, such as file upload to Acrobat.com, or real-time chat, voice and video.

Can you trust Acrobat.com not to lose or leak your documents? “We do have a service level agreement”, says Larson, adding “there’s a general trend towards increasing comfort with online services. People are more comfortable with having super-sensitive information up there. It’s much more secure in a general sense than if it’s on your hard drive. Our data centers are much more protected than your laptop.”

A winner?

Adobe’s cloud offering is fascinating from a RIA perspective, because use of Flash is its USP. It can also exploit the popularity of PDF and the desktop abilities of AIR, though we have not yet seen this fully exploited. While there is some momentum behind Acrobat.com, it seems limited compared to that behind Google Docs. I rarely see links to documents on Acrobat.com, whereas I frequently get directed to a Google spreadsheet. In other words, my sense is that Acrobat.com has not yet broken through. The features announced today will help, but I suspect the big Autumn announcement with the promised Smartphone and iPhone support will be more significant. For myself, I’m waiting for the offline piece that, according to Larson, is not yet on the roadmap.

Links: Erik Larson presents the changes;  Lisa Underkoffler describes Tables.

apple, google, javascript, sql, web authoring

Local SQL support in Safari vs Google Gears: what is happening?

Today I installed Safari 4.0, and one of the features which caught my eye is its local database support. No, it’s not new, but perhaps has not received the attention it deserves. The feature lets you use a local SQLite database from JavaScript, both online and offline, and works on the iPhone 2.0 and higher (2.1 for offline support) and in Safari 3.1 and higher. The API is rather simple. windows.openDatabase returns a database object, and you then work with methods like transaction.executeSql, reading the results in a callback function. Security restrictions mean that access to the database is restricted to pages served by the domain from which it was created. Apple has more information in its Safari Client-Side Storage and Offline Applications Programming Guide. Safari’s local database features implement the HTML 5 W3C Web Storage API.

It’s a great feature, and strengthens Safari on the iPhone as an application runtime that avoids the hassles of the App Store. Does it have wider value? A problem is inconsistent support across other browses. Microsoft’s IE8 supports DOM Storage (key-value pairs), which is also part of the HTML 5 standard, but not SQL. FireFox also supports DOM Storage, but its SQLite support is restricted to components and extensions only.

A possible reason for the lack of wider SQL support is that Google has its own implementation in Gears, which works in Safari and FireFox on the Mac, in IE and Firefox on Windows, and in Firefox on Linux. One place you cannot install Gears though is on the iPhone. A possible solution is to create a wrapper API that uses HTML 5 on Safari and Gears elsewhere; Malte Ubl has done some work on this, for example.

Personally I’d like to see the HTML 5.0 specification more widely supported, since along with the iPhone issue, not everyone wants to install Gears. I would have thought it could be added to both Chrome and FireFox relatively easily; but would be interested to know what is planned.

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google, microsoft, search, yahoo

Bing’s disappearing search share gain in the US

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Web stats site StatCounter caused some excitement last week when it announced that Bing had overtaken Yahoo in search market share, as tracked by its site analysis tools.

I took a look at the figures today, and they make depressing reading for Microsoft:

I’ve annotated the image to show Live Search share on 29 May, compared to Bing share now. They are nearly the same; within the normal daily variation. Yahoo is actually slightly ahead of where it was. Note that all Live Search hits automatically became Bing hits on the day of transition (1st June). As for Google, it is back a little above where it was before.

One odd thing about the StatCounter figures is that at the beginning of this period there was around 5% share for “other”, which has now almost disappeared. Gone to Google? Who knows; and I don’t particularly trust these figures.

There are two organizations with more reliable numbers, one of them Google, because of the number of sites signed up for its Web Analytics, and the other Microsoft, which can count actual hits, but these numbers are not published.

Well, Ballmer said it was a long haul. I’m actually impressed with Bing; the results seem decent, there are some good UI features, and the re-branding is sensible. If StatCounter accurately reflects the market though, the immediate affect of the launch is vanishingly small.

Update: Things look a little better today – Bing is up to 8.52% (note that the figure changes dynamically during each day). A long haul; I’ll be tracking the figures with interest.

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apple, google, internet, software, software development, web authoring

Will Microsoft respond to the JavaScript speed challenge?

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While people argue about JavaScript performance in Chrome vs Safari vs FireFox, there’s one fact that is beyond dispute. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is hilariously slow in comparison. On Apple’s figures, IE8 is 5.9 times slower on its i-Bench JavaScript test and 7.7 times slower on the SunSpider test.

You may hardly notice this in normal browsing. It most likely takes longer to download the JavaScript than to execute it. In fact, download speed is still the most significant factor in browser performance, and changing your browser will do nothing to change that (though different approaches to caching might).

This could change though, if more web applications appear that make heavy use of JavaScript. Google Wave could be an example. In fact, this seems to be Google’s game plan: make the browser (backed of course by the Internet) the operating system. The larger these web applications become, the more difference that JavaScript performance will make.

Offline is another interesting case, enabled in Chrome by the Gears add-on. In this scenario, content is served locally so browser performance has a better chance to shine.

The big question: will Microsoft step up to the challenge and fix JavaScript performance in IE? The company could do so relatively easily, either by using one of the open-source engines (unlikely) or by applying its existing knowledge of just-in-time compilation, used to good effect in .NET and Silverlight, to JavaScript in the browser.

The horns of Microsoft’s dilemma: improve JavaScript and undermine the advantage of Silverlight, which runs code much faster. Don’t improve it, and see market share continue to decline in favour of faster browsers.

The right thing to do, of course, is to fix the JavaScript engine; but companies do not always do the right thing – and Microsoft may still be comforted by its 65% market share for IE. That’s false comfort; the share is in long-term decline.

Incidentally, I’ve noticed that Google, while not exactly taking the gloves off, is stepping up its promotion of Chrome. When I go to youtube, which is the 3rd most popular web site in the world according to Alexa, I now see this on every page, if not using Chrome:

I don’t always see an ad on the Google home page itself – Alexa’s number one site – though occasionally I do see this on the right:

All very low-key; but I reckon we’ll see Google step-up its campaign as Chrome itself gets better and the Mac version appears. With Apple, Google, Mozilla and of course Opera all gunning for Microsoft, it would take extraordinary complacency not to respond.

apple, google, internet, web authoring

Is Safari the world’s fastest browser? You need to test more than just JavaScript

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Apple says its new Safari 4 is the world’s fastest browser:

Still the world’s fastest web browser, Safari outraces Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. On even the most demanding Web 2.0 applications, Safari delivers blazingly fast performance thanks to the industry’s most advanced rendering technologies.

Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript nearly 8 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and more than 4 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.

In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance — the best on any platform — loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at zdnet has tested Safari vs Chrome and IE8, and says Apple’s claims do not stand up to scrutiny. In his tests, Chrome is faster. Unfortunately, he used a different build of Chrome than Apple – 2.0.172.30 vs 2.0.172.28. In addition, he is using a quad core processor, Intel’s QX9770, whereas Apple is using an iMac with a Core 2 Duo processor. Chrome is still work in progress on the Mac, so the results for this are on Vista.

ZDNet’s results certainly cast doubt on Apple’s figures. On the SunSpider JavaScript test, used by both, Apple quotes 609.07ms for Safari vs 870.00ms for Chrome, whereas zdnet has 808.8ms for Chrome and 846.2ms for Safari.

That said, JavaScript performance is not the same as browser performance. If you read Apple’s claim carefully, it talks about rendering technologies and HTML performance as well as the JavaScript engine. Focusing exclusively on JavaScript would be like assessing the performance of Windows vs Mac, for example, simply by timing some number-crunching operations.

In practice, what users care about is the time it takes to load a page and its responsiveness thereafter. Apple claims its best advantage over Chrome in i-Bench HTML, claiming that Chrome takes 40% longer. Unfortunately I cannot currently find the test which Apple used, but I’m presuming it tests DOM rendering speed rather than just non-visual JavaScript performance; an earlier i-Bench HTML used actual web sites.

Bottom line: I don’t trust Apple’s figures either, but I’m retaining an open mind. You need to compare like with like, and not focus exclusively on JavaScript, to test browser performance.

Update: Blogger Luca Filigheddu backs up Apple’s claims with some real-world tests.

google, microsoft, search

Bing, Blind Search and electoral fraud

It’s election fever in the UK: in dramatic results, the incumbent party is being pummelled at the polls. So too for search engines? Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi set up a blind search test. Perform a search, select your favourite from three columns of results. It started well for Bing, but market leader Google soon asserted a lead:

Blind search engine test at http://blindsearch.fejus.com Right now: "Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 21% | 8,518 votes"

said Mr Google Matt Cutts.

Still, that’s not bad for Bing, considering that its market share is tiny in comparison to Google. 5.5% vs 81.5% according to stats I dug up for this Register piece. The real loser is Yahoo, whose second place in search is now under threat from the Microsoft juggernaut.

But can you trust the results? At some point last night Yahoo started an unlikely surge:

Internet search blind test: Google: 34%, Bing: 26%, Yahoo: 40% Try it out! http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

tweeted Bill Hamilton a few hours after Cutts. Someone was gaming the system:

not surprisingly, #blindsearch has been compromised you can still play, but i’m not currently showing results

said Kordahi, as Yahoo hit 57%.

Will Kordahi be able to insulate his test from fraudsters? Who knows; but it is still an interesting experiment.

I tried the test and found the results generally close, with a small edge to Google in my searches. Still, it would be interesting to measure not only which results are best, but also the margin of difference. In the past I’ve found Live Search almost useless, so Bing has made a substantial improvement from my perspective. The UI changes are important too. I’m a minimalist at heart, which again favours Google, but I like some of Bing’s features, especially the site and video previews.

Google’s Wave is of course more interesting from a technical perspective; but it would be a mistake to downplay the business significance of Microsoft improving its search market share. Search drives advertising income.

It’s also worth noting that in search, quantity drives quality. Program Manager Nathan Buggia explained to me how Bing’s categorisation feature works:

For the categorised results those are driven more off the search behaviour we see on our web site, not actually the semantic information that we infer from their web site. What we’ve done is to take all the queries that come into live search and analysed them to see what user intent those queries have. We take a look at the other search terms that they use to figure out where they go, we aggregate that information and use that to define categories, and we are able to draw on that.

Currently Bing only displays category tabs for around the top 10-20% of searches. The reason it is limited to that, according to Buggia, is insufficient volume of data. Using the Xbox as an example, he told me:

If we have a high enough volume of XBox data and we’ve seen that there are a specific set of intents that people are looking for, then we feel confident enough to show the quick tabs.

In other words, Bing could improve its results simply by more people using it.

What happens next? The easy prediction is that Bing will make at least small gains in market share, and that Yahoo will likely decline, perhaps to third place. For Microsoft, that would be no small achievement, but would do little to dislodge the big G. Further, if it sees significant traffic moving to Bing, Google will be quick to counter it with its own improvements. Personally I would like to see more competition in search, which for many users forms a portal that controls which sites they see and which they do not see, but a good launch for Bing is not enough to effect real change.

It could be the beginning of a change though, and that possibility makes Bing worth watching.

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adobe, google, microsoft

Google Wave: a disruptive approach to collaboration

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I watched the Google Wave Developer Preview session at Google IO.

It is tedious to sit through 1 hour 20 mins of conference presentation; but it is worth watching at least a little of it to see some Wave demos. In essence, Google is presenting email++ and hopes it will catch on. A “wave” is loosely analogous to an email conversation or a thread on a discussion board. You participate using a browser-based client. Unlike email, in which messages are copied hither and thither, a wave exists on a server so you always see the latest version. Again unlike email, a wave offers real-time synchronization, so that I see your replies or comments as you type. This means you can use a wave like an instant messaging system or like a wiki (collaborative document editing). You can also embed rich media and extend the system with robots (non-human participants which add functionality) or gadgets, such as polls, games, applications. Waves can be embedded into web pages, just as the above video is embedded into this blog post.

The client-side API for Wave is written in Google Web Toolkit, and according to the keynote:

we couldn’t have built something like this without GWT

The server side, such as robots, has an API in Java or Python. You can check out the APIs here, and sign up for a developer account. The Wave protocol is also published, and is documented here. Google is talking about launch later this year. Mashable has a good overview.

Significance of Wave

This is the bit that interests me most. Why bother with Wave? Well, Google is hoping we will find this to be a compelling alternative and partner to email, Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, discussion boards, and more. For example, you could develop a new kind of discussion board in which the topics are waves rather than threaded discussions. The impact might include:

  • Driving users to Google Chrome and other browsers optimized for fast JavaScript, and away from Microsoft IE.
  • Promoting use of Google-sponsored APIs like OpenSocial, upon which Wave builds.
  • Shifting attention away from classic email servers such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
  • Offering an alternative to Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat for document collaboration.
  • Getting more us to run our content on Google’s servers and use Google’s identity system. This is not required as I understand it – the keynote mentions the ability to run your own Wave servers – but it is inevitable.

The demos are impressive, though it looks like a large Wave with many contributors could become hard to navigate; but it is definitely something I look forward to trying.

Finally, it is notable that Google’s Flash-aversion is continuing here: all the client stuff is done with JavaScript and HTML.

I am not sure how this might work offline; but I imagine Google could do something with Chrome and Gears, while no doubt there is also potential for a neat Adobe AIR client, using the embedded WebKit HTML renderer.