Ali Kuru

Google released an interesting new web site dedicated to promote their environment friendly technologies: The Story of Send. According to the site, magic happens through sophisticated and ultra secure data centers, with the help of overweight engineers :)

Site tells the whole story around sending and receiving emails with Google’s mailing service, Gmail. There a lot of videos and pictures embedded throughout the neatly designed web site. Especially how they shred the hard drives that have fulfilled their mission in the data center is quite interesting, don’t miss it.

What really attracted my attention while watching the videos, almost all of the staff shown on them are obese, or overweight at best. Google pays well, apparently :)

Obesity is a serious health issue and I believe companies like Google should care about the overall health of their staff, as much as they do for the environment. I suggest Google management team to Google for “obesity“, as a start :)

Firefox has a feature called “Inspect Element” for inspecting elements on a web page. It allows you to dig deeper in both the HTML and CSS code of a web page and lets you understand the inspected elements position and styling information in the structure. Today, while inspecting the branding features of Johnson&Johnson’s YouTube page, I’ve noticed a “3D” button on the “Inspect Element” bar and found that it takes the experience in a whole new level :)

After a search, learned that it’s been around since de v11 beta and migrated to the v11 stable after testing. If you are interested in learning HTML and CSS, you should try Firefox’s 3D inspection. You can see how browsers implement the code, in a fun way :)

I saw the first of these ads today on Twitpic, one that say “I’ve been tagged” in three photos, and clicked it with curiosity on whether Twitpic started photo tagging on its system or not. It was the official account of the magazine I’m working for, hence it was important to check if the content was appropriate.

After I clicked the ad, it redirected me to an executable file named “etype_setup.exe”. Certainly, I haven’t downloaded or installed the executable on my system. But, since these ads are obviously misleading users to an installation file without any proper description and warning, it feels like a stinky situation.

Is creating its own botnet a new business model for Twitpic?

Hit the link for the full page screenshot and click on the image to see a larger version.
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According to the Next Web, Google is about to launch a third-party commenting system that is very similar what’s been offered by Facebook.

Obviously, this is not a surprise. But, it is also probably the most important update for the company since their “Social Search” implementation.

With on-by-default social search, Google literally forced site owners to create Google+ profiles for their businesses and for themselves. And, since Google highly values “+1″ interactions on both its search engine and third-party sites, this new feature gets late adapting webmasters attention to optimize for Google+ and adopt +1s, too.

Because Google is still dwarfing all the competition, I believe the soon to be released third-party commenting system of the company will also be welcomed with mass adoption rates. Comments will be indexed by Google, most probably with their +1 values, and this will bring the SEO power on the most powerful search engine of all times.

Unless Google somehow manages to ridicule itself, no one will miss this.

Who said “the content is the king”? It seems like that era has been finished already.

This is what I see when I open an item belong to the Wired Gadgets RSS feed on Google Reader. After they became more annoying, disturbing and interrupting with every day, online ads are finally holding the throne.

The King is dead. Long live the King.