The following is a good offer for developers who are working on some cool web or desktop products/service and wonder how to get Robert Scoble’s attention:

PS: are you excited about something you’ve built? Just post it here. Don’t send me email. If you send me email your excitement might get lost in my inbox. 133 emails to go.

One might think a post like this would draw nothing but spam, but as of this writing anyway the comments still seem pretty clean. It’s neat seeing somebody with as much blog exposure as Scoble opening his comments this way. Now if you fit the description of working on something exciting then get on over there and tell him about it. I have a project that I think Scoble will like and hope to be able to tell him and many others about it soon.

After throwing a few stiff jabs Yahoo’s direction in the last post, let me give them props for doing something right. Libras love balance.

The Yahoo! User Interface Blog describes its mission:

… is the companion blog for two libraries we’re proudly releasing today. The new Yahoo! Design Pattern Library offers our thinking on common interface design issues for traditional and rich Internet applications. The new Yahoo! User Interface Library is a collection of industrial-grade JavaScript utilities and widgets that enable you to efficiently get the most out of today’s powerful browsers. In both cases, these are the exact same things that power Yahoo! today.

For somebody who hasn’t done that much with AJAX (moi), I’m excited by these two libaries and even more excited by the BSD licensing. Unlike the developer APIs which have commercial restrictions (have they lifted them yet, haven’t checked in awhile?).

[Sidenote: If they haven’t relaxed their APIs then somebody over there should say: if they are using YPN to monetize something with our own APIs then we should let them do that, doh!]

Haven’t fully dug into this stuff but I like what I see here. Nice work, Yahoo. I continue to be impressed with what Yahoo does with the developer side of the triangle (user/siteowner/developer).

This morning I logged into one of our test machines and it’s running in super slow mo. Every keystroke is … like … de. Layed. Reminded me a bit of some older x386 and x486 experiences. I knew I shouldn’t have taken out that 256MB stick of RAM and put it in another machine, what was I thinking? This got me thinking, is 256MB RAM inadequate for running multple applications these days? Let me tell you what was running on it when it started choking and sputtering (not listing the background process list which is also a major culprit):

- Opera 8 with six tabs
- Internet Explorer 6 sp2, one tab (MSN)
- Screen Grab Pro
- Outlook
- Photoshop 6 (yeah, an older version, that’s the one I have a license for on this machine)
- Windows Media Player 10, playing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Simple Man’ (oh the irony!)

Tray processes:
- Revenue Checker for Adsense
- ActiveSync
- MSN Messenger signed off icon … I need to rip that thing out
- InstallShield Update manager

It is kind of sad that this combination of apps won’t work smoothly with 256MB RAM. Have have moved past a 256MB reality for webmaster usage? Here is how much RAM we have in a few other machines:

1GB RAM - Motion Computing M1400 Tablet PC
756MB - Dell
256MB - eMac [note: I’m typing this post on the eMac and it is running a different set of multiple programs and the slow-mo syndrome isn’t setting in there, so perhaps I don’t have the memory hogging happening there that is happening on the HP. I realize this is a totally bogus comparison, but just thought I’d mention it).

How much RAM are you using in your computer(s)? Is it adequate or are you getting slowdown? Plans to upgrade? A gig of RAM is like $75 USD or so these days, so I need to go out and just buy one for this test machine … after making sure it’s not something else. Reboot.

Of course this blog is just a very, very, very tiny microcosm, but readers sometimes mention things here which strike a chord with me. This feeds into some of why I was upset that another blogger would carelessly want to rip out all his prior comments as if they were weeds instead of roses. Beauty is in the eye of the …

Hmm reader Paul is tired of hearing about Google:

What is up with all the Google news? Is Google the center of the universe? … Are all you web developers scared to death of Google? Isn’t anybody else doing good or evil stuff in the web development world?

Paul poses some fair questions and I’m sorry for making this yet another Google-related post (I held it for a little while) — and adding to the baggage — but, well, he asked a different question that I haven’t yet answered here before in any significant detail. Those who don’t care why I am so interested in Google, feel free to skip this one by right now.

I follow Google because:

1) I’m interested in a lot of what they are up to (they make me go hmm on a variety of fronts). They might not always have the best product launches, but they seem to poke around in places that I find to be revealing and in some cases market changing.
2) They are disruptive like many big companies, but they weren’t always big. They were started by a couple really smart guys in their garage at a time when people believed little guys couldn’t rise up and make a difference. They have proved that thinking flawed. So now my fascination is: will they keep the fires burning or flame out like some others who got fat, sucessful, big and became lazy?
3) I own their stock and use, review or at least try many of their products to see if they might help save me time in personal or business, automate tasks and/or make my computing life better. I share those good and bad experiences here so that others can decide whether or not they may want to take the time to check them out. Hopefully I’m saving some folks time by providing information they don’t have to gather on their own, or at least giving them one user’s perspective and experience.

In the case of my opinion pieces on Google, these are the result of following their actions for years now and perhaps helpful to those who aren’t as keyed into their current, past and rumored future moves. If you watch something long enough and follow the timeline patterns do begin to emerge. I’m fascinated studying those patterns. Am I always right about what I think they are up to? Of course not. Do I enjoy pontificating on what their intentions might be? I get a tickle from it, sure. Do I expect every reader will like these posts? Nope. But rest assured, kind readers, that if I feel like I have nothing important to add or say, then I won’t say it.

I also follow what Microsoft is doing because I am surrounded by their products and they are not too far away from where we are located geographically. They have invited me up there on numerous occasions to test products (usually under NDA) and have always treated myself and others in our family who also do beta testing politely and professionally. I don’t own any of their stock but have said several times that I hope to buy some someday. Just not quite ready for them yet. After Vista, perhaps.

And definitely no, I don’t consider Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft) the center of at least my universe. I can’t and won’t speak for other “web developers” as Paul refers to us. Frankly, I consider myself a webmaster/programmer not a web developer or software engineer or any of the other fancy chic names making the rounds today. Readers might consider me simply ‘ blogger’, but in reality this is just a very part time gig for me. Heck, just give me a blank text editor and some free time and I’ll make something happen.

Paul’s comment hit on a trend I’ve definitely been seeing in the tech news and blog sectors: Google mania is on. I’m sure each person/publication has their own reasons for covering them and to what extent. My buddy Nathan — I think we are buddies, I talked to him quite a bit at Search Champs — does a great job covering Google in great depth at Inside Google. If I were to start a blog only about Google, then I’d like it to be as good as his Inside Google or Phillip Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped. Those two blogs set the bar for Google-specific blogs. For readers who can’t get enough of Google Mania, add those two sources to your aggregator. You’ll be in ecstasty soon.

But I think Paul is talking about blogs and tech news sites in general, not Google-specific blogs, and their perhaps unbalanced coverage of Google, Hmm included. There might not actually be an unbalance but at times it definitely seems that way. I’ve seen people at Slashdot complaining about Google Mania for example, and they definitely don’t focus specifically on Google.

This last week — really since CES 2006 I’ve been growing weary of the excessive Google stories too (and intentionally have skipped some of them, but yesterday busted out with two of them) for example the whole Google Orwellian crap, Verizon complaining about Google piggybacking on fiber and so on. No need for me to link them as you have probably already seen these stories. It’s getting out of hand. Still, I know some readers actually do look forward to my commentary and updates on at least some of these stories because I’ve specifically been asked to comment on a few occasions where I might have taken a pass otherwise.

Sometimes I’ll give a quick response in the comments, sometimes privately and sometimes I’ll use a new post like this (although admittedly the latter two reactions are more rare). I think once in awhile a post like this is helpful to center where I’m coming from and maybe lay some sort of roadmap, as vague as it might be, what could be coming down the line. I like serendipity in reading and writing so if today seems too Google-centric (and you happen to be sick of reading about Google), then check back tomorrow. Actually, I think there has been more blog-related post focus the last few days here than Google.

In fact, looking at the last 25 posts tells the best story. Five of these (20%) were related to and/or specifically dealt with Google. Plenty of different things to choose from — both good and evil — to choose from the rest. I didn’t link them all up, but those interested can just start at the home page and scroll back:

- Is Riya teasing us too much?
- Peerflix DVD service update
- weigh in on the stupidest purchases we’ve made or fun ideas for identifying blog comment spam
- tool to keep track of your comments around various blogs (cocomment)
- NVidia accused of hiring forum shills
- a mini-review of Feedster’s new service
- a bunch of Super Bowl activities and games (prior to the Superbowl)
- the Kama Sutra worm
- NASA’s SuitSat update
- What’s happening to blockbuster movies and hit records?
- CBS skips iTunes to try its own direct 24 hour rental service for Survivor
- Interactive Gold Rush reality TV + AOL show
- A romantic game (Bliss), perfect for Valentine’s Day
- Newspapers changing links on stories after a short period of time to combat deeplinking
- Bought my first eBook: Cell by Stephen King

Anti-Google coverage readers probably do not want to follow tech.memeorandum which seems to have a new Google story or three every day (top story right now is on Google-related, maybe we should make a game out of how often the top story is Google-related?) and many times multiple stories a day with scores of bloggers talking about them. Not the fault of memeorandum, but that’s what people are writing and linking to a lot these days. Google is the 2006 Cabbage Patch Doll.

I hear what readers like Paul are saying and yes in a sense I’m adding to the pile. This blog isn’t only or even primarily Google focused though and I’m not going to shy away from writing about something they are doing if it makes me go hmm. Like any other topic though, no sense staying there too long or riding it too hard. My strategy with most speciality topics has to start another speciality blog about those topics and work them there instead. I do that with my PHP blog, the Mac and several other topics. A new one is coming out next month.

Good news! This coming Friday I’m going to be attending Moose Camp and Northern Voice in Vancouver BC. I will be blogging the event just like last year and was looking over the schedule a little earlier. I’m already seeing some things that have my curiosity piqued and will undoubtedly be blogging about them, so stay tuned.

In my review queue right now I am looking at the much heralded online calendar 30boxes.com, several different Mac apps (part of the MacAddict issue I bought the other day), the new Opera 9 beta, just to name a few, and I’m sure there will be an abundance of non-Google stories to follow. I’m on it. Oh, and it sounds like I may finally get a peek at Riya. One of the things I love about the tech scene is there is always something new, updated or different to write about.

Thank you for the feedback and reading Paul, and to the rest of the readers who put up with an occasional Google overdoses. As Wyle E. Coyote might say: Vomitus Extremetis.

Beep, beep!

I think every comment moderation section needs a brief, but helpful guide for identifying comment spam, so let’s see if we can put our collective brains together and come up with a list, here’s seven sure signs:

1. Blame the name (with ego stroke): I love reading your blog, well said, you really know what you are talking about and my name is adobe acrobat
2. Hyphen horny: this-is-my-keyword-loaded-viagra-domain.com.
3. Unrelated nonsense: My comment has absolutely nothing to do with what you are talking about — insert unrelated link — but I thought you might like to know my long rambling and completely incomprehensible run on sentence that doesn’t make any sense but seems to fill some word limit to look like it is, or perhaps might be, genuine.
4. Keyword diarrhea : some, keywords , separated, by, commas, over, and, over, and over, and over, and maybe over again and sometimes over without using commas over.
5. Programming run amok: comment that just says: array (this is what happens when you try to echo an array in PHP)
6. Hyperlink frenzy: Just nothing but hyperlinks. Doh!
7. Comment good, URL spam: The comment itself seems legitimate and on topic, but uh oh, look at where their URL leads — spam hell.

Have more sure signs it is comment spam to add to the list?

According to Chris Beasley, Amazon is cooking up their own Adsense-clone and offered him the chance to get into the early testing. He turned them down twice:

On the phone last night it was explained to me that this is more or less an Adsense clone, meaning third party sponsored links, not Amazon links. It is known that Amazon currently get’s sponsored links for their own sites from Google, but apparently they wish to take out the middleman and break out on their own. The fact is that while Amazon has a high gross revenue, they have really thin profit margins, whereas Google and even eBay have much better profit margins.

We’ve been Amazon affiliates for many years now and this is the first I heard about this program. The last beta we tried was their product preview ads, which I liked. I also like the idea of them getting into the contextual ad game. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. I logged into the Amazon Associates publisher area and don’t see any word about this beta program that Beasley claims stopped taking new beta testers on January 31.

We still haven’t been able to get into the Alexa Web Services program and no developers I’ve asked yet have gotten in either. So I’m left to believe that the whole Amazon/Alexa crew must run really small, exclusive beta tests.

Perhaps they should broaden their net of beta testers instead of trying to hook all the big fish out there, and try to bait some more of us small ones? It is kind of ironic how that works: talk to the big fish and they pass and then you alienate the small fish by not inviting them, so who are you left with? The really, really small fish? Seems like adverse selection at play here.

The Amazon Associate program, probably because they are on such thin margins, has never really paid that well. I’m curious if their AmazonSense will be competitive.

Question for those who have blogged awhile and linked to mainstream news: how many times have you noticed the links have been changed? I’ve noticed that in some news publications they don’t seem to understand the concept of a permanent link, and instead intentionally choose dynamic links for their content. This is the perfect defense, BTW, against people that deeplink your content. Are these dynamic links intentional?

Yesterday I was tied up in the office most the day but still able to catch several stories regarding some newspapers grousing over Google News and related sites scraping their headlines and (thumbnail) pictures without permission, pondering whether this was Fair Use or not and wanting to challenge this legally.

“They’re building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,” Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. “The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article — it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.”

The newspapers that are upset don’t need to go to court to break the current system, they just need to continue to alter the links to their source stories after a certain period of time like some of them have been doing. Most bloggers, myself included, don’t go back to the archive links very often and update prior linked stories. In fact, a good WP plugin would be something which caches pages linked to and looks for material changes after a period of time and then automatically delinks the piece in the article with a note that the source was changed by the publisher.

Last year I wrote about when third party links are changed and broken, specifically fingering a few publications clearly guilty of changing their links.

Admittedly, this practice by some publications has altered my linking in posts strategy. I’m much more likely to link to a publication, blogger or content which has true permalink structure rather than ones who have good content but will intentionally alter their source after a certain period of time or other factor.

Dan Gillmor wonders if this is biting the hand that feeds and the answer is of course, yes. It’s already working with me but I’m just one miniscule section of the internet. One of the fastest ways to guarantee that I don’t read your publication or link to it is to change the link to the source after some period of time. This is considered very anti-webmaster behavior. In some niche online businesses (link lists, for example) this can get all of your sites blacklisted. It’s a form of redirection and it’s bad netiquette.

Readers that find stories I’ve linked to here in the archives that have changed, please use the comments and tell me about it. I try not to link to sources that do this. If other bloggers and publications like Google unite and treat source material the same way, it will send a clear message to publishers that permalinks are internet-friendly and dynamic links are counter productive.

Nathan hits the proverbial nail with:

I don’t understand the fighting of Google News. It sends traffic, produces zero content, sells zero ads, and helps small and large publishers alike. Taking yourself out of the search engines is always a way to shoot yourself in the foot … and there are plenty of websites doing far worse content theft. Besides, if the Google cache is fair use, how could Google News not be?

There’s little doubt courts will rule what Google News and others are doing is absolutely Fair Use and the whining, crying bitches from this global news assocation will either need to exercise more dynamic linking practices — and hose their own sites’ usefulness. Good riddance, because search engines will have a hard time following this activity, much less people. If they had one foot in the grave, after increasing dynamic linking practices, soon they’ll have two.
Joseph Weisenthal agrees with Michael Parekh that this is “SIMPLY A NEGOTIATING TACTIC.” I don’t know Parekh that well, but I think one of his buddies needs to send him a new keyboard or suggest decaf; that caps key seems to be stuck.

Seriously, I see Parekh’s point, but again, they don’t need to go to court, they need to just keep disrupting the links. Change the links, break the flow. Broken links break the system and over time you can break enough links so that nobody with any significant amount of traffic will want to link to your site. If these newspapers don’t like the traffic they get from these sources there are numerous ways to stop this from happening, both technical and non-technical — like just asking them to stop, for instance. I’m pretty sure if Google was told to stop indexing they would stop. Robots.txt anyone?

Bottom line is these disenchanted newspapers should learn to adapt, establish their presence online and fine creative ways to monetize their content. I’m not calling for their heads, but the RIAA-type tactics just piss off and alienate people, some of which might be their very paid customers. Not too business savvy.

Bittorrent and private beta testers aside, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but yesterday’s release of the IE7 beta 2 for the general public is the very first opportunity to download and try IE7 with tabbed browsing and RSS support.

Dave Winer, the father of RSS as some refer to him, gave Microsoft’s official entry into RSS space some positive mojo but then left himself an out by saying that these days he was primarily a Mac user “these days” and hadn’t actually downloaded and tried the software. In other words, Dave is glad to see Microsoft join the party, he’s just not sure if what they are wearing is in style.

I saw IE7 downstairs from Rob Greenlee’s Webtalk Radio studio but didn’t actually play around with it. Tonight, you bet I was all over the opportunity to finally download that 11.2MB of bits and put it through the paces despite the somewhat ominous message:

Evaluation of Internet Explorer 7 should start now, but the software should not be used on production systems in mission-critical environments. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview will only run on Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) systems, but will ultimately be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003.

These days installing beta software sometimes feels like jumping out of an airplane and checking and rechecking that you’re wearing a parachute. After downloading the IE7B2P-WindowsXP-x76-enu.exe it was time to click “Run” and hope for the best.

As the installation did its thing I wondered about if and when I’d soon need to restart the system. The opening screen (pictured above) not only suggested that, but backups too. Fortunately the machine being used didn’t have much in the way of important files on it. On our network all important files are sent to a shared drive and/or uploaded offsite. This machine could crash and burn and it would suck in the sense that we’d have to reinstall some programs, but little to no data would be lost.

The perfect guinea pig. Time to click “next.”

STEP 1. Validate your copy of Windows.
STEP 2. (default checked) Install the latest updates for Internet Explorer, and download and run the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (recommended). This is some sort of anti-virus tool which scans the system and protects “your computer against security threats.”

STEP 3. Time to reboot.

STEP 4. The IE 7 experience begins …

Subscribing to an RSS feed is as easy as clicking on the orange feed icon that automatically illuminates when on a page that contains an RSS feed. A separate “Feed Center” exists inside the Favorites area.

The dysfunctional list
- The tabbed area on my test machine was a mess (see screenshot above) with sizable black blobs surrounding the tab area. The IE7 blog clearly indicates that there are still issues with IE7B2 as far as client user interface and this beta is more about seeing how sites look and allowing developers to test if their toolbars work.
- The Google Toolbar installed a few days ago seemed to be functional, as well as the older Alexa and MSN toolbar with the tabs which seemed to degrade without offering me two sets of tabs.
- Synergy would run, but could no longer connect to other machines.

I stayed with IE7 on this test machine all of a couple hours before hitting the add/remove section. This looks like it will have some possibly useful features but as the IE7 blog warns, this isn’t really ready for users yet. Accordingly, I will wait for Vista before making any hard fast determinations, but errors and buggy UI aside I was only marginally impressed with what’s there so far. Guess I’m taking Winer’s wait and see stance. It really is way too early.

How about the uninstall?
This was one part of the experience I was very curious about testing. Would I be able to go back to my IE 6 Service Pack 2 environment without problems? Would the issues experienced with Synergy be resolved? That was the only third party program running on the test machine that I noticed problems with, by the way.

STEP 5. The uninstall. Navigate to START -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs. Strangely, you won’t find Internet Explorer among the list of remove programs. This seemed like a real uh oh moment, but if you check the box for “Show Updates” you’ll see under the Windows section: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview. and can click and then remove.

STEP 6. Software Update Removal Wizard springs into action. As I watched it delete and copy files, update the registry and more I wondered again what the state of this machine would be after rebooting. As a Windows user it’s a mixed bag with OS changes. I remember struggles I had getting ActiveSync functional and some past Windows OS upgrades have been less than pleasant (driver problems), so I’m a bit of a battered upgrade customer.

Turns out this removal was completely painless. The original environment was restored, Synergy worked again and the only noticeable traces were I had to reset the toolbar area layout in IE6. Nice work on this part, IE7 team.

Summary of findings
Install and uninstall were hassle-free. Overall operation of IE7 beta 2 on the test machine was mixed. The toolbar/UI section was crunched and disrupted to the point of being pretty much unusable. Websites I visited seemed to render OK. I would need to see a future beta or use a different test machine to better test this scenario further. The IE7 built-in phising tool is a nice plus, though I didn’t really get to see this in action. I didn’t test any other features or functions.

IE7 progress seems to be going ok overall. Based on my very limited exposure, and thus subject to change after a good sneeze, I’m still not convinced this will be ready for a Vista ship later on this year. I hope the next version comes pretty quickly as it seems like Beta 1 was in the fall 2005 and here we are in February 2006. The clock is ticking. One thing does seem certain:

Microsoft needs some fast exploring in their internet browser to get this thing shipped before year end.

I’ve been reading several comments on one of Microsoft’s newest brainchilds: Live Labs. In fact, I was sitting two rows back at Search Champs when Dr. Gary Flake gave the speech about Live Labs that included Robert Scoble’s infamous “edge case” outburst. Dion Hinchcliffe has the full audio here which is filled with all the usual buzzwords like “long tail” which tend to scare me away more than draw my interest.

I started to blog about this at the event last week and held off because it’s all just way too nascent right now to form any concrete opinion either way. Sure, Live Labs sounds like a positive move for Microsoft, but I want to get into the Labs and see where this really goes. I put in a request last week to be included in the future backchannel along with several champs and am excited about actually making something actually happen and not just talking about things. In fact, since I’m under NDA, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it anyway which is fine with me. Let’s get something going. Let’s move the needle.

I guess my problem about getting overly excited too soon is that Live Labs on the outside isn’t really anything but a fashion statement at this point. Only ideas and plans and goals, which of course you need for a good foundation, but compare that to say Google Labs which has been busting at the seams with actual products/services.

Nathan over at Inside Microsoft makes a great point that all us armchair quarterbacks shouldn’t do this:

… before you start comparing this to Google Labs, understand this: Google Labs is a marketing tool, it is not an actual team within Google. Many of the Labs products are developed in regular Googlers 20% free time, while others are just risks the company wants to keep as low-key as possible, while others are just theory products.

Live Labs is going to be mostly composed of people working 100% of the time, and shipping often (how many months between Google Labs releases?

Unfortunately the problem with this is that most people will compare the two because of the all too coincidental use of the word “labs.” And if they do compare the two, it’s a 7-0 game, set, match as of this writing in Google’s favor. Microsoft appears more like a follower than a leader and that plays into the whole Microsoft hater crowd that believes they don’t really innovate, they copy and dominate.

Seven products/services within the last 12 months: Google Suggest in Japan, Google Ride Finder, Google Web Accelerator, Google Video,
Google Reader, Google Transit and Google Extensions for Firefox. Yeah, we can talk about the quality of some of these creations — and we have on this blog critically — but the fact is releasing something is better than planning on releasing something.

Guess I’m a bit disappointed that Microsoft didn’t hold onto publically announcing the Live Labs until they actually publically released at least one product/service — whatever it was — to hang their hat on. It’s a bit like what they’ve done with the live.com and microsoftgadgets.com. Fortunately both those sites have continued to add content over time and are starting to fill out, so I’m sure that Live Labs will too.

What concerns me is that it’s one of those you only get one first impression deals. So let’s fast forward say 6-12 months when Live Labs has some content to chew on and what will things be like then?

I don’t know.

That’s why I didn’t blog about this in more detail last week from Search Champs, it is just a gigantic question mark for me. Microsoft’s more famous in recent times for coming soon shipping dates than being as agile and quick to ship as this Live Labs is plans to be. I am rooting for this to be a success.

I guess you might describe my whole feeling of Live Labs as cautiously optimistic. I am involved in the back channel and would love to be helpful in creating, reviewing and/or offering feedback on content that someday might appear in the Live Labs … if that’s even where it will appear? I’m not bashing the concept, I’m bashing the release of the concept without anything concrete to measure it by … yet.

Microsoft employee, Dare Obasanjo appears marginally impressed:

It’s unclear to me why we felt we had to apply the “Live” brand to what seems to be a subsection of http://research.microsoft.com/. I guess “Live” is going to be the new “.NET” and before the end of the year everything at Microsoft will have a “Live” version.

*sigh*

Dare has a compelling observation. People don’t like branding exercises, marketing speak, without substance and Microsoft is famous for branding efforts: Activex, .NET and now Live. The fact that they call it Windows Live instead of just Live is yet another bizarre branding effort.

It’s your turn. Are you comparing these two labs or can you look at Microsoft’s lab as something different despite the name?

Google has just sucked me back into being their toolbar user. I had long since given up on their toolbar until they did something that got my attention with their newest version: offered up some of the real estate for custom use.

That’s right, you can now add your own custom buttons to the Google toolbar. Here’s all you have to do:

Short Way
1. click here to add custom MakeYouGoHmm Google Toolber button. If you aren’t using the current Google toolbar that supports custom buttons then it will offer to install that version automatically.

Long Way
1. Download and install the upgraded Google Toolbar (beta)
2. Navigate to the makeyougohmm.com home page
3. Right click with your mouse in the search box in the upper right corner
4. Choose “create custom search”

Notes:
- you can substitute makeyougohmm.com with your own blog or site search to make your own custom search button. Most Wordpress blogs pass s={query} so if your blog homepage is index.php you would use: yourdomain.com/index.php?s={query}.

Creating and hosting your own XML button file
The XML file format is pretty straightforward. You can view the code for the MakeYouGoHmm search XML here as an example. Just change the image block to your own and the other fields to match your own site search.

To convert your favicon or other 16×16 image into base64 you can roll your own script or use an online tool like this one which Google recommended in the docs.

Developer Reference
- full Google custom toolbar API specs
- Google Custom Buttons Group
- Submit custom button to Google for listing in the Google Buttons area. I submitted the Hmm search button and it meets all the Editorial Guidelines. The email autoreply I received read:

Thank you for submitting a custom button for the Google Toolbar. This is
an autoreply to let you know we received your custom button. We’ll review
it over the next few days, and if it’s accepted, you should see it up on
our custom button site within a few weeks. Please note that we’re not able
to provide updates on individual buttons.

It’s 6:36am PST, will report back how long it takes to get listed.

Others talking about Google Toolbar v4
Chris Sherman from Search Engine Watch breaks down the various v4 features including bookmarks, sharing features and custom buttons.
Matt Cutts shows how to make a custom WHOIS button
Nathan Weinberg is already on the case: “The new Toolbar is 627k, 76k larger than Toolbar 3. When turning on the translation feature, you are warned that it has privacy implications. You might as well turn off the “Go” button, since it no longer has the handy drop down to choose different services”
Techcrunch: “This is a great bookmarking product, interesting features can be added down the road, and many users will find it useful.”