Hardest. Working. Prez. Ever.

Phew. With New Orleans sinking, soldiers dying on the battlefield in what may be an illegal war, foreign trade relations straining and the economy on the brink, It's good to see the Chief working hard as he can to improve the situation.

Has anyone asked - lately - after the man's mental health?

Google Does IM - and Does it Right!

Google finally implemented an IM network/server pool and released a client. This is awesome news for those of us who figured it was only the next step. We agonized as google did this payment thing, baffled as to its purpose and its release while Google still hadn't done IM.

Google has a habit of taking a niche of the Net that's been done, do it themselves and completely render the prior efforts obsolete. Consider their mapping and directions effort, competing with Mapquest, and see how vastly superior it is in comparison. See how they've crushed the online web-mail semi-industry, long since plumbed by Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail but completely shaken up and reinvented by Google Mail.

Now they've done the same thing with Chat. Their "don't be evil" philosphy probably had less to do with them choosing the Jabber protocol as much as it did with ramping

We are going to try to be the first in the world to connect everyone to everyone Georges Harik, Google

up and with ease of implementation. And hey, let's face it: Jabber is the official protocol for Chat, standardized in the same manner as Email. And thank god Email was standardized before MS and Yahoo and AOL got their hooks into it: can you imagine an email system as fucked-up and non-interoperable as Chat is now?

Yeah, Google's Talk network uses Jabber and they're really open and encouraging about it. They say "Hey, use anything you want", like Gaim, which I'm using now.
All us fan-boys have been chanting about the revolution which will start as soon as something like Google starts using a decent and standard protocol like Jabber. I'm so hoping our dream will be realized, so that our friends finally have a reason to stop using those pathetic and proprietary protocols as they do now.

More power to Google, and I'm hoping they document Voice and Vision soon!

Nude toddlers Offending the Easily Offended

The Telegraph Online: "Police should fight crime, lifeguards should rescue swimmers and beach busybodies should let parents decide whether it is appropriate for their toddlers to swim naked."

In a normal country of common-sense people, this kind of thing wouldn't even come up. We forget that the US was settled by fundamentalists kicked out of Europe for their holier-than-thou ways.

Sow what ye reap, I say.

Google may do IM

From the New York Times:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc. (GOOG.O) rose nearly 1 percent before the bell on Tuesday after the Los Angeles Times reported the Web search company will launch its own instant messaging system (ID:nN23524360).

I'm only one of a few hundred people who've been begging for an IM offering from Google for a year or more. Not only because it'd finally tie together the various mail, search and blogging tools and would therefore be an obvious move, but because Google and its "Don't be Evil" policy is the best hope for a standards-based IM app that we've got.

Reports are coming out (here, here and /. here) and Tom Servo bravely tried to connect to a Google Jabber server - see the pic, above - with his Trillian IM client:

Inquisitive Neowin member Tom Servo, taking a que[sic] from member CarlNewton tried to connect to talk.google.com using his Trillian client.

What he got was a secure XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, alternatively known as Jabber) server waiting for connections.

Could this be Google IM waiting to be unleashed? Since the server is using open source technology it'd be wonderful if anyone with a Jabber enabled chat client could use it (Trillian, GAIM, etc) and not just users of Google IM. While this hope is based on speculation, it does have some backing in the form of an active server.

The standard for IM applications is mostly well-defined, suffering only from a life of niche use, and stands to drive the future of short messaging everywhere. Google's rapid penetration into new marketplaces - huh huh, he said 'penetrate' - with its amazing take on old and crusty web tools is well demonstrated. If Google leads this charge and uses open protocols for establishing itself, the proprietary IM applications will soon be staring at their own extinction.

It'll be all over but the cryin'.

BBC NEWS | Google revives Clippy

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google tool watches as you work: "The revamped desktop search system is much more active and keeps an eye on what users do and instantly displays relevant webpages, blog entries, documents, messages and photos in a hovering, on-screen panel."

Oh my god, it's Clippy all over again. In their struggle against Yahoo!, it appears Google forgot all about the worst parts of Office 97.

Good luck, guys.

So Close

I've been searching for a calendar server or web app for some time, now, something that can be used to track my own schedule as well as others in my house.

Ideally, in a perfect world, this thing would have my auth info and talk SOAP to the calendar at work and other places, so I could log appointments with varying opacity on those calendars too. No, I think I can't begin to imagine more than one layer of indirection there.

But then I saw Plans on Freshmeat.net. Look at it: It's gorgeous. It looks usable and well-laid-out - which is really half the work - and also supports things like multi-day events, email notices and downloading to popular software packages.

Then I noticed it was in perl. Given my past problems with this-week's-release of GLIB and how I can't get GAIM and GIMP to work at the same time, and given the problems at work with version incompatibilities between software releases shorter than 5 years apart and how a C source compile worked unmodified over 10 years (and counting) as a backup tool, I'm really considering whether I want to invite this kind of hell upon myself.

I think I'll wait for something written in a language that's been stabilized.