The diagram above talks about “cloud-aware printers” but I don’t know of any of those, nor do I own anything similar. So I went down the legacy printer router. The First thing you need is a printer attached to a computer that’s running Chrome. That was easily arranged; I installed Chrome, and configured Cloud Printing to be running on the machine. It’s a relatively straight-forward process and once it’s set up your printer is visible from wherever you may need to print.

And here’s where I got stuck. I thought you should be able to print from any computer or application you wanted to. Or, maybe a website that can produce print output like www.123print.com could use a cloud based printer to output your work to your local printer. But it seems that the Google Cloud Printing isn’t that mature yet. Reading the FAQ on the Google Labs page, they say:

Any app can use Google Cloud Print. When a web app uses Google Cloud Print, it should just work in any browser on any device. Browsers themselves can also use Google Cloud Print

However, I couldn’t find any way to actually print to the printer. Digging a bit further, I came across a different FAQ on Google Support site that said:

We’re working hard to provide Google Cloud Print integration with many Google products and services, the first of which are Chrome OS, Gmail for mobile, and Google Docs for mobile.

Right, seems rather limited, but I did have Gmail for mobile on my Nexus One. So I fired it up and looked for a Print option. But it was to no avail, I just couldn’t find a Print option anywhere, which meant that I couldn’t actually use the printer. I did give a check to make sure I’m on the latest version of Gmail and that was an affirmative.

So, I’m just going to leave things as they are for now. The printer is set up, but there doesn’t seem to be much I can do with it. I would have expected that my Android phone would be able to use it, but maybe I have to wait a bit more for that.

Any luck out there using Google Print Services?

Today I came across a video Google have put up which outlines the steps they take to protect people’s privacy; how they scan for artefacts like people’s faces and car number plates and blur them out; and how they respond to people’s requests to remove similar information. It’s a cute video, check it out below:

It was interesting to read about a new type of search engine which will be hitting the Net towards the end of this month. It’s called Wolfram Alpha and promises to change the way we gather information online. Currently, if you search the Web for “where can I buy Polaris RZR accessories?” for example; you’ll get a list of websites that may or may not give you an answer, may contain reviews, products and an assortment of different results. Wolfram Alpha does something different. Instead of pointing you at websites with an answer, it will try to answer the question for you.

So, for example, if I ask the question What is the population of London? Wolfram Alpha will give me a direct answer. Google, on the other hand, gives me links to websites that contain the answer. Will it change the way we use the Web? Time will tell. One thing is for sure; the SEO world is going to have a fun time trying to break their model in the same way they try to influence traditional search engines.

Have you noticed the new widget in my sidebar? It has just been pushed out by Google as a tool for webmasters to “add a dash of social” to their website. Here’s how they describe it:

Friend Connect’s goal is to facilitate an open social web. Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit. Additionally, websites that use Friend Connect become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community.

It doesn’t seem to DO much at the moment, but what this is doing is giving Google the power to create linkages between individuals, websites and each other and build up a social graph that can then be used for lots of different things. It’s interesting to see that Facebook released something similar on the same day. Interestingly, both offerings feel a bit immature compared to the functionality that CloudShout offers.

There’s a great post on Dave Winer’s blog about how technology comes in waves with things like new hardware developments, the rise of the internet, live event video streaming, handheld computers all starting a new wave. And this movement is just heralding the beginning of a new one. This one will be fun to watch because it’s not just a technological wave, but will affect the way and interact with one another.

It compares the actual outage of Gmail over the last year against industry standard downtime for GroupWise, Lotus and Exchange. It’s not a 100% fair comparison, as the platforms the solutions run on are different (cloud vs data centre), but a user isn’t really concerned about how the technology is delivered, just what level of service they are exposed to.

The post also talks about another development on Google’s side. They are extending the 99.9% SLA promise to Premier Edition customers across a number of other cloud offerings including Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk. It’s an interesting development, particularly as my personal biggest concern with cloud computer is reliability. This move will help drive expectations and the levels required from other providers. 99.9% reliability works out to 10 hours downtime per year (if my calculations are correct), which should be enough for pretty much anyone (although not everyone would agree)

Do you use Google Apps? How reliable do you find them?

Well, the bottom line is that Microsoft’s search engines consistently returns worse results than Google. Don’t believe me? Try it for a few days. You’ll find yourself switching back to Google when you REALLY need to find something. The problem that Microsoft faces is not one of getting people to try their product, the problem is that their search technology is inferior to Google, and at the end of the day, that’s all punters care around. You may attract a small segment of bargain hunters with this strategy, but as soon as you remove the incentive, you will lose them to other schemes like Homepage Friends, who pay hard cash if you search through them (using Yahoo! incidentally)

What do others think? Well, nobody really seems really convinced, with some parties actually finding the attempt hilarious. Begging people to use your products is no way to increase their confidence and it’s practically impossible to “earn” anything of value.

Once again, the search engine war is all about relevance, and until Microsoft get that into their head, they’re just going to keep pumping money into it for nothing. What a waste!

It should be available in the US and UK by the “end of the year“, but this particular offering will be locked to T-mobile (until someone writes an unlock for it). However, the OS is open source, so it won’t be long before a whole host of other mobile phones could be running it. Expect a number of gadget sites to be publishing instructions on how to install it on unlocked cell phones with the right specification as it becomes more and more commonplace.

I’m still on my Windows Mobile XDA here. It does the trick but I’d love to get my mitts on one of these.

Chrome Logo

Chrome: Google’s new browser. The only way you would not have heard about this is if you’re hiding under a rock as all the technology news sites are talking about it; certainly Techmeme has been flooded with information about it over the last couple of days. So .. here are some personal pointers about it:

The Good

• It’s as fast and lightweight as you could wish any browser to be.
• I love the start screen that shows you your top used websites. You don’t have to define them, it just figures it out from your browsing pattern.

The Bad

• Well, it’s still in beta, so a number of things are lacking. It’s not terribly buggy, but don’t expect to use 100% of the websites you used to use before (example Facebook)
• I haven’t seen any specs for an extension framework. I won’t be switching away from Firefox till I have AdBlock and FireBug, just to mention my 2 favourite plugins.

The Ugly

• The security guys have already found some potential security holes.
• Does Google really think they own all the content you use your browser to submit. That’s a major faux pas.

The main thing you need to realise however is that this is just the first iteration of this software, so there’s bound to be bad and ugly bits floating around. Some initial skepticism has already been addressed, for example, Google does not directly monitor what sites you visit, but they still have a way to go yet.

What did you like and what did you hate?

I’ve just come from an interesting post on FuelMyBlog’s blog entitled: SEO wins gold, silver and bronze. It’s an interesting post that compares SEO to the Olympics and The Guinness Book of Records. Here’s a snippet from the post:

A lot of SEO technology is used to make sure weaker content makes it to the top. Some SEO techniques are allowed, some are not, some are dirt evil and some evil performance-enhancing techniques are still not being detected …

I find the post particular interesting because in my mind there’s a big distinction between making your website more readable/indexable by search engines and trying to figure out how search engines work so that you get ranked before other sites which may be more valuable for the reader.

For example, let’s say I’m looking for information about a clothing company called Nautica. Assuming there are no other companies with that name, search engines should be able to tell me straight away about websites that can give me that information. However, if someone tries to elevate that keyword because they are selling, say Nautica watches, that page may have a high SERP for that keyword. Was that useful to me as a consumer? Does all this fighting for position really benefit the searcher?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling anyone who works in SEO a snake-oil merchant, however I think it’s only fair that they set their client’s expectations of what can be achieved. I’m sick and tired of receiving spam from people claiming to be able to make my websites rank first on search engines. At the end of the day, I’m sure decent search engines (that only really includes Google at the moment) can figure out what is relevant and what isn’t; and provide me with exactly what I’m searching for.

The web was ablaze yesterday with people complaining about the latest outage of Gmail. It started with AnaisAmy asking for help on Twitter as she had problems getting to Gmail. Withing a few minutes quite a few people were posting Tweets to the same effect. Turns out Gmail had a real outage (they needed their own fail whale) and millions of people (up to 20 million) were affected and left in the dark. Later on Google issued an apology which included the following:

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.

Now GMail is only one of a number of “Cloud” applications that have suffered an outage recently. Cloud Computing refers to those applications that are entirely or partly hosted on a managed infrastructure somewhere on the Internet. The question in my mind is this: Where would your business be if you were dependent on these applications? Apologies are one thing, but if your company is losing money every minute due to an outage of a service you are reliant on, what recourse do you have? Gmail is a free applications, but that doesn’t mean that Google they don’t have the money to support it (charging people $1 to use the service for example, won’t help improve reliability).

If you decide to go this way, make sure you always have a disaster recovery plan in case, some way you can operate your business if your applications aren’t available. And if you don’t at least make sure you have some recourse so that if your SLA isn’t met, someone else is liable for your losses.