Think, Eric, Think!

Jyri showed me a new “search engine” that just got out of private beta, called Wolfram|Alpha. I put “search engine” in quotation marks because it’s actually much more than that. It’s really clever natural language parsing combined with a reasoning engine that seems very powerful. The goal of Wolfram|Alpha is to make all the world’s knowledge not only searchable but also computable. Quite a formidable challenge, but only seeing these first steps makes me think this could be possible.
Check this screencast if you don’t believe me…

“It feels like the web has been trying to claw its way back to the simple utility of Hypercard ever since Mosaic. GeoCities was the first massive-uptake anyone-can-build-here website haven. But it was all static html…” Rich Skrenta: AppEngine – Web HyperCard,  finally

HyperCard is how I learned scripting. Much has happened since, but I will never forget how easy it was for me as an 8-year old to get started with that brilliant tool. The web, and even AppEngine, still has ways to go.

With recent cool announcements from Google (Amazon? Nah, too expensive!), I hear a lot of people bursting out in great enthusiasm “Ah, fab, let’s move to App Engine!”. But I think it’s always good to step back and think twice… even though it is *darn cool stuff*. Here’s something to keep in mind:

“The bottom line is that if you build your application on App Engine, Force or EC2/S3, you are locked into those platforms. Moving off will require a substantial re-engineering effort.”

Although Joyent aren’t exactly neutral in this matter, they do have a point. Here’s the full post.

So, I just had to find the mp3 of the absolutely beautiful ballad sung by Caetano Veloso in Almodovar’s motion picture “Talk To Her”. Here’s the heartbreaking scene I’m talking about.

Ok, so I go on to iTunes. Nope, not available, only a strange orchestral version. Then on to AllOfMp3. Ah they have it! But “credit cards are currently disabled”. Hmm, wonder why that is? Haha…

Then I remember a blog post about finding mp3:s with Google. So I type in:

intitle:"index.of" (mp3|mp4|avi) cucurrucucu.paloma

And voila, there it is in pristine quality for your listening pleasure (and here are the lyrics). Thanks Google.

Best collaboration software in years, hands down. Subethaedit still rocks for pure code, but I’ve been looking for a cross-platform wysiwyg dito for a long time. Combine it with Basecamp and you are… teh p0werful. And now those smart Googlers acquired Jotspot, too. Microsoft is truly in danger. Boy does Word sux0r on Intel Macs.

Yesterday I was at the Googleplex with Alex and Ted. We meet up with Cathy, Erik, and Glen. Really nice place, really nice people. We’ll go back to see the Spore techtalk at Google on friday.

Is available.

Very Ajaxified, quite nice. Google RSS Reader.

There seems to be a typo in the Google Wikipedia links feature. An & sign is missing, which destroys all the links to Wikipedia. Try this or this and click the Wikipedia link. First time I discover a Google search bug, I think. Wonder how many corrupt Wikipedia pages that little bug results in..?

Would be very cool if there was a “public bug tracker” where one could enter a bug for any website. And if anyone could submit a patch, it would be even cooler. Greasemonkey is one step in the right direction, since it allows for the creation of “temporary patches” for any website. But we need a platform where both Greasemonkey bugs and patches can easily be submitted.

Just realized the importance of RSS search engines when looking at my traffic logs, realizing that one of the top 10 search strings leading visitors to my site is the phrase “iShuffle sucks”. Type this into Google and my page for entries tagged with music comes up as number 18. The problem here is that I don’t think the iShuffle sucks, in fact I think it rocks (but I did point out a few minor mistakes in the design the other day)!

What happens is here that Google mixes up this post with the post about Beatport and why it sucks! This would never have happened if Google had the least idea of the fact that it’s indexing a blog with separate posts about separate things! I find myself turning more and more to search engines like Technorati and Del.icio.us these days, and this little happening gives me all the more reason of doing so.