BlogSat

I finished " In The Plex " by Steven Levy over the weekend. I wasn't expecting to try to read the book, but a comment from a long-time Googler that Steven Levy "probably knows more about Google and its history than almost any Googler" was enough to get me interested. I was very, very pleasantly surprised. Even controlling for the fact that its the most recent book on Google, I do think its the best book ever written about the company (and there have been a bunch!) I read a couple just before I was going to join the company nearly four years ago, and I'd assumed that my time here and my general curiosity and pokiness (I know - not a word) meant that I knew a lot about the company, its history and a lot of our businesses but I learned a lot reading Levy's book - what helps make it extremely readable are the anecdotes and the details - little nuggets like why Scott Hassan re-wrote the crawler in Python; how Eric Veach thought about the ads system, the dy...

Increasingly, Google does some truly delightful marketing. :) I got these in the mail today: I thought this was cool! It was unexpected and delighted me - always something good to do to your users. Compliments to the eBooks folks who came up with this! If it were another company, I might complain that I don't read physical books as much anymore. :( even when I do, and despite years of my mother telling me to, I fold the page instead of using a bookmark. I suspect I'm not alone. the eBook store doesn't even sell physical books and by their very nature .... Bookmarks are not seen by others - the automatic evangelizing of the product doesn't happen. Sending this out will make people momentarily happy (Good!!), some like me will blog about it cos they're excited and create buzz (also good!!) but it ends there. Stickers are great for that viral push - especially if people put them on their tablets and phones and laptops (y'know on which they read those eBooks we just...

So the iPad was finally released (...oh, announced!), and if the reactions of my friends are anything to go by, Apple has another winner on its hands. Also, it looks like Jobs is now officially mad at Google . :) I'm keen to get my hands on one and play with it for a while before making a decision, but I'm not planning to buy one yet. I have my cool device for the year, but I have been seeing a lot of Kindles on the ride to work. In addition, yesterday I saw two other people reading what looked like books on their iPhones on the train. So, my anecdotal evidence + Amazon's continued encouraging success suggests that that there'll be enough people who use these tablet-like devices perhaps first for reading, and will eventually want them to do more. But I'm pretty certain that it won't be their only device, and even if it becomes their primary device to consume media, they'll want to continue to have access to their books/music/movies on their phone and on...

... Google's paid homage to Sesame Street all of this week with different Doodles across the globe. As someone who grew up on Sesame Street, the doodle below makes me really happy. :):) It's been a pretty great set of Animated/puppet doodles the last few months , including this Dilbert series .

Nice!

...and there's comic genius. Today, the Fake Steve Jobs blog is firmly in the latter territory. :) For more behind the Dan Lyons story, check out the extremely entertaining video below:

I had a hallway conversation last week that triggered yet another Twitter / Google analogy for me. Google is like a library, Twitter is like a bar. Searching for something on Twitter e.g. "Michael Jackson dies" results in a lot of very immediate, very shallow, perhaps even inaccurate results but its interesting, has attribution, and satisfies a voyeuristic tendency we all have. The same applies for Facebook status messages. Google is much more like a library: better quality, better sources, but a little more delayed and "stiff" Even controlling for their other uses, libraries tend to be less popular than bars, so that's something I'm sure worries some folks at Google. Possible solution for Google: Library Bar ?:)

The coolest little Google feature I stumbled upon (which apparently has been around for over 2 years!) was the " Find It in a Library " feature when using Google Book Search . I like reading books, but don't actually want to deal with collecting them, so I rely on public libraries a lot. So this feature is pretty useful to me (even more than the "Buy this book" feature, which I imagine more people care about.) What's even cooler is what seems to really power the feature: a non-profit organization dedicated to helping Libraries the world over get their catalogs online.

It's old news now , and here's the official blogpost . This was the second round of layoffs at Google, but this one cut much closer to home. So far, at least 3 people that I worked with on a regular basis were given 2 months to find another job within Google or outside the company. As far as I could tell, it came as a shock to everyone concerned. I'm conflicted about how I feel... Do I think Google could've handled it better? No. No one is perfect, but Google's executive team comes close. Its hard for me to imagine a more perfect (i.e. real, insightful but heartfelt) response than the one that Eric Schmidt gave when questioned (internally) about this. Do I think it'll change things at Google? Yes, but hopefully not too much. 200 employees is approximately 1% of the company; that's really nothing in this environment. I mean, there are companies that try to weed out the bottom 5% of their employees every year. The very first time I was looking for a full-ti...

Last weekend to a colleague telling him to how find a certain video on YouTube: "Just google the term '.....' on YouTube." ( Legal/PR wouldn't have approved :)) At a conference about a certain blogger/journalist, "Hmm..he's so much more charismatic in print." In conversation with another Googler about yet another Googler, "Sharp guy, but he's pretty unGoogley for a Googler, isn't he?"

There's nothing like being part of pop culture for a Marketing strategy. From today's Simpsons' TV episode Homer to the dog, pointing to the computer: "Show me where the kids are on Mapquest." Dog barks violently. Homer jumps on to the table. "OK, OK Google Maps then!!" Homer sees his entire life flashing before his eyes....and it ends with a YouTube related videos screen. Oh, here's the live-action Simpson's intro:

Google/YouTube mentions happen so often enough lately that I could make this a regular feature.:) From Reaper last week, (some paraphrasing) Sam (speaking to the Devil about finding an escaped soul from hell) : "But where is he?" Devil: "I don't know." Sam:"That's not helpful! Don't you have minions to find this guy? Devil: "Who do you think I am? Google?"

As an undergrad, for a couple of months I really resented a really good company , simply because their campus representatives acted like pompous jerks during interview season on campus. Employees, willingly or not, whether their employers like it or not, are always ambassadors for the company.... ...and in the age of ever-present company-logo T-shirts, even more so.:) Anyway, those who know me well, know that I wear company logo stuff far too often. There are number of reasons for this the shirts are free I'm too lazy to go out and buy real clothes I like the T-shirts most of the time and they're free Now, in general I only wear stuff from companies/organizations that I think fondly of, or recruited with; their is some overlap there; occasionally it'll be because I stopped at their booth at a recruiting fair and their rep stuck his/her hand out with a T-shirt :), but that was a long time ago. Anyway, I came back home tonight and changed. I realized I needed to quickly pick ...

It was a more innocent time: a long, long time ago. I still thought I was young, couldn't complete a sentence without trying to work in a pun, and my parents were still asking me questions like, "So how do we turn on the Internet?" OK, lying a bit about the last one; they'd stopped asking that much earlier. But about two-ish years ago when someone first told me about a startup called Writely that wasn't half-bad, and everyone couldn't stop talking about the inevitability of the online office suite, I'd heard an interview with a Microsoft Product Manager, who was rolling out a collaboration suite for Office products (which after all of Msft's branding fits and feature roll-backs is now called: Office Live Small Business and has fewer-even-than-promised features) . He maintained (I paraphrase from memory now), "We don't think there's much value in an online office suite. We believe that people want to collaborate online and share docs, ...

Once works starts, I'll really need to watch the Google-referencing blog posts just in case, though I'm obviously pretty bull-ish on the company by default.:) So here's one that I meant to post three-ish weeks ago when Google announced their Q2 earnings , which weren't spectacular enough for Wall Street. A few people asked me what I thought (apparently an offer letter from the company qualifies me to have an opinion. :)) Well, I don't know. My one course in Financial Statement Analysis though allows me to appreciate how insightful, Kevin Kelleher's commentary over at GigaOm is, and he seems a little worried. Time will tell if he's right to be concerned. Either way, its a really exciting time to start work there. Interesting sidenote: you can't seem to buy a car or rent a house in the Bay Area without getting a Google reference just randomly thrown in. For example "BTW, we have a lot of Google employees live here." ...

Hey, did anyone else notice their Google menus had changed? Here's a snap of mine below. It looks like the text is bigger and they've changed the background around: Wondering if this is happening for everyone? or if this is just one of their famous live user tests? Update: Yup, it is one their famous user layout tests .

The WSJ had an article today on yet another issue that some parents apparently consider while naming their kids. They check that Google thinks their uniquely precious one really is that unique. In the words of a proud mother of a young baby boy, their excuse for wanting to name their child Kohler is the currently low Google return for this "I wanted our son's name to be as special as he is" Sheesh! Yes, lady. Unfortunately your telling this to a WSJ reporter now means that the first 100 links for your precious one's name are going to be links to articles where people are questioning your decision.:) Now I'm as big an ego-surfer as anyone else out there , but this is carrying things too far. Parents overthink the names of their kids, and that's natural and to be expected. What annoys me is when they start unnecessarily worrying about optimizing these names to suit the environment. I have friends of Indian origin who're giving thei...

... which makes the marketer's job harder than it should be. Take for example my decision to finally install Google Desktop. Did I do it because I saw the benefits of all my data being indexed and so very searchable? Did I do it because maybe I wanted to use their cross-desktop file-sharing system (don't ask!) Hell no! I tend to be able to find files on my computer and when I can't Microsoft's default "Find" thingy does an adequate job. Quite frankly, there are many files on my computer that I never, ever want entering any index ...ever. Just so we're clear absolutely never..ever.....absolutely never...ever...ok, I'll stop. So why did I install it? Cricket. The World Cup started yesterday and I wanted to install the Cricket Google Gadget . So what did I learn from observing my own behavior (besides that fact that I'm weird)? That you never know what will make a consumer adopt a product, and so it's useful to try to develop an ecosystem around ...

Oh dear God!! This is so frikking cool, I'm not sure what to do. I'll probably rarely use this, but I can't even believe the technology is good enough to do this, and to see it rolled out and integrated in to Blogger!!! And so easy to use!! Whoa... The feature is Transliteration and I learnt about it at ContentSutra (that's a good name for an Indian tech site; almost as good as Alootechie :)) Anyway, I should explain. Look at the heading. I just typed in "Satyajeet", but with the push of one button it became सत्यजीत . It's not the perfect translation into Devnagri , but it's pretty damn close! Now, I've really lost the ability to write in Devnagri; well not really, but I probably write at the level of a 10-12 year old (and not a very bright 10-12 year old.) I wrote two Hindi plays once in college and though the dialogue was all in Hindi, I had to write it in the Roman script , because writing in Devnagri would have taken me too long. Someone...

OK, I can't decide if this ad is cute or annoying. So, I've been skeptical about video advertising in general, but this was kinda cute and it did get the message across: Gmail works again spam. It's a good example of the Google synergy game: Youtube meets gmail meets Adsense .