Google and Microsoft - more sparring

Google have now opened their new London offices, down in Victoria. They have a huge list of jobs available. It's interesting to see if you can guess what direction they are taking. Looks like WiFi and Mobile are the main areas of development over here. The UK must be spending more money in this area. Perhaps they'll offer to do the same for London as they have offered to San Francisco, full wifi coverage of the city. That would be so convenient, but I'm sure that many of the phone companies must be having similar ideas. There's going to be a lot of money spent before any return. Sounds like the 3G auction doesn't it! Sounds a great place to work tho'. Free lunch twice a week, free breakfast once a week, 10 percent of your time should be on your own projects, 20 percent on blue sky ideas. What more could you ask for!

How did Microsoft get the www.live.com address. Did they have it for a few years, or have they just bought it? Would be expensive to buy. Looks pretty similar to Google with lots of space and a smattering of adverts. They'll be competing soon, so I should try to put up all the pages from our websites to get them logged into the search database. Do it this week. The sidebar seems different but isn't it the same as the Bookmarks area in Firefox/Explorer? Seems that people are moving towards configuring a page for all that they need to use. We can add our email to the window, if we have Live Mail or Hotmail, have a weather forecast in the corner, add some RSS feeds to give us information as it happens. These are all things that can be added to Firefox or Explorer with plugins, but MS Live will have it all built in, and delivered with the Operating System. It will be a big advantage and something that Google will find hard to overcome. Firefox has put a dent into Explorer, but it hasn't got major penetration yet. Google has that major penetration, so we shall see how quickly Microsoft Live takes up its share. Maybe the Vista OS will be its salvation, by opening up as the machine is powered on. It's extendable as well. Gadgets are Microsoft's name for plugins. They have their own dedicated site. Already they have some new ideas there, with people asking for things that thay are used to having on their msn sites.

I'll try using it, see what more there is to it. Might even build a gadget. There's probably a Wizard in the new Visual Studio 2005 developers kit to do it.

To counteract this publicity and to take the fight in a different direction, Google have leaked out their new GoogleBase It allows people to post any information they like up to it and tries to categorize it in some or several ways. Searching is similar to Google, but the items you come up with might be information, trying to sell something, event dates, jobs etc etc. Quite confusing. They say they are not aiming it at ebay, but it seems to have a lot of people on there selling things already. I must get the web sites published on there as well. Anything to add to the links count. Who know which direction this may take. I'm sure that there will be a lot of people using it and, being a beta, it will grow to be more useful as people come up with more ideas.

There are an awful lot of web pages out there on the net. Around 4 billion by all accounts, with around 17 billion links between them. But will all these pages around, over half of the people browsing, go to only the top 500 sites. That is an awfully small percentage, as well as being an awfully large number of people. How can I get them to my site?....answers on a postcard....

Around 5 million sites get a significant amount of traffic, enough to survive on. What are the rest doing? It would appear that you just have to have a web site for the few occasions that people want to find you, but it is a hard task to set some pages up to make a living from. One in a billion chance that this blog will ever be read by anyone? I only started it so that I could remember what I was doing the previous year. It is there to remind me of all the ideas that I should have looked at, but have been too busy for. The internet just seems to give me more ideas that my brain can cope with! Better go do some work!