automaticable

Just a quick post here, but something I’m very excited about.  Since Google Maps started releasing “Street View” for cities around the US I have been waiting anxiously for them to add Atlanta.  I actually thought it was a bit ridiculous to be queued behind places like Spokane WA and Manchester NH since Atlanta is a fairly large city, but I’m sure there were reasons behind the decision.  Maybe since Atlanta is such a large city and is not on a grid system they figured it would take more effort to actually scour the streets.

Anyway, I was looking up directions today to figure out where to go to pick up my car since it is in the shop and was greeted with camera icons that marked every turn on my trip.  Awesome!  No more having to guess what each obscure twist and turn will look like when I take trips.  For someone as OCD about directions as me, this is great news.  I am always looking for visual cues to let me know I am going in the right direction.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a favicon is the icon that rests on the left side of the tabs or navigation bar in your browser that is unique to different websites.  For example, the favicon for automaticable is a red wrench on a black background.  See it?

Earlier today I noticed that my iGoogle page had a new favicon. Instead of the capital G surrounded by Google’s primary (and green secondary) colors, now a blue, lowercase g stands on an opaque background.  For a second I thought my browser had loaded the wrong page, as such a drastic change really threw me off.  The favicon change actually applies to the google.com page as well, so if you do not use iGoogle you can check out the new favicon simply by going to Google search.  Also, if you don’t know or don’t remember what the old Google favicon looked like, Google Blogoscoped has a short story, including an image, of the favicon change.  You can find that story here.

So why do I bring this up?  Well, to me this is a huge branding play by Google.  Their capital G has long represented them as a clear, powerful symbol.  It looks like Google has decided they do not want to have as powerful of a symbol representing their brand, as consumers generally trust super-powerful corporations less than mom & pop shops.  Moving to a lowercase logo has been a trend in the past for companies that want to feel more personal.  The first that comes to mind is AT&T, the once megapowerful telecom provider for the United States, which has recently rebranded themselves with a lower case at&t.  Whether people actually change their feelings about a brand simply through upper case and lower case lettering is a mystery, though I can tell you personally that lower case lettering definitely looks inferior and weak to me.

Is this a good idea for Google, changing from their iconic G symbol to a plain, lower case g?  No, not in my opinion.  I’m sure this favicon change is just a single step in a long-term rebranding campaign for Google, but if they think they are going to be able to position themselves as one of the little guys, I think they are going to have to decentralize the entire company.  There is no way a company with 60%+ market share in their realm (search, here) will ever convince consumers that they are still a small personal company.

Then again, I am just a single consumer that spends a huge part of his day on Google doing SEO work.  Do you think this is a good idea? How do you think something as small as a favicon change will effect things vs. a full branding campaign?

Staying true to my promise for this week, here is another daily post!

Although much of what I enjoy throughout the internet eventually makes its way to the readers of automaticable, a very large chunk of what I find useful or entertaining hasn’t found a home here.  That doesn’t mean, however, that these gems are lost.  Much of what I find across the net is through the many blogs I read daily.  My RSS reader of choice is Google Reader for its flexibility, portability, and speed.  If you aren’t up to speed on RSS readers, you can find out what all the hubbub is about here.  Anyway, Google Reader recently added a new feature to the “Share” function: comments.  Instead of blindly “sharing” a story, I can now add a small comment about what I found useful in the post.  This adds a huge amount of functionality and usefulness, especially when sharing with a large community.

How does this help you?  Well, for one, if you use Google Reader already, you can become my “friend” through your gmail address.  My name is simply kyle.wegner[at]gmail.  Add me and you will automatically be subscribed to my shared posts.

For those of you who do not use Google Reader (or any RSS reader, for that matter), you can also check out my shared posts at this URL.  Bookmark that page if you enjoy it, as I tend to share stories quite often.

You may notice that many of my shared stories have comments on them directed at a specific person (Scott, I’m looking at you!).  I have taken the functionality of comments and integrated them into a Twitter-like conversation.  If I respond to someone else’s shared feed, you will see their original comment as a blockquote at the top of the post, directly under my comment.  If this sort of functionality is popular throughout gReader, I am hoping they start integrating a reply function so I do not manually have to quote other people’s comments.

Some other quick notes for those of you who want to experiment with the “share with note” function on Google Reader.  First, you have the ability to change the original post in any way you see fit.  This may be a blessing and a curse, as changes are not marked, meaning people could change the original text and the readers would never know it was not the original post.  What is nice about this, though, is you are able to use most HTML tags, so if you want to add a link, bold or emphasize text, or blockquote a response like I do, the functionality is there.

So check me out.  If you frequent Google Reader and share posts often, leave your gmail address in the comments (or email it to me) and I’ll subscribe to your shared posts as well.

GrandCentral has been in the news a lot recently, as Google finally moved its newly-acquired startup from closed-beta to open-beta. Using GrandCentral, you can get a new phone number that intercepts calls and does all sorts of cool things before forwarding to your current number. And now that it’s open, anybody can sign up to give it a try. I’m in the market for a new cell phone, and so I was looking it over to see if it’d be the right time to test it out. It has a lot of cool features, but overall I think it’s not quite ready. Here’s the breakdown:

What’s Useful

These are the features that really make GrandCentral a useful service. This isn’t a complete list of features, but the rest are more novelty in my opinion.

• Forward your GrandCentral Number to multiple lines: This is the most basic use of GrandCentral. It gives you one phone number to use as a “virtual number” to use as you wish. Have it ring just your cell phone. Or your house phone too. Or your house phone, cell phone, work phone, and Pizza Hut– the options are limitless, and potentially ridiculous.
• Number in Your Code: When signing up, you can choose from a list of numbers in your local area code. That way, your friends won’t have to call long-distance to reach you.
• Visual Voicemail: This was all-the-rage when the iPhone came out, was the ability to see your voicemail on your phone. GrandCentral takes it a step farther, and puts it online and in your email as well. Similar to Gmail’s philosophy, never delete a message, so you can come back to it and search through later.
• Caller ID: Caller ID is offered as a basic service on most cellphones, but GrandCentral takes it a step further. It’ll maintain your address book online, which makes searching easy. When you get a call from an unknown number, you have the option of letting it through, or “screening” them for their name first. Even better, GrandCentral does some automatic “spam filtering”, to keep the unwanted salesmen out. If this is anything like Gmail’s spam filter, it could be a killer feature.
• Customizable Caller Groups: They’ve explored all sorts of options with this one. Once you assign your contacts “caller groups”, you can customize the way your service based on each group. Have your house phone ring only for your family, automatically send your ex-girlfriend to voicemail, and set a special voicemail message that your co-workers will hear.

What’s Fun

GrandCentral offers some other fun perks that aren’t necessarily deal-breakers either way, but they’re neat to play around with.

• “ListenIn” on Voicemail: When you get an incoming call, you can send the caller straight to voicemail, and then listen to the message as they record it. Fun, and a little creepy too.
• Change Your Ringer: Any cell phone has the ability to change-up your ringtone. But with GrandCentral, you can also customize the “ringer” that people hear when they call you. Choose from a few different nationalities, or have “NY Voice” harass callers as they wait for you to answer. Before Google acquired GrandCentral, there was also the ability to upload or record your own– we’ll see if this feature comes back.
• Switch Phones mid-call: While you’re talking to a buddy on one phone, you can switch the conversation to another phone with the click of a button. The use case they give is if you’re talking long-distance on your cell phone, but want to continue the conversation on the home phone when you get home, to save a few minutes.

What’s Lacking

For me, these were the deal breakers that I just couldn’t live without. I hope GrandCentral and Google are working together on these features, because they will truely have a useful service once they’re implemented. But without them, I can’t imagine committing to a GrandCentral phone number.

• No SMS Support: That’s right– if you plan on giving out your GrandCentral number to all of your friends, make sure they know that it’s not possible to text message you, or vice-versa. Of course, if you don’t like paying the premiums for text-messaging service, this could be a blessing in disguise.
• Outgoing Calls Display Physical Phone Number: Imagine you start using GrandCentral and tell all of your friends to update their phones with the new number. They’ll start calling you with the “virtual number”, but there’s no way that you can call them using this number (except from the website). It would be a little confusing if all calls from you came in on some old number.
• Can’t “Port” Existing Numbers: If you want to start using GrandCentral, you have to commit to using their phone number. This means telling all of your family and friends to update their contact lists and start using the new number. It might be even more confusing for them when they accidentally call your old number, and it still works. Also consider the fact that once you start using a GrandCentral number, you’re locked in– no “switching” this number to another service. Everyone knows that Google isn’t “evil”, but what if they started moving some of these features to a premium-membership paid service?

What’s to Come?

Like I mentioned before, I sincerely hope that the lacking features above are changed, to make GrandCentral really useful. But there’s also a few others that we could tack on, to really make it a killer service. And with Google backing it, I think some of these may already be in the works.

• Forward SMS To/From Email: I’m not a fan of text-messaging in general, but I certainly wouldn’t want my incoming messages to just disappear. I think it would be nice, and completely feasible, for GrandCentral to “intercept” text messages and send them to email instead, where you could similarly reply to them. Added bonus that it would be free.
• 100% Free Calling: Google has already rolled-out the free GOOG-411; why not make GrandCentral calls toll-free as well? GOOG-411 is completely ad-free, but I don’t think users would mind listening to a short ad before voicemai in return for free incoming and outgoing calls. Of course, I hope this would be optional as well.
• VOIP Integration: Right now, you can have your GrandCentral number dial your cellphone and your house phone. Wouldn’t it be cool if it would dial your computer as well, using Skype (or something less proprietary). Answering calls while you’re at your computer anyway would be convenient, and save you a couple bucks.
• GPhone Compatible: Now that Google is officially entering the cell-phone market with Android, it’s almost a given that we’ll see slick integration with GrandCentral and it’s other services. I imagine we’ll see an integrated visual-voicemail interface and advanced caller-id and screening, but what else could they roll out?

All-in-all, I think there’s a lot of cool things that are happening with GrandCentral. But, it’s still young, and it has a ways to go. Keep checking up on it, because with Google fostering it, I think we are going to see a lot of neat things happening.

So we recently made the switch from Blogger, and it’s been quite the trip. It feels good to break free from the proprietary grips of Blogger, and into a clean, polished interface that is WordPress. But with every new WordPress installation, it becomes necessary to choose: which plugins will make the cut?

With such an active community that supports the WordPress project, there are literally hundreds of plugins to choose from. It’s simple to customize every aspect of your blog, without writing any of your own code. So without further adieu, here are the ones that I’ve chosen to stick with:

Akismet

This one is pre-installed on every fresh WordPress blog, and thank goodness for it. Akismet has become the de facto standard for catching comment spam in blogs. From their website, they say that 91% of all blog comments are spam. It works quietly behind the scenes so you never have to worry about it.

Overall Rating: 9.1 / 10

wp-cache

This is one of those plugins that you don’t realize you’ll need until it’s too late. Essentially it’s an extra layer of server-side caching, which saves bandwidth and speeds loading time under heavy traffic. It’s gotten some recent hype with sites like Digg and slashdot that bring in lots of traffic all at once. I haven’t noticed any difference yet, but this is another plugin that you can simply setup and forget about, and sleep a little easier at night.

Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10

All In One SEO Pack

Everyone knows that with having a blog now-a-days, it’s all about SEO. Although WordPress already does a fairly good job of organizing your content, this plugin promises to optimize even further by automatically setting title tags and optimizing other meta data. This is a good start to get your page noticed by search engines like Google, but it’s by no means an end-all solution either. One of the other little features I enjoy about this plugin is its “One Click Upgrade” option– no more fussing with FTP every time there’s a new version out.

Overall Rating: 6.7 / 10

Google XML Sitemaps

This is another little charm that will help with getting your blog listed, and keeping those listing up-to-date. A sitemap is a file that lives in the top directory of your blog (generally “sitemap.xml”) that Google’s crawler uses as a cheat-sheet for indexing your page. Using a sitemap is highly stressed in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Not only will this plugin keep your sitemap prioritized and up-to-date automatically, but it’ll also notify Google and other search engines every time you post new content.

Overall Rating: 7.1 / 10

Flexible Upload

One aspect of WordPress’ interface that I feel is lacking is their options for upload images for posts. They do have a simple box that will let you upload and insert, but your options from there are limited at best. With this plugin, you also have the ability to automatically create a smaller thumbnail image and resize the original while you upload. This is better than simply specifying a smaller size in the HTML, because it can reduce load times. Also, if you have an image-viewer plugin installed, such as LightBox, it integrates with those as well. The scope of this plugin is pretty narrow, but I feel it patches an important whole in the WordPress editor.

Overall Rating: 7.6 / 10

I recently came across a neat tool called YouGetSignal. It does a reverse-DNS lookup, which basically tells you what websites are hosted from the same IP as another. Not particularly useful in my case, but fun nonetheless.

I decided to do a reverse lookup for Google, because I recently read an article about some obsure domains that Google owns. Indeed, the list came up with lots of obscurities, such as
http://abnamrobankgroup.net/
http://chessforcar.com/
http://fergusonclinic.com/

Amongst others. It was suggested that these might be useful for people behind a proxy that blocks google.com. This sounds feasible, but I’d think that any proxy that blocks google.com would block domains from the same IP as well. Of well. The most important part of this information is that I found my own personal Google domain:

http://scott.wegner.svc-1.google.com/

So, I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for quite some time, and it seems like a good opportunity now. I’m not committing to any specific topic or genre, but really anything that happens in my life. So then, perhaps a little background:

I’m a computer science major at the University of Illinois, and so I assume most of my posts will have a nerdy slant to them. But, I also enjoy music, travelling, cooking, and all sorts of other things that could make their way into here.

But what the heck is ‘automaticable’? Well, that leads me to my first mini-post. Coming up with a cool, catchy, and seemingly-nonsense name is the most important aspect of any product. I decided not to go the Web 2.0 route, so I scrapped names like “scottr” and such. Instead, I stole an idea I recently read on Google Blogoscoped to come up with random names. The idea is to use Gmail’s account name suggestions to come up with something clever. If you enter numbers for your name, like “123456″, it’ll combine two random words, and sometimes it’s interesting.

The idea from the previous blog was intended for account names, but also applicable for domain names or… blogs. And with that, a website was born.