Solar OP Technology Blog

We’ve been working hard to add new functionality to tFeeder, the technology news aggregator that uses Twitter to rank stories. We have added several new key features, which makes tFeeder truly unique in terms of usefulness. We have added more server power to handle many more blogs. We added a mobile version so that you could tFeed whenever you feel like it. We improved our algorithms to make tFeeder identify hot stories even faster than before. And we made tFeeder much more friendly with Google Friend Connect.
Read more…

Today’s hottest technology news, according to tFeeder:

• Techrunch Robin Wauters (the leading Techrunch blogger in terms of tweets-per-post), reports that Youtube no longer supports Internet explorer 6. IE6 is a terrible product, but where does it stop? Could Google one day say ‘we do not support IE6,and IE7, and IE8′ ? The post is Boiling, with over 1,000 retweets in the past couple of hours.
• Techrunch also reports that sales of the Palm Pre are flat. Techrunch has a long history with the Plam Pre, as they criticized the product early on and caused quite a stir when a fellow tech blogger reviewed a giveaway Palm Pre, hinting foul play
• Cnet news has an interesting story about the growing importance of Chip makers (e.g. Intel) as the Google-Microsoft war expands. It used to be a software war, between search engines, office suites and online services, but since Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS, it’s becoming a hardware war as well.
• Engadget, the gadgets blog, reports that Apple crossed the 1.5 Billion downloaded apps mark. That’s truly amazing. Apple invented the market for application downloads and no one to date was able to imitate its success.

Read more…

The latest, hottest technology news from tFeeder:

• It’s interesting to see that 2 of the top 5 top technology stories on tFeeder are Techcrunch stories,and one story is a Wired story - usually the top 5 are owned by Mashable (see screenshot below).
• Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that a company called DST is buying stocks from Facebook employees. That means a lot of happy faces on the Facebook campus, congratulations! Mashable also covers this story and it’s a BOILING story on tFeeder.
• Techcrunch also has a story written by an anonymous person, an executive from one of the largest Internet companies (at least this is what they say, who knows, a PR stunt??), suggesting the whole Google ranking and SEO industry should be regulated. That would mean many SEO companies will die, I don’t see it happening.
• A big story is coming from Mashable’s Adam Ostrow - apparently Microsoft will offer its office 2010 suite (Word,Excel etc.) as a hosted service, similar to Google Apps. Is this Microsoft’s counterpunch to Google’s Chrome OS announcement?
• ReadWriteWeb suggests that comments are dead and tweets are their replacement. These days, everyone thinks that Twitter will kill everything - it will kill Google search, it will kill RSS, now it will kill comments. Whatever..

Read more…

It seems like this days our world needs to be defined in 140 characters (we are trying to fight this). Google is a great company and any product it offers is worth at least a blog post. One of the latest released products is Google Wave. You must have already heard or read about it, but still, I couldn’t find anywhere a good definition, in less than 140 characters, of  where Google Wave innovates.

Google defines wave as :

.. a tool for communication and collaboration on the web

but that sounds so late 90’s - communication? collaboration?? that’s web1.0 stuff.
Google sure got a lot of hype around Wave, some calling it an MS office killer, some Twitter buster, and some claiming it will become the ultimate project management tool. I’m not sure yet if I see the added value in using Wave. As a stand-alone product, which adds real-time features to email and lets you easily share pictures using drag-and-drop, it seems to me as a natural evolution of Gmail, no more.

I believe what can make Wave a true game-changer will come from a 3rd party developer, someone who will leverage Google Wave’s API to create a new type of web service, possibly mashing Wave up with other web services.

And the truth is, I think I might have a killer idea, the next Twitter. And that’s why I need your help - I requested a user for the development sandbox and still waiting for confirmation. If you happen to have a sandbox user, I’d love to get an invite!

To understand Google Wave with minimal effrot, read this great Google Wave F.A.Q.
If you have more time to spear, here’s the Google Wave live demo.

Look for furture post on the Wave app I plan on building, register to t our RSS feed.

Over the past year I’ve uploaded several video clips to Youtube. Today, logging into Youtube’s “My videos’ section, I noticed a new, shocking button - ‘Download mp4‘. When I clicked the button, the movie downloaded to my desktop in an mp4 format.

It doesn’t make any sense - why would I want to download movies I uploaded myself? Although the downloaded movies are mp4 - and you can upload a verity of formats, I doubt it if Youtube  wants to become a movie format conversion service.

I could see the download button only under movies I uploaded myself. I believe the day Youtube will allow us to download any movie (with ads embedded, of course), as it might lower streaming costs. Youtube traffic bills are in the billions, and Google is yet to find a reasonable way to monetize Youtube’s huge audience.

Here’s the screenshot with the new button:

About 7 years ago I decided to build a search engine for video clips (yes, including adult clips). Youtube was still an egg, and low-quality video clips started popping like mushrooms after rain. I spent about 3 weeks on the project, until I realized that’s a lot harder than I though. The amount of data you need t crawl and index is huge, you never know where an innocent link will lead you.

Fast forward to 2009. I decided I’d build a search engine, inspired by the launch of Bing. I though I’d take it straight at good old B. gates (is he still with the company??). I  didn’t have much time to spend on the project, and I’m broke. So I decided I’ll build a search engine in 1 hour, spending no more than 10$.

The 1 hour, 10$ Search Engine: PinGoog

Here’ how:

1. Google Custom Search - why crawl, index and search when you can outsource all these activities? So I outsourced it to Google. They offer Google Custom Search - a Google search box anyone can embed inside any webpage, directing the search query to Google own search engine. Results are displayed on a Google’s page, or on your own page. Revenue generated from click on ads in the results page is shared.

2. Google App Engine - you need a webpage (a simple html page would do the trick) to accommodate the Google search box. There are many places yo can host the page (free or paid hosting etc.). I decided I’d use Google App Engine. First, It’s free. Second, I have experience using it (solarplanez.com, for example). And third, and most important , it’s infinitely scalable. So if I get a sudden spike of traffic when a top tech blogger links to PinGoog Google App Engine handles it easiliy - I don’t have to worry about the service crashing due to lack of resources or a poor hosting plan.

3. Register domain name - That’s where the 10US$ went (actually,the project went over-budget: 10.19$ for the domain name). I mistakenly used GoDaddy to register the domain name. What I should have done was use Google Apps own domain name registration services - it would make things more simple (read below why).

4. Register with Google Apps - since my application runs on Goolge App Engine, by default, its URL is something like: http://pingoog.appspot.com. I wanted to change that to a my own domain name,  pingoog.com. To do that, I had to sign up for Google Apps. Only through Google Apps was I able to change my application’s URL to http://www.pingoog.com. When you register with Google Apps, you can buy the domain name through them- it’s a good idea because you don’t have to configure DNS on GoDaddy (or any other domain register service you used).

Steps 1-4 took me about an hour of work. It cost me 10.19US$ for the domain name registration - everything else was free! Since then, I continued working on PinGoog, trying to spice things up.

5. Miscellaneous APIs - Once the search engine was up and running, I decide to add some real time data, collected from various web sources, to make the search experience a bit more fun, interesting and unexpected. I connected to API services from Digg, Yelp and Google News. From Digg - I pull the top rated stories in different topics and from Yelp, I provide localized review services, currently for the US only. So if you visit PinGoog from New York, it will show you reviews of bars, restaurants, movie theaters and other interesting information, all from New York, all randomly.

No two visits to PinGoog are the same.

And yes, if you keep visiting PinGoog to do your Google searches, you’ll get to play the games.

Just noticed that when you do a search in Google, the logo in the search results page is a Tetris game - a Google logo made of Tetris! I wonder what was the score on that game…

Here’s the screenshot:

Update: It appears the Google Tetris logo appeared all over the globe, in some countries replacing the official logo in Google’s homepage. It marks the 25th anniversary of the invention of the Tetris game.

You might have also noticed that the screenshot was taken form an Ubuntu Linux machine running Google’s chrome browser. I’ll review Google Chrome on Linux in a couple of days. Register to our RSS feed to read this and other technology news.

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine. We all know that, part due to the fact that Microsoft will spend about 100MUS$ in advertisement. But someone didn’t quite agree with the definition of Bing as a search engine - arch-rival Google, the undisputed king of search. It’s gonna be a war, and I found earlier today that Bing drives higher quality traffic to my blog.

Google Analytics is a service Google provides to webmasters and bloggers who are interested in knowing how many people visit their blog and most importantly, where they come from.

But when Goolge Analytics display statistics for ‘Traffic Sources’ ‘, it divides them into categories - direct traffic, referring sites , search engines etc. I found it very surprising to see that traffic I get from Bing is listed under the ‘Referring Sites‘ category, and not the ‘Search Engine‘ category.

Here’s the screenshot:

I don’t believe this is a mistake, as someone had to classify Bing to a Traffic Source type. This being such a delicate issue, I’m sure it’s been discussed thoroughly inside Google.

To get the latest, hottest technology news, register to our RSS feed.

There’s  been a lot of bang around Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine over the last few days. According to StatCounter, Bing already bypassed Yahoo in search volumes. Personally, I don’t trust any Microsoft service since they deleted my entire Hotmail mailbox, which included some very important emails. I’ll never trust them again.

Looking through one of my blogs (Open Source ERP) Google analytics figures, I noticed something very surprising - although obviously,  most of the traffic to that blog comes from Google searches, Bing drives much higher quality traffic. Higher quality traffic means visitors who view more pages, stay longer on my blog (twice as long as Google-driven users!!), and most significantly, do not leave my blog without reading any post (’Bounce Rate’, the lower-the better). In fact, bounce rate of Google visitors is more than twice that of Bing users.

Here are my Google Analytics referrers stats(click to enlarge):

My  open source ERP blog doesn’t get much traffic (about 500 daily  visitors), so there might be a skew in my stats. It would be interesting to hear from other tech bloggers if they experience the same behaviour.

Last year the people at Google announced project 10^100 - an ambitious plan to crowd-source world changing idea generation . The model they chose was to put 10M US$ into selected ideas, which will be developed by organizations Google thinks can turn these ideas into products (I have a better model supporting a similar cause - jumpstart the technology revolution). Since there are so many people in the world who think they are smart (including myself), Google was overwhelmed by submissions.
Read more…