Is it just me

Or has Google Reader been demoted to the "More" tab in the Gmail menu for everybody else, too? Eric Schmidt hands over the reins and everything goes to heck!

You brought myrrh?

In the midst of a frustrating morning tracking down information on the Flare visualization library, I suggested to Matt that he should spend his 20% making a "It's Not Just You" button for the Google toolbar. You know, when a site is inexplicably unavailable, and you think to yourself, is the site down, or is it just me? The second thing I do after refreshing the page a dozen times is to google the url, to make sure I've got it spelled right, see if anyone has mentioned it's gone down, and check the cache for the information I was after. Matt realized we could just use translate.google.com for the same functionality. I tried it out, and it was not just me. Of course, this is the situation 99% of the time, I'm sure, but now I can feel like I've actually done something about it.

In other Matt news -- actually, very other Matt news, as this is about a different Matt -- Matt Stanley, a friend of mine from high school has a really cool audio/photo story on the dying art of rail hunting. Not to be confused with trainspotting. By all means check it out, as well as the rest of his blog.

Finally, cnet presents an object lesson in the pitfalls of web accessibility by including a picture of a table of data. In an article on web accessibility.

The tenor of conversation

So all the underwhelming new features in Opera 10 — Turbo, visual tabs, new skin — have been a cover for the big show -- Opera Unite, their “reinvention” of the web that turns the browser into a no hassle web server to share pictures, music, chat, anything.  Setting security concerns aside, it makes sense.  If we've got near server-class hardware on the desktop, and server-caliber net access, why not bypass the middleman (or person, or computer) and act as our own servers?  (N.B. Like Turbo and Opera Link, all roads lead to an opera.com account.)  Opera is framing it as using our existing computer resources to add to the robustness of the web.  

It's interesting to me that this is happening just as Google is introducing Wave, which in a very real way reinvents email using everything we've learned in the past 40 years or so (yes, email is that old) about communication online.  Instead of using mail servers to just shuffle messages around between computers, Wave turns each message into a sort of hub for all manner of communication and collaboration, like live chat, annotation, media sharing, etc.  The message, and all the rest of the associated content, seems to exist on a server somewhere, accessible webmail- or Google-apps style, although a desktop Wave client wouldn't be unimaginable.  Google's planning on making it an open protocol, which should ease adoption.  (If Opera's hunch is correct, maybe we'll all be our own Wave servers sooner or later.  In which case, IPv6 better hurry up.)

While Opera, on the other hand, has driven browser innovation in the past, that's usually been as a function of new features, not a whole new web paradigm.  If their widget library in comparison to Firefox's plugin community is any indication, I'm not certain they actually have the juice to make this happen.

I do not regret not calling this post “Something to sing about”

Is it just me...

...or does Google have another new favicon all of a sudden?

UPDATE: And of course, the google blog has already beaten me to the punch. Time for bed, I think.