Google Reader: A different way to view your Buzz stream

As you may or may not know, Google Buzz is tightly integrated with another Google product besides GMail. That product is Google Reader and it may help you quiet some of the noise so you can “listen” to one person at a time.

Google reader allows you to subscribe to websites and blogs that have RSS feeds – most sites do. In fact, Google has just enhanced Reader to create a feed for sites that don’t have a feed.  This allows you to be notified whenever there are changes to a site to which you’ve subscribed.
More on Google Reader can be found here.

So, the interface in Google Reader is a pretty basic but powerful two column display. On the left are your lists of subscriptions and on the right is the summary or complete post of the site you are navigating. There are shortcuts allowing you to scan quickly through lots of subscribed site updates in a very quick fashion.

With the advent of Google Buzz, another section appeared (at least I never noticed it before) on the left called “People you follow” with a parenthetical count of unread updates,  from all the people you follow in Google Buzz.

So what you say? Well, what if you’re short on time and just want to scan some updates of a few folks? This feature in Reader allows you to do that without having to scan your whole Buzz stream.

Scanning your whole Buzz stream can take quite long and require several pages refreshes. Using the Reader feature lets you zero in on a few of your favorite folk’s updates.

Also, the drop-down menu next to the “People you follow” section enables one to sort Alphabetically and Recency along with other presentation options.

I found this section of Reader to be quite handy for my Google Buzz consumption.  Let us know what you think?

Now this is real-time!

Update: Added video below explaining PSHB

Update: Wow, that was fast!  Less than a minute it was available in reader and in Google Trends Latest Results

Just finished reading a post by Jessy Stay about the Google’s apparent turning on of the” firehose” in Google Reader.  He mentions a conversation with a Google friend.

I quickly queried a friend of mine at Google, who stated, “They can neither confirm nor deny my suspicion” (that it was launched), but I was “observant”.  Sounds like they just launched Pubsub Hubbub support.

So to test it out (via this WP plugin) I’m putting up a new post to see just how it works.

Google presented a demo of  its unique operating system, dubbed Chrome OS on Friday.  The concept was introduced back in July of 2009.  They also released all the source code for the OS to the open source community.  How does this affect me you may ask.  Well, right now, not so much.  In a year, that may be a different story.

Operating systems are a necessary part of your computer experience.  It’s the king of all programs running on your system allowing you to access all the internal and external devices and programs you use daily.

The problem is, as our computers get more complex operating systems become more complex.  This complexity leads to a slow startup and multiple background programs running  and well, what many call “system rot”.  User frustration with their computers running slow, being infected with a virus, or a multitude of other issues is a growing problem.

Google attacked this problem in its unique out of the box way and presents us now with a revolutionary solution, the tenets of which include simplicity, security, and speed.   Sergey Brin (co-founder) says that all along, the driving force behind this effort has been to improve the user experience.  It should be noted that improved user experience means that users will be online more, see more online ads(a majority of which are managed by Google)  and purchase more of the advertisers’ goods and services.

To optimize this new OS, Google has defined a reference hardware specification.  Solid state drives (no moving parts) is a major component of the design, along with a full sized keyboard.   More details will be forthcoming in the months ahead as they work closely with PC hardware vendors.  Google hopes to be ready for a full roll-out in time for the 2010 holiday season.

The Chrome OS demo employed the use of an off the shelf netbook equipped with a solid-state drive.  Speed was impressively demonstrated with the push of the on button to the login screen taking only 7 seconds.   Repeated emphasis to the audience was that most people spend a majority of their time online; answering and sending email, browsing the web and using other online applications like YouTube to view video and listening to music with online application like Pandora.

Boot-time and security were also discussed as being compelling reasons to totally revamp what is essentially a piece of technology that’s getting a little long in the tooth.  Sure,  initially this will not replace your current desktop computer.  Not all applications that most need currently exist in the “cloud”.  Google hopes, however, that this will be the starting point and envisions this Chrome OS computer as complimentary  for now.

Enough of me trying to describe what Chrome OS is or its benefits to the user community.  Below are some videos that will do a much better job.

Let us know your thoughts, we’d love to hear your take.

Chrome OS Descritption

Chrome OS Demo

And a look at the Chrome OS UI which will evolve

Google Alerts is a great addition to Google’s plethora of free services – one that you shouldn’t overlook. This recently added powerful tool allows you to track conversations about any topic completely unattended. Just feed it the search term, refine the search type and let it go do its job.

In a timely fashion you’ll receive links with snippets of text related to your search terms. You choose to have results delivered via email or to your feed-reader. The icing on this cupcake is its ability to schedule the frequency of deliveries – “As it happens”, “once a day” or “once a week”.

Configuration of your Google Alerts is simple. At the Alerts site you complete 4 fields. Enter the “Search Terms” you’d like to track. The next two fields are drop-downs where you specify “Type” (where to search), and how often to deliver results. And lastly, where you’d like alerts delivered.

Types include News, Blogs, Web, Video, Groups, and Comprehensive (all of the above). The “where” can be a feed to your reader, by default this is Google Reader. Or if you prefer, enter your email address. You’ll have to experiment with this a little. It alldepends on what your tracking. If you’re tracking something popular like “government health care” you may want to direct that to your reader so as not to overwhelm your inbox. Whereas, tracking the last sighting of your favorite celebrity may be something different.

Think of the possibilities. Tracking sports, news updates on a high profile event, or just keeping up to date on an emerging technology.

One should also mention that there is no limit to the number of alerts you can set up. One of my favorites right now is tracking “Black Friday”. I read the returns in my reader along with my other feeds. I also just bought a Roku, so I’m tracking its mention everywhere for the upcoming new channels to be announced soon. This I do daily to my email inbox

I highly recommend you give Google Alerts a whirl. It’ll just take you a few minutes to set up and then you go about your business. And before too long you’ll be the goto person on the latest advances in silicon doping – cool dude!

Try it and share your take.

Here’s a short video demo:

Google Photo Management Software adds Face Recognition

The latest version of Google’s Picasa, Version 3.5, comes equipped with a powerful new feature – name tagging. This new enhancement has tempted me to move all my digital photos from Flickr and Smugmug to Google, not a small task mind you.

The new version of Picasa finds all the faces in your photos and presents the zoomed in image and asks you to name them. What’s amazing is that after you do that it automatically finds other matches and groups them. It does an amazing job.

As Google puts it:

Picasa 3.5 scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It’s easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking “Add a name” below a photo and typing the person’s name. Once you’ve tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them, or upload your name tags to Picasa Web Albums

If you have a lot of photos of your kids, say from birth through marriage, you’ll most likely have to identify them at different stages in their life.

What’s very useful after you’ve name tagged your photos is that you can now easily find photos – especially useful if you have hundreds or even thousands of photos. And, you can find photos that contain any combination of people just by clicking on their face to add them to the group.

Additionally, you now can easily Geo-tag your photos – just click Places and you’ll be presented with a Google map upon which you can drag your photos.

Google provides a helpful video as well to guide you:

Picasaweb

Not suprisingly, Google provides on-line sharing of your photos at their online Picasa Web site. As you might expect, you can create albums, share albums with your friends and sync your albums with your local – Picasa Web Albums to Picasa. You can find detailed help here for both Picasa and Picasa Web.

Now, do I make the move to Picasa? What do you think? Are you a Picasa user and how does it compare to say Flickr, Smugmug, and others out there? We want to hear from you.