Brand Control Revisited: Google Sidewiki

In previous post on the illusory but often sought “brand control on the internet” I talked about Squidoo’s Brands in Public and GetSatisfaction.

Google’s new offering, SideWiki, makes Brands in Public look very web 1.0. Why make consumers come to a third party site just to see all the comments about a brand, when you could put them right next to the brand’s site?

SideWiki, which requires installation of the Google Toolbar, lets you add comments to any web page. You can comment on the page as a whole or on specific highlighted text within the page.
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Whoami? Google Account Leakage?

So I’m up working late tonight (well, late for me – 10pm. I normally go to bed by 9 – I’m old) and I fired up Firefox to recheck the time of my flight tomorrow morning (Yay! DrupalCon DC).

I landed on the Firefox Google homepage, as I always do in a new browser window – http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official is the address, I believe it is the default shipped with firefox.

But look at what I see in the upper right hand corner where my email address should be (click on the image for full sized one):

Google Homepage Issue

Very strange. I tried, just for investigation, clicking into “my account” or some of the other google services – I don’t seem to be actually logged in as someone else. Anything which would require login actually asks me to login and doesn’t prefill the box with stephenandmandy or anything. But it is really odd to see someone else’s email in that upper right corner.

Anyone else seeing this?

(For the non *nix folks in the audience, whoami is a shell command on most unix/linux systems that tells you what user account you are currently logged in as – or, as the man page so concisely puts it:

whoami — display effective user id

Try it on your local *nix box today.)

Hybrid: Plaxo and Google collaborate on improved OpenID and OAuth user experience

Hybrid (photo by Burning Image)

Late last week, Plaxo and Google unveiled an implementation – currently in limited testing mode – of OpenID and OAuth working together to create an improved user experience. In essence, the implementation affects Gmail users receiving invites to join Plaxo Pulse. They call this a “hybrid approach” and I think it will have a significant impact as it significantly simplifies the flow.
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It’s about time

Why isn’t this a feature of every modern email system?

Forgotten Attachment Detector

(This is a feature on Gmail Labs, which you’ll find under the settings label in Gmail)

The use case is so simple. The user writes “Attached you’ll find” or “in the attached” or something like that – basically anywhere they use the word “attached” – if there is no attachment, ask the user if that’s ok.

The number of times you say “attached” and don’t mean to attach a file is presumably outweighed by the number of times you mean to attach a file but hit send before you attach it.

How can I get this in Apple Mail or (sigh of the reluctant user) Entourage to do this?

Twitter Charts via Yahoo! Pipes and Google Charts API

(Via David S. on Babbledog)

Xefer has created an intriguing mashup using data from the Twitter API, a Yahoo! Pipe to some basic transformation, and the Google Chart API to display results:

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