Another blog bites the dust

I’m sure you’ll all have heard about the Gmail dot scandal and that it WAS confirmed by Google. I’m not a heavy Gmail user but I do have an Email box there (like everyone else) but it DOES pisses me off, specifically since my Email HAS a dot in it. This can also explain why I got an Email a while back from someone that claimed to be my wife (although she was referring to another Eran Sandler ;-) ). [Read More]

Continuing my current fixation about Jabber and Jabber related stuff (it all started with this post about how Google is openning up Google Talk to talk with other Jabber based servers), there is a good article up on O’Relly’s OnLamp.com about the pros and cons of a Company-Wide Instant Messaging solutions as well as how to setup Jabberd 2.x to do just that. It’s really worth the read for people that are trying to figure out how to utilize an IM solution in their company while still retaining a high degree of security. [Read More]

I promised in the previous post about Google Talk’s support for federation to check what open source Jabber servers supports the DialBack protocol described in RFC 3920 used by Google Talk server to talk to other Jabber server. Well… it seems that the dialback protocol is supported by all server listed here and a bunch of other non open source servers not listed there. This is a good thing, but it seems the dialback protocol is not encrypted like the other TLS and SASL server-to-server protocols. [Read More]

A while back I posted a request/hope that Google Talk will open up to AOL using one of the Jabber bridges. I also secretly hoped (meaning, I forgot to blog about it) that since Google Talk uses Jabber, they will open up its federation abilities and enable everying Google Talk user to communicate with any other Jabber user (providing that that user supports the necessary XMPP spec that Google Talk uses, which I still don’t know if it is one of the common ones, but I’ll check that up). [Read More]

I’m sure you all have heard by now that Google and AOL have signed a deal in which part of it is to enable Google Talk and AIM users to communicate with each other. Google Talk is based on the open XMPP (Jabber) standard which has built in abilities to work with gateways that enables this protocol to communicate with other protocols. I just hope Google will use some of the Jabber/AIM bridges such as AIM/ICQ-Transport to make this thing work. [Read More]

I’ve recently read this article on BusinessWeek about how Google changed the landscape for VCs and innovation. To sum things up, the article states that instead of encouraging innovation, VCs are looking for companies that can fill in some gap in Google’s portfolio (at least the portfolio they think Google is seeking for, since they don’t really tell anyone what they are doing most of the time). This step alone can diminish innovation since less VCs will invest in things that cannot be sold as quickly as possible to Google (or some other one of the big giant such as Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and the rest) [Read More]

I’ve recently experimented with Amazon’s E-Commerce Service. In general, it’s a very complete API giving you access to almost every piece of information including titles, images, prices (and historical prices) that Amazon stores. There were two things that were a bit problematic, in my opinion, which I think should be addressed. The first thing is the ItemSearch method. This method allows you to search for items answering a set of criterias. [Read More]

Whether it is Gmail, Google Base, Google Video, Google Answers, Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Maps and Google Toolbar, Google seems to be conquering the world by offering a lot of services in different and diverse areas. (You can get a good review of the various Google Services here) With your Google Account (which is also your Gmail email), Google can also track a person specifically and learn things about what him/her, what he/she searched for, shoped, interest in, etc. [Read More]

I’ve decided I wanted to find a reasonable blog editor to post from instead of using the web interface of Blogger (which is nice, but not THAT nice) After long searches and going through a lot of blog editors (some even cost money) I’ve found this one which is called Zoundry which is even written in Python. It has some neat features in it like: Tags support – including support for Technorati, Del. [Read More]

My good friend Yaniv lately talked a lot about tags and other tagging related issues.Now this whole tagging thing is kinda going out of hand so I’ve decided to create a new game that will bring tagging to the real world.I’ve decided to call it GoTag. Ingredients: One pack of 3M PostIts in the color of your choice (Yellow is recommened because you can see it very well on all clothes). [Read More]