Another blog bites the dust

According to this link in Globes, the Israeli Business newspaper, Google is going to open up an R&D center in Israel in the second quarter. The center will be led by Dr. Yoelle Maarek, a long time (17 years) veteran of IBM’s research labs and will be located in the northern city of Haifa (near the Technion, surprise surprise)

The only company out of the big 3, a.k.a, GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), that has an R&D center in Israel is Microsoft. Yahoo had something in the first bubble and after the explosion of the first bubble it was quickly closed.

If blogs are the long tail of knowledge, what are the comments that most blog posts have?

Are the comments the long tail of the long tail of knowledge?

Think about it…

A long long time ago on July 6th 2005 I’ve posted a rant post about how I’m so pissed at Google after I had to pay $37.25 to get a “Free” Google T-Shirt I won because I wrote the Google Search API .NET Wrapper.

Well, now after 8 months I finally got a refund.

It started as a strange Email I got from the GoogleStore saying something about my request being handled. I didn’t figure what this was and the Email didn’t have any special links in it.

I read a this post on Niall Kennedy’s blog about the new features in the Google Toolbar which includes the ability to store and tag label bookmarks that can also later be retrieved when logging into a different machine.

While the concept is nice (and is similar in a number of ways to the del.icio.us extension for FireFox the thing that caught my eye was the fact that Google decided to call the tags labels.

I know it has been a little quite around here and on my other blog.

I may have hinted a bit in the past that I’m involved in this new and cool project but if I didn’t, I’ll say it out loud, I AM INVOVLED IN A COOL PROJECT :-)

That’s the main reason for the quiteness.

This project is called Yedda and you are more then welcome to visit the site and the Yedda Blog to get more information.

Just saw this on Digg and since I’m already on a Jabber frenzy due to my previous posts, I thought I should share.

Looks quite cool, though I haven’t tried it yet.

I’m using GAIM so I got everything all up in one client. I’m just waiting to get a build of GAIM that works with libjingle so I would be able to chat with my friends using Google Talk’s voice features.

If I only had a bit more free time to actually code on GAIM that would be even better… oh well… back to the salt mines.

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 ;-) ).

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.

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. On the other hand all other IMs today are not encrypted by default so privacy issues regarding this are legitimate as to the rest of the IMs available.

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).