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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).

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.icio.us, Flicker, 43 things and more.
• Preview with your OWN template. It even downloaded my template and enabled me to view this post as it would appear in the blog.Anyhow, this is my first post out of it to test it out and see how it is and if its worth using it all the time.

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).
• One dark marker pen to write on the PostIts.

How to play?

I’ve just stumbled upon this article stating the the IFPI – the international equivalent of the RIAA – has just released a virus that will delete your P2P software.

Now I find this act to be criminal.

All the recent worm writers that were caught and legal action was taken against them. This virus is sponsored by an organization and as much as they’d like to fight P2P piracy, writing a virus and deleting software from my computer without my knowledge IS a CRIME!

As my good friend Dudu pointed out (and I forgot to tell you), Google Talk’s log abilities are very limited.

It only saves the last 20 lines of chat (and only if the window was closed properly, otherwise it will NOT save the log).

Since Google Talk currently lack any normal API (heck, its just one executable file ;-) ), I thought about writing a small up that would listen to file changes in the log directory, parse them and accumelate them in one file per converstaion with a person (similar to what the log is doing now).

After discovering the Google Talk Chat Log format and seeing that its not human readable, I’ve decided to write a log viewer so I can check out and read my logs whenever I want to.

You can download the Google Talk Chat Log Viewer v0.1 from here .

I’ve also written there the Google Talk Chat Log format if anyone else is interested.

Enjoy!