#Google

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.

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!

Google Talk stored all of your custom messages that you have entered in a file in your user profile directory.

The file is located at “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\status”

Inside you will find a file named in the format [userid]-history.txt.

So if your Gmail account is John.Dow@gmail.com the filename will be john.dow_gmail.com-history.txt (besides, there is usually only one file there anyway ;-) ).

The file format is very easy. It start with a first line which has the character “1” in it. I’m not sure what it stands for and what it do but you can disregard it.

I’ve just stumbled upon this, which seems to contain some very interesting speculations as to Google’s future plans.

They all strengthen my point about in my previous post that Gmail IDs are a Passport like system for authentication and they will be used throughout current and future services. They are already being used in most of Google’s personalization sites.

Another thing the link I started with talks about is the fact that Google Talk is also more about managing your contacts and you can see that the integration with Gmail and its Contacts into Google Talk also adds to the fact they it is heading to a more centralized authentication system.

I just installed Google Talk (talk.google.com). Its REALLY cool.

It’s a basic IM and its in Beta but the Voice has a really good quality.

I really liked the fact that they use an open standard, the Jabber/XMPP (www.xmpp.org) which is always good. This means that you can use any Jabber/XMPP supported client like iChat (for MacOS), GAIM (For Windows and Linux), etc.

Read their developer manifesto here, to see that they mean business and I do hope that they will use the built-in federation ability of the Jabber/XMPP protocol to federate messages to other IMs such as Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN.

UPDATE: It took a while, but Google eventually refunded me. See my post about that.

Apparently, I am going to be the “proud” owner of a 37.25 bucks Google Desktop T-Shirt.

The same T-Shirt I was suppose to get for free from Google and apparently, If you are outside of the USA they will ship it ONLY in UPS Express.

For god sake, can’t you just USPS it? Normal Air Mail?! it will cost like $7.

The saga of the geeky Google Desktop T-Shirt continues

Do you remember my rant post about not being able to order my free Google Desktop T-Shirt that I got after submitting a Google Search API .NET Wrapper?

I’ve decided today that I’ll go to the GoogleStore again and try again.

If you remember, I talked in one of the previous posts about the Google Search API .NET Wrapper I wrote that includes a single coherent API for both Google Desktop Search (GDS) and Google Web Search (GWS)?

I submitted it to the Google Deskop Search Plugin program almost a month ago and I just got an Email saying that it got in. You can check it out here.

I’ve been messing around lately with Google’s Search APIs including the Google Desktop Search (GDS) and Google Web Search (GWS).

This is part of some experimentations I’m performing in regards to productivity and search engine/applications.

I’ve wrapped both GDS and GWS APIs in a nice .NET assembly (source code in C#). Both of them have the same interface and can generate the result as a .NET DataSet, as an XMLDocument and return the raw format that is being returns from both GDS (string) and GWS (their result structure).