Garett Rogers at ZDNet, who first spotted the likelihood of Gmail and Gtalk being integrated is up to his old tricks again. This time, he reckons he’s spotted the possibility of a voicemail system being integrated into Gmail (to be used with Google Chat or with a new VoIP system that Google’s got in the works; who knows?), and also integration with Evite.com.
Sounds interesting and exciting. :)
I’m going to keep this short and sweet by summarising the news that “Bali Nine” ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran will be sentenced to death for their part in an elaborate drug plot to smuggle heroin into Australia into two phrases.
“When in Rome, do as the Romans.”
“You do the crime, you do the time.”
That is all.
With the latest revolution on the Internet continuing, I took the plunge last night and dug my heels into its latest creation. First there were things like Ajax and Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us, and now the best thing of all: Last.fm. It’s a Web 2.0 self-described “music revolution”.
Pretty much what you do, is you install one of their plug-ins into the audio player of your choice, or use their custom built one, and it sends a list of the songs that you play to their server. It collaborates, sorts, orders, and organises all of the information into a big pool, mixes it up, and spits it out in some amazing ways. You can see what my favourite artists are this week, what my favourite tracks of all time are, or what the most popular artists were on the website from the week of the October 16, 2005. Crazy stuff!
And because it’s part of the whole folksonomy goodness, it comes with its own self-servicing community, too! There are also tonnes of RSS feeds (see right) that you can grab on-the-fly, as always, and do with as you please.
Last.fm is brilliant. Highly recommended. Join up, add me as a friend, and we’ll compare and debate music. As Big Kev would say, “I’m excited!”
An idea! As Google continues to take over the world (latest announcement — Gmail for your domain), maybe a buy-out of Last.fm would be good to fit in with its music search? I mean, with Yahoo! having already bought out del.icio.us and Flickr, maybe Last.fm would be a good investment for Google. It would certainly make it pretty cool to have in my Google Accounts toolbox.
Being a bit bored after my surgery, I found quite a few good articles on various issues. It’s really the kind of thing that you only tend to find on a Saturday when news is a bit slower, and the stories get intersting.
One for the “only in America” file: In the state of Wisconsin in the mighty US-of-A a burglar robbing a house made himself quite at home. According to the AP article:
“the burglar left his Yahoo account open after checking his personal e-mail on the computer [in the house he was robbing]”
What an idiot! Apparently
“the suspect also reportedly took the time to make coffee, cook and eat meals, take showers, pick out a change of clothes, watch television during his crime spree.”
The New York Times reported it yesterday, and lo and behold, it’s popped up in Gmail today — over the next couple of weeks, Gmail and Google Talk will be integrated into one cosy interface. (Google blogged it while I slept.)
This should be great, because I’ve been using Google Talk a lot more over the last few weeks and the audio telephony function — when it works — is fantastic.
Even though it seems some more cynical than I are concerned about the privacy issues, I really don’t think this should be an issue. So what if a computer scans some text to deliver ads? I reckon it’s great! Instead of getting a stupid ad that will never help me on other sites, Gmail and Google give me companies and websites that are actually relevant. It’s useful advertising. Thanks cousin Gil. ;)