Google’s been busy, busy, busy this week.  The most significant release was Google Talk, which is a pretty ho-hum chat client.  I haven’t used it’s Skype-like features, but I do appreciate the fact that multiple machines can be logged into the same Google Talk account, and that new messages are delivered to all logged in clients.  That’s an important feature to anyone who uses more than one machine (and there are a lot of us).

Second on the list of importance, I think, is the fact that you can now invite yourself to Gmail.  They’ll send an authorization code to any cell phone.  So the beta is pretty much over.

I ignored the new Google Desktop, just because I couldn’t really remember anything that I really liked about the first version.  Yeah, it searches your files, but I’ve got AppRocket for that, and I love it.  I didn’t really want my personal results comingled with my Google results, anyway: I wasn’t sure what to expect when I clicked, and I don’t like that.

But I saw that they’d added Outlook search, which is exactly what I’ve been loving about Gmail and angry about in my current office Outlook situation.  (In brief: I saw an email in the past few days about the office fridge being cleaned out, and then a bunch of stuff from the fridge appeared in my mini-fridge, and I wanted to check that fridge-cleaning mail, but I couldn’t remember who sent it or what the subject line was.) 

But the sidebar is the easiest win for this new version.  Let’s just go through what I like about it.

1. Internet-savvy panels include displaying photos from RSS feeds (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny weather (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny stocks (it’s okay, Konfabulator), and a tiny mail reader (that integrates Outlook and Gmail… if you’re into that).
2. A modified RSS reader automatically rips RSS feeds from the pages you visit, and puts together a "best of" based on what you visit most often.  This could be nothing short of the missing link in RSS feeds.  Everyone could use RSS, but few are ever going to go through the trouble of learning which sites have it, which don’t, and subscribing to the feeds that would minimize their information overload.  This app does it for you… automatically… correctly.  It’s smart.  It’s almost creepy, but it’s really okay once you get used to it.
3. An internet best-of panel, which just ranks the pages you visit most often.  Again, something that’s just cruising in the background, ready to help… I like it.

This may not topple the intercontinental communications infrastructure as we know it (like Google Talk might, if they can work those deals with VoIP providers and get real phone numbers hooked in, like Skype), but putting more information at my fingertips (and getting me to uninstall half of my Konfabulator widgets) is notable, too. 

Okay, so del.icio.us and flickr are social software.  Collaborative.  They’re for people to come together and combine for a greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts experience.  Find other people with similar interests. 

But does anyone actually meet anyone else on these?  I have collected contacts in Flickr from the real world, but I know them… from the real world.  It almost never goes the other way for me.  Friendster even makes it a point to connect people from connected social circles, and at best I’ve tracked down people from the real world and found their digital copies. 

Tim summed it up pretty clearly a few years ago on this site: I have a hard enough time keeping up with the friends I already have.  On the other hand, you could be trading in the friends you currently have for ones that are really into the kind of things you’re into, talking to them on Skype, taking advantage of the technology and Internet of 2005.

I guess I see wasted potential there.  If the new wave of social software isn’t doing much more than loosely organizing the poeple we already know into friend and not-friend categories, then we might have hit the peak for this kind of thing back in the days of classmates.com.  And that’s discouraging.

…is that Yahoo News Searches can be turned into their own RSS feeds.  If you were of a certain mind, you could set your pager to go off when the following RSS feed gets new content:

chinese democracy

Yeah, for real.  Replace "Chinese Democracy" with whatever else you’re interested in, and throw away your Google News Alerts.

Hey all… this site still has an RSS feed, and I’m not sure who’s using it or why, but it’s there.  Do let me know.

Shameful admission: rss.asp is actually an ASP page, which hits the database every time it’s requested, which is silly as hell.  The ideal solution would be to write a text file whenever I update or add an entry, since the file should be static until I do that again.  No database hit, no overhead.  (A close second would be an ASP page that used proper caching… but since I don’t run the server this page uses, I don’t know if they’ve got caching on, severely minimized to reduce impact to the shared environment, or what.  Anyway.)

I have three or four tools for parsing RSS and working with it. 

First is SharpReader, which is great, but slow, and I’m sure there’s a good reason for that.  That treats changes to a feed like a new email: it can notify you each time, it sets each headline to bold, until you read it, then it’s not… so subscribing to a feed that feeds more than you can handle is not recommended.

My Yahoo offers you the top N links in any feed, but does nothing with the description.  That’s got its place, but if I were to use it to stay on top of blogs, I’d still be asking myself "did I already read this?  Should I click?"

You might not know that Firefox will check an RSS feed and insert it into your bookmarks (although they foolishly call it a Live Bookmark, when it’s really a collection of links, and a bookmark is just one link).  This is awesome for feeds like the del.icio.us/popular page (one click access to fifty-or-so timewasters! perfect!), but also awesome for feeds like del.icio.us/dnordquist/bands, which can be bookmarked just the same.  Any time I add something to my bands list, it just shows up in any Firefox that has that set as a Live Bookmark.  Boss.  A lot of feeds are links-and-not-content.  FARK has a feed like that.  So does blogdex.

The fourth way is most similar to the My Yahoo thing: it’s what you see over to the right of this page on my Netflix, flickr, and Audioscrobbler panels.  I’ve got a little bit of code that actually syndicates the content of other sites: if I wanted to put the most recent posts of Cratchit, Meister, and MC Chris together on this page, I could do that.

But I still feel like I’m missing out on something important about RSS.  I’d like to see more of my vital intarweb data in RSS form, so I could really keep track of things I don’t really need in email form, or more things from the real world (my dentist reminders, oil changes, etc.) as a reminder. 

I might be making it too complicated.  Anyway.  The topic’s open for discussion.

Damn it, if you’re going to post a mix on your website, at least upload it into iTunes for the lazy people among us.  It would take an intern, what, fifteen minutes?

(This has been a service provided by me, which you can support by you clicking the link and buying music.  But probably not that John Denver song.)

Yeah, now The Onion’s AV Club is getting in on the video game review biz.  (It’s harder than it looks.)  They write fairly well, and if their choice of Winning Eleven 8 is any sign of their priorities, they’ll stay fresh.

(Winning Eleven is a soccer sim that competes with EA’s much more well-funded soccer games.  It’s widely acknowledged as more complete, more realistic, more fun, and more deep than EA’s game, which is really saying something.  I just found it had come to America today at Target, where it was on the PS2 demo machine.)