False Positives

Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is a new FireFox (versions 1.5 and greater) extension released by Google, and developed by Glen Murphy, which shows you what bloggers around the world are saying about the current url you are viewing, using the indexs of Google’s Blog Search.

It was inspired by Aaron Boodman (well known for this work on GreaseMonkey), who cames across ( and was inspired by) comments I made in November 2004 on the old FalsePositives blog on blogger : Looking for FireFox / Mozilla extensions for Del.Icio.us and Technorati, about a system to find and display commentaries on the current web page, using the Technorati index. I also mentioned some other work done towards this in Illuminating the Web, with GreaseMonkey

Very Well Done Glen! The visual design of the extension is nice. However: the “add comments” allows you to add a post on your Blooger blog onl; and “1 of Many” is too cute, tell me how many, Give me “1 of 7″

Add this to a bunch of other Google releases : a FireFox extention for Safe Browsing, protection agianst phishing or spoofing sites; and the Google Homepage API allows you to create sharable Javascript modules that can personalize the Google Home page. (this will be come more important when calendar.google.com finally surfaces.)

Update: Technorati Niall Kennedy makes some good points in Technorati Web Comments for Firefox about how heavy handed Google’s terms of service for this extension is (and I can’t think of any FF extension that had any terms of service before). Yes, I would like to see the a Web Comments for Firefox with full support for the MetaWeblog API, so I could point it at the index of my choice.

Share This

Back in April 2004 I wrote about Other uses for the Google Operating System, or the Google Space when Gmail (Googles mail service) was first in limit release, and now this week we have seen a) a major update to the Google Desktop and b) the launch of Google Talk.

Googles Desktop is important because it includes sidebar a place where a panel on your desktop provides convenient, one-glance access to all sorts of personalized information including: Email (Outlook) integration and offline Gmail searching, API support, better encryption, QuickFind, and the abliity to add / build more plug-in’s.

Google Talk is a IM (Instant Messaging) and Chat VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) client. It uses the standard Jabber / XMPP protocol for authentication, presence, and messaging, and all you need is a Jabber-compatible IM client (like iChat) and a gmail account. Here’s 2 review’s : 1 and 2.

The supplied Google Talk client also works with your gmail email account, and the Google Desktop sidebar includes a Google Talk plug-in. The circle is complete.

Where is this all going? Does the Gdesktop (GTop?) become, more and more, your integration place. Is this the rise of the WebOS as Jason Kottke talks about. And Yahoo’s buy of Konfabultor leads to the same place.

Looks like we are moving from a OS-centered to a network-centered world. Can this be good for MicroSoft?

More :

• Speculations on the Google Wallet
• August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web
• Dare Obasanjo : The Evolution of AJAX: Jason Kottke Beats Me To The Punch

Share This