Say goodbye to ad-filled free visitor logging services for your blog/business site - Google today announced ‘Analytics’, a service which monitors your site’s visitors, search keywords and more.

Yes, Google might well now know everything about you bar what you had for breakfast (it knows I had cereals, but just can’t quite work out which one yet), but it’s free, and it looks damn good. It’s down for maintenence at the moment, but apparently it’s back later. Try it out.

Google has launched a beta version of it’s new online RSS reader, Google Reader. You can import and export subscriptions via OMPL, and the good thing about it is that you can read your news from anywhere with a net connection.

To coincide with the announcement that Google will team up with NASA to aid the space programme, I can exclusively reveal a few other ideas Google are toying with:

• A tasty Google McSearch from McDonalds
• A stunning pair of Levi’s jeans with the Google logo emblazened on the front
• Google and Hedges - multicoloured, cuddly cigarettes fresh from the heart of Western America!
• A fresh tasting Coca Googla, with even more sugar, because they’re so damn cuddly.

Techie blogger Nugget thinks that Google are walking away from a chance to open up instant messaging in the same way as SMTP opened up the world of email by disallowing users of their Google Talk service access to the world’s Jabber servers.

All Google has done is create yet another closed-loop system. They’ve made it just a little bit more of a burden for people to reliably have IM connectivity to all their friends. They’ve made it a little bit harder for people to communicate. They’ve made it a lot harder for the overall state of instant messaging to progress.

His comparisons, or not as the case may be, with the state of email 10 or 15 years ago, make a lot of sense. All I hope is that Google sees sense and incorporates it in the future, perhaps when they take the ‘beta’ seal off of it.

Have a read if you’re interested.

On Google Talk, I apparently talk a lot (cheers to Oishii)

Initial Dawn have a list of tweaks and tips for Google Talk, including a lot of stuff I hadn’t read anywhere else.

The secrets include how to edit the system tray menu to include extra commands, tweak registry settings and change text size.

Google Talk Secrets! (via Oishii)

Engadget are running another one of their “How would you change..?” thingies, this time on Google Talk. There’s over 100 suggestions already, ranging from the sensible to the downright inane.

Here’s a selection of my personal wishes:

• Something NEW. There’s nothing innovative bar the audio quality, and even that’s been done before. I don’t know what - but that’s why they’re the professionals and I’m not. Amaze me.
• Ignore the pleas of others and KEEP EMOTICONS OUT! Display names too, and all that other rubbish. Being able to glance down my contacts and see people’s actual names is rather refreshing. Call me boring, but I’m fed up of wondering who the hell ‘[{-i love milly 05 -}] mark can i hav my cd bac?‘ is. Emoticons are also getting boring - animated ‘LOL’ images don’t make it funnier.
• Talking to two people at once. With audio if possible, but if not, then simple old group chat would be nice - not many clients don’t allow that these days.
• Now here’s one which would make it very popular. Allow users of Talk to add MSN and AIM etc. contacts to your list. The features are there in the Jabber service. There’s too many IM clients for yet another exclusive one.

Engadget: How would you change Google Talk? (via The Unofficial Google Weblog)

FLHurricane.com has a Google Map tracking the exploits of hurricane Katrina across Florida right now. It seems to update every two hours, and shows the wind speed and other measurements in the pointer pop-ups.

FLHurricane.com (via Google Maps Mania)

I swear, soon I’ll stop posting constantly about Google, but an article in yesterday’s New York Times just caught my attention. Entitled “Relax, Bill Gates; It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain”, the article bangs on about how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think Google is taking over Microsoft’s evil reign.

One upstart even proclaims that “Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did”. You what? How can Google possibly be doing anything that halts innovation? Their products in the past couple of years have had a hell of a lot of influence, surely.

Their original selling point, when they were simply a search engine, was to me the simplicity. With MSN, even six months ago, you’d open up the search page and be bombarded with adverts, celebrity gossip and links to the Gardening section. All you wanted was to find out who won the 1978 World Cup, and it’s taken a minute and a half to open the page.

And now look at the new MSN search page. It searches web pages, news, images, and they even have their own version of Desktop Search.

And the Microsoft search engine isn’t the only system which has taken its cue from Google.

Look at the new Hotmail beta. Or their version of Google’s personalised homepage, Start.com. Hell, they might have had MSN Maps for years, but Virtual Earth was only put together after Google went forth and released Google Earth and Maps.

My understanding of ‘innovation’ is pushing technology to it’s limits. Doing something that forces even your stronger rivals to out-do you just to keep them on their toes. If that’s not what Google is doing, then I must be reading from the wrong dictionary.

Who bets that in a few months time, MSN will announce a new instant messenger, with better audio capabilities? Don’t doubt it.

Tags: Google, Microsoft

Having released two large-scale betas in the past week, Desktop 2 and Talk, Google are on the lookout for someone to play a key role in their “future video conference systems”, says a job posting on Yahoo! Jobs.

This definitely points to Google Talk as far as I can see, as well even a system pointed more at corporations in the future - email, video conferencing, and IM functions built into one product perhaps.

Yahoo! Jobs (via Search Engine Journal)

Google Talk was launched on public beta this morning, and seeing as the very meaning of beta is that we’re allowed to dissect it’s every flaw and annoyance (and some good things too), that’s what I’m gonna do.

Good point number one - it’s so lightweight, both visually and technically speaking. Using MSN Messenger as comparison, open both apps up and place them next to each other. Sure, Talk is missing a variety of Messenger features, but how many do you miss? It looks clean, retro even.

Comparing the memory usage also yields Google-positive results. When signed in and dormant, Talk uses around 3,000K on my system. Messenger, 22,000. Google 1, Microsoft 0.

Next, the voice call capabilities. The sound quality is like nothing I’ve heard before. Your recipient sounds like they’re in the same room - that may have been between two broadband connections, but it was impressive compared to other free services. You can also broadcast music to them if you follow this guide.

Another quick good point is the ability to send a message to an offline contact, as with other services such as ICQ.

The lightweight thing does mean it’s very short on features, but as I said, who misses them? I certainly don’t miss memory heavy MSN things such as tabs, MSN Today, advertisements and ‘personal messages’.

Google have also added something that I now notice was sorely missed on MSN Messenger. Tabbed conversations. Sometimes you can have 5 or 6 windows open, each with different recipients. Should you be talking to 2 people on GTalk, the conversations will be in the same window, tabbed vertically. Great stuff.

There are a few improvements Google could add to the next version, though.

With the Jabber protocol Google is using for Talk, they have the opportunity to let people add MSN, AIM etc. contacts. That would definitely be a bonus, although may obviously affect Google’s threat of world domination.

I also wasn’t alerted when I recieved new mail, but maybe that was just me.

No display pictures, backgrounds, emoticons. What am I talking about, that’s a damn good point..