Chris Meller

Why is it that Google is so paranoid about people mining their PageRank? I mean, this is freely available information. Just load up their toolbar and you’re free to check out which sites rank the highest.

So honestly, what difference does it make? As popular as they are, I can’t imagine that it would be a matter of resources or bandwidth. They have to have solved any of those problems by now, right?

Any ideas out there? And no, I haven’t Googled it yet, I’m looking for reader responses… (yeah, so sue me!)

BTW: Did you know that this blog ranks a 4/10 according to Google’s Firefox toolbar? How cool is that? Yahoo! only ranks 8!

Looks like MSN was lagging a little adding Virtual Earth to their Sandbox… The situation has been rectified.

NOTE: This review is not meant to be a full-featured analysis of Microsoft’s latest product. Instead, it is meant to outline some key observations noted in the first 2 minutes of use.

First ObservationI like the method the VE team has taken to zoom in. When you click the “In” button at the top left of the screen, the currently displayed image immediately zooms in (creating the pixilated view seen below), then tiles over with the new higher-quality zoomed images (including any further details, such as roads).

Second ObservationAt first, I thought this was a one-time load problem, and that it would go away. As I continued playing with VE, I noticed that it was a major problem.

Apparently, there’s a problem with one of the VE servers. Either it’s overloaded, or actually malfunctioning. In either case, you get randomly broken images (as seen below) on your map. This has the unfortunate side effect of making the entire thing virtually useless.

Third ObservationIt would also appear that one of their backend servers is malfunctioning (or overloaded)… As you can see in this screenshot, my search for Starbucks locations around the Haywood Mall in Greenville, SC (where I live) is obviously not working. Unless they’re actually calling Starbucks to find all their locations first-hand, in which case I’ll actually wait.

Also, the default searches they populated for “Book Stores” and “Pharmacies” at the bottom are un-closeable. Maybe it’s because their script is locked waiting for Starbucks results… Beats me…

Combine all these observations and you have an essentially useless “beta” of Google Maps that is totally and utterly broken. There are a couple things about VE that I like (such as the scratchpad), so kudos to the VE team for having some good ideas. Unfortunately, the implementation of those ideas is somewhat lacking…

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes to get these issues worked out…

For those interested, Scoble has a Channel 9 video with the VE team available here.

Oh yeah, and you can actually find Virtual Earth here!

UPDATE: It appears as soon as I finished this review that they have fixed most of their problems. I’m still getting the occasional dead tile, but everything else seems to be loading and working pretty well. I guess we EST-ers have to remember that it’s still only 6:30 on Microsoft-time…

UPDATE 2: It would also appear that everything works flawlessly in IE, but some of the AJAX-driven stuff doesn’t in Firefox. I’m still unable to remove a previous search term from the map, nor switch between them. Come on MSN, you’re sooo close!

UPDATE 3: I found another good review here. Also here, and a critical review (but rightly so) here.

UPDATE 4: And let’s not forget here…

Welp, I downloaded it the other day and installed it, just to see what was going on. It’s been a long time since I’ve used anything but the default ‘logon’ screensaver in Windows, but I figured MSN did a surprising job with the tabbed browsing in IE, and that gave me enough reason to try out their latest creation.

There hasn’t been all that much of a buzz surrounding this screensaver, even though it is about as revolutionary (if not more) than their toolbar and tabs were. I’ve only really found one mention of it in my travels of the blogosphere (even though I’m sure I could find more if I actually went looking). Surprise surprise, it was linked by Scoble, and you can find it here.

Personally, I have no pictures I want other people to see. Well, except for ones featuring half or wholly naked women, but those wouldn’t be appropriate for a screensaver at work. Since that’s really the main feature of the new screensaver, and I can get both my news and weather in my RSS feed reader whenever I want, there’s no real reason for me to use it. However, it’s nice to see people taking an interest in some long-forgotten features.

Finally, Scoble has an original idea!

I’d love to see some quality user-provided images on the Windows Vista desktop! No more of that crappy PR-bullshit bliss picture.

Here here, Scoble! This is why I still subscribe to your blog! Less random links, more genuine original ideas! Too much to ask?