Byte by Bite

Friday Freebie, Google buys Youtube

by Marv Dealy

If you want to leave one of these just playing in a full-screen browser so the “stuff” to the right doesn’t take up screen space, look below the display for the link that says “view this variation on a page by itself…” and click on the word “view” and you’ll get a full screen version of whichever example you’ve chosen.

Call the Future—Here’s a little freebie that will enable your computer to call a phone number and have a computer voice read text you’ve typed into the online form. You can, says the website (www.CalltheFuture.org) use this tool to give yourself a reminder, pull a prank on friends or give yourself an excuse to leave an date, family event or business meeting early. It’d be really nice if this actually worked. I’ve tried this service several times and always got a response that claimed “your call has been completed successfully” followed by “demo allowance exceeded—please try again in a few hours” and the phone call never went through. If one of you gets this to work I’d appreciate a word on how you did it.

Googling—Google’s purchase this week of YouTube, the website where you can watch videos posted by folks around the world or post one you’ve made, was made for some $1.6 billion in an all-stock deal. This follows the $1 billion it paid in December 2005 for five percent of AOL, which gave it a wide platform for its ads. Google has been on somewhat of a spending spree lately, with their March 2006 purchase of Writely maker Upstartle (Google now calls the program Docs) for an undisclosed amount of money and the January 2006 purchase of dMarc Broadcasting Inc. for more than $100 million in cash which lets Google expand its advertising beyond the Internet.

Yahoo in the meantime continues to lose market share in terms of advertisers as well as market value, and its growth versus Google is slowing. Google’s audience grew about twenty five percent while Yahoo’s grew about six percent in September compared to the year earlier.

Yahoo has also missed out on deals and acquisitions—it was trying to buy YouTube when negotiations broke down and Google apparently swooped in and made the winning deal in breakneck fashion reminiscent of the dot com craze at the start of this century. Google’s market value of some $130 billion—nearly four times that of Yahoo’s market value—mans it can more readily swoop around and grab this and that, and its $11 billion in cash extends that swoop a lot.

I’ve tried Google’s Docs word processor, by the way, and so far don’t like it much at all. It’d be fine if you needed something free, and didn’t mind that documents were stored on Google’s computers instead of your own, but I’ll certainly pass for now.

I admit to being used to Microsoft’s Word word processing program—before that (many years now) it was Word Perfect and before that Word Star for the PC and AppleWorks then ClarisWorks then Word for the Mac. I’d think that Google’s Doc would include some features to make it more familiar to Word users.

For example, the line of text you’re typing stretches all the way across the width of your browser in Docs, where it’s confined by the document specifications in Word, making it easier to read the words as I write this stuff as the line of text is one-half to one-third the length it would be in a browser. In Word, I also make use of the feature that allows me to “zoom in” to the text, making it larger on the screen for easier reading and editing. There is a good reason, boys and girls, that the text in this newspaper doesn’t stretch all the way across the page—you’d find it incredibly difficult to read.

Before any of you writes, yes, with Google’s Docs you could narrow the width of your browser window and you could also increase the text size in your browser, both of which do make it easier to read the text you’re working with. However, when you shrink the browser width you can hide some of the toolbar, so that doesn’t work out well. If you fiddle with the browser width and the font size you can work this way, but again this would only be tolerable if you had to have a free word processor and wanted to use Google’s tool. The preview tool is useless, as it just spreads the text across the width of the browser window as opposed to showing you what a completed page should look like after you print it.

On September 22 I reported that I found Google’s maps to be less useful than those of Microsoft and Mapquest for driving directions. I guess there is still room for improvements in Google’s word processing and the mapping departments—maybe we’ll see the level of improvements there that have been made to the photography at Google Earth. Our area, if you haven’t used this free tool recently, is now photographed in much higher resolution and detail. I can actually make out my office in the bend of Highway 120, although the photo was taken at a time of the year when the shadows were very long which unnecessarily clouds the view.