Digital Life: Google Has some Big Plans
I just got through my first run-through at Digital Life, spending an hour at the Google booth, chatting it up about various things. Here's some of what I learned:
Google Desktop is a great product. Some Google people gave me a run through, and I was very impressed. It doesn't integrate with Gmail or Picasa yet, and you can't log in from remote computers, but its only day one, and they already have an impressive, top o' the line product. I ran a search for New York in Google News, read a story about the playoffs, and then a search for "Red Sox" in Google Desktop brought me right back to the article. Google Desktop knows what its doing, and it seems to run pretty fast.
I chatted with Biz Stone from the Blogger team (that's him in the center of the photo, and you can click here for the full size version), and we talked about this blog, which he says he reads, and lots of the stuff Blogger is going through. I also got to chat with Orkut Buyukkoten, who Google's Orkut is named after, and he gave me an Orkut invite. Cool stuff!
The Picasa team let me in on a little known secret: Google actually has an instant messenger. It's in Hello, a part of Picasa, and it's pretty powerful, as well as, in their words, "more secure than AOL's". I'll be checking out that more in the future. They also showed me how Hello integrates with Blogger, and told me why Google bought them. The Gmail guy explained to me why Google's attachment limit is ten megabytes (hint: It's Hotmail's fault).
Anyway, I'll have more in depth posts later. For now, lunch and Intel's keynote, and this photo of my head in a Google logo.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 10/14/2004 02:00:00 PM