Lacisoft's » Internet companies

How to earn money with Google Plus

lacisoft — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:57:00 +0000

Well, you can’t. But some people can. You might ask yourself how. Well it’s simple, they sell Google +1’s. And it isn’t very cheap either. 100 Google +1’s for 29.99$.

So Google, this is the future you imagine for us ? Can i Google –1?

I wonder what Matt Cutts has to say about this ?

My two cents on the new Google layouts

lacisoft — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:48:00 +0000

Lately Google started to change the layout of all its products to the so called Google+ layout. Actually its not a layout specially made for Google+ but rather it was the first product to use this new theme.

Well, i don’t like this new layout but it really didn’t bothered me too much either. This is until yesterday when Google Reader switched to this layout. And Google Reader looks awful with this theme. And not only it is uglier but its less usable.

For example its rather hard to distinguish between individual posts in the feeds, the options on the bottom of each post are also less visible (harder to find). There is too much white space everywhere, it is like the thing has no design at all.

I think if you put a few first grade school kids they do a better design. And the worst part is that they are feeding it to me and i have nothing to do but accept or change the product, which will i do shortly.

Actually i’m planning to switch from most of Google’s products to something else. Not because of the layout but also for other reasons. Soon i will write a post about the alternatives to all Google products and to many people’s surprise, there are quite a few good alternatives!

Gmail man :)

lacisoft — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:03:31 +0000

Microsoft fires another salvo in Google’s direction.

Although Google is doing this from the beginnings of Gmail, many didn’t realize this until now. Maybe because Gmail’s adoption wasn’t as big as it is now. Anyway, interesting times are ahead of us.

A new dotcom bubble underway ?

lacisoft — Sun, 15 May 2011 23:04:57 +0000

I’ve just read an interesting article from The Economist which points out the similarities between the dotcom bubble from the beginning of the century and the Internet economy as it is now.

It is just plain crazy that some companies like Twitter are estimated to worth more then Boeing or Ford. And this knowing that Twitter has no revenue model as of now.

Given the amount of money that is being pumped into some internet properties and the value of some of these companies i tend to believe that yes, a new bubble is possible, but a global bubble will not occur. Instead companies that are overestimated and overvalued will go burst.

Gmail is down! How to check if it is really down or its just your connection

Yahoo! Tech is closing

lacisoft — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:20:50 +0000

Is there anything left for Yahoo to close ? After shutting down Photos, Geocites, 360 and whatnot now they’re closing Yahoo Tech! too. A sad company Yahoo became.

Gmail is down! How to check if it is really down or its just your connection

lacisoft — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:43:32 +0000

As i’m writing this post Gmail is down. This is very annoying as both regular Gmail and the Google Apps version seems to be affected. I can’t check my email at all.

At first i thought it is only my internet connection playing some weird games. But its not. Gmail is really down. Twitter is full of gmail spam as a result of this breakdown. If you want to check if Gmail and other Google services have a service outage or its just a problem with your internet connection then head over to the Google Apps Status Dashboard and you will find out.

Yahoo just lost a friend

lacisoft — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:28:03 +0000

Yahoo Messenger is the IM software i use most often, not that i really like it but here everyone is using it. So if i want to talk to someone i have to use it.

Two days ago it asked me if i want it to automatically update itself. I said why not, lets make sure is up to date and i won’t have surprises with some potential security hole or bug in the older version.

But here is what happened. Instead of updating only my Yahoo Messenger application the updater without asking me anything installed Yahoo Toolbar both for Firefox and Internet Explorer. I don’t hate too many things but toolbars are among those things. And i was shocked that Yahoo does such lame things. Install their annoying toolbar under false pretext of updating my messenger app.

I can say this. The toolbars didn’t stayed enough on my computer to take their breath after the install. And Yahoo lost a friend.

If i ever had any sympathy for Yahoo and their business then with this move they wiped it out.

Wolfram Alpha is impressive. Very impressive

lacisoft — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:10:47 +0000

I’ve finally had some time and tested the recently launched and much hyped Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine. Make no mistake, this is not a classic search engine. The “computational knowledge engine” phrase really has meaning. If you’re expecting search results similar to those of Google’s then you’re in the wrong place.

But what Wolfram Apha does ? It searches in structured data and displays it in easily readable format, format that differs for different types of data. Be aware that it does not return results from other sites. It just returns answers to your questions formatting it so you can easily read it.

And with over 50000 algorithms and more then 10 trillion rows of data Wolfram Alpha can do a lots of things.

For example i searched for:

- a few place names (cities mainly) and it will return a nice little map with the location and other useful data: paris , comandau

- some geographic stuff: Danube (river), last earthquake in japan (it returns the list with earthquake that you can fine tune), next eclipse in germany (returns the date and infos about the next solar eclipse visible in germany)

- some chemistry: ethane (returns: formula, representation and everything from boiling point to critical pressure)

- some mathematics: pentahedra (returns graphic representation, formulas and much more), volume of a sphere (returns formula for volume)

- some stock exchange information: google (returns stock evolution, prices and more)

- some names: john, maria (returns evolution of name, number of people estimated to be named with them and more)

My conclusion is that Wolfram Alpha is not a Google competitor as many claim it. In fact you can even find links to Google satellite images in the information boxes for place names. This suggest that Wolfram Alpha doesn’t want to compete with Google and Google may appreciate this favor, returning it in some way.

Wolfram Alpha is a fact verifier and it will give you just raw facts, no opinions, no comments. In this way it may have and i believe it will have much more success then last years so called Google killer that just was forgotten (Cuil)

Google Trends forgets about Romania

lacisoft — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:46:53 +0000

Romania is a country in Central Europe with a population of 20 million people. Not many people from other parts of the world know where is it exactly. But its on the map and its a country. The country I live in. Not according to Google Trends. When checking today for something on Google Trends i wanted to see how that search term evolved in Romania. But big surprise. Romania is not in the list of countries provided by Google in the filter located in the right top corner. There are many other countries with almost insignificant population and some exotic island not even i (with a degree in geography) heard about until today. That is Bouvet Island. Shame on me, but i did not hear about it. And it seems that its not even a country! Its a dependent area of Norway and has 0 (zero) population. But Google wants to give us search term data for that country but not for Romania with 20 million people in it.

Nice work Google! Hire some geography teacher would ya!

Here is the screen-shot

Yahoo closes Geocities this year

lacisoft — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 05:22:39 +0000

I learned that Yahoo plans to shut down Geocities later this year. This is a sad news. Geocities was the place were i hosted my first website back in the year 2000. At that time Geocities was one of the few free choices to host a website and it was a pioneer on the modern web.

Blogs didn’t exist then so people made websites using all kind of editors, everything from Notepad to Microsoft Word. You could find websites on any subject, from collecting stamps to astronomy.

Sure the Geocities offering today is behind many similar services, but shutting it down completely seems a rather radical gesture from Yahoo. Today i no longer use Geocities, but somehow i feel attached to that service and i’m convinced that it is possible to improve it and make it better and more profitable. But i’m not Yahoo’s CEO.

If you ask me to name 3 websites that somehow has influenced my life Geocities would be among those 3.

R. I. P. Geocities