Mahalo and Thank You to Google
Anna and I drove down to Columbia to see Jon and Stepanie’s new baby and are staying at their house for the night. Columbia is much hotter than Asheville still… just in case you were wondering.
It is nice to see the city finished the renovation of Main Street, and it looks charming. Jon says they’ve also completed the grueling 5 Points construction project and I’ll be checking that out in the morning.
Mia is beautiful. Can’t wait to see her and Baby Harrelson grow up together. I’ll have pics and video up tomorrow when we get back to Asheville.
The world they will grow up into just got a little (or a lot depending on your persuasion) more interesting for us geeks based on two developments that came about while Anna and I were traveling.
First, Jason Calacanis launched his guided search engine Mahalo (in very very alpha). Mahalo means “thank you” in Hawaiian. Here’s the official description…
Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.
The guides are attempting to hand write the top 10,000 search terms by around the end of the year and then exponential growth. Should be interesting to see if Mahalo, or this concept of search, can compete with Google. I think there’s something to a more nuanced “search” feature, and network science tells us that people do value the hubs of authority that might develop around the cult of contributors here. Will be interesting to watch.
Secondly… speaking of thank you’s and Google, Google released Google Gears today. This is the one thing I’ve been waiting for from Google since I became hooked on GMail in 2004. Basically, Gears is a Firefox plugin in Mac or Linux, or a full fledged .exe program in Windows, that allows you to take web applications offline.
Their first test case is the Google Reader, which is their popular feed reader. So, now you can read your feeds offline if you’re on a plane or in the middle of South Carolina with no wifi or EVDO service. Excellent.
Now that I use Google for email, documents (Google Docs and Spreadsheets) and feed reading, I am beyond excited to see this being developed and rolled out. The ability to get to my GMail account on my laptop while being offline will be a very happy day indeed.
posted: 07 May 30
under: Family, Google, Google Docs, Mahalo