Wednesday 30 January 2008

Rolling in my Y! $$$$

Its the day we've all been waiting for here at the big G (and most of the Silicon Valley world) the day the Borg decided to shed some much needed pounds and axe almost a tenth of the collective. Its a triple bonus for me. I bet Larry a ride in his helicopter that they'd lay off more than 5% of their workforce, then yesterday I picked up a crap load of Y! stock at knock-down price and now I get to throw rotten tomatoes at all the unemployed Yosers! who'll no doubt be knocking on my door, begging for forgiveness.

What really makes me laugh is the futility of it all. Yahoo! can't win. I own the online advertising market and its only a matter of time until Y! will have to pack up their own excuse of an advertising service and join mine (more cash for me). When they actually try and do something innovative, I just shit it right back at 'em (my hill shaded maps being a prime example). If anyone else does something vaguely interesting, I buy them up before Y! have even heard of them. You see where I'm going?

Despite my clear supremacy, the beardy hacktard brigade still seem to prefer Y!. No matter how many free "Summer of Code" stickers I give away at every hacktard freefest, they still love Yahoo!. Not for long. In the next instalment of my GSP, I've lured the neotards right into my lair. Come, sit on Uncle Ed's knee and tell me you secrets.

Monday 28 January 2008

Wokingham

I told the freetards weeks ago about this and still there's no map of Wokingham. They're going to lose 'ol Ed credibility nuggets at a rate of 1 a day, and the balance is now -20. Tomorrow: Slough.

Sunday 27 January 2008

If I could have it all back...

People don't often ask me to look in the rear view mirror, but as I glided down secret corridor X-5A on my segway into my command center deep beneath the streets of London at Google HQ I got a bit reminiscent. It could have all been so different. What if I didn't have that breakthrough with location back at Kingston? What if I hadn't patented it and sold it to OS? What if I hadn't had that fateful meeting with vanessa and taken a new path at the One True Company?

You can spend all day (and I often have, with a bottle of Jack) going over the possibilities. A lot of it's in the deep past but there are some things at Google, even now, that perhaps I would have done differently.

Take our ad-supported schools project. That started as a 20% time project from one of the new intake of 12-year-old PhD students - basically it makes Coca-Cola and Pepsi look like pussies. They can put logos on the odd textbook and gym bag but I ask you this - who's scanning all the textbooks? We'd take schools off the government book and make them fully free. We even had a scenrio where no ads are shown to the little darlings but just to the parents, or free schooling if they install a Google Digital Billboard on the front of the house. I thought Google logos on all wedding photos on picassa was a bit far, but there's scope there.

Then there was the ad-supported girlfriend project. Girlfriends cost money after all - dinners, presents... old Ed knows this. Of course a lot of people around here have no need for girlfriends but getting out the office now and again might be added to the Google Constitution soon so we need these backup plans. The whole thing set off a lot of red flags as you might imagine.

Anyway, back to the future.



I was interested to see on my other blog that some guys launched a balloon and then (of course, how else?) put all the results in my 3-D side-project, Google Earth. Reminded me that I'm on the second Virgin space plane to go up. I scored a ticket from Branson after winning the most bubbles contest in the hot-tub after the wedding. It's going to be amazing. It'll be so real. I've been practising by staring a lot at Google Earth while jumping to get that weightless feeling.

I'm really having the time of my life here at Google. It's a shame that none of you on the outside have a clue what goes on here (hint, the final chapters of The Dice Man is a good start) but I'll have a lot to say during my keynote at Where. Enough to flip the script and wipe the smiles off all the freetards, paleotards and borgs.

Written and submitted from the future (where we all live at Google) where none of you will ever understand anything, using a DeLorean.

Tuesday 15 January 2008

You think you can piss on my Picassa parade?

You might have heard therumours about my latest venture into the world of Mac applications. To my more loyal fans out there, it won't come as any surprise that I've been busy leading the development of a Mac version of my photo-management software, Picassa. After all, I have every copy of MacWorld ever printed stacked up next to my bed. I actually took a call from Steve J back some twelve months ago, when I first ditched the paleotards in search of more multi-coloured pastures. "Ed", said Jobsey, "we need your locative genuis in Cupertino. We'll give you free lunches, your own Prius and as much Apple merchandising as you can grab from the store in a 2 minute sweep. Apple needs you."

Dream on Jobsey, I'm a Google guy at heart. So meanwhile, on the other side of the Valley I've had my drones wip up a Mac version of Picassa. Its all been going swimmingly, until today, when the impossible happened. A leak - straight from the mouths of a BLG (Blue Level Googler). Incredible though it may seem, a chink has been found in our armour.

I run a tight ship and I'm damned if some Bluey is going to piss on my Picassa-parade. Within minutes, the G-Machine sprung into active. We flipped the button that sticks a whole load of "nasty content" into Duncan Riley's Google accounts - he's going to wish he'd managed his own mail server instead of using Google Apps on his domain. Right after that, we buzzed the Feds. No-one likes a spoil-sport and TechCrunch have been getting on my nerves recently - its my valley, Arrington. Get it or get out.

Back on the G-front, the source of leak was immediately identified (via the implant, of course). She's been extracted to a re-re-education camp and her ass has been busted back down to Green. I hope this will serve as a lesson to any trash hunting journalist scum-bags or loose lipped Googlers out there. I know where you live, I run the internet, you can't hide from me.

Saturday 12 January 2008

Nestoria / Freetard hookup

We own a company called nestoria and... whoa I'm getting ahead of myself. We don't own them in the traditional sense, but they're this firm that puts houses on my map service, Google Maps.

Ok back to ownership issues. They use my map tiles right. So one day soon we're going to flip the switch on adverts and there will be a flood of maccy-d logos on the maps. Now nestoria users might not like that so we have this option where they can pay me a protection fee if you will. After they pay the fee, good ol' Ed will make sure no naughty adverts get on the map. So, either way we get our dollars.

But the sweet thing is that every time someone downloads a tile... we get a whole lotta information. And information is power. And power is dollars mwahhh mwahhahahhaHAHA!

Every little tile comes back to us dripping with juicy data like when and where it was so we can see where people are browsing for property (and, um, adverts). We know what browser they're using, what town they're in. Then we cross reference it with other bits we have laying around and can find the color of their hair by the time we're done.

As if that wasn't enough, nestoria kindly make use of my Google Analytics service so we know what people are clicking on, what the monetization looks like.. the whole shebang.

This is probably all news to you but Larry had some of the nerds create Google Buy ages ago. See lots of sits do this, ok? So we know everything about every property site or kitchen utensil web reseller there is. All we do is say, Google Buy, given all this info just tell us what we should buy because baby, if that share price doesn't fly like Steve Jobs on meth in 1974 we're all out of jobs.

I can't tell you what GBuy is telling us right now (it's in maintenance after suggesting Microsoft again) but as you see we own nestoria whatever way you look at it.

Right, back to the story. These dudes think they can side-step Ed's Master Plan by using the feetard service openstreetmap. It may as well have been someone like the borg or the hippies at Yahoo, y'know, some maps with actual, er, MAPS in there. See this is the scoop! I found out that openstreetmap doesn't have maps of Truro!! When I retire, how's ol' Ed going to buy that holiday farm if he can't see any roads!!??

I bet the nestoria (what does that even mean anyway? At least my company means a big number) GBuy index is taking a dive right about now.

I really think these freetards are going to lose credibility unless they finish that map soon. I bet Vanessa three of her cats that the freetards would be a threat by 2008 so I have a lot riding on this. I told her it took OS two centuries to map a country and that was with Ed in charge for some of the time. Now with Web 2.0 everything is like, 1,000 times faster so the freetards should finish the world in about 3 weeks. With time for sleep.

But still no bloody Truro. If OS can lose credibility in 5 or 10 years, then the freetards should lose it in about a nanosecond using my 1,000x rule. I would add some data myself but it's a bit hard from the...

Sent via WiFi from the BA first class lounge at Google International Airport (we're still buying it from NASA)