Google Developer Day 2007 has ended! The Youtube Videos will be uploaded by tomorrow but anyway I have to make an exciting announcement (well, at least for me it's exciting ;-): ElPais.com has written an article about the Developer Day and chose MY picture to accompany the article (see picture in the post before this one).

Still live from the Developer Day in Madrid: It's not over yet but we are heading into the final phase. Right now we are watching a live videoconference from Mountain View and I guess everyone is hoping that at least one of the founders will show up. Ok ehm, we just got the update that it won't come that far. That's real live blogging ;-)

However, there will be a cocktail now and a DJ, so this might be fun too!

Here are also some posts about the event:

- Dirson (spanish)

- Enguillem! (catalan)

- nvivo (spanish)

Hey there, I am blogging live from the Google Developers Day in Madrid. This is an event for the developer community, held today at 10 different locations in the world for a total of about 5,000 programers ;-)

Check out the worldwide site includign a real cool mash-up with live photos and blog posts.

Also, have a look at our Spanish blog, where we will publish posts about the sessions later on. All sessions also will be taped and uploaded to Youtube, I don't have the link yet but I will add it as soon as I have.

Just read an interesting blog post about a Google critic -> click!

I agree very much w¡th the author of the post. A lot of people criticize Google, but too many have NO IDEA what they are talking about. Often, they are not to blame entirely because of limited availability of information, but sometimes, criticism is just purely "market-leader bashing" and completely unjustified.

A agree that one should keep an eye on any powerful company, but in my point of view Google has kicked off several revolutions that are nothing else than positive and I think that there are a lot more companies out there that are more worrying than Google is.

Being a user of the internet for about 14 years now, I would consider myself as an advanced user of this medium. However, I just tried to acquire a train ticket on the Trenitalia website and it took me about half an hour to get it done.

Trenitalia always had an awful site, that I knew, but as I went there today and saw the new, modern design I hoped that functionality had improved, too. Well, let's put it like that: I was wrong. I probably would even find it hard to explain how you can finally buy ticket over this site and I guess that a lot of more basic users or users with less need to buy one would fail in the process.

This experience is just part of something that I notice more and more recently. Registration or sign-up processes for products or services are often irrationally difficult and complicated. Is it still too early for good navigation, simple sign up, click and buy? I mean, it's a paradox, because making something easier should be simple, right?

I know that it is not as simple as it sounds because it happens to me at work as well; putting something as easy as possible or facilitating a fluid navigational flow is sometimes quite tricky. Still, some e-commerce site or service providers would do well to have a look at Amazon or ITunes and adopt some of their principles. Google Checkout also could help them a lot, I guess.

I'm amazed AND pissed off. It just needed a moment of lack of attention and this prehistoric Web 0.5 community sent an invitation email to all the contacts of my Gmail account! I seriously thought such sites don't exist anymore but apparently I was wrong. Tagged.com makes use of nearly all the big DON'Ts of the industry: blinking ads, pop-ups, spamming the users, etc.

But from the beginning: I am at work and get an invitation from Tagged. Curious as I am, I sign up and the site asks you if you want to check with your address book which of your friends are already in this community. Somehow I don't pay attention and accept to send an invitation to all the other contacts. Minutes later I get the first emails "Dude, this is kind of spammy", "A lot of advertising in there, don't you think", etc. I log in myself and see the most disastrous community I have seen in a long time.

So I take this opportunity to apologize to all the people who got an invitation. It was not on purpose. Next time you see me and greet me with the words "You've got Tagged" I invite you for a beer. I hope that's a deal.

I don't even want to link to them because that would be actually a favour to them, but I just warn you: Avoid this "service" by all means.

P.S.: One thing I like about them. You have the possibility to cancel your account, which I just did, and they actually ask for the reason why you are about to cancel your account. I wrote: "You tricked me to send an invitation to all my contacts. Your site includes pop-ups and blinky, sleazy ads. Dudes, we are not in the '90s anymore."

Here is one of the worst articles that I have recently read about Google's business model.

The message is practically that Google gets rich because it "uses" other peoples information, while the truth is rather that Google organizes the information so that it becomes more accessible and useful for internet users. It's pretty obvious that the vast majority of people actually WANT to get ranked well by Google's search engine (be it as an advertiser or in the organic results) and not the other way around. For some, a good ranking is their major revenue driver...

However, it's especially curious that Mrs. Bogatin quotes the people from Microsoft to stress her argument. A company that runs a search engine with the same business model and that would die for Google's market share.

Mrs. Bogatin should not have hung out so much with the Microsoft folks at Stern school. It did not reflect well on her journalistic skills.

Directly from the source...



Gmail Open Sign ups now worldwide ;-)

It's true!