Surely not? Yet I’m getting this error in Chrome…

IE doesn’t appear to have this problem.

Update 21:43. Ah, it’s come good. Momentary blip? Wonder how many others got the scary message.

Google Buzz went west; the lesser-known Google Jaiku is shutting-down in January. No surprise to hear another aborted Google social media product will go belly-up: Google Wave to go read-only from 31/1/2012, and being switched-off on 30/4/2012.

They must really be hoping that Google Plus stays the distance.

Usually the GMail spam filter is very good. I wonder what happened this morning.

No, I don’t recognise the sender, nor do I recognise any of the other people on the To list. Odd.

(Okay, not an actual filter outage, but certainly the most obvious spam I’ve seen the filter miss recently.)

A fascinating rant about why Google Plus isn’t working (as well as some interesting stuff about Amazon), from a Google insider.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.

The full rant.

Analysis from Ed Bott:

And there’s the problem with Google+ in a nutshell. It’s a clone of Facebook, built by engineers for people who think like engineers. I now realize what it was I couldn’t put my finger on: this service started out as a list of features. But it didn’t start out with a vision. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone articulate, from a customer’s point of view, why Google+ came into existence in the first place.

I think they’re both probably right… and it’s why I suspect Google Plus won’t get the critical mass to become the replacement for Facebook or Twitter anytime soon.

The Google blog has detailed a number of Google products being discontinued. Most of them I’ve never heard of (Aardvark?) or considered of doubtful use (Google Pack).

But the really disappointing one for me is the end of Google Desktop.

In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.

I really like the way Google Desktop can simultaneously search my local documents, emails in Thunderbird, and in GMail as well. I suppose I’d better learn more about Windows 7 Search — does it even offer the same capabilities?

Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.

I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.

But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.

What the…?

Justin Bieber out-Googles the Wikipedia entry on Twitter, the iPod Twitter client, and Twitter Australia?!

Interesting: Google Apps has stated they will support the last major version, and the second-last of web browsers.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3.

I suppose IE6 was around for so long that it’s easy to think of IE7 as being “new”. But in fact it’s five years old this year (official release October 2006), and was officially superseded two years ago.

Hopefully all those corporates who dragged their heels on IE6 can move a little faster off IE7.

Interesting piece by Ed Bott: Malware authors target Google Chrome (on Windows).

Sounds similar to these kinds of fake Windows anti-virus scans which you see around the place, and try to convince you to click and download an executable which will supposedly clean up your PC:

This type of thing reinforces the fact that no browser/platform is safe from malware, and that it’s important not to regularly run your account with Admin privileges on your PC.

Personally I reckon it wouldn’t hurt to have a setting in Windows (and other operating systems) that prevents running executables from any directory where the current (non-Admin user) has write-permissions, eg only letting them run programs that have been installed by an Administrator.

Does any OS offer something like that at the moment?

I love GMail, and this error probably seemed like a good idea when they coded it…

…but it’s just irritating.

Please trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m replying to something in the Trash. I don’t care if the sent copy isn’t saved… invariably it’s going to an email list which I have no interest in archiving for myself when it’s stored on Yahoo’s servers or whatever.

So I don’t need this error popping up unpredictably multiple times to interrupt me, when I’ve seen it hundreds of times before.

In fact despite the wording, I didn’t save the message. GMail auto-saved it for me.

And when I send the email, just to cap it off, I get this:

1. These shouldn’t even be Errors. They should be Warnings.

2. How about an option to turn these warnings off, once and for all?

A quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)

Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:

• Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
• Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready

No wonder people are heading into the cloud.

Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):

• Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
• Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds

Interesting.

Sometimes Gmail decides your session has expired, when you’re in the middle of writing an email.

If you’re lucky you might be able to copy the text from the draft out. If not, the most recently saved draft may or may not be up to date.

This is bad design. Why interrupt like this when you’re in the middle of something?

If you must have sessions that expire, than at least give the user a bit more time to actually finish what they’re doing — send and/or exit the draft — and then ask them to logon again.