Dear Google,
Let me tell you why you are a winner in my book. Three letters, A-P-I. I think opening up your services through developer APIs is what gives Google an edge over your competitors. It is what makes Google more than just a web site. It makes Google a web service. Your latest efforts to make Google data more mashable is a good example of your continued efforts to support nice APIs.
Thank you for your efforts and keep up the good work.
Today I passed one of those big trailer hauling semis, and I started to wonder about what it might be carrying. Bread that I might buy at the grocery store? My next couch? Fertilizer for the farm down the road?
Then I started to think about how incredibly not aerodynamic the trailer is. Anyone who has participated in a pine wood derby knows that a big block on wheels isn’t the best way to go. If you’ve felt the wind come off the end or sides of one of these trucks as it drives by, then you have felt the energy that is lost because of the inefficient design of the big box trailer.
I suppose they are made that way because that is the most inexpensive way to make a trailer. But with diesel prices near $5 per gallon, maybe it’s time to re-think that.
If big-rig trucks were more aerodynamic, then they would get better gas mileage. If they get better gas mileage, then that reduces the cost of delivery for the products they are delivering. This, in turn, can keep consumer prices slightly lower. Lower prices helps the economy.
So much of our economy depends on the distribution of goods, that maybe it is time to think uniquely about making our means of distribution more affordable.
Dear Google Code,
A few months ago I suggested allowing projects hosted on Google code to display advertising in order to collect revenue and support their project. One of the problems I saw in this model was that it could encourage project forking just so individuals could collect advertising revenue.
While collecting advertising revenue might work with projects with just a single developer, full-community projects with multiple developers would make it difficult to decide how to divide up the money among many developers.
What I might suggest instead, is that projects hosted on Google Code can display advertising, but rather than collecting the revenue themselves, they can decide to donate the money a non-profit organization that supports open source software. Google can pre-approve and generate a list of these non-profits groups, such that the open source project can simply select their favorite organization to receive the profits.
This is a win for everyone. Google can increase (maybe only insignificantly) its advertising market share. The non-profit groups receive extra financing, allowing them to further open source software development. Developers don’t win anything directly other than satisfaction for helping a non-profit (although considering many open source developers write software purely for satisfaction, this is not a small bonus), but developers will benefit from the overall strengthening of the open-source community. Google can also win on its taxes by being able to write-off the financial donations to the non-profits.
Please, Google, consider Google Code advertising that can help provide financing for open-source non-profits.
What does it mean to be desperate? I think it involves ignoring the natural order and process of things.
Being desperate to get married involves short cutting some of the natural steps that normally come in the progression of a relationship in order to get married faster.
Dear Google Docs,
Recently you added PDF support to Google docs. This is such a great feature that people instantly want it third-party apps which connect to Google Docs through the Gdata API. Please add the ability to upload PDFs through the Gdata API. If that support is already there, perhaps you should update your list of supported document types. Thank you for your help, and I look forward to integrating this new feature into my third-party app.
Hillary Clinton recently ended her bid for the presidency. She has incurred over $20 million of debt from her campaign, the largest presidential campaign debt in history. I guess it’s a good thing that she is out–think of what she would have done had she managed more than just a campaign budget… like the national budget? Scary.