Thursday, September 13, 2007

Google In The News

Google Founders’ Ultimate Perk: A NASA Runway
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/technology/13google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The famous founders seem to have acquired landing rights to a runway that NO other civilian planes can land at, and are only a few miles away from Google's headquarters. The articles says that NASA gets to run scientific missions on their planes, and thus the allowance. Hmmm, I want to see the results of those experiments.

In other Google news, it seems that some confidential Google plans to compete with FaceBook were leaked.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/video-leak-goog.html

They're allying some of their platform around the Google Reader. I haven't used the reader yet, but I may have to. And some interesting learnings at the bottom of the article:

  • Two thirds of all RSS feeds only have one subscriber
  • Google prioritizes more popular feeds polling every hour for updates, while the two thirds mentioned above are polled every 3 hours.
  • The Google Reader back-end stores a staggering 10 terebytes of data from 8 million feeds

And of course, there's the Moon Prize they announced. I was at the first prize, so I'll definitely try to be at this one, if someone enters.

2 comments:

Jake of All Trades said...

This part astounds me:

"Two thirds of all RSS feeds only have one subscriber."

SpaceMonkeyMojo said...

Hey there team. I'm back from cyberia.

Get it? Cyber? Siberia? I'm hilarious.

Anyway, heard through the grapevine that someone else is working on a "Facebook" killer other than Google. Wouldn't surprise me.

Many of the key people at "facebook" by the way used to work for the CIA. Not saying conspiracy, just saying...kinda makes me uncomfortable.

Anwyay. I'll be commenting more over the next couple of days as I catch up.