Fran's Blog

Well, a few months ago I started using Chrome as my default browser, and I’m still with it. I even switched the little lady to it, with a fantastic Cath Kidston theme (how easy it was to sell it in when it looked pretty).

Anyway, Chrome is brilliant, but it feels wrong. I am now fully tied into Google. Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Maps. Now my browser is Google. So I decided to switch my default search engine to Bing because you can’t knock anything till you try it.

It’s strange to see Microsoft as the new underdog as Google dominate the search market, and what I like about underdogs is the passion to innovate, to really knock the competition. And Bing has that (if you get time, watch this talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/766 about the innovations happening at Bing Maps).

I really like Bing. The results are pretty decent and getting better (it’s only a baby still compared to Google). I love the perpetual results in images (keep scrolling and it will load more pages of results) and the preview in the video section. I also love the image on the front page with some facts each day (possibly borrowed from the old Ask site with some improvements).

The maps are really good with a birds eye view function which make the maps viewable diagonally, it isn’t quite StreetView, but a nice touch. Maps are also rotatable.

Overall, pretty nice and some good innovation happening, but whether it gains popularity over Google with the normal user who uses the term “Go and Google it” will be interesting, if Google can do it with a browser, maybe Microsoft can do it with Bing.

I saw this video on College Humour the other day and had to post it. I did wonder what the conversation was like in the Streetview car.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1922981

Today Gmail went down. It’s hit the news again (tech news that is). On Pocket Lint they had a short article on the outage. It attracted a comment from a person saying “I also love gmail but I’m a bit worried about the fact that it’s still in beta!”.

I’ve seen this kind of quote quite a lot. And it’s an acceptable thing to say, it is in beta. However, Google have changed the meaning of the word Beta. Back in the day with traditional software development, an application would go through Alpha, Beta, Release Candidates then final or something similar (it still does, and will for years to come). Alpha and beta would be for testers and those who dared to install and potentially destroy their machines.