This is utterly ridiculous. It’s a screenshot with a standard Firefox browser, in the standard screen resolution (1280×800), on a Ubuntu machine with only the OS top panel showing (the bottom is hidden, to reproduce more or less the screen estate you’d have on a Mac).

Hell, I’ve even hidden the bookmark bar and status bar and – STILL – the content area is tall not more than half my screen. A power-user may still press F11 and F to put the browser AND Google Groups into full screen mode, and – STILL – the fixed top bar would not move, even a bit.

Google, seriously, which kind of usability testing you perform on your products ?

Google, seriously, what are you feeding your designers and UX experts with ?

Well, I deleted mine some time ago, but while trying out the new Youtube homepage the first thing I saw was this:

My circles are still saved, my real name is showing and the same is probably true for the people in my circles.

Yet another reminder: don’t believe the big guys, data deletion doesn’t exists on the Internet, no matter what. There’s no escape, you access the internet, you get sold.

It’s a while Google has ipv6 services (if you’re an ipv6 enabled user, you can access google search at ipv6.google.com for example).

The news here is that Google has sent private invites to beta test their Ipv6 services, to the users of SIXXS.net.

Dear Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx,

As you may know I work for Google in Zurich. Google has launched a project
called ‘Google over IPv6′, and I have configued the Google DNS servers to
accept queries also for SixXS users. I would like to share with you the
details, and invite you to also become a tester of Google’s IPv6 services!

This DNS Cache Service is available only to users of SixXS address space.
We are running (powerdns) recursor jobs on some of the PoPs. They allow
access to all IPv6 netblocks of SixXS, both tunnel space as well as routed
(subnet) delegations. [...]

The mail the goes on to give the coordinates to setup a Google’s DNS server as your DNS. This DNS server will automatically redirect you to the ipv6 version of their services.

This is a very conservative move, since they could just auto-redirect all ipv6 enabled users instead of only those who opted-in to their DNS server, but is neverthless a strong signal that the IP revolution is approaching and that Google is not going to play catch up.

Read more about Google over ipv6 here.

PS: the mail was sent on April 1st but this is definitely not an April fool !

Seems like Google is desperate about getting me to make new google friends. Of course the info bubble does not have a close button. Does not disappear even if I:

• click in the white space of the rest of the page
• refresh the page with F5.
• perform logout and login (yes, afterwards you’ll find it there).

Google reader is very nice but I really:

• don’t want any google friend
• don’t want to learn more
• just want to use my reader.

I find google getting less and less inspired respect of a bunch of years ago. That’s normal, as the tree grows you’re more likely to find apples gone bad. Just cut them.