You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world” using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid — toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling’s hands, global trends — life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates — become clear, intuitive and even playful.

You can see the Trendalyzer application running here. Thanks Patrick for the link!

But can you export these shared items to a file? Google Reader does not allow you to do that from the interface, but you can use the URL below to do that. Just replace {USER_ID_HERE} by the ID of your user ID (it might require your Google authentication), and you’ll get the last 10’000 items that you shared in the form of a long Atom XML file, that you can download and store.

[source:php] http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/{USER_ID_HERE}/state/com.google/broadcast?r=n&n=10000 [/source]

Update, 2009-11-06: The URL has changed (thanks to Jordan Peacock for the heads-up!); try this URL instead now:

[source:php] http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F{USER_ID_HERE}%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast?r=n&n=100000 [/source]

Update, 2009-11-06: Check out this project on Github, which has a set of scripts to help you download your shared items to HTML pages in your own computer for later reference.

I was an avid everyday AltaVista user; I found it quite useful since 1996 (when I started browsing using Netscape at the University of Geneva) and I was frankly happy with it; I was not looking for another search engine. All the others I had used were not as good, so I kept using AltaVista for years. I knew how to cope with the poor result sorting, and I would usually find what I was looking for, typically as a link buried in page 4 or 5 of the search results screen. It was like that, it took time, and more often than not, I did not find what I wanted.

However, one day I saw a colleague at work looking for something at a new search engine, called “Google“. I asked her the URL, typed it on my browser, and started to use it. I haven’t stopped since. Google was (and is) amazing. It is rather unusual for me to have to go to page 2 or 3 of the search results: I usually find what I’m looking for, right in the first page. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is the sign that shows how smart the backend engine is (as well as the team that created it). Joel Spolsky was among the first to notice this at the time, I think.

I used Google just like that, for a couple of years, and in 2002 I discovered the Google Toolbar. That changed a lot of things in my day-to-day workflow: it seemed stupid, but having that search box in the browser made everything so much faster! I started to include it in every browser of every computer I used, either at home or at work. But then again, I was not using Google for anything else than search. I knew that they offered other services, but I wasn’t too much interested in looking at them. What I learnt to use was the Google search syntax; I found that using “site:” and “filetype:” in my queries were simple yet powerful ways to find what I was looking for.

The IPO in 2004 made the big news. Everyone started to talk again about the web, like when Yahoo! and Netscape went public, nearly 10 years earlier. The big NASDAQ boom seemed to be so far away, and so close at the same time.

Finally, in February 2005 I was invited to open a Gmail account. And I think that everything changed that day; Gmail was so advanced (and still is!). I’ve used Hotmail since July 1996 (I am sure to have signed up for one of the first Hotmail accounts), and I’ve also used Yahoo! Mail extensively; but Gmail was years light ahead of everything. At that time, AJAX was appearing as the new hot technology, and again, Joel saw Google’s advance in Google Suggest.

Nowadays, I’m at Google nearly all day long:

• I get informed on what happens elsewhere thanks to Google Reader, the greatest RSS reader I’ve ever seen;
• I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets extensively for my own documents, particularly when I have to cooperate with other people remotely on the same files;
• I use the latest version of the Google Toolbar in my Firefox browsers, with nearly all of the cool features turned on; for example:
• I open Word and Excel files using Google Docs & Spreadsheets;
• I make it handle “mailto:” links with Gmail;
• I added the Google Reader button, to see if new information is available;
• I keep an eye on my blog thanks to Google Analytics and the Google Webmaster Tools;
• I have a personalized Google News page, with some keywords that I follow closely every day;
• All of my bookmarks are now online, hosted in Google Bookmarks; this is the first time in more than 10 years that I have found a useful way to centralize all of my bookmarks and “favorites” in only one, single, accessible location (I do not use Google Browser Sync at all, though);
• My personal agenda is hosted in Google Calendar;
• I host a couple of programming projects in Google Code: DVDRental and JuicyCRM;
• I use Google Talk with some of my friends, particularly if they are connected simultaneously to Gmail (that integration is awesome);
• I use several of Google’s services for preparing towards my Master’s degree in IT:
• The most important, is definitely Google Notebook, together with Firefox Google Notebook Plugin: they both allow me to put together ideas and references for new papers, and then I can export all the links and references in Google Notebook to a new document in Google Docs & Spreadsheets…;
• I use Google Scholar a lot, to get links to PDF papers and reports;
• Google Groups, with an amazing mass of newsgroup postings, makes a really good reference, particularly for Computer Science subjects;
• My Search History helps finding links that “I knew I saw” sometime in the past, and you cannot retrieve otherwise;
• I host some photos in my Picasa account (though I prefer Flickr, actually);
• When using Windows XP comptuters, Google Desktop makes it easy to find information on the hard drive (but I do not use any “widgets”, I prefer to keep my desktop as clean as possible);
• I’ve even played a little with Google Pages… actually I’ve even written a blog entry about it.
• The other day I’ve discovered Google Base… so one of these days I’ll post something about it as well.   :)

Just to tell you, even in my job toilets I’ve put some of the Google Testing team “Testing on the Toilet” papers, with great success!

But Google’s advance goes beyond what eyes can see; one of the key concepts in their infrastructure seems to be “MapReduce“, a whole infrastructure that allows them to parallelize complex problems in small chunks, in many different programming languages, using their server cluster to do the tough jobs. Again, Joel has written a very interesting article about it. After having worked for Microsoft, Joel is able to see the differences between Google and his former employer, and his insight is really awsome.

I think that Google makes the web a useful tool. I nowadays spend more time in front of a browser (usually Firefox, or Camino on the Mac) than using any other application. I can access all of my stuff easily, fast, without problems. It looks like “the network is the computer”, after all. Sun was right… but Google delivered it through the web.

Here’s what you need:

• Word processing and Spreadsheet
• Diagramming

Lately more and more of my documents are going online. I must say that while I love Gliffy.com, I would like them to offer more export options, particularly to some other diagramming formats, such as Visio XML (as OmniGraffle does) or even dot.

But apart from that, it is a great tool! I think that this is what should have been possible to do with Java Applets, but was never possible to do. Flash appears to be a great development environment after all…

• Getting Real, the book by 37signals
• Google TechTalks; feed your brain

Happy learning!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7833143728685685343&hl=en

You can download it from here too. Don’t miss it!

And today I found Google Pages. Basically it does the same, but sooooooo much nicer and interactive and fast and coherent and AJAX and Web 2.0… Just go and play with it! You’ll love it.

• Subversion
• Password-protected;
• Over a secure HTTPS connection for committers;
• Also open to others to freely checkout using HTTP;
• Browsable online, using something similar to websvn.
• Issue tracking

Very neat! However, if I could make a wish, the only things that I would like to see there in the future are:

• A wiki;
• A project planner, similar to Trac.

I will upload there some of my own projects, for sure!

This is a test posting from what used to be Writely, the online word processing tool; it turns out that you can use it to publish in your blog, just using the API that is exposed by WordPress!