Has Google Buzz had its 15 minutes of fame or what? I’m not going to explain how you can avoid showing the entire planet all of your contacts–there are a thousand other sites where you can find that info–but I did find this list of undocumented little tips for Google Buzz interesting: Post from SMS? Buzz-it widget? Geolocation for Buzz? Turning Buzz off? Nice list.

Google’s Thomas R. Stromberg created an easy way to find the speediest DNS servers that are available for your computer. Namebench runs its benchmark using web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets to give you your recommendation. You can then change your DNS settings to use Google’s Public DNS rather than that of your ISP. It is free and runns on Mac OS X, Windows, and UNIX, and has a simple to follow GUI.

Here’s the real significance of the Google Phone, the first iterations of which were given out to Google employees yesterday (12/11): since it is unlocked, it will be the first opportunity for the masses to make what used to be known as ‘telephone calls’ without using what used to be known as a ‘carrier’.

OK, people who spend time out of range of a wi-fi connection might have a need for a SIM card, but lots of urbanites don’t, and won’t. Yes, many, many people have phones, iPhone and otherwise, with which they make calls using VoIP over Wi-Fi. But it will be different when people are given the opportunity to have a fully functional phone without having to pay a carrier, on gadgets that do not include carrier involvement by default.

Regarding iPhone: This doesn’t force Apple to open up and offer Verizon as a carrier for iPhone. To keep up, Apple will have to, sooner now rather than later, come to grips with the idea that their customers won’t accept being tied to any carrier at all.

I’d contend that this will be the beginning of a large-scale migration away from carriers per se, and that within five years the idea of communicating by voice through anything other than the net will seem utterly foreign.

Update, from Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management at the the Official Google Mobile Blog:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

So, a mobile lab. Despite peoples’ insistence on calling it Google Phone, Google is choosing not to call this device a phone at all. And why should they, when VoIP calls will be only one of the many things that it does?

Has the case for device convergence into a do-everything box ever been stronger?

Chrome for Mac first impression? It is so fast that I didn’t even see the icon bounce in the dock! Maybe I can live without my Firefox extensions.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Twitter seems destined to be the inevitable winner in real-time search. Not so fast. Google now offers real-time search functionality, accessible through the ‘Show options’ link at the upper left corner of the results page. Just hit ‘Latest’ under the ‘Any time’ part of the column and watch commentary of the entire internet on whatever you have typed into the search field. Wow, talk about stream of consciousness.
In related news, Eric Schmidt thinks that only people who are doing something wrong have legitimate privacy concerns. Damn, I really want to like these Google guys too.

It seems hard to believe that Google Chrome will ever have the range and depth of extensions for the browser that Firefox has. On the other hand, it is Google, and they know that even with the performance and speed of Chrome, extensions will be a major point if they really want to achieve large-scale Chrome adoption. You can be *fairly* sure that they want that, and there is now an extension gallery set up for Chrome, along with documentation on creating extensions for developers.

As basic as images are to the Internet it’s no surprise that Google’s approach to image search, born back in 2001, continues to evolve. Good thing too because it was always pretty slow going, plodding through pages of images results that didn’t really have what you wanted. Recently they added a link to “similar images” beneath some image results which will take you to an entire page of photos of the same place or subject. It’s better, but only incrementally so.

Today Google Labs launched Google Image Swirl, which uses new technology to gather images with common characteristics into groups, with an interesting interface that should greatly reduce the time it takes to find an image if you are looking for something specific. Now this is a leap.

The search will take you to a page of thumbnails as usual, except that you’ll see receding edges of photos underneath the top thumbnail. (The effect reminds me of Apple’s Time Machine interface.) Click on the thumbnail and you’ll be presented with a set or group of related photos or images. Interestingly, by clicking on peripheral images in the group, a whole new group of images will open up. Eventually clicking on an image will take you to the web page upon which the image resides, rather than drilling down further into new groups. I’ve probably made it sound really complicated, but it’s extremely intuitive and fast. It’s much, much faster this way to look through a lot of photos to find something good or exactly what you’re looking for.

Another smart feature is that at any time you can click on an earlier group or the results of your original image search. There is an echo of Google’s Wonder Wheel here. The technology is derived from Google Similar Images and Picassa face recognition that determines or discovers the relationships between all these images and sorts them into groups.

At the moment it only works for about 200,000 queries but it’s a fun taste of what’s to come. It’s experimental, you know the drill, but aside from the rather limited number of queries it can handle right now I found Google Image Swirl to be extremely usable and fairly comprehensive already.

Here’s a nice overview of Google’s new language, Go, by Scott Gilbertson over at Webmonkey. Includes a 1-hr video on Go developer Rob Pike.

From the Chromium blog Google announces that it has an early-stage research project for something they call SPDY (“speedy!”), the purpose of which might be to replace the HTTP protocol.

Techchrunch claims to have heard that Google’s Chrome OS (that would be OS, not Chrome browser) is close to launch.

Programming language improvements. Make the web faster. Build a better OS.

Ultimately Google’s biggest strength might not be any one particular offering, possibly not even its search engine. It has systematized methods to encourage its developers to aggressively innovate while not losing focus on improving the core, revenue-producing businesses. If an enterprise involves itself in as many frontiers as Google does, it does not have to find success in everything that it tries (and it does not). In an environment changing as fast as the internet is today, failure lies in not extending yourself. Try everything, because no one can know where it’s all going.

For years, some naysayers in the investment community disparaged Google for being a one trick pony revenue-wise. Between acquisitions like YouTube, which is now making a profit, and a culture of tech disruption the likes of which can be found nowhere else on the planet including Apple, Google wins by keeping everybody else on their toes. Note how often new Google offerings are not incremental improvements, but instead meta re-imaginings of the current techscape. What comes after HTTP?

With enormous companies the danger is rarely trying something new and failing at it. The danger is not staying ambitious enough. By segmenting its collective efforts so that individuals or small groups are also allowed to pursue interests about which they are passionate, Google may have hit upon a way to weave vibrant small-scale ambition into its enormity.

OK so I was playing around with Google toolbar preferences and realized that there is a much easier way to access lot of Google functionality that I use very regularly, without necessarily having to have Gmail open all the time so that I could hit the links in the upper left corner, or much worse, the ‘more’ pulldown. (Hey, I knew it was possible, I was just busy earning a living and stuff like that.)

Anyway, just in case I’m not the last person in the universe to have done this already:

Assuming you have the Google toolbar already installed, (remember the days before you could put Google toolbar on Firefox?) just go to ‘options’ under the little blue wrench icon, then hit the button tab, then add whatever you need. Google Documents, Maps, Picassa Web Album, Groups and Calendar were inexplicably not on for me by default.

This won’t change the catbox for me or anything, but make enough of these positive incremental changes and I should find myself saving some time, right? Especially as this is a great way to save some of my Google preferences across multiple computers, when I use other machines. (Assuming the toolbar is installed, and that the ‘Access your Google Toolbar Settings everywhere ‘ option is turned on.)

Dmitry Baranovskiy is not impressed. Via Sitepoint and Kevin Yank, we get this scathing review of Google Closure tools from the creator of the Raphaël and gRaphaël JavaScript libraries. His contention is that Closure, Google’s new javascript library, was written by Java developers who don’t really ‘get’ Javascript, and he gives us plenty of examples. Memory leaks, data-type confusion, API-design indictment, it’s all here.
Well, if you put the wrong people on a project you’ll get suboptimal results. To the extent that Baranovskiy arguments have merit, this looks like a failure within Google to really check what they are producing before they release. And that would be a big surprise.

If there’s one thing we expect from Google it’s a focus on performance. Heck, Google released its own browser, Google Chrome, primarily to take JavaScript performance to the next level!
Seeing code like this, one has to wonder if Google could have achieved the same thing by teaching its engineers to write better JavaScript code.