There’s no other way to say it: when it come to street-level navigation, Microsoft’s Street Slide is a vast improvement over Google Maps. Microsoft needs to release this to the public pronto, period.

Am I the only one who feels like clicking up and down the street with Google Maps in the ’street view’ perspective is akin to a drunken stumble looking for an ATM? I’m limited to a series of shortsighted views, each of which regenerate individually. It’s clumsy, slow and ripe to be improved upon.

What if there were another sort of interim view that made it very easy to search several blocks quickly then flip right back into a view of a specific address or storefront?

Rather than lurching up and down virtual streets looking for something, Street Slide lets searchers navigate a whole street from a panorama, with signs and logos for businesses positioned below the view to facilitate the search. It’s intuitive and simple. The video below is amazing.

Microsoft has often been slow to move interesting, useful innovations out of the lab. It’s a shame to have the tech but not be smart or nimble enough on the business side to aggressively push things into the real world, a la Google’s constant and relentless ‘beta release’ model. I’m sure it’s really, really hard to release new tech, but It’s what businesses do, and if it’s prohibitively difficult for Microsoft then it has to be made easier. To often they do what Detroit does: show me concepts that pique my interest, then follow through much later, if at all. No doubt tooling up for release of an application is expensive, but it can’t compare to that for a new car model, and Microsoft is awash with money looking for good ideas.

Not only does Street Slide pose a real challenge to Google Maps and other online mapping applications, it would help redefine the company as a force for innovation in the minds of a public that has grown skeptical.

Here’s a comprehensive bookmark-worthy guide to JavaScript from none other than Google, covering both language rules and style rules.

Google has been testing a tool-with schoolchildren-that will enable anyone to produce Android apps very easily. The video below gives just a hint of what Google App Inventor is, but it looks interesting, probably more interesting from a GUI design perspective than for the fact that I’ll be able to download the work of non-programmers to my Android phone. I doubt it will put many developers out of work, but it’s an ambitious idea. What do you think?

If you produce content of any kind on the internet, chances are that visitors from Google are a relatively high percentage of your total visitors. For this reason it behooves you to be clear on how Google works, even if SEO isn’t your highest priority. A lot of the minutiae on the real inner workings of the most popular search engine are not publicly disclosed; they are also being tweaked constantly. Still, here’s an excellent graphic showing the process, from you creating a piece of content, to how it is indexed in Google, to a searcher doing query which returns a set of organic results (left side) and advertisements(right side and above the organic results). Remember: this will change, and it may not be entirely accurate even now.

Infographic by PPC Blog

As fast as Chrome is, the knock against it is still that is inferior to Firefox when it comes to the sheer number of extensions available for it. I don’t know how much longer we will have this reason to stick with Firefox to the exclusion of chrome (mind you plenty of people are running both anyway). At any rate Net.tutsplus has a very nice list of 20 Chrome extensions for developers, and I’ll admit there were several of which I had not yet heard.

Google has recently improved Webmaster tools. As I only stumbled across the changes myself I thought it might be useful to note them on Digital Media Minute. I don’t consider myself a ’stats junkie’ but I think a lot of people will find value in the detail that Google now gives you about just how well your site ranks in its index for the keywords that bring you visitors.

If you’re familiar with Webmaster tools you’ll know how you used to be able to see how much traffic you got from Google for a given keyword, relative to your other top keywords. This was expressed as a percentage of your overall search traffic, so you could discover that 4% of all visitors who arrived via Google came from people typing in the term “iPhone applications”. You would also find that longtail variants of the term like ‘cool iPhone apps’, etc. drew a percentage as well, and there was some value in knowing that Google accorded your site some authority to this general subject, of course. Also, I was often surprised what blog posts/queries drew visitors for me (though Analytics does a pretty good job of this in my opinion.) At any rate, knowing the importance of each keyword relative to other keywords on your site is nowhere near as interesting as knowing what Webmaster Tools will now tell you, which is how important a page or pages on your site are for a given search query, relative to the entire Google index, and other details too:

Most people probably realize that in a given month the SERP position of a site’s pages will vary, and that on a given day different Google data centers around the world might rank a page on your site in different positions. I was surprised that even on a given day (presumably due to geography) a page might be in position #2 for a term, all the way to the second page or beyond. Naturally in the course of a month placement for a page varies even more.

It’s fascinating stuff, even if–like me–you don’t obsess over SEO as you are doing posts and articles. If any Digital Media Minute readers have discovered more goodies in this Webmaster Tools redesign, or if you think I have misinterpreted anything in the new format, please let us know in the comments.

We have seen mobile apps that allow you to speak in one language and have the audio translated into another language. Google Goggles aims to give you a quick way to translate text using your phone’s camera.

You just draw a frame around words that you want to translate on that box of cereal in Barcelona, hit the shutter button, then if it is readable by your device you have the option to choose what language into which you need it translated. At the moment it can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and translate into ‘many more’ languages. Reading non-Latin characters in Chinese, Hindi and Arabic is coming ‘eventually’. Goggles v1.1 Is capable of other things as well, such as logo and product recognition, as well as doing visual searches via your phone’s photo library.

I have not tried it yet but I would love to. If you have any feedback you like to share with the Digital Media Minute readership, I’m sure we’d love to hear about it in the comments. By the way does anyone else think it’s cool that you can download android apps simply by scanning QR code? How far have we come from having to run down to ye olde electronics store to buy a CD in a box and install it via a physical drive?

I just had to check my calendar to see if it was April 1st again. Google has spent real money to invest in a company called Recorded Future, whose technology ‘extracts time and event information from the Web’. That seems reasonable, but wait, as they say, there’s more.

By ascribing ‘momentum value’ to events and entities, then constantly updating the data, they claim that they can predict the future. Well so can I, but they say their predictions are actually accurate. I would never say that.

So it wouldn’t be reverse engineering, I guess it would be a kind of forward engineering of the future, or the “predicted future”, as they refer to it. I suppose that if you assume that there is such a thing, having a handle on it with ‘data analytics’ doesn’t seem like such a big leap.

Still, as anyone who has ever bet on the wrong horse will tell you, it’s an intriguing idea. As the company’s site reminds us:

“What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”

This may also be true, but I’m not sure I’d throw money at a company that claims to specialize in predictions of the future when they use two tenses in the same sentence.

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.