I can't follow “Who to follow”

Twitter just added a new feature they called it “Who to follow”, a nice idea, Twitter finds you people who have the same fields of interest as you have. I liked that idea, I wrote in the past about LazyFeed I like the idea that applications suggest you what to read or follow according to your choices in the past. In Twitter's case, people I follow. But “Who to follow” has some problems:

• The list shrinks when you choose to follow some body, no new person is added, so the more you follow, the shorter you list becomes. 

• The same with the “Hide” button, every time you decide to hide so one, the list shrinks. 

• The list never changes, it's always the same people, so once I check it, I chose who to follow, and thats it. The “Who to follow” finished its job. A result of the past two problems, the shrinking of the list. 

• At least ten people in my list are not active, they “twitted” once or twice and the last “twit” was almost a year ago. For what reason should I follow them.

• Some of the people that were suggested to me, well how can I say it, I wouldn't follow in a million years. I have no intention to follow Microsoft's Twitter or MS Window's Twitter. Some of them just write in a language I don't speak, like Spanish or French.

One think I did like about Twitter's new idea is that it finds people from my community or speak the same language I do, very useful if English is not you first language, like me. Cool idea, but you can see it's only the begging, hopefully they'll fix it soon.       

The Fast Death of Google Wave

What started in a big noise ends quietly, Google just announced it's ending the developing of “Google Wave”. Less then a year ago Google announced it's newest development “Google Wave” this time the same as in the past, in the begging only people who got invitations could register hoping that it will increase the buzz around “Google Wave”, this time it didn't.

If you look back on Google's history you find not once that if failed to develop or market a new web application or some thing they bought like “Orkut”. The basic fact is that Google's most profitable application is it's search engine, they have some other applications which came out quite good, the first one is “Gmail” - one of the leading mail service almost from the day it became public. They also have their calender , their RSS reader and “Picasa” . It dosn't look like this is going to change in the near future.

The most interesting web application, that is being more and more commonly used is “Google Docs”, the web based office applications, a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool, lately they added a PDF reader and a drawing application. Until recently you could work off-line using “Google gears”, but since Firefox 3.5 came out it stopped working and Google didn't upgrade it. According to Google they took that option down to make “Google docs” work with HTML 5. I personally had been using it until then, but this days I can't use it any more cause I need to work off line some times. I hope they'll fix this soon.

Two more interesting tool are “Google trends” and “Google Insights for search” tool for discovering, analyzing and comparing trends in the web, I've used “Google Insights” to compare Google's applications to other web based applications, you can see the results.

Other Google applications which failed are there social networks like “Orkut” and “Buzz”, there notebook application “Google notebook”, “Google video” which they stoped working on when they bought “Youtube” and now “Google Wave” . I must say I've been using “Google notebook” all this time, and I hope that one day they will return working on it.

Those are only part of Google's products they have more then I can cover in one or two posts, here's a list of them. 

How The Internet Works