Google's Chrome Browser: First Impressions

Here are my first impressions of Google's new Chrome browser. In short, it's a shiny ball of fun which is also wonderfully useful.

The first thing that hit me was the cool, shiny-looking Chrome logo...a round ball made up of the distincting bright Google colors. I like the way they gave it a 3-D and realistic look.

Once the browser installed, I thought the translucent-looking borders were cool.

- Most visited sites: Then it told me it would create a "most visited" area: The "Most visited" area shows the websites that you use most often.

After using Google Chrome for a while, you will see your most visited sites whenever you open a new tab. You can learn more about this and other features on the Getting Started page.

Following the Getting Started link, you are prompted with "What makes Google Chrome different," including that it will give you suggestions for both search and web pages as you type in the address bar.

If you want more differences, you can click "view all features." Google famously keeps its information coming at you minimal, so you can choose what you want and only get more when you have the time.

- Easy, "Instant bookmarking."

"Want to bookmark a web page? Just click the star icon at the left edge of the address bar and you're done. Learn more."   I like that. I hate having to click something and then monkey with a drop-down menu as well to bookmark something. I just want to click once and be done with it.

- Cool comic book. A comic book available on the Chrome dashboard explains the story of Chrome and why it was developed the way it was, for today's more application-based web use. I love that they documented their story of such a modern, cutting-edge tool with one of today's most popular formats, the graphic novel or comic book.

I went to three sites at first -- 3 of my usual stomping grounds -- eBay, YouTube and AOL. Then, next time I fired up my Chrome browser, they were right there in neat little boxes, awaiting my click.

So far, for me using the browser, it's a great start. Google has created a browser which has taken into account the way we use the web today and given us many conveniences.

eBay and Google Checkout: What Next?

eBay Live is now over and the eBay-Google foofaraw also seems to have died down a bit...first Google planned the "Tea Party" (I"m still wondering what they would have done..thrown Monopoly money into the Charles River?), then canceled it after working things out w/ eBay, eBay pulls its ads from Google, a Google sympathizer is ushered out of the eBay Live gala, etc. 

(See Ina Steiner's blog post at http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2007/6/1182309976.html if you want more on that.)

I've been trying to decide what to make of the whole thing. Different people seem to have completely different takes on the thing: on the one hand, most of the eBay seller-type folks who left their thoughts on an AuctionBytes phone poll seem to be of the opinion eBay should allow Google Checkout, it's being a mean monopolist, etc. (I'm paraphrasing but that seems to be the gist of things).

As as an eBay seller and buyer, it would be nice to have multiple checkout options for people and myself. As an eBay shareholder, I  think I can understand eBay protecting their turf. As a Google shareholder as well, I appreciate that Google is an incredibly competitive and innovative company. Should they be so aggressive with Google Checkout, however, or should they take more of a Ho Chi Minh strategy, and be patient for the long term?

Remember what happened with PayPal? eBay had its own payment system, Billpoint, and resisted embracing PayPal until it became clear it had gained so much momentum and was what everyone wanted to use.

At the eBay DevCon, early eBay investor Bob Kagle said of PayPal that eventually they decided they should look at buying the company, but at
first $300 million, it was too expensive, then at $700 million, it was
too expensive..."finally at a billion and a half dollars, we realized
it was cheap." This got a laugh out of the crowd. 

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m06/i14/s03

Of course, this would not be a case of eBay buying Google Checkout. (At least I don't think it would).  But I wonder if Google Checkout becomes so popular and there are so many people clamoring for it, eBay will give in and accept it. But they may figure, why borrow trouble before then?

On the other hand, an analyst I recently met said "Checkout is doing everything possible to encroach on eBay's domain. Many people in the community state that if Google wanted to trounce eBay they would have opened up an auction site. Google sort of did with their Google Base."

"Again, this was a typical strategy of Google. Open up something under eBay's radar and state it is not in competion with eBay. Over time if it was successful, Google would have transformed it into an auction site. With all of the money eBay spent adertising with Google they could have purchased a very decent search engine."

He cites mamma.com as one example.

I hadn't thought about eBay buying or developing a search engine, but it's an interesting idea. I have, however, seen all the eBay ads that popped up all over the place, and with some pretty obscure word combinations, when doing Google searches, and wondered if eBay wasn't maybe overspending a bit with the ads.

But one would  hope they are monitoring the results of the ads and not spending where it was not effective.

Hmm..will eBay buy a search engine? Will Google checkout encroach more on PayPal's turf? And what about Google Base? Is that going to gain momentum?

As the Chinese say, may you live in interesting times.

How Google can Avoid YouTube Copyright Problems

There has been more in the news about media co.'s such as Viacom taking issue with unauthorized use of their videos on Google's YouTube. (See today's USA Today, "Google takes hits from YouTube's use of video clips, " 3B).

OK, I see how they have a problem with that. But what I don't get is why media co's aren't more enthusiastic about seeing YouTube as a new source of revenue. In my mind, Google just needs to figure out a way (this may be harder than it sounds, I know) to tag or have users designate who the copyright owner is for what video when it is uploaded. Or maybe the community does it, or YouTube employees do it, whatever.

Then, for whatever ads are run in, around, or before the video, YouTube/Google and the media owner (Viacom, GE/NBC, whoever) split the ad revenue 50-50, or  40-60,  or whatever they agree on as a split.

Viacom gets to make money off its  tv show clips such as Jon Stewart, the Colbert show, whatever (which, frankly, I don't think people were paying to download in droves before); Google makes money from providing a popular forum for the clips, and the public gets its fun daily fix of short-attention-span videos all on one convenient, homey place. What's not to like?

I don't think the public (if I may speak for the public) wants to see the Balkanization of their online videos, where they have to go to paramount.comedycentral.whatever.com and download three minutes of Jon Stewart, then hunt down Prince playing at the Super Bowl, blah blah blah yaddi yaddi yadda.

OK, so maybe setting up the administration of this would be a nightmare, but I think all the big brains at Google should be able to figure it out. And I hope the big media companies keep an open mind about this because it would be sad to see all this content get scattered will-nilly. (And hey...the copyright owners don't even have to do the tedious job of uploading their own content..someone does it for them!).

Thoughts? Think I'm way off or totally deluded? Feel free to post a comment here. :)