Tag: Google

Second Life Bits 2018 w/41

SL Universe is Gone – Sort of… but gone. Actually, the SLUniverse forum redirects you to the Virtualverse site as of October 10. You’ll have to open a new account to use the new site. This is the pages showing when an SLUniverse URL is entered.

SLUniverse Gone – 10/2018

Viewer Blocked – There is an Android viewer named IM to Second Life. As of last Friday, the Lindens have denied that viewer access to Second Life™. Seems there were privacy and security issues. Serious enough ones to cause the Lindens to act.

See: Android Viewer “IM to Secondlife” Blocked from Second Life.

Second Life Halloween – Premium members get a new gift this month. See New Premium Gift and the Return of the Haunted Halloween Tour. The announcement also points you to scary places in SL. Continue reading Second Life Bits 2018 w/41

360 Video – Google’s Take

Google and their YouTube are moving toward 360 video. The site Voices of VR Podcast has an interview with Google reps. See the article: YouTube VR Wants to Find the Next Billion Dollar Genre That Hasn’t Been Created Yet.

This video is from the New York Times, taken in Falluja, Iraq August 2016. It is a 360 video. You can drag the view around as it plays. I think it works amazingly well.

For viewing on my 2D screen it is a bit of a pain. I can’t always tell what the point of the clip is and have to pan around to see what it might be. I suppose in VR with directional sound it would be more… useful? Enjoyable? I think as each scene fades in from black that a direction needs to be set so one is looking at the subject of the clip.

Google Forms and WordPress

From time to time I’ve wanted to collect information from readers. I have adopted and discarded various polling plugins. But, they keep changing and being a pain. So, seeing this come through my mail I thought I better take a look.

How to Add Google Forms to Your WordPress Website

Elegant Themes has a tutorial out explaining how to add a Google Form to your blog. They do a good job. The result is pretty much point-click then post a block of text into your post. Easy.

They go on to explain how to use the resulting data collection.

For complex data collection I think this is a good solution. If you want to collect information from users check this out.

Gmail Clean Up

If you use Gmail as I do, you soon find out that it lacks many of the tools in advanced email applications like Outlook. What you may not know is Gmail has an amazing search feature. This search feature allows one to perform many of the tasks you may think are not possible.

Gmail Search Help
Gmail Search Help – Click for more…

I discovered the hidden features of Gmail Search when I decided to clean out some of 7,000+ emails sitting in my Nalates mailbox. Deleting the 50 or 100 emails displayed per page was looking to be rather tedious.  Continue reading Gmail Clean Up

Google+ Second Thoughts

Google+

Indigo Mertel has supplied me with links that are a counterpoint to the Tech Crunch article on Google+ Walking Dead. So, I was asking myself if Tech Crunch had blown it or not and I by piling on. So, this morning I started looking at various articles written about Google+ (G+) in recent days.

Forbes has an article out on both the Tech Crunch claims and what Google is saying. See: Is Google+ Really Walking Dead? The article dose not really answer the question its title asks. But, they too point out that G+ is failing to compete with Facebook, which seems to be general knowledge uncontested by Google.

The article does point out the value G+ has for those doing SEO work (Search Engine Optimization). Everyone wants placement in the research results. Of course Google’s challenge is in keeping people interested in buying their advertising. To do that they must keep people searching via Google. That means providing good results for your searches. G+ has significant advantages for those wanting search placement and for those trying to find things.  Continue reading Google+ Second Thoughts

Google+ Is Walking Dead

This is interesting, at least I found it so:  Google+ Is Walking Dead.

Vic Gundotra, the brains behind Google+, is leaving Google. This raises questions about Google+’s future. Add to that management’s decision to move staff working on Google+ to other teams, like Android. Rumor is something like 1,000 employees have been moved to other teams. Now that is a move.

Take away the brains and muscle (engineers) and it is a pretty good indication the product is being abandoned.

The word is Google’s goal is to have every Internet/Google user be a ‘signed in user’ via Google. It appears G+ wasn’t getting them there. Plus Facebook has pretty well captured that market. The attempt to push G+ on everyone was apparently creating blow back. Have you tried a Nexus phone? The recommended way to move your contacts is to put them into your Google login and then download them to your phone.

Of course Google would never read your email or addresses. Nor would the NSA…