Honestly, I think this was just Lifehacker’s excuse to use the Double Rainbow song. Either way, the song is awesome and Google Instant is awesome. I certainly can’t wait til they make it native in Chrome.

Google Instant Shortcuts
Tab/Right arrow = selects the first suggestion
Up/Down arrow = selects a suggestion from the list
Right arrow while selecting a suggestion = I’m feeling lucky
Enter or Esc = ignore the suggestions and find the results for your query

According to recent patents filed, Google may be looking to use video annotations as a basis for gaming. The patent covers using annotations and urls to link to a video, or specific time in a video. Imagine watching a video and you are given annotations for the characters actions. You select one action and are taken to another video for that scene to play out. Add in some special affects, change live action to animation and you have yourself a game.

A video may have associated with it one or more annotations, which modify the appearance and/or behavior of a video as it was originally submitted to an online video hosting site. Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video. Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video. Selecting such annotations causes playback of the target video to begin at the associated time. Such annotations can be used to construct interactive games using videos, such as a game in which clicking on different portions of a video leads to different outcomes.

Of course there can be wide range of uses for this that is beyond my mortal understanding. We will have to wait and see what Google will do but I am curious…have others been using annotations in this manner?

Via Mashable and Bnet.

One thing I am always looking to improve upon is communication. One method to improve communication, is to improve the tools you use to communicate.

Imagine: You’re a build engineer, and you get a request to make a small configuration change to the build environment and to execute a development build. You create…better yet, watch the video below. It is a great example of how you could use Google Wave in an business environment.

Google today released Google Chrome Frame. It is a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer that does what Microsoft should have done years ago, support web standards. I am so excited by this that I will be seeing if my company can use this as I very much dislike supporting IE at work.

If you use IE, then please install this plug-in so you can see how the web really looks. Maybe it will fix what you see wrong with my site as I do not support IE at all for my blog.

Chrome Frame Download

Well, I can I say I am shocked at this news. Google has been known for having a majority of their services stamped with a Beta tag. Many have surmised that Google’s services can’t really be taken seriously, especially by businesses, if they are willing to claim their product is ready for an official release.