Lately i’ve been obsessed with the panoramic images created by Photosynth, or downloadable from Google Maps Streetview. (As below, via Jamie Thompson)

But for me– more interesting than capturing a panoramic image would be drawing a panoramic image and then playing it back in some kind of 360-degree renderer.

You’ll notice the file is named ‘idiot soccer’ – referring to the basic player AI.

and here’s a look at how HBO’s channel looked before Cosmic Panda –

and after –

For state of the art browsers — like Netscape Communicator.

I’ve never seen a big company move as quickly as Google has been lately.

Not all feedback has to do with problems & bugs found.  

It’s exciting to see Google+ address many of the challenges I faced with my team when relauching Passado (still need to write a blog post on that).  We developed a lot of ideas which are similar to what Google+ is doing with ‘Sparks’. I’d love to send some of those learnings on– maybe those ideas can still be put to good use, as Passado/Wasabi is now defunct.

My obligatory Google+ post.

There’s not a lot to say about Google+ as a product – other than that it’s just like Facebook, no more, no less.  And yet, as a Google product, that’s exactly what’s remarkable about it.

Google– who usually try to reinvent *everything* by shooting for the moon, but hitting themselves in the foot– has simply made a well-designed, easy and intuitive Facebook clone.

And this suggests that Google is finally maturing in its approach to product development.  That is to say– Google is realising that it is a utilities company, not an innovation company.

It has been a long-standing conflict for Google to come to terms with its inward sense of identity and its outward perception– and that its unconventional corporate culture doesn’t reflect the practical use of its applications.  Like a middle-aged man on a skateboard– how Google sees itself doesn’t always match up to how the rest of us see it.

You can’t blame them.  They’ve hired the best and brightest talent of the digital world.  Of course these guys want to push the boat out.

We don’t want innovation from Google. We want scale, reliability, ease of use.  We want web apps like search and mail to behave like always-on utilities.

So how do you behave like a utilities company? Just as you don’t want your energy company to start changing the voltage on your power outlets in a ‘beta test’ or your water company changing the scents and flavours of your tap water – we don’t want Google mucking around with the core services we depend on.

A utilities company adopts standards and pushes them out to its customers. And that’s exactly what Google has done with Google+.  Facebook has spent the last 7 (nearly 8) years refining and promoting the standard of social networking platforms.

Google can’t not have a social network.  It’s a hygiene factor for them at this point– you can’t have a service without social integration of some sort. So it was the right decision to not call upon their considerable brain-trust to ‘reinvent social networking’ – and just do what works.  The web savvy public already ‘speaks Facebook’ – so don’t invent a new language.

One thing Google does very well, however, is openness of data– and by acknowledging that Facebook’s social networking model is the fabric of the current online universe– they’ve exploded a giant ‘g’ shaped hole in Facebook’s social data monopoly.