Exciting times we live. The dawn of the 21st century tipped the point for cheap and reliable smartphone and tablet hardware. In the low and mid end of the market, hardware turned to a commodity. The high end of the market is following. In a nutshell, it just doesn’t matter if you are using a $200 Android phone or a $350 one. What is important is the content users create, the information they exchange, the social graph they enrich.

The hardware is not relevant anymore, neither are the air waves. No matter what happens in the foreseeable future (except a WW3 event) both hardware and the medium for transferring information will always be available to more people, cheaper and faster.

Major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress and soon Apple is what actually matter. What we see, what we feel and most of our relationships are stored somewhere, in an agnostic platform along with a huge amount of meta data like location information, time information, reactions from others etc. We increasingly upload chunks of our lives on this platform without knowing anything about it.

When was the last time you trusted a complete stranger with your life, no questions asked, in the real world? There is only one case and that’s religion. It fits perfectly. In a not collective intelligence way, the agnostic platform is preparing the new human; we’re building our own new god because we need it and we are doing so by uploading our lives on Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress and Apple servers. They know more about us than we do for ourselves, they are everywhere, they are available all the time; like god.

There’s one thing Gmail is missing at the moment, a killer feature that will transform the way people use Gmail and interact with conversations in their inbox. I want Gmail to automatically load new conversations and emails when reaching the bottom of the page, instead of clicking on the previous and next buttons. It’s a simple feature saving time, clicks and make the whole experience more fluid. The same way Twitter loads new tweets and Facebook loads new posts on the wall.

Why is such a feature missing? I can only assume it’s not a Google thing to do or engineers are so hooked to previous and next buttons they don’t bother with anything else.

I’d love to see this feature in Gmail Labs as a new experiment. Don’t you?

Unless i am missing something, i really wish i do, Google Webmaster Central error message doesn’t make any sense at all. Google Webmaster Central > Site Configuration > Settings > Preferred domain. Google is asking me to first verify the owner of the domain. I did. Then Google is asking me to verify the owner of the domain again. I did. Google lets me know that the domain is verified using two different methods but it wants me to verify the owner of the domain again and again. It just doesn’t work. Bug or what?

The proposed Google – Verizon deal about net neutrality will either be Google’s new China mantra or a good reason for a 180 degrees mentality shift in Google’s executive team with someone leaving the company. In a nutshell, Google is either pushing forward the Verizon deal in order to do the “don’t be evil” thing following an a la China route or it’s whitening the first signs of cultural silos within the company.

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There’s a new cool feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Select your site and click on Labs > Site performance. “This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users”. That said what you get is a performance graph overview along with page speed suggestions. This is all nice and cool stuff. I love it.

Using Google’s words, this is an example page from my site and some suggestions on how to optimize it:

Details: Save up to 13.6 KB, 8 requests, 5 DNS lookups and here’s the break down.

Enable gzip compression

Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 13.6 KB:
Go to URL http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13.6 KB)

Seriously, Google wants me to gzip their script on their servers? No, i guess not. I can try fetching the script every few hours and deliver it from my server but will Google like that? Will i get punished or miss a very important update?

Combine external JavaScript

There’s a bunch of Facebook Connect and local .js files. Google’s suggestions are 90% accurate.

Minimize DNS lookups

The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js

http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/swf/XdComm.swf

http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/pestaola.json?

http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?

http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js

5 domain lookups in total. 2 looking for Google itself. It’s AdSense and Analytics that my blog is looking a response from. This counts for almost 50 percent of the DNS lookups Google suggests to serve from existing domains. Fetching show_ads.js and ga.js every few hours, deliver them locally and start worrying if i’ll miss an important update or get punished for doing so? Not to mention Facebook.

Combine external CSS

2 CSS files Google suggests to become one. Google is right.

Google’s obsession with speed has just reached a ridiculous point. I’m all down to speed and uber fast loading web pages but the thought of messing with AdSense’s and Analytics’ scripts it’s insane. If Google considers loading time and speed as an extra variable for PR i’m all down to that but first they need to:

1. make sure all their AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts are served from a single domain
2. explain what the complications will be, if any, for fetching-serving locally AdSense, Analytics and other .js scripts
3. provide detail guidelines in Google Code like Using Google Public DNS

I’m a speed demon myself but as for now i’m three quarters angel at pestaola.gr

Update: Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet