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Regular Geek

Where programming, the internet and social media collide.

Is Google Me Really GMail 2.0?September 1

Google is trying to ensure that you never leave GMail. Besides GMail being a fantastic email service, Google has continuously added features to keep you engaged. We have chat in GMail and various widgets like Google Calendar to add functionality. We also recently saw a cool revamp of the Contacts application which really did need some help. So, it should come as no surprise that Google Voice is being integrated as well. Initially, this is not a full integration, it is an addition to the chat feature to allow for VOIP calls, but it will use Google Voice if you use it:

If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).

I know I wrote about the continuous Google Me rumors recently, and the VOIP integration seemed like a logical extension at the time.

Social features are starting to permeate all of Google’s products. Lots of products are getting mobile updat

Can You Be Too Old For Software Development?August 29

It has been a while since a good bitchmeme came about, so it is with great pleasure that I participate in this one. Actually, is it not with great pleasure as the issue hits close to home. The issue at hand is regarding age in the software development profession. This is important to me because I am 38 years old and have been in software development for about 16 years. Some people are saying that Silicon Valley has a bias towards younger people. TechCrunch has an interesting article that makes some very good points:

The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000?

Is Google Me The Merging Of GMail, Buzz and Orkut?August 25

Google launches new products and features constantly. Some of these products gain widespread adoption, like GMail, and others eventually whither and die, like Wave. In this age of the internet, the question is now whether Google expects some of these products to fail and is just releasing them to see what features people like.

As an example, look at Google Wave. Wave was extremely aggressive in what it was trying to do, reinventing email and collaboration. In hindsight, we can easily say that the change was too great for mainstream adoption, but there were a lot of people that love using Wave for collaboration. What if Wave was really just a market test of real-time technologies and collaboration? If that was the case, then Wave was hugely successful in testing real-time collaboration. They also received useful feedback on their “reinvention” of email and saw first-hand how resistant to change people can be.

Timing is also another important feature of these types of market tests. Google Buzz was released and had privacy issues around the same time that Facebook was having serious privacy issues. Buzz was not a reinvention of email, but it was a limited foray into changing your inbox. It looks just like any

Facebook Places Is Yet Another Facebook Search ApplicationAugust 20

So, the worst kept rumor in the valley was finally confirmed. Facebook now has a location offering called Places. However, this was not a simple check-in application announcement, it was much different. First, they announced partnerships with many of the major location-based applications:

We’re working with an initial set of partners including Gowalla, foursquare, Yelp and Booyah‘s InCrowd to enable users to share check-ins on Facebook.

Booyah has an application soon to be released already, and Gowalla is already talking about building on top of the Places platform. So, Facebook has started with some good third-party adoption. Assuming that these partners get access to the write API, integration will probably be swift.

However, having partners does not mean you don’t get to make fun of them. The funniest part of all t

Web & Scripting Programming Language Job Trends – August 2010August 18

At the beginning of this month, I compared the job trends for traditional programming languages like C++, Java and others. This post is one of the recurring programming job trends posts, where we look at web and scripting programming languages. Feel free to review the web programming job trends from February as well. You may have noticed that I have changed the title of this series to “Web & Scripting Programming Language Job Trends”. I think this more accurately reflects the list of languages, but it is still a crappy title. Let me know if you have a better description of these languages. Currently, the list includes Ruby, Rails, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Flex and Groovy. If you think I should be including another language, please let me know in the comments.

So, what do the trends from Indeed.com look like?