It’s The Google Countdown!

Here’s a nifty little Google Easter Egg on this fine Friday. If you go to the Google homepage and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no query entered, a countdown timer will appear below the buttons. As of right now it stands at 1765472, with each second ticking off the last number in that sequence.

Some quick math (with Google’s help) tells us that 1,765,472 seconds equals a little over 20 days. What happens in 20 days? It could be the end of the world, when Google becomes self-aware, or 2010. You decide.

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It’s Raining FAIL. Widespread AT&T Outages Reported In San Francisco.

Today started out like any other, which is to say, the AT&T connection on my cellphone was somewhat working, depending on where I was positioned in my apartment. It sucks, but things like this are a fact of life that AT&T customers have grown accustomed to in cities like San Francisco and New York. But this afternoon I started getting an abnormal number of messages from friends over email, IM, and Twitter because they apparently couldn’t text or call me. I tried to use my phone, and sure enough, no dice.
Calls are working sporadically, but the AT&T data network in San Francisco seems to be completely borked right now. There is obviously a lot of talk on Twitter about this right now. Everyone, it seems, has the same problem, “Could not activate cellular data network.” I should mention that it’s raining in San Fracisco today, so perhaps that’s to blame. I know how hard it is for AT&T to be reliable on a regular day, so rain is apparently completely out of the question.

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ZOMG The Google Phone Is “Like An iPhone On Beautifying Steroids”

We told you the Google phone was confirmed. And now some Googler’s seem to be confirming it, too. There is a lot of chatter on Twitter about Google employees with HTC-built unlocked Google Phones running Android 2.1. And the devices look to be coming out in January.
We noticed a Twitter message from a Google Program Manager, who writes “Stuck in mass of traffic leaving work post last all hands of 2009. ZOMG we had fireworks and we all got the new Google phone. It’s beautiful.”
Another guy, Jason Howell, says he had his hands on the device, which he says is made by HTC and is running Android 2.1: “The new Google Phone runs on HTC hardware. I saw it w/ Android 2.1. Homescreen has new visual enhancements like animated desktop wallpaper.”
“Supposedly, Google employees were given tons of these phones today. unlocked,” he adds.

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Google Suggest Becomes More Universal

Search is getting more visual. Today, Google is adding universal search elements to Google Suggest, the drop-down list of suggested keywords that appear under the search box as you type. Now you may find suggestion box filled with results from universal search, which may include weather, flight status, definitions, calculations, currency conversions, and more. Universal results tend to have a visual component, such as the sun-and-cloud icons that appear for weather-related searches or the clock for time-related searches.
Google says it is all about making search even faster.  It is also releasing a new extension for Chrome called Quick Scroll which helps you find the part of a web page that triggered a search result.  So when you do a search and then click through to a results page, a black box pops up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen which will take you exactly to the place on the page which most closely matches your search query.  Once again, this is designed to get you to the information you are looking for faster rather than just using the “find” function in your browser.

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Mint Study Shows That Holiday Shoppers Are Back In Action

Feel like this holiday season is a bit cheerier than last year’s? You’re not alone. According to some new data from personal finance site Mint (which was acquired by Intuit for $170 million earlier this year), the holiday season has been accompanied by a major bounce in consumer spending. After a dismal shopping season in 2008, many retailers specializing in everything from electronics to high-end clothing have seen big jumps in the last few months. In a post called ‘The Return of Retail: Holiday Spending 2009′, Mint has illustrated these trends in a number of attractive infographics (we’ve included a few below).

So where does this data come from? To your everyday consumer, Mint is great for a lot of things — it can help you manage your budget, find deals on credit cards, and plenty of other other good stuff. But Mint can also look at aggregate spending trends to see how the economy, and even individual retailers are doing.

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Want Everyone To See Your Credit Card Transactions? Of Course You Do. Meet Blippy.

As the Internet matures, slowly but surely everything we do in the real world is going social. But there’s a limit to how much information we can explicitly share on all the various services. A new service, Blippy, launching today in private beta, has an interesting way to take something you do everyday, buy things with your credit card, and automatically push those transactions online for others to see and interact with.
Yes, I know this is a controversial idea — that’s part of what makes it potentially a great one. Imagine being able to see everything your friends buy with a credit card as they do it. This not only tells you what kind of things they’re actually into (rather than someone just saying they like something), but also other information like how cheap they are, as well as where they actually are at a given time. There is actually a lot of data tied into the transactions we make, and Blippy takes that and makes it social.

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