ok with failure

Cheers to Google for making it easier to grab a user’s GMail contacts with their brand spanking new (to us) Google Contacts API. No, there’s no OAuth support but this is an awesome start.

Got this today when I logged in to Google Reader…

Which means that Google is basically allowing your friends to see your shared items from Google Reader and vice versa. Great idea and definitely a useful feature, especially since Google lets you pick and choose who to share with.

Check out the Google blog for the official announcement.

Udi Manber posted on the official Google blog about the company’s foray into the authoritative content space currently occupied by the likes of Wikipedia and, umm, Squidoo (in case you happened past the title of this article). Googlers are currently calling these pages “knols” and hope that they will be penned by genuine people who intimately know a given topic. Not only will a “knol” be attached to a “name”, which would in turn make it a more serious source to reference since the main author’s reputation will be on the line, but they will also have wiki-like functionality. People will be able to submit questions, comments and edits to be included on the “knol” and even the author will be able to choose to display ads on the page (from which Google will take a cut). Hit the jump for the full picture of an example “knol”. Imagine all the spam ;)