wooba.com - for your clicky finger

There’s been big talk of the Google Desktop Search (which is a decent little app, at least for it’s price of FREE), but the buzz lately has been on Google offering Instant Message (IM) services. Well, they sorta already have one. When they bought Picasa (a photo organizing and storing program), they also got Hello, which is an IM that is optimized to easily send pictures to your friends. The slick part is Hello instantly resizes your photos for sending over the Net and it can also upload photos and post them to your blog via BloggerBot. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about Hello and GoogleIM soon, it’s always nice to find a blog with the scoop before it hits the mainstream press.
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Hello is Picasa and Google’s little secret, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be. Picasa is a way of storing and indexing your photos. Hello is about interacting. Hello was created as a way to share those photos Picasa spent so much time indexing, but it does so much more. Do you want an instant messenger from Google? Well, Hello is an instant messenger, complete with buddy lists and bots and smilies and sounds. The difference is that Hello is optimized for sending photos. It can automatically resize a photo so it sends properly. You can jump back and forth from Hello to Picasa to send your photos and share your albums. But most strikingly to most of my readers, it is an instant messenger in a Google product, and its a good bet that as Google integrates Picasa better with the rest of its services, Hello will be its chat client, with full feature support for Gmail and Google Desktop. And if you are worried about security, Google claims it’s more secure than AOL Instant Messenger.

http://insidegoogle.blogspot.com/2004/10/hello-whats-this-its-googles-most.html

So it’s been about ten years since the first secure online transaction, but e-commerce sales still only count for about 1.7% of all consumer sales in the second quarter of 2004. It’s just odd, and I’m sure I’m WAY above the norm, but I’d say about 80% of the stuff I buy is done online. Newegg (although not always the lowest price) is a cult or something. I just searched for Newegg in my emails in the past few years, and there’s a ton of orders that I’ve made. I’m always impressed by their fairly cheap shipping (which comes to me in just 2 days here in Seattle) from their CA shipping centers.

The only things that I avoid for the most part are clothes and tools / home improvement stuff. Clothes because some things just don’t look right on the Net, and tools and stuff because I usually need it at that point, and shipping for heavy things are never worth it. It’s interesting to note that there’s still a lot of room to grow in the e-commerce field (even a rise to 10% would be five-fold, , looks like the stocks to buy are UPS/FedEx/Lowe’s/Home Depot, eh?
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“We haven’t even started yet; we’re really in ‘E-commerce 101,’” said Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer of Yahoo. “I think this is going to get really fun in the next 10 years.”

The panelists were enthusiastic on Friday about the prospects of increasing that amount closer to a double-digit figure, despite growing fears over identity theft, fraud, privacy invasion and online nuisances such as viruses, worms and spam that have taken root on the Web right along side online shopping.

News.com Link