google easter eggs list... secrets of search, reader, picasca and more

Edit II:
happy Halloween!
We have a new easter egg hidden in Google now for Halloween its at the bottom of the robots.txt hook here at

Bottom of Google's robots.txt (google changed it back this is a mirror) you can also see google's robots.txt change log

Disallow: /voice/media/
Disallow: /voice/shared/
Disallow: /app/updates

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/hostednews/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/ventures/sitemap_ventures.xml

Edit:
there wasn't much meat to the post so i thought id add some more easter eggs i was able to round up. programmers will leave little tricks or games hidden in the code. eventually through word of mouth these secret codes get released and become part of public knowledge. Google as a bunch of hidden secrets here are just a few...

Here are a bunch of different flavors of Google search

• Hacker Google
• Klingon Google
• Pirate Google
• Bork Google
• Elmer Google

Some neat things for the calculator to tell you

• Number of horns on a unicorn
• Once in a blue moon
• The answer to life, the universe, and everything

Google search for ascii art (ascii google logo)

Google search for recursion

Translating the word table from spanish to english

Google Special Searches (like the one for uncle sam)

Teddy Bears in Picasca

In Picasca: Just Press Ctrl + Shift + Y to see them appear!

Google Earth Flight Simulator:

To enter the flight simulator mode, press Ctrl + Alt + A ( + Option + A on the Mac).

here are the Google Earth Flight Simulator Shortcuts you will probably need them

so i subscribe to @mattcutts because im a nerd and i just saw his video here about how to get the google reader easter egg but its in a video so i thought id steal some thunder and make the post as text so here it is. while on reader the code is

up up down down left right left right b a

i made an animated gif if you dont get it (feel free to steal it)

it then makes this way cool changes like hearts for your like buttons and then does cool animations when you click them its kinda geeky fun. you also get the bonus of a reader ninja to watch over your rss items which will all read to contain 30 items a homage to the original contra cheat

if you unlike it breaks your heart

but if you do like it you get bunches of love :)
and a cool ninja

if anybody knows any other google easter eggs id love to add them to this list

Google wave | pleading to get one of those invites on sep 30th

edit:

you may be interested in the invites i have to wave

If you havent heard of google wave then watch this http://wave.google.com/ (i know its long but it is worth the time). wave is the end all of collaboration tools and will make taking notes at meetings and at school so much easier as well as cool games and other uses we haven't even thought of yet. it has realtime translation as well as awesome bots and controls that lets you extend the hell out of the thing and link it with almost anything you can think of, it tracks history of the wave and allows for multiple users to be editing the same page at the same time. SO i definatly signed up my apps domain as well as my email address to the forms i found to try and get invites

these are the three ways you can sign up to a google wave invite

here they are for you:

google wave dev invite
google wave app invite
wave signup for single users


and the unofficial ill help and give out some of my google wave invites is
http://googlewaveinvites.com/ it gets you connected with those that do(they wont be giving away invites to new users)

so this is my intro about what wave is and the second half (the one thats starting now) is me begging google to let me be part of those 100,000 users that will get accounts 2 days from now (september 30th). but what diffrent about me than the other people scrambling for accounts? i needed something to set me apart, so i started thinking about something i could build that would leverage the technology and be something that could increase awareness and promote the service (flattery should help get me in that group right? i hope :) well heres the ideas (leave comments let me know if you have others)

1) madlibs on wave

madlibs are little stories with missing nouns, verbs, other parts of speech that make little funny stories as you fill them in. so madlibs in a wave would allow everyone to be changing editing each others words until they have created the perfect madlib then like they did in the IO video (i did watch whole thing x2) it can remove all the comments / editing parts and become a new wave that is the completed story. This uses the group collabaration ideas as well as creating finished documents.

2) commentary on hulu

this idea is a little less developed but basically embed hulu shows into a page and have the wave at the bottom. the individual or group if they start at same time (still iffy on how to keep time synced but) you can comment on the show as your watching it and then using the replay functionality replay / share your commentary on the episode with the world. kinda like a social mystery science theater

3) collaborative embeddable lists for sites / blogs

pretty self explanatory

4) somehow have an entire blog post as a wave

i use blogger so i know i can embed into posts but i dont know how an embeded wave would behave in rss. i might be able to make some bot that syncs the post text to the wave but thats kinda not clean to me so i got to keep thinking

5) note sharing website

i want to make a website to make it easy to share notes with groups of people and organize them (this is how ill make it the rest of the way through college)


please let a wave invite fly into my gmail on the 30th id be a great beta guy (like i did for aviary) help report bugs / ideas and code as a developer open source to help make it a good tool for everyone. i have already run into customers who love the gallery embeddable widgets and i really like to be able to test it while taking notes in meetings.

some screen shots of wave:

some relevant links:
wave coming soon
wave developers blog
post about invites comming

Embed your Google profile into sites with this cool badge

so i love my google profile and want to be able to share it everywhere so ive added some updates to my script that drops the icons from the profile.

you can now embed a large badge on your site with one line of code (i got the idea from here but mines better :)

so to embed this: [326 x 122]


all you need is one line of code:

<script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=[username]&type=2"></script>

verifying blog at technorati | ctbxyj27ev

This post was originally me verifying my blog at technorati but i guess ill explain how i did it... basically i got an account went to verify blog and then made a post with the title and text the verification code below i gave them my RSS feed and Boom! i had a verified blog...

ctbxyj27ev

i found this thing to send a vote for your blog out to Technorati favorites
heres how you can get your own for your blog! [ be sure to click mine above lolz :) ]

google profile icon gadget | show off your social bookmarks

so I love Google and one of the cool things i have found now is Google profiles (if you haven't made one yet get on that). i wanted to be able to put my string of social bookmarks into a page. the explanation is below but heres the code to use the script along with some examples

you may also be interested in the other widget i made to embed a google profile badge

Carter Cole

<script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=[user]&width=[100]&limit=[5]"></script>

Matt Cutts <script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=mattcutts"></script>

Tim O'Reilly (limit = 5) <script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=timoreilly&limit=5><"/script>

Jeff Huber (width = 100) <script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=jhuber&width=100"></script>

i also did css classes on each element (you may need the css !important)

image class = "google-profile-img"

anchor class = "google-profile-link"

wrapper div = "google-profile-gadget"

i think one of the best features is the links and reader uses your profile links see?

i have all my profiles linked to from there but i wanted to be able to embed them into pages(like google reader did). rather than trying to fight and get the data from google i decided to go about the problem myself. First i thought i was going to have to do parsing and checking to find the right favorite icon but then i found that google had done my work for me(thanks). you can do this...

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=[domain]

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=wellsfargo.com

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=seomoz.com

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=pipes.yahoo.com

so then i made a asp page to spit out some js to write the icons...
there are 3 optional parameters

1. user=username (this is the last part of the profile url)
   http://www.google.com/profiles/Carter.Cole
   (if you dont set a user it uses mine)
   
2. limit=number (this sets the number of icons that the script should spit out) [default is 100]
3. width=number (this is used to make the icons show up in a block) [its the div width that holds the icons]
   

please let me know if you have any questions / comments / concerns id love to hear from you

googles picasa facial recognition works perfect

I just installed Picasa and I saw the post about facial recognition so i am testing it out. It works perfectly but all I want to know is how do I mash it with Facebook? Check this out

its detecting my face and is trained once I give it hints of the new angles of my face. I have always hated the repetitiveness of tagging and wanted to hook facial recognition into Facebook for awhile and ill I am asking Google is how I can do it with this code? Is it open source? Or can Google let me borrow the code so I can do it? It’s such an awesome technology and with all the data becoming open it’s so fun for me to be a developer right now. It’s obvious that the Picasa facial recognition is superior. I know dealing with the privacy of facial recognition on a social media site will be difficult but nothing worse than that town that kicked out the street view car right? Who would I even talk to at Google for that?I guess ill tweet at @mattcutts ill bet he can point me in the right direction. God I love web 2.0, social media,viral marketing,twitter world that we live in now woohoo

aviary online editing in the browser

I was a beta tester for this when it came out and now ive got a pro account. im pretty excited these are some things i made. all editing is done in the browser and allows collaboration and directives by the community enterprise.egg
melingdeath.egg

I love mashups | some cool stuff i did with yahoo pipes and cameroid

So i wanted to take some pictures with my built in webcam and i started to write my own in flash but then i thought to myself, self i bet theres already one that exists and you know what? i was right. check out http://cameroid.com/. heres the gallery im scraping using pipe



its got some pretty neat features like distort and other filters but it was missing one thing. a strong username / api for the system, not even a rss feed so i decided to make one. I had just found this crazy thing yahoo pipes
so i went to work to make a rss feed with my images. I made a pipe that just pulled the images for a single page. then i used a loop to have it run through the first 15 pages of the user gallery i set with the pipe. now the pipe sends out clean rss with my cameroid pictures in historical order perfect for me to plug into friend feed. awesome another social mashup under my belt

Monopoly City Streets - The online tycoon life for Carter Cole begins...

EDIT II: The game ends on dec 9!

read more about the game ending here

Edit:

ive been playing awhile now and building buildings takes too long its hard to make sweeping chnges... you should check out my post on tools for monopoly city streets

This game is way cool. It lets you play monopoly with the real world! ive just started playing and i didn't realize i had to buy houses to make rent so im going to have to try and remember to login so i can get my money. Go get an account, apparently there has been some cheating but the game is rest again so get in quickly :)

A review of Google Fast Flip | why i think news is failing

Today Google released its news reading tool Google Fast Flip. It's supposed to make online news faster to find and read, and get interesting articles quicker. This is the first time I have been disappointed with something Google has put out. The idea itself is good; make it easier to flip quickly through articles to find what we want (Google is all about helping the users and increasing accessibility) but news sources in general are failing, especially print with readers getting more and more of their information from online sources and blogs. It’s obvious that something has to change, I was really excited to see some names that they "partnered" with but once on the page I was confused. I started flipping through the articles and I had to click the button pretty quickly to see the loading message... good so far. Then I happen upon one I wanted to read but I quickly realized that all the articles are just rendered screenshots off the actual website, and it’s done with poor rendering engine that doesn't have all the features. First I find this little issue on BBC page but good coding on their part replaces the video with a picture.

but just a few pages later and I find another error this time on the cosmo girl article

There’s nothing on this entire page. Where’s the content? There are only 40 pages and it’s the first day for public release and there are broken articles. I try and click on the article and I can instantly see what’s going on, it’s all flash (if you don't support flash shouldn't you make sure the page isn't based on it?), I find other articles missing their advertisement missing (JavaScript doesn't render) what’s wrong? I don't get it. I know it’s a beta but this method for showing news will never work it’s just screen shots. You lose all the good parts of the internet (analytics for the most part) and the content still doesn't work. Heres what I thought it was going to do... Google would get a special raw story feed from newspapers and would show just the text and a few ads placed throughout the article preloading the stories as you flip through them. Even better it should load the text then if you stay on the page for a couple seconds then load the adverts. We use html to track all kinds of things the newspapers would get info on what stories catch user’s eyes and still get their ad revenue in. I don’t want to have to click an extra time to get to the real article. I’m a RSS user and I love Google reader it’s how I happen across this lab in the first place. I feel like it’s just not up to the standards of what Google normally puts out and doesn't really help the usability of the articles. I like to believe I’m a "power" Googler and have almost every service they offer and constantly are referring my customers to their apps but I really don't think this will work which brings me to my rant about online news. Are newspapers just not getting it? The internet is about making things easier and open. Running through my RSS today I found an article on the Wall Street Journal and i got this

I feel like its lying about what’s on the page. Now I give them credit for trying to monetize their online traffic its better than some of the other places that don't even want you linking to them (like the AP). But are you crazy? Links are traffic, trust and rank and that’s means money. Learn how to make money online and stop grasping for the old ways of publishing news. Penalize people for using / liking your content is just stupid. In search engine optimization we love people using and linking to use its called user generated content and it is often hard to get. They are driving you the traffic, you just need to learn how to make money off it not sue them for it. I don't know anything about the newspaper industry and I’m just giving my opinion but look at Hulu they have finally figured out how to distribute TV properly and I don't have to pay. I thought that would never happen, newspapers need to grow up and stop being like the RIAA, your industry is changing and you need to get with the times and stop biting the hand that feeds you.

I really thought I used too much voice in this post I want to keep an objective view on events and things I review here so please take the time to comment and let me know what you liked / hated.

Thank you for your time

---

relevant links:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/read-news-fast-with-google-fast-flip.html

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/ap-tells-google-and-other-news-aggregators-pay-or-face-lawsuits

http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php

virtual tarot cards | leveraging Scriptaculous and Prototype for web 2.0 style sites

So as i learn more ajax stuff and switch between jquery with theme roller and scriptaculous on prototype i happen to dabble in the tarot cards a little. I decided that i wanted to make a virtual tarot card dealer so i went about learning the definitions and positions of the most common spread the "Celtic Cross". This is what i came up with: Automatic Tarot Cards you can see the example below:

i did some stuff with the builder object so its easy to call and create the cards in any position. I use google awesome ajax api to host all my code for me (see page here) and load it on startup using 2 lines(way easy to implement) thanks again google. the api looks something like this

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script> 
<script> 
//your awesome google
  google.load("prototype", "1.6");
  google.load("scriptaculous", "1.8.2");
</script>

i use an array to keep track of all the words. if anyone wants more spreads or has better definitions of the cards or i have anything wrong please let me know

Carter Cole the Guru | Great link bait and viral marketing

We all love ourselves so when i saw this little flash ad that Cisco made i decided i would actually click on it this time. It connected to my webcam took my picture and made this awesome movie. they allow you to share on Facebook as well as Twitter and you can even embed it. This is free advertising and i wanted to make a point of how simple it can be make something everyone is going to want to share and then make it easy to do so. Retweet buttons as well as making sure your pages have the correct markup so Facebook can create a pretty link for you.

this is how my donation page looks when shared in Facebook

cool huh? it has a custom description and title different from what would normally be shared by Facebook.
i use 3 meta tags



so now you know how to add some support to share your page on Facebook and don't forget carter is a total web guru

thanks for the video Cisco! Great marketing

Carter Tomorrow Fund | linking Wells Fargo to #twitter

When i was young i created the Carter Tomorrow Fund and im happy to say its now back!

But i wanted to take it a step further so i found this way cool site http://tarpipe.com/
Tarpipe lets you fire off a bunch of stuff by connecting pipes in workflows. So i make a filter in gmail to forward to my Wells Fargo alerts to the tarpipe workflow email.

and now i get these nice alerts on my twitter http://twitter.com/CarterCole/status/3623058706 everytime i overdraft or my account drops below $20 so all my social networks can know and my friends can donate to keep me from paying overdraft fees

Someone even donated some! so help out and automate your banking alerts on twitter and give some to the fund