Happy birthday to Google whom celebrate there 13th birthday today.
googles 13th birthday
I was going to list all of Google’s products but then I said to myself if you don’t know them you are truly living under a very large rock 
So happy birthday to Google, may you create many more products in the foreseeable future.
I was accessing my web site today and down in the status bar at the bottom of Firefox I saw i1.ytimg.com and I was wondering what it was, from what I can tell it is a cache that stores a static thumb nail of you tube videos and other cached items, hence its name “yt” is for youtube and “img” I would assume is for image.
I checked my main page which contains different posts and a few of them had youtube videos and to my surprise one of the videos didn’t have a thumbnail so I refreshed the page and now it displays correctly and the status bar no longer shows i1.ytimg.com
There seems to be a few sub domains like i1, i2, i3, i4, etc.
From The web site traffic spy “The i1.ytimg.com Server is powered by video_thumbnail_server webserver software” just what I thought.
There is also the s.ytimg.com which seems to be something different altogether, there is some information here and here relating to that one, seems to be related with flash and your web camera and microphone, you can adjust the settings here for all web sites and from what I can tell all browsers.
Most people think that Google’s search is only a search tool for finding web sites, images etc, but you can find a lot more with the search engine than just web sites.
Some of my favorite ones are:
Type in weather and then the town or city name and below it will show the weather.
google-weather
Next to find out the sunset time type sunset followed by the location.
google-sunset
Also works for the sunrise, type sunrise and the location for the sunrise timse.
google-sunrise
Also works for maths, 10 / 10 for example is 1.
google-calculator-1
500*10 is 5000
google-calculator-2
Ask it hours in a year and it will tell you.
google-hours-in-a-year
My favorite is the time followed by the location.
google-time-canberra
Type in define: followed by and word you like including Abbreviations, Jargons and even things like LOL
I typed in define:love and this is what I got, works well for names as well.
google-define-love
Google can also convert speed and temperature
google-distance-conversion
Weight measurements like kilos in stone
google-kilos-in-stone
Cooking measurements like
google-cooking-measurements
You get the idea, there a hundreds of others that can be entered.
Go to Google and have some fun.
I went to my gmail account this morning and this new feature or screen appeared.
google-buzz
I will try it’s features and see how it all goes, looks like it has all ready added my Flickr, RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter, this could get messy actually Buzz comes up on my Google profile.
Seems to be similar to friend feed, not what I really need in gmail, seems to me that it should have been integrated into Google Wave instead of gmail.
Jennifer Leggio on the zdnet blog has some good things to say about it.
I shall check it out more but I will more than likely disable it (if you can)