Google's local servers

I don't know how this slipped by me, but it's finally appeared in my Google Alerts:

Stafford Masie of Google SA at a MyADSL conference in November 2007 [thanks ITWeb]

“We are going to establish a point of presence in this country, which means the international bandwidth problem is solved. There will be a big announcement in a month,” Masie said at the time.

Google do host a lot of bandwidth-intensive services, and having these served locally will help a lot with latency (for the cached stuff, of course) and cheaper bandwidth, especially for consumers.

Those local-only ADSL accounts are starting to look great. Telkom's partial-compliance with the ICASA rulings on local bandwidth will help too. Perhaps using Stefano's DSL split-routing setup will become more commonplace.

Of course, a month from November 2007 was December 2007 or, charitably, January 2008. Still no word though. Google - what news?

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Let's see, the more bandwidth-intensive Google services are:

• GMail
• Picasa and PicasaWeb and Image Search
  
• Docs (watch out Microsoft - your anti-piracy drive may backfire)
• Maps
• Google Video (and does this mean YouTube will be served locally too? What about Limelight?)
• Google Earth (mmmmmm)
• full list of all services
  

Publish your location live to the web / Google Earth

(from Ogle Earth)

GMap-Track does KML

Monday, July 23, 2007 (19:28 UTC)

If you're using GMap-Track to publish your location live to the web, here's a quick cool hack in anticipation of the release of the API. A GMap-Track URL can return KML instead of a Google Maps-based placemark, like so:

http://www.gmap-track.com/api?v=1.00&output=kml&method=location.get.user&getuser=ogleearth

Just be sure to first wrap that inside a network link, like so. Voila, now you can find out where your friends have been recently when you log onto Google Earth. (Thanks to GMap-Track's Cristian Streng for for the tip.)

A sort of real-life weblog...