In case you missed this among Holiday Week travels, FeedBurner’s premium service is now free. Cause at Google we don’t like revenue 😉

Some fun video of Larry Page taking a helicopter into Foo Camp this past weekend. Reminds me of a conversation I had with him a few years back after Larry choppered into an event i was attending. Paraphrasing:

Hunter: How do you know it’s safe?
Larry: My pilot uses the Magnum P.I. theme for his ringtone.

🙂

Paul Sloan writes a Business 2.0 cover story on direct navigation and the domain registration business (you know the folks who own large portfolios of domain names to show ads, build lead gen businesses or otherwise sell). I’ve talked with Paul in the past – he was one of the first legit journalists to cover this space.

My interest? Not because i own choice domains (although if you want to pry forcerank.com from my hands just make an offer :)), but rather I led this product area at google for a while and have been fascinated to see mainstream investors getting involved.

We launched Universal Search today which blends many of our indexes into a single results set. I need to spend some more time with it in order to really evaluate but it’s an awesome first step. Users don’t want to think about dozens of different places to start their search — they just want an answer.

Was glad to see that the most interesting quotations from Google’s shareholder meeting this week came not from our executives but from the audience.

A few gems:

“I would like to thank you for not splitting the stock because Wall Street would like that very much.”

One woman complained that Warren Buffett had only served her “one lousy taco,” at the annual meeting of his investment firm [but complemented Google on their hospitality].

A man held up a pocket knife that he had been unable to carry into Apple’s annual meeting in Cupertino Thursday morning. “They confiscated my pocket knife and checked it for me,” he said. “But you guys didn’t.”

Just started circulating another job spec for a Product Manager to lead our Video Syndication efforts at Google. Besides Google’s recruiting resources, i usually post to LinkedIn, alumni boards, etc.

Fascinating – a MSFT job post from 1984 on usenet. Choice excerpts:

“Since the development people report strictly to software engineers, who report directly to chairman/CEO Gates, we never do anything stupid because some manager/MBA/suit-type has power without knowledge. (When we do something stupid, its our own fault!) Likewise, there are no “politics”, just engineering.”

“Microwave ovens, refrigerators, free soda, etc. throughout the buildings” [wait, i thought Google invented giving away free soda :)]

I don’t have official commentary on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick (except maybe welcome to the family for my new colleagues), but instead a big congratulations to my friend Andy Ballard, a key guy from Hellman & Friedman (who stand to make big big bank on this deal).