Do you use the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button over at Google search? Didn't think so, and Google knows this, so why not just take it off?

The 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button has been a mainstay at Google since it was released nearly eight years ago. Its main purpose, to connect users with the top search result with a simple click.

But not many people use it, and the company has no plans to get rid of it. Fearing a mass protest Google execs just want to leave it alone. Marissa Mayer echoed this fact saying that it is part of their heritage and what users really like about Google even though it's only used in 1% of searches.

Windows keeps the Start button, taskbar and system tray at the bottom of the display and a menubar in every window. Mac OS X keeps one main menubar at the top of the display, with a 'dock' of larger icons that take the place of the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the display. Linux, for the most part, seems to prefer the Windows UI, typically using a taskbar-like system with menubars again in every window, but through the power of Open Source, you can do just about anything you want to the Linux UI to make it feel more like home. Some people find one approach more useful, while others prefer a different side of the fence. While the debate surrounding one's OS preference isn't showing any signs of subsiding, we thought it might be useful to offer at least a little insight and theory into why some fundamentals of Mac OS X are designed so differently.

One of the basic principles that informs the Mac OS X menubar is something called Fitts' Law, which I first learned about from John Gruber of Daring Fireball in a post here. To keep things brief, however, I'll just quote a short introduction from the Wikipedia:

In ergonomics, Fitts' law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts' law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, for example, with a hand or finger and on computers, for example, with a mouse.

To summarize: Fitts' Law is about how far you have to travel to hit a target, and how easy that target is to hit. Apple implemented these concepts (and I'm sure plenty of others) when designing their menubar by pinning it to the very top of the display, not only from a hierarchal standpoint (you can always look to the very top left of your display to find out exactly which app you're in), but also from a 'make it easy as possible to hit this' perspective. You can simply fling your mouse 'up' and you're at the menubar; even if you click on the very top-most pixel above File, Edit or Help, you'll still hit that menu item and activate it. It's a seemingly minor detail, but one that can help quite a bit during one's daily computing.

This concept is also present in other major OS interfaces, such as the Windows Start button; fling your mouse 'down and left', click and you'll hit the One Button to Rule Them All. Mac OS X's Apple and Spotlight menus also function the same way: fling your mouse 'up and to the left', click in the furthest pixel up there and you'll activate the Apple menu; 'up and to the right', and you're in Spotlight.

If anything, the main point we want to get across is that there is typically a lot of theory that goes into the design of an OS and how users interact with it. We might not always agree with the approach taken by one camp or another, but at least people are thinking about this stuff, because even in 2007, computers still aren't that intuitive to some users who have yet to hop on board the digital train. The more thought, consistency and intuitiveness OS engineers design into our software, the easier it will be for everyone to come along for the ride, no matter what side of the car they're sitting on.

Google has updated the Google Talk Gadget with a few new features today including a Pop out feature, a button for websites, Firefox sidebar integration, and video and image displays. These significant enhancements add a lot to the way the web is heading with widgets, gadgets and keeping applications online and off the desktop. Keep in mind that these new features are only available for the Google Talk Gadget, and not the standalone desktop version.

The Google Talk gadget Pop out feature is similar to the Talk in Gmail feature. Click on the Pop out link, and a small new window will spawn where chats will take place.

Another feature is targeted at website owners and bloggers is integrating Google Talk into their own web locations. This is done by adding a line of code which produces a button on a website. When clicked, this button will produce a conversation in a pop up window.

But perhaps the coolest new feature is the ability to open up Google Talk right in the Firefox sidebar in a simple two step procedure! Oh ya, this is pretty wild, and saves a lot of time when chatting back and forth while working in browser windows, which of course is what Web 2.0 is all about.

1. Right click on this link "Google Talk Sidebar", and save it into your Bookmarks Toolbar.
2. Then open the Bookmarks menu bar from Firefox and select "Properties". In the menu, check the box that says "Load this bookmark in the sidebar".
3. When you open the bookmark, you will instantly load the Google Talk gadget in your sidebar.

Last but not least, we have some YouTube and Picasa Web integrations. Users can now send and watch YouTube and Picasa Web Album slideshows, as well as Flickr slideshows in Google Talk by simply pasting the links into your chat windows. Bye bye desktop applications.

If there was a category we could apply to things that spread faster than wildfire, the craziness that is Twitter would likely be the first example you could use for just such a category. One only needs to check our Twitter tag to find hacks like automatically twittering your blog posts, mapping out tweets and even putting Twitter on autopilot for you. But why stop there? New TwitThis buttons and bookmarklets are likely to take the web by an even bigger storm. As you might imagine, the button is ideal for placing on your website or blog, allowing readers to easily tweet (hopefully in a good way) about whatever you wrote. Fortunately, a full-on WordPress plugin is provided along with the raw code.

The bookmarklet, on the other hand, should make things a lot easier for the avid Twitter user who can't wait for website owners to adopt the button. Both tools make use of TinyURL (though in our opinion, urlTea has some cooler things going on) to ensure the link you're tweeting stays intact.
All of this is provided for free, as we can't find any donation links, and TwitThis even surprsingly offers a support email in case you have questions or ideas.

Google's been busy lately. First they give gTalk a much-needed update, and then they quietly announced that the Google Toolbar has been taken out of beta by introducing a new 'roll your own buttons' feature. Users can now right-click in the search field of any site and chose 'Generate Custom Search' to add it to their Toolbar. Even more advanced features can be had by checking out Google's guide here, while a 600+ button gallery is here.