Paul O'Flaherty

Google Buzz Reduces The Noise? My Irish Arse It Does!

I listened yesterday and started to believe the crap I heard about how Google Buzz was going to make my social circle more relevant, reduce the noise, filter out the crap and generally make right the wrongs of the universe.

Why then Google, have I woken up this morning with 1000+ new items in my Google Reader, which were shared by people I am following on Google Buzz?

Google Buzz = Less Noise?

This is a perfect example of what Sara was talking about in her post yesterday when discussing Googles need to have a singled shared address book or set of contacts across all their services. Google doesn’t get that sometimes you don’t want to follow the same people everywhere.

For example, I had (prior to Buzz) my Google Reader set up just the way I like it, but now, on top of the items form the 300+ blogs and news sources I check a day, I’ve got all the shares from many of the same people I am already subscribed to? What gives? I did not subscribe to their shares in Google Reader!

That’s like saying that because I subscribe to your blog, I have to get all your tweets as well!

Sorry Google, but this is a major fail – You’ve just increased the noise to signal ratio that I receive exponentially!

Has Google Gone A Step Too Far By Forcing Buzz On Users?

I know Google desperately want people to use Google Buzz, but as Steven Hodson pointed out, growth of the network will always be limited by the fact that you have to have a Gmail account in order to use the service.

Google Buzz is a clever trap, but a trap all the same. It is the hunk of cheese to get more people using Gmail which in turn locks users into Google even more.

Google, in it’s attempts to ensure adoption have taken the kind of  step that hasn’t been seen since the Microsoft of the 90’s and actually forced all Gmail account holders into being users regardless of whether they want to or not.

As Mark Davidson said on Facebook earlier tonight:

I’m not sure why but I’m bothered by Buzz. I don’t like it, I don’t want it. But I have it. Sure I don’t have to us it. I think maybe it’s because for the first time, Google has forced a web tool on me. I’ve been using Gmail since 2004. If I love Gmail, and I do, I’m forced to have Buzz. I’m about 10 minutes away from …re-installing MS Office so I can use Gmail as a relay for Outlook again. You know what I like? Choice. That’s what got me using Google web tools in the first place. Today is the first day, I’ve ever viewed Google in the same light as I viewed Microsoft in the mid-nineties.

It’s this kind of move that could result in a temporary boost for Gmail and Googles other services, but as I’ve already seen tonight people are complaining about things like unremoveable messages in their inbox, and of course the pre-existing faults caused by Googles need to have a universal address book and not allow you to delete contacts from one Google service without deleting them on all.

This forced use could ultimately be detrimental to Gmail as users who don’t want an intrusive social network clogging up their inbox choose to go to less crowded and more traditional email systems. Yes, you can stop Buzz features from appearing in your inbox after the fact but once you are in, you’re in.

As I’ve said before, the right tool for the right job, and morphing Gmail into a full featured social network may stop it being a tool of productivity and turn it into another Facebook/Twitter timewaster.

Google Hasn’t Built A Twitter Killer: Goolge Buzz

FYI: I started writing this before the Google announcement today and am writing it as I watch it live and as a product GBuzz looks great.

Google doesn’t want to build, nor is it trying to build a “twitter killer”. What Google wants is your information in order to better target advertising.

Every time you send an email, update your status, chat on Goggle Talk, share an item on Google Reader, post a video to YouTube or a picture to Picasa, Google gets a little bit more information about you that it can use to better tune the advertising you see in the hope that you will click on one of those ads.

Information like your status updates disappear as soon as they are used but by offering timelines where you can see the status updates of your friends Google  can keep you on in their service a little longer and in front of their advertising a little longer.

By associating Facebook and Twitter id’s with your Gmail contacts Google learns a little more about both you and your contacts. They have already announced that you will be able to import RSS streams from other services, connect with twitter, and there was a hint of facebook connect. It was driven home that the platform will be made as open as possible and noted that if you tweet and it gets imported into GBuzz then it could end up on somebody elses recommended list.

GBuzz is shaping up to be a wonderful looking social experience, but it boils down to being a content gathering service. It will allow you to pump information into Google from all your other services, consume information there and ultimately spend more time in from of Google advertisements while providing it with the information necessary to fine tune those advertisements to you and your friends.

At the end of the day it all boils do to gathering more information about you in order to target advertising. They don’t need to build a Twitter killer. Twitter and Facebook already do a great job creating the information that Google wants.

What they have built however, is a marvelous looking social experience for those people who already use Gmail and Googles mobile services and given them the means to pour information about themselves and others into Googles servers.

Do You Know Where Chuck Norris Is?

Where am I?

A bit of a laugh for Saturday. I just couldn’t resist posting this!

Go to Google.

Type “Where is Chuck Norris” into the search box.

Hit the “I’m feeling lucky!” button.

Enjoy

SourceForge: Nobody Is Asking Why Now?

Bound by the law?

Sourceforge is now blocking access to sites from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

In all the commentary I am seeing, nobody has asked the very simplest and perhaps most obvious of questions: Why now?

These terms have been in place for nearly 7 years now. (The Entities list has existed since 1997)

Lets forget for the minute that one hell of a lot of the software hosted by Sourceforge is developed with the help of, or even entirely by, people living outside the U.S.

Lets also bear in mind that SourceForge has claimed that this is because of the “transfer and export of certain technology” to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list, yet doesn’t give any details about what this technology is?

Surely everything on SourceForge can’t contain dangerous technology? Why not just restrict the programs which contain those technologies?

Not to mention the fact that everybody knows that any idiot, never mind some evil axis human overlord wannabe wouldn’t be able to use a proxy or Tor to get past the IP filtering!

Or is there something more at play here?

Google and China perhaps? Did the U.S. government pay SourceForge a call and “politely” remind them that these laws exist? Maybe because the government wants to show that it is willing to enforce it’s laws and send a subtle hint to China that the hacking of U.S. companies and theft of their I.P. might get them added to these lists?

I find it very hard to believe that the guys at SourceForge have had a sudden moment of conscience and, out of the blue, decided to comply with laws that have existed for almost 12 years and to their own terms and conditions which they have ignored for the past 7 years.

Remove Lady Gaga from Google And Other Search Tips

Search Better!

It can be very frustrating to click through page after page of results on Google to to find the result you were searching for.

Contrary to belief of many “non-geek” types the issue is not with Googles result but rather with how we search for them. A lot of us search for just one word when we search, I know I do, and the differences between searching for “car”,  “honda”, “red car” and “red honda civic” are substantive.

If you tried searching Google for the terms above I’m sure you’ve already figured out that the more descriptive you are the better the results will be, but being descriptive is not the “end all and be all” of efficient searching.

Google (and most other search engines) accept a lot of search commands, or operators, which you can employ to further narrow the results.

For example, earlier today Sara was searching for “romance” while researching material for Everyday Love Stories. Much to her chagrin she kept getting results involving Lady Gaga, so I suggested using the “minus” operator to remove Lady Gaga from the results (now if only that would work from the air waves).

romance -”lady gaga”

There are a lot of operators which work on most of the major search engines such as: wildcard (*), OR, phrase search (“phrase”) etc…

If you you want to make your searching more efficient and by extension your day more productive a good place to start is Google Search Basics help page which lists a lot of the operators and explains their usage.

Happy searching.

WWWBing.com – No That’s Not A Typo

I love it. Patrick McAuliffe from Kerry (check the whois) registered wwwbing.com and has it redirecting to Google.com.

Simple, genious and I love it.

I am wondering two things though:

First, how did Microsoft not own that already? I thought it would be obvious to most people that when you own a major search engine (or any site) that you also buy as many of the typical typos variations as possible.

Second, how long before Microsoft tries to get a hold of it and take it down?

UPDATE: 22/02/2010 – It looks as if Microsoft has already had the domain moved to their control.

Google Is Just Saber Rattling And Won’t Pull Out Of China

All talk?

David Drummond, SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer for Google, just dropped a very provocative post over on the official Google blog.

Normally a post of this nature would go pretty much unnoticed (except by the tin-foil hat wearing security freaks) as it details an attempted attack on Google and a number of other companies operating within China.

What makes this post truly interesting however is the tone of the post, which, to my mind at least insinuates that the Chinese government were themselves responsible (or at least played a part), without ever coming out and actually making that accusation.

While that was provocative enough, the real sensationalism was to be found in this bold statement:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Wow, it sounds like Google is going to pull out of China. After all we know the Chinese government won’t back down, so what choice will they have?

To be honest, it’s all saber rattling. Google is trying to put pressure on the Chinese government, a regime that it knows doesn’t even generally bow to the massive weight of global political and public opinion.

In fact, Google is so aware of this that they provided themselves with a back door within their statement:

and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law

I’m confident that the settlement will come, one way or the other, and there are a number of reasons for it.

First and foremost there is the financial situation. Simply put, the amount of money Google will lose.

In Q2 of 2009 there were 338 million internet users in China and Google was the search engine of choice for 23.7% (about 80 million) of those users in Q3. That’s more users than North America which had 246.8 million users.

Add that to the fact that the Chinese market is growing rapidly as internet penetration is only 26.9% (or 1 in 4 people are online) compared to the saturated US market which has 74.2% (or 3 out of 4 online) penetration.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there is too much at stake to walk away and too much potential for growth.

Could Google really walk away from that? Could they honestly allow their market share in China to be eaten up by Baidu (the number 1 search engine in China) or to allow Ballmer to walk Microsoft in there and expand their market share? Or even better have Ballmer cut some sort of a deal with the Chinese government?

Sara, Steven Hodson and others have pointed out that Ballmer wouldn’t walk into that hornets nest. I think he would. What is there to lose?

Microsoft already operates Bing in China so it won’t be as if they can be demonized for pushing into the territory.

The digiratti may get up in arms about it, but who in the real world listens to them? Once they leave the geek twitter/blogosphere they have no real influence over the masses, no matter how they may delude themselves. Lets make it very clear-being famous in the blogosphere is nothing but an ego trip. It comes with no power and you won’t be recognized if you walk into the average pub.

Mainstream media will pick up on the story, but they’ll likely focus on the fact that Google is pulling out and not who is staying in. Even if they did, you can be sure Microsoft would have an army of PR experts ready to be on the tube and tell everybody how they’re trying to do the right thing, by sticking it out and fighting for the Chinese peoples right by providing them a service, working with the government and trying to affect change. Not like childish Google who couldn’t take the heat so took their toys home to play in their room alone.

The number of activists who may give out about Microsoft (and others) staying in China will be many, they will be loud, rant and rave on twitter, get their backs up and shout from atop their high horses, but very few of them will do anything about it.

Only a very minute percentage will actually bother to stop using Bing, or to not buy a Microsoft product and even their outrage will be short lived before they go back to their old habits.

Most will forget what they were angry about after a few days, and the real world will have forgotten about it within 24 hours of the mainstream media miking it.

The bottom line to a company like Microsoft would be an increase in revenue from the Chinese market that would far, far outweigh any potential loss or fall out from the few malcontents who actually do something about it rather than just rant on twitter and blow hot air on their blogs.

Public opinion can be a wonderful thing, but it only works as long as the public pays attention. In this day an age the public has an attention span that can be measured in minutes. The next time Angelina and Brad adopt, that Madonna farts or Obama stares at a girls ass, it will all be forgotten about.

The Chinese government has a stubborn streak and disregard for international opinion that is beyond legendary and Microsoft are definitely not above doing something that may not immediately be popular in order to gain a long term advantage and the public is too wrapped up in dealing with their own economic woes and miserable lives to really care who is providing search results to the Chinese.

Finally and above all, Google is not a public service. They are a business and their primary responsibility is not to their users but to their shareholders. Leaving China would not be in their shareholders best interest.

Google are testing the waters to see if they can get a concession. It would take some serious brass balls to pull out of the Chinese market and give their foothold over to competitors. Brass balls, which for all Google has done in the past, I think are more like two rolled up socks stuffed down the underpants.

They may look impressive from afar, but they don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Chromium OS First Impression: The 90’s Set-top Box of 2010?

An Operating System. Supposedly.

As most of you are aware I am a huge Google fan but…

If Google’s Chrome browser went to the office Christmas party and had a one night stand with Linux behind the bar, then Chromium OS would be the resultant bastard child.

Unfortunately for this particular bastard child it would share none of the looks, speed or intelligence which makes either of its parents great.  In the chromosomal world of this coupling all of the good genes have been invited to a party and headed off to get pissed and enjoy themselves, leaving only the crud of the genetic pool to great baby Chromium.

Normally I take a great deal of geeky pleasure in testing a new operating system so today I enthusiastically followed Jorge Sierras quick post about how to run Google Chrome OS from a USB drive, edited my bios settings to allow booting from USB and in next to no time was looking a a big blue login screen. That was where the fun and excitement stopped.

Chromium (or Chrome OS) is supposed to be an operating system for connected folk. In fact about all you can do with the operating system is be online. Want to do something offline? Forget it, better go back to your Windows or Mac laptop, Chrome OS is not for you baby!

So being the connected chappy that I am I was surprised when asked to log in with my Google account but wasn’t presented with a place to enter the network password for my Wi-Fi.

I had to log in with the default username (chronos – no password) and then go about finding out where the network settings were. After clicking enable wi-fi a few times it still wouldn’t connect and never asked my for my password even though my wi-fi light was glowing happily away at the front of my laptop.

In the end I was forced to whip out an ethernet cable and connect that way (irony or what?).

Windows 95?

Inside the operating system wasn’t much of a better experience. The UI felt slow and very underdeveloped (although the browser itself was fast but that’s to be expected, it’s Chrome after all) and moving through the options menu felt like I was back in Windows 95 or NT.

To be fair, part of the slowness I felt could have been attributable to the fact that I was running the Chromium from a USB key but I have run other linux distros (and that’s what Chromium is under the hood) from USB keys before, as well as tested a lot of portable apps and none of them felt quite this slow.

It wasn’t terribly slow, just slow. Hard to quantify although as I said earlier the browser felt snappy enough actually surfing.

Chromium comes with a few “preinstalled” applications which are actually all shortcuts to web based apps such as Gmail, Pandora etc. There is actually nothing installed in the operating system. I suppose if living exclusively online is your thing then this won’t bother you but my love/hate affair with the cloud is well known and I don’t really want an operating system that is practically useless if  you don’t have access to web.

Everything about Chromium feels unfinished and even not particularly well thought out. It’s as if the guys at Google had a collective brain fart, decided to prototype an operating system, gave up a fifth of the way through the prototype to go for beers and decided to release it when they came back a full six sheets to wind.

Just won't open!

Take saving an image you find on the web as an example.

I visited the gallery on this blog and attempted to save an image. In order to find my saved image I had to go to the downloads section of Chrome where I could see that it was downloaded. Clicking on the link to display the file or open the folder didn’t work.

It didn’t matter how many times I clicked that link, it wouldn’t open and to top it off, the preview image didn’t display either.

Now, for someone like me that is not the end all of trying to access the file. The more tech savvy of you are aware that in most (all?) browsers you can get to the file system of the computer.

Browsing files

In Chromium this can be achieved by typing “file://” and hitting enter in the address bar. This results in a listing of directories and files much the same as you get when you visit an open directory on the web in your browser.

If you are familiar with Linux it’s easy to find the file image you’ve saved, once you’re prepared to click on “mnt” and then find “chronos” all the way to the “downloads” folder. Easy simple. No seriously, everyone will be doing it soon so you might as well get used to it!

Chromium isn’t finished. Not by a long shot. It’s shitty even for a Linux distribution of the incredibly lame ‘made by a 1st time learner’ variety. It has no file explorer, the interface is crap, finding saved files is a nightmare and even simple things like logging on and off or even just properly shutting down your machine are lacking UI menus and buttons.

Chromium may have a place in internet cafes and libraries where a locked down environment without much functionality is required, but even there it may have problems. Printing is not supported at the moment and for those of you intending to use it at home you can forget about hooking up your portable hard drive or that nice mouse you’ve got.

If you have a laptop or even a netbook and you install Chromium then you are cutting the functionality and usefulness of that device by about 50% (90% for a decent laptop) and that’s a best case scenario. If you do eventually buy a device that is Chromium only then I’d consider getting your head examined because there are better things to spend money on, like a descent coffee machine while you save for a real laptop that can actually do things beyond just surf the web.

Back in the 90’s we had set top boxes for your TV that allowed you access the internet and had about as much functionality as Chromium. They were a gimmick. Cheap, cheerful and useless.

Do we really want to go back to that?

The Cloud isn’t Everything

Which one?

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has been arguing the case for PC manufacturers to build their own operating systems.

The essential argument being that with everything that we use every day already existing in the cloud it shouldn’t matter what OS we are running.

Apple has separated themselves from the crowd by developing their own OS and hardware, other PC manufacturers should be doing the same thing or just give up and die.

If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers?

If Apple and Palm can do it (and now Google) then why aren’t Dell, Sony, HP and the rest of the big gin PC manufacturers?

These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying.

Johns logic is sound as long as you are willing to make the assumption that the only reason personal computers are used today is to surf the web and be online.

The web is a great resource and has enriched or lives dramatically but is only of any value if you can actually connect to it. Admittedly, for most of the developed, world it is now easy to connect to the web even while on the move, but even when you do connect the service that you want is not always there.

Your email host may be down. Your web applications host may have server issues or simply shut up shop.

What about graphic designers or people doing audio and video editing? Photoshop on the web? Not likely! Not in a way that offers the power and options of CS4 running on my laptop.

As we’ve already seen most online applications are cut down versions, lacking the feature set and power of the their desktop “big brother”.

Can you imagine editing a high definition video and having to upload gigabytes of data to the cloud before you could begin editing your footage? Not to mention the bandwidth costs to the service providing the editing software.

What of the lowly PC gamer? Will Activision develop a version fo Call of Duty 2 for Sony OS, Google OS, HP OS, Windows, Mac and god knows how many other OS’s?

How about Photoshop, Firefox or iTunes for all these platforms as well?

I think not. It’s just not a practical solution. Most companies have a hard time getting versions of their software out for Windows, Mac and Linux at the moment.

The reason we have so much diversity in software at the moment and so much polished quality software that we rely on, is because the operating system arena is not saturated in the way that John wants is encouraging.

If it was, then talented developers would all be working on incredibly similar projects for a vast number operating systems, their talent and the programs they develop reaching incredibly limited audiences.

As it stands now we have vast armies of developers working for a limited number of platforms which allows them to develop and innovate without having to constantly reinvent the wheel. They can build upon and learn from the work and code of others.

Lets not even bring the issue of software patents into the mix!

Imagine if every time you wrote an application you had to do it for 16 different operating systems with their own file systems, quirks and API’s? A nightmare!

In fact it is that nightmare that would bring us very rapidly back to a situation where we had only a small number of OS’s as developers would develop for the platform which is the most developer friendly.

This is turn would lead to end users choosing that platform as it would have the greatest choice of software and support. That in turn brings more developers to the platform because the money is where the users are.

As John notes this already happened in the early days of personal computing when we had a massive amount of operating system choices and they all whittled away as developers and users moved to the platforms with the most choice and users.

See where I’m going with this? Even if every PC manufacturer released an OS tomorrow, after a while we would end up with the vast majority of people using only 2 or three of those operating systems.

Everything is not in the cloud, nor should it be. The cloud is unreliable. Connections to the cloud are unreliable and the cloud can’t match the convenience or power of software running locally on your home PC or laptop.

The Future Of YouTube Channel Customization?

Interactive User Channels?

Google launched a new page on YouTube to promote the new set of “Artist Themes” for Googles browser Chrome.

The page itself features a fairly cool short video depicting the differences between bland ordinary browsers and Chrome, but the real fun doesn’t start until near the end of the video where it seemingly expands beyond the confines of the video player and takes over the entire page.

Once the video is ended it continues to scroll through images of the themes changing the background of the page accordingly.

While this is a great way to demonstrate the range of skins available for Chrome, I also wonder if Google aren’t letting us see a possible future feature of user channels, where you can have the background of the page change according to triggers in the video.

Much like setting annotations now, a user could set triggers to alter the background or some other element of the screen as you watched the video on their channel page?