Is Google braindead about social apps?

Filed under "your strengths are your weaknesses":

why can't Google build social apps? Because Google's core values ("be useful", "do good by users") reject the very notion of lobster traps, bacn and toast, a dozen dimensions of junk food, and giant blue ball machines. Understanding those concepts is not easy. It takes lots of practice, and lots of patience, and lots of learning...

Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter...

Googlers who wanted to develop great social applications had to leave Google to do so... because Google's culture has no respect for successful social applications. YouTube's office is still far from the Google campus to avoid the toxic attitude described by a former Orkut employee, "[Google has] an environment that viewed social networking as a frivolous form of entertainment rather than a real utility, and I'm pretty sure this viewpoint was shared all the way up the chain of command to the founders."...

Google FAILED in acquiring and integrating other social products. Blogger, Picasa, JotSpot, Dodgeball, are dead.

Obviously, this dogma can't be entirely correct, but the line-up of failed apps speaks pretty loudly.  Even their successful apps -- gmail, google phone, google reader, and maybe blogger and picasa -- succeed only in one-to-one interactions, and fail as places to do interactions with multiple people.  They don't resemble social hubs in any way.

But, if as the author says, practice, patience, learning, and failing are key, then Google can definitely turn this around.  They excel at putting new things out and seeing what works.  As long as they don't get driven by the immediate payoff to shareholders in every project, they can continue avoid Microsoft's fate.

Better living through software

f.lux dims your monitor brightness during the evening and night.  Just like your dashboard lights dim when you turn your headlights on.  I would feel blinded when I'd come home and log in, and this really helped.  It might help you sleep better, too.  (Via Seth Roberts.)


Dropbox automatically syncs files between multiple computers.  It also keeps a copy of everything in online storage.  So, it solves the problem of storing to an always accessible location, while also keeping a second local copy in case the cloud goes down.  While also creating a copy in a different location in case you have a fire.  While also eliminating the need to email and thumb drive copies around to yourself.  This is a freemium service.  (Via Dave Winer.)

Bloomberg embraces baseball via new baseball stats analysis.  Seems a little like swatting flies with a brick, but as a baseball fan working in the financial industry, I have to like it.  As a side-benefit, it keeps the financial modelers busy and not creating fancy new financial products that no one understands and threaten our economy.  Then again, at the end of the article, one man claims that the Bloomberg product will destroy baseball.

Indie software games

Indie games are to the game industry what the indie movies are to the movie industry.  According to one leading indie game developer:

“A realization is dawning that games can be much more than what they are now... They even have the potential to be meaningful in deep, fundamental ways.”

You can try some of them for free, so you owe it to yourself to give them a shot.  Like indie movies, they tend to have more ambiguity in purpose and focus on aesthetics.

I hope these guys succeed, because we can only play so many versions of Halo / C&C / AoE / Warhammer / Warcraft.  Change way the people look, turn the castle into a spaceship, improve the design, but it's still the same game. 

Yet, I'm not convinced that games will join books, movies, and music as high art.  (Many argue that mass-appeal movies like The Transformers are no less an art form than other movies anyway.)

First, story lines and characters tend to be very shallow.  The old dude in Up had more depth than any video game character I've seen.  I'm not saying that, even when you're building your Civilization, there isn't a story being told. There is, and that history creates part of the fun of the game; it's just not a very complex story.

The bigger question is whether games should try to create meaning.  They should definitely try to force people to imagine new things.  Indie games do a good job of that.  Whether or not that's meaningful from an emotional sense may be irrelevant.

In addition to imagination, games should try to involve more of our senses.  The breakthrough of the Wii centers on the fact that it brought new senses into the experience.  Dance Dance Revolution is really a game revolution that we should appreciate in awe.

Ultimately, the division between games and tools will increasingly blur.  While "games" will continue to be a way to pass time, "tools" can make people's lives better, more efficient.  What more meaning could there possibly be? 

Phone industry: the third phase

The remarkable story about Android phones is not the phones.

True, Motorola's Droid is selling well, proving the platform presents a real challenge to iPhone.  Not this year, and not by itself, but I'll stand by my earlier prediction that this is the last year iPhone will dominate.  Next year, we'll have more new, hot Android phones, and the snowball will continue to roll and grow.

What I find fascinating is how software is revolutionizing phones.  Software used to be a few buttons you pressed to find the right contact.  Phone hardware concerns dominated: how usable are the buttons (blackberry), how big is the screen, how many megapixels does the camera have, etc.

It seems obviously now, but if you had asked someone a few years ago, "How do you take on the iPhone," they would have replied, "You need better hardware."  Remember when everyone speculated that Google would get into the hardware business in order to build a beach head on the phone platform?  But Google saw right away that the hardware had developed to the point where it didn't matter as much as the software on the phone.

Think about this: an entire category of phone hardware has been marginalized -- the clam shell phone -- because that form factor can't really run the software.  Did "candy bar" vs "flip" used to be a preference decision for you?  It was only a couple years ago!  Then iPhone's large screen and keyboard phones killed flip.

And then think about this: Google, which doesn't even make phones, is now arguably the second most important company in mobile phone production.

The phone industry has entered a new phase.  Software issues will dominate, and that change will be as disruptive as the transition from landlines to mobile phones.

Update: just noticed that Google will in fact have their own phone.  So, Google will play both ends, presumably aiming for a completely seamless experience like iPhone. 

Facebook is hell

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote (taking lots of liberties in my summarization here) that having all your thoughts and actions observed by someone else would create a hell of shame and fear. 

Welcome to our always-on, interconnected digital world!

Facebook is quickly becoming the grand marshall of this world.  I'm not saying Facebook is evil or bad, I'm just saying its tools -- easy updates and posting, photos and videos tagging you, a feeling of privacy in a public space -- work well, and as a result, create a perfect situation for unintended bad results.  It's the metaphorical equivalent of someone picking their nose in their car (false feeling of privacy in public), but instead of just a few fellow drivers seeing it, it's posted on the web.

Canadian woman loses benefits over Facebook photo
Bank intern busted by Facebook
Facebook postings closing doors for job candidates

For years, we "adults" have been tut-tutting the kids with party pictures posted with comments like "Stupid kids, you'll regret it later when you try to get a job."

But this is the world that kids grow up in today.  I met some recent college grads on a Facebook alumni page, and they all had between 500 and 5000 friends.  Every one of them.  That seemed weird -- most people I know, older of course, have between 30 and 300 -- but then I realized they'd been adding friends from every school, every club, every summer camp they'd ever been to, all their lives.  From that perspective, 500 is probably the number of an introvert.

If you got very drunk at a party, you used to just reminisce about it with your friends.  Getting drunk or doing stupid things together and then reminiscing about it was one of the things that bonded you. 

Now, the reminiscing happens on-line.  That's just the way it is today; it's designed that way.  Even against your will, someone else might take photos (Michael Phelps), and often those end up in their Facebook album, with you tagged.  And then, lots of people you barely know -- that guy you took driver's ed with and your sister's friend's boyfriend's karate coach -- are all reminiscing with you.  Without the bonding effects, of course.

Privacy options help a little bit, but that's a finger in a leaky dam.  Our groups of friends and family and business associates overlap and intertwine.  These days, I share jokes and beers more often with co-workers than with "friends".

The only safe option is to never do anything stupid that might be embarrassing if someone took a picture and posted it online.  You never know who's looking, so assume that someone always is.  That sounds like Hell.

Who owns your free online account?

Answer: not you.

a federal judge has ordered Google to deactivate the email account of a user who was mistakenly sent confidential financial information by a bank.

Try to follow the logic: a bank accidentally sent out confidential data, so the random person that happened to receive it is punished. Since that person doesn't pay anything for the account, he has few rights in the matter.

The problem of account ownership will only grow.

Facebook user recently revolted over changes in content ownership. But the problem still exists: some people get kicked off and have their accounts closed on them, while others try to get off but can't get their accounts closed. Because Facebook owns the accounts, not the users.

Maybe you could live without Facebook, but what about things you invest serious time in? Like writing a blog everyday. Or applications you use for school or work, like Google Apps.

Scarier still: apps that have all your personal data, like mint.com. Maybe you feel comfortable with this company, you like how they do business. But what happens if they get bought?

Scariest of all: apps that have all your business data, like Amazon's S3 storage. Amazon couldn't go out of business, right? But it was only a few years ago that we thought they would never turn a profit. And only a year ago it was inconceivable that Lehman would be gone. In this case, as a paying customer, you have a few rights, but Amazon still owns the switch.

Thin, free software remains the inevitable future destination, but you might think twice about being the vanguard.

Cool software: instant check deposit

Depositing checks is one of life's little tediums, and this app solves it:

The friendliest bank in the world, USAA, will soon let customers instantaneously deposit checks through its iPhone application.

The check itself is mainly ceremonial. It's a convenient, self-contained document with a couple of standardizations for machine readibility, but otherwise it's nothing special. Makes sense to combine recent technologies to simplify the process.

Using pictures of checks might seem to invite more fraud, but anyone wanting to engage in deception could always print their own checks by getting MICR toner and the font, both of which are easily and legally obtained. I've actually done this in a previous job. (No, I am not wanted by the FBI.) We were an outsource for printing balance transfer checks you get in the mail from credit card companies. Our printing press was an unremarkable HP Laserjet 4.

Why doesn't every major bank doesn't do this for all their customers? Use a Firefox / IE app if there's too many phone platforms. Simply tell customers that the cash can't be withdrawn until the check clears, which is often the case anyway.

What does free software look like?

Evernote is a tool makes it easy to save your data to web-accessible storage. Like a lot of web companies, it uses the freemium model: charge nothing for the basics, fees for premium services.

The beauty of Evernote's business is that continued use results in increased likelihood to pay:

About 0.5 percent convert to paying customers in the first month. But after about a year, 4 percent have converted... The shoebox of data is more valuable to the customer as it becomes larger. In addition, compelling uses — like photographing those business cards — quickly eat up the monthly allotment of memory, inducing a person to start paying.

This is similar to Google's gmail / storage strategy, but seems more direct and more effective.

But one thing nags at me. What happens if Evernote runs out of money or parks their cash with the next Bernie Madoff?

It's almost as if the business model works too well if it works well: if Evernote makes it so easy to store things, you will store a lot of things. That will in turn make you nervous to keep storing things there. In other words, if your data becomes so valuable to you that you're willing to pay monthly fees to store it, at some point doesn't it become so valuable that you fear keeping it at Evernote?

Light Friday reading: robots

Has artificial intelligence advanced far enough to be scary? This article thinks so (requires free registration).

They're worried about a HAL-like computer from "2001", but worse would be the robot clones dreamed up by Philip K Dick, mainstreamed by James Cameron, and fully realized in Battlestar Galactica.

Of more immediate concern, robots are increasingly taking over jobs, perhaps permanently freezing out unskilled labor.

But perhaps we should be worried about skilled labor. Watch these robots make ramen. The best part comes about 2/3 through, when they entertain the crowd.

The orders are complex too, requiring the robots to take customer preference for amount and type of sauce, salt, noodle, and so on. The finished product is handed off to a human server who brings the food to the customer’s table. The irony could not be more real as we witness the lowly human in the role of a mere server while the robot takes on the cooking.

Media is software, software is media

Much attention has been given to how media is getting killed trying to make the leap to the digital age.

Newspapers are literally dying while they search for an online business model. Magazines are being replaced by blogs. Craigslist destroyed the classified ad industry. Kindle is the most successful attempt so far to update the book, but it's hardly mainstream. (My dad said he never heard of it.) Movie theaters don't make any money unless you buy a popcorn.

Meanwhile, we have had occasional public discussion about whether software is speech, as these other forms of media are. Often, digital rights sit in the middle of these discussions, as some company invokes the DCMA to stop a coder.

But, I recently noticed something that made me realize that software, particularly games, are even closer to traditional media than I thought.

At the bookstore, I started seeing many books that originated from computer games. These include everything from long, intricate novels to comics. Apparently, this has been going on for a while, but it's reaching a point of mainstream acceptance, which is why I finally noticed it.

Of course, good games have always told stories. I can remember some of my Civilization empires as clearly as some movies. Games are increasingly described today as "prequels" or "sequels", and not just in the sense of having newer features, but literal extensions of the storyline.

And, sometimes at the end of a game, you miss the characters, just as you do when you turn the last page of a good book. Which is why these books make perfect sense: another chance for fan interaction.

As we contemplate how to apply old laws to new forms of digital media, new forms of digital media are morphing with the old ones.

So, while technology threatens to knock the doors off our old understanding of speech and fair use, software may actually deliver the bigger blow by changing what our definitions of media and speech. Software is speech.

Software is fun

Sometimes, in the pressure of our deadlines, it can be easy to forget how fun software is.

This video of a demonstration of some cool software offers a great reminder. By now, you might have seen some variations of this out in public already, but the presenter's enthusiasm catches you anyway.

Maybe your software won't look as cool or elicit oohs and aahs, but if it makes an order flow seamlessly or helps a trader make 100k today, people are feeling even more giddy.

Software wants to be free

In the not too distant future, there will be two price points for software: customized software that you have paid someone to build just for you, and free. Everything not customized will be free.

Right now, we're at the transition point. Software is lagging newspapers, but people are starting to notice and have various reactions. Jeff Atwood celebrated more software at lower prices, but recognized that some disparage this as a "race to the bottom". Another columnist noted that the next Office will have a free online version, and blamed Microsoft's desire to push Silverlight.

I disagree that moving to very low cost software is a bad trend. All digital media -- newspapers, magazines, music, phone calls -- is moving to free. Free is the future. Why should software be any different?

Frankly, Microsoft faces a real threat to Office. One day, within three years or less, a free, on-line spreadsheet and document app suite will challenge them*. Gmail is the first breach in the Office product line. If you could get apps that supported Word and Excel formats seamlessly, cost you nothing, and did a few other things like enabled on-line collaboration and integration with IM, gmail, etc., how quickly would sales of Office fall to zero? Microsoft has to make versions of Office free, because someone else will. Silverlight is just along for the ride.

The question remains: how do you make money on free software? No simple answers have emerged. Giants such as Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook haven't quite got it figured out, though they're working furiously on it. Even Apple doesn't make much money on the apps; the apps drive sales of the phone.

It's safe to say that the survivors will have figured out how to compete at the free level.

*Edited on Sept 8: Just to clarify, of course we have Google docs and some others today, but I'm talking about a competitor taking significant market share like Firefox takes from IE.

Software in the news

Your credit card company knows you better than you know yourself. "Anyone who purchased a chrome-skull car accessory or a 'Mega Thruster Exhaust System' was pretty likely to miss paying his bill eventually."

Stealing ATM pin codes from within the ATM app. "One of the risks of using a commercial OS for embedded systems like ATM machines: it's easier to write malware against it."

The same tools that allow history to be erased also help preserve it. Via Lauren Weinstein, who is optimistic about preventing this form of censorship. Others are less so.

The limits of software

At the margins, the limits of software get exposed, even in areas you'd expect software to excel. This site went to a mechanical solution to overcome random number generation limitations (via Bruce Schneier):

Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the dice rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.

Jeff Atwood recently talked about famous math errors. What do you do to fix those?

What do the Google, Windows, and Excel (pdf) math errors have in common? They're all related to number precision approximation issues. Google doesn't think it's important enough to fix. They're probably right.

As he alludes to, the answer often is: you don't. Almost all human activity is not at the margins.

Good developers and development teams know where to stop engineering and accept the flaws, based on the code base, user skill level, and anticipated future requirements. (And, if you have mechanical skills, maybe you also know how to create a giant machine to handle the exceptions.)