google

Weird day at Google

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Just one more thing about Google, this time partly because it has a lot of news detail that it’s done much better than I could. But mostly because it’s quite funny:

After two hours of technical talk, with nary a mention of new hardware or consumer-level software, the attendees began to get a bit bored. It was at this point that Twitter briefly became a strange meta-I/O, with dozens, or perhaps hundreds of attendees hopping on their Twitter accounts to talk about how bad the show was—while it was still going on.

The Only Thing You Need to Read About Today’s Weird Google I/On Keynote – Mike Wehner. The Daily Dot (25 June 2014)

Present imperfect

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I do a lot of presenting now so I’m thinking about it all constantly and yesterday’s Google presentation isn’t helping. But it is fascinating. Cult of Android ran this story, We Watched Google’s 3-Hour Keynote So You Wouldn’t Have To which tells you the Android community’s take but cult of Mac, on the other hand, went for this:

As the event dragged on, the tone on Twitter went from restrained interest about Google’s somewhat underwhelming announcements to reports of sleeping reporters and jabs at the ponderous presentation’s length. “Apple just launched a keynote shortener,” tweeted Dave Pell

That’s from a piece called Copy this please: 9 things Apple can teach Google about Keynotes. It continues:

Find your Steve Jobs: Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, so Apple looked inside and found a suitable replacement to become the face of the company. Apple exec Craig Federighi emerged as the company’s new “Superman” presenter at this year’s WWDC. Google’s Sundar Pichai might be “the most powerful man in mobile,” but he’s no Federighi.

Cult of Mac writer Lewis Wallace is right that Craig Federighi is quite the star presenter now. But he wasn’t before. It takes time and standing up in front of millions of people online before you get that good. So hopefully Google will take a telling from how poorly this year’s event went and is going to come back strong.

Sort-of extensive Android coverage

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Strap yourself in: I’m going to name drop. Well, place name drop. I missed all of Google’s Android announcements yesterday because I spent the day in Parliament.

Oh, come on. It’s the best I’ve got, just pretend to be impressed.

Fine.

Fine.

I missed the Google announcements and I had planned to get you some proper catch-up coverage in case you missed it too. But it was a strange announcement.

It was at Google’s I/O conference which is pretty much the same thing as Apple’s WWDC: it’s an annual gig officially for software developers but which has become more. These are now platforms for Google and Apple to show off new things. That’s typically new things for consumers as well as developers, but not necessarily.

This year’s Apple WWDC didn’t have any new hardware, for instance, and it’s considered a success for how much it did for developers. It’s also a success for how Apple-slick it was with the company’s presenting style. It doesn’t always work and when it’s off, it’s a clanging bell, but when it does work, it’s the kind of presentation you would want to give. Quick but not rushed, long enough to be detailed but not long enough to feel padded. Witty helps.

It’s a lot harder to do than it seems and nobody’s expected Google to be as good. You expect Google to have lots to say and maybe to eschew style and slickness for straightforward practicality.

None of that happened.

Not the straightforward, certainly not the style. Instead, it is reported that one journalist in the audience fell asleep. It’s reported everywhere that the presentation was boring, extremely long, extremely padded and while it had many announcements, they were muddled and confusing and lost.

By today I expect us to see Android fan boys usefully explaining the actual features and details that were hidden in the mess. But for now, I want you to see a good rundown of the event in this article. Really, I want you to see the title of the article.

Do to take a read of “We watched Google’s 3-hour keynote so you wouldn’t have to” on Cult of Android.

Three hours? What the L?

What was that about not being evil?

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Google is not and never will be a super villain. But it will shortly have its own space fleet.

It’s bought a firm called Skybox Imaging which is launching satellites in order to step up just how finely detailed a company can map the world or even see preposterous details. Skip straight to the excuse-me-what part of this news, as reported by Macrumours:

Skybox says they are already looking at Foxconn every week and are able to pinpoint the next iPhone release based on the density of trucks outside their manufacturing facilities.

So, seriously, Google will be able to see when trucks leave the iPhone factory. It takes quite a long time for Apple to get as many iPhones out as it needs for a launch, so the shipping must start – what, days? weeks? before the announcement. That means Samsung will have time to make and release another dozen phones while the trucks are en route.

The rest of the news is more straightforward, this time from Wall Street Journal:

By the time its entire fleet of 24 satellites has launched in 2018, Skybox will be imaging the entire Earth at a resolution sufficient to capture, for example, real-time video of cars driving down the highway. And it will be doing it three times a day.

The Complete History of Android

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Or near enough. There are reasons why the earliest days of the phone software will never been told and – this is the bit that interested me – there are reasons why the history has to be written now because soon so much of it will be lost.

Nonetheless, you do have to like Android. I managed about 10,000 words of this 40,000 and it is interesting, I just had little reference: I can’t remember which Android versions I’ve tried, I just have this vague memory of surprised how slow and unfinished they all seemed. Plus the article is very in favour of Google’s apparently very fast development cycles where it sounds to me like a cacophony of trying everything, then trying to fix everything, and just possibly noticing something that happened in 2007.

But the site Ars Technica has been promming ahead about this article and it is the big deal they say: they’ve done a good job and I’m fascinated by the top where they explain why it had to be done right now. Have a read, would you?

Weekend read: “Only Apple”

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Chiefly because I’ve been reading this and it’s the weekend, let’s have a Weekend Read. This is an interesting and chunky piece by John Gruber of Daring Fireball – I do just like the name – about where Apple stands today and specifically about one recurring issue. Apple head Tim Cook has apparently taken to repeating the phrase that “only Apple” can do various things that it’s doing.

Sounds like typical marketing guff to me. Apple uses words like “magical” a lot and everything is “incredible” so I do rather tune that stuff out. But Gruber argues that there is a point, that there actually are things only Apple can do at the moment.

It’s all to do with how Apple controls its own hardware and software so it really controls the entire experience of getting and using its stuff. If something doesn’t work, it’s Apple’s fault. If something works brilliantly, it’s Apple’s fault. The suggestion, especially from Cook, is that there is simply no other company that is doing this on this scale and with this success.

Is this true, though? Is Apple the only company that can do this? I think it’s inarguable that they’re the only company that is doing it, but Cook is saying they’re the only company that can.

I’ve been thinking about this for two weeks. Who else is even a maybe? I’d say it’s a short list: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. And I’d divide that short list into halves — the close maybes (Microsoft and Google) and the not-so-close maybes (Amazon and Samsung).

Only Apple – John Gruber, Daring Fireball (13 June 2014)

Read the full piece for a careful, weighed examination of whether Apple is really different to those – and why it’s important.

Google’s new design ethos

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Previously… I told you about Apple’s long-standing Human Interface Guidelines that I read first as a paperback book in the 1990s but is now a free iBook. I just find the intense thought and detail fascinating, the care and the thought. Take a look at me enthusing and then get the iBook too.

Now Google has something in the same ilk. I’m telling you this moments after learning about it so I don’t yet know how interesting it is. But one of the key reasons I don’t use the free Google Docs is how clunky it is. I do change my mind every time I see that price, but still, it’s just not a pleasant experience and I would be facing that unpleasant design for 12-15 hours a day if I used it.

So I am very interested in what design improvements Google has been doing. If you are too, take a look right here.

Google minus

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ZDNet's latest opinion piece about Google and specifically Google+ has a title that could be called ambiguous. It's hard to know if the writer Violet Blue is really for or against the company and the service. Because the headline is:

Thanks for nothing, Jerkface

It's come up now because of the two key people behind Google+, one of them has left the company abruptly and the other is now saying it was a mistake to get involved with it.

Now, I deeply dislike having to have a Google ID. It royally pissed me off that I used to have a pristine gmail address that nobody knew about – that sounds bizarre but it was a thing of beauty. At the end of every day or the end of every session writing something, I would email it to that address. More, I would also email it from that address. Any email received that wasn't sent to that address and also from that same address was immediately and automatically deleted. Consequently I had good five year run of every draft of everything, all right there and unsullied by spam.

I can't have that now.

People started getting really annoyed at me for ignoring their Google+ invitations. I never saw them: how could I? Instantly deleted, that was the entire point. And since I never gave that address out to anyone, how could they possibly know how to email me there? I still don't know when it happened that my address got out but I reckon it was when Google started joining services up.

Whatever the reason and whenever it happened, I can no longer use that gmail address for my archive. I've tried creating a new one but it is a true bugger trying to switch between them. Recently I did a magazine piece that required me to take screengrabs of Google Hangouts and I created a pile of addresses and IDs so that I could quickly generate some conversation threads, take the shot and get outta there. To this day, six weeks on, Google keeps logging me back in as one of my fictional IDs. I have specifically logged in as my original, own, real Google ID but, nope, I click to go to somewhere else and I am there as my fictional self.

But.

As intensely irritating as I find the whole Google login stuff to be, I am conscious that I don't mind all the Apple login stuff. So I figured that it was just me. Because I use Apple Mail and various other Apple-y things, it is convenient to use an Apple ID and I don't have to think about it much. I presumed that if I were to be using Gmail as my main email and I was into lots of Google services, I'd be fine about that one instead.

Apparently not.

Many people now use Google+ without even knowing it, through its non-consensual cross-posting on YouTube, Android photo integration, the takeover of Google Talk, and the infinite ways in which people every day make Google+ profiles without realizing it. Want to make a comment on a Google product (even if you don't know it's a Google product)? Google makes you a Google+ profile.

Thanks for nothing, jerkface – Violet Blue, ZDNet

Blue pulls together tales I'd half-heard of how Google's actions have caused real problems for people. Not just my boo-hoo archive problem (I've switched to saving everything in Evernote, by the way, except that I don't always bother, I just let it stay there in iCloud) but actual, serious, real-world problems:

For LGBT, political dissidents, activists and at-risk people everywhere, Google's little Google+ project became a loaded gun pointed right at anyone whose privacy is what keeps them alive.

Users found out in January 2014 when Google+ force-integrated chat and SMS into “hangouts” in the Android 4.4 “KitKat” update.

At-risk users were disproportionately affected, most especially transgender people who needed to keep their identities separate for personal safety and employment reasons.

One woman was outed to a co-worker when she texted him, and risked losing her employment.

Allegedly, Google shrugged at that. Find out exactly how and what more is riling Blue in the full ZDNet piece.

What unemployed people Google and what that tells us

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I’m not sure this is a wonderful indictment of human society but if the number of searches for pornography goes up, it can mean that the searchers are back in employment. Out of it, they were spending their time searching for jobs. Once they’ve got one, they’re searching for, well, anyway, indeed. (Have you hired someone recently? Don’t ask them.)

Google found that rising unemployment was not only linked to phrases such as “companies that are hiring.” It was also closely correlated to searches for new technology (“free apps”), entertainment (“guitar scales beginner”) and adult content (“jailbait teen”). The company said its data can improve the accuracy of standard estimates of economic data in a current month as much as 10 percent.

At the University of Michigan, [University of Michigan’s Matthew] Shapiro and his colleagues scoured more than 19 billion tweets over two years for references to unemployment, hunting for phrases such as “axed,” “pink slip” and “downsized.” They indexed the findings and compared them to the government’s weekly tally of people applying for unemployment benefits for the first time.

Their results are remarkably similar — and where they do diverge, the Twitter index may be more reliable. Computer malfunctions and the government shutdown last year distorted the official numbers, while the trends in Shapiro’s index held firm.

The Weird Google Searches of the Unemployed and What They Say about the Economy – Washington Post (30 May 2014)

Read more of what this analysis can find and remember that BBC newsrooms now regularly have rolling displays of what people are searching for. I’ve always assumed that was an edited list, I never saw anything untoward. But maybe the only people who read BBC News Online are unemployed.

Tweet in your sleep

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This came up at a couple of recent The Blank Screen workshops: how to send tweets or Facebook messages when you’re not around. Both times it came up, it was evil people who’d just learnt I start work at 5am and they wanted to send me a tweet to check. But weren’t so keen or so evil that they wanted to be up at that time.

If you have nicer reasons to do it, try one of these two possibilities:

HootSuite
Free for personal use hootsuite.com
Log in once to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and/or Foursquare and write a message for it to send to any or all of them whenever you tell it to.

Buffer
A free iOS app and a free website – buffer.com – doesn’t have Foursquare, so far as I can tell, but does the others easily and reliably.

I use Buffer for my personal Self Distract blogs that I write and publish on Friday mornings. The first tweet is live but then I always intend to send another one around lunchtime. And then that evening. And a last one the following Monday. Buffer lets me write the lot one after another and know that it is being sent for me at the time I say.

I do this because I regularly forget to send the tweets live. Now I regularly forget that they are going to be sent live and I suddenly get a unexpected notifications of retweets from the various tweets Buffer has sent for me.