Tag Archives: Google

Technology and morality

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The New Republic recently carried an interesting article about Apple (the full text may be available via Readability). The piece started out as a review of the Steve Jobs biography (ho hum), but soon diverged into a discussion of the morality of design. It helped me to crystallize some thoughts.

There’s a famous anecdote about how Steve Jobs spent weeks making his family discuss what they wanted from their washing machine.

Jobs’s meticulous unpacking of the values embedded in different washing machines, and his insistence on comparing them to the values he wanted to live by, would be applauded by moralistic philosophers of technology from Heidegger to Ellul, though it may be a rather arduous way of getting on with life. But Jobs understood the central point that philosophers of technology had tried (and failed) to impart: that technology embodies morality.

Emphasis mine. Technology may be morally neutral in the abstract, but when we make technology choices, we are making moral choices, either because of the details of how the technology is made, or because the technology filters moral possibilities.

The problem was that Jobs, while perfectly capable of interrogating technology and asking all the right questions about its impact on our lives, blatantly refused to do so when it came to his own products. He may have been the ultimate philosopher of the washing machine, but he offered little in the way of critical thinking about the values embedded in the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPad. When he discussed his own products, he switched from philosophical reflection on the effects of consumer choices to his Bauhaus mode of the vatic designer.

I would put it this way: Towards the end of his life, Jobs took his passion for product design in the autocratic and paternalistic mode, and applied it to everything about the products he oversaw.

“Steve believed it was our job to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like,” [one of his ex-girlfriends] said.

This is the real reason why the App Store exists. This is why iOS is locked down, and why the Mac is being moved to an App Store model. Sure, the revenue stream is welcome, but it’s really about paternalistic control.

“It just works”—Jobs’s signature promise at product launches—was soothing to a nation excited and addled and traumatized by technology. Nothing could go wrong: Apple had thought of everything. The technology would work as advertised; it was under total control; it would not get hacked.

This is the new Apple philosophy. Sacrifice control to paternalistic Apple, and you can relax. The benevolent leader will teach you what to like and what not to like, keep you safe from danger and ugliness. The fact that this philosophy is utterly opposed to the values expressed in so much Apple advertising is remarkable, and shows how cunning and slick their advertising and marketing people really are.

People fall for it, too. I know many self-professed libertarians who believe in absolute freedom of speech and say that they trust nobody to be a censor, but who nevertheless line up to buy iPhones and iPads and give Apple control over what software they can run on their phone, what books and magazines they can read on their tablet, even how they are allowed to arrange app icons. (Try removing Newsstand from your iPad.) Business travelers with iPads complain all the time about being forced to submit to the TSA when they take a plane flight, but what is the App Store if not the TSA of software?

Some iOS users engage in doublethink, recasting their lack of “freedom to” as a positive “freedom from”. (“Sure, I’m not free to download a wifi scanner… but I’m free from viruses!”) It’s true, all apps have metaphorically gone through the scanner and had a minimum-wage drone check their boarding pass, and you can be sure they aren’t carrying bottles of water that compete with the drinks sold by the gate, but that’s not how real security works.

Some iOS device owners ease their sense of guilt by rooting the device, ignoring that they’ve already cast a powerful vote for loss of freedom by buying it. Most, however, seem content to live in cognitive dissonance, apologetically pointing out that Apple hasn’t been that bad a dictator, and has mostly not eliminated competing services. I mean, yes, they’ve forced other magazine and book sellers to move their stores to web only to escape Apple control, but so far they haven’t blocked those web sites, so it’s OK, right?

Which brings us to the web. Criticize the lack of freedom represented by the iOS devices, and before long you’ll likely be told that it’s simply not a problem, because there’s a web browser. Sure, Apple says no porn on the iPad, but you can get porn on the web via Safari so somehow there’s no censorship occurring. But people are pointing out that Apple’s ‘app economy’ is increasingly threatening the web itself. Apple (and other corporate entities like Amazon) are managing to mold the web to be what they want it to be. And that doesn’t appear to be what I want it to be.

[...] Jobs outright rejected the possibility that there may be a multiplicity of irreconcilable views as to what the Web is and what it should be. For him, it is only a “direct-to-customer distribution channel.” In other words, Jobs believed that the Web is nothing more than an efficient shopping mall, and he proceeded to build his business around what he believed to be the Web’s essence.

Some people even claim that the web is dead, and that as we move into a post-PC era of tablets and phones as the primary Internet access devices, the web will be replaced by apps. And freedom will be replaced with complete corporate control.

Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying.

A virtual Dallas, a prospect that will make every Austin web developer shudder.

So I now realize that this is where I parted company with Apple. When the Jobsian paternalism was restricted to matters of hardware design, I mostly appreciated it. I wish my laptop had a replaceable battery and anti-reflective screen, but mostly I’m happy with what I was told I should like—the large trackpad, the solid metal casing, and so on.

But when the paternalism was extended to books and movies and video games and applications, and when it started to threaten the web—well, that was several steps too far.

Everyone says they love freedom, and that freedom is important. But as the cliché says, “freedom isn’t free”. Freedom means ugliness. Freedom means danger. Freedom means complexity. Apple, in a stroke of marketing genius, offers you freedom from those things. And by accompanying that promise with images of freethinkers and a ‘think different’ message, it manages to make you overlook the fact that what you are really doing is giving up your freedom, and financially rewarding the very entity you are giving it up to.

So what’s the alternative? Well, sadly you won’t find a mobile platform with a rich ecosystem that doesn’t require ceding some control to others. Many people have said to me “Well, since that’s the case, what’s the point? I might as well go with the best.” But I’m not an absolutist; I don’t believe in the idea that if you can’t be perfect, you might as well not try. Rather, when it’s time to make a choice, I’ll choose the imperfect option that’s better.

Even Google, with its naïve technocratic ethos, is more committed to questioning the impact that it is having on the Internet and the world at large. They fund a bevy of academic and policy initiatives; they have recently launched a Berlin-based think tank dedicated to exploring the social impact of the Internet; they even started a quarterly magazine. [...] Apple, by contrast, holds itself above the fray. It seems to believe that such discussions of meanings and consequences do not matter, because it is in the design business, and so its primary relationship is with the user, not with the society.

And then there are things like the Data Liberation Front, AOSP, and the periodic table of open APIs. You can even run Android devices without Google, pretty much. Try using a new iPad without an Apple ID.

So until something better comes along, I’m going with Android for my phone and tablet needs. Freedom is too important. Google might not be perfect, but in the specific area of mobile platforms, they are a lot better than Apple.

Wake up, Android device manufacturers

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Apple’s Q4 results were its best ever. They even managed to claw back some marketshare from Android. This should be a loud wakeup call for Android device manufacturers. I’ve been an Android user for a couple of years now, but let me say that there are some areas where Apple wins hands down.

Choice

Too much choice is a bad thing. I like that Android has phones with and without keyboards, phones in a variety of sizes, and so on. Unfortunately, HTC, Motorola and Samsung seem to crap out a new phone every couple of months, most of them indistinguishable from each other.

HTC Amaze, Wildfire S, Sensation, MyTouch 4G, Evo 3D, Evo Design? They’re all keyboardless. Apart from one of them being 3G, I’d be hard pressed to decide between them, or even tell them apart in the store.

And yet, the amount of real choice is less than ever. The phone I want is nowhere to be found (see end of posting).

Support

If you get an iPhone, you know there will be OS updates for a couple of years. In contrast, Android handset vendors have screwed over customers so many times that I won’t buy a phone unless I know for sure it’s supported by CyanogenMod. People who don’t care about freedom so much will just take the easy option and buy an iPhone. Trust matters deeply when you’re not technically minded.

I want to buy a tablet. Right now, I’m waiting, because I don’t trust any of the vendors to actually ship Android 4 for their tablets in a timely fashion, even if they’ve promised that it’ll be here in weeks. (I learned that lesson from HTC with my phone.) Again, people who don’t care about freedom so much will buy an iPad, because at least they can trust that Apple will ship OS updates for a year or two.

Experience

Part of the reason why manufacturers say they have trouble shipping OS updates, is that they all insist on layering extra crap on top of Android. But that’s not the only reason to dislike the value-subtract which handset makers keep applying.

My phone used to have HTC Sense. Installing CyanogenMod was the best thing I ever did to it. Suddenly the address book worked properly and I could star favorite contacts. The launcher lost the horrible bubbles around the icons. The useless social stream app and the voice search that never worked were gone, and the phone search button did something useful again.

I went to T-Mobile to look at phones. The HTC ones still have Sense UI crap all over them, and it’s still ugly. I don’t want it. And if you’re one of the people who does want it, there’s nothing to stop HTC from offering it as an optional add-on exclusive to their phones, without forcing it on people.

Motorola have claimed that the carriers are forcing them to layer UI crap on top of Android, because otherwise they’d end up with a half dozen identical Android phones on their shelves. Well, yes, see “Choice” above. Screwing up the UI so your multiple identical phones will look different is solving the wrong problem.

My perfect phone

OK, so support and experience suck, but at least we have choices, right? Well, it doesn’t seem that way to me. Here’s what I want from a phone:

  • A good camera.
  • A microSD slot for music, so I can replace my aging iPod.
  • A hardware keyboard.
  • Stock Android 4.x.
  • GSM compatible with T-Mobile.

So many Android phones out there, and yet precisely zero of them seem to meet my fairly mundane requirements, even if you relax the demand for Android 4. In fact, right now T-Mobile has no stock Android phones at all. Yet it wasn’t too long ago that they were selling the HTC G2, a stock Android phone with keyboard.

Something is very wrong here, and unless Google and the phone manufacturers can do something about it, the iPhone might get back the position of #1 smartphone platform.

Google+ is going to mess up the Internet, says someone who really hates Google+

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Back in December, Jon Mitchell wrote a post about a week of jury duty. He posted it to his personal web site, posted it on readwriteweb.com, and posted it on Google+.

Around ten days later, he did a Google search for ‘Jon Mitchell jury duty’, and discovered that the Google+ postings of the article were being ranked higher than the ReadWriteWeb copy. For some reason this made him angry, so he wrote a posting on Google+ accusing Google+ of being sleazy.

Anyone familiar with how Google ranks pages could probably guess what was happening here. Google’s algorithm ranks pages higher if they are more recent, more frequently updated, or linked to from pages that are more recent or more frequently updated. As people shared and discussed the G+ posting, that was boosting its page rank.

I made a comment in reply to his whiney article that apparently pissed him off so much that it was featured in his new article about how Google+ is going to mess up the Internet. Not just the web—the entire Internet. Gosh!

His complaint starts with the following observation:

It all crystallized for me this morning when two Google+ transgressions presented themselves at once. Mike Elgan, “The world’s only lovable technology columnist™,” re-shared a post by Rohit Shrivastava, a manager at IBM. Elgan’s post bore an awfully familiar headline, although the punctuation and capitalization had been maimed. It was familiar because I had written it. I didn’t see any attribution, though, let alone a link to the story.

Page down, and you get to his repost of my comment:

But then another guy offered this gem:

“Speaking as a user/reader, to me the G+ version of your posting is more interesting than the readwriteweb.com version, because I can comment here without having to jump through hoops.”

This might be the Googlest thing I’ve ever seen.

That’s right—after complaining that Google+ is transgressing by not attributing content, he goes and reproduces my entire comment without attributing it in any way. No link back to the thread, no link to my profile, not even a name. Just “some guy”.

But I’m not writing this to point out the blatant hypocrisy; I’m writing because he apparently didn’t understand my comment. He could have asked me to explain it, but that would have meant actually carrying on a conversation on Google+ where I might see it. Instead, he wrote another article about how evil Google was, and set out to mock the comment there.

First of all, he designates himself a “user/reader,” which is just spectacular.

Thanks, Jon. I thought the reason for the two words was pretty obvious—I was a reader of your article, and I’m a user of Google+. I was commenting from the point of view of someone who wears both metaphorical hats. My comment would not apply to someone who read the article but didn’t use G+, or who used G+ but didn’t read the article. Hence my use of both words.

And he goes on to say that he’d rather see a Google+ post about the article than the article itself, because, and I quote, “I can comment here without having to jump through hoops.” Hoops like reading the article?

No, Jon. Hoops like having to register on yet another fucking web site. Reading the article was certainly no joy, but the thing about Google+ is that I use it. Therefore I can reply to something posted on Google+ simply by typing my reply and hitting the submit button.

If I wanted to reply on ReadWriteWeb, I would have to jump through the following hoops:

  • Enable cookies for ReadWriteWeb.
  • Enable JavaScript for ReadWriteWeb.
  • Reload the entire page.
  • Log in to Disqus, selecting an appropriate ID.

And that’s given that I’ve already used Disqus at least once and that I’m willing to link an existing ID to it; otherwise there are additional steps to link an ID to Disqus or create a new one. That kind of hassle is why OpenID hasn’t taken off, according to ReadWriteWeb. It’s why I confidently predict that Jon Mitchell won’t reply to this article on my web site.

In fact, the fact that all the comments on ReadWriteWeb are invisible without JavaScript is likely one of the reasons why G+ discussions are being ranked above ReadWriteWeb pages. Again, anyone familiar with how search engines work should have realized that.

This darling “user/reader” has hit on the most touted feature of Google+: the conversations. Everybody finds it so much better than other forms of conversation on the Internet.

Actually, no. It’s nowhere near as good as Usenet conversations were 20 years ago, from a functionality point of view. I could easily come up with half a dozen improvements that could be made to Google+. There are other sites I use, like Reddit, that I’m pretty much equally happy with. I use G+ to share links to things because it’s convenient, supports discussion, and respects privacy reasonably well. (And, alright, because it’s not Facebook.) I’d really rather we were all using something decentralized like Diaspora, but so far hardly anyone has followed me over there.

And yes, I’d be more interested in a Reddit posting of a Jon Mitchell article than the copy on ReadWriteWeb, for exactly the same reasons mentioned above—I already have the account set up, I’m already logged in, I can join in a discussion with zero hoop-jumping required.

So basically, there are a number of big obvious points that Mr Mitchell apparently hasn’t grasped.

Firstly, conversation about something on the web is far more interesting than sitting back and being a passive reader of it.

Secondly, friction matters. People are lazy, and will engage in conversation wherever it’s most easy and pleasant for them to do so.

Thirdly, friends matter. People will tend to converse on sites where their friends converse.

Because of these fairly obvious human tendencies, if you expect people to register just to comment on your web site, you are likely to be disappointed. If you expect people to pick your web site for their discussion in preference to systems they are already using, like Google+ or Reddit or Facebook, then you are even more likely to be disappointed.

This is exactly why I re-post the things that I write on Google+: so that my friends can discuss them without having to deal with OpenID-type registration hassles or learning yet another threaded comment system. I assumed that was why Jon Mitchell posted his stuff on G+, but apparently not.

There are other points in the article I could criticize, such as the ridiculous idea that it’s Google’s fault when the crappy iPad browser crashes trying to render Google+; my iPad crashes on Facebook too.  Sure, the G+ app on iOS isn’t as nice as the Android one; but given the way Apple has treated Google in the past, I think iOS users are lucky they’re getting an iOS app at all.

While writing all this, I noticed that two G+ postings about Jon Mitchell’s jury duty are once more appearing above the ReadWriteWeb article in the search results, so now he can get angry all over again. Or perhaps he’ll quote me anonymously and without attribution in another article complaining about being quoted anonymously and without attribution. Wouldn’t that be ‘darling’ of him?

Learning from the Google+ suspensions

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With all the anger over the Google+ mass suspensions, I’ve seen quite a few people post that they’re going elsewhere. Rainyday Superstar has suggested that she might go use Tumblr more. Other people are talking about Diaspora, DreamWidth, even (gag!) staying with Facebook.

I think those people are all failing to see the big picture.

Google’s behavior towards its users is a surprise only because we’ve come to expect better from Google. I learned from LiveJournal and Facebook that sooner or later, almost any corporate entity that becomes popular enough will stop caring about its users. With LiveJournal, it got to the point where even Brad Fitz stopped caring–he had his exit strategy sorted out, and just told people he was no longer in charge of the ship.

Furthermore, freedom of the press in America has a simple rule: if you don’t own the press, you don’t get the freedom. The Constitution only applies to government censorship; private commercial entities get to censor as much as they like. If you are reliant on someone else’s platform to distribute your writing, expect limits on your speech.

This is why anything I write that’s of non-trivial length goes on my web sites. (One for work-related stuff, one for more personal matters.) I’ll post links to it on Google+, Facebook, and other social networking sites, but the actual content stays on a site I own and control.

I use free, open source software (WordPress) which can be deployed to any commodity $5-a-month web hosting provider. I own the domain, and have it registered through a separate company, so if my hosting provider goes rogue they can’t stop me from moving my site and domain somewhere else. (Yes, I’ve seen that happen.) The data is backed up automatically every night to a server in my house, so at most I’d lose a day’s postings and comments. I use rdiff-backup for the nightly archives, so that if someone hacks in and corrupts or destroys the site database I can wind back to the last intact version.

I could have my web site content destroyed, but it would pretty much take a government raid on my house and ISP to achieve that. At that point I’d have bigger problems to worry about, and the US Constitution would (theoretically at least) start to apply.

(I even picked the domain name partly because it’s a command used by every dial-up modem and by many Unix WiFi drivers, so it would be difficult for some tool like Richard Branson to grab a trademark or copyright registration and try to take the domain away from me. It also has no commercial value at this point. Hayes tried to stop other modem makers from using their commands using every legal trick in the book, but they ultimately failed.)

You might think that my web publishing setup is overkill. I’m not exactly Julian Assange, after all. But the other thing that LiveJournal taught me, and which the Google+ fiasco is also making clear, is that you never know what trivial thing is going to make a company use the ban hammer. LiveJournal booted me for posting information which was publicly available to the entire world on the subject’s web site. Google+ is giving people the ban hammer for having names like “Winter Seale” and “Laurence Simon”. So even if your idea of controversy is saying the word “fuck”, you might want to consider a setup like mine, at least if you put any time and effort into what you write. It isn’t hard to set up and use WordPress; arranging the automatic backups is a little more technical, but it’s not rocket surgery.

Google+ name policy: three seven fatuous arguments

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Following the discussion of Google’s profile name policy, I see some ridiculous arguments crop up with tedious regularity.

“It’s to stop spam.”

Looking at my spam folder, it’s full of mail from spammers with autogenerated fake names that would pass Google’s smell test: “Denese Mozelle”, “Adrien Lavona”, “Mohammad Alitahir”, “Letisha Lorri”, “Kelli Thomas”, and so on. If you don’t understand how trivially easy it is to bulk generate plausible WASPy names for spamming Google+, ask any programmer. If all else fails, spammers are quite willing to hack and steal account credentials of legitimate accounts in order to spam social networks.

If you haven’t had fake profiles with plausible looking female names try to friend you on Twitter and Facebook so they can invite you to visit their sexy web sites, you can’t have been using those services much. Spammers will even set up networks of web sites to try and push their spam through. Thinking up a plausible e-mail won’t hold them back for more than a few seconds.

There’s also the problem that spammers need to get you to follow them, for their ongoing spam to be effective on Google Plus. Conclusion: The anti-spam argument is bogus. The policy does nothing to stop spam.

“It’s to stop trolls.”

Trolls too have no problem inventing plausible names. If you play online video games, you’ll quickly discover plenty of trolls and griefers, even on services where you have to have a credit card number to get access.

In addition, some of the most famous/infamous trolls have used their real names — ROGER DAVID CARASSO, Richard Sexton, Jason Fortuny, John Dvorak, and so on. (I should note that these examples aren’t all full-time trolls, and some of them have retired from trolling at this point.) Those are just a few examples where I know the names are real; there are endless examples of trolls with names that would pass the Google Plus “smell test”, but which I don’t know are real — Adrian Chen, David Thorne, Joel Johnson of Gizmodo, and so on.

And again, the trolls need to get you to follow them and respond to them. Conclusion: The anti-troll argument is bogus, there are plenty of trolls with real or real-sounding names.

What really discourages trolls and spammers is giving users the tools to block them permanently, and recommend similar blocking to friends.

“It’s to stop people from being rude.”

Facebook has the same policy regarding real names. Have you seen any lack of rudeness on Facebook? Every now and again a page will fill up with bile and death threats, and there are entire web sites dedicated to cataloging everyday Facebook rudeness.

There’s also scientific research on online disinhibition that suggests that people flame more when they know each other’s identities.

“It’s not a problem for me personally.”

“TV censorship isn’t a problem for me, I don’t watch TV.”
“E coli contamination of meat isn’t a problem for me, I’m a vegetarian.”
“Sexism isn’t a problem for me, I’m male.”
“Anti-semitism isn’t a problem for me, I’m not Jewish.”
“The unemployment rate isn’t a problem for me, I have a job.”

See how none of these statements contribute anything positive to discussion of the appropriate topics, and would tend to offend those for whom the issue is a problem?

Conclusion: It’s a good idea to pause and think before ever saying “It’s not a problem for me” when discussing any contentious issue. Maybe there’s a case where it actually contributes useful information to say it, but off the top of my head I can’t think of one.

There are plenty of legitimate real-world situations where someone has a valid reason for wishing to use a pseudonym online, or wishing to use a name that doesn’t fit Google’s restrictions of “firstname and lastname in that order”. Here are a few:

  • Women who are suffering stalking or harrassment online.
  • People who are from foreign countries where names are handled differently, such as Korea. (And even if you have a western-style name on your driver’s license, that doesn’t mean you want that used as your name in a social context.)
  • People who live somewhere where your real name is whatever you say it is, like the UK.

So that’s tens of millions of people right there. So just because you have no valid reason or excuse to use a name other than the one on your driver’s license, doesn’t even begin to mean that nobody else does.

“Well, don’t use it then.”

Like the “It’s not a problem for me” argument, this one adds nothing to the discussion.

“Fox news is biased? Don’t watch it then.”
“Driving while texting is dangerous? Don’t do it then.”
“Cigarette smoke causes cancer? So don’t go places that allow smoking.”

The policies set by Google and Facebook determine many details of our social interactions on the Internet. If Google were to decide to block your personal web site, you would effectively be invisible on the Internet, and saying “Well, people should use a different search engine then” wouldn’t be any help to you.

In addition, the mere existence of personal choice does not mean we should refrain from criticism of corporations and their products.

“It’s so people can find you.”

If most of your friends call you by your nickname in real life, and almost all your Internet contacts know you by your nickname, then that’s going to be the name people will use to search for you in Google+. People aren’t going to search for Stefani Germanotta.

Yet there are plenty of examples where Google have suspended people’s profiles and tried to force them to use a name hardly anyone knows them by, because the name someone is most commonly known by is not necessarily at all similar to their legal name.

“Just use your real name and there’s no problem.”

First of all, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world whose names do not obey the rules “must be written as firstname lastname in plain ASCII”.

Secondly, there are many people who are harmed by being forced to use a “real name”.

Thirdly, the rules presented by Google are ambiguous if the name you are most commonly known by is not your legal name. It’s quite possible in many countries to have credit cards and other everyday identification with names other than the name by which you are known to the government.

Google +, circles, and privacy

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With people moving to Google Plus, I’ve seen some confusion about friends, circles and access.

On Facebook, if someone lists you as a friend, you get a request asking you to confirm it. On Google Plus, someone can add you to one of their circles without your permission. This is not, however, a privacy issue. The reason is that the things you post on Google Plus only go to people in your circles by default, not to people who list you in their circles.

Some creepy guy you don’t like added you to his circles? Ignore it. Unless you add him to one of your circles, he won’t see anything extra about you by adding you to his circles, unless one of the following things happens:

  1. You explicitly choose the “Public” option when posting.
  2. You explicitly choose the “Extended circles” option when posting, and one of your friends has put Mr Creepy Guy in one of their circles.

Both options show up in a different color from the circles of friends you define:

Don’t pick either of those two green options, and Mr Creepy will never see anything you post unless you put him in one of your circles. The fact that he’s told g+ that he wants to see your updates does not mean that he will.

(As an aside, this is an interesting example of how using red and green colors in UI design is often problematic. Green means “go” and “no restrictions”, but it also means “safe”. In this case, the two meanings are at odds.)

OK, you say, but couldn’t Google give me a way to block him from adding me to his circles? Well, if he wasn’t allowed to add you to his circles, he could still stalk you just as effectively by going to your profile page and hitting refresh every hour or so. So preventing people from being able to add you to their circles would not actually give you any more real privacy or security; just the illusion of safety.

If you’re offended by his ability to even say that he wants to see your updates, well, I suggest that you get over it. He could communicate a lot worse on his web site.

Circles are an access control mechanism when you post to them, and an interest list when you read from them. That is, when you post to a circle the circle defines who sees the post; but when you put someone in a circle and read the circle, that’s a completely different operation, and doesn’t change any access to posts. I think that’s why people get confused. It might have been better if they were separate things, but the “people who I’m interested in” and “people I don’t mind seeing what I write” lists are probably very similar for most people.

Also, a couple of quick tips about circles:

  • If you click on a circle name in the left navigator, you get a page of updates just from people in that circle. If you then go to post an update, it defaults to going to just that circle.
  • If you start posting an update from the main “Stream” page (which shows updates from people in all your circles), by default you get whatever set of circles you selected last time you posted from the Stream page. You do not get “Public” by default.

Also, the fact that the set of circles a post will go to is always visible, is a big win over Facebook’s “lists of friends” functionality. It means it’s much harder to make something public by accident.

If you want to post to everyone you’ve trusted enough to put in a circle, you don’t need to have a circle for that. Instead, you can click the link for adding people or circles:

The drop-down menu has an entry “Your circles”, which automatically contains everyone in all your circles, but not Mr Creepy:

Once you select “Your circles”, it shows up as a special blue pseudo-circle:

You can also type people’s names into the “Add circles or people” box, rather than using the menu. Google Plus will autocomplete them from your list of people in your circles. If you explicitly add someone by name in this way, they get notified of the post by default, even if they’re also in one of the circles — just like if you used ‘@’ or ‘+’ and their name in the post itself.

⊕/⊖

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I really want someone to provide a viable alternative to Facebook.

This week Google launched Google Plus. Before long I got an e-mail from someone inviting me to a “Hangout”. Clicking the link took me to a page that told me I wasn’t allowed in. Clicking the link to unsubscribe from such e-mails took me to a 404 page. That’s not social networking, that’s spam. I flagged it as such.

Also, a few weeks ago someone flagged my Google Profile as violating community standards. All the information in it was accurate, there was no swearing, no nudity, and no indication of what specifically they were objecting to… So I clicked the link to have it reviewed again. Back it came, rejected again, no explanation, with my photo removed. I tried a different photo, clicked to have it reviewed again. Rejected again. So I deleted the whole thing.

At that point, Latitude started failing on my Android phone. It turns out that there’s an undocumented dependency between having a Profile and using Latitude. So I created a blank private profile and submitted that. It was approved.

So this month Google told me I wasn’t allowed to post a useful public profile, invited me to a social networking service and then immediately told me to go away, and spammed me. This suggests to me that Google as an organization still doesn’t understand social networking.

I also tried to set up Friendika. After hitting three successive technical roadblocks and wading around in PHP internals for hours to try and debug them, I decided it just wasn’t very robust, and gave up. I mean, I’m not an idiot, I can deploy WordPress in minutes.

Earlier in the year I tried Diaspora. That seems to work, but so far nobody much seems to be using it. I’m giving it another try. Development progress seems to be relatively slow.

Update 2011-07-01

Well, I’m now in Google Plus. First impressions: It’s basically Diaspora, with an interface that’s more like Facebook. I still don’t see any value in wasting my time entering profile information until they fix their transparency issues, but it’s as good as Facebook for the things I use Facebook for–sharing links, posting occasional casual photos, and not much else.

Google Wishes You Merry Christmas, Launches Google Santa Initiative

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Lack of Information at North Pole Leads Google to Draft New Privacy Policies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15, 2009 UTC – As the holiday season continued, Google Inc. today announced that it is modifying its privacy policies in a new two-part Google Santa initiative.

The inspiration for the Google Santa project came from the realization that Santa has very little information to go on when judging whether people are naughty or nice. Now, thanks to Google’s advanced data mining systems, Santa will be given access to your search history, a log of all the web sites you visit which use Google Analytics, any passwords needed to access them from your Google Toolbar, the contents of your Gmail account, and complete transcripts of any Google Talk IM conversations made in the last year.

“Santa has a clear need for this information,” said Google founder Sergey Brin. “His intuition is unmatched, but his ability to sniff out naughty people will be dramatically improved now that he can search your e-mail and check whether you’ve visited any naughty web sites.”

“Do no evil,” added Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “Because otherwise we will find out, and we’ll tell Santa.”

Google also announced phase two of Google Santa, to launch in January. A new area of the Google Shopping site will enable users to sell coal in a global marketplace.

“By aggregating individual users’ stock of fossil fuels,” explained Google co-founder Larry Page, “we will enable ordinary people to participate in the global energy economy by selling their pieces of coal to their local electricity company.”

“In addition,” he added, “a modest 70% cut of the proceeds will be used to purchase carbon offset credits, making the overall operation carbon neutral, and helping me feel better about my personal Boeing 767.”

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative web technologies log the lives of millions of people around the world every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while recording the browsing patterns of users across almost the entire World Wide Web. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the North Pole. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Will history repeat itself?

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Once upon a time, Apple developed an amazing OS with a revolutionary graphical interface. They started selling devices which would run this OS. The devices were practically sealed units, and the OS would only run on Apple’s hardware. If you wanted to develop for the devices, you had to pay money to join a developer program.

Some other companies approached Apple and asked if maybe they would license the OS and software to run on third party hardware. Apple considered the matter, and decided that they were so far ahead in user interface and technology that the competition would never catch up. They decided to go it alone, Apple versus the entire rest of the industry.

The year was 1985. The devices were Macintosh computers. The companies who wanted to license MacOS were Philips and Sony. The people who decided that Apple could afford to go it alone against an entire industry were Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Jobs.

Denied the Mac OS, the rest of the industry settled on MS-DOS, PC-DOS and DR-DOS layered on top of one of a number of competing BIOS programs cloned from IBM’s original PC BIOS. Thus there was basically an open ecosystem of devices from many vendors, running OS variants from multiple vendors, but all able to run the same software, more or less. (I recall that the gold standard at the time was Flight Simulator–if your PC and DOS couldn’t run that, they were considered not-really-compatible.)

Apple continued to innovate throughout the 80s and early 90s, but they couldn’t out-innovate every other company combined. If you wanted a pocket-sized PC, you could get one; but there was never a pocket Mac. If you wanted a PC that was portable or had a color screen, you could get one years before you could get a Mac with those capabilities.

The same was true in software. The larger install base of PCs, and the cheaper and easier development process, meant that lots of weird niche programs appeared for the PC that didn’t appear for the Mac. That’s why even today, with the resurgence of OS X, it’s still hard to do CAD, circuit board design, 3D rendering or HAM radio stuff on a Mac. Some solutions exist, but few compared to on Windows.

Ah yes, Windows. Sure, Apple’s UI was years ahead to start with, but over time the rest of the computing world caught up. Windows is still not quite as slick as the Mac, but it’s good enough–the UI alone is no longer a compelling reason to get a Mac.

My feeling is that Apple is repeating the exact same mistake all over again with the iPhone, and then some. At least the Mac was an open platform.

The iPhone didn’t do anything that other phones couldn’t already do; what it had going for it was an incredibly slick UI. But Apple has locked down the iPhone and made it painful to develop for, with mandatory code signing and a bureaucratic approval process. They’ve prohibited entire classes of innovative application, and have a single hardware form factor. Want an iPhone with a replaceable battery, a flip-open form factor, or a hardware keyboard? Hard luck. Want to run Google Voice, a file server or the cult game DopeWars on your iPhone? Apple says no.

Android phones are now reaching iPhone-like levels of slickness. Android phones are being released by HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, and others. There are also non-phone devices running Android, such as the Archos tablet. Every major US cell phone network has Android devices on the way. The dev kit is free, and runs on every major platform. There are also a lot more Java developers around than there are Objective-C programmers.

So once again, I foresee Apple becoming a niche player. It might not get as bad as the days when the Mac had a single-digit percentage of the market, but I don’t see how they’re going to beat 15-20% with closed, locked-down hardware from a single vendor, when they couldn’t even beat MS-DOS with an open Macintosh OS.

Apple haven’t even beaten BlackBerry yet, in spite of the BlackBerry OS’s glaring defects–perhaps because of Apple’s refusal to ship a phone with a keyboard, an ironic move given that Steve Jobs famously ridiculed the Apple Newton by saying “Apple makes computers, computers have keyboards”. In some social circles it may seem like everyone has an iPhone, but the reality is somewhat different.

I’ve been thinking these thoughts for a while, but recently Gartner agreed with me, predicting that Android will come to dominate the iPhone and BlackBerry, because of its openness. Apple isn’t doomed; they can continue to turn a healthy profit with a small slice of the market, as they’ve proved with the Mac. But the iPhone’s days as the hot device where the innovation happens are numbered. Right now it has a lot of software–but then so did the Mac at first, but that changed by the 90s when Mac market share dropped to 5%.

I’m a Mac user. I like the iPhone UI. If they sold the phone completely unlocked, I’d probably have one now, in spite of the lack of keyboard. But instead, I’m looking ahead and predicting that my next phone will run Android. In particular, the Verizon Droid looks interesting. Time to experiment with the dev kit…