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Archive for June, 2011

Google, target of worldwide surveillance and takedown requests

28 Jun

Google continued to demonstrate its commitment to transparency on Monday by releasing fresh statistics on the number of times it has disclosed private user data to a government, or removed content at government request. The country-by-country report covers the second half of 2010.

During that period, the United States was the top requester of user information (4,601 requests), while Brazil was the leader in takedowns, with 263 requests leading to the removal of 12,363 items.

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Why Google+ won’t hurt Facebook, but Skype will hate it

28 Jun

Google launched its much awaited and highly anticipated social networking platform today to a limited number of users. Dubbed Google+ (Plus), the service may take its cue from social networking giant Facebook, but in the end it is about the harsh reality of Google saving and enhancing its core franchise — Google Search. It is search (and, by extension, advertising) that made Google a company that has run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission because of its huge size and influence.

At the time of Google’s founding, search was broadly defined as a sifting through a directory of websites. As the web grew, search became all about pages. Google, with its PageRank, came to dominate that evolution of search.

Today, search is not just about pages, but also about people and the relevance of information to them.

Google’s senior executives — long dismissive of the idea of importance of social to search — were contrite during their briefing earlier this week. “It is about time we have come to the realization,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product with Google, “If you don’t know people, then you can’t organize the information for people.”

Google’s realization — however late – that it needs to use social, location and other signals to enhance its core search platform is welcome. “Google needs to understand these relationships and basically use those to make search better,” said Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president for Social in an hour-long briefing earlier this week.

Why? Because the the internet (and information) are expanding with such rapidity that there is no room for assumptions, and as such our systems need to adapt to this world of no (or alternatively infinite) assumptions. Google needs to adapt, and getting social and location signals is important for the company. Search is now search relevant to you in the context of your world — and that is where Google+ comes in.

What is Google Plus?

Is Google+ a destination like Facebook.com? Is it a social network? Is this an identity play? The answer to those questions is yes and no. Google’s Gundotra said that this is the first step by the company in its long social journey, which is going to evolve.

Today, you can get to Google Plus by visiting a website – Google.com/+. But it also travels with you across different Google web properties, thanks to a Google Toolbar. The toolbar is personal to you and allows you to share and send photos, videos, links or just simple messages. A notification icon informs you if others have shared stuff with you.

Google, Gundotra says, has leveraged its infrastructure to offer an array of services, and at the same time the company is attacking Facebook’s noticeable shortcoming — granular privacy that average folks can understand. More importantly it is trying hard to not be compared with Facebook.

Some of Google + Features:

In order to use Google +, you need to have a Google account, though it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have a Google Mail account. Once you set-up your Google account, you can use your address book to invite people to your network and use that as a starting point.

Circles: Google has come up with the concept of circles — you can create a circle of contacts that are family, friends, work friends, former co-workers and so on. With these groups or circles you can define who gets to see what kind of updates. Facebook currently doesn’t offer the ability to control who sees what goes in our life that we share online.

Hangout: This just might be the killer feature of Google + effort. It is essentially group video chat done right. You click on the Hangout button and invite members of a certain group by sending them a notification. If there is no one around, all I could do is hang about without much drain on the system waiting for someone to show up. So theoretically I could invite all members of team GigaOM circle and have a quick video chat. In the demo at least, Hangout felt intuitive and easy to use (Google uses its own video codec and not Adobe Flash for this feature).

Huddle: This is a mobile group-chat service that is very much like Beluga, the fast-growing service that was snapped up by Facebook weeks after it was launched and is now said to be part of a major new communications push by Facebook. I think this is a great little feature and frankly, if Google was smart they should be rolling this out to all Google Apps for the Enterprise customers.

Instant Uploads: It has also come up with a new approach to mobile photos & videos. Google calls it Instant Uploads. Take a photo and it uploads to your Picasa or YouTube account and then you can share those videos via Google+  to specific “circles.”

Sparks: It is a new feature that allows you to create topics of interest and use them as source of information and then share it with various different groups. For instance, I could share results of Top Gear with my “petrol head” friends. These “interest” or “topic” packs offer a lot of content and not surprisingly YouTube videos. Circles, Hangout and Huddle are about personal sharing and personal communications. Sparks on the other hand is devoid of that connection and stands out as a sore thumb.

Google Plus + Chrome + Android

A few months ago, I wrote about how Google could beat Facebook, pointing out that it was not going to be on the web, and instead on the mobile.

I’ve always maintained Google has to play to its strengths – that is, tap into its DNA of being an engineering-driven culture that can leverage its immense infrastructure. It also needs to leverage its existing assets even more, instead of chasing rainbows. In other words, it needs to look at Android and see if it can build a layer of services that get to the very essence of social experience: communication.

However, instead of getting bogged down by the old-fashioned notion of communication – phone calls, emails, instant messages and text messages – it needs to think about interactions. In other words, Google needs to think of a world beyond Google Talk, Google Chat and Google Voice.

To me, interactions are synchronous, are highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it’s photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical.

The ability to interact on an ongoing basis anywhere, any time and sharing everything, from moments to emotions – is what social is all about. From my vantage point, this is what Google should focus on.

I am glad to see Google is thinking along these lines and is building products with a mobile-first point of view, a concept that former CEO Eric Schmidt has often talked about.

While I was given a demo by the Google executives on a notebook computer, the heavy use of HTML5 makes Google Plus an experience that could easily work on Android tablets and Android phones. Instant Uploads, Circles, Huddle and Hangout can work on these mobile devices without much textual input, making them easy to use on the touch-centric mobile platforms. Google at the same is also making  Google Plus available as an app – for Android and the iPhone platform – ensuring that it is getting the experience right.

Facebook Has Nothing To Worry About

I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about. However, there is a whole slew of other companies that should be on notice. Just as Apple put several app developers on notice with the announcement of its new iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion, Google+ should give folks at companies such as Blekko, Skype and a gaggle of group messaging companies a pause. I personally think Skype Video can easily be brought to its knees by Google Plus’ Hangout. And even if Google+ fails, Google could easily make Hangout part of the Google office offering.

One of the reasons why I think Facebook is safe is because it cannot be beaten with this unified strategy. Theoretically speaking, the only way to beat Facebook is through a thousand cuts. Photo sharing services such as Instagram can move attention away from Facebook, much like other tiny companies who can bootstrap themselves based on Facebook social graph and then built alternative graphs to siphon away attention from Facebook. Google, could in theory go one step further – team up with alternative social graphs such as Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr and use those graphs to create an uber graph.

Build it, But Will They Come?

View This Poll
online surveysIn the past, I have been pretty skeptical of Google’s social ambitions, mostly because of company’s DNA. Based on a briefing and a demo, I am not yet ready to change my opinion.

Google needs this social effort to work — it needs to get a lot of people using the service to create an identity platform that can rival Facebook Connect. It needs the people to improve its search offering. Of course, the Google’s biggest challenge is to convince people to sign-up for yet another social platform, especially since more and more people are hooked into Facebook (750 million) and Twitter. I don’t feel quite compelled to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google, just as I don’t feel too compelled to switch to Bing from Google for Search.

I can easily see services such as Hangout and Huddle get traction, but will that be enough to get traction with hundreds of millions of people? Doubtful, though I am happy to be proven wrong, for it would surely be nice to have a counterbalance to Facebook.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):


 
 

Are Indian Developers More Skilled Than Americans?

28 Jun

Is there any truth to the belief that U.S. tech jobs are outsourced to India at least in part because Indian developers are better skilled than U.S. workers? According to GILD, a company that combines professional social networking with games that assess skills, there are some areas in which Indians beat their counterparts in the U.S, but there are others in which Americans excel. GILD examined the results of over 1 million assessments taken by over 500,000 developers with an average of 2-3 years of experience.

Sponsor

According to GILD:

  • Indian developers outscore U.S. developers by 11% on math and logic analytical skills
  • U.S. programmers outperform Indian programmers on mainstream programming languages including C (US 8% higher), JAVA (9% higher) and SQL (9% higher)
  • U.S. professionals score higher on web programming languages: 53% higher scores on advanced PHP; 27% higher on advanced HTML
  • U.S. tech professionals are 33% better skilled than Indian counterparts at English communication skills

In an announcement, GILD CEO Sheeroy Desai said that "America still holds a strong lead when it comes to web development, but I suspect the gap will narrow over the next few years."

Photo by andi.vs.zf

Discuss

 
 

Milk UI Kit Freebie

28 Jun

Hey guys, I know its been awhile since we have released a new tutorial. That is partly my fault as I have been super busy lately but I did get an awesome freebie to release for your guys today. Thanks to our friend Dominic Wood we have this amazing Milk UI Kit for you to download. Several pieces of this UI Kit have been featured on the popular page of Dribbble, admired by other designers, so Dom and I decided we would release them to you guys. Anyway, feel free to download.

 
 

Georgia School Board Bans ‘Theory Of Math’

28 Jun
COGDELL, GA—The Cogdell School Board banned the teaching of the controversial "Theory Of Math" in its schools Monday. "We are simply not confident of this mysterious process by which numbers turn, as if by magic, into other numbers," board member Gus Reese said. "Those mathematicians are free to believe 3 times 4 equals 12, but that dun [sic] give them the right to force it on our children." Under the new ruling, all math textbooks will carry a disclaimer noting that math is only one of many valid theories of number-manipulation.

 
 

Under Sink Solution: Hang Spray Bottles From Tension Rod A Thousand Words

28 Jun

undersink03.jpg

If the cabinet under your sink could use a little organization, check out this quick fix. For more under sink storage and easier access to the Windex, try hanging those spray bottles from a tension rod.



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Recent history

28 Jun

I LOVE today's Daily chart:

Here's some of the accompanying text:

The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already "longer" than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010...

More person years have been lived in the first decade of the current century than in all of the 17th century. And nearly 80% of the economic output of the last millenium has been produced in just the last 110 years. Everyone likes to think that they live in historical times. As it so happens, we do.

 
 

What is the point of pruney fingers?

28 Jun

The common wisdom is that your fingers wrinkle when they’re wet because they absorb water. But Mark Changizi thinks there’s more to it than that. According to him, pruney fingers are an adaptation to help humans, and probably other primates, get a better grip during wet conditions. They act like the rain treads on tyres. Mark lays out his hypothesis in a wonderful paper that I wrote up as a news story for Nature News.

Here’s the start; click through for the whole thing.

The wrinkles that develop on wet fingers could be an adaptation to give us better grip in slippery conditions, the latest theory suggests.

The hypothesis, from Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist at 2AI Labs in Boise, Idaho, and his colleagues goes against the common belief that fingers turn prune-like simply because they absorb water.

Changizi thinks that the wrinkles act like rain treads on tyres. They create channels that allow water to drain away as we press our fingertips on to wet surfaces. This allows the fingers to make greater contact with a wet surface, giving them a better grip.

Scientists have known ...

 
 

Why so cold? The last refuge of Antarctica’s forests

28 Jun

We know Antarctica as an unfathomably cold wasteland, suitable for little beyond penguins and foolhardy researchers. But it hasn’t always been like that. At times in the distant past, plate tectonics and warmer climates have combined to cover Antarctica with lush forests, dinosaurs, and even marsupials. A paper published in PNAS details the final transition from habitable continent to the inhospitable ice cap that has developed over the past 40 million years. Its results describe the ecosystems that survived in the last unglaciated corner of Antarctica before the ice sheet swept away the last remnants of terrestrial life.

To accomplish this, the team behind the paper set out to read the history recorded in the sediment around the Antarctic Peninsula (Antarctica’s "tail"), which would have been the last piece of the continent to be covered by an ice sheet. They used seismic imaging of the sedimentary layers offshore to identify locations with sediment from the desired age range.

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bevara terrariums

28 Jun


I’m on a bit of a forced terrarium hiatus right now (I went a little overboard with glassed-in plants last year), but these hand-blown terrariums from Bevara were too beautiful not to share. Made in Poland, each of these terrariums is a seamless egg shape that makes them suitable for indoor or outdoor use. I just love the clean shapes — they’d be perfect for something small and simple. If you’re looking to add a handmade terrarium to your collection, you can email your order right here ($200 each) at Bevara’s website. xo, grace