Micro Notes

Where I'd like to be

I'm extremely good at conceptualizing, initial launch, and getting seed customers. I like that kind of early startup opportunity. I'm also extremely good in navigating bureaucracy, more with the goal of getting around it than complying with it.

html5 and the mobile web don't play well

So, this html5 example presentation works well on Google Chrome dev for Mac and decently on Safari 4.04. It might do better on webkit nightly. That said, on those desktop browsers, performance is impressive. It's a wow moment on either one, though a bit more so on Chrome dev.

The story is quite different on mobile safari as realized on iPad where nothing, not even the first page, renders properly. Also, the Android 2.1 browser, while at least rendering the first page, doesn't advance beyond it, at least not without a bluetooth keyboard wed to it. So, if you're on a mobile device, you're not getting any of the demo goodness.

Therein I think lies the problem of html5. Much of its development, while perhaps having the concept of mobile in mind, has been geared toward the capabilities and interface of desktop or at least laptop systems. Those systems have many times the RAM and processing capabilities of mobile systems.

I'd like to see a mobile html5 demo deck. It would probably provide much less of a wow experience, though I can attest that even the simple support of the video element on mobile safari is, to say the least, refreshing and fun.

n.b. This post is written on Typepad because it has a superior mobile posting interface built to the actual capabilities of a mobile browser.

The Idea of a personal cloud

After I asserted that Apple didn't have a cloud strategy, I had someone suggest to me that Apple didn't have a cloud strategy because consumers didn't care about the cloud. It was only a corporate thing for people looking to garner efficiences.

Little could be further from the truth.

Anyone who uses webmail or facebook is in essence using the cloud although the infrastructure may be supported by just one company. Anybody who uses their facebook logon on another site is taking advantange of facebook's willingness to syndicate their services out for use by other providers. That's at the heart of Sofware as a Service, what many mean when they say cloud computing.

Personal cloud services are those where a company or companies make their services available to users over the Internet. These services might let users authenticate at other sites or store their files such that they are accessible from anywhere with a web connection.

When I said Apple didn't have a cloud strategy, I meant they had not thought through what the package of services users might need and taken the necessary steps to integrate them into recent products like the iPad.

Tonight

So, let's just call this post a small aperçu.

Tonight, stepping from the strip mall coffee shop, I experienced the beauty of nature with no frame to contain her.

This blog is now syndicated into Google Buzz

This has been over a month coming, and I started another blog in the interim. You can read the full saga here. Yay!

The web is about narrow casting with broad reach

Most people are niche players on the web. They have expertise in one narrow area, for instance search marketing, and that's it. What often plagues such people is that their reach, the circle in which they are known, does not extend beyond their local community. The web can help with that by allowing niche players to make themselves visible beyond the narrow confines of their locale.

Buzz could be the social media grand central of sharing, but it's flawed and nothing quite works right

I've been using Google Buzz since the day it launched. At first, it seemed like an improved version of Google Wave, and indeed the two share a lot of features such as an underlying messaging protocol that makes updates appear in real time like instant messages. But, there is a fundamental difference that makes them not at all alike. Wave is private, by invite only. Buzz, by counter, is essentially a public aggregator of all things you. Sharing is hard in Wave and on by default in Buzz.

The problem is that Buzz breaks in most sharing use cases. I'll name a few:

• Although, I have indicated to Buzz that this blog belongs to me and has a public feed, it's unclear that this post will actually share in my Buzz stream. The blog is housed on Typepad. Buzz seems right now to mainly work with Google properties, except when it doesn't.
• Remarkably, sharing within Google's own properties is pretty problematic. Here's a few examples:
• • If a Blogger blog post is shared in Buzz, comments on the post remain Buzz only. It would seem they should also appear on the blogger version. After all, they're both public, and they're both the same piece of content. A central problem in social media sharing today is that fact that it's balkanized between services; this observation seems to apply to Google's own services.
  • Google Reader is also supposedly Buzz aware. One chief use case of Google Reader in the social media world is to share articles. Commenting on these shared items is natural in Buzz's gmail interface, not so natural in Reader. Again, we're faced with balkanization even at the Google level. One is forced to assume that Google just doesn't get sharing, at least at some level.
• When external services are integrated with Buzz, they're strangely broken. Take the case of Feedly, a social feed reader that integrates with Google Reader. Like Reader, people use feedly for sharing articles. When Buzz first emerged, Feedly touted its immediate integration. However, if you try to comment on a shared feedly article in your buzz stream, you get an error message. It can't be done.

The weird thing is that most of these things almost work. If you're hyper aware, you can see the potential. The problem is that most people just aren't going to work that hard.

I'll end on a plus though. I'm sticking with Buzz because the quality of interaction with my loosely joined social network (those I communicate with mainly electronically) is much higher than elsewhere. I'm much more aware of what some of them are doing, and it's interesting.

Orwell forgot the good parts of 1984: why I'm liking Google's embrace of all my data

Google recently announced that individual search was opt out. In other words, unless you specifically say no, Google is going to track your web surfing behavior and use that behavior to tailor the search results it displays to you. I now have the Google phone (Android) which is tied to my Google account. I use Google location services and Gmail.

Basically, Google's got it all, sort of like Big Brother in Orwell's 1984.

Should I be more worried?

The truth is: I'm getting a ton of use out of it. Search results have gotten better. I can find nearby friends and locations using my phone. Gmail has incredible spam filtering.

Orwell forgot the good aspects of 1984.

In search of time lost, or how Google search won't take you back to the way it used to be

Recently, I discovered an old, old friend via a Google search. You might say she had been hidden in plain sight using an obfuscated blog name intended only for her current close friends (she remains an incredible writer, exactly as I knew her 30 years ago). I found her because someone linked to her blog using her name, and Google has gotten good at ferreting out even the most obscure references and raising them to the top.

At any rate, I think one of her recent blog posts, and my response to it pretty well sum up how the explosion of web content, in combination with the magic of Google, has completely remade past reminiscence into something you can immediately act on, not always for the better. 

Here's a key remark from her blog post:

Every now and then the Internet weirds me out. At one time I was on the LinkedIn site, at the urging of a friend. That innocent effort at "connecting" led to contact with a former boyfriend I'd rather have had remain in my past. Not that he hasn't remained in my past, but the note reactivated thoughts about him. (Not endearing.)

And my extended comment back (btw, the boyfriend was not me):

At the end of the day, the Internet is a weird thing. It used to be that people would stay in your past; it was so hard to stay in touch. You had to write letters, and before the dawn of desktop publishing, you had to write them expressly for the individual.

Well ... a lot of people simply became fond memories, or perhaps not so fond.

Now, all you have to do is fire up the Google, and there everyone you once knew is. Perhaps, they're writing a blog which someone linked to using their name.

And, it can be hard not fire up the old Google. At our age, we pass a lot of milestones. We become the progenitors we once looked to for protection and succor. It's hard not to look at the past and wonder if it's not still there.

Of course, it's not, but its remnants remain, in the form of other middle-aged people who've gone on like we have. In a way, that fact is simultaneously both the most disconcerting and the most reassuring part of the whole process.

Put simply, as I know you know, your old boyfriend was looking for closure, and you were kind to give him some.

n.b. I normally link when providing excerpts from another site, but she doesn't want visibility, so I'll respect that. The first part of this post's title, "In search of time lost" is the title of Marcel Proust's most famous work and refers to the involuntary nature of our memories. My old friend and I were French majors together.

I don't just want to know what my friends think. I want to know what people who know something think.

A lot is being made of a face off between Google and Facebook, and perhaps between Google and all social media. The idea of a face off has a lot of facets and perhaps some merit, but one claim by Ken Auletta, recent author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, is just idiotic:

A potentially more efficient threat will come from a vertical search, which social networks like Facebook and Twitter might provide. Imagine you want to buy a camera. Would you rather have the advice of 20 friends whom you know and trust and who share their experience with cameras, or 20,000 or so links from a Google search? Google knows the answer to that question, which is why it tried — and failed — to acquire Twitter last spring. 

There are a few things that are egregious here:

1. The presumption that your friends are experts at solving problems you might experience. Just to make the absurdity of this idea starkly apparent, answer this question, "Who do you call in the case of a car crash?" Likely, it's the paramedics and not your best friend.
2. The presumption that knowing there might be a multiplicity of relevant results is bad. It would be bad if you had to sift through all 20,000 results to find the good one, but you don't. Results are returned ranked by relevance. Often people find what they are looking for well shy of the end of the first page of search engine results and often within the first two or three results on the page.
3. The failure to note the stark reality that no one uses facebook or twitter search in anywhere near the same way as Google search. There's really two points here: (1) The kind of thing people search for; (2) The frequency of those searches. On twitter, people search for other people and late breaking events. On Facebook, the only real search available is for other users, pages, and groups.

Now, to be fair, one thing people do fairly regularly, is throw questions out to their friends on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. But, based on my own personal experience, my guess is that inputs from friend networks tend to broaden the range of potential solutions that must be then refined and narrowed using, you guessed it, search engines like Google.