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Dear Google: Please Stop Finishing My Sentences For Me

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on September 8, 2010 by admin in Technology

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

I personally find Google Instant more annoying than useful. But I have 786,240,000 seconds to kill.

When a friend of mine’s two year old son doesn’t like something, he uses an expression which I find handy. He says “I can’t like it“. That’s my reaction to Google Instant. As googletastically amazing as I’m obliged to say that it is - for fear of being perceived as a Luddite - it mostly just gets on my nerves. There are a number of reasons I’ll probably keep the feature disabled, but primary amongst them is the fact that it mimics one of my few pet peeves, which is when people try to finish my sentences for me. My thinking is far too erratic most of the time for people to ever get it right. I mean, it wouldn’t bother me if they did get it right, but they almost never do. And since Google’s results have become so blogjammed anyway, I feel like I’m just getting often mediocre results faster. Which I don’t find all that gratifying. One of Google’s biggest sell points is that since they’ve determined that it saves you 2-5 seconds per search, they can make the cute claim that “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second“. Personally, I have the time to waste. If I live to the age of 75, I have about 786,240,000 seconds left. And if I did 50 searches a day for the rest of my life, that would only be about 456,250 searches, which - with the cantankerously slow “old school” method, clocking in at around 9 seconds per search - would only take me about 4 million seconds. I’ll wait. For the record, I have other objections that have to do with tools that control us rather than the other way around. A few of them are summarized nicely in this piece, which points out not only how much control the feature gives Google over word usage, but how the new feature affects how ads are displayed. I think Google Instant is more about creating Buzz than a good user experience. What about you? By the way. Thanks for not interrupting. Read the rest of this entry »

Confused By All The Google/Verizon Network Neutrality Talk?

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 10, 2010 by admin in Featured

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Don’t be. It’s simple. What Google and Verizon are trying to do is comparable to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone supporting free and open competition of horseless carriages while guaranteeing themselves protected monopolies to make cars.

Confused by all the talk from Google and Verizon about their plans for protecting net neutrality? Don’t be. All the jargon, press releases, and proposals thrown around by both companies are classic strategies. Confuse the public with a flurry of conflicting hints, public statements and denials while doing your best to control the actions of the agency that might regulate you. The nutshell version of what these two companies are trying to do with the internet and wireless broadband access could be likened to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone supporting free and open competition of horseless carriages while giving themselves protected monopolies of the yet-to-be defined automobile market. It’s dirty. But would you expect anything else from either company during economic times like this? And don’t get me going on the Google “don’t be evil” thing. We joked back in 2008 that Google’s got you covered top to bottom . And the irony of the words you’re about to read being surrounded by Google ads is not lost on me. But here’s the scary truth: if Facebook’s deceiptful privacy practices and attitude have caused you to be angry or concerned, Google’s attitude should trouble you exponentially more. Most recently, Google’s Eric Schmidt was quoted in this article as saying (in reference to the massive amounts of data compiled about you) that “The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a verified name service for people. Governments will demand it ” (emphasis mine). This is in line with his December 2009 remark that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Which may be true. But do you want a company like Google or Verizon to be the ones making these decisions? If this cavalier attitude doesn’t trouble you, and if - like many people - you have a Gmail account and use any of Google’s many free tools, try the following, if you haven’t already. Go to your Google Dashboard and see what they’ve been tracking. If you’re a light user of Gmail who just logs in and out to check mail, you’ll see little of interest here. But if you stay logged into your Google accounts all the time, you might be a little disturbed by how much information about you is compiled in one place. And now Google not only wants to know what you HAVE done, they think they can predict what you WILL do. By the way, if they’re so good at predicting the future, this begs the question: how did they not know that Facebook would kick their ass so bad on social networking? Read the rest of this entry »

Google And The CIA Invest In “Temporal Analytics Engine”

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on July 31, 2010 by admin in Featured, Technology

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Google and the CIA may sound like strange bedfellows, but not in an era in which the ad industry is building “databases of intentions” based on your surfing habits. Learn how “harmless” sites like Dictionary.com are tracking where you surf, and what you type while you’re there. And how to prevent it.

Love it or hate it (and in spite of occasionally hilarious results) the Google auto-complete feature can be uncannily accurate when guessing the rest of what you’ll type. So wouldn’t it be great if in the future, Google would know what you’re searching before you even search for it? If this sounds more like the movie Minority Report to you than reality, you should take a look into the kind of marketing and data mining methods that are in common usage on the web. For those of you who miss the “Big Brother” vibe of the Bush era and the Patriot Act, ponder this: Google and the CIA are both investing in a company called Recorded Future that “goes beyond search” to “visualize the future, past or present” using what Recorded Future calls a “Temporal Analytics Engine”. Although a disturbing alignment of interests, this isn’t so far from what other companies are already doing. Dig deep into the links in the recent WSJ feature What They Know to learn about who’s poking and prodding your browser, and which tracking technologies are at work. The days of simple cookies are over; these services use Bugs, Beacons and Flash Cookies (more on these insidious Adobe doodads below) not only to store information about which sites you visit, but even what you type while you’re there, or in the case of Flash Cookies, to re-insert the conventional cookies you’ve deleted without telling you! And we’re talking about “harmless” sites that you visit all the time, like Dictionary.com and CNN. While one might argue that you’d be happy to be served up ads based on the things you actively look at - which is a big part of what the intention is with these technologies - there are a few problems with that line of thinking. First of all, for people like me, this is an utterly useless approach; I do a lot of research looking at things that really don’t interest me. So when I write a piece about the billions being made by Farmville, for instance, I then get fed a constant stream of REALLY dumb ads targeting people who play web-based games and shop at Walmart. Another problem is that these third party services are often based on predictive marketing, and attach your data in ways that really DO very nearly identify you specifically with IP addresses and other information. BlueKai, for instance, is “aggregating valuable shopping and research behaviors across the Internet” to build “the world’s largest database of intentions”. Yes. You read that right. A “database of intentions”. If this stuff doesn’t trouble you, try putting what these companies are doing in a real-world scenario. Imagine going to the mall, buying something at The Gap, and then having a little attendant walk up and say “I’m just going to follow you around and watch what you buy, so we can improve your experience here at the mall today”. That would of course be annoying and unsettling, but wouldn’t it be even creepier if you knew a team of attendants were doing it with remote surveillance techniques? Below are some basic tips for easily blocking these rather invasive marketing tools. Read the rest of this entry »

How SEO, Google, and Facebook Are Ruining The Web, And Ruining You

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 9, 2010 by admin in Featured, Technology

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Has the web become a big Wordpress linkfarm driven by social networking?

I loved it the other day when Prince said “the internet’s completely over”. Like that statement, and the headline above, much of what I’m about to say will be hyperbole, opinion, and oversimplification. Which is ironic, because that’s kind of what the web has become as a result of some of what I’ll be talking about. Do you remember when there were more than three search engines? When grandma didn’t have a blog, and your mom didn’t ask you “how do I set up a Facebook?” Or when small business owners who can barely use e-mail didn’t ask their web developer questions like “we’ll be be implementing SEO and social media tools when you build my website, right?” I would argue that Google’s domination of search and the ease of installation of Wordpress blogs have done nearly irreversible damage to the web. How? Back when there were a half dozen or so competing search engines - Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, MSN, Yahoo, Altavista, etc. -they would have ups and downs and shortcomings, but competition would drive their evolution. And perhaps more importantly, an interesting cycle would drive part of that evolution: a popular search engine would attract SEO experts, which would slowly erode the engine’s organic results, which would cause a migration to a new search engine, which would inspire the top dog to clean up their index, or fail. Then Google came along. They did so many things so well in the beginning that it was almost magical. And slowly their competitors faded into oblivion, so that now, according to stats like this, Google has about 70% of the market, Yahoo 15%, and Bing 9%. So why is that bad? Although a disruptive technology could always come along, for now, there’s little incentive for developers and VC’s to say “hey, let’s start a search engine“. And with Google as basically the only portal to the web for most people, their search results have become so “spammed out” and infested with Wordpress-driven linkfarms in general results, and Yelp-like listings in local results, that random searches can often be utterly useless. And Google can care less about that for awhile, because where will you go? It’s sort of like if you were frustrated with your cable TV service. What are you gonna do, call the other cable company? Add to this mix an attempt to cash in on the myth of the wisdom of the crowd, and you get a real mess. Rather quickly, any site that is based on natural networks of user trust will fall apart. Think of something like Yelp. Who bothers to offer up reviews on sites like Yelp? Mostly either opinionated egoists, or angry people. Real experts are too busy doing whatever they do as experts. Which is an idea summed up nicely in this piece by Amber Naslund, which talks about “confusing ego with influence”. And when Facebook becomes the second most visited site on the web, you get an interesting new phase. Google vs Facebook. Google keeps going after Facebook, while Facebook enters the search market. I can’t wait ’til all my search results are based on “Like” buttons that were clicked in e-mail spam campaigns. How about you? Oh I don’t need to ask. Facebook’s Edgerank will keep me informed of what you’re thinking and doing if I need to know. Which is another piece of this e-pocalypse. We already know that Google is making us stupid, but once we’re stupid, is it really such a good idea to make Facebook the very first thing we do each day?

Google Wants Your TV

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on May 21, 2010 by admin in Featured, Popular Media

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Google TV is coming. Are you intrigued, or repulsed by the idea of Google reaching its tendrils even further into your daily life?


Yeah, yeah. Bad joke, but unavoidable.

Google TV’s pitch is “TV meets web. Web meets TV”. But wait. Didn’t this already happen back in 1997? Hard to believe that it’s been over ten years since Microsoft sunk $425,000,000 into this idea, and failed so miserably. Although they’re still around. Sort of. Obviously the availability of broadband and Google’s brawn and brains can bring something new to this realm, right? We all know the future holds some kind of convergence of your computer screen and your TV screen; it’s just a matter of who can pull the partnerships together. Or is it? This PC World piece asks some good questions, including “how probable is that you’ll want to use your television for Twitter or Instant messenger chats?” and then goes on to answer one of the only problems I see with Internet on the telly, by suggesting that maybe you could turn your Nexus One, iPhone, or even iPad into a visual remote. It will be interesting to see where this all goes, given the corporate partnerships with Intel, Sony, and Best Buy, among others. I personally won’t be too enthused if the service is dependent on a cable or satellite subscription. I’ve been happy without that much TV for years. None of the partners are talking dates for a launch yet, saying that would be premature, but Google wouldn’t be pitching it if they didn’t have SOME idea what they’re planning. Or is it a HOAX? If you haven’t tried watching TV on the web before and don’t want to wait until BoobTube is launched, you could check out our Best Sites For Watching TV On Line piece from last fall. How about you though - are you intrigued, or repulsed by the idea of Google reaching its tendrils even further into your daily life? Read the rest of this entry »

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