Google has advised businesses, organizations, and brands — basically, any entity that isn’t an individual human being — to hold off on setting up a Google+ presence.
Eventually though, Google will allow businesses to join. Over at VentureBeat, Jolie O’Dell quotes a nameless Google spokesperson:
While Google is mum on exactly what the business profiles will include, the spokesperson did say, “You can expect to see a level of analytics and measurement that you’d typically find in Google products as well as a nuanced approach to how things are shared. It encourages and enhances conversation, it doesn’t just put things in the stream.”
A “nuanced approach how things are shared” sounds an awful lot like code for Google+ Ads.
My bet: when these Google+ business profiles go live, they’ll be heavily tied into Google’s existing advertising infrastructure, and we’ll see the rollout of something very similar to Facebook’s ad targeting system:
Think about it. If you’ve bought into the whole Google lifestyle, they have your search history, email, breadcrumbs scattered across the web through Analytics… and now, your social graph. What would you do if your company had all of that?
Here’s a fun experiment you can do at home: if you’re on both Google+ and Facebook, go take a look at each sites. Compare and contrast. Did you notice what’s conspicuously missing from Google+? Yup. Ads.
Right now, my Google+ experience is entirely ad-free. But my gut tells me that’s going to change pretty soon.
The first time I heard the virtues of solid-state drives extolled was on One Thing Well. Then, Gruber and Dan Benjamin kept mentioning them on The Talk Show. My pal Thomas started swearing by SSDs. And when Khoi Vinh blogged about his SSD experience, I finally broke down and ordered a Mercury Extreme Pro SSD from OWC.
Holy smokes.
I’m now a believer. Our family’s mid-2007 MacBook got a serious kick in the pants. As Khoi said, “It really is like getting a brand new computer.” For a couple hundred bucks, an SSD breathed new life into our four-year old laptop. Now it seems just as snappy (if not moreso) than the flashy new MacBook Airs we play with at the mall.
If you’re considering swapping out your HDD for an SSD, do it now.
Classifieds were revolutionized by Craigslist and eBay, not by the newspapers. Music distribution was revolutionized by Napster, Kazaa, Bittorrent, or iTunes, not by the music industry. The commercial potential of the World Wide Web was realized by Netscape, not by Microsoft.
And online bookstores got off the ground with Amazon, which was founded by a former senior vice-president at a quantitative hedge fund with a degree in computer science and electric engineering, not by Barnes and Noble. My research suggests that this is not an accident.
It really makes me wonder where the next big revolution in public radio is going to come from. If these other industries are any indication, the next big thing probably won’t come from the CBCs, NPRs, or BBCs of the world.
This week, my CBC Radio tech column focused on holiday gadget-buying. I looked at three gadget categories: ebook readers, digital cameras, and HDTVs. The focus wasn’t on what to buy, but rather, how to be smart about buying it.
I do my columns eighteen times every Tuesday (on most CBC Radio One afternoon shows). Here’s an MP3 from one of my hits, with Peter Brown of CBC Edmonton’s Radio Active:
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There’s certainly a lot of choice out there: The Sony Reader. The Amazon Kindle. The Kobo, which is Canadian technology. Plus, a number of tablet computers (iPad, Samsung Tab) can be used as e-readers.
Personally, I think one of the most important questions you need to ask yourself when considering an e-reader for someone else is, “Where will they get their ebooks from?” If they want to read older stuff (Alice in Wonderland, or Little Dorrit), there are several places to download free, public domain books that’ll work on pretty much any e-reader. But it becomes more complicated if they plan to buy or borrow books.
Most e-readers on the market have an ebook store that goes along with them. For instance, Apple has the iBook store. But here’s the thing: the selection of books isn’t the same in every store. So, I really suggest you check out the different ebook stores. See if they have the kinds of books that appeal to the person you’re buying for.
Also, I know that many Canadian public libraries have started to offer digital downloads, so if you’re buying for a library user, make sure the device works with the system their local library uses.
Also, “where does this person do most of their reading?” Some ereaders are better suited to reading outdoors in direct sunlight, and others are better suited to reading in low light.
HDTVs
First thing to ask is: “how far away from the TV will I be when I’m watching?” That will help you calculate what they call the “optimum TV viewing distance.” There are several online tools that you can use to calculate this. You type in, say, the distance from your couch to your TV stand, and it’ll tell you the ideal TV size. Or, you can type in the size of the TV you want, and it’ll calculate how far away from it you should sit. And I know it’s hard to believe, but yes, it is possible to buy a TV that’s too big.
If you go HDTV shopping, you’ll hear a lot of tech specs. People will talk about 1080i versus 720p. They’ll talk about refresh rate: 60Hz, 120Hz, 240Hz, and on and on. These are the sorts of things that really matter to videophiles, but for most people, the biggest factors are the size of your TV, and how close you sit to it.
Another choice you’ll be faced with is going with an LCD versus a Plasma TV. Historically, a big part of the debate has been about which is better for fast moving proogramming like sports or video games. Historically, plasmas have been better for that, but these days LCD technology has improved significantly.
My advice: set a budget, figure out the optimal TV size for your room, and get the best you can for the size and price you’ve set.
Digital cameras
When it comes to choosing a camera, there are a lot of factors. And people have very different priorities: for some people, size and portability are really important. For others, it’s all about how easy it is to use. For others, it’s about expandability – can I add new lenses or accessories? Everyone has their own set of preferences. Which can make buying a camera as a gift quite difficult.
And, like with TVs, there are a lot of tech specs you can get caught up with. Most notoriously: megapixels. My advice: don’t get caught up in the megapixel game. At this point, it’s a marketing thing, and the biggest factors that’ll affect the photos you take are the lens and the sensor size. NOT the number of megapixels — anything on the market right now is more than what the average consumer needs.
I want to tell you about a website that I have found incredibly useful for choosing a camera. It’s called Measy.com. Basically, you go to this site, and it asks you a bunch of questions: what’s your budget? How important is size? Do you prefer a certain brand? That kind of thing. Then it gives you a list of cameras that it thinks will be good. And the best part of this is that you can answer these questions as though you’re the person you’re buying for. I tried this with my mother-in-law, and the camera that Measy recommended was an updated version of the one she already owned.
A word on extended warranties
I can’t go without mentioning extended warranties. Stores push these warranties so hard because they make huge profits from them. But Consumer Reports (the non-profit, independent consumer rights organization) calls them “notoriously bad deals,” and generally advises against them.
Their research has found that, products usually don’t break within the extended-warranty window, and when they do break, the repairs, on average, cost about the same as an extended warranty. They say the only possible exceptions are laptops, netbooks, or tablets. Personally, I’ve only every bought one extended warranty, and it was on a laptop. Other than that, I avoid them like the plague.
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This week’s CBC Radio tech column is all about app stores.
I think there are two things worth mentioning when we talk about app stores:
First: this market is huge.
Second: At least right now, app stores are almost exclusively focused on mobile devices: smartphones and tablets. It seems everybody has an app store these days. Blackberry has their App World. Android Phones have the Android Market. Windows Phones have the App Marketplace. Nokia has the Ovi Store. Apple devices have the App Store. If you own a smartphone, chances are there’s an app store for it.
And this is a multi-billion dollar business (last year, Gartner predicted $6.2 billion for 2010). I asked Apple for their latest numbers, and they told me that their customers have downloaded more than 7 billion apps since their store launched. Not all of those are paid, but many of them are. Again, this market is absolutely huge.
Even though the focus thus far has been on smartphones, that’s about to change. The big news is that Apple is set to expand its app store onto the desktop with its Mac App Store. Google is planning a similar move with its Chrome Web Store. To be clear, this isn’t about running phone apps on your computer. Apple wants to sell you full-fledged desktop apps to run on your computer (think word processors, spreadsheets, photo editors, games). A big part of what they’re trying to do here is take some of the hassle out of downloading installing software.
The move to the desktop
Once upon a time, if you wanted a new program for your computer, you had to go to a store and buy a shrink-wrapped box with a disk inside of it. You’d bring it home, put the disk in, and run an installer program. Sometimes there’d be a little slip of paper with some crazy-long license key, and you’d have to type that in to prove that you actually bought the software. Even now, when a lot of people download new software from the internet, you end up with some kind of .zip file, or a .dmg file, and you have to figure out what to do with that. It’s hardly the most elegant way to get a new program, and I think for a lot of people, it can be intimidating.
Compare that to the experience of buying an app on a smartphone like an iPhone. You go to the store, tap “Buy” and the thing downloads and installs. No disks, no funny filenames, no installers. In a lot of ways, it’s taken a lot of the work (and intimidation) out of downloading new programs.
Who wins?
If you’re a consumer, you arguably get a better experience when you buy and download new software. It’s certainly simpler.
Software developers stand to benefit from this as well. Right now, if you’re a software company, you don’t just have to write the software. You also have to promote it, and try and get people to talk about it, and market it. Plus, you have to handle all the back-end stuff that goes along with selling software: generating license keys, and processing credit card payments. With Apple’s Mac App Store model, you write the software, and Apple handles all that back-end stuff.
The other big advantage is scale. As a software developer, you theoretically have access to a very, very large audience of people who’ll be looking at the App Store for the latest thing to download.
But, it’s also important to remember that whoever runs the app store stands to benefit for this. For instance, Apple says it will take 30% of all sales through its Mac App Store.
Censorship concerns
Ever since Apple announced that they were going to open up this new Mac App Store, there have been many concerns.
First and foremost, people are concerned about Apple’s review process. Ultimately, Apple is the gatekeeper for everything that ends up on their store. In the past, they’ve rejected certain apps that include “adult content.” They rejected a political cartoon app because it “ridiculed public figures.” So obviously, some censorship concerns there. That said, you don’t have to use the App Store, and you can get software elsewhere. But people do worry about that “walled garden” effect.
There are also some logistical challenges when it comes to things like upgrades. For instance, what if I already own a piece of software because I bought it in a box from a store? Can I get an upgrade from the App Store? Or do I have to buy it all over again?
Apple not the only player
There are also smaller, independent app stores out there. For instance, there’s one called Bodega that’s been out for a while. It’s a program you can download and install. And once you have it, it makes buying and downloading and updating your software much easier.
Obviously, the app store model has worked incredibly well for some companies in the mobile space. It’s not clear yet whether that’ll translate into the desktop market. But with the Mac app store set to launch sometime in the next couple of weeks, and the Google Chrome Web Store soon too, it’s definitely worth watching.
About a year ago, Yahoo shut down GeoCities. Before the site was shuttered forever, a group called the Archive Team decided to grab as much GeoCities content as possible. They got almost a terabyte, and now plan to release it all as a torrent.
My CBC Radio tech column this Tuesday will be about GeoCities, The Archive Team, and web ephemera. As research, I interviewed Jason Scott of textfiles.com, one of the minds behind the Archive Team.
Due to time restraints, I usually only play short clips from my interviews on-air. But this was so interesting, I asked Jason for his permission to post our whole chat on this site. He agreed, so here it is (runs 58:12):
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You have email account x@y.com, which is your main email. You have the password XYZ, which you use for everything. You register at paypal with your email address x@y.com and use your normal password. You then register at some obscure webforum using your normal email and password.
Obscure webforum keeps new member details in plain text on their site. Hacker hits obscure webforum and takes thousands of email addresses and site passwords. Hacker then feeds these emails and passwords into paypal, a good proportion of which will actually work.
If you don’t know Auto-Tune the News, it’s a series of comedy remix videos by The Gregory Brothers. Most recently, they remixed this local news clip of Antoine Dodson, speaking out about his sister’s sexual assault:
into the viral hit “Bed Intruder Song”:
Now, they’re selling the song on iTunes, and it’s flying off the virtual shelves. According to Wired.com, The Gregory Brothers sold 10,571 copies of “Bed Intruder Song” on iTunes in the first two days. What’s more, the tune has made it onto the Billboard Hot 100. In a classy move, The Gregory Brothers split the profits 50/50 with Antoine Dodson:
We’re really breaking “unintentional singing” ground, so we’re trying to set precedents by making it so that Antoine, or whoever that artist might be in the future, has a stake not only as an artist but as a co-author of the song. It’s like you said: He wrote the lyrics, he’s the one who put it out there. What we’re doing on iTunes and on any other sales, we’re splitting the revenue after it gets through Apple down the middle. And that [also applies] if we ever license the song for TV or a movie. Whatever happens to the song, he has a 50 percent writing credit.
Though this is an American example, I think this story is particularly interesting to Canadians, in light of new proposed copyright legislation, which includes a “YouTube clause that allows people to mash up media under certain circumstances, as long as it’s not for commercial gain.” From Bill C-32:
It is not an infringement of copyright for an individual to use an existing work or other subject-matter … in the creation of a new work or other subject-matter in which copyright subsists … if the use of, or the authorization to disseminate, the new work or other subject-matter is done solely for non-commercial purposes
So, C-32 would make it OK for me to remix a local news report, so long as the remix was non-commercial (or covered by C-32′s parody or satire exceptions). But what does “non-commercial” even mean? At what point would a Canadian version of the The Gregory Brothers’ videos become commercial? Would it be after they get millions of views on YouTube? After they start selling the songs on iTunes? And what about the advertising that YouTube runs against “non-commercial” videos? Non-commercial means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Just read Creative Commons: Defining Noncommercial.
And when it comes to ownership, it’s incredibly muddy to me. My non-commercial remix may be a new work, and I may hold the copyright to it, but am I suddenly infringing copyright if my remix becomes a YouTube hit and the cheques start rolling in? In that situation, what becomes of the Antoine Dodsons of the world? The Gregory Brothers are splitting their piece of the pie with him, but do they have to? Should they have to?
Memetics and remix culture are the lifeblood of the web, and are constantly evolving. The first Auto-Tune the News video showed up 16 months ago. 16 months ago! Can legislation ever catch up with such a wildly moving target?
If you have opinions or (fingers crossed) pointers to some clarification around remixes and ownership under C-32, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
This morning, Facebook rolled out Places, their location-based service that lets users “check in” to places in the real world. Think Foursquare, Gowalla, et al, but on a much larger scale. Places is only available in the US right now, but still, that’s 131 million users.
Here’s what I find particularly scary about this announcement: Facebook Place Tagging. From Jolie O’Dell at Mashable (emphasis mine):
You can add places, check in to places that already exist, and tag people who are with you. If you’re checking in for a group, make sure you tag your friends before you checkin, yourself. For example, I added my house and checked in there. I then opened the Places page for a nearby sushi restaurant, tagged my boyfriend, and checked us both in there.
Wait a minute! Other people can check me in? Yup. According to Facebook’s FAQ:
You can tag your friends who are with you at any given location as long as you are checked-in and they have set their privacy settings so they can be tagged.
It’s not hard to imagine how this could become incredibly problematic. Personally, I don’t want anyone but me to have the power to share my location. Remember what happened to Plazes CEO Felix Peterson? Or just consider any number of potentially embarrassing Foursquare check-ins. Now, consider that all of your Facebook friends have the ability to create those awkward location-based snafus for you.
Two predictions:
It’s only be a matter of time before we see a blog dedicated to “embarrassing third-party Facebook Place check-ins”
The alibi fabrication industry is about to blow right up
