The 2008 Gmail Appeal

Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.

More on the Email Standards Project (from me).

Microsoft Wants Yahoo

Everyone is talking about the $44.6 billion that Microsoft has offered up to purchase Yahoo, so that means I’m obligated to add my two cents.

Stowe Boyd has a good take that I pretty much agree with:

Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.
...
Just smells like this decades AOL/Time matchup. It will go through. Microsoft will remove one competitor, but it won't work. It won't be enough to stop the future.

The big question I have is, “What will happen to the many overlapping services like Mail and Search?” Will they be combined, will both continue to exist, or what? What I haven’t been able to figure out from what has been written about this merger is exactly what the nature of it will be. Both Microsoft and Yahoo (especially) have suffered from the inability to focus their online offerings - spreading themselves thin, and expanding their services with little rhyme or reason - in my opinion. What happens to stuff like Flickr and Del.icio.us when Microsoft buys Yahoo? That worries me a little. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Does Google have anything to fear if this deal goes through? A little bit, sure. They’ll lose some Search market share, have a harder time gaining traction for Google Apps (if MS Office Live ever happens), become slightly less of a de facto standard in online advertising. But it seems to me that they have their eyes on something else entirely, and are gradually moving into a new, uncharted space that no one has figured out just yet.

My impression is that Microsoft and Yahoo are competing with Google, but Google is looking elsewhere, competing only with “Possibility.”

And keep your eye on Amazon. They just doubled their profit, announced they are buying Audible, and their web services division is rapidly becoming hugely important to modern internet applications and services.

Man, 2008 is going to be fascinating. Welcome to February. Don’t get too comfortable.

New Google Reader Favicon

Yes, I am aware this is the nerdiest thing ever.

But it’s cool. And a very nice icon. Bravo, Google Reader team.

And besides, I’m not the only geeky designer to notice this.

Add Me As A Google Contact

After the Friday-night announcement that Google would be making it easy to see your friends’ Shared Items feeds in Google Reader, I started waiting patiently for the list to auto-populate with the Shared Item feeds of my GMail contacts. I added Robert Scoble, because, well, I kind of had no choice, but other than him and one other friend (who reads far too many Gawker sites for my taste), it appears that no one I know is sharing their Google Reader items, if they even use it at all.

But I won’t let this feeling of loneliness overwhelm me, especially during the Christmas season, so I’m putting a request out to any of my readers to add kevinmichaelkeating@gmail.com to your GMail contact list. I’d love to get an idea what you’re reading across the web and discover some great new stuff.

And don’t worry, I share only a handful of articles every day, so you won’t need to worry about getting overwhelmed by my generosity.

Google Earthing The Crucifixion

Sydney-based “creative collective,” The Glue Society, presented a pretty awesome project at last week’s the Miami art fair called “God’s Eye View” that depicts several biblical events as they might appear in the satellite imagery used for Google Earth. Along with The Crucifixion, they’ve got The Great Flood, The Garden of Eden, and the Parting of the Red Sea.

Nice work, and definitely thought-provoking, though I think that the emphasized part of this quote by one of the creators might be taking it a tad far:

We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real ... As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.

Other than something about that line that doesn’t sit properly for me in relation to this work, it’s a great-looking project and is a perfect example of creating compelling and important artistic work with the tools made available by technological advances.

Glue Society via CR Blog via Kottke

Google Reader And GTalk Are Friends!

The Official Google Reader Blog is reporting what I noticed when I logged in to Google Reader three minutes ago: that you can now see your GTalk (or GMail chat) friends’ Shared Items right inside Google Reader, and they can see yours.

Prior to this, you could email your friends a hugegantic link to your Shared Items list, but having it all together like this is awesome.

Like Scoble, I use the Facebook Google Reader app called “Feedheads,” which is awesome, but I hate visiting Facebook all the time, so this new feature is quite welcome. It doesn’t approach Feedheads in terms of sheer utility, but it is a great little thing that helps connect what have up until recently been relatively separate apps.

Is it just me, or does Google seem to be rolling out stuff at a frenzied pace these last couple months?

Google Unveils New iPhone Interface

Last night I read on TechCrunch that Google had just rolled out an updated version of its applications for iPhone, designed by Joe Hewitt (of the amazing Facebook app for iPhone - one of the few things I’m liking about the site right now), and even though I was inches away from bed, I took a couple minutes to check it out.

It’s fantastic.

There’s really little else to say about it. You get quick access to all of the important stuff - Search, GMail, Reader, Calendar (though for some reason mine is in German!), and the ever-present “More,” which in this case includes Docs, Goog-411, SMS, News, Photos, Blogger, and Notebook. Everything I checked out looks awesome and works beautifully. GMail runs like a dream, and the new(ish) Google Reader interface rocks, too.

With this update, color-coded labels in GMail, group chat and AIM integration, and blah blah blah blah, Google is putting out some major amounts of awesomeness this week. What’s next?

Where’s My Gphone?

No such thing But something pretty awesome, anyway.

Despite all of the very interesting speculation over the last few months, we're not announcing a Gphone. However, we think what we are announcing -- the Open Handset Alliance and Android -- is more significant and ambitious than a single phone. In fact, through the joint efforts of the members of the Open Handset Alliance, we hope Android will be the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today.

Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications -- all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.

Cool stuff. Can’t wait to get a look at it.

One of the most important things this will do: Accelerate the migration into The Cloud.

Google Phone?

Today at 11a.m. Eastern, Google is supposed to be making an announcement related to its (much-rumored) mobile strategy. According to everyone in the know, it will involve something of a partnership with a long list of major players in the mobile carrier and handset markets.

What is this mystery phone?

How does this affect Apple?

And will I have to choose between my two favorite companies?

More here, after the announcement.

It’s Not About Facebook

Updates on OpenSocial:

• It’s now live.
• I don’t think this has anything to do with competing with Facebook. I don’t think Google cares about Facebook, to be frank. And I don’t think there’s a single thing worth being scared of.
  
• MySpace is now one of the partners.
• It’s in Facebook’s best interest to join.
• It’s in our best interest that as many sites join as possible.
  
• Dave Winer says this about Google: “It's the hurt of the software industry, moving away from serving users, and getting spun in its own drama.” In doing so, he completely fails to grasp what’s going on here, while coming across sounding like a crochety old man and small infant simultaneously, with his complaints about not being told about it personally (“But Google is keeping people like me far away, which suggests that there may actually be no “there” there.”). Boo hoo, Dave, sir.
• Very interesting thought from Nick Carr: “But given the fact that the OpenSocial consortium includes Oracle, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, and Google itself, it's clear that businesses are an important target of the initiative.”
• OpenSocial brings everyone together. Just like in real life, social networks will be connected. The new leading social network is not Facebook, not MySpace, not Orkut. It’s called The Internet.
• I wonder what kind of monetization will happen.
• This has a lot of Google Apps implications.
• Facebook is the soupe du jour. It’s hip and cool now, but users like to move around to . The brilliance of OpenSocial is that it’s not an all-or-nothing approach. It recognizes that there is a benefit to niche communities, and that not all users have a desire for an all-in-one portal-style network like Facebook or MySpace. Allowing the niche players to communicate and connect is a big deal.
  

“Do Not Track” Stupidity

A do-not-track list has been proposed by some privacy and consumer advocacy groups, to allow web surfers to opt out of behavior-tracking online as it relates to advertising. This list, unsurprisingly, is modeled after the popular “Do-Not-Call” list that takes your number off telemarketing directories, but there are some important distinctions that make this a really stupid idea.

First, it’s important to clarify what happens in behavioral advertising and why privacy groups are concerned.

Watch this video:

Now, the video is made by Google, so it’s got some spin on it, but the basics are spot on. Behavioral advertising keeps track of your search queries and clicks to serve up more relevant ads. Using your IP address to get a rough idea of your location (only your Internet Service Provider knows precisely who you are), and any other information you explicitly choose to provide (like if you opt in to Google’s Personalized Search and tell them your address and browsing history, for example), the company serving ads is able to bring you more targeted and relevant ads. The benefits to this are obvious: if you search for the word “bass,” for example, keeping logs of previous queries you’ve made will help Google decide whether you’re looking for something related to fish or something related to music.

And so the privacy concerns come in mostly in regard to a company like Google being able to “remember you” as you surf the web and encounter AdSense ads on sites in its content network, but also (inexplicably) for individuals who explicitly agree to share their personal information.

I’ll be the first to say that I have always been confused by the focus on things like this for the simple fact that, unless you give Google explicit permission to know who you are, all it can possibly know (or assume, rather), is that you are the same person who initiated the browsing session and that you live somewhere in New York City. Also, I’m baffled by the concept of a machine being able to invade your privacy by feeding random bits of data through some algorithm and automatically returning some response. Last I checked, a machine is not a person and can’t know anything about me unless I give it information. This is a deep philosophical question that I don’t believe we’re fully ready to grasp at this point in time, but is important to keep in mind as artificial intelligence inches closer to becoming a reality.

Anyway, I digress. Skepticism about privacy concerns aside, what about the proposed Do-Not-Track list is idiotic?

Well, unlike the Do-Not-Call list, being on this new list doesn’t mean you’ll be able to avoid ads. Actually, a quite negative side-effect of being on such a list is that you’ll encounter far more completely irrelevant ads while you browse from site to site. You can’t avoid them altogether (unless you’re willing to pay cash to view websites, and unless you’re crazy you aren’t going to want to do that), so it strikes me as counterproductive to opt in to being more annoyed by ads than you are likely to be if they have something to do with what you’re looking for or interested in. Seems dumb.

Additionally, it’s hard not to appreciate this irony: in order to be on this list, you have to tell these companies who you are. You are basically consenting to be tracked to the end of not being tracked. Yes, there’s a difference, I guess. But it works exactly the same way. As a matter of fact, it seems like being on the list works more like signing up for Personalized Search than the default cookie-storing and session-based behavior of search engines and ad networks. Of course, the people overseeing the list would never ever use it for evil. Right? Right?

In the end, comparing the Do Not Track list to the Do Not Call list is unfair and misleading. Unlike the DNC list, you’re not getting rid of anything by signing up for this one. The only way you benefit is if you have an irrational fear of companies like Google and a lack of understanding about how they operate and what information they collect. You’ll feel some peace of mind, I guess, but little else will change.

As I’ve said before, if you’re truly concerned about privacy, you should be looking at your Internet Service Provider, who knows far more about you and your online history than companies like Google ever could. These companies have your real name, address, phone number, credit card information, browsing and search and email history, p2p and BitTorrent activity, often also all incoming and outgoing phone calls, and your television-watching habits. Unlike Google, this information is stored in a far less transparent way. Google at least lets you see precisely what information it has about you and tries its hardest to resist handing over this information to the courts. Comcast and Optimum and Verizon and these folks keep everything to themselves, except when they feel like selling it to marketers and freely sharing it with the government.

In any event, watch this space. The FCC FTC is having a town hall meeting today about these very issues. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Related Articles:

• Oh No! Google Can See Your Cat!
• Google Still Doesn’t Scare Me!

Google Announces OpenSocial, Zuckerberg Cries

It’s official. Facebook and MySpace are going down, even if that’s not the point. Google’s new OpenSocial thing (which is not a social network in and of itself) will allow you to carry your information and activity and apps across social networks, freeing you from the data lock in these Walled Gardens (that’s the nice way of saying Roach Motel) like Facebook, where the flow of information is only in one direction. For developers this is huge, and means they can write apps that function all over, and are coded in standard and ubiquitous HTML and JavaScript, rather than proprietary formats like Facebook Markup Language.

The Web is the platform. There’s no need for more platforms on top of that. Google totally gets it. Some really exciting developments from this company lately.

Some great insight here from the great Marc Andreessen.

Post-dated press release is below (from John Battelle):

Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- November 1, 2007 – Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the release of OpenSocial -- a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web -- for developers of social applications and websites that want to add social features. OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. The release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.

The proliferation of unique APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for – and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their application to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. By providing these simple, standards-based technologies, OpenSocial will speed innovation and bring more social features to more places across the web. Users win too: they get more interesting, engaging, or useful features faster.

"The web is fundamentally better when it's social, and we're only just starting to see what's possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web," said XXXX. "There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social."

Learn Once, Reach Across the Web

One of the most important benefits of OpenSocial is the vast distribution network that developers will have for their applications. The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial -- Website Partner A, Website Partner B, Website Partner C, etc. –- represent an audience of well over 100 million users globally. Critical for time- and resource-strapped developers is being able to "learn once, write anywhere" -- learn the OpenSocial APIs once and then build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled websites.

Several developers, including Gadget Partner Z, Gadget Partner Y, Gadget Partner X, etc., have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. Starting today, a developer sandbox is available at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on Orkut and ultimately other OpenSocial sites.

More Social In More Places

The existence of this single programming model also helps websites who are eager to satisfy their users' interest in social features. More developers building social applications more easily translates directly into more features more quickly for websites.

"Orkut has tens of millions of passionate users who are constantly clamoring for new ways to have fun with their friends and express themselves through Orkut," said Amar Gandhi, group product manager for Orkut, Google's social networking service. "By using OpenSocial to open up Orkut as a platform for any developer, we can tap into the vast creativity of the community and make new features available to our users frequently."

The common method that OpenSocial provides for hosting social applications means that websites can engage a much larger pool of third party developers than they could otherwise. They can direct resources that might have gone to maintaining a proprietary API and supporting its developer community to other projects.

Because OpenSocial removes the hassle from developing for individual websites, developers can unleash their creativity anywhere that catches their interest. This will translate into a wave of social features in contexts outside of the personal entertainment and games that are traditionally thought of as the social web.

Three APIs available now

The OpenSocial APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user's profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. OpenSocial resources for developers and websites are available now at code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Developers will have access to:
- Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions
- A live developer sandbox on Orkut at sandbox.orkut.com

Websites will have access to:
- A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites
- A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites

All of these resources and the live developer sandbox are available now.

Developers already at work

Dozens of developers have helped test early iterations of the OpenSocial APIs and Google is grateful for the extensive feedback they have provided.

[List of all gadget developers]

Links to these gadgets are available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Number One On Google

The World’s Fair blog has started a meme called “I rank number one on Google!”

The rules:

Attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

You can use quotes if you have to. Allegedly, when you figure out your five results, you will learn the secret to making money by blogging!

Post the five on your blog, and, because it’s a meme, force all of your friends to participate (MySpace bulletins optional but recommended).

Here are mine, in order by number of other results because more results means more sites less cool than this blog:

• Awesome Tag Cloud (1,840,000 results)
• Reasons To Buy A Zune (1,210,000 results)
• You’re An Axe Murderer (362,000 results)
• I Haven’t Eaten Fudge In Ages (285,000 results)
• Macro Clitoris (115,000 results)

Bring on yours!

Did Google Make A Deal With Satan?

I mean, seriously.

Look at their stock price...if this isn’t the sign of the beginning of the End Times, then I apparently misunderstood the Left Behind series.

My advice: Buy.

No, sell.

Hmm...

Pray.

Google Music Coming Soon? Ever?

What if Google started to index MP3 files (and display them prominently when you search for an artist or album)?

How would that work?
Who would lose out?
Who would win?

How might adding music (to the existing YouTube, Orkut, and forthcoming secret stuff) boost Google’s social networking cred?

How would this fit in to Google’s long-term focus on mobile computing?

What if you could click one link to preview, and click another to purchase and download (automatically) from Amazon/Apple/EMusic/????

What else?

Is this even a possibility?

Google’s Flying Stock

In case you missed the news yesterday, Google’s stock price leapt to over $609 a share, the highest in the company’s history, and pretty freaking huge if you ask me. Look at this chart:

How long can they continue to climb? $1000? $2000? Anyone ready to cash in?

Google Celebrates Sputnik With A New Doodle

Google’s celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik today, with a pretty fancy treatment of their logo. Nicely done. And happy anniversary space! Read more about the anniversary here.

And here are some of my past posts with Google Doodles.

Putting The Google In Google Reader - Finally!

Along with a few other tweaks to the already-awesome Google Reader that made news today (like unread story counts now going up to 1,000), users are finally able to actually use the “Google” (this means search...shh, don’t tell the lawyers) part of the Google Reader.

Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you'd like to search for "ipod" so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today's announcements. (says the Official Google Reader Blog)

This single addition makes the application infinitely more useful. Infinitely.

I assume it works by doing a custom search of all the sites you subscribe to, which is great unless you’re looking for something that happens to be on a site from which you’ve recently unsubscribed, but I could be completely wrong. All I know is that it works pretty great so far. It’s exactly what I’ve been hoping for since I started using Google Reader, and I highly recommend you check it out.

Here’s a look:

Brief iPhone and Google Maps Oddity

I suppose this shouldn’t exactly be surprising, but when you surf to a page on your iPhone that contains one of the new, embeddable Google Maps, like, say, this one from two days ago, iPhone automatically opens the map itself in the Google Maps app, instead of first displaying the page containing it. Tap back to Safari, and the page you navigated to in the first place will finish loading.

This is one of those tricky “is it a bug or a feature?” things that I suppose comes down to user preference, but it seems like Apple got the default behavior backwards. From my point of view, the most important thing to display is the context surrounding the map, especially when it is (as in this case) just one of many blog entries or widgets on a page. If the user wants to see and engage with the map, she can give it a little tap and then it will open in the Maps app.

Google Maps Announces YouTube-Style Embedding

There was a rumor a couple weeks ago that this would happen, and today it became a reality: Google has made it possible to embed customized maps on a webpage or blog with a simple copy/paste of code. You can even use the pretty-awesome My Maps feature to create a custom map mashup. Good stuff.

Here’s a quick one I made:

Brothels Near Pahrump, NV
(my old hometown)


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