Fire, Brimstone and Facebook.
Google has always been known for its mantra of “don’t be evil”, but in the past week Facebook has appeared as a force prepared to bulldoze through any sort of similar thinking by introducing “Open Graph”.
I’m going to make it simple. Very soon you will see elements of Facebook all across in the internet. You will see Facebook “Walls” on blogs, the Facebook commenting system on news sites, and the “Like” button absolutely everywhere. With this, Facebook hopes to weave itself into the very foundations of the internet and become the de facto platform for any online social interaction. With nearly 500 million users around the world, Facebook is beginning to flex their muscles and show just what they can do with the largest social graph in the world.
What does it mean for you? It means that you will be able to share anything you find with all of your friends on Facebook. You will have the ability to send anything and everything to Facebook. While this may look good and sound convenient, there is a bigger issue at play.
If Open Graph turns out to be successful, Facebook’s tentacles will creep into every web page you visit. Sites will begin to live and breathe through the elements of Facebook they choose to implement. Everything you do could eventually go through Facebook.
As Google grew in size and popularity in the early 2000’s, concerns over personal privacy flared as the search engine began to track everyone’s movements through the internet. It was worrying because one company new where you were and where you had been. Google took the hint from their concerned users and changed their privacy policy to only keep this data for 18 months.
Facebook on the other hand has had a shocking history of dealing with personal privacy. Last year Facebook added a clause to their terms of service which handed all ownership of everything you had on the site, over to Facebook, photos and all. Public outcry over the blatant breach of trust lead to Facebook quickly removing this clause.
With such a sketchy privacy history it is impossible to know exactly how Facebook with deal with your personal information. And when you think about it, they’re not just collecting impersonal information like Google does, like your IP address, they’re collecting the comments you make, the photos you post, the people you know, the stuff that you like. It creates a privacy scenario much more involved than Google’s and one which has the potential for greater damage if misused. Google only knew your internet history, Facebook knows exactly who you are.
Open Social has the ability to change the way you and I connect throughout the web. But along with it come some serious question about how much power and control we want to hand over to one company, the company who knows everything about us. Keep this in mind: Google has the motto “don’t be evil”, Facebook doesn’t.
Google, China And A Balancing Act
12:12 Jan 14th, 2010 | Notes
Google today announced that after dealing with malicious threats against its infrastructure, theft of its intellectual property and targeted attacks against Chinese human rights activists who use Google services, the search giant is readying to remove all censorship of its search engine inside China possibly resulting in the exit of Google from the country altogether.
Above and beyond what it says about Google’s lack of success in China and their stance on human rights, this should send a clear message to the west that largest country in the world still has its door closed. This seems to be one of the biggest event in recent years which represents the extent to which information is suffocated entering the ‘Central Kingdom’. Google exiting China may be a big deal for us, but China’s government will not be taken for a ride that easily.
It’s important to make a distinction between China hating the west and China just hating western technology and web services. China does not hate the west. Going around China I found western influence everywhere. A Nokia mobile store in Shanghai, student wearing Nike clothing, drinking Coke and talking about the NBL. However, it was clear to me that the youth in China don’t understand the extent to which they are censored.
Looking back over the past year, freedom of speech has been the driving force for the totalitarian level of censorship happening in China. During the olympics, Amnesty International, the BBC and other reputable news sources were shut off in China, much to the dismay and anger of the western press. Even the Apple iTunes Store was shut down after the government discovered athletes were downloading the pro-Tibet album, Song for Tibet, in an act of silent protest. The ‘Golden Shield Project’, also known as the Great Firewall of China, aims to shut out any unregulated content streaming into China including Wikipedia, Livejournal, Twitter and Facebook at various times. In July last year, the Chinese government legislated that every new computer sold in China is required to come with the ‘Green Dam’ program, another thinly concealed way to increase censorship. The government also required all media outlets to stop publishing anything critical towards the software before its release.
At this point in time, it’s hard to know what to do next. A quick Google search reveals that every company with web services you can think of has undergone some sort of censorship during their time online in China; Bing, Skype, Yahoo! Search, Google, Flickr, Hotmail, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Aol. Heck, even my blog is blocked in China according to Just Ping and Websitepulse.
Google has now created a precedent for the rest of the world to follow: boycott China. But there are two sides to every argument. On one hand, the restriction of speech goes against our natural sense of democracy and freedom. That argument says companies should pull out of China in protest and to send a message. But on the other hand, those companies, the Chinese government and us western spectators are not the only players in this debate. There are 1.3 billion people who are directly affected by the choices of the internet giants. The result of pulling out of China all together would have a severely negative outcome for loyal customers, however few their may apparently be. Imagine if that happened in the US. Without knowledge of the extent of censorship on the internet, average Chinese citizens would be disillusioned and angry. This argument says that restricted service is better for the people than no service.
It’s 2010, and there is very little space left to tip toe around such an issue anymore. In my opinion, it’s time that some strong messages were sent. After all, the internet is becoming an indispensable part of our daily lives and that of the Chinese.
It’s beyond me why the level of censorship is so ridiculously high. There is no way that censorship can stop people finding out what they want to know. Seeing western companies leave their country may spark curiosity and start the Chinese questioning their government. Regardless, China’s growth as a world market means that the government will have to eventually respect freedom of speech, whether they like it or not, starting with the internet. All official international talks on the subject have obviously failed and not even the IOC could get the Chinese government to keep a promise on censorship. Maybe it is time that private industry does the talking.
Click through for a photo comparison between Google.cn and Google.com search results.
Google Reader, everyone’s favorite way to get their favorite parts of the internet delivered straight to them. But I’ve always had one problem, it’s looks. Now, I’m not one to judge purely on looks alone. I know that Google Reader is beautiful on the inside, but let’s not forget that it is still a website with no feelings. Therefore I have no qualms in saying it’s pretty ugly considering we’re in 2009.
So welcome to the prettier, Mac like Google Reader, courtisy of this, Google Reader for Mac. First up, it’s not a desktop app. Google Reader for Mac is a skin for the normal Google Reader website that does nothing more than making it look better. You can install it on any web browser excluding Safari, which is why I run it in Fluid.
So try it out for yourself, by finding the instructions somewhere on the website.
I’m curious, will you get it working, or will you start to panic at the thought of installing a userscript?
NEWS FLASH: 30 People in California Quit The iPhone, Rest Of World Laugh At Misfortune, Apple Giggles Under Breath
3:34 Aug 8th, 2009 | Notes
It’s being hailed the “mass exodus” of people from the iPhone. In the US, plagued by network issues and a US only Google problem, a few high profile people in the technology industry have decided that they’re abandoning the iPhone.
The reasons are quite clear and understandable. In the bay area of San Francisco, the cell service from AT&T (the sole US carrier of the iPhone) is reportedly awful. Complaints of repeated call drops, bad reception and the recent debacle over Google Voice have lead some of the most well known people in the tech industry, such as Molly Wood and Mike Arrington, to cancel their AT&T service and subsequently change phones all together.
Reporting side of this story aside, it’s time to get to down to my opinion.
The first thing I see when looking through the list of reasons why these high profile people are quitting the iPhone is this: US only problems. Let’s take a look, shall we?
- No MMS - US only problem
- Google Voice app rejection - US only problem
- Bad reception - US only problem
- Call drops - US only problem
- Network congestion - US only problem
- General network slowness - US only problem
In the rest of the world, these problems don’t exist. Every non-US carrier supports MMS. Google Voice is a US only product. Other cell phone networks are handling all the extra strain from increased iPhone sales.
So ignore the tabloid press. While people in the US are close to tears with the situation they find themselves in, we in the rest of the world are laughing at them and enjoying our stable, fast cell networks while sending MMS messages to each other (not really, who seriously still uses MMS?). And all without the help of Google Voice. The iPhone is not dying, it just got a scratch. Don’t panic just yet.
ChromeOS and Why Google Won’t Succeed in the OS War
7:52 Jul 13th, 2009 | 0 notes
Look at the laptop market ten years ago. What do you see? You see Windows dominating the PC arena, a Mac OS that isn’t anywhere near its current glory and a Linix base still wondering why people aren’t using it in the masses. Essentially, you have one market dominator and a few stragglers hanging around. Jump forward to today and you see a very different market for laptops. Windows is (still) dominating, but Mac OS X and Linux distributions, like Ubuntu, are growing like never before. The biggest difference you see in today’s market is that there is choice. You can walk around a store or browse the internet and find quality operating systems ranging from $500 to absolutely free.
But this is just the laptop market. Next to these well developed operating systems and machines a new bud is growing out of the idea that you don’t need a 17”, quad core processor to do everyday computing tasks like checking emails and browsing the web. That bud is the netbook, and with their smaller screens and slower processors a new need has arisen. That need is for an operating system to match the machine.
A few days ago Google announced their entrant into the netbook OS (operating system) market named ChromeOS. It promises to be a light weight, open source operating system designed with one thing in mind: cloud computing. Google says the OS will have no preinstalled applications and that computing can all be done on the web using services like the Google Apps suite and more. Originally, the idea for netbooks was that most of the work to be done on them would be done using cloud computing. It looks like Google is trying to return to this original idea.
But here’s the problem for Google: nobody will use ChromeOS.
By nobody I mean that the ChromeOS will fail to gain any sort of substantial market share. Why? Because Google has chosen to enter the budding netbook market when flowers are already starting to appear.
Look at Windows for example. Microsoft already acknowledges that the netbook market is going to be big with what they’re doing with Windows 7 (coming out in October). They looked at the netbook market, saw that the current Windows Vista doesn’t work on netbooks and that people were happy buying them with Windows XP installed, and decided that they needed to focus on getting Windows 7 to work perfectly to fill the gap they created with Vista. Their netbook solution: Windows 7 Starter Edition. While I can say first hand that Windows 7 Ultimate Edition runs brilliantly on a netbook, there is one very good reason why Starter Edition is Microsoft’s solution. Microsoft has said that they plan to essentially give Starter Edition away for free to manufactures just to make sure your next netbook will be running Windows. With the behemoth from Redmond giving away the most popular OS in the world, why would manufacturers even think about using a newcomer like Google’s ChromeOS on the same scale as Windows?
On that same point, look at what the Linix base has been creating for netbooks. Ubuntu Linux Remix has been out for a while now, ask any average user and they won’t even know what Linux is, let along Ubuntu. Even the likes of Dell, HP, Acer and Asus have offered Linux alternatives for their netbooks, but every attempt has been outsold by Windows XP. This shows that people like the familiar, even if that means the familiar is slower and older than the new alternative. For Google, ChromeOS presents an entirely new way of thinking about computing as well as being far different to peoples’ safe Windows haven. This will prove to be part of its downfall.
Restrictions in Linux OS’s and netbook OS’s have led me to use Windows 7 on my netbook. As an average consumer (well kind of) I don’t like the thought of my experience being restricted in any way. If you look at the ChromeOS, Google plans for you to do all of your computing over the internet. That means no storing your music, photos, documents, contacts, email or calendar on your netbook. Google wants that all online. It is this type of restriction that will be a major reason why ChromeOS will fail. What if you’re in the middle of nowhere? What if you’re on the subway? What if you’re on a plane? You won’t have internet access to get to your files. That is restriction number one. Restriction number two is online services. Google Docs, Flickr, Photoshop.com and iMeem are all great internet services, but none of them are at all comparable with their desktop counterparts. For example, Google Docs has nowhere near the functionality of Microsoft Office. That means the scope of your computing is restricted by the limitations of what the internet can offer you. With ChromeOS relying on you doing all of your computing online, you would be downgrading to a more limited experience by using it.
Similarly, Google themselves claim that all of the web apps usable on ChromeOS are available on all other operating systems. After all, ChromeOS is essentially just a web browser. Google’s struggle to market ChromeOS will come when people ask why they should choose it over Windows, which has much, much more to offer than just a web browser. People will have this choice: buying an OS that is a web browser, or buying an OS that has a web browser.
The final reason ChromeOS will fail is this: Google has chosen to enter ChromeOS into a market where comsumers are already confused. Judging from the reaction of my peers to my HP Mini, it’s clear that the average consumer doesn’t understand the purpose of a netbook. People don’t ‘get’ what a netbook is, even when it’s running Windows. Such a far out concept like ChromeOS and its way of interpreting netbooks as just a web browser will only further confuse people.
Google’s mantra has been about simplicity and ease of use. But in the case of ChromeOS, I believe they’ve made things too simple. Google has failed to see that netbooks can run full operating systems to a high standard. They’ve failed to recognize people’s needs and normal computing habits. Most importantly, Google has failed to recognize that are attempting to bring what looks like an inferior product into a market with much better alternatives.
Google has come into the netbook game with too little, too late.
![The new Google!
Google introduced a new suite of tools today at their Search]ology event. As you can see, by clicking of the “show options…” button near the top of the page gives you a slew of new ways to find exactly what you’re looking for!
Check it out! It’s pretty cool!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/u21baLfxDnf3g7d21opshzFRo1_500.png)
The new Google!
Google introduced a new suite of tools today at their Search]ology event. As you can see, by clicking of the “show options…” button near the top of the page gives you a slew of new ways to find exactly what you’re looking for!
Check it out! It’s pretty cool!
