Google – Page 4

Tag: Google (page 4 of 6)

Building stuff at Google’s scale

Here’s the difference between what a company like Google can do and what most can do. Google Wave was the big news yesterday, but it’s not exactly a new effort. It’s been in the works since 2007:

Lars had already moved to Sydney, and made the case that Wave could best be created there, where the team could operate as a kind of independent startup. Jens moved over, and they built the first prototype over nine months with a team of five, during 2007. Since then, the team has grown to about 100.

Not many companies can afford to dedicate 100 highly paid people to what is essentially a completely speculative effort. Google has almost certainly invested more resources in Wave than Twitter has utilized over its life, and Twitter has millions of current users.

It’ll be interesting to see how Wave does once the demos are over and real people start using it. Google Wave’s evolution clearly runs counter to the “release early and often” culture that pervades Web development these days and I’ll be interested to see whether it works out well.

Links from May 28th

May 28, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

O’Reilly Radar: Google Bets Big on HTML 5. The big takeaway from this is that current browsers already support a big chunk of HTML 5.
Webmonkey: Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5. More coverage.
O’Reilly Radar: Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? Really interesting new project from Google.
Introducing Typekit. Third party hosting for embeddable fonts. This could be huge.
The New Yorker: Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum. Convincing argument that capitalism is driving rising medical costs, delivering inferior care to patients and lining the pockets of doctors and the health care industry. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about health insurance.

Google advertises Chrome

May 13, 2009 / Rafe / 6 Comments

How committed is Google to driving Chrome adoption? They’re running TV ads to get people to try it out. Farhad Manjoo speculates on why people aren’t adopting Chrome, but not so much on why Google really wants them to adopt it. I don’t think anyone has really explained what Google hopes to gain by driving adoption of its own browser — and clearly, given the TV ads, they are very committed to this project.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s far too early to write off Chrome. Google needs to worry about winning over the alpha geeks. If they can do that, larger adoption is almost certain a few years down the road.

Google’s hardware

April 2, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Sure, everybody is going to link to this article, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Google has revealed the server hardware it uses, as part of a larger effort to push for more energy efficient data centers. The details of how servers work are interesting, but what’s just as interesting to me is the degree to which the range of possibilities widens as things scale up. When you are rolling out servers by the thousand, it makes sense to design them yourself. I laughed at Google when I read about the study they did to select the right shade of blue, but their hardware efforts show what can be gained from taking a highly data driven approach. This article is a must-read.

Links from March 16th

March 16, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Mark Danner: US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. There can no longer be any debate on whether the US tortured detainees. We did. The evidence is undeniable. It’s time to investigate the crimes and start charging people.
Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline. Just about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. Simple solution to an incredibly annoying problem with OS X..
Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. I really want to write a whole blog post on this, but I’m linking to it in case I don’t.
Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. The key piece of information here is that you can make confit just as well with olive oil as you can with duck fat.
David Pogue: Unify the Phone Numbers and All Else Follows. Google Voice sounds great, but I hesitate to use Google products for everything.

Google’s new ads

March 11, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Nelson Minar has a short post explaining Google’s new interest-based ads and the privacy controls available to users associated with them.

Here’s the crux:

I’m usually quick to criticize Google on privacy issues. But not this time. Because along with this juicy new ad product, they’re giving users unprecedented control and visibility into the ads they are shown. We can opt out of tracking entirely. Or we can set our ad preferences, viewing and altering Google’s profile of ourselves. And Google has a detailed and readable page describing how their ad products works with personal user data. All of this privacy protection looks real, a user-focussed product, not just some sham to satisify lawyers.

Don’t be evil

January 21, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

A lot of people have made fun of Google’s informal corporate motto — “Don’t be evil — since it was originally disclosed in 2001. And clearly it’s a motto that they’ve failed to live up to at times, but what I really like about it is that it sets the standard to which Google expects to be held.

If Google is evil, every critic can say that the company doesn’t live up to its word. That’s a powerful thing.

Indeed, it’s something that I’ve come to appreciate about the Obama transition. They’ve made a lot of promises, now it’s up to us to measure their performance against those promises, and hold them accountable when they’ve failed to live up to the standards they set.

Yesterday Dan Froomkin, the Washington Post writer who tirelessly chronicled the misdeeds and mistruths of the Bush administration, talked about how he plans to cover the Obama administration. His starting point is that he plans to hold them to the standards that they have promised.

Self-imposed standards are a shortcut to establishing trust. By creating these standards and then living up to them, you demonstrate that other promises you make can be trusted as well.

On a personal level, I’d rather deal with a person or entity that sets high standards and sometimes fails to meet then than one that refuses to claim any standard at all.

Today, Obama set a high mark for himself and his administration: “Let me say it as simply as I can, transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” Let’s hope they live up to it.

Discussion: is Obama too close to Google?

January 16, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Over at Talking Points Memo, they’re holding a panel discussion on Barack Obama’s relationship with Google. Are they too close?

Here’s a specific question that was asked today:

Today over at the Mothership (that’s the TPM Front Page) we see one of the “wire” stories that the General Services Administration is negotiating with YouTube (a Google service) to post federal hearings, etc.

Given the uncomfortably close relationship between Google execs and Obama, should we be worried about this? I think so. YouTube is already the default video platform on the Web. But it does not have to be. And there is no clear reason for the government to solidify YouTube’s market dominance. In fact, there is no reason why the GSO could not mandate that all federal agencies post their videos in open forms — accessible, repostable, and mashable — on their own sites.

Then We the People could repost them on YouTube with commentary and maybe some cartoon graphics mixed in. Better yet, because .gov can’t deal with the bandwidth demands of too many folks pulling down popular videos, the federal government should post open format video as bittorrent files.

I can see both sides of this argument. Contracting with YouTube to host the videos clearly further cements Google’s position as the dominant player in hosting videos on the Web. At the same time, there’s no reason not to put them on YouTube. Many people expect YouTube to have what they’re looking for when it comes to online video. If you leave the videos off, people won’t find them, or they’ll find the remixed mashups people make and have no idea where to get the originals. That’s a problem.

I think BitTorrent is a terrible response to bandwidth issues. I love BitTorrent, but it’s not very user friendly.

At the same time, YouTube’s Flash videos are hosted in a closed format. If the US government is going to post videos online, they should be posted in a format that’s easy for end users to repurpose, for broadcasters to use, and so forth. So if YouTube is going to be the only place these videos are hosted, that’s a problem. If the US government is going to host videos there to stay in the mix, I think that makes sense.

As to the larger question, presented in the opening post in the series, as to whether the government should start looking at Google from an antitrust perspective, I think the answer right now is negative. There’s nothing to suggest that if some other company came out with a better index tomorrow that Google wouldn’t find itself losing traffic like it’s going out of style. Google is hardly the first search engine to dominate. Doubt it’ll be the last.

Update: Looks like we have our answer on downloadable videos. They’ll be made available through YouTube.

The state of Android

December 3, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Patrick Mueller has written a pretty good developer-centric overview of where Android stands today. I’m eager to see Android make it onto more handsets, and for the UI to pick up more polish. I find that over time, user interface polish takes on more and more importance for me, and the iPhone’s nicer interface insures that I’ll be sticking with it until Google makes some pretty major improvements to Android, and until they find a hardware partner who designs devices as well as Apple does.

Google SearchWiki

November 21, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Lauren Weinstein considers the likelihood of success of Google’s new SearchWiki feature. Here’s the official announcement from the Google blog. The basic idea is that users will be able to provide feedback on search results, ranking them up or down in the list and entering comments on them.

It’ll be interesting to see whether spam and other forms of abuse render this feature useless. I can see the black hat SEOs burning the midnight oil this weekend to figure out how to exploit this feature.

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