I am apparently not the only person confused about Google’s confusion about Google+.
Sam Biddle via Gizmodo
Maybe Google knows it’s never going to top Facebook at the social game, because when asked, its description of Google+ makes very little sense! AllThingsD chatted up Google+ exec Bradley Horowitz, and he sounds… confused.
From Bradley Horowitz:
We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing. So we’re currently making a number of improvements to this process - specifically regarding how we notify these users that they’re not in compliance with Google policies and how we communicate the remedies available to them.
These include:
- Giving these users a warning and a chance to correct their name in advance of any suspension. (Of course whenever we review a profile, if we determine that the account is violating other policies like spam or abuse we’ll suspend the account immediately.)
- At time of this notice, a clear indication of how the user can edit their name to conform to our community standards (http://www.google.com/support/ /bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271)
- Better expectation setting as to next steps and timeframes for users that are engaged in this process.
Second, we’re looking at ways to improve the signup process to reduce the likelihood that users get themselves into a state that will later result in review.
Third, we’ve noticed that some people are using their profile name to show-off nicknames, maiden names and personal descriptions. While the profile name doesn’t accommodate this, we want to support your friends finding you by these alternate names and give you a prominent way of displaying this info in Google . Here are two features in particular that facilitate this kind of self-expression:
- If you add nicknames, maiden names, etc. to the “Other names” portion of your G profile, those with permission to view those fields can search for you using that term. For example: some of my colleagues call me “elatable,” a pseudonym I’ve used on many services, so I’ve added it to my list of other names.
- The “Employment,” “Occupation” and “Education” fields in your profile can appear in your hovercard all across Google — to those with permission to view them. This also helps other users find and identify you.
A good start, but not far enough yet.
Another example of the Zuckerberg Fallacy: that we should have a single, unitary persona online, and that all right-minded people would agree with that. It’s naive, dangerous, and ideological.
The other day I read a number of pieces that quoted Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, for example, this:
Bianca Bosca, Facial Recognition: The One Technology Google Is Holding Back
former Google CEO Eric Schmidt shared one technology he says is the only one Google has ever built, then withheld: facial recognition.
“We built that technology and we withheld it,” Schmidt said of facial recognition at the All Things Digital D9 conference in California. “As far as I know, it’s the only technology Google has built and, after looking at it, we decided to stop.”
“I’m very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition,” he explained, adding that the company feared that these capabilities could be used both for good and “in a very bad way.” Schmidt described a scenario in which an “evil dictator” could use facial recognition to identify people in a crowd and use the technology “against” its citizens.
Though Google may not be releasing products with facial recognition capabilities, Schmidt acknowledged that the open nature of Google’s Android and Chrome platforms could enable third parties to develop and distribute this technology.
“There are plenty of apps I don’t like that are still legal,” he noted.
Still, for the time being, Schmidt maintains that Google is “not going to go into” facial recognition in a “general way.”
I figured that Google had developed and held back — or killed — other technologies, and decided to look for examples. Here we are, a few days later, and I see this:
Cade Metz, Apple iCloud: Steve Jobs’ own private internet
Just before the launch of its long-rumored GDrive – a service for storing all your desktop files on the web – Google killed the thing. “Files are so 1990. … I don’t think we need files anymore,” Google’s Sundar Pichai told colleague Bradley Horowitz, according to the new book In the Plex. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”
According to the book, penned by Wired scribe Steven Levy, Horowitz – who led the GDrive project – was skeptical of Pinchai’s stance. GDrive eventually vanished in favor of the Google Docs model, after more than a year of development, even though it was never released to the public.
I’m betting that many other examples will come to light, over time, which just shows that Schmidt didn’t get down in the bit mines with the product people.
I have been watching Google’s frenetic quest to find an opening into the social revolution for a long time.
To date, what we have seen are experiments and acquisitions.
Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.
On one one side, half-hearted hobbies that senior management hopes will grow into something great. In this category we have the more-or-less failed social network Orkut and now Wave, which both surfaced from the company’s ‘one day a week’ tinkering culture.
On the other, acquisitions like Jaiku and Dodgeball, which were innovative and groundbreaking, but were allowed to die in red tape, and where the innovative founders — like Jyri Engstrom of Jaiku, and Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball, soon left the company. Or great fat purchases like YouTube, which have proven to be less valuable than market prices.
Then, Google staged a relatively public search for a leader to move them to social. (Despite losing Jyri and Dennis, either of which could have done great things for the firm.) The result? Can’t find the right person. Catarina Fake couldn’t be lured back into corporate deadness, I guess. And Bradley Horowitz, who runs Google Talk, Grandcentral, Blogger and Picasa, wasn’t the right guy, apparently.
So now we have Vic Gundotra annointed as Mr Social, a guy who has made great strides at Google Mobile, getting Android into the market with a bang. But is he Mr Social?
Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.
Om Malik puts it this way: Vic is a great product manager, focused on features. But social is more than a veneer of games, gestures, music, comments.
Om Malik, Slide, Vic Gundotra & The Un-Social Reality of Google
Social is more than just features. I’ve been saying for a while that in order to understand social and win over the social web, companies need to understand people. I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries. There are rumors Google co-founder Sergey Brin championed the acquisition of Slide. He also championed Google Wave (which is shutting down) and the poorly conceived Google Buzz.
We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion.
Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.
This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.
But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!
There are many unplowed fertile fields out there, where Google’s scale and engineering soul could do great things. As just one example, modern social network research has shown that the social ‘scenes’ we are situated in — the millions of people that form the ‘friends of my friends’ friends’ network — are the single best predictor of our likelihood to be fat, smoke, or be happy. And by extension, buy Chevrolets, listen to Country music, or read manga. And no services have tapped into that reality, yet, except in the most inadvertent ways. (For more background see Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence and Jeff Jarvis on The Hunt For The Elusive Influencer.)
This is why actions like buying Slide are likely to be diversions, like Jaiku and Dodgeball turned out to be. Meanwhile, there are real advances to be made — like building sociality into the operating platforms of the future. Obviously Google is in a position to do that with Android and Chrome, but I honestly don’t think they know what to build.
[I am returning to my old 3 threes review format for conferences, starting with this week’s TechCrunch50. This format involves a description of the three most interesting, challenging, or compelling companies, people, and ideas from the event.]
What ever happened to awesome?
Maybe it’s just me getting old and curdudgeonly, but I had hoped that I would see 10 or so really interesting products debuted at TechCrunch50. Instead, the most fun I had was talking to returnees (like David Sachs of Yammer) and hearing what their plans were for third generation products. The awesome start-ups just weren’t there.
Three Companies
Microsoft (Bing) — It’s unusual for me to praise Microsoft, but the newly announced Bing Visual Search was very impressive: the first Microsoft technology I’ve really imagined using since OneNote.
The service arrays results of certain searches in tables of images — like womens shoes, or other products — and provides controls to allow the searcher to change characteristics unique to the search domain to further refine the search results. Very impressive.
Threadsy — I think that the first company to come up with the right way to allow infovores (or ‘onfovores’) to manage their ever-expanding streams of links, recommendations and commentary will become the next big thing. No one so far has cracked that code. I thought that Threadsy was the best candidate at the show, however. And the company was runner-up in the final judging, so I guess others agreed.
AnyClip — I love the idea of being able to access any scene in any movie, since I am constantly pulling out movie references. AnyClip seems geared to supporting my addiction in exactly that way. As the judges said at the presentation, if they can work out all the agreements with the studios this is going to be a great service. And the demo showed that it really worked.
Three People
Mike Arrington/Jason Calacanis — Mike Arrington’s meltdown in the final 20 minutes of the conference was extremely odd (although consonant with Arrington’s Murdoch-like media baron persona), and highlighted Jason Calacanis’ showmanship, by contrast. I found myself wondering if the meltdown was staged, at first, but I guess it wasn’t just a ploy for press attention, but appears to be a real business breakdown between the two, and it means the end of Techcrunch50 as a conference, apprently.
George Zachary — A difficult choice for the best judge, considering that the group including Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Sean Parker, and a dozen other luminaries. Chamillionaire proved himself capable of holding his own, in this crowd, by the way.
Penn Gillette — Penn Gillette appeared to show off his new iPhone app, which seemed pretty lame. However, he wins the award for his one liner. When asked what he was going to do next, which was intended as a question regarding the business behind the app, he responded “I guess I will go to Vegas and shoot some guns at my partner.”
Three Ideas
Dolls Are Scary — I found the obsession with toys and dolls creepy (see TechCrunch 50: Digital Bedtime Stories Are Icky). More importantly, showcasing this niche, as opposed to general purpose Web 2.0 apps, suggested to me that we aren’t seeing as many products intended to be worldbeaters.
Maybe 50 Is Too Many? — Cramming 50 companies into two days meant that the conference started early, ran late, and the companies only had 6 minutes for their pitches. Despite 50 sounding like a small number, I came away feeling like ten or fifteen less — like the original TechCrunch40 — might have been better. Moot now, since the event seems to be headed for the dustbin of history.
The Flow Is Still A Torrent — No one has solved the stream problem: how to effectively throttle the stream so that people can stay on top without drowning. It might be interesting if there was a conference dedicated just to this issue, and showcasing various approaches. (Jason… are you listening? You don’t need Arrington for this.)
Techcrunch50 in Retrospect
So, a few days have passed. I have given away all the tchotchkes and washed all the tshirts (Zark get’s kudos for best shirt, by the way). Looking back, it really didn’t amount to much. No staggeringly beautiful SlideRocket, no enterprise-suitable Yammer, no crowd-pleasing Twitter client breakthrough.
Perhaps its a sign of the times. San Francisco and the attendant tech scene is under the cloud of the econolypse. Despite the bonhomie and attempts at pressing on, the layoffs, stillborn companies, and career wreckage is taking a toll. The investors and entrepreneurs that were preaching thrift and ‘longer runway’ last fall seem to be in a perpetual state of enforced optimism, but the tech start-up scene seems low energy now.
The high points for me were discussions with more established companies, like Yammer, and hearing what David Sachs, their CEO, is contemplating for next year and beyond. Or seeing serial entrepreneur Brian Alvey, former CTO of Weblogsinc, take another run at blogging with his Crowd Fusion. While these are young companies, they are not blazing a trail in the wilderness, defining a new product category.
So maybe it’s a time of consolidation and small advances. If so, Techcrunch 50 was the perfect show.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
My work is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
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