Rubénerd!

Google recently released Google+, a new social network. Do you think you need another social network? ~ The Daily Post

You mean, another Google social network, or another social network in general? I've had revolutionary Orkut, Knol, Jaiku, Wave and Buzz accounts that went nowhere, so it's hard to muster enthusiasm for yet another of this company's efforts. If it gains some traction I'll look into it further.

One thing's for sure, Facebook sorely needs some competition. I'm uneasy about trusting Google with my personal information (not necessarily their fault), but I trust them far more than Facebook. Then again, I'd trust Diaspora more.

As for the name, it's almost as lame as Apple's Ping, but not as bad as Qrocity!

As usual, Om Malik puts it better than anyone else.

Google, thanks to two brilliant engineer-founders, has become a great company seemingly able to solve the world’s most complicated engineering problems. That ability made it turn search into the great money machine that it is. It knows how to tweak machines and make them do unfathomable things. But what it can’t do is internalize empathy. It doesn’t know feelings. It doesn’t comprehend that relationships are more than a mere algorithm. You can see this in its many offerings; they’re efficient, but devoid of emotion, and emotions are what drive interaction. A smile begets a smile, a frown a frown and a conversation a conversation. That’s true in the real world, and it’s true on the web.

No point struggling against what you're good at

Google is great at trawling through large amounts of data, capitalising on it, and moving on. This is why their search engine usually finds what we're looking for and Gmail is a usable online email service. Unfortunately, this engineer oriented corporate culture doesn't lend itself to creating more organic sites such as social networks and wikis (remember Knol?).

Not all problems can be solved with cold algorithms and a bank of computers.

I think one can draw a parallel to Android as well. The Apple iOS may be overtly restrictive, but was clearly the result of people fed up with the previous phone status quo and wanted to create something people would want to use. Android was developed to get more people using Google's banks of computers.

I trialled a Motorola Milestone and the difference in the Little Things were startling. Of course, engineers scoff at such notions because they're intangible, and its for that reason Google is struggling to break out of its rut.

Basically, Google does reactionary well, revolutionary less well. Nothing wrong with that from a business perspective as long as it keeps bringing in the dough, but as Microsoft's repeated failed attempts in the consumer space have shown, overcoming corporate culture is a dang hard thing to do.

It's that all too familiar language that signifies the de facto end of a project: Google is cancelling any further development of Wave, its platform that was supposed to revolutionise email, chat, wikis, collaboration and grilled cheese sandwiches.

I just worry there's so much hype surrounding Google Wave a lot of people will be dissapointed [sic].

Me on Twitter, 30th September 2009

The defenders, detractors, fence sitters

During its troubled year long run there were plenty of people defending Wave. It was a 21st century SS Great Eastern, a revolutionary new service that was simply too far ahead of its time for people to understand. Saying that Wave was slow and had a terrible interface was akin to saying Gmail was slow and had a terrible interface with email, it was supposed to be just one front-end for an open protocol anyone could write software on. It was Google and automatically cool. Google was going to use its tremendous reach online to get people to use it. The two hour long introductory video wasn't too long, you just weren't patient enough or a developer.

Then there were the detractors. What do I use it for? Who else uses it? It didn't matter that Wave was an open protocol if the only client that currently supported it steered like the SS Great Eastern trapped on a sandbar. It was supposed to combine all the positive elements of email, wikis, chat and collaboration, but it brought out the worst of each instead. There are so many more clever ways to organise things and we want to read these waves in a glorified inbox that has all the shortcomings of email? And why... good heavens why... did they not understand how to design something as basic as a scrollbar?

Then finally there were the people sitting on the fence, or the railing of the pier where there SS Great Eastern had been berthed (Get it? A railgun pun with that picture? Never mind). We weren't sure whether Google's hype machine was really going to deliver, but we liked the idea of something that could make collaborating on documents in real time and more intelligent email. We just didn't know how to use it or what to use it for, and Google certainly made no legitimate attempt to explain it to us. In the end we used it a few times, closed the browser tab, and didn't give it much more thought.

Insert waving goodbye to Google Wave here

To me, the mark of a truly revolutionary new service (or device) is people who have never used it before can pick it up and not only figure out how to use it in a few short moments, but instantly integrate them into their lives such that they didn't know how they lived without it. Google Wave did neither of these things, it was just another in an increasingly long and worrying string of Google service failures. They're starting to look a little like Microsoft.

On another note, I stopped listening to This Week in Google because I didn't share the hosts' unbridled enthusiasm for the service, perhaps now its safe to listen again! Well, maybe after this next episode when they'll be talking about how it failed because nobody was brilliant enough to capture its true awesomeness ;).

As I said to Pownce in 2008: goodbye Google Wave, I hardly used thee.

Google Buzz was launched recently, and unless you've been living under a rather large rock (presumably with a cavity big enough for your entire body) you would have seen the outpouring of criticism with regards to privacy -- I'm saving the fact I'm not using the service because I don't see the need for it for another post! Speaking of which, when was the last time I logged into Google Wave?

Despite hardened cynics like Scott McNealy who famously quipped that "privacy is dead, get over it", and more recently Eric Schmidt with his latest outburst, people still expect a certain level of privacy online, and their expectations (for better or worse) aren't set by terms of service pages that nobody reads, but instead from what they expect.

People don't worry too much about privacy on Twitter (and IRC et al) because the entire point of the service is to be an open discussion forum and to see what other people are doing. People's expectations are: if you post it on Twitter, it's public knowledge. Aside from the fact it was less sleazy and it was designed by people who weren't recruited from Geocities, people moved to Facebook from MySpace for the added privacy, so friends could only see what they were doing.

Facebook blew it, could Google dodge the bullet?

The problem is, Facebook blew it. Their dodgy practise of changing their terms of service every five minutes, allowing third party applications ridiculous levels of access to private data (if not through you then through your friends), and their latest blunders with altering the privacy settings to public for people who'd never changed said settings (the very people they know they can get away with it with) have meant virtually no tech savvy people trust Facebook any more. Once trust like that is lost, it's lost for good. If it weren't for the fact most of my high school friends are on it and use it to contact me I'd delete my account today; I'm already in the process of stripping it bare of anything.

Google Buzz is this defining watershed moment for Google. Unlike Twitter and MySpace where the expectation was everything was open, people expect their email accounts to be private, even moreso than their Facebook profiles. Google Buzz publishing your most emailed friends is completely unacceptable and I think represents one of the biggest breaches of trust online that I can remember.

Uhhh...... Ruben, just turn it off lolz !!!1!1!one!!

Then there are well meaning people who say things like this:

@Rubenerd You can just 'turn off buzz' down the bottom.

Unfortunately, no, that's not true at all. Even if you do disable Google Buzz, your unwittingly shared content and people lists still exist, hence the controversy. For some people they didn't even accept the invitation for the service, it was simply turned on. I side with the Microsoft-ians on this one: If Microsoft pulled a stunt like this back when they still had relevance they would have been hit by hundreds of lawsuits left right and centre before lunch. That reminds me, the sushi I bought from the supermarket an hour ago is probably chilled enough to eat now, I'm hungry.

Fortunately it seems Google has got the message and people have started apologising. I'd like to chalk this huge blunder up to negligence, but it's hard for me to accept a company with such resources and talent wouldn't have figured out such a service would cause concerns.

In the meantime I've been a Gmail user since 2004, but I've decided to start trialling my own hosted email again. I'm a guy just starting out in this industry so I should be eating this stuff up, but this whole notion of cloud computing is really starting to scare me. Perhaps I shouldn't have had three cups of coffee on an empty stomach, I've got the jitters.