Memex 1.1

My Observer Comment piece about the dilemma facing Google and the other Internet giants: do they co-operate with the National Security State? Or look after their users’ (and their own commercial) interests?

The revelations of the past week explain why Schmidt was so preoccupied with the power of the state – especially of the national security state, which is what our democracies are morphing into. The apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, Google’s vehement insistence that it has “not joined any programme that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers” and, on the other, the assertions to the contrary in the leaked National Security Agency slide-deck that demonstrate the extent to which Google (and the other internet companies) are caught between a rock and a very hard place.

The rock is that the national security state, as embodied in the National Security Agency, GCHQ and kindred agencies, shows no sign of withering away. Au contraire. In the end, companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple will be compelled to obey the state’s orders. If they don’t, their executives will find themselves sharing jail cells with the likes of Bradley Manning.

The hard place is corporate terror that their users will become alienated by the realisation that personal communications cannot be safely entrusted to internet companies based in the US. Crunch time has arrived for Google & co, in other words. I look forward to the second, revised, edition of Schmidt’s book.

This morning’s Observer column.

The best is the enemy of the good,” said Voltaire. It’s a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the prototype stage because their designers felt they fell too far short of the ideals they had set for themselves. One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so remarkable as a company boss is that he was the exception that proved Voltaire’s rule. He was a perfectionist for whom the good was the enemy of the best. Which is why working for him was such an exhausting business and also why Apple’s products became so distinctive.

As it happens, Voltaire’s maxim may also be useful in explaining what will happen in the field of autonomous vehicles, aka self-driving cars…

From the Official YouTube blog:

When YouTube’s site first launched in May 2005, we never could have imagined the endless ways in which you would inspire, inform and entertain us every day.

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

All of which suggests that YouTube was a very smart investment for Google. Better, I suspect, than the $1.1 billion that Yahoo is about to pay for Tumblr.

This morning’s Observer column.

The Chinese name their years after animals – the year of the goat, the rat and so on. In the tech world, we name years after devices. Thus, 2007 was the year of the iPhone and 2010 was the year of the iPad. It’s beginning to look as though 2013 will be the year of Glass. This prediction is based on the astonishing level of comment, curiosity, excitement, trepidation and hostility surrounding an augmented reality device created by Google and called Google Glass…

My Observer review of The The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen.

When, in early 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside from his position as Google’s CEO to become the company’s executive chairman, some of us were reminded of Dean Acheson’s famous gibe about postwar Britain – which had “lost an empire but not yet found a role”. What, one wondered, would Dr Schmidt’s new role be, and when would he find it?

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business

by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

Well, now we know…

Lovely Irish Times piece by Shane Hegarty about the implications of Google’s new toy.

Imagine the near future. Sometime next year. You, sir, are standing in a public toilet and a man sidles up to the urinal beside you. He nods at you out of politeness. You notice he’s wearing glasses. Then the guy takes out his phone and snaps a picture of you going about your business.

Something approximating a fuss would, no doubt, ensue.

At some point next year, maybe in a public toilet but probably on the street or on your morning commute, you’ll see your first pair of Google Glass glasses, the internet for the eyes that are currently with developers but have been given an increasing airing in recent weeks.

You’ll look at them. Everyone will look at them. The wearer will be looking at you. And you’ll stick it in the memory bank, tell the office about it and try and describe it.

But the Google Glass owner? He’ll have been able to record the whole encounter, play it back, download it, upload it, save it.

The funny thing is that even the Google bosses are beginning to wake up to this. Here, for example, is the company’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, talking about it at Harvard:

Talking out loud to control the Google Glasses via voice recognition is “the weirdest thing,” Schmidt said in a talk on Thursday at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

People will have to develop new etiquette to deal with such products that can record video surreptitiously and bring up information that only the wearer can see, Schmidt said.

“There are obviously places where Google Glasses are inappropriate,” he said.

Google is making the glasses available to software developers this year but has said they won’t be available more broadly until 2014.

Google has decided that it will pre-approve all apps offered to glasses users, unlike its more wide open market for Android phones and tablets.

“It’s so new, we decided to be more cautious,” Schmidt said. “It’s always easier to open it up more in the future.”

LATER: Turns out that Google’s plans to have Apple-type control over Glass operating system might be a bit optimistic. It seems that someone has jailbroken the device already.

Just days after its release to developers, Google’s Glass headset has already been hacked to give users full control of its Android operating system, according to Jay Freeman, a well-known Android and iOS developer who tested a known exploit for Android on Glass yesterday and announced his success on Twitter Friday afternoon. The “root” or “jailbreak” technique Freeman found would potentially remove any restrictions Google might place on Glass, though it’s not yet clear exactly what those restrictions might be in consumer versions of the device.

So Google has decided that Evernote needs to destroyed. That’s not what the search giant says, of course, but that’s the clear intention. The company has launched Keep as a web service and an Android app. This video confirms that Evernote is the target, because it could have been made about the older service.

I’m reminded of the way Apple launched iCloud as a way of dealing with Dropbox. That doesn’t seem to have worked. I’m still using Dropbox and avoiding iCloud. I expect I’ll continue to use Evernote, for two reasons. Firstly it’s built into my daily workflow. And secondly, if I pay for a service I have some level of confidence in its continuity.

No such certainty attends reliance on any of Google’s services. Charles Arthur has a terrific piece in the Guardian, “Google Keep? It’ll probably be with us until March 2017 – on average”, based on an analysis of 39 services that Google has shut down. Here’s what he found:

According to data I’ve gathered on 39 Google services and APIs – ranging from the short-lived “Google Lively” (a 3D animated chat introduced on 9 July 2008 and euthanised just 175 days later, on 31 December) to the surprisingly long-lived iGoogle (a personalised Google homepage, to which you could add RSS feeds and data, introduced in May 2005 and due for the chop in November after 3.106 days) – the average lifespan of products that don’t make the cut is 1,459 days. That’s just two days short of four years. For those keen on statistics, the standard deviation is 689 days; bar one item (iGoogle) all the group members lie within two standard deviations of the mean.

There are various ways of looking at this. One can, for example, applaud Google’s creativity — the way its engineers spew out innovative, experimental services as “perpetual betas”; it shows the kind of cognitive surplus that the company generates. Good for them!

On the other hand, one can take the view that as a dominant company on the Internet, Google has acquired special responsibilities: it’s become like a public utility and therefore should not behave like a cheeky, innovative start-up. Thousands and thousands of serious Internet users (including yours truly) built their work-flows round Google Reader; and Google’s entry into the RSS-aggregator market effectively ended the lives of earlier, smaller products. (I remember a time when the most chilling question a start-up could face from a potential investor was: “What will you do if Google decides to enter your target market?”)

Now, having wiped out those small fry, Google exits with a blithe statement saying that it needs to focus on core business.

I have a hunch that Google will come to regret this particular decision. Apart from anything else, Reader drove a lot of traffic — far more, I suspect, than Google+ does.

On the basis of his statistical analysis, Charles Arthur thinks that we can expect Keep to be around only until 18 March 2017.

This morning’s Observer column.

One of the wonders of the online world is the Downfall meme on YouTube. (For those whose time is too valuable to be wasted watching video clips, I should explain that the parody is based on remixing a scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film, Der Untergang [Downfall], which chronicles Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker.)

The clip takes the scene in which Hitler, memorably portrayed by Bruno Ganz, launches into a tirade upon finally realising that the war is truly lost and overlays it with subtitles about contemporary issues or events. Thus Hitler rants about the inability of the iPad to do multitasking, that Sheffield United have been relegated or that Twitter has gone down again.

What brings this to mind is that a new version of the meme appeared last week. In it, Hitler is told about Google’s decision to “retire” (ie scrap) its Reader app. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY THINKING??!!” he roars. “HOW CAN THEY DO THIS TO US?!! How dare they take away Google Reader. I have over 300 feeds in there!! Have they any idea how much effort I’ve put in? Of all Google products I spend 99% of my time with Reader. Why do they do this?” And so on.

For the first – and I hope the only – time in my life, I find myself agreeing with the Führer. For I, too, am a dedicated user of Google Reader…

It’s interesting — and perhaps predictable — to see the storm of (mainly geeky and journalistic) outrage at Google’s decision. But — as this post argues — it was probably a perfectly rational business decision from Google’s point of view. Most Internet users don’t use RSS, there’s no obvious direct revenue stream from it and Google is desperate for strategic reasons to shepherd its users onto Google+. On the other hand, maybe the reputational damage will cause the company to think again. After all, Google’s prime pitch is that it’s a good Net citizen — campaigning to keep the Internet open and uncensored etc.

Another thought sparked by the uproar is an observation made ages ago by Clay Shirky in another context when he said that what people complain of as information overload is actually a symptom of filter failure. I agree. Every new communications technology in history has led the early victims of it to complain of information overload. But in due course they figured out tools for managing the overload. The Net is no exception and RSS is one of the first-generation tools we devised to handle it.

In the meantime, the important thing for people like me is what to use instead of Reader. The Online Journalism Blog has published a very helpful spreadsheet giving details of the various alternatives. Thanks, guys.

I’m a user of Google Reader, and I’m not pleased either.

A while ago I wrote this:

We have replaced the old Microsoft Windows software monoculture with a new one based around an apps-centric user interface. Mobile devices have become machines for running apps. And whatever patent litigation says, all smartphones are now either iPhones or iPhone clones: a visiting Martian would be hard pressed to distinguish between an Android device and an Apple product, except perhaps on the basis of price. And, given the way network effects work, we will be stuck in this rut for the next few decades.

So an interesting question is: what will supplant the Apps-based interface? Here’s one answer (from Tom Simonite): voice-driven interfaces like Apple’s Siri and the technologies underpinning Google Glass.

Siri should be thought of a general purpose tool to achieve just about anything. I suspect the people in charge of Google Now’s development have similar ideas. Virtual helpers conceived along those lines could transform how people get stuff done with a smartphone, and remove the need for them to interact with the apps and websites they must turn to today.

Right now, Apple and Google’s operating systems are platforms on top of which the things a person needs sit. Achieving something involves a collection of apps, and often the Web, that users customize. The operating system just makes it possible to go to the places you need to go. If Apple and Google make their virtual assistants really work, that could be replaced by a much more centralized approach. Want something? Ask Siri or turn to Google Now and they’ll do the work of dealing with all those Web pages and apps for you.

It’s already possible to see how that could make things easier for people, and also remove the need for them to install or really be aware of apps as they are today. Many people with iPhones make use of Wolfram Alpha without ever installing it, for example, because it is drawn on by Siri. Likewise, you can find a restaurant and check table availability with Siri without having installed OpenTable, Yelp or any of their competitors. Google Now helps a person track sports scores, and deal with flight boarding passes without their turning directly to ESPN or United’s own mobile services.

Perceptive.