Why Everyone Hates Google

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Tim Judd

Why Everybody Hates Google

If you were Google, you might be forgiven for wondering what’s in the water that is prompting the world to hate you quite as much as they are this week. The answer is easy… a goal of owning and managing the worlds data to your own advantage is getting folks a little jumpy. In a crowded week for Google haters, the launch of the very cool Google Glass product is getting push back from state legislators who are already pushing to make them illegal for driving to casino operators who are already banning them from the gaming floor. Civil rights groups and privacy activists are forming strange bedfellows with bar operators and strip club proprietors against these devices. None of this stops me wanting to buy a pair (as long as they come in my prescription).

At the same time, a ground swell against Glass is getting underway. Monopoly regulators in Europe are calling foul on Google’s aggressive use of patents it purchases from Motorola against arch nemesis Apple in Germany. In a double EU whammy, the tax regulators are clearly coming after Google for their creative financial planning. Just in case you thought Google was in fact a warm, fuzzy Silicone Valley Company it’s not… it’s really based in Bermuda. It’s EU operations are ostensibly transacted through Ireland with a pass through to Bermuda… minimizing EU tax exposure. Unfortunately recently they recruited a bunch of folk for “sales” roles in UK, France, and Germany… and by doing that, they inadvertently qualified themselves to be more aggressively taxed in those countries. Clearly the EU has it in for big G, and is determined to get them any way they can.

The problem Google faces is that they make a great target for anyone with a beef against corporate America, technology in general, and information in particular. They are also incredibly secretive and harder to get a straightforward answer from than Ben Bernanke on Quaaludes. Apple gives us cool toys and Amazon let’s us buy pretty much anything we want to any time anywhere, Google seems to be infiltrating pretty much a very place where we touch information. If they didn’t invent, it they “borrow it” (witness Android and AdWords both critical products they “borrowed” from Apple and Yahoo respectively). Add to that their enthusiasm for minimizing their tax burden which enrages legislators, their willingness to use patents to hobble competitors, and their absolute power over how we navigate the Internet; and it’s not hard to see why they are getting increasingly rough treatment… and it doesn’t seem to bother them very much.

A Very Social Moment #NBCAGT

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Tim Judd

It’s fascinating to watch an old dog learn a new trick… almost as much fun as watching him chew toffee. The incident I refer to was my experience at the Pantages Theatre in LA. If you haven’t been there it’s an excellent old theater in the unfashionable end of Hollywood where the homeless meet to mingle. I was there to watch a recording of Americas Got Talent. Ever since Howard Stern (blessed be his name) joined the show, I have become a firm fan of its eclectic mix of dancing dogs, jugglers, comedians, and singers. A long time a go I worked at a TV studio for a year. I was mostly the “Studio Gopher” (Gopher Tea, Gopher coffee, lunch, etc), but I did get to see a lot of recordings and it’s almost shocking to see how little the entire process has changed in 30 years. It’s still lots of very important people talking into headsets and ordering the poor benighted studio audience around; much like the guards at a WWII POW camp… come here … go there… no food or water for you… stop screaming!

The tickets were free and I’m always looking for interesting and exciting new places to fight with my lovely wife at, so we grabbed a hotel and went on an AGT adventure. On a side note, I used a new app called “Hotel Tonight” to get a room. It only sells hotels for that day, and doesn’t start selling until 12 noon local. Unlike Hotwire, it let’s you see the hotel before you commit. It has some decent deals and the price actually dropped as I was booking.

We arrived at the theater to begin several hours of waiting in line in the sun and general hanging about before we were brutally strip searched by the camp guards, given a change of clothing, deloused, tattooed, and finally admitted to the theater to be further bossed around. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how they managed the process of recording the acts, the delays between each contestant were manageable and the audience wrangler did a good job of keeping us reasonably entertained. At the beginning of the recording, they asked the entire audience to learn a simple mini dance routine to “living in America” for use in the opening credits (maybe). It was all fun and games for the first dozen or two runs but by the time we had passed 20 the natives were getting restless… we were about three more forced repetitions from an all out camp uprising.

So what about the old dog learning new tricks? Well, it wasn’t much of a trick…but it was interesting to watch. The audience is patrolled for the entire show by what can only be described as video bouncers. They watch avidly for anyone trying to sneak a pic or video of a dog dancer or belly dancer (yes we had one and yes she went through to the next round). Any attempt at video is leapt upon, water cannons are turned on the audience the offending person is dragged out, beaten senseless and in some cases water boarded on stage. However in a massive break with tradition, they did allow the audience to video the judges’ progress from the back of the theater to the stage. In fact, the audience is actively encouraged to do that… and post the pics or videos on their Facebook, Twitter, Vine or Instagram. In a further concession to the real world, all the busy and bossy crew wore t-shirts with #NBCAGT emblazoned across the back. They plugged the heck out of the Hashtag, and from the number of followers and tweets they are getting it seems to be working reasonably well. In my video (attached) of the King arriving, it’s interesting to note that you can hear cheers from the crowd but not much applause… for the simple fact that you can’t clap when you are recording… and fully 75% of the crowd was recording.

What would have been much more interesting would have been for them to let the crowd film anything they wanted, publish, and be damned. What I suspect would have happened is they would create tons of buzz on the show long before its real broadcast driving people who want to see the event in HD, as opposed to shaky phone cam – but baby steps still count as progress.

Keeping up with Google

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Tim Judd

As an avid Google watcher it’s been almost a full time job just trying to keep up with the guys. There are probably a good dozen Google related stories moving and shaking as we speak. In broad terms you can classify these developments as falling into several themes.

The PR Battle

Google used to be cute, now it’s a monster which eats it’s own and grinds the face of its critics into the dirt… a perfectly logical progression in business, but it’s clear Google themselves have a problem being seen as the ogre they are rather than the cool kids they think they should be. Putting aside the fact that the German authorities just hate Google and all things Google, the German regulators have just handed down the largest fine they were able to for the reckless collection of non-map data as they built the German street view component a few years back. Although Google claimed it was a problem caused by over enthusiastic geeks; the Germans weren’t having any of it. Indeed, they made it clear in their ruling that had they had a larger book to throw at them, they would have been happy to oblige. At almost the same time, Eric Schmidt continued to defend Google’s legal but creative way of reducing taxes as much as they can. The BBC chewed him up and spat him out, and other media rushed in to pile on. The Brits love paying taxes, so for them to see Google gleefully avoid paying taxes they can legally avoid, it makes them see red.

Focus, Focus and Focus

Google used to throw off pet and or goofy projects with gay abandon… now not so much. Indeed they are thinning the herd. They let their digital children persist of kill them off depending on revenue and potential, and or the phase of the moon. Recently they have been killing products at a faster clip than usual. They killed off their very popular RSS reader, and last week they axed the Google Affiliate Network… to the consternation of many who have scratched out a living in this industry. The affiliate network wasn’t a huge contribute, but it’s interesting that they axed the product which was (presumably) profitable. The logical successor to the late and not very lamented GAN, is the shopping search they introduced last year as a paying service. That’s an enormous opportunity which will likely eclipse the rather clunky GAN…indeed it’s probably already done that.

Colonizing the Future

Google won the search war by doing one thing supremely well, and “borrow” anything else they may need. They pretty much invented the search category and have benefited enormously from that initial win. The classic example of this strategy is the ad product, which they built on their first empire. That platform is powered by an auction bid platform, which they simply stole from Overture (then Yahoo). They spent good parts of the next year or so in court settling with Yahoo. That legal process allowed them enough room to solidify their market share so that even though they were paid fortunes when they settled, Yahoo lost. The odd thing is that although they innovate like crazy, they rarely get it right in house and have to use their checkbook to play catch-up. They missed video (and bought YouTube), they missed social media with the awful Google Buzz and have foisted Google Plus on a reluctant world. Apple beat them to the punch on phones, and Android is a good copy – albeit under legal attack. ITunes rules paid downloaded content; Google play is a distant second place. They missed local reviews and couldn’t buy Yelp. They missed classified to Craigslist, and the quilter market to Pintrest. The list goes on. The list is complicated by the sea changes underway in both how we experience all things digital (mobile, iPads, etc), and the places we go to search (Amazon represents a huge threat to commercial search).

All this puts them under what I have to imagine is intense pressure to second-guess the future to consolidate their hegemony. Google Now is interesting as a potential digital assistant, which will follow you around and be your constant digital helper. Google Glass represents a new category… and maybe their first, truly new category, useful digital overlay. Some are skeptical but I’m already a believer (after a fashion). My new car has a rather cool Heads Up Display feature; where it projects basic travel data and directions in the screen so that you can gauge your speed etc. without ever taking your eyes off the road. After only a week or two of using it I’m hooked. As long as Google Glass comes in my prescription, I’m going to be an early adopter.

All Of A Twitter-verse

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Tim Judd

I was at a conference recently and was entertained by a presentation from the CMO of Twitter taking us through how just, Gosh Darned marvelous Twitter is. I found it interesting that they were making the case that “it’s not just for news and celebrity.” Funny… I’d of said it is exactly all about that. Away from news and celebrity, 81% of users have less than 50 followers and 75% of users follow less than 50 people. There are certainly a relatively small number of people who are followed by tons of people. Twitter collided with the news this week in a couple of ways, which reinforce it really is all about News and Celebrity. The SEC carried out an investigation into announcements or comments, which might impact investors from people involved in the company. They concluded that it is indeed OK for folks who work in public companies to use social media for announcements about the company provided that they tell all investors where the announcement will be made. Visualizing thousands of Wall Street types trying to figure out how to hash tag or retweet is hilarious. Always keen to make things easier for the “buy at 10 sell at 12 go home at 3″ brigade Bloomberg announced today that they will be adding tweets from companies to info about those companies on their screens. Luck WSJ types can sort by company, industry proximity to any Kardashian.

To reinforce that it really is all about news and celebrity, Twitter is being cited as an unindicted co conspirator to the recent re-death of Jay Leno as host of the Tonight Show. Leaving aside the inherent goofiness of the public execution (again) of the lantern-jawed late night hack, one of the key reasons for his demise is (supposedly) the modest Twitter following he has accumulated. Strictly speaking, Jay doesn’t have his own page but the Late show does and it garners a measly 500+ thousand followers. In contrast, his replacement Jimmy has over 8 million followers and is famous for viral videos. In terms of online engagement, he’s head and jaw ahead of Jay. The late night TV crowd typically skews old… or very old. It’s unclear that Fallon will be able to bring with him any, or some, of his twitter flock… many of his crowd are no doubt out having fun when his show runs live. In any event, the battle for the key 18-49 demographic has already been lost to the Daily Show and my personal favorite the Colbert Report. Had they broken ranks and made one of those guys the new king of late night, we would really have a battle on our hands… and remember, Twitter is not just for celebrity and news.

Google’s April Foolishness

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Tim Judd

OK, it’s that time of year… April fools, and as always the bright young things at Google have led the charge with a plethora of goofy gags. They have been doing this for so long that we have come to expect attempts at fun from the Mountain View pranksters and this year is no exception. I won’t waste your cycles with a detailed breakdown on the (I think) six hilarious pranks, but in no special order they include:

Shutting down YouTube.
A blue version of Gmail.
A scent based search (presumably to go with Google Glasses).
Silly Google Trends.
Treasure maps on Google maps.
A version of Google Wallet; which is able to print real cash.

Each spoof had real technology spent on it to stage, had videos with great production values, and each was less funny than the last.

In part, my grumpiness springs from the predictability and flat footedness of the humor (these after all are not people who were originally employed for their cutting edge wit) rather it’s the lavishness of the whole thing that has lodged in my nose. There is a Native American traditional ceremony called Potlatch. At these, the wealthy tribal principal involved either gives away enormous wealth or more spectacularly ceremonially burns great wealth in order to reinforce the position of the chief concerned. When I was a little boy faced with finishing off my cabbage at dinner, my mother used the “there are starving children in India who would love to have that food.” Like every kid I wanted to reply, “well mail it to them”… or some such smart remark. Today’s exuberant waste of resources on April foolery, only a week after Google announced that they were shutting down Google reader and by adoption striking at the heart of RSS, altogether smacks of Potlatch. Google, we get it… you are Mighty and Terrible. Your wealth is beyond calculation and we should indeed finish our cabbage… but guys…you really aren’t that funny. Would it have killed you to axe a couple of these unfunny projects and keep Google reader around for the rest of us to use and enjoy… and we promise to laugh at your jokes next year.

Suing Google…and Other Ludicrous Activities

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Tim Judd

I’m not a huge fan of the legal process. I have been frivolously sued too many time to find it funny… indeed I received notice of a case where today which, once I picked myself up off the floor, I forwarded to my tame attorney to add to his to do list. The case of Beverley Stayart, a poster child of lost causes, rose to prominence again recently when she failed in her doomed-from-day-one suit against Google… again. What’s at issue here is the auto complete feature, which attempts to guess what you are looking for by adding popular or related searches to what you are typing. Years ago when this feature first came out, it inadvertently linked Ms. Stayart with the brand “Levitra” – which is of course a popular drug used in the management of ED. Why she was linked to it… who knows… but she was offended by the linkage and sued Yahoo in 2009 and appealed in 2010, then Google and others then Google again. She lost her last case a week or so back.

If you search for my name you will find it linked to the truck engine Duramax, and Wegnams the grocery store. In the first case a Tim Judd races for their team, the second Tim Judd is their IT manager. I have no problem with either and since I’m 5 of the top 6 results offered by Google, I don’t think the auto fill matters either way. Ms Stayarts case hinged on some pretty thin arguments which she has failed to convince any court of competent jurisdiction, and I’m pretty sure that in a country without contingency based lawyers (or her being CFO of a law firm which happens to share her last name), her case would never have made it past first base… allegedly.

The irony is, allegedly, because she brought all those cases to argue the point that her name has indeed become irrevocably linked to that auto suggestion… indeed the most likely thing she will ever be searched for or written about in authoritative places is exactly this case. Had she left it alone it would have probably auto corrected years ago. It’s Schrödinger’s Cat for the search industry. The more you protest, the more content about the issue is created, and the more you will be linked to exactly that issue. This feature has been used for evil purposes more recently where concerted efforts have been made to link a person or name with something very bad. Interestingly where this has been noted it tends to be deemed “spam” and goes away on it’s own reasonably quickly… human intervention, or just because stuff happens… who knows? What you can be 100% sure of, and I know this because I used to work for a big search engine and had exactly these conversations, is the moment the legal process is introduced then nothing will change or get better until the case gets decided. It is far better to suggest to a search engine that it is being spammy in a result, or point out how it’s being spammed. Search engineers are a very proud breed (they would have to be to have that little social life…just kidding guys). Point out a mistake or a problem nicely (say at a search technology conference or on twitter) and it mysteriously goes away… sue them and the grownups take over… and now you have to take on fair use and the first amendment… and you will never win.

The Five Hour Fifteen Minute Fine

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Tim Judd

I keep pretty current with all things search, yet even I was a little taken aback by the fine on Google just announced today. In this case, the attorneys general of 38 states settled with Google by fining Big G seven million dollars. Any Google watcher will initially be surprised that Google settled at all. Google is famously combative, they took on and took down the FTC before Christmas, and if you come after them you had better have a great case and deep pockets. In this case the states AG had exactly that. What Google is being fined for is a by-product of their Street View project. Back in 2008-2010 when they send goofy looking cars to photograph everyone’s house from a pedestrian point of view the cars also collected other data like your emails, financial records, browser behavior, and for all I know your inside leg measurement, from unencrypted WiFi connections.

Putting aside the question “who in their right mind leaves an unencrypted WiFi connection out there (remember it was a few years back)… the bigger question in my mind would be, why on Earth would you equip a fleet of cars with the infrastructure needed to harvest data which you have always said you weren’t trying to capture? A street photo is not financial data; browser behavior is not a street photo. Google used the (oops) defense. It claimed it collected WiFi data because of “rogue code” mistakenly included in the software by a lone engineer. Yeah right. I think a better, more honest and quite reasonable, answer would have been “Back then we thought it might be cool to map as much data as we could since we were in the neighborhood anyway we took what we could find. The team working on it was over zealous, we collected more than we intended, we never wanted or used the data, we have destroyed it and we will work hard to preserve private data doing forwards.”

I just don’t buy the “rogue coder” defense… (BTW The Rogue Coder Defense would be a great title for a Big Bang Theory episode)… with “rogue” teams fitting “rogue” WiFi data collector systems into thousands of “rogue” vehicles which were then scouring the country uploading non existent data to “rogue” servers. Why is it I can’t beat a speeding ticket but Google can sell that ration of nonsense to 38 states AG? The topper for all this silliness is the fine. Google does roughly 32 Million a day. The laughably small $7 Million dollar fine will take roughly 5 and a quarter hours to earn out… oh well… I wasn’t using my forth amendment rights anyway.

Harvard Crimson Faced

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Tim Judd

It’s fascinating to watch the good people at Harvard twist in the breeze caused by their current search scandal. At the center of the controversy are the searches they did on the email of several Harvard Resident Deans. Resident Deans are what most regular schools would call “Resident Advisers” they share accommodation with students and offer advice. Harvard essentially admitted that it had searched through the Harvard (as opposed to personal) mail of several advisers looking for the source of a leak to media of information from the Harvard board about how students caught cheating might handle the accusation. The theory was that a resident Dean had forwarded it to students and either the Dean or the students had leaked it to the media.

“No one’s e-mails were opened, and the contents of no one’s e-mails were searched by human or machine”

What strikes me as horribly disingenuous is their claim that they only searched the titles of email, presumably hoping that they would find a note titled “FWD: Don’t leak this to the media it’s about student cheating“. Harvard insists, “No one’s e-mails were opened, and the contents of no one’s e-mails were searched by human or machine”. They did indeed track down the leaked info to an email on the subject forwarded by a Resident Dean to two students accused of cheating.

The kerfuffle, is of course, centered around privacy. How could an institution as traditionally liberal as Harvard engage in such authoritarian snooping? It turns out they do, because they can. It’s the same answer that would be given by the vast majority of businesses anywhere. Email is not the confessional. If you use company email on company servers or another tool (such as Skype) on company servers or on company time, you can have no real expectation of privacy… get over it and move on. Nobody, not even a Harvard Dean, is immune from their communication being searched by their employer without notice or permission. Harvard says “that under some circumstances, the university can search a faculty member’s Harvard e-mail accounts, but that the faculty member must be notified beforehand or soon after“. “Or soon after” is effectively exactly the same as “not at all”.

Search pervades and invades our lives at pretty much every level. Mostly for the good, it allows us access to information and convenience like never before. The flip side is that the Internet is now your permanent record.

The Distraction Conundrum

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Tim Judd

I’m easily distracted… always have been. Had I been born in the 80’s rather than the 60’s, I’d probably be a life long Ritalin user. My internal hamster is running a mile a minute and if what’s happening right now isn’t getting to the point fast enough I reach for the zapper… I have often thought how neat it would be to have a human zapper, which allows you to fast forward through lackluster conversations. This impatience extends to media. I was raised in the UK on commercial free BBC TV and radio with the result that I am physically unable to sit through more commercials than the concise 30 seconds offered by the brilliant people at HuluPlus. I’m clearly not alone in this; media companies and advertisers are in constant conflict with consumers who don’t want the distraction. Placing ads anywhere, especially on social media, draws cries of outrage from consumers who have gotten used to the price of admission being free… both from cost and distraction.

So, it is with interest that I started playing with Vine recently. If you haven’t tried it already you are probably using an Android phone… so far it’s only available on iPhone and iPod Touch. What this cunning, but evil little App does is allow you to create six second long stop-motion micro movies on your iPhone. If you ever watched Wallace and Gromit, or anything by Ray Harryhausen, you will be familiar with this technique. It’s very easy to do and kinda fun, but in the same way that Twitter drove the wannabe witty commentators to compress their deathless prose into 140 pithy characters, so Vine is going to turn a good number of us into six second animation crazy people. The app allows you to post direct to your twitter feed or Facebook, and it’s pretty addicting. I haven’t had the nerve to post my first efforts yet, but I’m working on it.

The challenge this very cool App, and the social integration it brings with it, goes beyond the interest it may generate in millennial cineasts or middle-aged goof balls like me. In the same way twitter declared 140 characters to be the required length for any conversation (commercial or otherwise), so Vine and the compressed media featured on Hulu is driving the attention span and the media window ever closer. Advertisers are responding by attempting to build their brands into successful vehicles much like Hyundai and the Walking Dead. That’s a show where no matter how horrific the zombie attack may be, you can be sure that our heroes will escape in a weirdly clean Hyundai… makes perfect sense. I’d much rather be trying deal with zombies in a shinny new Hyundai rather than (say) a Humvee. Mobile is further compressing the real estate available to target. The end product is an audience which is highly fragmented, talking to itself or just the people it likes, consuming media on multiple screens often in time shifts who is increasingly intolerant of the distraction commercial messaging creates.

What was that?… Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.

Google is Racial Profiling?

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Tim Judd

You can’t make this stuff up. I checked the calendar and it’s not April 1st. According to a story I found in the Boston Globe Latanya Sweeney a Harvard University academic noticed that when she searched for herself on Google or more precisely a site powered by Google search she received ads back for (amongst other things) criminal back ground checks for her name. She then did a more extensive test and actually wrote a research paper which found that distinctively “black” male first names are 25% more likely to return an ad from instantcheckmate.com offering background or criminal record checks than traditionally “white” names. She doesn’t draw any conclusions other than that this could be problematic for people of color….but the allegation that Google is somehow racially profiling is in the mix.

Of course even a cursory examination of the facts (as opposed to the hilarious conspiracy theory) is (allegedly) that instantcheckmate.com is in fact targeting what it believes to be ‘black’ names with ads for criminal background checks as opposed to more generic services for ‘white’ names. Google racially profiling would be a much better story. The same thing would apply were I targeting Russian fur hats or nesting dolls to people with Vladimir for a first name. It is a sad reflection on our society that (according to federal statistics) black males are seven times more likely to end in jail than their white non Hispanic peers. Logically that makes them more likely to have a criminal record, so it makes a twisted kind of common sense to target uniquely black male names with criminal background checks advertisements….but it’s not the Google Geeks doing it.

ThinkJudd

I think therefore I search

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