Google's got two new announcements: It's pairing up with Twitter for Friend Connect login purposes, and it's done the unthinkable and re-designed its home page. Both moves are surprising...do they mean the curly-haired youth of search is growing up?
Google's clinch with Twitter is ostensibly to bring "Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together" from Google's point of view. The search giant goes on to explain that "now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login." There's also the usual blurb about being able to Tweet your new-found Google powers when you sign up for the joint service.
This feature is going to be darn useful, basically reducing the burden of having to identify yourself in different ways at so many different sites. But there're two odd, strange, nay weird little facts to think about behind it. Firstly, as John Battelle points out at SearchBlog, the real shocker here is that Google's made a deal with Twitter, not Facebook. Though Twitter's hot, up and coming, and potentially a long-term winner, it's still very much a second place in the social-networkosphere to Facebook. But Facebook was just snapped up by Yahoo for a similar purpose...meaning Google's not quite the leader in this game (a bit like trailing Yahoo in Japan, but worse.)
Secondly, though there's been fierce speculation about Google's interest in social networking for its potentially rich real-time data mining powers, and rumors have swirled about Google buying Twitter (which beats Facebook in this field), Twitter has remained stubbornly independent. And now Google, which of course has its own user login system, has had to acknowledge the power of the Twitter phenomenon by co-opting its login system to Google's own services. It's a bit like Goliath suddenly admitting a need for some stones for his rockery, and buying them from David.
As if this seeming turn-around wasn't intriguing enough, then check out what Google's just done: It's redesigned its iconic splash-landing home page. And, though normally Google seems to have its eyes firmly shut when designing its UIs, it's actually done a good job. The driving force has been toward simplicity, because when you first arrive at Google.com now all you get is the big G's logo, the empty search box, and the familiar "Google Search" and "I'm feeling lucky" buttons. All of the other bits to do with image searching, your Google login, settings, and Google's ad program only appear when you move your mouse over the page. With this small tweak Google's actually focusing user attention on Google's raison d'être--search--by going for almost Zen minimalism. And it works...though I do wish there were a way to permanently switch Google to this clean mode for every time you visited.
Taken together you could be forgiven for thinking that these news pieces imply Google is kind of growing up. For years its basically done whatever the hell it likes, extending tentacles in all sorts of weird and wonderful business directions, ignoring even basic design principles and the developing look and feel of the rest of the Web, trying to seize whole marketplaces by offering for free what other companies charge for, and so on. It's basically been a rowdy, self-confident teenager--one that burst onto the scene with a good idea, and then rolled with it. Now it might just be time for the company to smarten up and think a little more carefully. We can but hope so...in the long run, it's probably in the consumer's best interest.
It's hard not to be excited about Augmented Reality since it's a dream sci-fi tech that's actually real and growing before our eyes--led in part by the AR Browser Layar, which has just been updated. Its new powers show the future of AR really is everywhere.
Hidden in the typical version-to-version improvements of Layar 3.0 are a few gems that will transform the system. The first is 3-D objects--which we wrote about before--adds a rich virtual reality-like capability to the augmented reality experience. The second is auto-triggered actions which will enable a whole host of novel exploitations of AR tech, particularly if you're talking about AR-enabled games which require you to navigate yourself to a particular point. And the final feature is a point of interest-to-point of interest system. This could transform many of the apps within Layar from being a mere list of nearby geotagged reference points to a way to guide people through a location--picture yourself taking part in an augmented city tour on your next vacation, complete with interesting pop-up data on the buildings you're walking past.
If that technobabble is all a blur, then check out the examples below for what this means for the real app on your smartphone:
Virtually Augmented Locations
If you happen to be in Rotterdam and switch on Layar when you're at the site of the new Market Hall building by MVRDV architects, you'll be able to wander around inside its strange hollow arch-shape and check out how the novel building fits into its environment.
And that's pretty amazing, since it's not scheduled to be built until 2014. Augmented reality with 3-D powers will let architects, designers, games designers and so on plop virtual objects into the AR view of the real world. It'll likely be an extremely useful tool for many such people...but I suspect the really clever uses of the tech haven't been dreamed up yet.
Augmented City Tours
The Beatles almost regroup with another new layer in Layar that activates when you go to particular spots in London associated with the band. In particular the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing gets some magical AR love that makes John, Paul, Ringo, and George appear exactly in place as they did on the album cover.
The next part of the tour is enabled when you get to the previous spot--which lets the app developers choose your path around London. Just watch out for the traffic.
Virtual Art
This is the most amusing new power inside Layar--the ability to create virtual art in real spaces. Think of it as digital graffiti or electronic performance art: When you hold the AR browser up to an artistically-augmented location, it shows the digital art as if it were present in the scene. The mind boggles as to how this will get used.
Of course while Layar is impressive, there's plenty of other AR developments going on...and as each implementation becomes more clever it really highlights one fact: AR is so useful and comes with so many potential exploitations that it's going to be a part of the way we consume much of our digital info in the future. That's simply because, as the Layar team puts it, it's a whole new "rich, immersive" experience that you can't replicate on a map, in a normal Web browser or even a simple location-sensitive smartphone app. Plus, digital graffiti is way easier to remove.
This week the CrunchPad died. Writers all over the Internet sank their teeth into the meaty deliciousness of the fiasco. But it occurred to us that behind the gadgety sadness of the story, there're some very positive things to learn.
Why did the CrunchPad die? Well, that's going to remain a mystery for a little while, as we only have one side of the argument to examine--TechCrunch's Michael Arrington's. And since Arrington's a famously difficult character and biased by his own enthusiasm for his product, we can but wonder that behind his accusations of attempts of IP theft by partner company Fusion Garage lies a much more fiery story. At least until Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan tells his side of the story and demos the prototype for reporters in San Francisco on Monday.
Forget the pissing match, though. CrunchPad may never see the light of day as a real product (and yes, I know one should never say never), but there're a bunch of very positive facts behind the device.
1. It's technologically possible, for a very affordable fee
In very short order, Arrington's team pulled together the big touchscreen tech, processor, ancillary electronics, rechargeable batteries and software to make a super-slim, powerful and fun-to-use basic Tablet PC. It worked, it was well-designed with almost Jonathan Ive-levels of minimalism, and those that tested prototypes apparently liked it plenty. In the death-knell post itself, Arrington noted that the team was close to running Google Chrome and Windows 7 on the CrunchPad, meaning it probably shouldn't be considered a basic Tablet PC at all. And remember that this successful (well, 95% successful) team had diverse experience, enthusiasm and a charismatic leader--but it was very, very small.
The good news from this is that a CrunchPad-like device is certainly achievable by anyone committed enough, and if a manufacturing giant turned its efforts in this direction it could probably achieve an even more capable machine.
2. The public wanted the CrunchPad
Having the capability to make the CrunchPad would've been a pointless thing had no-one wanted to buy one. But considering the media excitement and public enthusiasm expressed at TechCrunch and elsewhere, there was definitely a public desire for the device.
You may even say there was a definite thirst for it. I would certainly have considered buying one for idle in-bed Web surfing before the work day started for real, or for in-flight movie-viewing--assuming it was powerful enough for this task.
The upshot is that the public seems to actively want a slim, super-sized iPhone-like device. And should someone else choose to make a gimo like this, it'll likely sell well. And possibly sell like hot cakes.
3. Industry wanted the CrunchPad
Perhaps the most surprising information revealed at the end of the CrunchPad affair was quite how enthusiastically the hardware manufacturing and sales industry itself embraced the ideas. Arrington speaks of a "major multi-billion dollar retail partner" that was ready to "sell the CrunchPad at zero margin to help us succeed in the early days." There were sponsors in the wings ready to help sell the gizmo "near our $300ish cost." Investors were champing at the bit, waiting merely for the final prototype approval before pouring in cash to make the venture work.
And, most fascinating of all, Intel was on-board. It assisted with engineering help during the design phase and was ready to offer Arrington's team a per-chip price for Atom CPUs that was "ridiculously generous" given the projections for first-year sales.
What we can learn from this is that many industry insiders looked at the future of the CrunchPad--which would've been an early format-defining machine, much like the Kindle for e-readers, perhaps--and saw that it was bright. So bright, they were willing to take significant risks in order to get the project off the ground.
Draw these three conclusions together, and what have you got? Tacit confirmation from multiple angles that slim tablet- or slate-format touchscreen PCs will soon be rolling off someone's production lines, for a netbook-like price. Dare I say iTablet? Yes, I dare.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey just flicked on the public spotlight over his new venture: Square. It's a tiny plastic blob that gives smartphones the ability to act as secure credit card readers. It's clever, disruptive, but will have to evolve very rapidly.
Square was born extremely rapidly: It began as an idea in February 2009, and the new company came out of stealth mode just yesterday--that's a window of just ten months, which is swift even though the idea behind the device is extremely simple. Essentially it's a small piece of electronics that translates the signals from a magnetic strip reader into an audio signal. This audio signal, corresponding to the data on a credit card swiped through the device, goes in through the headphone/microphone socket of an iPhone, where it's decoded by the special Square app and wirelessly routed off to Square's remote servers which then perform the usual banking jiggerypokery that more ordinary credit card readers do.
So far, so simple-sounding humdrum, right? Well, it's more complex than that of course. By providing a basic, easy-to-use and secure system (no credit card data is stored on the iPhone in use) Square could turn almost anyone into a credit-card accepting merchant. It also costs way less than the typical wireless keypad/printer card machines you see in stores, even factoring in the price of the iPhone--partly due to its "no contracts...no hidden costs" promise. And ultimately it'll be able to work with other smartphones and laptops--anything with a microphone input, and for which a Square app can be written. Over at GigaOm they're calling a disruptive technology because of the ubiquity of smartphones, and the possibility Square could overturn the way traditional e-banking transactions are carried out.
And that's probably true...with one huge "but." It's to do with Europe. European banking and credit card systems are very rapidly switching away from magnetic strip technology towards the smarter, more secure in-card chip tech. The change is so swift that U.S. visitors are often finding their old-fashioned magnetic cards aren't accepted in many establishments, and it's such a vastly superior system that there are even mumblings that the E.U. may ban magnetic bank cards pretty soon. This will pose a significant problem for Square, which relies on the low cost of its hardware components and fancy in-smartphone processing to work. For Square to disrupt the European electronic banking system, it will need a newer, more expensive piece of hardware that can interface and decode the in-card chips directly--this will complicate its business model pretty severely. And there's another problem: Europeans in many nations are already used to using wireless credit card readers for almost every transaction--I bought a single carton of milk in my tiny local store using the system this morning. Square will have to fight cleverly in a battle dominated by the big, muscly banks if it's to be a disruptive influence over the Atlantic.
Still, since Square went from concept to product so swiftly, it should be possible for Dorsey's system to evolve with nimble speed to cope with this issue, don't you think?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has long been shrouded in mists made of equal measures of awe, mystery, controversy, and spying. Now it's strolling out of those clouds, jauntily singing a 1980s pop ditty by Nena. 99 red balloons, floating in the summer sky
Er, 10 red balloons, actually.
DARPA's launching a public challenge on December 5, timed to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Internet predecessor ARPANET. The agency is offering $40,000 to the first person who finds 10 red balloons hidden somewhere in the continental U.S., each one somewhere
near a public roadway. Yup, that's ten tiny balloons in an area of 3.8
million square miles. Presuming you don't have personal access to a
network of live-view spy satellites with incredible optical resolution
and a supercomputer to crunch the data, to solve the puzzle you're
going to have to take part in a seriously clever group effort.
Which is, of course, the point. DARPA's goal is to learn how groups of people using distributed computers work together in social networks to achieve a specific goal. The Agency expects to see different teams working differently, different team sizes, odd strategies like spreading false info to throw people off the trail and possibly even attempts to sell balloon location information on the Net. It'll help with research into terrorist activities, particularly how distributed groups work cohesively, along with a huge bunch of other useful data.
But wait a minute, back up a step. Did I just write that DARPA, an organization with operations at Above Top Secret at its core, an agency mentally linked with Area-51 and stealth bombers, is launching a global public challenge with a cash prize? Yes I did. And the reasons for this apparent cloak-and-dagger about-face are actually pretty intriguing, and can partly be attributed to DARPA itself.
It's all about crowdsourcing, you see--a technology that manyotherorganizations are beginning to exploit. Back when DARPA was founded in 1958 after Sputnik's launch caught the U.S. napping, its operations were secretive mainly to prevent spy activities eroding the cutting-edge advances DARPA was supposed to generate. And there was no easy way for DARPA to sample the behaviors of millions of people in a semi-controlled way. The World has opened and changed in innumerable ways since then, but the Internet (sparked partly by ARPANET, of course) is perhaps the most socially and technologically transformative invention of modern history. It offers DARPA access to untold millions of willing scientific guinea pigs, each giving the Agency useful data on things never-before researched.
So, think about that when you trot along to the registration Web site and when you while away too many hours looking for red balloons when you're supposed to be working on Friday. I wonder if part of DARPA's experiment includes calculating the economic impact of millions of lost man-hours by distracted tech-workers?
Offerpal's just announced a new way for online shoppers to earn virtual currency to spend in online games and social networks. Dubbed, unsurprisingly, Offerpal Shopping, it's how you may well expect to do some of your future online e-commerce.
Offerpal Shopping sounds, at heart, incredibly simple: When you shop at "hundreds of online retailers in categories including clothing and accessories, electronics, entertainment, food, furniture, gifts, services, software, sports, travel and more" with the help of Offerpal, its software will sniff out the transaction and reward you with a virtual refund. The discount/refund/call-it-what-you-will is in the form of digital cash in Offerpal's i-frame system, and typically will amount to 5% to 10% of the value you spent in real cash...though you can expect tempting offers of up to 30% return.
It all sounds neat, until you wonder where you can spend the virtual dough: I-frame is apparently embedded in "more than 2,000 online games, social networks and virtual worlds," and it's in these artificial environments that you'll be able to spend your artificial money.
Online game publishers will love the system, since it will entice players deeper into their games--where they'll be exposed to more advertising, equating to more revenue for the publishers. And it'll likely attract those casual gamers who would be wary of plonking down their real credit card number to buy mere virtual points: These consumers may well be tempted to buy, say, goods from Macys.com with the added benefit of Offerpal refunds. It'll even be a good thing for Macys and the other participating retailers too, who'll see a sales uptick from newly-tempted online shoppers.
But is it good for you as a consumer? This system, and others like it is certainly how some of your future e-spending will work. But how good it is all depends on your point of view. Offerpal was embroiled in the recent "spam shopping" controversy that centered on online games like Farmville on Facebook, where the virtual currency system was seen as potentially abusive. Offerpal Shopping is also, unlike real-World spending rewards schemes, heavily tipped towards the online retailers side of things: You shop online, and your reward is an ephemeral token that increases the opportunity for online retailers to advertise their wares at you. Think of it as the opposite of the Air Miles system: Where this offer rewards you for your loyalty shopping in certain stores with tokens you can exchange for real flights in real aircraft to real places, Offerpal's rewards are all digital, or unreal. Of course, if the system let you spend Offerpal dollars at those same online retailers, then it could be very attractive to e-shoppers...but it certainly doesn't seem like this is how it'll work.
Oh Facebook, when are you going to learn? When you've got over a third of a billion people using your site to basically fritter the day away, any tweaks are going to stir up your population. What are Facebookers saying about these new ones, then?
Mark Zuckerberg is obviously sensitive to the controversies that Facebook's previous attempts to adjust its terms and conditions and privacy settings stirred up, so he chose to announce the news in an open letter posted on the site, with an alert at the top of everyone's landing page today that links to the letter. In the few hours since the letter launched, there have been over 16,000 comments--a huge number, considering that the U.S. hasn't really woken up yet.
But before we get to the user comments--what's Facebook done now? On the face of it, not a lot, actually. The core decision the company has made is to demolish the "networks" feature of the site. As Zuckerberg notes, it made sense in the early days when the site was popular among school and college students, often keen to share or learn information only with people from their academic establishment. As Facebook's exploded, networks have grown to include businesses, esoteric groupings and even whole countries--essentially eroding the usefulness of sharing with a particular network. Mark puts a positive spin on the decision to abolish them by remarking "If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information."
The solution is to have a much simpler privacy control: You can now share information with only your friends, friends of friends, or everybody. And there's a new, and extremely powerful, system--you can now decide on an individual update basis who gets to see your data. That's going to be very useful, though no doubt will quickly be abused by the kind of "Sarah said this dumb thing at school yesterday" comment, which "Sarah" won't get to see.
So. We know Facebookers are incredibly sensitive to tweaks made to how the site works, and we know they all tend to reveal their online personality pretty openly. How do they respond to this one? We took the most recent 10% of comments, and did some analysis--the text is shown in that stark word cloud up there. And the upshot? Facebookers seem to generally like this improvement. There are 133 uses of the word "love" in this comment sample, 83 "greats" versus only 8 "hates" and just 17 discrete uses of the word "no", though of course these could be being used in a different context.
While positive, this data doesn't sound like too much of a resounding thumbs-up though, especially since there's very little discussion about privacy concerns or the loss of networks. What then, among the spam adverts and side-arguments in the comments, are Facebookers really talking about? It's obvious, when you look at the wordcloud: They all want a "dislike" button. Yes, in the face of a potentially significant tweak to Facebook's privacy settings, the biggest response is to ask for a totally different and rather trivial service. Has Facebook's community suddenly gone all shallow and careless with their online data, trusting the site's decisions more than before? You certainly could argue that. You may even suggest that that's what the whole site is about anyway.
Losing the ability to form networks will certainly irritate some Facebook users, but it would seem a small price to pay to gain the enhanced privacy settings the site's now offering. But what we really need to watch for in the coming hours or days, is whether Zuckerberg really cares about what his community wants, versus what he thinks it wants: Will Facebook get a dislike button?
Facebook seems like a damn good mirror for reality, according to research by scientists--at least if you're talking about your real-life persona. Because your Facebook profile turns out to be excellent at capturing your true personality.
You might think, if you spend a minute or two pondering about it, that your social network profile may represent an idealized version of yourself--after all, who hasn't thought twice about uploading a status update that could make you look bad, or carefully selected photos to upload that aren't too embarrassing.
And that might be so, but according to Sam Goslin at the University of Texas at Austin your real personality still can shine through. Goslin is a psychologist, and he and his team analyzed 236 profiles of college-age types in the U.S. and Germany (from Facebook and StudiVZ, SchuelerVZ). They established a baseline personality assessment by sending questionnaires to the owners, and cleverly measured both the actual traits as well as the traits the individual thought would be ideal for them. By comparing the social network profiles with the perceived and actual personality types of their owners, Goslin's team was then able to work out if the profiles did a better job of representing the actual or idealized personality traits.
Goslin himself professed surprise at the outcome. He assumed that people were idealizing their profiles but found that real personalities tend to shine through. Why the results point this way are now attributable to two causes: Either the people in this dataset really weren't trying to idealize their online persona too much, or they were trying and failing.
The upshot of the research is that as well as being able to get you fired, heavily fined, and not hired, your social networking profile could actually let your true colors shine through--bad news to those among you who prefer to keep your personal selves truly private at all times, for whatever reason. But it's good news to those legions of PR guys and advertisers who are trying to serve up adverts carefully tailored to appeal to you: Essentially they now know your Facebook profile is a pretty reliable match to your real personality.
How can you avoid all of this self-revealing? Its pretty simple: Don't have a Facebook account. Or, and this is a radical idea in a world where we all analyze ourselves 24/7, just don't worry about it: Be confident in who you are, and get on with your life. It's probably more relaxing this way.
I got all excited about Twitter's geotagging feature before, and now it's getting a new spin that wraps in another neat technology: Augmented reality. Enter Twitter 360, an AR iPhone App that puts Tweets in a global navigational context.
It's a product from Presselite, the company that snuck the very first AR iPhone app into the App Store under Apple's nose before the system had been officially enabled. It has a slightly familiar look and feel to those of you who've used the company's Metro map apps. Essentially it superimposes Tweets from your Twitter feed onto a view of the world through your iPhone 3G S's camera--each Tweep responsible for the Tweets gets a digital tag in the AR view that corresponds to their approximate location (if they've just used a generic location in their Twitter settings) or a precise location if they've switched on the new geotagging feature.
One neat thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that Twitter 360 lets you set the upper limit to the range the app covers as being the "World." As you can see from this pic, that's quite handy for tracking Fast Company tweets--and for working out precisely how far I am from New York. It's warmer where I am, so I don't mind those 5,000-odd kms.
Presselite is careful to note that this is "one of the first" iPhone apps to use the new geotagging facility within Twitter, and that's with good reason: Layar, the AR browser, has had several Tweep location apps like Tweetmondo and Tweetaround working as AR layers inside it for quite a while, and they're pretty sophisticated. But Twitter 360 is clever all by itself--even offering the capability to locate your friends (once you've added them to its database) and if you enable it, it'll auto-update your official location field on Twitter with your most recent coordinates when you turn the app on. Antoine Morcos, the company's co-founder is careful to note that "Twitter 360 does not intend to be" a full Twitter client app, and instead the company's goal is "to provide a different approach to the Twitter experience." It certainly opens up interesting new possibilities, like using Tweets to coordinate a rendezvous with a friend in a new city, and it's likely to get more applications over time as Presselite is "already working on new ideas to be added."
The other thing to think about Twitter 360 is "oh damn," at least if you're nervous about the idea of broadcasting/lifecasting your location to the World. The app is clearly the thin end of the wedge which will end up with everything and everyone potentially knowing your location at any instant (though it's strictly opt-in for now.) Next stop: Personalized AR location-aware advertising, à la the film Minority Report. I'm just saying.
Google's offering free Wi-fi access in cafes--but not in the U.S. The company is busy wooing customer affections in another country: Japan, where it's losing the search engine battle.
We're used to Google dominating pretty much everything search engine-related (and dabbling in many other business sectors) on this half of the globe. But it's just not the case in Japan where, like the Xbox, it runs a distant second to Yahoo! Japan (which is run by Softbank). As The New York Times noted on the weekend, Google owns just 33.7% of the search market in Japan versus Yahoo's 56.5%.
Hence Google's Sagasou promotional campaign--and free wireless broadband Internet in a number of restaurants and cafes across the country from now until February 28. It's happening with the help of NTT's WiFine wireless system, and it's limited to a single access event each day for just 30 minutes of time. Hence the need to register your device with the system before accessing it--not too much too ask for free Wi-fi.
Google's also launched a new TV spot to boost its image in Japan:
The ad is just the latest step in Google's effort to promote itself. So far the endeavor has included weird events like floating passers-by into the air under 2,500 helium balloons, and even adapting Google's traditionally spartan (nay, empty and boring) homepage to include links to youTube and GMail. And it's the second video produced for Google Japan, here's the first:
Will these efforts work? The Times notes the "Japanese propensity for trying new things" as a good reason to think Google's tactics might pay off--but it also means that if Google does manage to capture attention, it needs to persist in those efforts, as it could be just as easy to lose new customers as to win them. Presumably that means Japanese Net users can expect more deals like this one to arrive soon.
And that's probably true...with one huge "but." It's to do with Europe. European banking and credit card systems are very rapidly switching away from magnetic strip technology towards the smarter, more secure in-card chip tech. The change is so swift that U.S. visitors are 
But is it good for you as a consumer? This system, and others like it is certainly how some of your future e-spending will work. But how good it is all depends on your point of view. Offerpal was embroiled in the recent "spam shopping" 
