This Week in Google 243 (Transcript)
Show Tease:
It’s time for TWiG, This Week in Google. Gina’s got
the week off. Mike Elgan joins Jeff Jarvis and me.
We’re going to talk about, of course, a big announcement from Amazon. The new streaming platform. Happy Birthday Gmail, the 10th anniversary of everybody’s favorite email program. And how many views on Google
plus do you have? We’ll measure next, on TWiG.
Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by CacheFly, Cachefly.com.
Leo Laporte: This is TWiG, this week in Google. Episode 243, recorded April 2,
014
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Leo: It’s time for TWiG. This Week in Google, the show where we talk about Google,
Facebook, The google Verse. Gina Trapani has the day off. Mike Elgan is sitting in, nice to have you Mike!
Mike Elgan: Glad to
be here. I came all the way from over there.
Leo: Across the hall.
Mike: Yeah. Glad to be here.
Leo: Also from his book lined study, where…
did you buy those books by the feet?
Jeff Jarvis: They’re all props, it’s a green screen.
Leo: Oh ok. Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Somebody was
saying, I think this is true, that as we get to this digital world, books will
become more and more precious. In fact, books will never be as inexpensive as
they are today, so buy, buy, buy.
Mike: That’s right. I’m a big book collector.
I’ve had them in storage for a long time. It’s really a great time to go to
book stores, buy old books, nice books. Look out for acid free paper because
they’ll destroy themselves.
Leo: But you raise a good point, because
I’ve got them in storage, because it’s not convenient to move them around.
Mike: No it is not.
Jeff: I went to the Strang bookstore the other day, and I was wondering what their business is like now.
What’s the used book business like now?
Leo: Well I guess that is the point. And in
fact, it’s going to get very good. Because…
Jeff: But there’s less…
Leo: It’s not a mass market anymore.
Jeff: No, no.
Leo: But as a specialty market it’s going to
be quite good, and I think that most… I shouldn’t say must, but many people,
like the three of us, love books, right? So it’s not going away.
Mike: The reality is that almost everything
being produced nowadays will be with us forever. You’ll be able to find Gutenberg
the Geek in three hundred years. Like search for it, download it, and so on.
But before everything was being scanned and digitized, those copies are the
only copies. And my wife buys these books that are about food production,
making wine and stuff at home. And the content in it is amazing. This is lost
information. And there are also a lot of books in lost languages. And the
internet is sort of killing off lost languages, as well. So it’s a good thing
to collect, not only from a collector’s point of view, but also from a cultural
information point of view.
Leo: But I think that’s kind of the point,
it’s not really killing it off, it’s just as a main stream interest it is not
huge. But in fact, I think the internet makes it possible for us, those small
few who care about these obscure books, to gather, to find them, to buy them.
In a way it facilitates that as much as it’s killing it off.
Mike: Absolutely. I mean, in the old days you
had to go from bookstore, to bookstore, to bookstore, asking questions, “ Do
you have this book?” now you can have a running search for Craigslist, eBay, whatever.
For a very obscure title, and you can wait for three years, I’ve done that. And
then boom, it pops up and you buy it! It’s a great…
Leo: Let’s not forget that’s how Amazon
started. Not only selling new books but they quickly went into used books. So
speaking of Amazon…
Jeff: I’m going to go to my closet for one
second, I’ll be right back.
Leo: Uh oh, he’s going into the closet
folks. This is unprecedented.
Mike: He’ll come out of a closet.
Leo: Into and out of in the same show.
Mike: He’s going to have a cape when he comes
back.
Leo: I’m thinking so. But let’s take a look
at Jeff’s office while… oh shoot, he’s back! I was going to…
Mike: He has neither cape nor book.
Leo: You know we interviewed on
Triangulation on Monday, we interviewed Michio Kaku, and he has the most, it’s typical, what you’d expect
a physics library would be stacked. He’s a quiony as
well, Jeff do you know Michio?
Jeff: No.
Leo: His office…
Jeff: Oh! The physics guy!
Leo: Dr. Kaku, the
physics guy, yeah! He has books like worse than this, like piled everywhere.
Your office is pristine, wonderland compared to his. But I could not resist
looking at the spines, seeing what is he reading, it’s fascinating stuff.
Mike: Spiderman comics and stuff.
Leo: Mostly, yeah.
Jeff: This is the stuff that gets me too, drinking
game folks, drinking game. Gutenberg printed in 1476.
Leo: So Jeff is now holding up, you have a
page from Gutenberg press?
Jeff: Gutenberg Era, no, no, Gutenberg Era,
out of Clone.
Leo: Wow, that’s so cool.
Mike: Somewhere there’s a Gutenberg bible
with a page missing.
Leo: So is it a bible? What is it?
Jeff: No, this is a page from the memotracus super bibliam.
Leo: Oh, it’s a super book.
Mike: So the movie.
Jeff: Early commentary based on secret
service.
Leo: It is sacred.
Jeff: But I just wanted to have it for that
reason. I just wanted to have something that was this early. The printing press, will be by the 600 birthday will be a museum piece. Printing press.
Leo: Oh yeah, well today this morning at 11.
Just a couple hours ago, I got to interview the man who made that all possible.
Vince Surf, one of the architects of the interview. One of the guys who created
TCPIP, he was at Darpa, in the earliest days of the
internet, he then worked at MCI, where he created MCI mail. One
of the very early email implementations. We talked a little bit about
that. Founded the internet society with Bob Conn. Founded ICan,
and was the chair of ICan for many years. And is
currently vice president and internet evangelist at Google. And it was just
really great to talk to him. And I had to say at the end, I teared up a little bit, because at the end I had to say, I just want to thank you
because of the work you and Bob and others did, in those days, not so long ago,
30, 40 years ago, literally changed the world. And sometimes not, books aren’t
as big as they use to be, or whatever, but it really did change the world. He
said one of the things that became very apparent to them, I said did you in the
early days, did you invasion what’s happened now? He said the obvious answer
would be no, but in fact, many of us, as we started to use this thing, realized
that it was not about technology or even computers, it was about communication,
and as we started linking up people, the power of what was about to happen was
very obvious.
Jeff: I think that’s the key to it, Leo. And
still in my business, in our business, we still feed the internet in media
terms as content, and publication, and pages. But that’s not what it’s about at
all. It’s a connection machine. That’s the essential architect of the net, and
that’s what it enables.
Leo: That interview will be out on a TWiT special, and there’s also a hangout on YouTube.
Jeff: It’s already up on YouTube.
Leo: Yeah, well it’ll be instantly up on YouTube,
because it was a YouTube, Google Hangout. You know, we’ve actually created a TWiT google hangouts channel, you
finally got to me Jeff.
Jeff: So let’s hang up Chad, I’ll go back to
my Google.
Leo: I’m surrounded by Google Plus fanatics.
But that is a great technology, speaking of communication.
Jeff: It really is.
Mike: Especially hangouts on air, if you
think about what you can do with hangouts on air, and compare it to 5 years ago,
to what it would take to do a global real broadcast, in real time. Capable of having an audience of hundreds of thousands of people. You’d need a truck, and a license, and a big van with a satellite dish, it’s
astonishing.
Jeff: Leo, if you started TWiT today, what would your technology choices be?
Leo: Well pretty much what we do now,
because as continually evolve as technology improves. When we started doing the
screen savers on tech TV in 1998, even then we wanted to have video calls on
the show. We actually god 3Com to give us ten thousand of those little ball
cameras, and we called it, it was then ZDTV netcam,
network. I said, they wanted to call them webcams. I
said it’s not the web, it’s a netcam!
Mike: You lost that one.
Leo: I’ve lost them all! Netcast, netcam, I can’t win. But I think strictly speaking,
it isn’t a webcam, and then it was very, such a primitive technology that we
couldn’t really get audio and video, so we’d say do the video, and then be on
the phone. So all of our callers on the show we on a phone. And then the video was one frame a second, so you didn’t lose lip sync because
you could barely see their mouth move. But it worked! And then so as that was,
what almost 16 years ago, as the technology has advanced, we’re using Skype
now. Are you on hangouts, or are you on Skype?
Jeff: No, I’m on Skype, because I listen to
you, boss.
Leo: Right. Well we’d like to get something
better. And you know, we’re always testing stuff. The
engineers are always in the basement, that’s what they tell me they’re doing.
Mike: The biggest limitation of doing Google
plus, is as a policy is that you, a lot of people that you’re going to have on
the show, you say let’s do a hangout, and then they’re like okay, so where is
it? The internet discoverability for new users of hangouts is not great. And Skype
is, you know, everybody understand it at this point, so that’s the only
limitation.
Jeff: Mike, that’s a really good point,
because it’s so ingrained a built into plus and mail,
and stuff, that they almost should just make a hangout thing just for people to
get into it, and understand it.
Leo: The future really is just Web RTC. And
this is actually related to hangouts. And I suspect that in a year or two,
that’s what we’ll be using. And the neat thing about web RTC,
which Google has been supporting. They didn’t create it, it’s open, but they’ve
really been the chief proponents of it. Is that I can give you a website, a
URL, and you’d go to it, and the communication, the call would be established.
Jeff: We did that on the show. Right after it
was announced we did it, and it was that easy. Somebody wrote us an app for it.
Leo: That’s the way it should be.
Jeff: And that, by the way, that is a webcam.
Leo: That’s a webnet,
yeah that’s a webcast. Actually it’s not really using the web, just the web for
the signal. But that, I think, is exciting because then any link can be a call.
Mike: Right, you send people the link, and
that’s done.
Leo: Yeah, and remember Kevin Marks has been
talking a lot on the last couple of episodes, about content selects, and what
he’s doing to kind of create this, you know, mobile page that allows you to just
press a button and call somebody. It should be easier, you know. And so I think
we’re getting close to that.
Jeff: Was it last week and I was late for the
show, and before we got on air.
Leo: That was amazing!
Jeff: See I got the call from Chad, and I was
in the car, and my phone is, you know, installed on the dash. And I hit answer,
and there I am driving the car. And said, I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying, but it’s
that easy to be talking to somebody!
Leo: Isn’t that mindboggling.
Jeff: It is! It really is!
Leo: in 1965, we’re going to the New York World’s
Fair, and AT&T showed its famous video phone. On the
future. And remember in 2001, the future, we’ll all be seeing each other
in phone calls, and it didn’t happen, didn’t happen, because everybody said,
you know you don’t want to see each other in a phone call, because nobody wants
to brush their hair for a phone call. And yet we see a lot of video calls all
of the sudden. Everybody is doing it all the time, we
do it all the time. I think we’ve made Skype work for us. Wouldn’t have a
network without Skype, but there’s going to be something to replace it soon, I
hope. Yesterday, 10 years ago, boy was that a revolution, and Harry McCracken,
great job, on Time Magazines technologizer sight. The
10th Anniversary of Gmail and he has the inside story with Paul Buchheit, and the Architect. And others
from Google talking about it. It was a near thing. Almost didn’t happen!
Folks at google thought, well, we’re really a search engine company, I don’t
know about this email thing. In fact, even when it launched, you remember how
hard it was to get an invite? There were people… I think Harry says in his
article he bought an invite on eBay. There’s a picture of Paul Buchheit when he was first at Google, he was employee
number 23 at Google. Then went off to start friend feed. Who can forget? Which I loved! Three of the google, Gmail folks went and…
Jeff: You and three other friends.
Leo: It was just me and my friends.
Jeff: That was friend feed.
Leo: I loved Friend Feed. Facebook bought
it, and then the rest is history.
Mike: Yeah, swallowed it, digested it.
Leo: There was so little support at Google,
that even when they launched it, it was running on what did they say? 300 Pentium two computers that nobody else at google wanted.
Mike: That’s right. That’s one of the things
you learn, when you learn about how Google works. Everybody is jocking for compute resources, and it’s this big who gets
what, and where they move it around. And Google historically has always made
huge use of old and busted and lousy computers. They don’t care how broken down
and busted the computers are, because one of their early innovations were to be
able to use computers that failed with 2 digit percentages.
Leo: Yeah, Bail over. Actually it was
Pentium 3 computers, I apologize.
Mike: yeah, well one of the interesting
things about this is that, of course, this launched on April fool’s day. They
did it on purpose, this is something I didn’t know.
Google did it on purpose, and Larry and Surgay actually wanted to launch it on April fools because they know people would
think it was a hoax, and they thought well this is a double April fool’s joke.
Leo: Surgay was
the most excited about it said Ricouski. The Ultimate
April Fool’s joke was to launch something that was kind of crazy, on April
first. And have it still exist on April 2nd!
Mike: And the craziest thing about it was it
was a gigabyte! Gigabyte of storage,
which nobody nowadays…
Leo: Even that wasn’t automatic, as Harry
points out in his article that was something like 300 times the amount of space
Yahoo mail offered. Yahoo mail existed. Hotmail excited. So it wasn’t one of
the first web based emails.
Jeff: That was one of the points MCI made
about it, was soon as mail became interconnected, charging for mail went up a
window.
Leo: Yeah he’s talked about that. I talked about
that with him. He was in his old office at MCI, where he had invented MCI. So
that was pretty interesting.
Mike: I had an MCI account. I remember MCI
that was pretty cool. So the other thing that was interesting about this was
that everybody when you tell the story of Gmail everybody says oh this is a 20
percent time project. In fact it wasn’t, this guy worked on it full time for
three years, more or less by himself. He got help here
and there, but it was essentially just this single guys working on it. And he
had this personal… And again there’s a great story by Harry McCracken, who
uncovers all this stuff very nicely but he has this obsession with making sure
whatever he’s using is functional. So after one day he had a function,
essentially a search engine for email.
Leo: He said for him personally, but I think
this is more than just Paul Buchheit. He said I find
I lose interest in projects if I can’t use it right away. So my first goal is
to immediately make something I can use, and then iterate on it to something
useful.
Mike: We’re so use to a good search from Google
that you have to pause and realize how much made search is out there. Even today…
Leo: Just look for something on the app
store on Apple!
Mike: I know forget about it!
Leo: It’s impossible!
Mike: Right.
Leo: I always think search has been solved! Clearly
not!
Mike: Yeah. But this is the great thing about
Gmail, and it’s also the great thing about Google Plus, which is everything on
google plus, everything on Gmail is essentially a search. When you look at your
inbox you’re looking at a search result, which is kind of set up for you by
google. It’s everything with certain attributes and that’s how they go at these
things, and it’s brilliant. And that’s why these products like Gmail are so
good, because they’re rooted in search.
Jeff: And not only that, Mike, it is really
revolutionary to think that you didn’t kill your email.
Mike: Yeah.
Jeff: You know you want to keep your email
because you can search it, and you don’t need to put it in all kinds of folders
and stuff, because you can just search it, and so it really took search out of
just the web, into your life.
Leo: As I remember that was one of the
selling points, don’t delete any email, just save it all, and we’ll find it.
And that was a revelation, although how much is it. Is it 7, or 8 gigabytes you
get for free?
Mike: Well now they combine it with Google
Drive, and so I have way over 100 gigabytes.
Leo: I have terrible gigabytes.
Jeff: I have 16.9 gigabytes.
Leo: Yeah, because we both have pixels.
Jeff: 1.1 terabytes.
Leo: Another thing that Time notes, actually
I should really give Harry credit, Harry McCracken notes in the Time article,
is this is probably the first time we ever used a web app. Unlike Yahoo,
Hotmail, and other web pages. This was an interactive App. In
fact, really the debut of Ajax to the World Wide Web. Now I said this on
Sunday and somebody said, “You know Microsoft invented Ajax with Active X
control.” I’m not talking about an Active X control, this is the first web app
most of us used on a Windows machine, a mac, a Lennox machine. It would work if
you had a good modern Brower, that it wouldn’t rewrite the whole pages when you
opened the compose window. That was were Ajax came
from.
Mike: And of course most users had no idea
about that all they knew was that when you used Gmail 10 years ago, 8 years
ago, since its beginning, lightning fast and just felt so good to use. Because
everything you did was really zippy, and it was really kind of thrilling to
use. And I think that most users assumed that it was because they had almost no
interface, it was all text and links with no typography. Nowadays, google is
very good with design, but in the early days there was a spectacular absence of
design of any kind. And it was kind of nerdy for that reason, but the
performance was so good that everybody loved it. Well not everybody, but you know,
nerdy types did.
Leo: McCracken quotes Buchheit saying, “The ambitious use of java script was another thing that most people
thought was a pretty bad idea. One of the problems we had was that web browsers
weren’t very good back then. We were afraid we’d crash browsers and nobody
would ever come back.” Now here’s the big story, there were debates within
google whether it should be a paid service. And Buchheit,
and others, according to McCracken, wanted the service to reach as many people
as possible, which was the argument for it being free, and supported by
advertising. They wanted little unobtrusive text ads, with Google search
results. He, Rimouski says, we weren’t going to plaster it with banners, we committed
to that from pretty early on, but the key was that the ads were keyed to the
contents of your email. And I was curious as to whether they knew what an
explosive thing that would be. Harrick says, in this interview, I’m not sure
who Harrick is, we thought it pretty hard before doing what we did, we thought
is this thing a perceived privacy violation, or a real one? And we decided it
would be an issue of perception. So they think they knew that there would be an
issue, but they also knew it wasn’t a privacy violation, because it was just
automated. Boy they underestimated the reaction of the internet.
Jeff: They underestimated the reaction of
that, but the funny thing is, and I’ve told the story before, when priority
inbox came in. All they were doing in reading the email, is giving you ads and the truth is, I don’t know how much they make from that,
I don’t even notice the ads on Gmail.
Leo: No, I don’t see them. Never clicked on
one!
Jeff: Whereas priority inbox makes some
really critical decisions, obviously understanding your email, who’s important, what’s important.
Leo: Nobody mentions that.
Jeff: Because the value is so great. Even in Germany
Google’s own programming staff in eunuch is a privacy bargeman staff, and they’ve taken the brunt of everything about
street view, and buzz and that kind of stuff. And nobody complains about that
kind of stuff about priority inbox, because it’s valuable.
Leo: I disagree, I think
they don’t complain because it’s not to support advertising. I mean everybody
understands that if you have any spam filtering on your service, as everybody
does, mostly not as effective as Gmail, but that means that something is
reading your mail, looking for keywords. So people know that, what they didn’t
like is it was tied to advertising Jeff, I don’t think it’s…
Jeff: Well yeah okay. I think that’s a really
good point on how it ratchets it up. But I don’t know Leo, I always here this
general complaint, Facebook knows too much! Of course, everything you tell
them.
Leo: They know everything!
Jeff: They just know too much, they’re too
big and they know too much. So I hear that kind of generalized eeoryish a lot.
Mike: I don’t think it’s because it’s tied to
advertising. Spam filtering is a clear benefit where…
Leo: So you think it’s not enough of a
benefit.
Mike: The reason is because you look in your…
people who notice the ads, unlike you two, who don’t notice the ads, just
notice you’re having this conversation about, you know, snipe hunting, and then
you have a ad there for snipe hunting rifle! And it’s like Oh my God, they’re turning into our conversation. It’s the creep factor.
Leo: It creeps them
out. Right.
Mike: And this goes back to search, the way Google
looks at it, they have this huge advertising category, and then they use the
content of your message as the search query. And they surface the most relevant
search results within their ad inventory. That’s the way they look at it, and
they see that’s their job. If they’re going to serve up ads, they’re going to
serve up the most relevant ads possible, and it’s a brilliant idea. And it
shouldn’t freak us out, and no longer does by the way, we’ve all gotten used to
it, and we’ve all gone on to be worried about much bigger things. But it
shouldn’t freak us out, because no human being is actually seeing this.
Jeff: Here’s another interesting story I just
heard about Mike. I believe that the services could give us more value, but
they’re scared of doing this. I talked to a journalist the other day, who was
calling me about a story about privacy. And he told me that he has MS. And on
Facebook, in just private messages, he was telling family, boy I have these
weird symptoms, I don’t know what’s going on I can’t feel my hands, I can’t do
this, I can’t do that. And then suddenly up came ads related to multiple
sclerosis. It basically diagnosed him.
Mike: Wow.
Leo: That’s kind of creepy.
Jeff: Well your first reaction right?
Leo: And problematic if they then inform an
insurer.
Jeff: Well the actual problem with it was
that they were for grapefruit cures, and bad stuff. But the larger point here
is, that in your communication, there is things about
you that you don’t know that a smart algorithm could discern, or could be of
value to you, if it’s your choice to turn it on. And I think that the googles
of the world have to find ways to find these kinds of individual benefits, and
give people control over them so it’s not just in googles benefit in their
view, but it’s in your benefit, but then you’re going to have what Leos
reaction was, which is oh that’s creepy.
Leo: The response form the world was quick
and very angry. Remember this came out April 1st 2004. On April 6th,
thirty one organizations and advocates co-signed a letter to Larry Cane raising
a gaggle of concerns about Gmail calling it a bad precedent, and asking the
service be suspended until they’re concerns could be addressed. This was there
quote, “Scanning personal communications the way google is proposing, is
letting the proverbial Genie out of the bottle.” California State Senator Jill Figueroa, sent Google a letter calling it a disaster of
enormous proportions for yourself, and all of your customers. And then went on
to draft a bill requiring any company that wanted to scan an email message for
advertisement purposes get the consent of the person who sent it.
Jeff: And so let’s now look back folks, yes armegedden was torcher, 2005 was absolute torcher. There
was no privacy in the world. Everything fell apart. Oh my god, everyone was
running naked through the streets. Nothing happened! It was okay, it was fine!
We figure it out. If Google had screwed everyone, and done something horrible,
they would have lost business. They’re too smart for that. This is the same guy
who proposed don’t be evil.
Leo: Do you think that people widely know that Gmail scans your mail? That’s pretty well known,
is it not?
Jeff: I think it’s pretty well known. But you
know, I was just looking at some mail and I’m finding it very hard to find an
email of mine that has any ad on it.
Mike: Yeah, mine tend to not have ads, and I
wonder about that.
Leo: I think they backed down. Frankly, a
little bit, not completely but a little bit.
Jeff: Because I don’t think there’s much of a
market for it. I think that’s the issue. I don’t think the ads perform there.
Leo: Advertisers have to want for it to be. So the point is that 425 million people actively use Gmail now.
Almost half a billion people actively use Gmail. Obviously, I mean, if you
assume even only 50 percent know about this scanning, obviously people have
voted.
Mike: One of the things that Google does, the
big companies like Google, and Apple for a living is they build a better user.
And by that, I mean they are trying to change our thinking and our behavior and
they’re always edging toward where we’re going, and this a perfect example. But
I always wonder about people who complain about contextual advertising.
Advertising has a bad rap for two reasons. One is that in the madmen days, when
there were three channels on TV, and television advertising was the lead way of
advertising, they had to manufacture desire, they had to tell you what you
wanted, because there was no way to know what you wanted. And so advertising
did, and should get a bad reputation because they’re always sort of trying to
manipulate you into buying products you wouldn’t otherwise want. The other
thing is advertising tends to grow and go places it hasn’t been before. You
know tattoos on people’s faces, billboards, every surface is covered with advertising, this is bad and this is one of the reasons
advertising is bad. Contextual advertising in your Gmail is good. Because it
will show you things you want. It won’t show you weight loss creams and
tampons, it’ll show you stuff you probably really are interesting. But the
biggest problem right now is nobody is good at it, not even google. Facebook is
terrible at it. They show you stuff that you don’t want, they show you stuff
you’ve already bought. It’s horrible, but the idea is a great idea, it should
get to the point where it’s like hey every ad is like oh I want that, that’s a
great price for it. Click, buy it. That’s good, we do buy things, we do want things. And so I think that in general the complaints against contextual advertising is totally
misplaced. I think that’s one of the good types of adverting.
Jeff: I agree, and not only that, but I know
of news companies that spend a lot of effort to contextually advertising and
serve ads to you, but don’t know the same things with the content. And I’m
squeezed about that these days. You’ve heard me say on the show before, Google
knows where I live and where I work, and my newspaper doesn’t. My Newspaper
gives me the same 300 to 500 pieces of content it gives everybody else, in the
world, exactly the same as if I am the member of a mass. It needs to know me as
an individual, and serve me with a greater relevance. And so the skills that we
bring to advertising actually to some extent, we now have to bring to content.
Leo: You know I had the same conversation in
a more hostile environment and Sunday with TWiT,
because box Alex Lindsay, and Jolie O’Dell, both feel like there’s all sorts of…
Jeff: Jolie was practically crawling into
cave.
Leo: Well she actually at one point retired
from the internet but then found out her job as a manager of adventure required
the use of the internet, so she changed her tune.
Mike: Remember it was the publisher and not venture
beat.
Leo: The publisher said, you know you really, you ought to be on the internet. You do have a choice, you don’t have to use Gmail.
Jeff: You gave a really good defense of the internet
to the two of them, I think, on Sunday.
Leo: I feel like we get so much out of it. I
do want targeted ads. Well I’m inspired by you Jeff, because you’re the one
who’s hammered this into my brain. This is my moral panic of what might happen
should the government or insurers get this
Jeff: That’s the great example for what you
just have from time from Harrys piece, is that all the cries, this is disaster,
what Gmail is doing is disastrous, I have to pass a law to say stop this right
now, I have to stop this right now because this is so terrible. That’s technopana.
Leo: And the final point on this is what a
success Gmail is, not merely because the number of customers, but can you name
another app, that you still use basically unchanged, and this is a point many
developers made with Harry, this is pretty much the same code we’ve used for 10
years! There’s not a lot of apps like that, where you can just, you know, yeah
it’s worked, and worked well for 10 years. They built it right, they built it
to last, and it’s scaled like crazy.
Mike: And its competitors like Hotmail have
completely reintroduced, totally new apps, totally new sites. And this one they
haven’t, they haven’t had to. But at the same time they’ve upgraded it for the
modern world.
Leo: I like the new features, many of the
new features a lot.
Jeff: It’s still fairly ugly.
Leo: You know Harry was singing the praises
of it, and I’ve always thought it was too many buttons, too difficult to use. I
never really quite understood why they called them filters, not folders, but
that’s that search mentality. This is search, not a folder.
Mike: And speaking of filters, I can’t leave
Gmail now, because I have so many filters holding back the ocean of spam. If I
were to ever go without those filters, I just couldn’t, I couldn’t function.
Leo: Well and the other thing they’ve done
really well, of all the other email services I use, the only one that really
stops the ocean of spam, and they’ve really nailed that.
Mike: Anything with Dr. Oz in it gets through
though, I don’t know why!
Leo: They think you like him!
Mike: The world is trying to tell me I need
to lose weight or something, because I get weight loss things.
Leo: We talked last week about the new
promotions tab, and I applied then, and I finally got it and this is what it
looks like now. Remember if you use the priority mail box…. The priority mail
box didn’t work quite well for me, but these tabs, social, updates, and forums…
Jeff: Where do you get the tabs, I never did
them, so…
Leo: I like them.
Jeff: But how do you get them? I don’t even
know.
Leo: Oh it’s a setting. It turns the
promotional emails, all of which, these are not spam because they’re newsletters,
I said okay to, things like that, turns them into things like kind of a pintresty magazine layout, which makes them a lot easier to
scan. Yes I know they are, for the most part, bacon. Which is
spam I signed up for. But I can go through it quickly, it doesn’t bother
me as much, and the fact that it’s not in my primary inbox really solves the
problem for me. Gmail has gotten better and better and better.
Mike: Yes. Jeff, it’s the gear icon, and then
choose configure inbox. I tried the tabs, I don’t like it.
Leo: You don’t like it? Neither of you guys
are doing that?
Mike: I don’t like it. I really tried hard to
like it but…
Leo: You don’t use it Chad, either?
Chad: I Love it! It’s the only way that I can
manage my inbox because…
Leo: If it gets to primary it’s almost always
a person, primary. And if it goes by accident to one of the others, I just make
it primary and vice versa and it really, I have a lot of filters, as you see I
have a lot of folders, I actually usually use a desktop client, apples mail
client to read this because I fetch it from Gmail, so it has its own rules and folders,
but this works, in fact, when I need to see what’s in my inbox quickly, I don’t
go to my apple mail, I go to this! I go to the interface on the web!
Mike: I’m a former fan of getting things done
on the book.
Leo: Former?
Mike: Well I’ve veered so far away from the,
whatever, but it’s I use my inbox as my one trusted place for where I put
things. And so I want one trusted place for everything, I don’t want three or
whatever. So I just use, I don’t want promotions, I don’t want things that are
in the other tabs.
Leo: But you don’t have to look at them!
Mike: But that bugs me! Maybe I’m anal
retentive or something, but it bugs me to know that they’re there! I want them
to not be there! You know what I mean? And I’m also a zero inbox kind too.
Jeff: Well I’m confused.
Leo: Uh oh, we’ve ruined Jeff’s mail now.
Jeff: Yes you have. Well I did it, now my
priority inbox is gone. Now I don’t have the important and everything else.
Leo: Oh no, it doesn’t do priority inbox, it
does primary instead.
Jeff: Oh screw that! That’s off.
Leo: I hope you can turn it back off!
Mike: Look at the benefit! You don’t have any
priority inbox to worry about!
Leo: They’ve deprecated priority inbox.
Mike: Don’t worry about it Jeff.
Leo: It’s going to be okay.
Mike: Don’t worry about it Jeff.
Jeff: Oh no! It’s gone! I can’t get it back.
Chad: You can get your priority inbox back.
All you have to do is hover over your inbox, and then on the right side there’s
a drop down, and just choose priority inbox at the
bottom.
Leo: There it is, I see, it you can show
mine Chad, it’s okay.
Jeff: Chad you saved my life!
Chad: You’re welcome!
Leo: Inbox type, and then it says try them
all. Keep what fits. So you can have default, which is what I’m using,
Important first. See I want them in chronological order, unread first, or
starred first, of Jeff’s’ fitcatca, priority inbox.
Jeff: Priority inbox, I think beyond spam,
priority inbox the brilliant thing the miss rate, when I look down at
everything else, the things that I ever want in there, are nil. And it’s not
just bacon, its people I don’t pay attention to.
Leo: Right.
Mike: I use the star feature. The starring email, and I have filters that automatically star certain
things to determine what goes into Google glass, and what doesn’t. That’s all I
use it for.
Jeff: Well aren’t you the super user. Oh my!
Mike: Yes. Glass hole number one. Right here.
Leo: Unfortunately you can’t combine the tab
interface with the priority inbox.
Jeff: Yeah, because priority inbox is a life
saver for me. That’s anything that…
Chad: It’s funny to hear you say that because
I could never get behind it, because I was so afraid that it would use an
algorithm that would miss something. That’s why I use the tabs.
Jeff: No Chad I’m telling you, do it for a
week, and you’ll be amazed.
Leo: Don’t do it Chad, don’t do it Chad!
Chad: I didn’t do it, I mean like the moment that an email from my grandmother is sent away because I
didn’t…
Jeff: No just check to everything else.
Chad: But that’s an extra step. If it’s in the tabs at the top.
Leo: This thing works perfectly. If twitter
goes to social, YouTube goes to social, promotion is bacon. Updates
is exactly what I expected. It works.
Chad: I’m totally in Leo’s camp. I feel like
these are two different products for two different types of people, and me and Leo
are one type. And you and Mike Elgan are another.
Jeff: Listen, Leo’s an old fart, don’t be a
young fart.
Chad: That’s what I am!
Leo: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Chad and
I are the young farts. You guys are the old farts.
Jeff: I’m telling you, the more I trust the
algorithm of the priority inbox.
Chad: I don’t think it’s an algorithm, all its
doing is categorizing, and you’re never going to miss anything because it’s
still going into the folder. I don’t trust algorithms, that’s why I like twitter over Facebook. Is I followed people because I want to see
what they write. I don’t want Facebook, to do it’s stupid Facebook algorithm.
Leo: Hey, this old fart likes the new fart
way. I’m just telling you!
Mike: I’m using the new fart filter and it stinks everything for me.
Leo: We’re going to take a break. Mike Elgan is here, ably filling in for Gina Trapani, who has
the day off. And Jeff Jarvis as well. We’re talking
about Google, Facebook, the Cloud and more, lots more to talk about. No change lock though, because without Gina it wouldn’t be a
change lock. So, we’ll just have to leave that for next week. Our show today is
brought to you by 99designs. Actually that’s such a bad name, because it’s so
many more than 99 designs. It’s an unlimited number of designs. Look, the world
deserves to be a better looking place, and if you’re a restaurateur, or a
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it’s a different breed, they’re not really human, there a new species. They
have aesthetic since, they can tell mauve from purple,
you know what I’m saying.
Mike: They use Macintoshes.
Jeff: My theory, Leo, is there is no such
thing as mauve, it’s a color made up by women to fool men.
Leo: That’s why you should not do your own
design. Right there! Right there!
Jeff: I need mauve protection from 99
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Leo: If you don’t know what curning is, don’t do it. And you should go to 99 designs.
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surgery, why would you do your own design.
Jeff: Back away from the font sir, back away
from the font.
Leo: Step away from the font. It really, I
have such respect for designers because they have some sense that I don’t have
that gene.
Jeff: I heard something amazing yesterday at
lunch. That IBM is hiring 200 designers a year.
Leo: Wow.
Jeff: The belief is the technology is going
to get easier and easier and all those CS degrees, blah, but experience and design,
I think it’s very important and young students should be learning more design.
Leo: It’s unfortunate and somebody like
Steve Gibson, an old timer like Steve Gibson would say this, he hand codes his
stuff for, it’s tight, it’s fast, it’s small, and he writes an assembler. The
problem is that programming has become a little bit more hack profession,
because you just throw more power at it. Ah don’t worry about it because there’s
plenty of memory and plenty of power, so programming is not the type of art
that it was. But design still is. So, and UI still is. That stuff still is. So
I’m going to get in trouble, I’m going to get some nasty emails from
programmers, but there are plenty.
Jeff: I remember back in the day I use to
work on a program called Coyote terminals by a company called SII. Back, way
back in the newspaper days, and what a huge deal it was when somebody wrote
Hand J. Hyphonation, justification to fit inside a
terminal. This was just beyond belief! Genius, to be able to, it was like hiku to get that in there so you can decide where to put
the hyphen in a word.
Leo: We were looking at, where was that MacBreak weekly, Woz’ original schematics
and design for the floppy drive, and what an artist he was, because in those
days every chip meant it was huge. And he was so proud of the fact that he got
the entire design into one chip. I guess it was Gibson actually.
Mike: Gibson was talking about that.
Leo: It was just amazing.
Jeff: So what happens when, we need Gina here
for this too. When space isn’t an issue, and code becomes aluminous, is there
an issue for that? Does it all become messy like my eyes?
Leo: Uh, yeah! I would guess that half the
security issues we see today come from poor programming. Something as simple as
using, when you’re copying a string into memory, using stir copy, instead of
stir and copy where you don’t check the size of the string. Sloppy programming
or the assumption we don’t need to worry because we’ve got lots of ram, that’s
where you get these buffer overflows, that are lots of
problems. So sloppy programming. Just look at go to
fail. That’s all you have to look at. One other thing Google has added but not
to Gmail, and the desktop, but Gmail for android. Apparently and according to
gadget, they’re allowing you to snooze and pin messages.
Mike: I love that. I need to snooze messages. I use something called follow up pin. If you’ve ever heard of that. It’s a very simple way to make
things go away, and then come back later. And it would be nice to just be able
to do it in the app. I’d like to see this on the desktop too.
Leo: According to Geek.com, Google is
testing an army of new features for Gmail. They always do, and that’s why I
always look in the labs to see what’s there. Pinning would make it sticky so it
would never go away.
Jeff: What’s snoozing? I don’t get snoozing.
Mike: Something comes in and say you don’t want to deal with it until the day after
tomorrow. So you basically tell it go to away for two days, and then it comes
back into your inbox.
Jeff: It doesn’t stay in your inbox, it reappears in your inbox?
Mike: Right. I would assume that’s what it
is.
Jeff: See I’ve got a problem here Mike. When
it rolls of the screen I’m screwed.
Leo: Right. You’d love snoozing.
Jeff: So I think I would, but then what’s
going to happen, I just picture in my mind of 3,000 emails at my window, like
let me in, right! This is bad, I don’t know.
Leo: Well that’s getting things done right,
is the idea that you don’t, you can defer it but…
Jeff: Here’s the tyranny of email, the tyranny
of email is that the sender controls, not the recipient. Bob White taught me
that lesson years ago.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: And once the sender controls, it’s
screwed. You know, you think about it, it’s actually pretty rude to send
somebody a message and expect them to respond. Just like it would be rude to
just show up out of nowhere to a front door, and knock on the door and expect
them to answer and let you in.
Leo: That’s email. But remember, now, that’s
a little more opanic, because remember people didn’t
want the telephone in the house because it would ring at random, and you can’t
stop it!
Mike: Imagine a bell in your house that anyone
in the world could ring at any time, for free!
Leo: Actually that’s a terrible idea!
Mike: It’s a terrible idea!
Jeff: Chad, wasn’t it you who was saying you
sleep with your phone and answer things in the middle of the night?
Chad: Yeah!
Leo: So what I do, and all good Android phones
do this. Moto X has a do not disturb that you can set either for a time, or
when you’re in a meeting. You can say do not ring the phone. I use it, HTC one
is not quite as elegant as the motto X, but there is a do not disturb, and I’ve
actually written a schedule seven days a week of when I do not want this phone
to ring. Some of it’s when I’m sleeping, some of it’s
when I’m on the air.
Jeff: How are you with the HTC versus the…
because you loved the Moto X.
Leo: I did! And I’m going to talk about it
at the end of the show, it’ll be my pick of the week
this week. What’s the latest with Turkey, Mike I know you cover this on TNT
every day. It seems to be an automatically updating story. The prime minister
of Turkey got a little upset with social media, and he started blocking
Twitter, so the graffiti of the walls of Turkey had Googles DNS of 8.8.8.8, so
you could just basically instead of using the officially broken Turkish DNS,
you could just use Googles. But now that’s not working anymore.
Mike: That’s right. So what they did was
first they blocked Twitter, and then they viral campaign, then Turkey blocked
google DNS, and some of the other DNS services. And then they did something pretty
astonishing. They spoofed it. So they had the actual DNS service
were in Germany and other countries. They spoofed it so at the ISP
level, any attempt to go to some of the major Google public DNS, or some of the
other major ones like that, would be rerouted to a fake DNS page, within Turkey
at the telecom level. And there was this not only prevented people from going
to YouTube and Twitter, it also enabled them to harvest the IP address and so
on, and essentially spy on whoever was trying to use the services. So it’s
really an astonishing thing because this kind of thing has only been done at
the large scale by the Chinese government, but not in this exact way. This was
the first use in this particular approach to spoofing it. And it’s called DNS
tampering. The first time it’s ever state sponsoring DNS tampering has ever
taken place at this level.
Jeff: Really? Wow!
Mike: In this particular way, because of the
way they’re doing it. And so it’s really, you know, it’s the horrible thing
about it is it’s really effective. It’s really a great idea if you’re trying to
control information, to hijack essentially, the thing that people are using to
get around your block.
Jeff: here’s a question Mike, so because of
the graffiti turkey knows that 8888, everybody is going to that. But they can’t
control every DNS, or can they make every DNS in the country
go to their DNS?
Mike: They’re doing the major ones. So
they’ve hijacked the two by Google. Level 3 DNS and open DNS, are the big ones.
So they’re going after 80 or 90% of the usage. So what they’re really tapping
into are the viral information of people sharing it
and saying, “Hey everybody go use this.” And then they’re tapping into that
information. And they’re going after it.
Jeff: Which is what I
feared when I saw the graffiti on the streets staying to go 888. You’re
just saying to the government, okay, we know what to block. Is there the idea
if there were an explosion of good DNS’ around the world that the people in
Turkey could go to, does it become a game of wack them all for the Turkish government then.
Mike: I would be but the problem though is
they’re both playing it for the masses, essentially and the masses are going to
be slow to find these more obscure services. So it’s really a question of
communication, plus there’s a lot of censorship in Turkey anyway, over porn and
things like that. So they’ve really got quite an infrastructure to tamp down on
this. Now the Government itself is divided as well, so it’s really a problem,
and it’s probably going to lighten up after their election, which I think is in
a couple of days or something.
Leo: I don’t know, once you figure out how
to do this, it’s tempting just to keep it up right? That’s the problem with
this, its slippery, oh we’ll only do this until after the election, and then of
course, they keep doing it. I asked Vince Surf about this specifically, and
also about the move to end the US department of Commerce contract with Ican, and this whole notion of the internet, somebody
controlling the internet. Control is a funny word, you can’t’ really use the
word control when it comes to the internet. But what he did say was within the
extremities, the in points of the internet can be controlled. Within a nation,
you can control the internet.
Mike: Sure.
Leo: Or your internet service provider can
act inappropriately with regard to net neutrality. But the internet itself
heals itself, protects itself, is designed to not to be susceptible to this
kind of stuff, so no one can, Turkey can’t screw up our internet, but they can
screw up their own internet.
Mike: That’s right. Because
the government, the ISPs are just companies that have to function with permission
by the government, theoretically. And China has done, if you’re going to
be a conasuer of fine authroitarion internet.
Leo: They’re good at that.
Mike: They’re so good. They have multiple
things. They have the great fire wall of China. They really go after the intelligence, they don’t really worry about the bumpkins in
the country side and so on. But they really crack down on the eastern side of
the country, and the southern part of the country. They have this 50 cent army,
where they have just huge numbers of people out there saying nice things about
China, and criticizing anybody who criticizes Chinese policy. Plus they have
huge numbers of internet sensors on social media. So they’re censoring social
media, twitter like sites and Facebook like sites, painstakingly. Huge numbers
of people going through all these messages, and just blocking and ratting out
people. It’s a daily constant…
Jeff: On top of all of that, they have
intimidation.
Mike: Yes.
Jeff: Those are all the known and seen
things. Even though we don’t know exactly how many but those are the explicit activities
of censorship. But there’s the more heinous government activities which is intimidation.
Mike: That’s right. And Combined, all of that
combined is what makes their control information so effective essentially.
Leo: Yeah. My thought has always been,
you’re going to see this in localized areas, but it also hurts the country so
much, in terms of, because the internet really is about free communication,
it’s good for a country, that’s why we want to preserve the internet. It’s good
for innovation, it’s good for consumers, it’s good for commerce, it’s good for so much stuff, that you only do this at your
own peril. So I would, I believe ultimately that the Chinese government will
back down on this, because ultimately it’s not good for China. China wants to
be part of the global community.
Mike: But the Chinese communist party, which
controls the government, doesn’t. What they’re concerned about other political
parties, entering in and participating in their government. And really that’s
the same thing in turkey, it’s a political party doing
this to defend itself against another political party. So you don’t really have
a democracy in most countries. You might not have it in any country, but in
places like China, and to a certain extent, Turkey, you have political parties
who are competing with other political parties and you have censorship…
Leo: So the party can control it.
Mike: yean.
Leo: But ultimately it’s bad for the
country. And if it’s bad for the country it’s ultimately bad for the party. And
you know, of course you’re going to have to totalitarian regimes. Those aren’t
good for people at any respect. But I think that the internet is a great threat
to those in the long run and I feel like it’s such a democratizing power and
the people always seem to get around these things.
Mike: Well as they’re learning in Turkey.
Turkey is a functioning democracy, and the party that’s doing this is just
going to get hammered. In addition to the fact that they were committing this censorship
to cover up some apparent graft and so on, but in China it’s a different story,
there is no alternative political party in China, so that’s a different story.
Leo: And there is no history of democracy in
China.
Mike: That’s right. But what they’re learning
in Turkey is you can’t do this. It doesn’t work at all, it makes you a laughing stock. It brings attention to the things you’re trying
to hide. We’re sitting there on this tech show, talking about a really inside
baseball Turkish political thing. Everybody now knows about this corruption. We
wouldn’t have been talking about Turkish corruption unless they did this, so this
is a horrible idea.
Leo: Nexus 10 might be coming back soon. A
listing on the google play store, maybe that’s a mistake, says….
Jeff: It still says coming soon.
Leo: Does that mean the old nexus 10, and
they’re out of stock?
Jeff: Well it’s been gone for some time.
Leo: We’ve been waiting for a long time for
a new nexus 10 tablet.
Jeff: And they kept the price up there, so if
they were going to come up with a new nexus 10, they would take some details ou,t and say coming soon. It’s a
bit odd.
Leo: It’s hard to know what it means when
they say coming soon.
Mike: It’s got to be a new one. It’s got to
be a revamped edition.
Leo: But the specs currently aren’t any
different.
Jeff: It stills says a 32 gig for $499. 16 gigs for $399.
Leo: yeah. 5 megapixel man
camera and 1.9 megapixel front.
Jeff: Funny, I have zero desire for a big
tablet anymore.
Leo: I like my nexus 7 plenty good.
Jeff: Yeah my seven.
Leo: It’s just the right size.
Jeff: Cat’s meow.
Leo: Cat’s meow. Google normally, in fact, I
gave them a little trouble for this last year, really goes wild on April fools.
Do you think they’ve backed down a little bit, they realized its…
Jeff: I think it’s a little more than that,
Leo. I hate April first. I just want it to be April 2nd, I cannot
stand it.
Leo: Who doesn’t?
Jeff: My, this year my Twitter feed had
virtually nothing, I didn’t see any of the usual stuff. I just think maybe last
year was the Armageddon of April firsts, and this year it’s calmed down.
Leo: Thank God.
Jeff: It may not just be google. I do have to
say that the mac cuts one was cute.
Leo: What was the Mac Cuts one?
Jeff: It’s a video. A
visual gag. He’s not going to stop changing, and it’s a visual gag so
you probably won’t…
Leo: For our audio listeners it’s not going
to be much fun. I’ll give you the play by play. Here’s our beloved one from Mac
Cuts.
Video: We
have a Dave asks, When will you stop changing things? Look, I’m sorry Dave, but
I can’t do that. The web is always changing, the things that we think we need
to do for users, will always be changing, and of course, spammers, and their
techniques are always changing.
Jeff: So for our audio listeners, what’s happening his shirt is just constantly changing colors.
Leo: It is? I didn’t even notice!
Mike: Yeah!
Leo: Oh it is! It’s gray.
Mike: Violet, purple.
Leo: How do they do that?
Jeff: I don’t know how they did it. It’s kind
of brilliant.
Video:
Based on what our users are looking for, you know people are starting to do
more…
Jeff: That’s it. Matt keeps on blabbing on
and on and on about things that are changing.
Leo: (Laughs) I didn’t even notice it!
Jeff: And his shirt changes colors. That’s
it. That’s the gag.
Leo: Okay, that’s pretty subtle. For Google
that’s very subtle.
Mike: I thought that Hassel Hoff thing was
great.
Leo: Oh I got Hoffed!
I got hoffsomed.
Jeff: I couldn’t get it to happen to me, I’ve
been taking pictures of me to make it happen.
Leo: That was kind of the beauty of it, you
couldn’t force the Hoff. And they had a David Hassel Hoff bot that would, if
you mentioned David Hassel Hoff in a post on Google Plus, he would respond. And
I’ll show you some of the things that happened to me. Did you see the pictures
they Hasselhoffed of me. Let me see if I can find
some of them. Here’s some obvious ones. Let me just
show you the obvious ones first. The first one that happened
to me. What is that Chad? Who’s that?
Chad: This is my only Hoffsome.
Leo: Oh, I got three.
Chad: yeah. I know.
Leo: So here’s one. I was testing out the
HDC one camera. Took a picture of Jason. I thought
there must be a human doing this because this is too perfect.
Jeff: It is perfect. Jason’s looking
mournful. And the Hoff is looking like, hoffish.
Leo: Like something. But notice where it
would have the auto awesome mentioned, it says the April Fools. And this photo
was created by adding David Hassel Hoff to your photo. Which
is so random as to be hysterical. And then I got another one. Because I was testing out this camera out a lot. This is
John Slanina. Oh wait a minute! This is a new one!
This is one that I hadn’t seen before, so there’s new stuff because this is the
one I saw earlier. So they put more Hassel Hoff with Jammer B.
Mike: And if the listeners and viewers want
to check out what happened to other people you can go to Hoffsome. The hash tag hoffsom.
Leo: And you’ll see them all. But this one
was my favorite, and I thought my god, this is got to be a human.
Jeff: wow.
Leo: Because you see this chess set here?
Zoom in a little bit and you’ll see Hassel Hoff is peeking out behind one of
the bishops. A little tiny Hassel Hoff.
Mike: A mini Hoff.
Jeff: That’s some great algorithmic work,
man.
Leo: And I figure it has to be algorithmic
because these are not public photos. So there’s no way google is going to go
into my photos, some humans going to go in and modify my photos, right? Tell me
that. But how do they do that?
Mike: Well they do some, you know, amazing things
with some computer image recognition. For example, they know the difference
between a dog and a cat. They know the difference between a baby and a child.
Jeff: They know smiles.
Mike: They know smiles. They know facial
expression. So their image recognition algorithms are killer.
Leo: I will submit, I got the best, Hoff some.
Mike: That is amazing.
Leo: That blows me away.
Jeff: He’s exactly the same size of the chess
pieces.
Leo: And he’s peeking out from behind one!
How could a computer know that?
Jeff: well the computer has to silhouette the
chess piece. And have him behind it. His hand is behind another chess piece.
Leo: Right!
Jeff: It layered the photo.
Leo: it layered it!
Mike: In this case, it may have made what
they considered an error. It may have thought those chess pieces were actual
people. It may have recognized them as humans and just put him into a group
photo. But it’s brilliant the way it looks, it’s perfect. If you were to do
this by hand, it would actually be kind of hard.
Leo: Oh, there is one more good one
and I have to play on my android. Why shouldn’t I show it on Google Plus, maybe that’s the best thing and I wonder if it’s still
there. They added a new translator to chrome. So, If you go to text page and chrome, OH it’s gone. Oh, was only there for one day.
How Sad. You can translate a page into MoG. I am
glad, I captured this, I went to ndnarcos blog on the mobile and translated into MoG. Oh, they
should have left that it. I am so disappointed. However, they do this without
updating chrome. I did not get a chrome update in either respect.
Mike: It’s
like magic.
Leo: These
guys at Google are good.
Mike: Ways
dates. Ways shows you single person a hub
Leo: That’s
another rightful hobo. Look at
behind from the people, maybe I am not the only one who gets that.
Jeff: Look at
that.
Leo: That’s
good one
Jeff: It did
not realize it was her hand, so eating her hand. They cut the edge
Mike: Yea, it
did not realize it’s the table that like. That make me does feel they go
better.
Leo: it’s
slipping off
Jeff: Yes, I
don’t even realize the content
Leo: You young people live under
profanity. Anyway, I thought that was pretty good. Again, we did not see a massive
number of Google likerophol jokes and I for one am
thrilled. Remember the toilet internet. Let’s see, oh there was one Poki man. Goggle is going to focus on poetry shorts and facts
by offering an camera app for everyone on Google
store.
Mike: And then you fancy HTC one,
people wont
Leo: I am feeling already ripped
off. They are also working on raw support. This is clearly one of the big
differentiate but the big battlegrounds in smart phones; it’s not the quality
of camera but computational photography. Taking the photo and modifying it
Mike: Yes
Jeff: They say they are going to be
able to do what your new camera does without second lenses. They are going to
understand the depth
Leo: Actually Nokia does that with
their refocus app and actually I does a very good job. We did a review on
before you buy yesterday Brnaird head Icon the 929.
He had a picture of rain drops on the windshield, it actually arguably better
job than HTC one.
Mike: Really
Leo: well but the problem is you
have to have a windows phone to use it.
Mike: The important thing though I
think that companies like Google are realizing that 98% of what people want from heir smart phone camera is to take
picture, uploaded to the social media and have to be like wow. Just have a wow effect
Leo: Instagram, that’s what
Instagram realized.
Mike: Yea an Instagram is not doing
it as well as Google is doing it. Google plus their auto filters and their auto
modifications is really astonishingly good. It’s really so good, I take all
these lousy pictures with Google glass and stich them together and do all kind
of really amazing things. The settle improvements that make and hopefully this
feature of blurry feature will make it to the Google plus. Because they have
the auto backup things, every picture you take just goes right into Google Plus, you can have every picture on your laptop. Just go
right into your Google plus, they will modify it, you
can undo the modifications with single click. It’s really really nice the way they do that and it’s really improving photography which is great.
Because the Instagram process, Instagram corrects your pictures, Facebook
correct your pictures. I have done a lot of side by side pictures. Of what
Facebook does to your photographs with it’s aggressive compression and this is the direction we want to go in. Improving
the pictures rather than creating them and make them look lower resoling kind
of stuff.
Leo: here smart, combination of
Google plus, a great android app. It’s frankly almost so good nobody use their
camera anymore. So, 4.4.3, Oh, I am sorry this is not right that’s settle be I
guess 4.4
Jeff: No actually the
camera stuff is supposed to be a separate update from the android update…
Leo: Do we have to have Nexsus5 or..?
Mike: I don’t know.
Leo: Hmm… but increasingly they put the Google apps on the play
store, which is really great for those of us who don’t have.
Mike: Yeah, it will become a default thing in 4.4.3 but in the
meantime they are going to come out with a stand-alone app, which is great
Leo: Awesome, we were up early this morning. It’s been a long
day; 8 AM. Actually you were up early, I got here
late. Mike Elgan and Peter Kafka from recode watched
as Amazon revealed a set-top box, The Fire TV; $99. It is Android; looks like,
they did not say the word Android but it’s pretty obviously Android powered…
Mike: It’s Android, yeah Peter Kafka and
some of the top rated developers said that it’s just Android
Jeff: Some of the stories said straight out Apple Android
Leo: Yeah good chase, it’s just Amazon that did not say that but
of course it is just like the Kendall and it will have a Quad core processer.
They did not name the processor and a dedicated GPU and that’s important
because unlike the Roku and the Apple TV, all have
some gaming but this is going to be a significantly larger amount of game
impact. Amazon has a game studio, they’ve put together. It will have all of the
requisite Netflix and obviously Amazon streaming, Hulu Plus; they mentioned
Vivo I think they mention.
Mike: Yeah
Leo: so it’s just a streaming box and at the same price as Apple
TV and the IRoko.
Mike: Yes, with some benefit’s. One of
them is that it’s an X-Box like game controller…
Leo: For additional $40
Mike: Yes, but to play casual and mobile style game as opposed to
like, you know, Call of Duty and so on. The other thing that I think is kind of
a killer feature for parents is this parental kind of thing. You can sign your
kids up for all content…
Leo: Free!! Is that free?
Mike: No No.
It’s..
Leo: For special paycheck
Mike: yes.
Leo: Alright.
Mike: And but then they already have it for the tappets, 4 for
the Kendall Fire and their parental controls, all that kind of stuff. But now,
they are extending it to TV. So now if you have, you know, small children, you
don’t want to expose them to the horrors of the TV commercials, you can sort of turn them loose on this, they get to choose their own
content and it’s a great idea. They, you know, we don’t really pay a lot of
attention to this cause it’s like children’s culture, you know to certain
extent but this is really. They really are hitting it hard in the same way that
the McDonalds did with, you know, playgrounds and Rama McDonalds which really
is secrets of McDonalds is you get small children loving your brand and
lifelong…
Jeff: Yeah and they’re bribed..
Leo: They’re hooked.
Mike: Yes. And so this is a big and it kind of under the radar
because who else is really targeting children so aggressively.
Jeff: That’s the point. Well then, there is the Voice command,
which I think going to give me a turn off.
Leo: well a lot of things have voice command like I was pointing
at my Television, my Samsung TV as a remote control over the microphone; of
course the Xbox One is a voice command. This is not unusual.
Mike: but overall, performance is something they are touting and
singing. Everything’s… Zippy voice search is very fast they say. And well we’ll
see the reviews and of course you’re going to have one of the box in soon.
Jeff: Here’s a question about that in mind.
Leo: I have one tomorrow.
Mike: Yeah.
Jeff: I have a question
Leo: I wasn’t going to be here tomorrow. (Laughs) I guess I am
coming in. You know if ... I tell you what Mike it’s coming here, if a box from
Amazon arrives here… to me. You have my permission to open it and demo it.
Mike: OK
Leo: That’s for you
Mike: Great
Leo: With any luck we’ll have it on TNT, if not then Tech News
tonight.
Jeff: Here’s a question. After the Netflix…was it…Chromecast deal. Were you streamed to the Amazon box? Are
they going to have to be per viewing fees? They could perform well.
Leo: That’s a very interesting question. I mean probably not. Iroko doesn’t but Netflix does, and gets some benefit on Iroko.
Jeff: but then Netflix goes to the Amazon box. Is that what two Chromecast, like it’s Amazon or
Netflix?
Leo: It’s Netflix. That’s what I believe was different about the
Apple TV. Is that the Apple TV…Apple has its own CBN and all contents of the
Apple TV comes from Apple CBNs. I believe these are arc mines. So that’s very
pricey for Apple. But it gives a much better user experience even if you’re on Chromecast prior to the deal.
Mike: Yeah and Amazon brings up another thing is that Amazon is
doing which is that they have a recommendation engine toward any given time
they say, based on what you’ve watched so far probably based on the what books
you’ve ordered, things like that. Here are the TV shows we think you are going
to like and starts to download them In advance. So when you choose one, it just
plays it instantly.
Leo: As it knows you are going to love see this.
Mike: Right. And here we go.
Jeff: hmm…
Leo: I tell you what, you are going to
love seeing this crazy Gary at... Is Gary actually crazy or is he just making…?
Mike: He has some… I believe he has some brain damage from
motorcycle accident.
Jeff: He does but he’s also just…
Leo: He’s making hay on. I mean, he was on… was it Entourage
where he appeared in… absolutely crazy crazy?
Jeff: Yup.
Mike: He mostly plays himself.
Gary: If you’re like me? You like talking to things. Like Hello
lamp!
Lamp: Oh Gary!
Gary: See, Hello pants!
Leo: Maybe the weirdest ad a major America company has ever
made.
Gary:…thank you beach for bringing home…
Mike: One of that’s really is his house
Gary: ….especially high tech planes…Find Gary …FIND GARY BUSE.
Additional Amazon Fire TV, this is to me and this is exactly what I say Gary.
Mike: He’s pressing hold but…
Jeff: (Laughs)
Gary: Yayyyyyy, Amazon Fire TV (Laughs)
Leo: It definitely gets your attention
Mike: Yup.
Leo: (Laughs)
Jeff: Awwo Why do they kick on Iroko specifically?
Leo: But It all asks direct competition and…
Jeff: And I know what it’s kind…
Leo: The truth is it’s just another, you know, it’s a Me Tube
product. I submitted but I think I was wrong that maybe this is just Amazon
saying what we got to get the starring point so that we are equal to all these
other companies so that when the big deals come down the pipe, we can basically
replace the cable, we want to be there.
Mike: Yeah I think the streaming box is going to get much more
compelling this year and I think they are afraid that people who were using
their streaming services are going to say You know what I don’t need Amazon
anymore cause I get better deals with this other box. Now they have a box with
games and you know they are hitting all the high points a couple of vaguely
unique features, it’s enough to keep people and keep growing. They bragged in
the beginning of the event how fast they’ve grown, so on. And they want to keep
that going and they want to sort of hold off the competition and who knows. You
know, I think the real play here ultimately as we were saying in the broadcast
this morning is they want to get people using their TV to shop, to engage with
Amazon content, to see advertisings and promotions on Amazon to, you know,
across colony, across the various Amazon… it’s tappets.
Leo: it’s not a big market. I mean the total, if you include the
Apple TV, Iroko and all these set-top boxes, were all
under 20 million unit’s.
Mike: Ahmm
Jeff: How about the…
Leo: And Google which added this market and has left it. I mean
the Chromecast is something completely different and
almost as if Google though about it and said you know what “Nobody really wants
this! What they want is a Medius”. Yeah you liked the
Google TV, Chad. I liked the Google TV! But it’s dead.
Chad: Yeah I know but that is one of the reasons I brought; I
wore the shirt today because…
Leo: yeah, You knew.
Chad: I knew the Amazon announcement thing, that’s like: Hey
Amazon! Don’t forget that the…it’s a hard space.
Leo: The Chromecast is a different
idea, the idea is whatever is on your smart phone or your computer or your Chromebook Jeff, can be sent to the TV and that really the
responsibility for it lies with the device sending it to the Chromecast. If you want voice, you do it on the device,
right?
Jeff: I am happy with Chromecast. I
don’t know why just bought the Amazon box.
Leo: Oh! You bought it too huh! I am owning the fact that I have to buy it to review it. I don’t want it. Last thing I need
is another thing attached to my TV.
Jeff: I am cancelling…
Mike: I don’t know…
Jeff: It’s no advantage
Mike: They certainly have the means to market the crap out of it
and I know that people will… you know the…Amazon has some real fans, people
love Amazon. They love the prime service, the shipping and all that kind of
stuff and this is a way for them to leverage that kind of a fandom. So you can
imagine little pop ups; pop ups popping up and saying your package is going to
arrive in next ten minutes and you know this weird stuff like that. Amazon is
moving to having their own trucks…
Leo: That would be interesting
Mike: Yeah but this… so there’s lot of opportunities everywhere
Leo: “Stop watching the Americans, your package has arrived”
would be interesting.
Mike: And that’s the other thing; there’s data. There’s a lot of
data here, they’re be able to look at people’s habit’s…they’re be able to…you
know remember this is a company, not only came out with a tablet but its own
silk web browser cause they want to harvest data more and more data. They were
the original data harvesting company that there book recommendations in the
early days was the first real glimpse we saw of the world of contextual
marketing and advertising, essentially. Cause they said “Here you going to love
this book” and you’re like “How do they know? That’s exactly the book I would
love” and do it with these algorithms and so on. And they just want a lot more
than that…
Leo: This is paranoid. This is just another device watching what
you do in your house.
Mike: They can deliver the washing and post right to your TV.
Leo: I do wish, I I keep waiting for;
yeah right cause we own it. I DO wish that that flood of Chromecast as set, we keep expecting what would happen….
Jeff: Well was it coming more, haven’t it been from the last two
weeks?
Leo: I guess… guess. Yeah YouTube…Yahoo wants to cover a little
of YouTube Glitter by luring YouTube stars over to a new video service
presumably they’re creating according to the recode and they’ll give you more
money if you do it. They haven’t come in to me yet.
Mike: Hmph
Leo: I am YouTube star, oh no I am not a
YouTube star, there’s the problem.
Jeff: Believe me we used to be a star.
Leo: oh God what is our total downloads on YouTube? 5000?
Mike: It’s cause you have your own YouTube.
Leo: (Laughs)
Jeff: Oh alright
Leo: I need to start, Chen and I’ve both tried to figure it out, Chad wants to be YouTube star. I know that, I know
that fact; Chad’s crazy cause he did not come make any
money on YouTube but maybe that’s…
Chad: well there is a lot of… The
thing is I was watching something, Jim Lauterbach had
to talk about “Can you make a business on YouTube?” and he had a whole panel
about it with all these people….
Leo: Because he thinks so, we revision through it. That was you
model
Chad: Well at the end, the panel was NO.
Leo: NO
Chad: You at the moment you can’t make business on YouTube, but I
think that individuals can create a business for themselves.
Leo: Barely with a lot of, you might make a 100,000 a year.
Chad: With a lot of work.
Leo: You might be working 50 hours 60 hours or 70 hours a week or
you're making 100,000 a year. You're not going to get rich.
Jeff: Somebody’s like Marques Brownlee
Chad: Right, But he is...
Leo: he is the exception that proves wrong , I am sure MKBHD pulls in a ,you know, 6 figures.
Chad: Right
Leo: But if I may pay him 6 figures to work here and he wouldn’t
be editing all the time.
Chad: But the point is he'd...
Leo: wouldn’t be his own thing
Chad: he wouldn’t be his own thing
Leo: It would be a lie. I think it’s a lie that’s being told,
propagated right now by Google. Because I don’t think he need to, but but just that’s a notion that you can become a rich YouTube
star if you just make videos in your kitchen.
Mike: it’s a... it’s a but it talks about Marques Brownlee and
even his success and hes one success story who we
have to compare with million much less successful people
Chad: Well...
Leo: that’s not a bad thing
Mike: Right but the point is even his incumbents is very...
Leo: He deserves more
Mike: well, he could get less if you know, when you succeed even
in an environment like that, they're going to be hundred imitators, the market,
the economics of advertising in that environment are just completely
unpredictable and they tend, they always tend to downward toward less and less
valuable and there’s such a glut of content on YouTube, it’s just, it’s not
anything you can really build a business on, you can’t really count on it,
because you can’t control the market if there’s another recession like that,
you just never know what can happen. It’s not a good reliable business model.
It’s great if you're in college and making a ton of a money and you're going to buy a convertible, it’s great but it’s really not a place,
a good place to build a business.
Leo: I got to say, I really, the more...as much as I pop this, I
still think YouTube is a million years better than the mainstream...Hello! Is
that me or ...
Chad: yes, it’s your computer
Leo: god I just
Chad: your phone ringing here just a second
Leo: well you know what the problem is Hangouts, not everybody
does much Hang outers. So did you see the story on
Tesla's 60 minutes? So once again, the mainstream media, let me play this if I get this video going here
Chad: if you play, we're going to hear Hangout music
Leo: I don’t know where that’s coming from, I don’t have the Hangout
open
Mike: We could just do the audio
Leo: Well lets close everything
Chad: (laughs)That will fix it?
Leo: Nothings making noise, let me pull
that up again. So apparently 60 minutes to the story (laughs) on the Tesla, in
which they added car sounds, because it was too quite
Jeff laughing
Chad: quite
Leo: It was too quiet and 60 minutes even admits that it was an
editing error. P.S. an editing error. Chad tells me it
was an editing error.
Jeff: Moment of the week
Interviewer: ... how did figure you were going to start a
car company and ....
Chad: it’s feels like 60 minutes is a laughing stock of news
Leo: It shouldn’t be, it’s our most prestigious television news
Jeff: at CNN, chad
Leo: CNN a laughing stock, by the way lets switch to CNN. Oh that jet's still missing. Oh ok, thank you.
Jeff: we sure know nothing
Leo: we still know nothing but let’s talk about it
Mike: but in a...in semi-related story, the EU has just ruled all
electric cars have to make artificial engine
Leo: that’s because French people like to wander in the streets
Mike: is that right?
Man in TV: ...right before the 250 miles on the charge and
Musk's building a network of charging stations where the driver pays nothing
for a fill up...
Leo: Did we miss...
Man in TV: he hopes to make the station on solar power one
day.
Elon Musk: drive for free on pure sunlight ...
Leo: that’s a The End
Elon: ... that’s the message I convey, even if you like....
Leo: it’s still a great ad for Tesla but come on you don’t have to act corny,
it’s insanity.
Chad: he’s going to drive into the future
Leo: I guess it was over here, somewhere that looks like
Google's charging... that’s the super chargers
Man in TV: ...right before the 250 miles on the charge and
going over ...
Leo: (laughing) that’s not what it sounds like
Man in TV: right before the 250 miles on the charge and
Musk's building a network of charging stations ...
Leo: (laughing) that’s indeed, there you go, thank you 60
minutes for that (Chortles) In my day you did not edit footage and add sound
effects to it, I think? Maybe we did, I just forgot.
Jeff: Did you cry on camera?
Leo: (smiling) Yeah, what was that...who was
that for...
Jeff: Broadcast news
Leo: Broadcast news, that’s right. That was a movie, that wasn’t
real right?
Jeff: No
Leo: ok
Jeff: Well, it’s more real than CNN news is
Leo laughing
Jeff: I wrote a, I really do this for a, just a spoof post not
April 1st the same and then they were going to reprint in CNN, the missing
network.
Leo: Yeah I saw that and you're right on
Jeff: ...recover missing people, Jesus. I’ve seen that, been
disgusting me.
Leo: but obviously they fan out people who want to think about
this jet 24/7, it’s only, seems to be the only story they're covering. There
was a really good piece on Wired by an amateur pilot. I actually think it, is
this is a true story and I don’t know they want to think space aliens...
Mike: black holes
Jeff: black holes
Leo: Black hole, now they are saying the criminal investigation
but this piece in Wired, seems pretty straight-forward. The guy’s a pilot he
said. Well, first thing I saw when this plane took this hard turn, I looked in
to see what was on that trajectory, it was... it’s a, the nearest landing strip
that has sufficient capacity to land the Triple 7. He said as a pilot of course
one of things you always keep in mind, I always keep in the back of my mind is
"Should anything go wrong, where is the nearest place I can land?"
Mike: They train you to do that every minute you say word alert
Land...
Leo: that’s your job. So he says what it seem like say there was
a fire, there’s been several cases of fires in tires and then there’s working
them up through the plane fuselage taking out the electrical system,
sequentially. He says it makes perfect sense that the fire was deducted they
immediately made that turn towards the safe landing place and he believes that
they then were overcome by smoke inhalation and the plane continued on its
course until it ran out of fuel and crashed.
Jeff: Yeah
Leo: That makes no sense
Chad: To CNN
Leo: slides say that it makes no
sense either, so (chortles) I guess we're now succumbing to this...
Jeff: if you go to the CNN right now, guess what they’re talking
about?
Leo: oh no, I have it in my office and it’s almost comical. It’s
all they'll talk about. Alright.
Mike: I think it’s Al Capone’s vault
Leo laughing
Jeff: The problem is, it’s a tragedy
Leo: It’s a terrible tragedy
Jeff: It’s a terrible tragedy, the
real tragedy, the real lies and it’s been exploited
Leo: By the way, the Google
Connection of the good fellows strain, why is it on Google Earth to find out.
Why it is that he use Google earth to find out, where that plane was headed.
Mike: I think the bigger issue with
news just, coverage like this is that they used to be for a while mistaken. Now
worth news organizations made was that the amount of coverage and the time
spent on the coverage of story how big the story was. That to me is kind of a mistake,
if there is no information you shouldn’t be spending hours on a story with
everybody taped in and making stuff up. But now, it’s like instead of what’s
the most news worthy thing, it’s what’s the most
Leo: Holy ratings driven
Mike: And it’s, the problem is that
you attract more people, but their their their people who don’t buy stuff like from is trying to
boost their advertising and stuff and so on. But people spend all day on,
people speculated by black holes long in the their playing, are not buying their advertising.
Leo: Microsoft, billed conference
is going on in San Francisco, are billed conference coverage is really going to
happen on Friday on Mari John Pal, coming here and do windows weekly live from
4 o’clock Friday afternoon. I think we have a full house already. That going to be a lot of fun. Windows phone 8.1 was
announced on windows phone handsets at the end of April or early May. And It will have a very Google now like Cortana.
Mike: Yea
Leo: I think they might compare
more serious than Google. Google now doesn’t have personification. Mike: Right
Leo: Cortana that does some interesting things like
Jeff: Things like rij curtain leather
Leo: Yes, you are watching Jo Bill
Fury, do the demonstration in his sister called. And he said, Zoe and Cocktana is my name is to ask about her dogs.
What they did not show is , how Cocktana knows about that
Mike: That’s creepy
Leo: laughing, now Jeff, don’t you
mind. But you know I pointed out at the time that what happen because of their
conscious decision of rescue their privacy cannot do Google now style feature
very well. Microsoft can, they have got Bing they have good search engine, they have got the ways to gather those signals. They
conceivable do that Google now style
Mike: They could, and I think public
is ultimately going to embrace that kind of thing because of it’s so cool.
People love Google Now and problem with Google Now is that they still are not
really putting in front of view and when they do in front of view, they don’t
really give you enough stuff. I want to torrent of Google Now
Leo: I want more
Jeff: Yes
Mike: I want more and I face the
whole time but..
Leo: There is some flaws and may be they are still working on those, I keep getting told. I
searched once, long time ago, for a window a glass replacement company and I
still to this day Google Now cards get is only eight minutes to Curtis windows.
I need and I want to go there in the first place.
Jeff: Enough already with
windows
Leo: Enough with the Windows, and
there is nowhere I can turn that particular thing off’
Mike: I had a really interesting
experience. The other day, where I got information about a flight in Google
Glass which went from the Google Now app and Google Glass. It said, oh flight
Toronto is on time is going to be leaving at this time and I am like what what flight. So, I asked my wife and she said oh yea that’s
her brother was flying. She had the received the email. Now they are looking at
my Gmail, they know that my wife is my wife and they are looking at her Gmail
to tell me about
Leo: That’s weird
Mike: Yea
Leo: How do they know she is your
wife?
Mike: Probably because I have
Leo: Did not it appear in your
Gmail
Jeff: How do you if it’s her
brother?
Mike: I am pretty sure, did not. But
they
Leo: That’s strange
Mike: They tend to know that I am
also got her brother circled. I have a lot of communication with her brother.
So, they also know that I have a relationship with her brother. So, it’s kind
of, I don’t know, they are doing something
Leo: That’s, I think that’s one
place you do get a creep line when you can’t figure out how they know.
Mike: Yea
Leo: That’s really what freaks
people out
Jeff: That’s key that they have to
revile that and give control over it. Otherwise, you creep
Mike & Leo: yea
Mike: So, there is another thing at
billed conference that we cover this morning. I thought it was kind of
interesting which is that a website popped up yesterday called
windowsondevices.com and I don’t know if they announced this yet at the billed
conference by Microsoft. This website called windowsondevices.com popped up and
then it went away, before it went away people went through it and found all
kind of stuff about talking teddy bears, robots, smart coffee mugs. The internet running windows and this is going to be powered by
Intel Golay Platform. So, they are going to do
something roughly equivalent to Android ware. But less about wearable and more
about the internet things and it seems to be aimed very securely at makers and
builders, educators and you know that sort of hardware hackers market. Which I
think is great and in fact, it has to be said and is probably more coincident
than anything else. That ever since Saint took over Microsoft; they seemed to
be a much better company. I don’t know if you guys have perceived that but they
seemed to be doing all kind of stuff
Jeff: How could you make that much
shape? I mean, this is the Queen Marry and so a guy comes on with a new pedal.
I think that’s a wishful thinking
Leo: laughing
Mike: Well, could be I mean. The
thing is Microsoft, the forestry thing about Microsoft is they are always
working on great stuff and they withhold it. One Example is, Microsoft
research, which is one of the best research labs in the industry and you never
see their stuff. They withhold it somehow; either the internal politics of the
company or something prevents them from executing on many fronts. They really
could get home runs and just for the last ten years, you have to hear they have
failed failed failed, to
execute on the stuff they have and have been working on. So, here I don’t know
how much it take, it’s just turn things on, let thing go forward, announce
things that have been in works for several years. I really don’t know, one possibility is that Ballmer, certainly achieve the
enlightenment in his last year and got a bunch of things in emotions that are
now such a delicate state clarifier. The other one is that such and Delos
basically, you know things like you know nose squelching Android Nokia devices.
Things like, you know, the big having an announcement almost entirely about an
iPad product. I mean that was that they did not see that
Leo: They did not even mention
windows
Jeff & Mike: yea
Mike: That was, you know, and is
that can Ballmer be given credit for that? I am not so sure
Leo: That Ballmer was one holding
back, I think this is such an announcement coming out. But it’s a long standing
tradition technology, remember the book Fumbling the
future how zero ax invented the first personal computer. Blas went to Packer and
said, I just invented the Apple one, would you like to
sell it? No
Mike: They did that twice
Leo: Long standing tradition
Mike: Hp purchased Palm, which has web OS, which was a third alternative multi touch
user interface and very innovative one
Leo: Beautiful
Mike: Different from the others,
that has that huge feature on all the devices even onto the desktop. The once
again they had the future of computing in their hands and they like No, we
spend a lot for it but you know what we just going to ignore it and then sort
of let it go. Idiotic
Leo: It happens a lot
Mike: Unbelievable
Leo: Anybody, as always asks
confident long enough, we have seen it happened. Time and time again, Chad you
will see it too some day
Chad: May be with you too
Mike: will you grow up, will you. We
will see it all happen
Leo: Fumbling the Future, we are
going to take a break, come back, get our number, tip, anything you like to
submit Mike to our pool of stuff, just a second I am sure they brought you by a friends of personal capital. I had personal capital’s
founder on trianglish company, couple of years ago,
Bill Haris. He was former CEO within intuit and
PayPal learn a lot about how people use money, keep track of money. He wanted a
solution for people to track their investments. He realized before you can even
talk about wealth creation or investing you have got to understand where all
your money is. That’s so hard. You got bank accounts, charge cards, stocks, 401K. Do people still call them charge cards?
Mike: No idea
Leo: I think I just did myself,
charge cards. Credit cards, 401Ks. They are all on
different websites with different years names and
passwords. You can’t see it all, it was the landscape. So, he created personal
capital, you set it up and within a minute you seeing live real time dashboard
of your financial situation on your tablet, on your phone, of course on your
desktop. Then of course you see, the investment checkouts, if you are paying
too much. Your fees and investment advice, they gave you tailor investment
advice. So, you can start building your retirement, building your future and
best of all and this make sense it’s free. It has to be free, why spend money
on this. When you should be putting that money in this, your
savings, your investments. Personalcapital.com/twig, I think he created
a great invention, a great idea. Then if you are curious, the way they monetize
is, it’s just like their other products and by giving you personalize
recommendations and that take their commission if you decide to buy. They do a
very nice job and they give you a great advice. Personacapital.com/twig reliant
our chance to Mike Elgan to share his break pizza
oven on twig
Mike: I can bring it in I think. It
could have fit in Prius
Leo: Mike and I was talking yesterday about I want to build one. So great Idea
Mike: Yea, well when we move to
Paddle Move, we looked at a lot of houses and there are some my wife likes and
this one I just. When I saw that Pizza oven, I am liked this has to be the
house. We getting this house
Leo & Jeff: laughing
Mike: I don’t even care if there is
a roof, keep drain out or whatever
Leo: is that door you throw in and
it heats up and then you cook cook cook
Mike: That’s right, the big steel
door. When you open it, it make noise, and then you like shove pizzas in there.
It’s like 700 Degrees and it’s fantastic.
Leo: it’s Awesome
Mike: Yea
Jeff: Cheeesssee
Leo: Yea, so, Jeff I think you need
to come back
Leo: Pizza party is at Mike
Mike: Are you coming back
Leo: look at that, it’s Google plus
picture. What about the hat, tell me about the hat? What is that?
Mike: That’s a chef’s hat
Leo: You wearing a chef’s hat
Mike: I want people to know, who has
the charge of this oven. That’s how you do it. I own a Chef’s hat
Leo: Now, I have to have a chef’s
hat, we need chef hat parody
Mike: It gives you authority
Leo: Is he wearing glasses in that
picture
Mike: Yea, Google glass, and I
posted the Google glass video of the whole pizza process as well, so it’s
really
Leo: I want to build one.
Mike: Yea, keep going down if you
want to play, I don’t know if you want
Leo: If you don’t follow Mike on
Google plus, you are missing one of the best most prolific posters on Google
Plus, he really
Mike: Yea, keep going
Leo: Now, have you looked at your
reviews?
Mike: Yea, Three Hundred and Thirty
Three Million
Leo: Jeminy,
Creaky Christmas
Mike: it’s a lot, I was so astonishing to saw that.
Leo: What the heck? That’s amazing,
but you know of course the king of all this is Trey Ratcliff. Let me see if I
can get a trace. Let me see if I go to his pager. That’s the only trace
Mike: Yea, you will see it
Jeff: Oh, they put followers backup,
they took followers down along. Now they have, I think this is which sometime
they don’t show any numbers
Leo: Look at this, Three Hundred
Thirty Three Million views
Jeff: I have got 43 million
Leo: Awwwww,
I am some pathetic numbers, I don’t even want to mention
Mike: Really put things in
perspective, Google Plus is. They are in also some recent reports about
Leo: They are in ghost town. So,
Trey has 4.5 Billion views, 7.3 million followers. He is probably the most
followed, I don’t know who is, but he is probably one of the most followed
Mike: Did I tell you about my
Morocco Story and Trey Ratcliff. I went to Morocco by the year ago and thing
where I loved it. Trey Ratcliff of all photographers that I know of should come
to Morocco and I posted some stuff saying, you got to come to Morocco. He just
went to Morocco.
Leo: Good
Mike: And my God, the pictures he
posted from Morocco were just
Leo: Larry Page has more followers,
8.1 million, but he is only got a poultry 29 Million views.
Mike: Yea, he doesn’t really get
Google Glass.
Leo: laughing
Mike: Like Trey and I get
Leo: laughing
Mike: I am thinking he needs to work
on it; he needs to spend more time just posting.
Jeff: How well know Trey was before
Google Plus
Leo: he was well known but Google
Plus really helped put him out there
Mike: yea
Leo: I have a mere 16.9 million
views, so phatic. I don’t know how you all getting millions of followers. I
have half a million followers in Google Plus and never been lacerate that. I
don’t know why that is
Jeff: I was on recommended was spare
some time
Mike: Yea, I am still on it.
Leo: Why am I not on the list. Oh I feel better about myself
Jeff: Mike Geno was on it too
Leo: I know, you all have millions of followers. It’s not like I don’t post it on time
Jeff: It doesn’t matter because..
Leo: What
Jeff: The algorithms still decides
to, what to show to whom. It’s very much like Facebook, but it’s not business
oriented. You know what, we it folds both ways. Because I only see what
algorithms chose to show me one feature. Hey, Google
if you listening, one feature I would like to have; is the ability to turn on
or off the people I follow.
Mike: Yea
Leo: OK, you can’t, like Facebook
you don’t see everybody’s allover post. That’s not good, I thought the slider.. you can go all the way
Mike: you can do a Slider but it
doesn’t go to hundred percent. It goes to a lot but not everything. I got that.
The other thing is, there are five thousands circles
count limit. You can’t circle more than five thousand people and that bugs me
to now and every other day I have to go and uncircle bunch of people so that I can circle the people that I want to circle. So, If
you are listening, whoever,
Leo: More circle
Jeff: This is the real test, how
much does Scoble have.
Leo: So, followers are
Leo: Scoble has 91 million views. He is not even in the ballpark.
Mike: The interesting thing about
Google plus though, is that there is no automatic traffic. As Jeff is saying,
you really see it in the comments and engagement. If you put a boring post up
there that would waste all the time. You get hardly any traffic, if you put
something that is really hot, it goes crazy even if you don’t have a bazillion
followers.
Leo: Scoble has got five million followers and 91 million views, which I think that a low
number of views for the number of followers he has, frankly. Really, Trey got
seven million and he is got what was it four billion views
Mike: yea
Leo: Four Billion!!!
Mike: I can give Scoble hard time about that. I got three hundred thirty three million
Leo: You got billion dude!!
Jeff: You really worked it
Leo: That’s how we get into this.
One of the most prolific posters on Google Plus and that shows you really do is
the quality posts. Good posts, you do consistent work people will follow you on
Google Plus. Mike you have a pick or a tip or something you like to share.
Mike: I do, things are little birdy.
Little bird told me, which is the new book by Beston.
This is a, I mean this is not getting a lot of buzz but I think it’s really
great book. We recently saw the excellent book “Hatching Twitter”
Leo: let me see it
Mike: which gives us origin story
of twitter. This is about Beston’s, mostly it’s like a cross between manifesto and an auto
biography. But it talks about how he ended up as a billionaire, almost by
accident. Multiple stages in his life, I want to point out, the dumbest thing
ever seen in a book
Leo: This book is limited to 140
pages, it would be over. It would end here
Jeff: Can’t
Mike: The tree has to die here
Leo: By the way, it continues on
for another 100 pages.
Mike: That’s right, but it’s an
engaging book. It’s pretty well written and I am really enjoying it. It’s a
nice
Leo: This is by the way why, know why he is talking about this book and why people
don’t hear about it. Their impression of biz that he maybe is
little bit or egoist. The first chapter has his business card. Biz Stone
Genius
Mike: Well, he actually tells the
story of why had that business card that he got it from, where most good ideas
come from, which is a roadrunner cartoons. While E. Coyote had a business card,
I think that said E. Coyote Comma Genius something like that. So, that’s where
it came from and he talks about how he has... It’s very personal book actually,
he says, there are two Bestons. There is the interest
perspective. Nerdy Beston, who does this kind of
self-effacing sort and then there is the eagle maniacal Beston that he turns on when he needs to. He needed to when he was hung over and had
bunch of interviews at Google. He was like, Oh yea, started telling him you
know sort of re-interviewing him. But It’s really an
interesting book, talks about how one person made it from just obscure blogger
to becoming this zillionaire
Leo: So, You recommend it
Mike: I do recommend it, it’s very
enjoyable book. Just came out Tuesday
Leo: You know I tried to get it for
triangulation. Steven Stephen Colbert says, in things little bird told me Biz
give away all his secretes to access, I advise him against it. If you are not
inspired and informed by this book then you haven’t read it. That’s pretty
good. I praise from Colbert and little bird told me. All right, Good pick. Mr.
Jeff Jarvis you have number of the week
Jeff: So, Google has forty-nine
percent of mobile advertising according to microbe.
Leo: Who has the rest?
Jeff: Facebook has eighteen percent
and other apps thirty three percent. Now they say that time spent Google has
18%, Facebook has 17% time spend
Leo: Oh, that’s terrible
Jeff: But, I am not so sure either.
I questioned, I don’t know what’s the methodologies behind
that because same problem is saying time spend on Google.com. Google
puts ads on a lot of places
Leo: Right, so their numbers
brought down by the fact that people see search results and then quickly
Jeff: Oh, I don’t know the
methodology. So, Google brought in 14.5 billion mobile add revenue, Facebook
shared rated under half of that 6.8 billion but let’s not forget Facebook was
zero with mobile, not very long ago at all. Now it’s stocks is going up because it’s doing so well in mobile. So, I think it’s
important
Leo: Here is why While E. Coyote
business card. Just in case you are interested, that says genius. Now, is that
have brain will travel?
Mike: Yea, that’s a good line too
Leo: That’s going to be my business
card. Mine have brain
Jeff: What was Zok CEO SUCKER?
Leo: I am CEO bitch.
Jeff: Bitch, right
Leo: I am CEO Comma Bitch
Mike: There is another guy who has a
business card and he was a kind of an academic type and he just told the Google
that he can make up his own title. So, he came up with the title Jolly Good
Fellow. Great title
Leo: I think my tail chief twig is
pretty good
Mike: It’s pretty good
Jeff: Yes
Leo: it’s both aggrandizing and
deprecating at the same time
Jeff: and it’s true
Leo: True!!!
Mike: yea
Leo: It’s who I am, the chief twig.
Chad it carries no power. So, I am sorry Jinni is not here because you remember
last week we trying out new HTC One the M8 I guess what all called. She hit her
old one had broken and she brought the Google play addition but she hadn’t
checked out yet. Now, if you get Google play addition so it’s going to be
couple of weeks away. This is actually not a Google play addition; this is the
One and all HTC sends scullery. This is amortizing one, I would tell Jinni
don’t. But Chad, I have told this before, she told she doesn’t buy. Don’t be
put off by this set skin because actually it’s pretty tolerable. It’s much more Googly then the original HTC One. I love for instant
the original HTC One has those capacitive buttons at the bottom. They were none
standard. Now, they have gone to the standard, you know back
Jeff: By the way Leo, as I remember
Leo: I hated that
Jeff: Yes, you hated that
Leo: Yea
Jeff: No, You are the one who wanted
to visit those buttons
Leo: I did and I was wrong
Jeff: Ok, Alright thank you
Leo: I did, I was wrong. I did not
like the HTC One, I at least wanted, you know I did
not wanted to be completely none standard either. But I did like the fact that
all my phones up to that point had a home physical home button that new where
the home was. Now I was wrong, I guess my complaint was that all wanted weight
screen space with the menu on the screen. These screens now are so damn big
that you could have afforded it and the HTC menu bar at the bottom is actually smaller
than the standard Google. Kick that menu bar, so doesn’t take out much space. I
do agree with the thinking behind it, which is as you rotate the phone and so
forth. I thought they would move the menus around, the menus stay where they
are and that was my big complaint. You don’t want menus moving, remember that.
They don’t, they stay where you expect them to be. They are always here, that’s
fine I don’t have a problem with that. The screen is gorgeous, 5 inches. That’s
up to the Nexus’s 5 is, this is bigger than the Genesis old HTC One. Still 10
AP, 441 dots print, really gorgeous. I think the camera, that’s what we are
talking about, is pretty remarkable on this. In fact, I wasn’t crazy about
original HTC One C1 Camera, she liked it. It’s 4-mega
pixels, the ultra-pixels ID, better low light photography. So, they don’t
things to take it to make it better. So, actually I am pretty happy with it, so
you asked the right question though , Jeff; Do I give
up the Moto X? Which...
Mike: right
Jeff: true that!
Leo: ...Mike and I both are Moto X
fanatics!
Mike: Yup
Leo: The Moto X camera is so bad, I
think it comes down to how important is a camera to you...
Mike: Yup
Leo: ...If a camera were not
important for me, I wouldn’t give up the Moto X...
Mike: Right
Leo:...because I really like the
"always listening", I liked it ;it knows when you're driving, when
you're in a meeting; it will read you. This is I am going to miss this on the
HTC One, when you're driving and a text comes in, that reads you text. It’s says
"you want to respond?"; that is great.
Mike: It’s great, It’s...
Somebody came out with a phone that was essentially the HTC One with the Moto X
"always listening" stuff and the and that;
plus the Lumia camera, the Lumia 1020 camera...
Leo: then you've got something!
Mike: I will pay anything for that
phone...
Leo: yeah, that’s a $1000
Mike: anything... I will pay $5000
for that...
Leo: What?! you so...lets be...
Mike: well it’s easy to say cause
they're not going to do it so I...
Leo
laughing.
Mike: ...just say that but but I want, you know...
Leo: I agree!
Mike:...why do you have to pick over a
good camera experience and you know...
Leo: right
Mike: ...voice command?
Leo: I...I do think there’s hope
for you because Lenovo has said; or somebody I don’t know; whoever’s on
Motorola now; has said that this summer there'll be a Moto X and I...if I were
Motorola, if I were Lenovo, that’s exactly what I would do is I would say
"Ok we got it down , the Moto X was great but the
screen wasn't great and the camera wasn't great. Want to make them better. If I
make those better I might go back the Moto X this summer". But for now I'd
made the choice, I am going to carry the HTC One. It’s hard to give up that
great camera, that great screen which is...
Mike: yeah, I know
Leo: ...i guess it’s just hard to give it up. So. Alright, we
found somebody with even more page views. I don’t know how this is possible.
Bert's found, a guy named "Romain Guy"...
Mike: Romain Guy? Who’s that?
Leo: Romain Guy...
Chad: You guys don’t follow Romain Guy?
Leo: who is he? He got 15 billion
page views...
Chad: The guy from Romain...
Leo: He works at Google, he
attended...Oh he’s French...No
Mike: 86,000 followers.
Leo: Is that 15 Billion, it is? He
must be a very... Oh he’s...I actually follow him (Laughs)... he’s in my
photographer group, so I guess he’s a photographer.
Mike: Ahan
Leo: It’s not surprising that the
great photographers are the ones who get the most attention on Google+. It’s
such a photogenic...
Jeff: Yes
Leo: ...site. WOW,is he number one, Romain Guy?
Chad: I don’t know.
Leo: (Whistles)
Mike: It’s astonishing.
Leo: 15 BILLION Views!!!
Mike: He’s following you too.
Leo: That must make Trey feel
terrible. He’s following me?
Mike: Yeah, the arrow goes both
directions, which means you're following him, he’s following you.
Leo: Ahhhh.
Well now I feel better. Even if I don’t have a lot of followers who views, at
least I have Romain Guy.
Mike: (Chortles) I am not following
him and he’s not following me.
Leo
laughing.
Mike: This is outrageous!
Leo
and Mike Laughing.
Leo: Hey it’s so nice to have you,
Mike Elgan. Mike is our news director here at TWIT
and can I say what a great job and I know that the people are going to say...
Mike: Thank you
Leo: ...oh that’s self-serving you,
hiring me the. No, you're doing...you're knocking the other part...You're doing
exactly what we brought you here to...
Jeff: He is doing a great job
Leo: ...which is
to really raise the tenor of conversation here. If you don’t get to
watch the new TNT every Monday through Friday at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern
time 2000 UTC; you're really missing what it’s becoming a deep news show with
great guests, great insight and I...it’s exactly what I was hoping we would get
from you, so...
Mike: Well, Thank you...
Leo: ...Thank you.
Mike: ...I am
loving it because I am such a fan of great journalism and every day I get
to howl these great journalists in and we talk about the news, we also talk
about the journalism and so it’s really a joy. And I am really enjoying it.
Leo: I...Good. And I, I know again
this sounds self-serving but I am really very very happy with what you've done. Mike also kind of runs the entire news operation
so Tech News Tonight, Wall Sera Lain Jose is also Mike Elgan's joint and and and and all the breaking news stories in the live news stuff
and we're going to get better and better. In fact we're going to build little
set for Mike in his office. So he could feed us quick breaking news hit’s.
Mike: Keep me out of the general
area of office area...
Leo: well...
Mike: ... just Keep me in there. So...
Leo: So if he'd wear shoes, I wouldn’t
feel so bad. But I just...
Mike: Not going to do it.
Leo: (Laughing.)
Mike: Not going to happen.
Jeff: It’s the pants I would...
Mike: ...come to the man
Leo: He’s got a glass. He’s also
got chef’s hat. Shoes? Not so much.
Jeff: He needs pants.
Leo: (Laughing.)
Mike: Don’t follow society rules.
Leo
continues laughing.
Leo: And of course it’s always a
real pleasure to have Jeff Jarvis on, another guy really consider; not only a
great friend but a brilliant and wonderful commentator on this world around us.
Jeff blogs BuzzMachine.com, his book is public parts and Goodwin Bart the Geek
anything else with Professor McQuiny, anything else
you want to talk about?
Jeff: No, not yet, not yet.
Leo: You're working on anything or
you're just scribble scribble scribble?
You're writing something?
Jeff: No I am working on something
for the school but later.
Leo: But and we do have to get
together and talk about the basements...
Jeff: Oh yeah in fact we're probably
going to be back there on May 15th.
Leo: Alright deal. We are going to
negotiate.
Jeff: We start before then so we
can, so we can...
Leo: I am desperate to do this. The
more I think about them the more I like it.
Jeff: We are, we are telling people
about it but we are absolutely desperate to it.
Leo: Thank you everybody for
watching.
Jeff: I think you should read email.
Leo: Say again!
Jeff: I will send you at least an
email and we'll schedule it all...
Leo: That’s the problem, I never
read email...
Mike: That will end up in your
promotional tab.
Jeff: ...
Leo: update.
Jeff: you got to have a priority
inbox.
Leo
laughing.
Leo: We do this show 1 PM Pacific;
4 PM eastern time Wednesdays on the TWIT network. Please watch live if you will
that is 2000 UTC, if you can’t watch live please do watch the after effect on
main or on the video available anytime at twit.tv/twig wherever finer netcasts are aggregated. I realize I’ve told the people the
wrong time for TNT; 10 AM Pacific; 1 PM Eastern time 1700 UTC, so please tune
in for that. Thanks everybody on the chat room, everybody live in the studio
and thanks to all of you watching it at home. I am Leo LaPorte, we'll see you next
time on TWiG!