This Week in Google 262 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiG - This Week in Google. Gina has
the day off, Matthew Ingram from Gigaohm joins Jeff
Jarvis and me to talk about what happens to your accounts when you pass away. Trolls in the internet hood, and of course everything new from
google including a new classroom project that looks pretty darn good. It’s
all coming up next, on TWiG.
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This
is TWiG - This Week in Google, episode 262, recorded
August 13, 2014
I'm Not in The Moodle!
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go to shutterstock.com and use the offer code TWIG814. It’s time for This Week
in Google, TWiG, the show that covers Google, but not
just Google... The cloud, the Facebook, the Twitter, all that stuff. Jeff
Jarvis...
Jeff Jarvis: Anything that's irritating me,
that's what we cover.
Leo: And anything that pisses off Jeff. If it’s in Germany, anywhere. He'll let you know. Jeff
Jarvis is here, he is the professor of journalism in the City university of New York, book author - his most recent is
called Public Parts. He's also a blogger at Buzzmachine.com, and a man about
the world. World traveler, hey Jeff.
Jeff: Hey there, I sneezed.
Leo: And he's got allergies.
Jeff: I kept waiting for Chad to switch
to me than thought... I made it...
Leo: Oh now I sneezed on my touch
screen, that's terrible. Gina is swamped with work at ThinkUp.com, her start
up. It happens from time to time, but good news, Matthew Ingram is here, so it’s
great to have Matthew from Gigaom. You can tell he's
at the cabin.
Jeff: Did you cut those logs yourself,
Abe?
Mathew Ingram: No I did not. That was someone a
hundred or so years ago.
Leo: It's beautiful up there.
Matthew: It’s hemlock, believe it or not.
Leo: Hemlock?
Matthew: The whole of the cabin is in
hemlock.
Leo: You're obviously in New England
somewhere, yeah?
Matthew: No, Ontario. Northern Ontario.
Leo: Ontario? Doesn't everybody in
Canada have a summer cabin?
Matthew: Not everyone, but...
Leo: Almost everyone.
Matthew: We certainly have enough room if
everyone wanted one.
Leo: It’s like Sweden.
Matthew: Come on up.
Leo: It seems like everyone in Sweden
has a summer cabin.
Jeff: In fact, Robertson Davies, the
wonderful wonderful Canadian novelist always said
that Canada is not like America, it’s like Scandinavia.
Leo: That's interesting.
Matthew: Very similar, yeah. It’s cold a lot
of the time.
Leo: The people are friendlier. They're
nicer. Yeah. They don't have mounties in Scandinavia, however.
Matthew: True.
Leo: But hemlock. Wow. Is that... I
always think of hemlock as the poison that Socrates drank, but that's a tree
also...
Matthew: So you don't want to lick the
cabin.
Leo: In the chat room, Jeff tells us
hemlock is the hardest of the softwoods.
Matthew: It’s true.
Jeff: You just learn all kinds of things
when you're on TWiG.
Leo: If you see Heisenberg, say hi for
us. Yeah, everybody in Michigan has summer camp. Michigan lake,
going up to the lake in Michigan is a big thing. It’s beautiful, beautiful. I'm
just jealous, I wish I had a summer cabin. So, what
has been going on in the world of Google? They've invested $300 million in an
underwater cable to Japan. Whaaaaat?
Jeff: I found that one interesting,
because I've been doing some research on a project I'm kind of working on,
panicky stuff. I went through lots and lots of old clips from the New York
Times and from The Guardian and the Observer on the lane of the first atlantic cable. And I was just
amazed at the jubilation when the first cable worked... The queen sent a
message, but it wasn't the full message, they didn't know that. It took
seventeen hours to get the whole message across by the time they fixed stuff.
And then the president sent a message back and then the word got through the
landline cable to New York and there were fireworks and parades, and
jubilation, Elmira New York they were shooting off the cannons. The church
bells rang the next day for an hour, because you could send a message across
the Atlantic.
Leo: It was considered a huge breakthrough, it was the equivalent of putting a man on the
moon.
Jeff: So I was thinking about this, and I
was thinking that one of the mistakes that Google and Facebook and Twitter and
all of our dear beloved tech companies we talk about are making these days is
they're not making technology actually wow-y enough. I think there ought to be
a Google World's Fair. What do you think about that?
Leo: What a great idea? Isn't that what
the world's fair was originally? Was to show progress?
Jeff: Right.
Leo: I remember going to the 1965 or 64
world's fair in New York City... If you're on your way out to JFK and you pass
that giant globe, and some other stuff, that's leftover from the World's
Fair... And then you and Canada you had a Expo 76.
Matthew: 67.
Leo: 66, 67, 76... Expo 67, thats the last World's Fair I
remember. Have there been some?
Matthew: I was only five.
Leo: You were only five.
Matthew: You know, if Google had something
like that, wouldn't a lot of that stuff terrify people? If google had a world's
fair and it had driverless cars and all sorts of futuristic stuff, you know a
lot of that is kept...
Jeff: Yeah but if you think back to the
stuff we saw, you know the GE home of the future, I
think some of it is left at Disney World. I think we're just not being... I
think we're allowing the scaremongers and technophobes to take over the
discussion and we should be saying, at some point, "Wow."
Leo: The next World's Fair is coming up
in Milan. It'll be expo 2015.
Jeff: Oh really?
Leo: Well, there you go. There's no,
like... It’s not the Olympic committee. There's no world's fair committee, is
there?
Matthew: No, I don't think there is.
Leo: According to Wikipedia they
originated in the French tradition of national exposition and exhibit’s, the
tradition that culminated with the French industrial exposition of 1844 in
Paris. And they moved people in Europe and the United Kingdom did it... The
best known first world expo was in the crystal palace in Hyde Park which still
stands.
Jeff: Where the first TV station was set
up in London.
Leo: In 1851?
Jeff: No, at the Crystal Palace.
Leo: Oh, I was going to say, wow. So
there have been a number of these expositions, of course the Paris Eiffel tower
was built, wasn't it, for a World's Fair, as was the
first Ferris Wheel in Chicago, in 1893.
Jeff: So Matthew, how about this as a
thought, yeah I think that if one says, "Oh look at all the scary stuff we
can do," but instead it demystified things and explained things and showed
you the benefit’s and wonders and showed you the better world because of it?
Now it’s just mysterious technology these geeks are doing things that we don't
understand, but if it brought it down into life more and said, "Here is
where we're headed," with even things that are scaring people like health,
with data and health, and here's how information is stored and searched today.
And here's how sensors are going to change your life, and here's... I don't
know... Maybe it’s not a big deal with the fair, but...
Matthew: No, I think that's a good point, I
mean, they could definitely do, in fact all companies could do a better job of
pointing out why you would even want to do these things. So
why would you want to give all of your data to this company or why would you
want to login every time you do X or Y... Why would you want sensors in
everything? And to give you the kind of... People are
always going to, you know, say well you could do this bad thing or this other
bad thing, but at least if you talked about the positive reasons why you might
want to, and how it could help your life, then you could kind of start the
conversation off on the right foot.
Jeff: And that's my research that I'm
working on, is that there are people who said bad things could happen with
every technology we've seen, and so the telegraph and people will also say they
form a paper tiger and say well it didn't bring world peace, not that anyone
said it was going to... But the telegraph was ratcheted up that way and then
shot down. The funny thing about the telegraph, after all this... Go ahead.
Matthew: I was just going to say when you
mentioned the telegraph, it reminded me I had just seen a news story someone
posted on Twitter, a sort of image of a news story from the early days of the
Telegraph and they were criticizing it, as you know, speeding up information
too much, and why would need all of this extraneous information from some far away place and couldn't we just deliver... Yeah, and it
was exactly the same stuff people say about Twitter, so if you had just taken
out the word Telegraph and put in Twitter it sounded exactly the same.
Leo: Apparently there is, there must be,
some sort of need for higher speed connection between California and the west
coast of the United States and Japan. This cable known as Faster will cost, in
total, $300 million. I think this headline is wrong. Forbes says Google
invests... Google invests IN the $300 million cable... Google's investment is
not that high.
Matthew: And didn't they just invest in one
a few years ago, didn't they? This is not their first.
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: They invested in other underwater
cables, yes.
Leo: If you're interested in the
technology, it is a six fiber pair cable, and optical transmission technology.
Initial capacity of sixty terabit’s per second, with six pairs. Because each pair is capable of a hundred wavelengths each, a
hundred gigabit’s. Wow, that's really interesting. That's a lot of
capacity. China Mobile international, China Telecom Global,
Global Transit, KDDI and Singtel, the other investors. Mostly Asian telecoms. NEC, I didn't know this, is it
the same NEC, is the top vendor of submarine cable systems. They'll be the
system supplier.
Jeff: They had to get out of the printer
business.
Leo: Yeah really!
Matthew: Do they also sell the equipment
that the NSA uses with the subs, where they tap into the cable?
Leo: Sure, well yeah. If you're going to
build the cable you got to build that in, it’s a lot easier. Google subs... Not
Google. NSA subs, do they actually go down to the cable, tap into it and come
back?
Matthew: They drop a thing. They drop like,
a device and it attaches to the cable and then they just...
Leo: Incredible. Incredible. At Google, this is Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure,
Google fellow, Earnest Itzel... Posts, "At Google we want our products to
be fast and reliable, that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it’s
for the more than a billion android users..." You got to get the plug in.
"Or the developers building products on Google Cloud platform, sometimes
the fastest path requires going through an ocean." Oh, I like that. That's
why we're investing in faster and new undersea cable to connect the west coast, it’s to two coastal locations in Japan. And the
capacity is ten million times faster than your cable modem... He threw that one
in. To Chacura and China in Japan. There are already 200 fiber optic cables undersea, transporting internet data
around the world, carrying more than 95% of transoceanic voice and data
traffic. So you might think it’s satellite, but that's
too slow. Underwater cables, they care 51 billion gigabytes a month.
Facebook...
Matthew: So google invested in Unity in
2011.
Leo: Yeah, this isn't the first time.
Matthew: And SJCE.
Leo: Facebook has done the same, they have a stake in an underwater cable consortium
between Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. It’s
kind of interesting. I'm not sure why these big companies get involved in this,
but it's kind of interesting. It will be lit up, second quarter of 2016. In the
US it will connect to hubs in LA, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. It’s kind of neat. I'm not... It’s an
interesting thing that they feel they need to get into this business.
Jeff: You know they're in both ends of
it, fiber in the home business and fiber in Japan business.
Leo: I understand doing it in the US to
kind of kick current ISPs in the butt. That makes a lot of sense.
Jeff: It’s working, too.
Leo: Time Warner Austin now has a
hundred megabit symmetric. Austin really has benefitted.
Matthew: That's right. Would they ever have
gone to that if it wasn't for Google?
Leo: No, of course not. I think Austin
of all of the cities, has benefitted a lot. I guess because it’s larger than
KC, I don't know.
Chad
Johnson: You don't mind if I bump in, but you know what's
that quote... To write great software, you need to make the hardware, it’s
kind of how I feel with this in Google, they need to make sure they own part of
the infrastructure.
Leo: That's Chad Johnson, our producer.
Matthew: When you think about it, the
quality of their apps, the quality of their services... People notice a
billionth of a second when they're loading pages, that's a huge part of their
UI offering to people. It’s going to be fast, it’s always going to be there, it’s
always going to work. And if you're using Google Now or something and it’s
trying to get information and it’s slow because of someone else's network ,that looks bad on Google.
Leo: I was wrong. Time Warner and
Comcast are also increasing speeds in Kansas City. I was wrong, so it is... It’s
everywhere, right? Fascinating.
Jeff: I found that quote, Matthew.
"So far the influence of the newspaper upon the mind and morals of the
peoples concerned, there can be no rational doubt that the telegraph has caused
mass injury. Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast
for the truth must be all telegraphic intelligence. Has it not rendered the
popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days brings the mail from Europe. What
need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes? It snowed here, it rained
there, one man killed, another hanged. Even the Washington
letter has..." I can't read the word in the type. "Since the
innovation, and I can conscientiously recommend my own pistols prior to 1854 in
preference to those in later years, said the New York Times, Washington
correspondent."
Leo: Fascinating.
Jeff: He also says, "That it will be of great use cannot be questioned,
but how will it’s uses add to the happiness of
mankind? Has the land telegraph done any good? Has it banished any evil?
Mitigated any sorrow? Is it of any consequence that you in New York should know
on Tuesday instead of Wednesday that Jones smashed the nose of Thomson in
Congress on Monday? Upon the whole, is any more money gained or lost by the
cotton speculators of New York and New Orleans, because they know the
variations of both markets five minutes, rather than five days, before their
operations take into effect? Is not the anguish of relatives increased by
hearing day to day that the wife or son has breathed his last, and by receiving
ten days after the sad details of sickness and death?
Leo: I just find it interesting that
John C. Dvorak was writing even then.
Matthew: Yeah, it’s incredible!
Jeff: Well done!
Leo: You know, it’s fascinating.
Jeff: That's the New York Times, 1858.
Leo: I think though, I think back to my
first trip to Europe as a kid. I was in fifth grade, it was in 1967. And I... We spent the summer there, and I was so interested
in baseball at the time and I wanted to know the scores and you couldn't get
the baseball scores until like 36 hours later when the Herald Tribune came out
and they used telegraphs or something to send the baseball scores... And now
everything is instantaneous everywhere. So it isn't even just from 1860, it’s
from 1960. We've seen a huge revolution and I don't think anyone wouldn't agree
at this point that faster information is worse, but we do have to learn how to
sift through the faster information, in fact all you have to do... A number of
people wrote after Robin Williams after untimely passing, earlier this week
that Twitter is where people go to die, basically.
Jeff: Mathew, you have some things to say
about that, didn't you.
Matthew: Dylan Byers was complaining about
how twitter turns into the worst possible place when people die... People like
Robin Williams and I argued that it’s actually the opposite. I find it the
opposite. I know there's... You know there are horrible things like his
daughter was basically driven off twitter by trolls and so on and I'm not
saying it’s a paradise or that nothing bad happens, but I actually enjoyed
seeing people talking about him, mentioning movies that I had forgotten about
or mentioning roles that I remembered. It felt very much to me like standing
around, at an actual funeral, talking to your friends or acquaintances or
family members about that person. I enjoyed that. It helped me remember what I
liked about him.
Leo: I feel so bad for his daughter,
Zelda. But I think you're right. Trolls just... What are we going to do about
this? This is so sad.
Matthew: There's no question.
Jeff: I guess Mathew I go through a cycle
on it. On the one hand, what's going to happen when something horrible like
that happens, and I thought I was a great fan of Robin Williams and remember
him from his days on stage in San Francisco, and I couldn't read it. So at first I knew it was going to happen, it got
bombarded as everyone discovers. Okay, we know, we don't need you to... Then
there were personal reactions back, which like you I do appreciate. And then
comes the media overdose, we couldn't go anywhere without a rehashing of the
same thing. The single bit of news is the tragic moment he's dead.
Matthew: It got... I mean one of the things
I mentioned that I didn't really get into, was after the, "Oh he's
dead." And sort of mourning, then came the press conference, and police
effectively giving really horrible details.
Leo: They gave out his street address,
and details that were just not for public consumption.
Matthew: At one point Andy Carmen said
basically, this is the police press conference is basically a how-to. It gave
so many details about the suicide, which is generally frowned on.
Leo: This is not the way. One of the
things social media did so well, Jenny Jardan on
Boing Boing referred, and a lot of people
subsequently referred to a document about how to communicate about suicide to
try to minimize the contagion factor, because there's a strong contagion
factor. I think in total, obviously there were some trolls, but the worst
people were the media people, not the social media people. Mainstream media and
the police were far worse. ABC sending helicopters over his
house.
Jeff: That was
ridiculous and on the morning show this morning they complained there
was a story on ABC on family asked privacy is respected, and a link to go see
video right now over their house.
Leo: Horrible.
Matthew: But the thing I did find
interesting, apart from all the bad stuff was because he had fought depression
and addiction for so long, and because he committed suicide there was a lot of
people talking about depression, talking about suicide, talking about how to
deal with those things. Talking about, you know, steps
you can take or places you can go. That kind of thing is actually hugely
valuable. It very rarely gets talked about in public, and so you know, I
thought that was a big benefit.
Leo: There's hope.
Jeff: One issue of it, at the time of
death is that we tiptoe. And the Guardian had a piece this morning saying that
suicide is not a selfish act. And as I think about his children, I'm not sure
that I agree with that, but one can't say that. Especially in
America. There's a time of... In the UK they do pretty blunt orbit’s, that bring up people's faults. We don't believe in
doing that in the US. In Canada you're always nice, because that's the way you
are. And so there are some difficult things to talk about too, that you don't
say because of the respect of the past.
Matthew: True.
Leo: All the 140 characters eulogies, on
the one hand it’s really great to see the outpouring, right? And
to hear other celebrities, their memories... But you can't say that much
with 140 characters, but at least it’s something. It’s at least initially a
chance for everyone to express how they feel about it, and to get together.
Matthew: I remember some of these issues
came up, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine died. A
close friend, of cancer. And he loved the media, was a heavy user of
social media, and so I, on the spur of the moment at his funeral I decided to
live tweet his funeral. And, in part it was an experiment, but actually in part
it was a tribute to him because he was such a big user of social media and he
was always experimenting with different ways to use it, and I got a lot of...
The funny thing was I got a lot of support and I got a lot of criticism. A lot
of people said it was not appropriate, and it was kind of just... Unseemly and
then I had a lot of other people, including family members of his who couldn't'
make it to the funeral who said, thank you for doing this because we weren't
able to sort of participate. And so we got a window into those events through
you tweeting. So it, to me, it was... It showed how there is still a lot of
resistance to that sort of thing, but how there's also a lot of benefit’s that
can come out of it.
Leo: You know if you may tweet... I want
to go on record right now, Jeff and Matthew, you may tweet live or otherwise my
funeral. I encourage you to do so. And we can have a live stream and... Just don't do Facebook. Wear Google Glass.
Jeff;
You know here's the question about your digital will, and this has been talked
about. I suppose one should put in a safe place, one's passwords and such and
digital wishes so that one's family can... Blog what I want and get into my
Gmail and such and so forth, yeah?
Matthew: Definitely.
Leo: I... Aren't there sites that do
this?
Jeff: There was one shown about a year
ago, where if you didn't post something within a certain amount of time...
Leo: Brian Brushwood did that, right?
Wasn't that a Brushwood? He has a site that if he...
Chad:
And the idea is that if he...
Leo: If you don't hear from me...
Chad:
What it'll start to do, is instead of giving out passwords it'll start to
retweet and redo everything that he did the last year. It’s a digital ghost. It
keeps him alive.
Leo: Daniel Suarez Daemon, which is a
wonderful novel, the premise of which is that a brilliant programmer and game
developer creates a demon, daemon that is inserted into the public internet upon
his death and does all this stuff, it comes basically comes alive on the net.
We don't yet have that technology.
Matthew: Google has the built in, you can
give an address, or an email address and phone number of the person you want to
be notified if there's a lack of activity in your account. I think it’s Gmail.
Leo: That was new, yeah. Is it a lapse
thing? Did you do it?
Matthew: Not sure... Yeah, I did. So if you
don't log in for a certain amount of time it notifies some next of kin. Pretty
sure that's how it works. I forget what it’s called though.
Leo: Yeah, I remember when they
announced that.
Jeff: I want to leave my blog up, but
turn off all the damn comments. I will not be trolled in death.
Leo: Yeah.
Matthew: They have a bot that can reply on
your behalf.
Leo: Google Public Policy Blog. Plan
your digital act of life, with the inactive account manager. It sounds like an
April fool's joke. So search for Inactive Account manager.
Matthew: At least they didn't call it dead
account manager, or...
Leo: It seems morbid and nobody wants to
think about it, but you make a will and there comes a time when you, especially
Jeff, you and I as we approach our later years, we start to think about this.
Although it can happen to anyone as we know.
Matthew: I've got probably thirty gigs of data on Amazon's
AWS and on a bunch of photo services and it’s all password protected, if my
family wanted to get any of the photos that I've taken for the last fifteen
years, you know, get the actual original copies, they'd have to get into those
accounts.
Chad:
So I'm looking at it right now, and you can either have it alert you, before
they delete it...
Leo: Are you dead yet?!
Chad:
Right. Your time out period can be a month, but you can set this...
Leo: A month of no mail, is that what it
is?
Chad:
Of you not logging in, you can set it up to eighteen months. You can add
notifications so you can notify... And then optionally you can just delete your
whole account, just get rid of it.
Leo: See I don't know if I want to do this,
see I use Lastpass, so all I'd have to do is give my
next of kin my lastpass password. Or
maybe an attorney or if you're paranoid, split it up, half to the attorney,
half to your next of kin. Put it in your will... And then in there you
could have a lastpass secure note that would say what
your last wishes are. I think the inactive account manager is not quite right.
So the idea mostly of that is to delete your account after a... No?
Chad:
It’s an optional. You can optional delete it, but you can notify all of your
contacts.
Leo: You're so funny, they say what happens to your account when you stop using it?
Jeff: That's a nice way to put it.
Matthew: You can give a loved one access,
basically.
Leo: Yeah, might just be in jail. My account will time out... You could add up to ten trusted
friends or family members. This is good. And you could... You know, I wonder
if... Can you create an email that could be sent out upon your death? That's
what I want. If you're reading this, it’s because I haven't logged into gmail in a long time...
Jeff: You know what I want, Leo?
Leo: What?
Jeff: I want a tweet funeral. I want a TWiT memorial service.
Leo: For me?
Jeff: For me or for you...
Leo: You would want that as well? We
should get this all on record.
Chad:
It is on the record.
Leo: It is on the record now,
whatever... Actually it’s kind of depressing, Robin
Williams did this with Louis C. K. If ever, whichever one of us pre-expires the
other, the other will live tweet the funeral.
Matthew: Done.
Leo: And don't... This is good Dr. Mom.
You're thinking, she says, remind people not to deactivate the phone of the
dead person in case of second path of authentication. Keep the dongle alive! I
would imagine, I don't know, but that a lot of loved ones... I mean, look, when
you pass away there's a lot of cleanup anyway. Right? Um, but I would imagine a lot of loved ones, this is just one more area of
cleanup. Facebook has a process... Facebook actually I think handles it well,
where if you pass away your next of kin can notify Facebook and they'll take
your Facebook page and turn it into a memorial. Right? Yeah.
Matthew: Which is good because then it
doesn't... This happened to me, with this friend who passed away, once it’s
memorialized it doesn't show up in the sort of recommended things. Because, at
one point... This friend's page showed up and it was like, "Your friend is
having a birthday!" And I was thinking, I'm
pretty sure he's not. So maybe you could stop showing me that.
Leo: I feel so bad for Robin's daughter.
There were trolls posting unpleasant images and terrible comments. Initially
she asked her supporters to report the trolls, but then she realized that was a
mistake and decided it was better for her just to delete her social media
accounts entirely. She did not. She posted on Twitter, "I'm sorry, I
should have risen above. Deleting this from my devices for a
good long time, maybe forever. Time will tell. Goodbye." Can you
imagine?
Jeff: It’s just awful, at a time when she
should have received support...
Leo: Horrible, horrible people. And I'm
sure most of the traffic was supportive and loving. But then these sad, bent
people... It’s just... It’s...
Jeff: And the other thing that happens, I
don't want to give the guy any attention, but I had an episode this week of
trolling where someone used my identity to go after somebody else and I had to
protect my reputation. What's really equally disturbing is the people who then
egg it on. And take no responsibility for what they're doing.
Leo: That's just trolling, too.
Jeff: Exactly. There's someone from my...
A very large important newspaper, and a very large important job there, who was gleeful about this trolling of this person. This
prominent person who thought that I was...
Leo: Wait til it happens to you, big shot editor.
Jeff: Exactly. I went back at him today
and I said, egging on the troll is trolling in it’self. You're an accessory to the crime. And I said, by
the way, why don't you say the things that you just
said straight to the face of this person and I put that person's twitter handle
on there. Come on, big shot. You want to talk about how you don't like the
person and how you're a troll, go ahead. You have any bazongas?
You know it’s just depressing.
Leo: So so sad.
Matthew: A lot of these things start, you
know, because it's seen as funny or it’s people just
looking for lols as they call it, on 4chan. And then
it just escalates, because everyone's trying to one up the other person. And then eventually it just... Descends into, you know... The most horrible thing possible.
Jeff: That's where Gina was talking about
this problem and with twitter and I see some movement now, and I think you
heard about this too Mathew or you linked to something about this, of having
shared blacklists. That could turn ugly too. But... If
the people you care about and you trust say, "I'm muting this
person." And I would trust a list of who you two muted. You might have
personal and individual reasons but probably that's a good indicator that says,
"Let's just give them no attention." Because the one fuel to a troll
is attention.
Leo: Even... Blocking them is fueling
them to some degree, right? If they know they've been blocked.
Matthew: You're right about that. Flen Fleischmann wrote something about this idea and I was
discussing it with him, and then wrote about it and it does have a lot going
for it, I mean, the one big benefit is you don't have to rely on Twitter to
figure out who to block or ban. You know, this is a much more sort of crowd
sourced different groups can have their own shared lists. So it’s not like a
master list of who's blocked, it’s different groups
can come together and create their own. My theory is that those things can in,
themselves, become tools of harassment. So, the, for example, someone wrote about
being added to one of these block lists. I'm trying to remember her name now.
Caroline... No, Create Perez, a British journalist. She was harassed on twitter
and was quite critical of the way twitter handled it. She's actually on a
blocked list, because she posted something that someone thought was offensive
towards transgendered people.
Leo: You should be allowed to collude
who they don't like.
Matthew: Sure they should. My only fear is
that it’s, if it’s... It’s a double edged sword, I guess is my point. It makes
me nervous.
Leo: I liberally use the block feature
on Twitter. It’s the best thing in the world, and yes I know others are seeing
these, but I'm not. And you know, out of sight out of mind.
Jeff: That was the problem with my
episode was that I blocked this person and then I saw that there was notoriety
going on. If it hadn't reached a level of notoriety I wouldn't have realized
how this troll's victims, thought that I was such a terrible person.
Leo: Knowing what's going on, that's the
argument against blocking. YOur ignorance is bliss
but you don't know what's going on.
Jeff: Right so I immediately tweeted that prominent person and I said that this person is
not me, and he was gracious and came back and acknowledged it so that I know he
now knows. I know someone, we have common friends,
this prominent person. It’s just... Goes over the line.
Leo: It’s interesting. He understood,
immediately though what was going on though right?
Jeff: No. No he didn't. That's the point.
See that's the problem. He was attacking back saying, what a slimeball you are to say these horrible things. And people
said, well you can see that's not the real account. There's no obligation from
him to look for my green check.
Leo: He's not sophisticated enough to
know that these things happen.
Jeff: He's going after me, I just want to get away. I don't want anybody on me, so I'm not going to go
spend time to investigate. That's a bogus standard. And it was just played out
someone trolling, attacking this person and this person thought it was me, and
you know, it goes over the line and I've just had it. I've more than had it
now. And you know, fun. Have fun, and accuse us of
having no sense of humor and so on, but you know trolling people... Someone
said that this prominent journalist said of this important person, somebody
deserved to be trolled. Did someone deserve to be hit and run? No one, no one
deserves to be trolled, full stop.
Leo: But what do we do about it? I like
this idea of collaborative lists. There's no facility that... There's no
feature of twitter that facilitates this, but we can easily just do it.
Jeff: I think Matthew is good, it
shouldn't be universal blacklists because then...
Leo: Glen and Mathew want to send me a
list of people that you don't follow. I'll send you a list of people I don't
follow. That's a good start, right?
Matthew: there's a service called the Block
Bot. Which is those most developed, and then there are a couple of other
projects that are trying to do similar things, so you can share a block list
and it would integrate with Twitter or with Tweetdeck,
and so if you agreed to opt into this list then certain people would be
automatically be blocked.
Leo: I always... Look for a
technological solution to these kinds of problems that were spawned in fact, by
the new technologies that allowed people to do things they couldn't do, or
couldn't do as effectively before. I'm sure there've always been trolls. But
that's a good way to handle it.
Jeff: Another way is on comments on
disgusts and on Wordpress as well, they'll give you a
high level submission index. I almost want that. If I see somebody who's being an a-hole in twitter and if I can see a little mark that
says how many of your friends are blocking this person...
Leo: Join the block but, that sounds
like a really... Well done idea here. And it has a list of a lot of blocks...
Oh you can see who's blocked on here. Holy cow. That's
the problem... This is just... You're never... It’s so easy to create a new
account on twitter. Sorry, I just closed it. It’s so easy to create a new
account on twitter that this is only of limited value...
Jeff: But this is also a universal list,
right?
Leo: Right.
Jeff: I got a problem with that, because
that can be gamed so easily.
Leo: I don't want to block people just
because they don't like Jeff Jarvis. I want to block people that don't like me. Alright. Well, good conversation as usual. We are...
This is the... This is the show for deep philosophical discussions.
Jeff: Oh jeez, yeah, death and trolling.
Jeez.
Leo: And the influence thereof. The intersection of death and trolling. That's something I
didn't think we'd be talking about.
Matthew: There's the internet.
Leo: There's the internet in a nutshell.
Jeff: Let’s talk about Chromebooks.
Leo: I don't know if you noticed, but
I'm using a Lenovo Chromebook right now. This is something we're reviewing.
Jeff: How much is that one, do you know?
Leo: You know, this is one of the cheap ones. The only difference is it has a touch screen. Which is okay. It’s not... The problem with cheap hardware, it’s
not responsive enough to be a satisfactory experience. And so what I did, I sat
down last night I was using it, and I switched back to the pixel just to
experience... And this is why I think you like Chromebooks so much, Jeff
Jarvis, you're using the Pixel. That you can't even buy anymore, even if you
wanted to spend $1200 you can't.
Jeff: It’s still for sale.
Leo: $1200, right?
Jeff: With LG, $1500.
Leo: More than a Macbook pro.
Jeff: Mmm. But it’s
a damn fine machine. I didn't have to buy anymore software for it, don't
forget.
Leo: Well as an example, we were looking
for a machine that had keys that light up. The only Chromebook with keys that
light up is the Pixel.
Jeff: Why do you need keys that light up?
Leo: I don't know. The person likes to
type in the dark?
Jeff;
Oh, okay.
Matthew: I find it really handy.
Leo: Lisa wants to give the Chromebook
as a gift to an adult friend and that's one of the criteria.
Jeff: Oh, you shouldn't Leo, I already
have one.
Leo: You feel the Jeff needs more Chromebooks.
But the problem is that right now, except for the Pixel, all of these are
pretty much cheap netbooks and you... Don't have a great experience.
Jeff: The Acer one is a...
Leo: This new Acer 13, it’s not
available yet. I pre-ordered it. It’s 1080P, eleven hours battery life, that's
the best I've ever seen on a Chromebook. It’s not that expensive, it’s $379.
Jeff: That's the higher end of $279...
Leo: That's the higher end. It has four
gigs of ram, and it’s using this new Tegra K1
processor, which is not only 64bit, but desktop class. It’s a fast processor.
Jeff: The video shows it’s pretty fast
stuff, yeah.
Leo: I've never, I mean even this less
expensive, it’s running on a Celeron, it’s snappy
enough. It’s just the touch screen that's not that snappy.
Jeff: The problem that I had in my
original Samsung, but the two gigs it’s just slowed to molasses at some point.
Four gigs, found it and emailed me yesterday, I just said four gigs, four gigs,
four gigs.
Leo: We bought for Michael at school a
Chromebook, the Acer C720, which is highly recommended. It’s fine for him, he doesn't know the difference. He's happy.
Jeff: Shhhhhhh.
Chad:
He watches Pewdiepie on youtube though.
Leo: Yeah but he's got his Macbook pro to play games on.
Jeff: I was talking to a friend of mine
today, they bought one for her daughter at school and just said the advantage
of knowing one, if the computer got stolen, no big deal, number two they had
forgot to put the thing on black board, nope. It’s all in the cloud. There's
no, "I left my homework at school..." For a student it makes a lot of
difference, I think. But I'm tempted by the thirteen inch just because I want
the $279 version has 13 hour battery promised. The $379 version with the screen has eleven hours promised. But, that's a long flight.
Leo: I want the battery life. So we've
said, we've issued the call before. People need to do
mid-range Chromebooks. Pixel I think, everyone agrees is too much. It’s hard to
recommend somebody spend $1299 on a Chromebook.
Jeff: I would spend $600 or $700 for a
good one...
Leo: I think you could do a good one for
$500, I really do. But I don't think you need to get that expensive.
Jeff: If you took all the features...
What does the Chromebook give you? It gives you touchscreen, you could do LG, it gives you high res...
Leo: I think you need to have a better
GPU. Because I think you need to have the screen be responsive.
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: I don't know.
Jeff: I don't even know what this thing
is built on. What's the Pixel built on?
Leo: I think it’s HI5, I'm not sure. I don't know.
Jeff: It wouldn't mean anything to me
anyway. It’s like me looking under the hood of a car.
Leo: It looks like you got four on the
floor and a reverse shifter in there. I don't know...
Jeff: So I got a question for you, Leo. I
opened it.
Leo: Oh, One Plus! But you have a
question, yes?
Jeff: I do, I do. I went through... It
took me two thirds of a day to get this working.
Leo: What? Why?
Jeff: Trying to get... I went to the
Apple store... It was the wonderful Alex Hugo, a fan of TWiG...
Leo: You took it to the Apple Store?
Jeff: No. I took it to an AT&T store,
and a guy looked up the AVN, APN...?
Leo: APN. Mine worked right out of the
box. You had a problem with the...
Jeff: Yeah, it didn't work, and then...
There were changes, I don't know what finally got it working and there were
changes done to this and Alex, a wonderful wonderful TWiG fan...
Leo: So you weren't getting data because
you had the wrong APN settings.
Jeff: We thought that was it but that
still wasn't getting it, but it turns out my account wasn't provisioned for 4G.
I don't know how that happened.
Leo: You were using a Nexus 5...
Jeff: So then, now, okay, it’s working.
But here's the problem, I think... It doesn't fail down below 4G for data.
Leo: No it does. Jeff... You're... I
don't know. You have problems that are unique to you.
Jeff: I have a kind of...
Leo: I have had this. I have had this on 3G, I have had this on 2G...
Jeff: Is it a AT&T or TMobile?
Leo: AT&T...
Jeff: Oh, so the data...
Leo: I think they're trolling you.
Jeff: No, the cloud I live in, Leo, it’s
dark.
Leo: You live in a dark cloud.
Matthew: And rain.
Jeff: It’s not just over my head, I'm in the dark cloud.
Leo: First of all, you could have screwed
things up by changing the APN settings. Mine worked out of the box.
Jeff: I think it’s okay. What's the name of your APN?
Leo: Oh, I have to figure that out.
Jeff: Go into your mobile networks and
then access point names.
Leo: Prefered network type 4G recommended, I have WAP.Singular,
which is correct, by the way.
Jeff: It works on the WAP? It shouldn't!
Leo: Yeah. Your mistake was trying to
fix something that wasn't broken.
Matthew: Uh oh.
Leo: Yeah, WAP.Cingular.
Jeff: That's the one that works.
Leo: Well it does on mine! My username
is WAP@singular...
Jeff: They're all the same, they're all
the same. Yours fails down to 3G. I'll have full bars at 3G, but no 4G and no
data...
Leo: It even says preferred network
type, 4G, 3G, 2G.
Jeff: I did that too.
Leo: I don't know. I think somebody
messed with you, dude.
Jeff: There's the other issue with the
One Plus, if you couldn't get it working he'd buy it, he'd buy it. He was very
nice about it, he was a TWiG fan. I'm not trying to
live on your misfortune Jeff, go talk to Gina and try to get it working, but if
not... And then he just tweeted me yesterday saying
I'm not sure I want anything from them, did you see the sexist campaign they
were doing...?
Leo: I've got something to say about
that.
Jeff: Okay, hit it.
Leo: And in their defence,
I agree it’s a bad idea... What they said is, the whole way One Pluses work,
which is weird to begin with is that you have to
somehow either participate in a contest or request an invite or get an invite
from an existing customer. To get this phone, it’s in very very short supply. The reason we all use it and like it is because it’s a very high
end flagship phone for $350 bucks, 64 gigabytes of storage. So that's, you
know, it’s a good price for a very nice phone. Five and a
half inch phone. They've gotten in trouble their first contests, that
was dumb. They asked people to destroy the phone, send them a video and then
people pointed out, well you're destroying something that's perfectly useful,
it could be handed on to someone that could use a phone.
Jeff: You're going to throw it in the
garbage and pollute the...
Leo: So they said, yeah, we're stupid
sorry. What we should have said is, you know, I don't know. They changed it,
they modified the contest. The most recent contest... I agree, ToneDeff said Ladies first, send us a picture of yourself, it didn't have to be with your old phone... But
send us a picture of yourself, but this is another contest right? And we'll put
you in a drawing for one of these phones or whatever.
Jeff: No, they had to write something on
their body and then we're going to take...
Leo: I didn't hear the write something
on your body.
Jeff: And then we're going to vote on...
I'm sorry. You're right, that's horrible. No, no, no, no. I misunderstood
though. I didn't know they had to do something more than send in a selfie.
Write something on their body...?
Jeff: Or they could hold a sign. But if
you're going to be voted on, clearly the less you wore, the better... Um.
Leo: Let me read... Let me, I didn't see
that. Okay... Then there's no...
Jeff: Put the logo on a piece of paper or
their body. Guess who's going to win. And then the top fifty most like to win
this would earn a t shirt and the opportunity to pay full price for the phone.
Leo: Yeah you're right.
Jeff: That's bad, that's bad.
Leo: Would it have been okay if they'd
said, ladies first, send us a picture and we'll have a drawing for an invite
and a t-shirt.
Jeff: Drawing, yes.
Leo: Having the forms was a mistake...
Jeff: Beauty contest, no.
Leo: I misunderstood. I didn't realize
that you had to do that, that's ridiculous. And by the way, you don't get a
free phone, you just get the opportunity to buy a
phone, which is already weird. Um.
Jeff: This is like the American Apparel
of phone companies.
Leo: Remember though, they're in China.
Maybe there's a cultural gulf.
Jeff: You're being so charitable.
Leo: I like the phone.
Jeff: it feels good, it doesn't feel too
big. The size is about right.
Leo: There's been a lot of backlash, I
think a lot of the... By the way, this is a good one, lady sends a picture of herself flipping them off with the OnePlus logo on her hands, hahaha. I'm not going to show it.
Jeff: She writes something on her hand,
right?
Leo: Yes, that's why I'm not going to
show it. Yeah, that's rude. Nevermind. But you know they've also incurred a lot of wrath just
because how they're doing this.
Jeff: Tony is saying, on the rundown,
cultural differences.
Leo: Tony is Taiwanese.
Chad:
And he says they're trying to get more female owners, cultural differences.
Jeff: But, Tony, beauty contest...?
Leo: They did say no nudity.
Jeff: But that's kind of the far end of
the boundary. Anything up to that... You're going to get more votes.
Leo: No, you're right. You're right.
Jeff: But it’s a nice phone, and the
battery, you're right, is phenomenal.
Leo: Yeah, I think your problems are
unique to you and I think your big mistake was bringing it to the AT&T
store.
Jeff: But it wouldn't work. It wouldn't
work. The guy at the AT*T store should have done what Alex did. Thank you Alex. By the way, just a fan that works in the
store and online. And he helps me out because I need help. But the guy at the
AT&T store here should have checked my account, I guess. But it wasn't
until the provision of 4G I got no data.
Leo: Well that's something wrong with
your account, it sounds like.
Jeff: By the end there were so many
variables I couldn't figure it out.
Leo: But the five does 4G right?
Jeff: I have one on my lock screen.
Leo: Why do you have Lennon on your
screen?
Jeff: I don't know, marxton angles on my screen.
Leo: Commie! You really want to rub it
in, huh? Now we know your real sympathies!
Jeff: My last trip to Berlin.
Leo: You know, when we were... Where were we? We were in... LA, there is a... They took all
the statues of Lenin down in Russia. But there's a statue of Lenin in LA, the
caveat of the point is that is the only statue of Lennon, I don't know how many
more... He was Armenian, he wasn't happy about the Russians. So, Mister Dark Cloud...
Good news is that they are upgrading this now to 4.4.4. and they're fixing a lot of the issues. One of the issues with the OnePlus that Jason had when he reviewed it, is it was
turning itself on in his pocket. And they've realized that was a problem, they
fixed that and they updated. There's a significant update coming, any minute
now.
Jeff: How do you get updates?
Leo: Just get it, it will automatically let you know.
Jeff: I would just say this, I think that the battery goes with me on the nexus 5, but as a whole... It’s
not a quantum leap past the nexus 5.
Leo: Okay. Um. Camera is a quantum leap past a Nexus 5, the screen is a quantum leap, the speed is a quantum leap.
Jeff: I understand this... A non TWiGy kind of person asked me today, she said my phone is
dying. I said go android, she said what phone should I
get, but I said get a Nexus 5.
Leo: Oh, I wouldn't get a nexus 5 now. It’s
a year old.
Jeff: Oh, excuse me.
Leo: It’s crazy talk. Yeah, I mean I
would say the M8 is very good. The LGG 3 I hear good things about. The Nexus 5
is old.
Jeff: They have now paired down the play
editions to two.
Leo: I saw that. What are the two?
Jeff: It’s the MOtoGP,
and the... What is it... LG? I think?
Leo: There you go. Those are the GTE versions, that looks like an HTC One and the MotoG, the LG. The M8 is still great, and I think the
Google Play edition of the M8 would also be an excellent choice. The good news
about the Nexus 5 is that it’s cheap. Can you get it still, are they still
selling it? Or is it out of stock? It’s in stock. The price is right on that...
I just... It’s a year old phone and I feel like there are better choices out
there. Chad would you buy a new Nexus 5? Yours is
cracked...
Chad:
No. I'm gonna say the same thing, if you wait... Basically
unless someone needs a phone today, then I would suggest the Nexus 5 or the M8.
Leo: There's going to be great stuff
coming out in a month.
Chad:
That's the thing. If you can wait until the end of September, you're going to
be so much happier with the selection.
Leo: Where is the Nexus, it wouldn't be
the 6, because... Well, it could be the 6... Where is the next Nexus?
Chad: There's been rumors only. Um. It’s what we know.
Leo: Good rumors, not reliable rumors.
Alright, let’s take a break, we'll come back with
more. Actually I'm going to do the changelog, we're going to do the changelog minus Gina. It’s going to be very quick, very quiet. We'll just play the
trumpets then play the drums, that'll be it. Our show today brought to you by
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thank you and a welcome to Shutterstock.com. All right, let’s try this. Jeff, we can tag-team the Changelog together. You want to do that?
Jeff: Hot dandy.
Leo: All right, play the
trumpets.
Announcer: The Google Changelog.
Leo: Time to see what’s new, new features in the Googleverse. Why don’t you take that first one—?
Jeff: Since that’s the only
one I know (laughter).
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: So now motherboard says
that legally satellites are now allowed to get twice the res, to go to 25
centimeter resolution, twice as detailed as the previous limit of 50 centimeter
Leo: Whoa.
Jeff: The U.S. government has
relaxed restrictions.
Leo: So the government images
are that clear, but they’ve never allowed Google to publish them.
Jeff: Right. So the joke here was watch out, Google will
soon see your face from the sky. Actually, though that’s only if you’re looking up at it.
Leo: (Laughter) I see.
Jeff: I figure what it’s going
to see is you bald spot.
Leo: Yeah. My uncle—
Jeff: But you know, I was
thinking—
Leo: Yeah? See, there’s some guy talking.
Jeff: I was thinking about
this the other day. I’m in one of the
skyscrapers in New York because we have them, and I’m looking out and you see all the—well, that’s where it would be the underlife of buildings. The tanks and the air conditioners and the ugly stuff. It’s weird how we don’t have aesthetic
requirements for the tops of buildings.
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: And now we have drones
and satellites and everything else.
Leo: I guess maybe we
will. Yeah.
Jeff: I think we need prettier
tops of buildings.
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: I think people should
plant flowers on their buildings.
Jeff: Yes. I think we need a top-down beautification
campaign.
Leo: Oh, that’s so funny.
Jeff: I’m going to be the
Ladybird Johnson of the skies (laughter).
Leo: Oh, you crack me
up. All right, Ladybird. Well, I think you should keep America
beautiful and make the rooftops beautiful.
Jeff: And make the NSA happy.
Leo: Make the NSA happy. So Google changed things with Gmail a little
while ago. They added support for
non-Latin characters in email addresses, but you can’t create an account that
way, but at least if somebody sends you an e-mail in Cyrillic, you can get
it. However, it turns out scammers are
starting to use this by using non-native letters to fool you into trusting a
message’s contents. So they’re not
tossing out e-mail with odd combinations of letters that look like they
represent phishing attempts. So if they
use let’s say an alpha instead of an “a” in the word bank. You know, Bank of America
(laughter), you’ll know and Google will—they’ll know more importantly and
they’ll filter that out.
Mathew: Oh, I see how it works.
Leo: Yeah, Bonk of
America. I guess because there’s some code characters that just don’t appear on the
screen, you can even have invisible characters stuck in there, but of course,
the computer knows. The computer can see
that. Oh, my God! They’re scanning my mail for non-Roman
characters. Oh, my God!!
Jeff: Android…
Leo: Pardon me.
Jeff: I’m sorry.
Leo: Go ahead. We didn’t rehearse. We should have rehearsed. Go ahead.
Jeff: (Laughter) Takes two guys to
replace Gina.
Leo: And not well at that.
Jeff: No. Android says that Google Play Music is quietly
introduced a four device limit per account per year.
Leo: No, four device deactivization.
Jeff: Right. So what’s the difference?
Leo: Right? You have ten devices, okay? Still, that hasn’t changed.
Jeff: Oh, so you can’t
switch—I see.
Leo: But remember, for a
while one brief shining moment, you were able to deactivate at will anytime you
wanted.
Jeff: You could have 20
devices.
Leo: Yeah. Well, no, you could have 10 devices, but if
you got to 10—which I do all the time—this hits me a lot because I have so many
phones and I try to activate a phone on Google Play Music. And they say, “Well, you’ve got 10
devices.” Well, I can just easily deauth some old devices. Now, you’ll only be able to do this four times
a year. So quickly deauthorize everything.
Chad: It’s retroactive.
Leo: Oh, crap.
Chad: So even if you’ve deauthorized stuff already, it’s taking effect.
Leo: Most people this
probably doesn’t bother, but it really affects me because I have so many
devices like this notebook, this new Chromebook. I’ll have it for five minutes, for a week to
review it, and then send it back. So I
authorize it for Google Play Music, and now I can’t Deauthorize it. So I guess the real takeaway from this is be very careful when you
authorize it because you’re not going to be able to deauthorize more than four a year. And I would
guess—
Jeff: I have a confession.
Leo: Yes, go ahead.
Jeff: I haven’t used Google
Play Music (laughter). I don’t use any—
Leo: Oh, I love it.
Mathew: What?
Jeff: Which one do you like best.
Mathew: Yeah, it’s great.
Leo: Well, there’s some really good choices, and we were playing with Beats Music the other day,
Apple’s newest acquisition. They
actually do a very interesting job, but depends what you’re looking for. Basically all of them, Spotify, Beats, Rdio, Rhapsody, Google Play, Amazon Play, have access to
the same 20 million-song library. As far
as I could tell, they’re pretty much the same. There’s a few areas where maybe they might have
an exclusive one artist or whatever, but it’s pretty much the same music. Prices are all the same, 10 bucks a
month. That’s pretty much the
standard. It’s more the features, so one
of the things I like about Google is I can upload my entire collection, so up
to what is it? Twenty-five
thousand songs? I can’t remember
what the limit is.
Mathew: I think so.
Leo: But that’s nice because
I have stuff in my collection that isn’t on Google Play Music, isn’t in that 20
million song set, so I have access to that. And, of course, I have access if I pay the 10 bucks a month to every
other song, and I can listen. They have
very good radio. I really like
Google. Careful,
careful.
Chad: I’m not going to use the
Kyocera Hydro again, so I might as well deauthorize it.
Leo: I guess you should.
Chad: I’m at nine, so...
Leo: You see where we
are? You see the problem for people like
you and me?
Chad: Yeah, and I don’t review
as many phones as you do, and I’m hitting my limit. This is absurd. And I wish there was a way that I could call
and say, “My situation’s a little different than the normal person.”
Leo: Right. So I think the music industry enforces
this. Apple has the same kind of
restriction. Once a year, you can deauthorize everything, but if you call them, sometimes
they’ll be nicer about it. Audible does
the same thing. I think these are
restrictions placed by the content creators, not by these companies.
Mathew: Wouldn’t surprise me.
Leo: Yeah, so I like Google
Play Music. On the other hand, Amazon
Music’s also a good choice. Their radio
selection is not very good. Their Amazon
Prime Music, which is free if you’re a prime member, has fewer than a million
songs in the library, so it’s not very good.
Chad: The other reason I like
Google Play Music—sorry, I’m butting in a lot this episode—is you can do radio
a lot easier and you can do radio off of playlists, which Amazon still hasn’t
quite nailed down. Also, Amazon’s
interface is very cludgy. You have to download a little application to
upload music, and now Google has done away with that on their service.
Leo: Oh, they have?
Chad: So you can do it just
from the browser.
Leo: Oh, but yeah. See, I still use the Google plug-in because I
want it to be running all the time so that when I add new music it just uploads
it.
Chad: Yeah, you can do that as
well, yeah. And then also, I mean, once
you’ve added your music to the Googleverse, any
Google app that’s going to tap into music is going to tap into all access.
Leo: Right.
Chad: And so just being part
of the ecosystem is really nice.
Leo: Also, if you have a
Chromecast, Google Play Music works with the Chromecast.
Chad: Exactly.
Leo: And they recently
offered Sonos support, so as a Sonos user, then now it’s a no-brainer because I can cast music from my Google Play
Music to my Sonos. That’s awesome.
Jeff: Wow.
Leo: Oh, and there’s one
other thing that makes Google Play Music really awesome. They have a little dice widget. So you tap the—whoops, let’s go back to my
home page. Oops, go back to the home
page. You tap the dice widget, it rolls the dice and then picks a random song for
you (laughter). Actually, this is the
“I’m feeling lucky” radio. I like
it. I like that (laughter).
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: Also, if you use
Android, it makes sense to use Google Play Music because you could do things
like listen to Del Shannon and it will play Del Shannon.
Jeff: Ohh.
Leo: I guess it’ll do that
with Spotify.
Chad: Yeah, it can do it with
almost anything, but yeah, it’s kind of automatic right out of the box. Yeah, you don’t have to tell it what your default
is if you have all access.
Mathew: The only thing I’ve
found—I was assuming when I did the play me station based on this album or
based on this thing from my music that the algorithm would be a bit better sort
of suggesting similar songs that I know you thumbs up, thumbs down them.
Leo: Yeah.
Mathew: But I think I had one
Prodigy song in there and then all of a sudden it was recommending every screamo death metal band. And I had to just keep saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
Leo: Well, the good news is
you have unlimited skips, which you don’t have on Pandora, so at least that.
Mathew: Right. Yeah.
Leo: I think all of these
recommendation systems have failings. Pandora always sneaks a Beatles song in no matter what.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: Why? Because they have the Beatles catalog.
Mathew: Because they have the—
Leo: Because they have
it. So it’s playing Bob Willis and the
Texas Playboys “Sugar Moon,” which is I think a really excellent I’m Feeling
Lucky choice right there. Then I could thumbs
up indicating I want more of that. I
pick Google Play Music.
Jeff: All right. I’m going to try it.
Leo: But this is This Week in
Google.
Mathew: It’s well done,
yep. It’s well done.
Leo: I think it’s really well
done. I think all the radios have that
problem.
Jeff: Even though they’re not
a sponsor of the show for a while, I actually do listen to Audible a lot.
Leo: Audible’s awesome.
Jeff: Though this week, I’m
happy with Amazon because when I buy Kindle books—
Leo: Yeah?
Jeff: I have a decent sized
little gift account where I have gifts over time, plus things I’ve earned from
Amazon stuff. And it insists upon taking
it out of that for Kindles. I’m doing
work right now and these are business books. I don’t want to use my gift money for that.
Leo: Oh.
Jeff: It will not let you take
that as an option. There’s no option.
Leo: You need another
account. You need a business account and
a personal account.
Jeff: But I’m using the same
device and I can’t do that.
Leo: Oh, that’s right.
Jeff: I’m switching my book
reading over to guess what? Google Play.
Leo: Yeah, yeah. So I’m disappointed on this yearly four
device deauthorization limit. I think this was previously the rule. They had been very lenient, which was nice,
but that’s changed. Finally, speaking of Googlecast or Chromecast, now you can Chromecast your
G+ stream—I love this—to your big screen TV. So browse and it—
Jeff: …Strangers to your
family snapshots.
Leo: Yeah, you can flip
through posts with manual controls or it has autoplay. I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it reformats too well. Big images do fill the screen with the post
content at top and the source at bottom, but I’m sad to say no animated gifs.
Jeff: What?
Leo: What! That’s just an oversight. I’m sure they’ll fix that. Chromecast gets more and more useful, I have
to say. I love it. That’s fun. I haven’t tried it yet, but I do get the new version of Google +, so I’m
looking forward to trying it tonight. And that is your Google Changelog. Damn, I hope Gina comes back next week.
Jeff: Gina, come back. Come back little Gina. Come back.
Leo: (Laughter) Come back,
Gina! We miss you. Come back. A lot of Snowden news. I’ll skip
that. Snowden’s got three years to live
in Russia. Reminds me of the old joke,
“First place, a three-year trip to Russia. Fourth place, five-year
trip to Russia.” I don’t
know. Twitter admits that there are 23
million active bots. That’s not
necessarily bad. I follow a lot of
bots. Not spam bot necessarily.
Jeff: Oh.
Mathew: That’s not true.
Leo: It’s not truth. Quartz’s reporting this.
Mathew: Yeah, I actually wrote
about that as well, and I made the point that you just made, which is some bots
are good. Some of them are funny. Some bots actually have useful things to
say. Some sort of automated accounts
give you information that’s useful like earthquake SF of whatever.
Leo: We have a bot for TWiT that says when the next show is. Yeah.
Mathew: But so what happened was
Twitter updated its 10Q, and it tried to clarify a number that it gave before,
and by trying to clarify it, it kind of made it less clear, if you know what I
mean. So they said before they had
estimated that 14% of users were accessing Twitter through some third-party
application. So then
they tried to narrow it down a little bit more. They said actually it wasn’t 14; it was
11. And of that 11, 8.5% were accessing
it through some automated service that didn’t require user input. So what Quartz did was take that 8.5% and
assume well that means 23 million are bots, but it was explained to me by
someone close to Twitter who didn’t want to be named that the language in the
10Q, what they meant was automated services that pull tweets, not automated
services that post tweets.
Leo: Oh.
Mathew: So they’re talking about
a notification layer on your phone that basically just displays tweets without
you having to use the app or go to the website.
Leo: Oh.
Mathew: That’s what they
meant. So not bots.
Leo: Oh (laughter). Well, I’m surprised there’s only 23 million.
Mathew: Yeah.
Leo: I mean, doesn’t every
third-part Twitter app do that? Pull
tweets?
Mathew: Well, yeah. And so what I thought was interesting was it
was a small number.
Leo: That’s a tiny—yeah.
Mathew: Like Twitter basically
controls 90% of the universe.
Leo: Yeah. Quartz completely screwed that up (laughter).
Mathew: I read the 10Q as well,
and it wasn’t clear.
Leo: Okay.
Mathew: It just said without
human interaction. It didn’t say just
pulling tweets.
Leo: Right, but there’s a big
difference between posting a tweet without human interaction and reading a
tweet without human interaction.
Mathew: Right.
Leo: Yeah.
Mathew: So the short answer is
they don’t know how many bots there are or they’re not saying, and bots are
included under the spam heading, which is about—
Leo: But they’re not
necessarily spam because a lot of bots are very useful.
Mathew: Right. One man’s bot is another man’s spam.
Leo: There’s lots of traffic
update bots. I mean, those aren’t
bad. Yeah.
Mathew: The one I mentioned was
Kim Kierkegaard. Do you follow that at
all?
Leo: No (laughter).
Mathew: It’s a mash up of Kim
Kardashian’s tweets and Soren Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy. It’s hysterical.
Leo: (Laughter) Add that right now.
Mathew: It’s awesome.
Leo: Kim Kierkegaard.
Mathew: That’s actually got a
medal.
Leo: And is that a bot
because it’s doing it automatically?
Mathew: It’s a bot, yeah.
Leo: Really?
Mathew: One of my other favorite
is defunct, but Stealth Mountain, if you used the phrase sneak peek and you
spelled peek wrong, it would respond automatically and say, “I think you mean…”
because lots of people say peek like the mountain peak. Just one of those
grammatical things that drives you nuts.
Leo: That would be good. You could have another one those. So it’s actually Kim Kierdashian. Say that three times fast (laughter).
Mathew: Yeah.
Leo: Just as the spirit is
invisible, so also is his language a secret, and
sometimes you can’t tell when it’s being sarcastic. I don’t see any Kim in that. Do the big one. Go down—yeah. Again, I am burdened by a heaviness of the
soul. Not going to call it baby weight
because that’s an excuse (laughter). Now
that’s good!
Mathew: (Laughter)
Leo: “The sea struck up its song with a deep, calm solemnity. The souls of the dead came forth to hold me
in their comforting embrace. Yacht life.” Or I’m
on a boat, biatch. “I love your Tumblr’s infinite scroll-down feature and the unfathomable,
insatiable emptiness behind it (laughter).” That’s human written. There’s no
way a human didn’t do this. “Look what I
found in my luggage. All
my worldly troubles and sorrows (laughter).” “My look is never complete without indescribable suffering.” Okay, that’s one to follow. That’s good, but I think a human’s writing
that.
Mathew: Definitely. But they tweet them automatically.
Leo: Ahh,
yeah. I mean, what if you use Hootsuite or something to schedule tweets?
Mathew: That’s sort of a bot.
Leo: That’s sort of a
bot. That’s kind of a bot. All right. I tell you, it’s hard to use a Chromebook to
do this show. I don’t think we have to
talk about Facebook Messenger. We’ve
talked about that quite a bit on the show. Twitch. It has not been
officially confirmed that YouTube is buying Twitch. Is that right, Chad?
Chad: Yeah, Twitch has not
announced it yet.
Leo: It has not been
announced, but Twitch.tv, which was owned by Justin.tv, they’re making changes
because they shut down Justin.tv and they did it boom.
Mathew: Yep.
Leo: Boom. So I expect that to happen sometime
soon. If not, whoops.
Chad: They’ve also implemented
a YouTube-like audio scanning feature to look for copyrighted audio.
Leo: In Twitch. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Chad: In Twitch.
Leo: But they do a nice
thing. They just turn off the music.
Chad: mute it, but it’s kind
of amazing because if there’s a two-hour stream with three-minutes of
copyrighted audio, the whole two-hour stream would be muted.
Leo: Oh, they mute the whole
thing?
Chad: Yes.
Leo: Even your narration,
everything.
Chad: Everything. Now this is not for live events, so they’re still
not scanning live and they won’t mute your stream if it’s live, but anything
that’s been recorded and archived for the four or five days that it’s up now,
it will be muted.
Leo: And the reason this is
concerning is because of course there has always been a little tension between
the game owners, the video game content creators and these broadcasters over
who owns the copyright. Not all—many
video game companies realize this is a very good thing indeed for them. It sells copies of the game, but a few have
issued take down requests on YouTube. And there is a real cause for concern for the viability of Twitch if the
same thing should happen. I think that
actually if YouTube buys Twitch, that’s very good news. Remember, when YouTube started, before Google
bought it, there were serious concerns. I remember interviewing Justin Kan saying,
“How are you going to stay in Business?” Not Justin Kan. That’s Justin
TV. Brian, the founder of YouTube
saying, “How are you going to stay in business?” because NBC at the time was
suing them. Viacom was. People were pissed off. Had YouTube not be acquired by Google, they
might not have survived, but Google with its great power worked out deals with
content creators. Content creators
started to realize the value. I imagine
Twitch the same thing would happen with gaming companies.
Chad: And the chatroom’s
correcting me. It’s only 30-minute
blocks, not the two-hour—
Leo: So it’s 30 minutes at a
time?
Chad: Right, so I guess I had
only seen a snippet that was less than 30 minutes and the whole thing was
muted, and I went, “Wow, they mute the whole video.”
Mathew: They actually said their
technical guy did—sort of the CEO did a round of ask me anything and said that
they were going to try and get better at doing discrete chunks instead of just
massive half-hour muting.
Chad: Right. And another issue is that sometimes something
will be in-game, that the game has—
Leo: That’s my question.
Chad: So let’s say BioShock has a music play that they got the license to, but
then the actual license-holder hears it in your stream and they block it. That’s a big issue.
Leo: That would be a problem.
Chad: Yes.
Mathew: Mm-hm.
Leo: And I think that’s going
to be another one where YouTube and Twitch have to go to the electronic arts and
say, “Hey, from now on when you negotiate these licenses, make sure you include
this additional usage.” Because I’m
telling you, it’s good for the game. I
don’t care if more people watch somebody playing Legends of Zelda, what is
that? League of Legends. Then buy League of Legends, which is probably
the case, right? I would guess, Chad,
that more people are watching people play League of Legends on Twitch than are
actually buying the game League of Legends.
Chad: I’m not sure. I mean, we don’t see that with
Minecraft. League of Legends is a free
game anyway.
Leo: Oh, well (laughter).
Chad: But with League of
Legends, their monetization that they have on League of Legends is kind of
amazing.
Leo: Is it in-app purchases?
Chad: Basically, and it’s mostly
all skins or—
Leo: Oh, god.
Chad: Yeah. And then also different
characters. So all the characters
cost money—
Leo: That’s a bad
example. I just used it because it’s the
number one game on Twitch right now, but the other games that you buy, Titanfall. More
people might be watching people play Titan Fall than buy Titanfall.
Chad: Absolutely, but I do
think that there is a definite correlation between how many people stream and
how many sells, but it’s probably not the same amount.
Leo: Goat Simulator took off
thanks to people watching other people play Goat Simulator.
Chad: Absolutely. But I think you’re right that more people
watch Goat Simulator than actually went out and purchased Goat Simulator.
Leo: It’s not as much fun to
play as it is to watch somebody play it.
Chad: Right, but still, it
definitely drove sales.
Leo: But it helped Goat
Simulator.
Chad: Yeah.
Leo: And I’m sure they made
more money than they would have if others had not been playing it and watching.
Chad: Right, yes.
Leo: Is this new? Because someone in the chatroom keeps saying
this is new. Google
for Education. Google Classroom—I
think we talked about this several weeks ago.
Chad: Mm-hmm. We had mentioned that they were going to
start something, but this is—
Leo: It’s now out.
Chad: —new. Yeah, this is out.
Leo: Designed hand in hand
with Google Apps for Education. So
basically is it Blackboard? Is it Moodle? What is
it? Designed to help teachers create and
collect assignments. Yeah, paperlessly, including time-saving features like the
ability to automatically make a copy of a Google document for each student. Oh, this is nice. Creates drive folders for each assignment for
each student to keep track, help everyone keep organized. This is a little bit like Blackboard or
Moodle. I’m not an educational expert,
so I’m not sure. We use up at Sonoma
Academy where everybody gets a Macintosh—it’s a one-to-one program, but we do
use Google Apps for Education, but we use Moodle. But I have to wonder if they might migrate to
something like this if it can do many of the things they use Moodle for.
Mathew: So now they said anyone
with a Google Apps for Education account can use it.
Leo: Wow. Free.
Mathew: It’s wide open.
Leo: Wow. That’s a pretty big deal. Sam Haroldson’s in
the chatroom. He’s the ed-tech director at a school. He says, “We’re really excited about this.”
Mathew: Yeah, because Moodle
actually—have you ever looked at Moodle? I’m not a teacher but—
Leo: it’s ugly as sin.
Mathew: The UI is horrible.
Leo: You can skin it.
Mathew: It’s like punching
itself in the face.
Leo: Yeah, you can skin it,
but we’re having a really hard time getting teachers to use it because it’s UI
is so bad. Not the function. Everybody likes the functionality. Kids are used to real user interfaces
(laughter). Real
software. Wow, this is
great. You can read more at classroom.
google.com
Leo: Who did we lose?
Chad: Jeff’s ghost just left
us.
Leo: Oh, that’s why we have
no audio from Jeff.
Jeff: Can you hear me now?
Leo: Yes.
Chad: Yes, we can hear you
great now. Yep.
Jeff: Wheww! Okay.
Leo: He’s doing a Verizon
ad. Of all the people in the world I
would not expect to do a Verizon ad, it would be Jeff Jarvis. Can you hear me now?
Jeff: Sorry for that. I have no idea what happened, but thank
you. I’m back.
Leo: Yea! So big, big news actually from Google and bad
news for—Moodle’s open source and free, but Blackboard is not. It’s got to be bad news for—
Jeff: Blackboard sucks!
Leo: Well, that’s what I
hear. Everybody who uses Blackboard and
Moodle say, “God! I wish there was
something better.
Mathew: True, terrible.
Leo: Maybe Google has found
the solution.
Jeff: I keep trying to get our
place to just switch over to Google entirely.
Leo: I have to say more and
more I think the schools should not buy MacBooks,
which are still $800, $900. Again, another case where if you had a really nice $500 or $600
Chromebook, it would be a lot easier to recommend. They’d be saving money, but they’d get a good
quality computer that students wouldn’t complain that you’ve given us a
netbook. And then now they’ve got
classroom. Pretty
compelling.
Jeff: Yeah, and don’t forget
how much education was a part of Apple’s growth strategy with the next
generation.
Leo: Right.
Mathew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff: Google’s starting to
copy Apple’s education strategy.
Chad: Absolutely. Just it’s in the cloud when I signed up for
community college. The whole cloud
infrastructure except for Blackboard was Google. Whenever I got my e-mail, it was a Google
apps e-mail. All of our docs, everything
was Google except for that Blackboard.
Leo: Blackboard’s going—I
would guess. I’m sure there are things
you can do with Blackboard you can’t do. It doesn’t look like for instance grading is built into Google classroom
and stuff like that, but…
Jeff: Good!
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: Kill the grades.
Leo: Kill the grades! I haven’t’ read this article. Maybe Jeff, did you put this in here? “Jezebel starts open revolt against Gawker.”
Jeff: Yes, this was a
fascinating thing. Jezebel, of course,
is a Gawker site and they had a real problem with trolling rape gifs.
Leo: Ohh,
Jezebel is a site aimed at women?
Jeff: At women.
Mathew: Yeah.
Jeff: At Gawker. And they couldn’t get the attention of the
company and the developers on the prioritization list, and so they wrote just a
vitriolic public post about how Gawker’s not paying attention to our
problems. And guess what happened? Next day, Gawker said, “Okay, you’re raised
up the dev list.” And now it’s happening, so good for Jezebel.
Mathew: Yeah, I thought that was
fascinating.
Jeff: They played Gawker.
Mathew: Jessica Coen, the outgoing editor, apparently complained to Joel
Johnson who’s the editor and chief and he said, “You should write about
it.” I mean, that’s the one thing about
Gawker is it’s one of Nick Denton’s fundamental principles. Everything should be out in the open,
including all the fighting and arguing. And so they wrote about it, and Joel to his credit said both on Twitter
and in a comment on Jezebel, “Thanks for mentioning it. You’re right. I dropped the ball. We need to
solve this problem.” They did an update
to the post and said that they’re going to reinstate pending comments, which
they used to have. So you’ll be able to
see that there is a pending comment that hasn’t been approved and you can
choose to look at it or not. And that
sort of gives you the leeway to not be surprised by some violent porn gif.
Leo: It was only a matter of
time, but at BlackHat, hackers showed that they could
infect nest thermostats and turn your heat up (laughter).
Jeff: Is this a big deal or am
I missing something here?
Leo: It is a big deal, and
I’ll tell you why. I agree with
you. My first reaction is, “So they can
change the temperature in my house? So what?”
Jeff: But it’s more than that,
eh?
Leo: It’s more than that
because the nest thermostat is on your network, and so the real risk is we’re
going to see a lot of this in the Internet of things that these poorly designed
things that are connected to your network become entry points for bad guys.
Mathew: Exactly, exactly. So they get access to one poorly protected
device, they get access to your whole network.
Leo: Yeah, so they were able
to compromise the nest device.
Jeff: What did it take to
compromise it? Did they have to have it
physically though? There’s one reference
to it being a used nest.
Leo: I love the—you know what
they (coughing). Sorry, I swallowed
something the wrong way. And I love what
they did in the demo. They put a text up
on—they actually changed the image on the nest. The nest has an LCD screen at its heart, which normally just shows the
temperature. They put a little eye up
and the words, “I know that you and Frank are planning to disconnect me, and
I’m afraid. That is something I cannot
allow to happen.” Yikes!
Jeff: (Laughter)
Chad: It’s really funny
because the nest has a built-in battery, and so even if you rip it off the
wall, it will still
Mathew: So that story was
updated with a comment from Nest. They
said physical access was required.
Leo: Well, that’s trivial
though, yeah.
Jeff: Okay.
Leo: And meaningless.
Jeff: Well, that’s not
trivial. That’s a big deal. It’s not as if—what? My cleaning lady’s going to come in and pull
the nest?
Leo: Right.
Mathew: Okay, and if someone
breaks into your house….
Jeff: So it what it really
says is don’t be a used nest.
Leo: No, they had to have
physical access though, right?
Jeff: Yeah, so why is this—I
don’t see the alarm. No.
Leo: If you have access to
any hardware device, if a bad guy has access to it, you’re screwed. Period (laughter).
Jeff: Yeah, but—
Chad: He was saying the story
is trivial, not the fact that—
Leo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m saying this
hack is meaningless in other words.
Jeff: Yeah.
Mathew: They plugged a USB
device into it and put it in developer mode and then loaded their own software.
Leo: Hello. I could to that. That’s nothing (laughter).
Jeff: Techo panic.
Leo: I could do that. Well, it isn’t really because actually this
was one of the themes of BlackHat and Defcon was that these devices generally don’t have the same
attention to security that a router might or a computer might. And this is an attack avenue, but it has to
be attackable over the Internet or it’s meaningless, I think.
Jeff: Yeah. It’s partly because they know that the device
has gotta be in your secure home, and if a bad guy
comes into your home, they’re probably going to be stealing your jewels, not
hacking your nest.
Leo: Right.
Mathew: Unless the only thing I
can think of is the NSA prehacked routers that were then
sold and shipped to customers. They
could prehack nest.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: It’s a different matter.
Mathew: Yeah.
Leo: But the truth is
whenever we buy any technology, we are trusting that
the manufacture of the technology has not embedded malware into it.
Mathew: Right.
Leo: That’s the very nature
of—there is a trust relationship when you buy anything. There’s a trust relationship that your garage
door opener doesn’t have a microphone and camera in it.
Mathew: True.
Leo: You have to trust the
manufacturer. So to say, “Oh, yeah,
manufacturer could do bad things,” well yes. Absolutely they could. They have
always been able to. Of course, it’s a
little different if something’s always online because then there’s somewhere
for that garage door opener to send the microphone and the—
Mathew: To send the data.
Leo: —(laughter)
right. Send the audio and video. The IBM PC 33 years old. It’s still a young’un.
Jeff: Well, and that basically
how long I have a PC, a real PC. Thirty-three years. But my original
was an Osborne 1, but that’s been as long as I’ve had it. And now I’m on Chromebook, so that’s the
limit of my personal computer era.
Leo: IBM shipped the first
PC, the 5150, because every IBM device had to have a number, on the 12th of August 1981, 33 years ago today. And
I think the world changed. It’s quite a
story and worth remembering.
Jeff: I can still feel that
keyboard under my fingers.
Leo: Oh, it was a good
keyboard. Damn fine keyboard. That clickety-click
keyboard, right?
Jeff: Very clickety-clack. I don’t think you’d like it today, but if
you’re coming from typewriters.
Mathew: I liked the Atari 1040.
Leo: Yeah, (laughter) I had
Atari 400 and 800. But I remember the
1040. That was an attractive-looking—
Jeff: Osborne 1, man. Osborne 1.
Mathew: 1040 was awesome. 1040 ST had trash icon, had desktop icons,
had drag and drop. It was incredible.
Leo: Gem, right? Wasn’t that the graphic OS, gem?
Mathew: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yep.
Leo: It was pretty
sophisticated for those days.
Mathew: And midi support too.
Leo: That’s right. And how much memory? Forty-eight K?
Jeff: (Laughter)
Mathew: Oh, I don’t remember
(laughter).
Leo: My Atari had 48K.
Jeff: I think my Osborne 1 had
96.
Leo: Ninety-six, ooo.
Chad: Ooo.
Leo: And the first IBM PC ran
a 4.77 megahertz, not gigahertz my friends, megahertz. All right, time to wrap things up with picks
and tips and the like. Mathew, do you
want to throw us a tip or anything?
Mathew: Give me a minute. Go to Jeff and I’ll try and think of one.
Leo: You think. Jeff Jarvis, give us a number.
Jeff: This week on August 19th it’ll be 10 years since the Google IPO. It came out an astronomical 23 billion. According to the story, I don’t know why I haven’t checked it right now,
but it was 390 million. That makes it
17X value increase, third largest evaluation in the world. Pretty amazing.
Leo: Who’s number one? Apple?
Jeff: Apple and Exon Mobile.
Leo: Apple, Exon,
Google. The big three
(laughter).
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: Wow.
Jeff: Pretty amazing,
huh? Ten years.
Leo: Anything you’ve got or
should I vamp some more for you? We
didn’t talk about, and this was something we talked about on TWiT on Sunday and Security Now Yesterday. We probably should mention this. That Google has decided to rank little bit
higher sites that support https, secure http. They’re going to use it as a ranking signal. They say, “We’re only going to do it 1%
ranking improvement for right now because we want to give people—”
Jeff: Well, a lot of things it
doesn’t really matter, right?
Leo: No! Most things it doesn’t matter.
Jeff: Right, that’s the only
issue.
Leo: I’m sort of in support
of the idea of http everywhere. We’ve
talked about that on Security Now a long time. Certainly Facebook and Gmail should use it and do, but there’s no reason
why I should have to encrypt my traffic from TWiT.tv to your browser or
vice-versa. It’s a waste of CPU cycles
and it’s expensive. You have to buy a
certificate for $50 a year or more.
Jeff: Right.
Leo: They say for right now
it’s only a very light-weight signal effecting fewer than 1% of global queries and carrying less weight than other signals such as
high-quality content. Well, I would hope
so. Well, the site’s secure. The content sucks, but the site’s
secure. “Over time, we may decide to
strengthen that because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch to
https.” Doesn’t make
any sense, Google. I agree that
there are lots of sites that should be secure that aren’t’ but there are many,
many, many, many, many more sites that don’t need to be secure, and I don’t
think you could argue this is a good idea. I guess you guys agree. Steve
agrees.
Jeff: I do.
Leo: Of all people, I mean,
Steve Gibson who’s been lobbying for https—
Jeff: Oh, wow.
Leo: —said no, this is
crazy. Is that your daughter? Time to go fishing?
Mathew: (Laughter) Not yet, no.
Leo: Well, you’ve been here—
Mathew: I do have one thing.
Leo: Yes.
Mathew: I do have one thing I
was going to mention, and I can’t remember if I mentioned this before.
Leo: Yeah, please.
Mathew: But did I mention
Vellum, the New York Times labs?
Jeff: I don’t think you did.
Mathew: It basically sucks in
your Twitter account and then shows you links that people you follow have
shared.
Leo: Nooo.
Mathew: It’s quite well done.
Leo: V-e-l-l-u-m.nytlabs.com.
Mathew: Yeah, and it’s very,
very simple. It just shows you who
shared it, and it’s kind of a way if you’ve been away from Twitter and you feel
like you’ve missed some interesting links. You just go to Vellum, and it shows you what people have been
sharing. I’ve been doing it a lot
actually.
Leo: I like it. I’m logging in right now.
Jeff: One of students had a
business that was going to do that and more, and you can have all the ideas in
the world, but it’s all execution. I wish she’d pursued this about five years
ago.
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: Because taking the links
that you have in a day, that’s the meat or the value, and then analyzing that
you can add value to it.
Mathew: You know, there’s
Paper.li and other things like that that do that, but I think it’s really well
done and it’s well designed.
Leo: Well, as soon as I get
my second factor authentication code from Twitter (laughter), I’ll be able to
pull it up. Oh, you’ve already got
it. Chad, you’re so good. And it’s pretty. They don’t have an app for this though. It’s just a web page, huh?
Mathew: Yeah.
Leo: That’s very nice.
Chad: Instagram hires a new
chief. I didn’t know that. Look at that.
Leo: Look at that. News already flowing in. Oh, my goodness.
Chad: And then I have my
groups, my lists. So if I wanted to
create a list of people who make news and not follow them, I could do that as
well.
Leo: No, that’s actually
good. I do that all the time, yeah.
Chad: Yeah.
Leo: I’m authorizing it right
now.
Chad: I also have multiple
people share it, it looks like their icons will show
up multiple. Like I’ll see seven or
eight—
Leo: I have to say more and
more I’m using things like Nuzzel, which is Jonathan
Abrams’ creation. The guy did
Friendster, Prismatic. Brad Cross at
Google did this. These are social
newsfeeds, and same idea. Not just Twitter. It could be
other social sources like Facebook, but they work really well, and it’s a great
way to surface news that I might not otherwise see. A little different than
like reading Flipboard.
Mathew: Yeah, I use Prismatic
and a big fan of Brad’s. They’ve changed
a little bit, so they’re focusing much more on the discussion within Prismatic
around those links.
Leo: Ahh.
Mathew: Whereas, Vellum and Nuzzel are pretty much just the
dashboard that shows you...
Leo: Here’s the links, yeah.
Mathew: Yep.
Leo: Yeah, I’ve been using
Prismatic and Nuzzel pretty much every morning to
look and see what’s going on. You still
can’t beat Techmeme though for just like here’s the ten big stories.
Mathew: I agree.
Leo: It’s right there. Does anybody still use Google News?
Mathew: Jesus, no.
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: Well, I use it every
week for the show.
Leo: Do you?
Chad: Yeah. I will too, yeah.
Leo: The Sci/Tech
section?
Chad: Yeah. I mean, for me, Techmeme is when I want to know what people are talking about. Google News is when I want the algorithm
thing.
Leo: (Laughter) What do the bots
think?
Jeff: I use Google Play
Newsstand.
Leo: Newsstand is a great app
for Android. It’s beautiful.
Mathew: Is it?
Leo: Well, I always assumed
it’s just trying to sell me magazines. But no.
Jeff: No, it’s not. It’s not. It’s how I actually read The Verge. I prefer to read The Verge on Newsstand.
Leo: I think they’ve changed
it.
Jeff: But you still make a
really good point, Leo. Not to insult
anyone who’s there and they are wonderful people, but I think Google News is
preserved in aspic. It could really show the way in so many ways for news. It could do so much, and it’s not
competitive, apart from the Germans and Murdock, just never mind them. It can send traffic to news sites in amazing
ways. It could understand me and my
tastes and my interests. I’m arguing
constantly now that news has to become a relationship business. It has to give me higher relevance, and news
sites don’t do that. And what Google
News could do in the long run is share data about me and my interests with new
sites, with my permission of course, and could bring me more relevance across
the whole pantheon of news. But it just
kind of sits there. It’s pretty. It works well…
Mathew: When I was at the
journalism festival in Italy, I talked to a couple of people from Google News,
and I basically said exactly the same thing. There’s so much it could do. There’s
so much more that it could do. It was
pretty good five years ago in terms of showing you headlines, but there’s so
little personalization. So there’s so
little intelligence for a company that’s built around intelligence and has
1,500 math PhDs or whatever, there’s so little intelligence in that product,
and it feels like there’s two guys working weekends in their spare time on the
thing.
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: But it’s not. It’s a very talented team of very smart
people, but I don’t think they put anything behind it.
Mathew: And I think they shared
my frustration to some extent, and the only thing one person said, who I won’t
name, was that it’s run by the product guys.
Leo: Ahh.
Mathew: It’s not run by
journalists.
Leo: The technologists or
journalists, yeah.
Mathew: Right. And so the product guys—
Jeff: A good product person
always says, “Hmm, how could we make something better for the user? What does the user want? Let’s meet those needs.”
Mathew: Sure, sure. They have to sort of get past, so the product
guys control the feature list. What
we’re going to do with it. And so the
things that they wanted to do are not necessarily what the product guys wanted
to do.
Jeff: But a product guy—I’ve
heard said lately to some people when editors talk to technologists,
technologists say to the editors, “You’re a product person,” and a product
person properly molded is the voice of the user.
Mathew: Sure, I agree.
Jeff: I have no problem with
product people running the show so long as they are good voice of the user, so
long as they plumb the possibilities well on behalf of users. And I think it’s just so much more that
Google News could be. Maybe they’re
scared of it politically that the more they touch it, the more—
Mathew: Right. I was going to say maybe they’re afraid of
adding too much functionality because then it’ll just become an even larger red
flag for media companies to jump on Google and say you are—
Jeff: That’s where they share
things with them.
Mathew: Yep.
Jeff: Give reports to the
media companies how much traffic we’re sending you. When you send traffic, give data about the
users, with the users’ permission, where you could bring greater value. There’s a lot of ways it could be used to
clearly benefit.
Mathew: Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Jeff: I also think embedding
articles in Google News so people can read actually more and discover the
optimal way to link articles. Embedded
articles have a lot of value in that way. So yeah.
Leo: On that note, I think
we’re going to wrap this thing up.
Jeff: This is a punctual Leo Laporte.
Leo: Well, I just feel like
we want to leave them wanting more.
Jeff: No, it’s good.
Leo: And by the way, Mathew
Ingram, the chatroom says, if there’s a dusty old book in the basement of that
cottage, don’t read it out loud, okay?
Mathew: (Laughter)
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: Mathew Ingram, from his
cabin in the woods in Ontario, Canada, thank you so much for joining us. Gigaom.com. It’s always great to have you on, Mathew.
Mathew: Thanks for having me.
Leo: Oh, yeah. Lots of fun. Jeff
Jarvis, he is at his home as well taking a little well-deserved time off from
his busy day as professor of journalism at The City University of New York.
Jeff: Time off? Time off! This is work, Leo!
Leo: Oh, yeah. This is a show. This is work.
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: This is not play. This is work. I keep telling them that.
Jeff: Pure pleasure. Pure pleasure.
Leo: Yeah, it’s always a
pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Gina will be back I hope next week because
I’m not doing the Changelog again (laughter).
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: I learned my
lesson. We do This Week in Google every
Wednesday afternoon 1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern Time 2000 UTC on
TWiT.tv. Please stop by and join us live
if you can. If not, on-demand audio and
video always available at TWiT.tv/TWiG. We keep it all on the website there or
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Pocket Cast, all that stuff. Or our great third-party TWiT apps, apps for every platform. They allow you to watch live, download shows,
and all of that. Thanks for being
here. We’ll see you next week. Thanks to our producer, Chad Johnson. I’m Leo Laporte. See you next time on TWiG!