This Week in Google 268 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWIG: This Week in Google. A great show for you. Jeff Jarvis has the day off, but we've got a great fill-in with Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land. He knows all about those new Google snippets, why publishers might be a little bit upset, and the Google Change Log has some good news for Gmail users. It's all coming up next on TWiG.

Net casts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by Cache Fly, at cachefly.com.

Leo: This is TWiG, This Week in Google, episode 268, recorded September 14, 2014.

You Had me at Blackberry

This Week in Google is brought to you by BarkBox. A monthly box of high quality fun and healthy goodies for your dog, delivered right to your door. Save 20% when you sign up for a new subscription. Visit barkbox.com/twig. That's barkbox.com/twig. And by Braintree. If you're a developer or a manager of a mobile app and searching for the right payments API, check out the new one touch from Braintree: the fastest, easiest, most secure way to pay in-app. To learn more, and for your first 50 thousand dollars in transactions fee free, go to braintreepayments.com/twit. And by Harry's. For guys who want a great shave experience for a fraction of what you're paying now. Go to harrys.com. Save 5 dollars off your first purchase by entering the code twig when you check out. It's time for TWIG: This Week in Google. The show that's all about Google, but not just Google. The Facebook, the Cloud, the Twitter, and all that stuff. Of course Gina Trapani is here from thinkup.com.

Gina Trapani: Hello.

Leo: Hello Gina. Host of All About Android, Android guru. Jeff Jarvis has the day off. He's traveling, right? He's in one of those travel loops that he gets in every once in a while.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: It is a loop though. He flies to New York, then to Germany, then back. Then New York to Bahrain and back. It's like—it's weird.

Gina: He's a travel animal.

Leo: He's a traveling man. But he'll be back next week I think. I won't. I'll be in London next week. I'm going to take a week off.

Gina: Good for you.

Leo: Yeah. I'm excited. But look who has replaced Jeff. This is great. Danny Sullivan is here from Search Engine Land. Hey Danny.

Danny Sullivan: Hey.

Leo: He is obviously a skateboarder and a twitter—a tweeter.

Danny: I'm well known. Tony Hawk is always saying, "Dude, come on over."

Leo: Really?

Danny: No.

Leo: That's pretty awesome. Wow.

Gina: I bought it. You should have rolled with that, Danny. He doesn't live too far from you. He's in San Diego, I think.

Danny: Yeah. That would be pretty cool. I actually did take a few skateboarding lessons because I felt like I should, but I'm not very good.

Leo: You live in San Diego. I think everybody is supposed to skateboard.

Danny: Yeah. We should all be doing that in Southern California, but it's actually a Google skateboard. I liked the logo that was on it, and I liked that it was a skateboard, so.

Leo: And then you have a snowboard too.

Danny: That's a Bing snowboard.

Gina: Is that a Bing snowboard? Oh sweet.

Danny: So, we have a lot of board meetings in California, as you know.

Leo: Very fair.

Danny: But you can never see the Bing behind me, so people are like, "You've got all that Google stuff," and I'm like, "No, there's a Bing behind me, you just can't see the logo," so there you are.

Leo: Hey, I got something in the mail today that I'm a little excited about.

Danny: Oh, is that the watch? The 360?

Leo: No, I did order the watch. I think it comes later next week, or something.

Danny: Oh, you got the Moto X!

Leo: This is the phone, baby.

Danny: I saw that. I'm jealous.

Leo: I'm going to do a mini unboxing— actually, I already opened it up, so it's not exactly an official unboxing.

Gina: Let's do it anyway.

Leo: Let's do it anyway. So I chose the cognac leather back, and it is nice. It really does smell like leather. It's got that leathery smell to it.

Gina: Oh yeah, the dimples in it really—yeah.

Leo: The dimples changed a little bit, but it's still there. I think it's very attractive, and the flash is in the ring, although it's not a two-toned flasher or anything like that. It's just a dual flash. And now, for the first time, a metal rim all the way around it.

Gina: Yeah. That's a good-looking phone.

Leo: I think it's really gorgeous. Now compare it to the—this is the iPhone 6 and you can compare the two. They're similar in size. I thought 6 was 4.7 inches, which is what the old Moto X was, so this is obviously a little bit larger than the old Moto X.

Gina: Wow. They actually don't look that different, although the iPhone has those nice, those kind of shiny edges there. The glass that sort of bends.

Leo: I love that.

Gina: It's rounder.

Leo: But this has rounded glass too, I think this must be a new technique that everybody is doing. So this has the—it's edge-to-edge glass, or it feels like it is. I think it is. And then it's rounded at the edge, which it would have to be, otherwise it would cute you. I like this little touch. This is the on/off button, and the volume rocker on the same side, so to distinguish between the two, you can't see it, but they've scored the on/off switch. It's like the edge of a dime. You can easily tell when you're on the on/off switch as opposed to the volume rocker.

Gina: That's nice.

Leo: I think that's a nice little touch. And of course it's the talkie version, and this time you can program it so I can say, "Hello Moto X. Hey, what's happening? How you doing?" Instead of OK Google Now, now you say whatever you want. And that's boring to say, "Hello Moto X." I should probably make it say something else, like "wassup?" So yeah. It's 1080 P now. OK. Thank you. Talkative little—I forgot what I was—It's a 1080 P screen, and a 13-megapixel camera, which is still not as great as the iPhone, but better. After all the iPhone hype, Gina, now you're really solidly in the Android camp, you have to be. Do you miss it?

Gina: Yeah, well you know the thing that I miss about it, and I was talking about this on All About Android last night, is I still have this creeping feeling that the iPhone camera is better. That the photos are better with less effort. In fact, Lisa Bettany just did a post, she did a great post. Side by side photos in different lighting situations with every model of the iPhone, and I got to tell you, the six photos, particularly when she zoomed in on detail in low light, they were amazing. The OnePlus camera is OK, and I'm not a photographer. I just want to press the button and get a good photo every time. I'm not messing with settings, but I take a dozen shots every single time and hope that one of them comes out well. And I've got to tell you I think the iPhone still has the better—I think it's still producing quality photos. And we were talking about this last night, and it's like, "why is this happening?" And I think it's because Apple makes the hardware and they make the software, and I think from day one Apple just prioritized the camera in a way that Android didn't. Partially because Google wasn't doing the hardware manufacturing. So that's the only thing that makes me want an iPhone, I'll be honest.

Leo: Well, and it's an important thing, because many people consider this their camera more than their phone even.

Gina: Yeah, and I have a small child, and I think to myself, "are the photos that I have of my daughter when she's a baby, should they be better?" 20 years from now, am I going to hate myself retroactively for not having a better camera on me? Because I barely get out the DSLR.

Leo: So Lisa Bettany, who is of course a friend of the network's and a pro-photographer, and the author of Camera Plus, which is one of the number one camera Apps on the iPhone, had all the iPhones, and took roughly the same picture with all of them, which is about seven different or eight different devices. It's amazing that she had eight working iPhones for one thing. But it's really valuable to see how they've improved. But even more than that, in the industry, there's a company that makes software for Lightroom called DxOMark, and they've become very well known for their acuity testing of cameras. I think they're widely trusted. DxO Labs they're called, and it's dxomark.com. They gave the iPhone 6 and 6+ the highest rating of any mobile phone on the market. The next one up is the S5, then the Xperia Z3, then the Z2, then the Nokia 808 PureView, which is that 41 megapixel camera. Even better than the 1020, which is kind of middle of the pack. So now people will argue this with you. In fact, whenever I say, "I think the iPhone camera is the best camera," the Nokia people jump up and say, "you're wrong!" But even DxOMark based on clarity, based on color accuracy, exposure and contrast, accuracy of focus—all the things that you care the most about, said it's really really good. Especially good in low light compared to other cameras. So yeah. I miss that. Actually, I don't miss it because I have it.

Gina: Well I was going to say, "You have it." So I'm curious to know—

Leo: I wish it were in the Moto X, because then I wouldn't need an iPhone.

Gina: Right. So that's the 6 or the 6+?

Leo: This is the 6, which is really what people should buy. The 6+ is like clown shoes. It's too big. Apparently it bends like clown shoes as well, which is another issue.

Gina: So only the plus bends. Not the 6.

Leo: Well, I think they're both bendable because it's metal and it's thin. It's 1 millimeter.

Danny: The 6 would be more likely to bend just because it's so much larger.

Leo: More leverage. Exactly.

Danny: I mean, if I put the 6+ in my back pocket, first of all, someone's going to steal it because it's just sticking out of the back pocket, but also it's just going to crush if I were stupid enough to sit down on it. Whereas other phones that are a little more compact, they probably slide around and work out OK.

Leo: And this is different because the iPhone users have had a little phone that you could put in your back pocket, and all of a sudden they have this giant phone and they haven't changed their habits much. So get a man purse, or a woman purse, and put it in there, because otherwise you're going to squish it. And I would say the 6 even will be prone to that a little bit. It seems to bend right where the battery ends internally and the volume rockers begin. That seems to be a particular inflection point.

Gina: Yeah, that makes sense, right? The iPhone 6 is a good-looking phone. It reminds me of the HDC One the M8 a little bit, that band across the back I really like.

Leo: But it's thinner.

Gina: Yeah, it looks really thin. So you've got the Moto X and you've got the iPhone, so what's—

Leo: You know me. I thought the Moto X was the best phone of the year last year; even though spec-wise compete with some of the other really high-end phones, including the ones that we use, the OnePlus One. But I always felt like the Moto X was my phone. The other ones were ones I were using, but this was my personal phone, and I think it's going to be the same with this one. Especially since it smells like a men's club. The high-end kind, not the sleazy—

Gina: Not the sleazy kind.

Leo: Leather chairs and cigars. Yeah.

Gina: Gentleman's club.

Leo: That's even worse.

Gina: Yeah, that's bad too, isn't it? It doesn't work either.

Leo: You've spoiled the name gentleman's club. And I like the speech features on the Moto X. Sorry. It does respond. I'm going to have to change it to Jarvis. That won't work either. And now, they've got infrared sensors on the corners so when it's doing the sleep thing, you can wave over it. Here, I'll put it to sleep and I'll show you. So it's sleeping, the screen's off, but if I wave over it, it'll show me the time and if I have any notifications they'll be available as well.

Danny: Does it not do—I read that it doesn't do the always on fading thing though. Is that right?

Leo: It doesn't. It waits till you wave at it, which I think is actually the right thing. It's easy to wave at it. It used to be it would pulse up and down, and I imagine that killed the battery life somewhat. Don't know about battery life, because I literally just got it hours ago. One thing I'm a little concerned about, and maybe someone in the watching or someone in the chat room can fill me in, last year Motorola, they had this Motorola Skip, which is an NFC tag, either on a sticker or on a leather thing. You could put it in your pocket, and you could tap a locked Motorola phone with a Skip in it and say, "That one I want to unlock," either my skips are broken or it doesn't work with skip any more. And I notice it's not in the copy anymore. They may have turned that off. You can still pair it with trusted Bluetooth networks now, which is really great, and if you have the Moto 360 I'm thinking that that's probably one of them. So you can say, "As long as I'm in proximity, I'm unlocked." I'm not sure that's a good idea.

Gina: Yeah, that's nice. That's really nice.

Leo: Because locking is a pain, and you'd like to use a strong lock instead of a swipe, so if it's easy to unlock with a tap that would be pretty cool. Screen looks good. Not great, but good. Super AMOLED like last year, but again, higher resolution. Jury is out. We'll see. I'm going to London with both it and the iPhone 6. Both will be on T-Mobile because T-Mobile offers unlimited international calling and text as well as 2G data for free.

Gina: Right. So you got the 6 unlocked so you can pop in your T-Mobile card.

Leo: I didn't. I got the Verizon 6, but it turns out you can pop in your T-Mobile card.

Danny: Yeah. That was the same thing that happened with me with the iPhones was that I was really surprised I bought the T-Mobile unlocked and I put my AT&T card in and that worked fine, which is what I expected, but then I threw my Verizon SIM into the T-Mobile iPhone and that was all working as well.

Leo: Yeah. I remember reading about it. In fact, you were the one who inspired me to do it, and the reason is that the new iPhones have all the bands. Verizon is doing voice over LTE and so everything now is—we're rapidly moving out of the bad old CDMA versus GSM days.

Gina: Thank goodness. That's such a difficult thing to explain to family members and stuff. It was like "no, no. That's a different thing. You need this thing." I was like, "what?" Mental maps of carriers and things and normal people don't know that and they shouldn't have to.

Leo: So due to an FCC ruling when Verizon acquired the LTE bands, they are required to not lock their SIM slot, so the Verizon phone can be used with a SIM from, at least from AT&T and T mobile as well as Verizon, and also from international carriers, because I think you've got every band in here.

Danny: Well that was the other thing, is I took my old Verizon phone, which was on my iPhone 5S, which was Verizon, and I threw my AT&T card into that, which I'd never done before, and that completely opened up and it was fine.

Leo: So I was able to get LTE and T-Mobile on the Verizon, which is new, you couldn't do that before. And we'll see how that works in Europe, or in England anyway. Travel-wise I'm set.

Gina: You are. I want to see some photo comparisons.

Leo: You will. That's one of the things I'll very likely do. I'm also bringing a good camera. And that's the other side of it is, while I do use a camera phone a lot, if I'm serious about where I am, I'm going to take a good camera with me.

Gina: Yeah. That makes sense.

Leo: Yeah. All right. So that's the story of the Moto X they did start shipping—I'm sorry I've got to change the name. And the Moto 360, they are back in stock and those are also shipping. I think next week, and I did order the him, which is their standard Bluetooth ear bud, but it’s designed to do some extra stuff. I think it's touch-free with Moto X.

Gina: So when is that coming? Didn't get that yet? I want to call it the Her. I don't want to—let's just call it the her.

Leo: Me too. Oh, hello Scarlett.

Gina: What was her name? I forget now what her name was.

Leo: Samantha. Sam.

Danny: Samantha.

Gina: It would be borderline a little creepy if you called the phone Samantha.

Leo: I would like it because actually, if it had Scarlett's voice. I don't know how you feel. Siri's voice I've gotten used to, but the Moto X Google voice is strident. Here. I'll give you an example. Let's get out of this. Let me think. What am I going to do here? Hello Moto X. What's the weather in Petaluma?

Moto X: Unlock your phone to continue.

Leo: It's just a little—I don't know. A little strident.

Moto X: It's 78 degrees and overcast in Petaluma.

Leo: Siri just seems nicer. You disagree? You agree?

Gina: No, the voice is still a little robotic. I think it's difficult to get it a little softer, but I haven't used Siri in a really long time.

Leo: Well you want to hear Siri these days? I think she's sounding a little bit better. I forgot what I do to start Siri. I have to press a button. By the way, I have to be careful on the shows now, because if people have their iPhone hooked to the power and you say, "Hey Siri," it will actually wake her up and she'll start doing stuff. How long is the Golden Gate Bridge?

SIRI: Golden Gate Bridge is 8,980 feet long.

Leo: Long.

Danny: Long.

Gina: Long.

Leo: She seems friendlier.

Gina: Yeah she does. Interesting. And her voice is a little lower. Now we've got to get Cortana in the mix, but—

Leo: I actually like Cortana's voice. But my Windows phone is in the other room so I can't. You have it there? There goes Danny. He's going to get it. Can I upgrade—I can upgrade the voice on this right? I can download a better sounding voice.

Danny: So you need to have celebrity voices, right?

Leo: That's a TomTom. I used to have great celebrity voices on my TomTom.

Danny: My TomTom, one of the versions I had was great because you could have all the—you could put your own voice and I had my kids do all the turns. So they would be like: "Go forward. Make a U-Turn."

Leo: Daddy. Go forward Daddy.

Danny: Actually, whenever I had to do a u-turn, because that was usually a sign that I was lost, it would say, my wife would go, instead of saying "make a u-turn," it would say, "why don't you pull over and ask directions?"

Leo: That's good. I like it. So let's hear Cortana. You got Cortana.

Danny: Yeah. What do you want her to say? I don't know if you'll be able to hear it.

Leo: It doesn't have a speaker?

Danny: Yeah, but I don't know if you can hear it through my headset.

Leo: Hold it, just put it right up there.

Danny: There we go. How long is the Golden Gate Bridge? How long is the Golden Gate Bridge?

Cortana: It'll take 6 hours and 51 minutes to drive to Golden Gate Bridge.

Danny: Did you hear that?

Leo: Yes. It said it'll be six hours to drive there.

Danny: That's not too long. Let's go.

Gina: It doesn't sound at all like Cortana in the game.

Leo: No.

Gina: They should have gotten Cortana from Halo to voice. I'm so disappointed, because I love Cortana in Halo. And I know this is a different Cortana, but I wanted the voice to be the same.

Leo: Ask Cortana what she thinks of Siri. Does she say anything about that?

Danny: She's got a whole series of things that she does.

Leo: That's one thing that Apple and Microsoft do is there is some personality.

Danny: What do you think about Siri?

Cortana: Hard to say. So far our conversations have been kind of one-sided.

Leo: She's great. I mean there's inflection. That was pre-recorded. That's one thing that Microsoft is doing which is intelligent. These canned speeches, and this is obviously one, are treated differently than synthesized speeches. So that sounded great. Morgan Freeman would be good.

Danny: Oh yeah.

Leo: Oh well. Someday. Ask who Bill Gates is married to.

Danny: Who is Bill Gates married to?

Cortana: Bill Gates is currently married to Melinda Gates.

Danny: I like that "currently" part.

Gina: I like currently. Like, right now this is the answer, but you better check tomorrow.

Leo: I would fix that. Holy cow. Jiminy Christmas. Well we don't know what's going to happen in the future, but right now—

Gina: Right now things are good with Bill and Melinda.

Danny: Who is your father?

Cortana: Technically speaking that would be Bill Gates. No big deal.

Leo: I like that. But again you heard all that inflection—"Technically speaking" those are pre-recorded, obviously. They're not synthesized. That's fun. All right. Enough. You notice one thing. Both Danny and I got speaker's block when we have to think of what to say, what should I say? I think that's kind of a problem with these systems in general. Do either of you use voice a lot?

Danny: I've been using it more if I have something complicated and I want to annoy my wife. She's like, "Just type it in." But I was doing it yesterday and I was trying to look up something and I just spewed out a bunch of things and it came up with it. I think this was on Google Now. If it's something complicated and I think I'm in a quiet environment and I just want a quick answer. I use it a lot more for commands that I'm confident will work. It's very rare for me to set my alarm clock by hand. I'm always like, "Set the alarm for 6 AM." And it's like: "I have set the alarm for 6 AM. You will get 2 hours of sleep." And it's great.

Leo: That's a great example. It's so easy. I agree. Those timers, in fact I use the Androidwear watch to do that. And those are really good examples of something you can do much more quickly with voice. But searches and things like "how do I get here"— I guess Navigation is pretty good.

Gina: Navigation is good. I do it while I'm cooking when my hands are wet or covered in breadcrumbs. Set a reminder, how many cups in a whatever. That kind of thing. But not as much as I thought I would. I thought the watch would make me do it more; I really just still use the watch to thumb through notifications and dismiss them. But I have friends who love it and reply to text messages and do the voice commands from their watch a lot more. I feel a bit like a doofus. So maybe that's just me being too self-conscious.

Leo: No. I think you're not alone, and I think that's part of the issue, isn't it. That's one of the things holding all this stuff back is the voice interface is such a public thing. Last night we say a new movie called "The Drop," and I really liked the actor in it, but I didn't know who it was and I used Siri and it worked quite well. I said, "Siri, who stars 'The Drop?'" She told me, and one of the names is Tom Hardy and I said, "Siri, who is Tom Hardy?" And she said his Wikipedia article, including what movies he'd been in. That was a very nice, very convenient interaction that worked quite well. I think Siri is much better, by the way.

Gina: You're doing this during a movie that you were watching with someone else?

Leo: Yeah, I got a few catcalls and some popcorn thrown at me, but otherwise—No. It was after the movie. By the way, it's an excellent movie. It's not what you think, it's a really really good movie. Really really good movie. All right. One of the reasons I wanted to know who the lead was is because he's so good in this movie. Here comes Google 2.0. According to Larry Page. In the future, Google will build cities and airports. That's the headline in "The Verge." Anyway. The information, actually I should look up, I am a subscriber, so instead of doing the meta reporting I should actually—

Danny: The information thing. Yeah, it was good.

Leo: The problem with the information is that it's 400 bucks a year and a lot of people don't subscribe to it, so all that happens is that "The Verge" just repeats it.

Danny: I kid you not. My renewal thing for the information is on my screen. It must have been a year because it's like, "we need you to renew."

Leo: I renew. Jessica deserves our support.

Danny: Oh yeah. They do a great job.

Leo: But is it $400 worth great? I don't know.

Gina: 400 bucks a year. That's a pretty— yeah.

Leo: And especially since you can read pretty much everything in— or listen to TWIT, because I regurgitate. Anyway. Amira Fradi, who has excellent contacts at Google, wrote the piece. Google 2.0.

Gina: So what does this mean? So, OK. Google is going to build cities and airports. I mean, many a time, I've been sitting on the tar mat wishing that Google could point its smarts at making airports more efficient. I just don't know what that would look like.

Danny: So maybe they could make the security check point more efficient. Maybe after you put your thing through the thing they could split into two areas, I mean, God. Let's redesign the entire area of the airport.

Leo: So this comes Amir, and his coauthor, Hunter Walk have combined a variety of sources. This is in an interview they did with him, but what I thought was kind of interesting, this Google 2.0 thing, which is absolutely happening, Page cleared out space on his floor, he has his own floor at Google headquarters to oversee a series of workshops run by Google's vice president of business operations, Christian Gill. Apparently, OK. This feels like there might be between Larry and Sergei something going on because Sergei basically runs Google X. That's his R&D lab. Apparently Larry wants to start his R&D lab that he would oversee personally. Some call it Google Y. I wonder if it's like, well Larry's getting all the fun projects. I need my own. And that does not bode well for a company when you've got the two founders not feuding exactly, but in a rivalry.

Gina: Yeah, and for listeners it's not "why: w-h-y." You might ask that. It's Y. The letter y.

Leo: That would be good. Google why.

Danny: I didn't read it so much like "Oh Sergei gets to have all the fun with Google X, I want to have Google Y so I can have fun." I read it more like Google X is doing all these long-term things that are not going to immediately change stuff. So, Google Glass is still lurking out there. But that's probably the closest thing that you might have that a consumer might give.

Leo: Isn't Google Glass even Sergei's thing?

Danny: Yeah. But that would call it a Google—I think it's still under Google X. I could be wrong though. It might have migrated out. But like the auto-driving cars—we're like 5 years, 10 years away from that being a thing, and my impression from the article is that Larry would like to have Google Y to make Moonshots, maybe not Moonshots, but suborbital shots.

Leo: Shorter Moonshots. So Google X is on a 10-year time frame.

Danny: Yeah. But the idea, although redesigning your airports is not exactly something that happens tomorrow.

Gina: I don't know. This is even longer-term programs than Google X. It seems to me that Larry is just obsessed with different problems. We've seen Larry wearing Glass in public, that's always been a Sergei thing. Even with the IO's, the different years were led by different founders, and we heard a lot from glass and Sergei was wearing Glass, and we had the crazy demo with the skydivers, and then the next year it was run by Larry and it was a lot different. We didn't hear a lot about that. He did the Q and A. It was kind of a different tone. I hope it's not a competition and more just a—these are just two different people with different ideas as what the long-term problems to focus on are. Although maybe if they're not on the same page, that's a bad thing. I don't know.

Leo: You're right. If they have different portfolios, different goals, then it's not a rivalry. It's complementary. Maybe that's it. Friday writes: "Some of the Google 2.0 workshops fizzled say people briefed about the event or the effort. One involved, Mr. Page's desire to build up a subscription business so that Google wouldn't be so dependent upon advertising. Paid Gmail, for instance. Page even discussed with colleagues the notion that ad supported services can sometimes be lower quality than paid offerings." I guess Google Apps is a paid offering. That would be the example. The problem is that paid services have smaller reach. And Google is all about reach. Another Google 2.0 project involved location. Larry determined that Google in the future should know a person's precise location down to the inches, not just that they're in a particular room or store. That way, people might be able to know who else is in a room with them. This is what Apple's iBeacon does, by the way. It describes exactly where you are in the room, and that's useful for merchants, because they can have different things triggered on your phone depending on what you're standing in front of. By knowing which aisle a person was at inside a store, for instance, Google could potentially provide helpful information to the shopper about what's there. This is exactly what iBeacon does. Google could also let people pair their Smartphone with another device. Ads! Information! Hey, I got some information for you. You want a pizza?

Danny: You don't want that pizza.

Leo: Not this pizza.

Danny: You've already got pizza at home.

Leo: It's a great article. An interesting article. New airports. He thinks that, for instance, Elop's plan to create a hyper loop railroad between San Francisco and LA so that instead of 6 hours and 3 minutes to get here, Danny could be here in seconds. He thinks that's a terrible idea. But he says planes work. Why don't we have better airports? Better flights? Friday writes in the comments: "It didn't make the cut, but Larry Page also thinks Wall Street is broken." Maybe a better way to do finance, that's obvious, right? When you got a lot of money and you've got a lot of power, and both these guys do, I think it's appropriate for them to think about it, as long as they don't stray too far from the business.

Danny: They stray all over from the business.

Leo: Well yeah. I guess the business runs itself nowadays, right? Google 1.0 is fine.

Danny: It depends on how you define the business, right? I mean the auto driving cars don't make a whole lot of sense.

Leo: They're not the business, right. Autonomous vehicles are not the business.

Danny: No. But they'll pour the money into it. The business, sadly, is still people do these searches and they click on these ads. I don't mean sadly, because that's my job.

Leo: That's your business. Search ads.

Danny: But I always joke every now and then on Twitter that all those self-driving cars are being paid for by mesotheliomads. That's what's bringing you the future. That and structured settlement and who knows what else.

Leo: That's true in any business. We have our bread and butter shows and those subsidize the newer shows that are not yet making any money. That's how businesses work, right?

Gina: Yeah. That's very common. A lot of businesses, yeah.

Leo: I reinvest 75 percent.

Danny: We just did another article yesterday looking at the arbitrage stuff that goes on with Google and ask.com. Ask.com CEO is about to run a counter saying that it's not like that, but you search for something on Google like "what is mesothelioma" or something, and you get these ads from other sites that when you click on them jump you from Google search results to their search results, which have more Google ads on. And it's all this sort of like—There's a lot of money being made off of stuff that is still very cruddy. And yet it goes further up the chain into producing these things that seem very all pure and all clean or whatever. I'm perhaps too jaded or perhaps I've been watching too much of the wire.

Leo: Oh. You're going through a wire marathon.

Danny: I'm in the middle of the series.

Leo: Which year are you in right now?

Gina: Yeah, which season are you in?

Leo: Which year are you in?

Danny: I'm literally in the middle of season 3 on episode 5 or something.

Leo: Three. Was that the school one?

Danny: I don't know. They just moved everybody into hamsterdam.

Leo: Oh Hamsterdam.

Gina: Oh, the Hamsterdam. OK. All right. That's a great show. Because there's the boats in season 2, the first season is the—

Leo: I thought the third season was school, but maybe the fourth season is school.

Gina: School and then the newsroom, because—

Danny: I'm waiting for the newsroom. I know that's coming.

Leo: But Hamsterdam. That's a good one.

Gina: Hamsterdam is a great one.

Leo: That might be the best year. However. But now everything you say is going to be filtered through that, so now I understand. I'm glad you gave us the disclaimer. That's a great show.

Gina: It gets in your head.

Leo: Let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to do the change log. We'll find out more. There's lots more going on at Google. But first, OK. So Glen who is a TV expert here, Glen Rubenstein in the network says that season four is the best year. I didn't like the newspaper season. But Glen says that season four is the one to look forward to. Wow.

Gina: That's the school one.

Leo: Is that the school one?

Gina: Isn't that the school one? The school one broke my heart. Anyway.

Danny: Oh my god! No spoilers!

Gina: Sorry. No spoilers.

Leo: Season three is the second best. So you're in for two excellent seasons, according to Glen. Is Glen at home, or is he over there typing? He's over there? Which is? Never mind.

Gina: Now he needs a Wikipedia page.

Leo: Yeah. You have time. Go Wikipedia while I talk about treats for your dog. You don't have a dog, do you?

Gina: I'm allergic. I have allergies, unfortunately.

Leo: Danny, do you have a puppy?

Danny: No. We have two guinea pigs, that's it.

Leo: One of the best parts of "The Drop," which is the movie I was talking about earlier, is the dog. There's a great dog in it. Really sweet looking puppy, and I wanted to send him a BarkBox. It's not too late. BarkBox is treats. Yes, treats for doggies. We got our new BarkBox with jerky burgers. Dog treats made with real duck. Who wouldn't like that? These are here from yumzies. So you see us talk about these boxes that come in the mail, the BarkBox comes every month, but it's not for you, it's for your doggie. Indigo smokehouse strips. Oh, Ozzie would love this.

Gina: Yummy.

Leo: Premium cuts. Bacon for dogs. Pure pork. Fresh meat, vacuum-sealed, and then when you get a treat. That's good; it looks like a Green Bay Packers shirt. That's good. That's a little doggy chew. What is this? Crunchy rabbit chews? That's good for his teeth to keep them clean. And a pennant from Barkeley, University of California Barkeley. It's our BarkBox. Every month. Treats for your doggie. BarkBox is a wonderful way to celebrate your four-legged friend. I think every dog should have a BarkBox in the mail. It's a monthly subscription, high quality, fun and healthy treats, toys and goodies. 4-6 awesome full size products. Everything from—Well you just saw my BarkBox. Innovative toys and gadgets to all natural healthy treats and more. Each box is different. It's a great way to discover treats your dogs really like. Toys he or she really likes. All the treats are US and Canada only. Not saying anything, but that's where you want to get your treats from. Chews are made in the US, Canada, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Good stuff. Edible products do not include rawhide or anything processed with formaldehyde. See they really care about dogs. The BarkBox folks love their dogs and they want to love your dog too. No glycerin, no wheat, no gluten, no soy, or fillers. Minimal processing, and whenever possible, organic. Rest assured, everything is paw tested. I love this site. Find the BarkBox office pups. Go to barkbox.com/twig and click "get started." You’ll choose the size of your dog, between four different subscription plans. No, I'm sorry, Josh. They don't have a birdbox. Josh says, "What about my birdie?" Nope. You've got to get a BarkBox. Ozzie, do you have the b-roll of Ozzie with last month's BarkBox? We want to call it the BurkBox, because Burk gets the box and feeds it all to Ozzie. Ozzie loves his BarkBox. Is that a happy puppy? He is so happy. He loves his BarkBox. By the way, BarkBox also gives 10 percent of the revenue to local rescues and shelters across the US and Canada. You can save 20 percent when you sign up right now at barkbox.com/twig. Ozzie loved it.

Gina: He's so cute. That Ozzie.

Leo: Isn't he a sweetie?

Gina: He is.

Leo: I've got to get him to chew those chew toys because he needs his teeth brushed. The veterinarian—

Gina: Are those the ones you put the peanut butter in?

Leo: You need a dog. I'm sorry that you're allergic.

Gina: I love them. But I just can't breathe around them.

Leo: That's not good.

Gina: But Ozzie I was actually good with. I react differently to different dogs. I should find one that I can—

Leo: There are hypoallergenic dogs.

Gina: There are. It would be great for the baby.

Leo: You're going to get. That's why we have Ozzie. And the kids had no interest. Kid says, "Oh, that's nice. You got us a puppy. See you. Bye." So I have Ozzie. Me.

Gina: You have Ozzie.

Leo: But I love him. So it's OK. It's OK. BarkBox. Sebastian Thrun has left in his role as Google vice president and fellow. He was the founder of Google X and did some really interesting stuff, including Udacity, which was his online learning startup. So apparently this has been on his linked in page since August, but somebody finally told Tech Crunch. He does have an advisory role. In his linked in post he says, "While I am now just an advisor, my enthusiasm for Google X is as high as ever." But I figure with Audacity taking off that made sense.

Gina: So that's his startup that he's working on separately from Google.

Leo: Yeah. Google spokesperson said, "As the co-founder of Google X and our self-driving car project, Sebastian made huge advances in computer science and robotics that have paved the way for autonomous driving technology. In his role as an advisor to Google X over the past couple years, he has provided invaluable inspiration and perspective to a variety of projects. In Udacity, Sebastian has his own more-than-a-full-time-job Moonshot to take, and we wish him well." That's very nice. That's a really nice farewell. So obviously.

Gina: That is a nice farewell. It was all OK. It was good between them.

Leo: If you're in Google, this happens all the time. It's normal, right?

Gina: Yeah. When these stories happen people are like, "Oh, is something wrong? Did something happen?" I think it was in Stephen Levie's book when he interviewed Marissa Meyer who ran that management program and she said, "We want people who want to leave Google eventually because we hire entrepreneurial types. And entrepreneurial types want to build their own thing; it's kind of a problem that you're facing too, Leo. Right? In some degree. The best people, the ones who take initiative, who want to do everything want to do it their way and this happens.

Leo: I don't know if you have this in the change log, I'm glad Danny's here to explain it, structured snippets.

Danny: Oh yeah.

Leo: What are—they're now live.

Danny: I know that.

Leo: Yeah, well I'm looking at a Search Engine Land article. OK. What are they?

Danny: Do a search for say, "Wonder Woman" on Google and you will see that you get a description that comes up. I'm looking ahead of time. This one is coming from Wikipedia, and you'll see underneath it, not just that you're getting a description about Wonder Woman, but underneath the description you discover her first appearance, her alter ego, and who she was created by.

Leo: I'm not getting this. Why am I not getting this?

Danny: You're missing it. Zoom right in on the very first listing.

Leo: Oh. First appearance— It’s tiny.

Danny: Yeah. So you can see this for a lot of the superheroes. In fact, somebody was joking with me on Twitter about how is Google making sure, like if Google is listing everybody's alter-egos, aren't they revealing secret identities?

Leo: Spoiler alert. Princess Diana of Themesura—

Danny: What Google is doing is understanding that from pages, they have been doing over the past year to two years now, understanding that you are not just searching for words, which are patterns of letters, but that you're searching for people, places, and things that are connected to facts. So this is Google saying, "We understand that Wonder Woman actually has a thing known as an alter ego, and in fact we know what that is. We know when she first appeared. And they're getting that information by automatically extracting it from web pages.

Leo: Is it all from Wikipedia?

Danny: it's not just from Wikipedia. You can see it from like Nikon. Try and do a search for Nikon D7100, and you should see the third or second listing, you'll see that it pulled off of this page the sensor resolution type, the weight of the battery, the display size.

Leo: So this is a dp review article.

Danny: If you look at the page you will probably find that these facts are on there. But these facts may be extracted from other pages and Google is starting to learn that these are fact extractions. It's all part of the stuff that Google has been doing to have facts and just present backed research. Another example if you type in—this is before—what you're seeing there with the Wonder Woman stuff, that is structured data being inserted right next to a listing. But then other kinds of things that are related to this. Do a search for "reset iPhone."

Leo: A lot of people are doing that today actually.

Danny: Let's not do that. Type in "how do I reset my iPhone." See if that one does it.

Leo: Is it better to do—I was searching for something today and I couldn't find it just giving it words, I think it was Moto X, then I wanted to know if the skip worked, 2014 Moto X Skip, and then I thought maybe if I say "does the skip work with the 2014 Moto X" it would be better. Is that me, or is that a reasonable thing to do with Google?

Danny: In the past, those kinds of searches weren't good to do, because you're searching in a way that somebody probably hadn't written it. Like "how does" people hadn't written stuff that way. They would just explain it. Then the search engines got smarter, but the content forums got smarter and started writing all the content designed for the people that were doing those kinds of searches. And know what's happening is Google itself is becoming smarter and is understanding this kind of conversational question better. It's understanding how to parcel it. So when you go in there and you say something like "how old is Barack Obama" it understands you're looking for that person, you're looking for an age, and in fact that I have the exact answer so I can provide it out to you.

Leo: So that really changes—so you're confirming what I have observed, it changes the way I used to think of a search engine. I used to think that the best way to get the result you wanted would be to actually match a string of text in the page and if you can't do that, then to use, as I did originally, "skip moto 2014" in any order, but knowing that the best result would be one that combined all three of those, so kind of outguess what Google is going to do with it.

Danny: So these days now you don't have to try. And that used to be good advice. I used to teach people on how to search, and I would give them those kinds of techniques. Try to think about the person who is writing the material and how you think they would do it, but these days, really search however you feel comfortable searching and trust that the search engine will probably figure it out. To give you that other example, try a search for "how to reset iPhone" again.

Leo: OK. Yeah, in fact, I'm getting the answer instead of the search result.

Danny: You get a big box of steps. So that's another example of structured data, direct answers. It's also, and this goes a bit further, this is becoming a concern for the content owners, right?

Leo: I was just about to say that. Because I don't have to now click on this link at imore.com, I got what I wanted.

Danny: Exactly. And so as Google is doing more of this, you've got content owners that are thinking, "is this going to steal traffic away from me? And yeah, you're giving me credit." In the past, people were happy to be lifted by Google because they clearly got lots of traffic, because there wasn't enough just given away for free. So that's part of the debate that's going on. But these structured snippets are perhaps more of that. You don't necessarily need to go to those pages if you were looking for some of this information, you just need to Google search and you are done. That debate is going to continue on.

Leo: I understand what Google is thinking here though. Because they're trying to serve their customer, and if a customer says, "how do I reset an iPhone," and you know the answer, you should just put it there.

Danny: And I agree, and if they can provide it, that's great. The problem is they're trying to serve their customer, even though they don't actually know anything themselves.

Leo: that's a good point. They're serving them with somebody' else's content.

Danny: And that is what their entire business model has been built off of, right? Again, to go back to those auto driving cars, everything you want to go to at Google, the built of their funding comes from the fact that people search on Google and click on ads, and the content that surrounds the search results comes from other people. And those other people have been happy to supply that because the balance has been very favorable for a lot of them. They get traffic that comes back to them. But as Google starts to say more and more "You know what? We don't even need to send you these websites. We already know the answer, here it is." Yes, that's good for the user, but it's not so good for the websites, and it hasn't come along with Google necessarily licensing that information from anybody. Because Google is like "Hey, they're just facts."

Leo: This is what the publishers and Rupert Murdoch are upset about. Here I just searched for how to make jell-o shots. I'm telling you, this is serving your audience. Right there, in a medium bowl stir together the Jell-O and boiling water. This is like—

Gina: Well this is the "how to eat sushi" issue. Right? That we talked about last week.

Danny: That would come up. I was trying to get it to come up again so you could see it.

Leo: Here's one. How to make Jell-O shots. There you go.

Danny: But if you go to, you could see this example, if you go to—

Leo: I think Danny spends a lot of time trying queries for—

Danny: You don't want to know the stuff I try. I always feel like I'm going to get arrested for the things on my computer that I've searched for too. It's terrible. But do a search for "how to eat sushi" and see if you find my article coming up.

Leo: Yeah, because you wrote about—

Danny: So do the search on Google for "how to eat sushi" and you should just get a set of search results.

Leo: I do now, I get Youtube, I get Wikihow.

Danny: Click on my listing, because my listing should be in there. It says the NSFW. Do you see my article in those listings?

Gina: There it is. Not safe for work advice on 'how to eat sushi.'

Danny: Now scroll down a bit further and you will see what Google was showing. And you'll see that when you read it, the fourth step on "how to eat sushi" was "don't shake the soy sauce off. That's like shaking your wanker in public." Which is an exactly correct British English for shaking your thing. That's what they mean. And it's because. So you're like, really Google? You're kind of giving that advice? And it wasn't that bad. I've heard worse. But the reason is is that's not Google's advice. That is Google extracting the advice from someone else and offering it up as a direct answer. And the concern really is down the line, if Google just takes all the answers and isn't giving enough to support the sites that are producing them, the sites that produce them no longer exist. And guess what? Then Google has no answers to provide.

Leo: You're right.

Danny: Unless it just stores them all on some database, but things change over a period of time.

Leo: You're right. People need to make a cut. How to change a flat tire. And boom boom boom. Everything is here, and I guess it comes from dmv.org. Right? Because it's in the box. That must be the original source. That's their way of saying if you want to read more.

Danny: And I agree. It makes a lot of sense.

Leo: But I see the risk too.

Danny: Although dmv.org is not the DMV, it is just some private website. So, in the past, that site might have gotten a lot more traffic from this on how to change a tire. Thank you. Pull over. Whatever.

Gina: The amazing irony for me about the structured snippets is that I've been a web developer for years and years and it used to be that you used tables to layout your pages, and then everybody moved away from that, you shouldn't use tables. But this is actually tabular data. The structured step is. That they're pulling out of the page. So this Nikon D7100 page has a table with a sensor resolution on the weight, the display size, and Google has figured out a way how to discard tables that are using formatting and not very interesting, and pull in data tables that are actually relevant and interesting. So it's like everybody put a table on their pages, I feel like that's the take away.

Danny: It can still do it even if things aren't in tables, but that's true. There used to be things you'd have to avoid with tables, the issue was more that the Google search engine used to consider the text higher on the page more relevant than lower, so when you'd use a table the table would sometimes would break apart, so all your—that hasn't been so much an issue. But it's kind of related was that for a long time, Google didn't want people doing meta data. They're like "we don't trust meta data. People lie. We don't support the meta keyword tags." And these days, Google wants you to mark up behind the scenes, not just doing stuff with tables—

Leo: For their benefit.

Danny: But also mark up your content so they really understand it, and OK, this page has a review. This review has five stars associated with this product because you've marked all these sorts of things that are up along with it from there.

Leo: Wasn't this the semantic web movement, this whole idea?

Danny: Yeah.

Gina: This is kind of like the semantic web, except a lot messier. Right? The original vision of the semantic web was that everyone was going to have these amazing, perfectly structured XML files with these pre-defined standard relationships, and anybody would be able to build an engine and suck it all in and know everything about the world, right? And that never happened. The reality is that web pages are messy and they use lots of different tags, and Google has just gotten really good at taking in anything and figuring out what's important. But it is, semantic web.

Danny: Exactly. And it's this hybrid, because in the Tim Berners-Lee idea is exactly like you say. Everything would be nice and neat, and that never happened. Not only was it not nice and neat, but you had people actively trying to be misleading with their meta data. So what Google has learned to do is both take the structured semantic data and extract the data, even if it's not structured, and add it all up to decide when they want to trust all that information together. And they're doing all this cross checking and trying to decide whether or not they consider something to be a fact. Because how old is Barack Obama? Well, if we have 100 different places where we see his birth date we feel pretty good about that, so we'll calculate it up from there. And that's why we're finally seeing this emerge, where you get these structured answers, but it really is a slow revolution in terms of what that means for publishers as well, and no one really knows the answer to it yet.

Leo: Reavermike in our chat room says, "This is just straight up plagiarism. Using other's thoughts and ideas without permission."

Danny: Well, I have to say, if you type into Google "what is a scraper site," that will explain to you that it cannot be plagiarism. So you've got to type this in. OK? Type in "what is a scraper site," and then the first thing you should see is a thing at the top of Google search results that says, "A scraper site is a website that copies content from other websites using web scraping." Or effectively plagiarizing it, right? Now scroll a little bit further down and you should see my article. It says, "Tweet Showing how Google itself is a Scraper Site goes Viral." Click on that. So, what happened was, earlier this year—

Leo: Oh my god! That definition is scraped from Wikipedia!

Danny: So, earlier this year, Matt Cutts, a good friend of the show's, he did this tweet where he said, "Hey, if anybody spots scraper sites, please let us know here at Google. We want to try to wipe these things out. We don't like it when people take content from other people." So this guy named Dan Barker tweeted back "I think I've spotted one, Matt." It was like up to 40,000 re-tweets. I've never seen anything like it, especially for a topic that is so SCO oriented or whatever. Oh my god.

Gina: I'm favoriting this tweet right now.

Leo: Me too. You'll join 3,382 other favoriters. And 33,000 re-tweets.

Gina: I think I spotted one. Note the similarities. It was a well-executed tweet.

Danny: But it also crystallizes that conflict between the publishers and Google taking their content and are you giving it back and Google wanting it to have rules saying other sites shouldn't take content.

Leo: I have to say, it's a very fine line that Google walks. And this is why they're being taken to task in Europe, in some cases. If Jeff Jarvis were here, remember last week he ranted about the Murdoch article about what Google is doing, but I could understand that there is opposition from the content creators. Hey, wait a minute.

Gina: But if you don't want your content to show up in these knowledge boxes, can't you just disallow? Isn't there—

Leo: But then you're not in the search results.

Gina: is that true Danny? You're either in or you're out? If you're in, they get to display however they want?

Danny: That's part of the issue that had been going on in Europe, and this is where the publishers, especially in Germany, have just been going overboard. They complain Google stole all their content, and Google's like don't be in Google. No big deal. But then they complain, well we want to be in Google, but we don't want to be in Google news. So then they finally got Google to pressure them enough to say, OK. You can be in Google news; you don't have to be in regular Google. And then they said, even though the law changed and they had to choose to be in Google News, they still said that they thought that Google was using too much of their stuff, and they wanted to be paid even more. And the answer is you don't have to be in Google news. You don't have to be in Google. You can opt out of this stuff. And they don't, because by and large, the mainstream publishers get a ton of traffic for free from Google.

Leo: And if you look at that Jell-O shots, there is a link to the rest of that article, and it is at the very top. You are number one on the search result, so there is a payoff in a way.

Danny: Everything that's going on in Europe has nothing to do with these last two years worth of direct answers.

Leo: Oh, I understand.

Danny: Because the Europe thing is so old, and it's so—

Leo: They'll be suing about this in a couple of years.

Danny: Exactly.

Gina: And I've got to admit. When I'm on my phone and I want a quick answer, and I search for something, I don't want to scroll through a heavy page with flashbanner ads—

Leo: Well isn't that what Siri is doing?

Gina: Right.

Leo: Exactly the same thing. How do I make a Jell-O shot?

Danny: I think all this is correct, but it is that key thing that if Google is going to provide answers, and it's just going to give the answers, is it going over the tipping point where it needs to actually license that content.

Siri: Let me check that. Okay, I've found this on the web for how do you make a Jello shot!

Leo: Siri does not, it should read me the recipe. (laughter)

Gina: It reads you the steps, yeah.

Leo: It does give me the same link. But not the snippet. That's interesting.

Gina: Interesting, interesting. I have a hard time coming at it from the perspective of like the content providers need to get paid. Like I get that if the content providers aren't getting traffic then they don't produce the content and then the answers don't happen, it's just it's hard to get out of the mindset of like this is obviously the best thing for users, if your content you know, if the Lifehacker tutorial stats were at the top of the page, I would take that as a compliment, I'd be like “Hey, Google's decided I'm the authority on this topic” if someone needs to dig deeper they're going to click through and if they're not it's okay, it feels like a free chapter for the introduction to my book on Amazon. It kind of feels like here's a sample of what you'll get. But I know that not a lot of people feel that way and I know that this tough, things are changing a lot and Google makes one tiny change and it can change somebody's business.

Leo: Okay Moto X, how do I make a Jello shot?

Danny: I had that exact thing where I would search for like, it was earlier this year I would search for what is SCO and they were listing the definition from our page and our link and I was like “Wow!” You're just going to take our definition and then you're done and then they switched over later that year where they took the definition from Wikipedia rather than from us and I was like “Why are you taking it from Wikipedia and from not us?”

Gina: Right right right, we've got the authority on this!

Leo: So there is some payoff, you get some authority. What if Google said “And we'll cut you a penny for everybody that reads it or something like that.”

Danny: Well I don't know that they necessarily have to pay, it's still so early that we're digesting it, what I can tell you is there hasn't been a whole scale reporting of people saying I no longer get as much Google traffic as I've gotten in the past. Which is a sign that these direct answers probably are not robbing enough traffic from people as you might think that they would.

Leo: Yeah.

Danny: Right.

Leo: Right.

Danny: So and Google still seems to be sending a good chunk of traffic to people so I think I'll sort of watch and see and I think the real case will come into a situation where if you do see that it starts to tip the other way where publishers might be like “You really are taking answers, there really is no incentive on some of these queries for people to click through. What way can you reward us or assure us that we're going to be better off down the line?” and it could be that Google says “You know what..” I'm sorry I'm just.. I said okay Google and now I'm trying to search on my Desktop.

Leo: It's, we've got to fix this. This is a problem, I can't my phone, everything is all responding..

Danny: It's fine. But it might be that people say, you know we want to be paid directly but Google could as easily say “You know if you want to participate in our direct answers program, we're also going to consider you to be a trusted source, you're doing better in rankings or a whole range of other stuff. Or maybe that's already happening too and people might say “Well great, that's a good trade-off because sure you could have these direct answers and I'm going to get a little credit but you know what, that's alright because I know on a lot of these long detailed searches I'm going to pick up traffic from there. So I don't know what the answer is, and again it is so early I think the real concern is that Google has not really shown a lot of concern about what they're doing to the publishers as they've rolled this out. Then now like “Hey publishers let's all get together and talk about what you think about this” or “What we should do?” or “Is it right?” just “We're doing it!”

Leo: Maybe they want to set a precedent.

Danny: Yeah, and they might want to get the Europe thing settled before they start doing this stuff.

Leo: Let's not bring up another issue, yeah.

Gina: (laughing)

Leo: Let's take a break, come back. I want to do the ChangeLog, I'm going to do the ChangeLog. Actually Gina's going to do the ChangeLog so get the trumpets ready because we're going to do the ChangeLog, right after a word from Braintree. This is a brand new sponsor on the show and I'm really glad to get them on because you've been using Braintree just don't even know about it. So message to developers: Anybody who's doing mobile apps and you're trying to get a payments API in there, I know this is kind of a specialized thing but there are lots of them and there's one that you want to do. It's the new one touch system from Braintree, the fastest, easiest, most secure way to pay in-app. You've used Braintree if you've used Venmo, if you've used Arbian Bee, if you've used Uber, Uber uses Braintree. Hotel Tonight, Living Social. You know, Github uses Braintree so you've probably used Braintree, it makes the payment experiences in these applications seamless. Dare I say, magical. And now you can do it in your app too. Braintree scaled with these companies from early stage startups to the successful companies they are today and did just great, you can scale with your business too. You know the problem is, and I as users we know this, when you are about to buy something especially in mobile, and you get to the payment part it gets often so horrible that you just go “Forget it.” I've done this so many times, in fact there is a 70% rate of abandonment at the cart. 70% of people stop, they're ready to buy, ready to push buy but your cart is so bad that they stop! And that's on desktop, it's even higher on mobile. So I love Braintree because it's a full step payment solution. Everything your customer might want, credit, debit, Paypal, Venmo, Venmo is run by Braintree. Bitcoin, yes and they're going to be Apple Pay as well. 130 currencies all over the world, fraud protection yes, customer service second to none. And don't worry about it taking days to integrate payments with Braintree you'll do it in minutes with just a few lines of code. Android, iOS, Javascript, SDK in seven languages .net, node.js, Java, Pearl, PHP, Python, Ruby. Those kinds of languages. Not French, German and Italian. Elegant code, in fact you could do this with ten lines of code in your app. Right now, when you start out with Braintree, Braintreepayments.com/twit. Get that right, now. Braintreepayments.com/twit, your first $50,000 in transactions are fee-free. That's nice. That's nice. The most secure way to pay, if you're a developer, if you're mobile especially, one touch from Braintree. My brain is not working today, Braintreepayments.com/twit. Really sweet, just go to the website, they actually have a lot of information there. The SDK is documented there, it's really interesting. Braintreepayments.com/twit. It's for a specialized group although I have to say a group of people doing mobile is growing rapidly. Alright ladies and gentlemen it's time for, play the trumpets, the Google ChangeLog

(Trumpets play)

Announcer: The Google ChangeLog!

Leo: La la la la la. Gina Trapani has the latest from Google.

Gina: Well if you're wondering what's going on with Google Plus these days, Google isn't saying much but at least one new change might be an indicator. Google is no longer requiring new Gmail users to connect their account to a Google plus profile. So you sign up for a brand new Gmail account, you'll get to a page which says “Create your public Google Plus profile” and there is a “No Thanks” option.

Leo: That's wild!

Gina: There you go, I remember when everyone was up in arms because you had to create a Google Plus profile if you had a Google account period. This is kind of a big turnaround.

Leo: I think so.

Gina: But there you go, Google Plus profiles no longer required for Gmail. Another nice, I think I would say user-friendly change, Google Play is going to start listing in-app purchase price-ranges for apps. So starting September 30^th, Google will start to display the range of prices an app can charge within app purchases within the playstore.

Leo: It's because they lost a court battle in Europe I remember.

Gina: Exactly, yeah. This is no doubt in response to that right? The dust up over children racking up purchases and their parents footing the bill. So this is nice, you know, because when you download an app currently in Google Play it just “an app purchased” you don't know how much or, you know, if you can use the app without buying an app purchase or if not. So this is a nice step towards letting consumers know what they're getting into. Actually, Leo you could probably speak to this. Chrome for iOS now added support for app extensions and this is a new iOS8 thing. Which I actually haven't had time to play with very much, but so if you've got Chrome installed in iOS, to share a website from Chrome to another app, you tap the hamburger menu and select share and then you can send pages to any app that supports extensions. Now extensions are new in iOS8 right Leo?

Leo: Yeah and in fact there are a couple of ways they're use is a little surprising for example the password manager. For example, one password and I just learned Last Pass does this as well, will add themselves to the share menu but when you share you're not really sharing, you're going to get a password. Which is kind of cool, before with Apple, I'll go back to the share menu, and this is of course with menu Apple apps, all the Apple apps and many third party apps, and the good news is Chrome has added this because of the capability which was added to iOS8. Previously you could basically email, Twitter, Facebook. You could message, now you've got.. this is just like Android, right? So as you add apps, this list will get longer and you could turn it off or on, so you get share capabilities which is great.

Gina: Right so similar to Androids and Tens.

Leo: Very much like in Tens, I'm not clear because on one of my phones it seems like the list is automatically populated and quite long. I'm not sure exactly when it does that and when it gives you a chance to turn it on. I don't know. But yeah, this is very much like what Android does. The Android does it automatically. And in fact that's a detriment because you can get an awfully long list.

Gina: You can get a very long list, and then you have apps that help you manage the list right?

Leo: Right. (both laughing)

Leo: Extensions are iOS8's response to all of the capabilities, the inner app capabilities of Android. Apple, which has traditionally sealed each application hermetically is now finally letting applications talk to one another. I think that's huge.

Gina: Right.

Leo: And to their credit, they understood that that was a security risk and they didn't want to do it, now they've done it in a way that's much more judicious. They've done it one step at a time and I think that's a good thing.

Gina: Yeah it's very nice that you can turn them on or off by default.

Leo: Yeah things like that.

Gina: Lifehacker reports that apps like Glasspass work some of the time but not all of the time, apps have to update to iOS8 to enable the hooks to share so you might not see a whole lot right away, it sounds like this is still pretty new and some apps are working out bugs but nice to see anyway.

Leo: iOS8 is very buggy in general.

Gina: Is it really?

Leo: Oh god yeah.

Gina: I'm fielding a lot of bug reports about my iOS app at the moment.

Leo: It's not you.

Gina: It's not me.

Leo: It's not you, it's Apple.

Gina: I'm going to tell all my angry users “It's not me!”

Leo: It's not me, no. But everybody who does apps for iOS is going to have to address it because, there's issues.

Gina: Yeah, and it's going to go out to everyone. Or it already has.

Leo: Yeah, well adoption traditionally is very high in iOS, this one was a little slower than iOS7. I think it's 43% now. That's still pretty high, it's only been out a week.

Gina: Wow, it's only been a week. Wow. That is fast.

Leo: And then there's the people who have 8.0.1 who won't be reporting bugs for some time now. Because they don't have any Internet access.

Gina: (Laughing) Oh right! This is what you were talking about earlier.

Leo: Actually.. say again?

Gina: So the update to 8.0.1 cut off your Internet access?

Leo: It cut off your LTE, your voice, on not all but some iPhone 6s apparently, and it cut off your touch ID. Your fingerprint reader. But that's all!

Danny: Cut off your finger.

Gina: But the fix is out, probably functional.

Leo: There isn't a fix out, they pulled it pretty quickly, like within an hour and the fix is kind of a restore your iPhone fix. (laughing)

Gina: Oohh..

Danny: Oohh..

Leo: You press the option key and you can restore 8.0.

Gina: Wow.

Leo: Yeah it's pretty ugly, about as ugly as it can get frankly.

Gina: Sorry iOS users, woof.

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: Well.

Leo: It will slow down the adoption rate I think.

Gina: I think so. Go ahead Danny.

Danny: I was just saying MG Siegler tweeted something like “Good job putting an update that takes everybody's minds off of bendgate.”

Leo: Yeah! Hey your phone bends? Who cares you can't use it now!

Danny: Nobody's talking about the bendgate issue any more.

Gina: They have it in their back pocket just in case antennagate happens again.

Danny: Come up with something that really screws things up.

Leo: Just amazing.

Gina: Alright last item in the ChangeLog, Google Maps update. Users in 20 new countries around the world just got navigation in Google Maps. The expansion is aimed primarily at navigation coverage in Africa, the Caribbean and South America. There are a few outliers in Nepal and Malta. Long list of countries here which my computer is currently loading, Angola, Bahamas, Bolivia, Nepal, Trinidad.

Leo: I didn't realize you couldn't navigate in the Caribbean.

Gina: That's because you're an American just like me.

Leo: So if you were in the Bahamas and you fired up Google Maps it just says “Well you're here. Good luck getting there.”

Gina: Yeah it was just maps, pre-navigation.

Leo: Wow.

Gina: Yeah, so it was something but it just wasn't everything we were used to getting. Sorry I'm so pixelated.

Leo: You're fine. And you are Gina Trapani and that was the Google ChangeLog.

Leo: (Humming) So it's funny because as we see the Apple users who have been in their little cocoon of Apple Happy Secure Happy Land get these new features like extensions and third party keyboards, the shock and horror with which they're greeting these is interesting. Maybe we should address this, you can now use Swiftkey which we've been using for years on Android and love. Swype, same thing. Flexkey, and a bunch of other keyboard alternatives on iOS including one that I wish we had on Android which allows you not to respond with text but with animated gifs. (laughing) It's an animated gif keyboard! And it's got thousands, it's amazing! But when you install a new keyboard on iOS you get a big bad warning saying hey watch out, third party keyboards can transmit all the data that you type to their servers and you should be wary of that. And it's scaring Apple users, the warning on Android is similar but not terrifying, right? Can't remember.

Gina: Yeah I mean, I don't even know if keyboards, is there a keylogger specific warning message? I don't think so, although you know it's funny I've been watching iOS users try Swiftkey and one of my friends was like “This prompted me to sign into Facebook and it uses my Facebook status updates to figure out how I write!” He just had his mind blown like “This is creepy! This is too creepery like why is it doing this, it should have told me!” And I was like “This is Swiftkey, it's been around for a long time, this is what it does, yes it's weird that you sign into Facebook with your keyboard.”

Leo: It's a good thing!

Gina: It is a very unexpected thing unless you know about it, right? But it was an interesting sort of wake up call. Oh this is a keyboard that has to tell you why you have to sign into your social networks.

Leo: Right. But you do get, I'm pretty sure and I'm going to install Swiftkey on my new phone because it's not installed yet. I'm pretty..

Danny: I think the thing about the Android phones too that's different is that even if you don't install Swiftkey, most of them at this point will have Swype typing of some sort already built into them.

Leo: The Google keyboard does.

Danny: Right but like every phone that I have right now I can Swype type as Android and I didn't have to install anything or worry about any security issues that were coming on. Plus I didn't have to kind of lose one of my keys so that I can switch back and forth whereas when I did it with the iPhone it was like “Hallelujah” I can finally do the Swype typing but it's a little awkward at times that I have to, if it hasn't come up with the Swiftkey I've got to push a thing and then I have this little globe thing that's in my way and it you know, it works. It's not as polished as I think it is when you're using Android and then all of the security stuff that comes with it, it's like Apple why didn't you just find a way to make that native despite typing. How difficult would that have been?

Leo: So you think that that's why people are using third party keyboards on iOS, they just want Swype. They want Swiftkey flow or equal.

Danny: There may be other reasons why but I haven't gone through to see which ones are big.

Leo: I think there are other reasons, I'll tell you the other reason. I'll give you the other reason. Apple still refuses to do anything but uppercase letters on its keycaps. Even when you're lowercase.

Gina: What is up with that?

Danny: What do you mean uppercase?

Gina: The letters are always uppercase.

Leo: Like a typewriter. Even if you're typing lowercase letters, the keycaps of the keyboard are uppercase.

Gina: That was one of the first questions I got from family members who got iOS. They were like, I don't understand, why aren't the letters lower?

Leo: That's reason two that I immediately wanted to change the keyboard. So maybe you guys don't remember but when you install a third party keyboard on Android like Swiftkey which I do on every Android device, you get this warning: “Attention: This input method may be able to collect all the text you type, including personal data like passwords and credit card numbers. It comes from the app Swiftkey. Use this input method? Okay or cancel. It's very similar actually to what Apple's saying, for some reason we Android users just go “Oh yeah, oh whatever.” And say okay. And Apple users are terrified. I'm getting calls, people “Oh is it safe? I heard Swiftkey sent stuff to the servers and..” And then Steve Gibson said yesterday, which I didn't want to say anything but, “Well Swiftkey sends stuff to the servers but Swype doesn't.” How do you know you don't know?

Gina: Well yeah you'd have to set up a network sniffer right and use it to see.

Leo: Yeah. Right.

Gina: Yeah. In a way I feel like Android users to some degree have been kind of Windows Vista'd. Like we've been asked permission so many times that we just give it give it give it. Dan you tweeted the iOS prompt that said like “Hey, Facebook has been collecting your location data.”

Danny: Oh yeah yeah.

Gina: Do you want to keep doing this?

Leo: Oh get ready. Every app will do this once, Danny. Every single one.

Danny: But you know what, somebody tweeted back to me how they liked it didn't all happen at once. Every time I would turn on my phone I got a different reminder and I didn't mind it. It was like “Oh.”

Leo: Wait a minute! Or it could just honor your.. because it asks you the first time, it says..

Danny: Yeah but it wasn't violating anything.

Leo: And you say yes, and then a little later, a day or two later it says: “You know, it's still doing that, is that okay?”

Danny: I thought that was fine, I thought that was totally cool.

Gina: Yeah I actually kind of liked it because...

Danny: I appreciated the reminder that Facebook is doing this because, you know. I just appreciated it.

Gina: What if I'm not using Facebook? Maybe I decided oh you know what I don't need this to be using my location data in the background, I'm going to uninstall this. This is the issue. If you want to use an app you have to grant it these permissions. Maybe I try the app, I try apps all the time and then don't need them later, but they're running in the background and I kind of want to be like no, but.. yeah this issue of constantly being prompted for permissions or being prompted with this huge wall of permissions with subcategories that have supposedly been made simpler, there's got to be a better way.

Leo: Well the choice is clear. Android asks you once when you install the app, and then presumes that you've read that and you've approved it and that's that. Now you can get a list can't you? Of all the apps using find location, that's all it is by the way is find location.

Gina: Yeah, yeah.

Danny: Yeah.

Leo: And on Apple same thing, you have to approve it when you install the app, the first time you use the app, not instead when you install it but the first time you use it it'll say do you want to give this app location permission, you say yes, you still can go in the settings and see who's getting location. But for some reason Apple's decided that a few days later it wants to warn you on each app doing this. Now I'm hoping that's not going to happen every few days because I have 159 apps and it's..

Danny: Yeah.

Leo: And it's happening a lot.

Danny: But the same thing to me also that I'm assuming that there's some kind of logic going on. Because I did not get hit with every app that I've authorized to do that.

Leo: You will. No, you will.

Danny: I, but it was the things that came up immediately or the things that I'm probably using the most.

Leo: Right.

Danny: And that made sense so maybe it'll come down the line, it's going to.. I'm wondering what the trigger is. Like hey we've noticed that Facebook has now done it's 100^th update at your location. To where as you installed emoji keyboard.

Leo: Let's talk next week Danny after you've seen the 50^th one of those.

Danny: Alright.

Leo: There's two problems. One it's annoying, but two is fatigue. And as you pointed out we Android users are so used to it we go “Yeah, yeah yeah.” There's a risk if you warn people too much. I like what Apple does which is it warns you not on install, but it warns you the first time it needs the permissions, you have to explicitly say so. But that seems to me sufficient. To continue to warn you is a little nanny, but that you know, I don't know.. whatever. It doesn't seem to bother you.

Gina: So you like the iOS approach of the in-flow initial permission to stop the reminder.

Leo: I do.

Gina: Yeah I agree.

Leo: Because it's very easy to ignore the permissions you're giving an app when you're installing it because it's a long list.

Gina: Just give me the app, yeah.

Leo: Yeah yeah yeah.

Danny: Yeah.

Leo: So many apps for instance want location information, your contacts and your photos. On Android you'll see all three of those requests only once when you install the app. On iOS you'll see it when you, when it actually asks for those permissions when you first run the app and you want to access the camera role say hey do you want to give this permission, I think that's exactly the right time because you know right then why it's wanting the camera role and what it is and I think that's when you can best make that decision. But I question the need to continue to remind me. But this is Apple saying, and by the way I guess this is a story for us because it's very clear in the last few interviews Tim Cook's given, this is Apple saying “Oh we've decided to be the privacy security company” and other companies are, you know, our business is selling you hardware other companies are selling your information. You know what we're talking about.

Danny: We'd never do that.

Leo: We'd never do that except with iAds but that's another story.

Gina: That's the marketing opportunity for them.

Leo: It's huge.

Gina: You know, they're capitalizing on peoples fear of what Google knows about them.

Leo: I think frankly that's good positioning and Apple has done some things to make it better..

Danny: Or you know, we would never you know, target you. With ads or anything. But we would partner with a big company that pays us lots of money to be the default search engine and probably gives us 90% of all the revenues when you do a search on our device and go over the search engine.

Leo: Yeah. Do we know how much Apple gets from Google each year because it's the default search engine?

Danny: I saw some estimate that it might have been like $2 billion or so.

Leo: Two billion! But..

Danny: It's a lot, and they're going to get a lot off of it, and they never disclose to you that they have paid or are getting paid from Google to do that. You barely even know that there was a deal that was ever struck so I appreciate it with..

Leo: So that's when you're using the Google search in Safari, that information is being leaked. When you use it in Siri it masks that information. I was told, and I may be wrong, that all of those searches are coming from Apple not from you.

Danny: Well they're going to come from Apple, yes. Although when you click to go through to a particular site if you do that, it might change. And eventually maybe Siri will happen where they don't target you in any sort of way, you know, with the third parties or whatever.

Leo: I wonder though, I thought I remember Safari was doing this too. But that would be forgoing $2 billion a year.

Danny: I think Safari has moved to by default to HTPS searches. But that just means you're going to have a secure connection when you do your search with Google. Google still knows who you are and in fact you'll probably be logged in, you know, with Google. You might be logged in with Safari and even if you're not logged in, Google's probably still going to cookie you even if you're on a secure thing because it's not like next time you go to Google it says oh you're still on a secure thing, I'll throw away the cookie I assigned you last time so. I appreciated what Apple said but what they didn't say is “But we also have deals with these big companies and make a lot of money off of them because they in turn make a lot of money off of you in turn by doing that stuff that we said we don't do directly. So.

Gina: That's a good point.

Leo: I would hope, here by the way is the Apple warning just so that you can compare it to the Android warning. I've turned on Swype. It says “Allow full access for Swype Keyboards? Full access allows the developer of this keyboard to transmit anything you type, including things you have previously typed with this keyboard. This could include sensitive information such as your credit card number or street address.” The Google warning's a little more clear, it's coming from.. it's pretty much the same isn't it?

Gina: Yeah they're pretty similar.

Leo: But it scares Apple people more because they've never confronted it before. I love it, somebody in the chatroom saying “Why are always bagging on Apple, can't you just be..” (laughter) It's like, excuse me? I think Apple people sometimes say I don't … nee nee nee, I don't want to hear that!!

Danny: Everybody says that. You're going to have Android people do the same sort of thing. Why do you always pick on Android? Why don't you ever pick on Windows?

Leo: Oh no no, I hear it from everybody. Absolutely.

Gina: People take these things very personally.

Danny: And then there's the three people still using Blackberry who get really upset. Well you see there's only three people using Blackberry.

Leo: I'm just going to see really quickly, if I do a search on the new iPhone if the default search is Google. By the way, immediately before, yeah it's a Google search, before it does the search it pulls up a Wikipedia entry, it does a search snippet right away before I even hit go.

Gina: That's the Google search app? No.

Leo: No this is Safari on..

Gina: Oh that's Safari. Mhm.

Leo: Safari on iOS. And then if I hit return, I get the Google results. So it is it's actually doing it on Google. I thought it was going to use Bing too. I think Bing is available if you wish. But against $2 billion worth of revenue.

Danny: It gets complicated, being as available for spotlight searches and then Siri but Safari still defaults to using Google although I'll have to go back and look because it's interesting that if they're pulling up Wikipedia as you type, I don't know if that's Google doing that or if it's Safari doing that.

Leo: I wondered too. Right.

Danny: I'm going to have to go look into that now. That just bummed my afternoon, thanks.

Leo: (laughing) And, we trust Swiftkey right? Apple users if you wish to trust Swiftkey you can, I would trust Swype. Here's to me the bottom line. These are all well-known big companies, it is possible with the packets for them to see what's being sent back and I think they would be discovered if they were to do anything nefarious, they'd be discovered quite quickly. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Danny: And can I just say those, when I was typing in Gbac, that was just because I was trying to understand some of the dope lingo from The Wire.

(Leo and Gina laughing)

Danny: If you look at my search history right now..

Leo: Have you noticed..?

Danny: Looks like a start up in the heroin trade or something. What the hell is that?

Leo: I guess trying to understand The Wire. Have you guys noticed that the, it seems like Google is doing a better job of catching the stuff I search for and populating the ads in other pages as I search around, it seems like it's really working well lately. I search for something and I see ads for it all over from now on.

Gina: Yeah, I have noticed that.

Leo: It seems like it's working better doesn't it?

Gina: Yeah, it follows you around. The stuff that you're interested in. And you know, I continue to get that feeling of like Google knows a lot about me from now and from ads and from search suggestions of like things I've searched for before.

Leo: Right

Gina: Yeah. Yeah, very smart. They have enough money from Google X and Google Y.

Leo: They're doing a good job.

Gina: They're doing a good job at their job.

Leo: Let's see what else before we wrap things up, we're getting to the end of our program schedule. You can tweet a Wolfram Alpha language program. Tweet a program and it will return, what is that? Where did that come from? Let me try it.

Gina: Yeah, you can so.

Leo: Tweet Wolfram Alpha.

Gina: Wolfram Alpha is the coolest..

Leo: I love it.

Gina: It's such a cool product.

Leo: That nobody knows about or uses.

Gina: Nobody knows about or uses but there's the thing, I know about it and I don't use it although until something like this happens I'm like oh cool let me try this! I try it and I'm impressed.

Leo: Oh I get it, so you can tweet code in Wolfram Alpha, obviously 140 characters or less. To Wolfram TAP and it will run your program and tweet the result.

Gina: Which is pretty awesome.

Leo: Now, have you played, so this is a really good one, geographics text style hello 150 georange world will put “Hello” on a world map and it'll tweet it back to you. It tells you two things, first of all that it's a very succinct language, it's a very powerful language. Have you played with this language? The Wolfram language? Look at this one, this is kind of like Mathematica, which is Wolfram's in the back.

Gina: Yeah that cube of spheres is amazing.

Leo: This is the RGB colors in a cube of spheres. And it tweets it back at you.

Gina: I haven't actually done this but I am now.

Leo: You're a programmer, we count on you.

Gina: Yeah this is neat and they attach the results as an image kind of as a twitter card, yeah that's very cool.

Leo: Wow look you can do fractals. Neato.

Gina: But again, it's like I just want, Wolfram just seems like a thing I want to use every day in my life I'm just never rendering cubes of spheres and the RGB scale very often you know what I mean? Like, it's not something I need to do that often.

Leo: I know but it's fun. Well here's one.

Gina: It's fun.

Leo: All the flags, of Europe, sized by population.

Gina: Yeah, that's cool.

Leo: Wow.

Gina: That's really cool.

Leo: With a 140 character tweet. Alright, tweet us your best Wolfram Alpha language. That's just crazy. It makes me want to learn the language which is obviously the intent. Are we still waiting on the Nexus 7 phone or 6 or whatever it would be? Nexus 6 it would be.

Gina: I don't know, what do you guys think?

Leo: Chad you're the one right? You're the one who'd be waiting.

Chad: Oh my gosh, the rumors, there are no solid great rumors.

Leo: Right, and the Moto X.

Chad: Everyone expects..

Leo: Sorry..

Chad: I don't know if I can in this office. As you've demonstrated.

Danny: What's the next Android version? Isn't that Android L that we're waiting for?

Leo: L, the L word yeah.

Gina: L, yeah.

Danny: So we have to get a phone that comes out with Android L.

Leo: Well it's due next month according to the Washington Post.

Gina: Yeah, so might be looking at a new phone running the L.

Leo: And by the way default encryption, remember this is something Apple announced, Apple used to have a waiting line for law enforcement to decrypt phones. You either fill out a form and send the phone to Apple and in a few months you'd get it back decrypted, Apple has announced we will no longer do that, there will no longer be a line because we don't have the capability, we've changed the default encryption and it's strong encryption and now L will do that too. Which is good!

Gina: Yeah that's great.

Leo: This is where companies influence one another. I love it.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: So yeah, you're right, they have to release.. do they always with a new version of Android have a new phone? A new Nexus?

Chad: That's what some of the developers tweeted was that listen if we're going to release an operating system we need to release some sort of hardware. We're going to have hardware to bundle with, which was from a tweet.

Leo: that makes sense

Gina: A reference device, right? A reference device about what the default Android L or Limoncello or Lollipop or whatever it is, what the experience is going to be.

Leo: Well you could just update the Nexus 5 and say that's it.

Gina: You could but then you wouldn't get all the money coming in on the holiday season on hardware.

Leo: Oh it's a profit thing.

Gina: I don't know.

Danny: But I don't know how much they sell for the Nexus 5.

Leo: Yeah, I don't think it's a big money maker.

Danny: You know, it's nice having it but.. I could see, is the Moto X out unlocked yet?

Leo: Yeah this is unlocked. And it's not exactly pure Android but all the Moto customizations are in Moto programs the connect program for instance, so it's pretty pure.

Danny: What I'm wondering is whether they just put out the Nexus 5 L or something and it's just the Moto X or whatever.

Leo: Some nice little fun. I like it.

Danny: It will be interesting, you know. Potentially they could just put the Nexus 5 back out and now it's... maybe it's time for a fablet. Maybe they're desperately coming out with the Nexus 5.5L.

Leo: The Blackberry Passport L.

Danny: Yeah, right.

Gina: What??

Leo: This just came out? Would you pay $599 for this unlocked? It is a passport sized blackberry full physical keyboard, nice screen actually.

Danny: Oh, no you had me at blackberry.

Leo: (Laughing) We shouldn't mock it. I want them to succeed. This is a product that some who have been very interested in. You know, there's such a limited store compared to the Android store, compared to the Windows Phone Store it's limited so, it's also kind of a weird form factor. It's like a poptart. It's like you gotta have, they have a picture of people trying to hold it. It's not good.

Danny: Now, Leo, the Wablets are going to be great.

Leo: What?

Danny: Wablets.

Leo: What's a Wablet?

Danny: A wide tablet. Yeah you'll see. They're going to be the leaders in Wablet technology and you're not going to be talking poptarts any more, you'll be going every phone should be Wablet sized.

Leo: Wascawwy wablet?

Danny: Has anybody done that yet? Wablet.com.

Leo: You just invented it, go get it Danny.

Danny: No I'm sure somebody's done it. Oh, no there aren't that many wablets.

Leo: Alright, I'm going to give you time to register that domain name and when we come back we're going to get our fix of the week. Danny Sullivan that wascally wablet from searchengineland.com, Gina Trapani one of our regulars. Do you shave Danny or are you just naturally boyish?

Danny: No I shaved for the show.

Leo: Thank you!

Gina: Aw thank you Danny! That was nice.

Leo: I appreciate that, did you use your Harry's? Do you know about Harry's? I love Harry's. This is..

Danny: Oh my goodness, yes I do.

Leo: Do you? Yeah, Harry's is a shave club basically, I get my blades every other month and the fabulous Harry's shave cream which is a critical part of the whole thing. You know if somebody could go on my desk, I don't know if they've announced it yet, but there's a couple of new Harry's products you can get from harrys.com. The new foaming shave gel, and the aftershave are here. Harry's is founded by one of the founders of Warby Parker, Jeff, he said just like Warby Parker, here's a business, the shaving blade business that is dominated by monopolies effectively that are keeping products artificially high. So high that now when you go to get razor blades at the drug store, it's not just New York City, Gina, everywhere in the country, here in Petaluma they're locked up. You have to get a clerk and he'll check your ID and your passport before you can get the shaving equipment. They're so expensive. Well Harry's is better for less, they actually bought, they looked around and said who makes great blades? They found a company in Germany that makes, the only company that makes really great blades, this is the Truman set. I have the Winston at home which is engraved metal but some people prefer the Truman. But you know, the handles aren't really the key, the key is this amazing blade. Made in Harry's own factory in Germany, they own the factory in Germany. Andy and Jeff said we could do better than those $8 blades, if you visit Harry's.com shop around, pick a set, I actually have to say I kind of like this Truman, it's pretty nice, but the Winston is good too and you can get that engraved and then you can get with the kit you're going to get the shave cream, the two blades, so you're all set to go and then you can have your blades and your cream delivered monthly. I haven't tried the new foaming shave gel. Ooh that's nice. Oh that smells good too. Harry's.com, here's the deal you get $5 off your first order when you use the offer code twig, this will be the closest shave you've ever had. Harrys.com. Now what do I do?

Danny: Shave?

Leo: I couldn't resist.

(laughter)

Leo: I have to finish the show this way! Offer code..

Danny: Santa, will you bring me a Nexus?

Leo: Ho ho ho.

Gina: Can we have a Nexus?

Leo: A Nexus 6? You've been a good little boy and girl.

(laughter)

Leo: Ho ho ho!

Danny: One with encryption please!

Leo: That foaming shave gel really foams! That was a little dab'll do ya and it just woo!

Gina: It did foam right up.

Leo: Whoa, I didn't expect that. And then afterwards you're going to want to use...

(laughter)

Leo: What are you laughing at? I got gel everywhere. Afterwards, you're going to want to use the Harry's shave lotion. Why's my phone making music now? Oh it's time to do something else. Well I'll tell you what, the Moto X alarm says it's time.. how do I stop this? Don't you hate new phones? It's time for our picks of the week. Let's start with actually our tip of the week with Gina Trapani, Gina?

Gina: So if you've got yourself an Android device and you want to get a taste of material design before Android L launches, Google actually released a little quiz app called Topeka and it's free in the Google Play store, that's Topeka it's a quiz app, you log in, you get to take quizzes about food or history or music, yeah! It's actually, they're actually good quizzes. But it also gives you kind of an idea of what material design is like. The cards kind of move around and slide, have the big numbers and sort of the more material design look and feel.

Leo: Oh I gotta try this.

Gina: Yeah, this app Topeka was actually built with Polymer which is a developer framework for making web apps that have the material design look and feel so this is actually a web app running natively on Android which is kind of neat too. And you'd never know, it behaves just as if it were a native app.

Leo: It's pretty.

Gina: It's just a very simple kind of cute, yeah it's pretty simple cute. Yeah a nice way to kind of get a taste of the material design and it runs on Android 4.0 and up. So Topeka.

Leo: Topeka. And it's free.

Gina: It's free. From the Goog.

Leo: Such good blades.

Gina: (laughing)

Leo: You never cut yourself, that's what I love about Harry's. I've been using Harry's for 6 months, and I've never cut myself shaving. You know I don't know why, I just took it for granted that you would always cut yourself shaving.

Gina: I wouldn't jinx it.

Leo: No, I'm not worried! These blades. So great. And because I get them every other month I get them fresh so I always have a sharp blade in there. It's good. Do you have a tip for us or a trick or a tool or anything you'd like to share with us Mr. Danny Sullivan of searchengineland?

Danny: I do. Breaking fresh off the search wire, if you have Google Now on Android.

Leo: I do.

Danny: And you have ever searched for a flight in the past.

Leo: Yes.

Danny: Google is now going to prompt you to tell you if that same flight is coming up at a lower fare. That's right.

Leo: Wow.

Danny: In fact, interestingly this is something that when being launched they made a big deal of the fact that you can fare track and have predictions or whatever and then they abandoned all that stuff and now Google is going to put it into Google now. So the way it would work is you know, there was a flight that it knows you've done all the time, you may see a Google card coming up telling you it's now a lower price and if you tap on the Google card you can go through and do the booking.

Leo: That's awesome.

Danny: So watch for that on Google Now.

Leo: Thank you!

Gina: Wow, nice.

Leo: Is that because they acquired, what was it, ITIA?

Danny: That will help them do that where they can track that more, and they were already doing flight tracking so it's sort of a good extension of what they're doing other than that.

Leo: That's neat.

Danny: It's sort of surprising that you can't explicitly set it up though right. But maybe if you're doing that on Google I'll have to go back and look at Google flight tracker there might be a way to set up a standard things that are going on.

Leo: Is this something that the airlines are going to hate them for? Probably.

Danny: Probably not. Because you'll place the flight through the airline so you know. The airline is still going to get the money. But I'm sure if there's a way for someone to hate Google about something, they'll find it so.

Leo: They'll find a way. Very nice. Well I don't have to tell you what my pick is and you'll hear a lot more about it after I've used it for a little bit longer, the Moto X I have to say the Motomaker site Motomaker.com is up, they had Moto 360s and Motorola hints right now, I think they're sold out on the Hint now. But I have ordered all three and should have all three for the next time we're here on This Week in Google. I'm going to be gone next week, taking the Moto X along with me as I head to London with Lisa for a week! Who's doing the show next week, do you know? Does anybody know Chad? Is it Father Robert Ballecer or Sarah Lane? You know what, it's Mike Elgin. Mike is a Google fanatic, it's definitely Mike Elgin.

Gina: Great!

Leo: So he'll be hosting next week with you and Jeff.

Gina: Cool.

Leo: I want to thank Danny Sullivan for being here from searchengineland.com, always a pleasure working with you Danny and I read you religiously like every day.

Danny: Well thank you very much it was a pleasure to be here.

Leo: Marketingengineland.com as well.

Gina: Yeah, thanks Danny.

Leo: Really really good stuff we appreciate it. And thanks to Gina Trapani from.. we were just playing with thinkup, I guess Danny uses thinkup too.

Danny: You know I kid you not, it's on my calendar every week. It says right here, write thinkup review.

(laughter)

Danny: So it might be another week or two longer but if anybody hasn't got thinkup you should really get it before Twitter just buys it which is what they should do.

Leo: You're not for sale, right Gina?

Gina: We're not for sale, we're too expensive I think for Twitter right now, anyway. Talk to me in a few weeks. Danny the longer you wait the better the product will be when you write the review because we're fixing stuff every week.

Leo: All the time.

Danny: That's perfect, because I can wait for a really long time.

Leo: Now, don't tell them that.

Danny: No I'm going to finally get to it but you know, it's awesome. I look forward to getting my digest of stuff that's coming and they're consistently giving me great things and better feedback than what I get from Twitter directly.

Leo: Well it's updated regularly, because you know we looked before the show and I'm looking in and I've got new stuff in here. Thinkup.com you can try it free right now.

Gina: Thank you.

Leo: Thank you, Gina. Thank you Danny. Thank you all for being here, thanks for Chad Johnson who put together a great lineup of stories for us. Today we do This Week in Google, every Wednesday 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern time, 2000 UTC on twit.tv you can watch us live, participate in the chatroom, we love it when you do but if you can't get here live you can always go after the fact on demand audio and video available. Twit.tv/twig and of course on the Roku all the apps for the iPhone, the Windows phone the Android phone, everywhere, iTunes, Google Play Store, wherever, DoggCatcher, Instacast, all the podcast clients. Just subscribe that way you make sure you get a copy each and every week. We wouldn't want you to miss an episode. I wouldn't want to miss you! Thanks for joining us, we'll see you next time, on TWIG. Bye-bye.