This Week In Google 232 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It’s time for TWiG, This Week in Google, we will watch, live, Gina Trapani launch her new enterprise, ThinkUp, we’ll talk with Mathew Ingram about the FCC’s Net Neutrality decision, and find out all about Jeff Jarvis’s bathroom habits. It’s coming up next, on TWiG.
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This is TWIG, This Week In Google, Episode number 232 recorded January 15, 2014. Just Lean Forward
Leo: This Week in Google is brought to you by 99designs, the world’s largest graphic design marketplace. 99designs connects business, seeking quality, affordable designs, with a community of more than 225,000 graphic designers. Visit 99designs.com/twig to receive a free Power Pack upgrade, valued at $99. And by Squarespace — the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free two-week trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use the offer code TWIG1. It’s time for TWiG, This Week in Google, a show that covers Google and really anything else we darn-well please, including the cloud, Facebook, Twitter and more. Gina Trapani is here, despite this being a red-letter day for her, a big day, and a day that she may at any moment be called upon to serve. And I mean “serve” like “server. ThinkUp is up, actually it’s now down because everybody has just gone there.
Gina: Because everyone has just now found out about it, yeah. Because I announced it here on the show. Yeah, thank you, I’m very, very excited. Particularly this past week has been very long days, so I’m very excited.
Leo: Congratulations.
Gina: Thank you.
Leo: So exciting. That’s Jeff Jarvis, he’s a professor of journalism, City University of New York, also a regular. Not in Davos yet?
Jeff: No, next week. And JeffJarvis.ThinkUp.com.
Leo: Yay. Or +JeffJavis or buzzmachine.com. That’s right, we can now start using our ThinkUp URLs.
Gina: ThinkUp URLs, yes.
Leo: Also here from Gigom, Mathew Ingram. By the way, Mathew, I owe you a great debt of gratitude.
Matthew: You sure do.
Leo: You did a fabulous rollup page of everything you need to know about the FCC decision yesterday.
Matthew: Oh thanks.
Leo: Priceless. Is that something new because that’s a great idea.
Matthew: No, we do that periodically when there’s a big story that’s complicated and it’s developing. I enjoy them because I enjoy reading them. I try to pick out all the good stuff so you can just read one thing.
Leo: That’s exactly what I do and it’s very useful for me because, of course, we have to talk about this thing. And the initial media coverage, just for people who haven’t read about this. The Federal Appeals court, essentially some say overturned the notion of net neutrality by telling the FCC that it did not have jurisdiction in that case against Verizon. Verizon had sued, saying exactly that and the court said “You’re right.” Now the FCC may appeal, but there are other interpretations of this. One interpretation is merely that the FCC attempted jurisdiction in a way that was perhaps inappropriate because in the decision the judge, who wrote the decision, was pretty clear that net neutrality did need to be protected. Am I right Mathew?
Matthew: So they basically did it the wrong way.
Leo: Yeah.
Matthew: So they tried to treat the ISPs like common carriers without calling them common carriers.
Leo: You know, that’s an interesting point because if they had said “Broadband service providers are like telephone companies.” FCC regulates radio, television, telephone companies, among others. If you were a common carrier, then we could regulate the Internet the same way. Why is the FCC reluctant to do that?
Matthew: Well, it’s not just the FCC. I think there’s a lot of people who are reluctant to have it do that because, if you were recall, there was a big fuss when they were talking about maybe regulating the Internet, people said no you shouldn’t do that.
Leo: Right.
Matthew: So, people kind of want them to so that we have net neutrality, but don’t want them to screw it up. So the risk is if the FCC, being what it is, it to tries help and manages to screw everything up.
Leo: In fact, I remember talking with John Perry Barlow, who was on the board of the EFF — one of its founding members. And even within the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation there is this debate over “does the government protect the Internet or is that the worst possible solution?”
Matthew: Right. And I think even if there’s a group that agrees that the open Internet, unfettered net neutrality, is something that needs protecting, who does it? Who makes that happen?
Jeff: Well, the argument that Cory Doctorow makes is that we’re not trying to regulate the Internet, we’re trying to not break the Internet. That the Internet has always been open in this way and that the phone companies are the ones who are trying to go to a new direction. And you’re trying to stop them from doing that.
Matthew: And that’s a good point. And in fact, if you see the Internet as a sort of evolution of phone lines and phone service, then that sort of “common carrier” principle should continue. So all the court said was “you need to make that explicit.”
Jeff: What’s the downside of the FCC seeing TELCOs as common carriers in the Internet context?
Matthew: There was a fascinating Twitter discussion last night that Marc Andreessen was involved in that Om started, and I pulled together all of Marc Andreesen’s tweets about it, and his point was that he very much wants an open Internet and is very much in favor of net neutrality, but he’s afraid that the investments that are required in new networking technology won’t occur if carriers and ISPs are treated like common carriers, that they won’t invest the money because they’re not going to be able to get the return.
Leo: Marc Andreessen called that “attempting to square the circle”. How do you encourage investment and preserve net neutrality.
Jeff: Yeah, but the problem with that is: Number one: they’ve invested so far — this is how we got the Internet we have so far is by investment. And net neutrality, so far they haven’t had the balls to go against it the way that AT&T is just starting to try. And second, a lot of these people are phone companies — they’re losing their entire phone business — and a lot of them are cable companies that are starting to lose their cable business. So having a decent Internet service for consumers — there’s no question there’s market demand for that. Double charging on both ends of it if you have a monopoly and you can get away with it and you’re phone companies and that’s the way you treat people, as prisoners, yeah. So the real solution in the long run isn’t regulation. The real solution in the long run has to be competition. And has to be consumers going to a decent choice. The problem is we don’t have that competition. We don’t have that choice.
Matthew: In fact, the judge specifically mentioned that. He said “even though I’m making this ruling, the risk is that these companies will take advantage of the fact that there’s very little choice.
Leo: So does the FCC appeal? Or does the FCC rewrite its regulations? There’s also some concern because Tom Wheeler, the Chairman of the FCC, is a former cable company lobbyist. It seems he’s saying the right words, at least now, maybe not in the past, about net neutrality. What is the FCC’s next step? They are going to appeal?
Matthew: He hasn’t said he’s going to appeal. And in fact, Mike Masnick, at TechDirt, pointed out in his piece that even if it goes to the Supreme Court, there’s no real indication that in the law that the Supreme Court would find any other way than the Appeals Court did.
Leo: No, in fact, I think that’s why the decision was written so narrowly — it’s very clear that the FCC does not have the jurisdiction if you don’t declare broadband providers common carriers. And that’s been the issue all along — who has jurisdiction? I think Mike’s right. Now Mike is worried because he thinks that the outcome is going to increase government regulation.
Matthew: Yeah. And that is the risk. Marc Andreessen mentioned that as well. If you look at virtually any other example, if you give a regulatory body like the FCC an inch, they will take a mile, and that’s the risk that they just wind up cluttering everything up and slowing it down instead of making it better.
Leo: For years it was a hypothetical discussion, that AT&T and Verizon and Sprint said “Oh we would never do that.” It’s not hypothetical. AT&T, with its sponsored data proposal, is doing exactly the wrong thing. They’re saying “if you are a company like Netflix and you want to give us a little extra, we’ll make sure that it does not come out against the bandwidth caps that our customers have. But if you’re a company like TWiT, and you don’t give us a little extra, well I’m sorry but every bit they download goes against their bandwidth caps.” That is very clearly the kind of discrimination we don’t want.
Matthew: And unfortunately, it’s also really attractive if you have huge bills.
Leo: Customers are going to like it.
Matthew: Yeah, customers are going to like it, but it implements this “toll road” mentality. Fred Wilson had a great post where he looked at, you know imagine a startup going and looking for VC funding — they’ve got this great communications tool or this great feature, photo sharing or whatever, and the VC says, “Well, why would I subsidize you or fund you? Your competitor has paid money to the carriers”, so they get preferential treatment. There’s no upside.
Leo: Yup. And customers, we need to be educated, I think. Frankly, that yeah that sounds like a good idea — Netflix won’t cost you anything. YouTube won’t cost you anything. But what it is is fundamentally undemocratic, and this is the power of the Internet is this democratizing force. And this is why you have to do this. I don’t think there is a conflict between innovation on the Internet and limiting what these companies can do. Because as you pointed out Jeff, these companies are the incumbents, protecting old business models.
Jeff: Exactly.
Matthew: The risk is if we do get that model, where certain things like YouTube or Netflix are given preferential treatment, and you get a discount, you’re not even going to know what you’re missing because it won’t be there. You literally won’t realize what you haven’t seen.
Leo: Yeah, and nobody would start something like TWiT — it’d be nuts.
Jeff: I want to get to that question in a second, but before we get there, is there a chance that the FCC is going to declare them common carriers? Have you heard anybody speculate to that end? That, “no we won’t appeal this decision, instead we’ll do what the court says and we’ll go and do it.”
Leo: Seems like the right thing to do.
Matthew: Wheeler seems to be hinting that he wants to do that. There was another commissioner. But everybody is dancing around it. I just don’t think that even though it’s two small words, it would be quite a huge step.
Leo: It would be.
Matthew: Tim Wu wrote something for the New Yorker saying effectively that’s all they have to do. It’s not that difficult. But it’s going to have tremendous implications.
Jeff: Second question: So we mobilized SOPA and PIPA. What’s to mobilize here?
Matthew: Free Press is trying to do that online petition. And Freedom of the Press, who sound similar but are different organizations. But they’re trying to get groundswell going. I think it’s a complicated issue for people to understand. So it’s hard to rally behind.
Jeff: And then third question: Leo, how does this affect you?
Leo: Well, right down it doesn’t. This is all somewhat speculative, right?
Matthew: Yes.
Leo: It presumes two things: one, that most viewers will start watching on mobile. Because this is all about mobile right now, although it could easily extend to home Internet service providers. There’s no reason Comcast would watch AT&T’s sponsored data and say “Hey that’s not a bad idea. We ought to do that.”
Jeff: Right, and Verizon may have agreed with Google some time ago — that was in proposed FCC regulation that are now thrown out anyway, so Verizon says “Google? Who;s that?”
Matthew: And you could see Comcast saying “If there’s this deal, you don’t have a bandwidth cap if there’s this deal, you do have a bandwidth cap.”
Leo: So it doesn’t disadvantage us, it changes it not at all right now. Because right now everybody’s charged. Everything counts against your bandwidth cap. So it wouldn’t change anything for us right now, but it would raise a barrier of entry to someone coming in later, and ti could affect us if we don’t get the-- And I do think, by the way, that most viewing is going to go mobile. If all of a sudden, we don’t get the mobile viewing because people say “Well I don’t see why I should watch TWiT because it’s going to cost me when Netflix and YouTube do not.”
Gina: Have you seen a spike in mobile viewing? Is it relative to the kind of spike we’re seeing in general Internet usage at TWiT?
Leo: That’s a good question, I haven’t looked at those numbers. I don’t know.
Gina: I’m sure that most of your listeners download the MP3’s and listen?
Leo: That’s changing rapidly.
Gina: That is changing. I imagine.
Matthew: So more streaming.
Leo: A lot more streaming. Streaming is coming on strong. And I think everybody agrees — streaming is the future for content.
Matthew: I just saw a number for somebody big like NBC, or somebody like that flash by on Twitter and mobile was a huge portion, much larger than I thought it would.
Leo: Yeah I have to think it’s going to be. And all computing is moving to mobile. All computing is moving to tablets and smartphones. That’s computing. Not just content consumption, but that’s computing, so people have watched us on their Roku boxes, much to my surprise, but I just feel like mobile is the future. I’m not so much worried about TWiT, I just hate to see anything that makes it less democratic. The power of the Internet, the reason the Internet has brought such change and will continue to rewrite the rules and change everything is that it’s fundamentally democratic. That’s so much more important. Isn’t it? There’s plenty of money to be made. If there were rules made to protect Barnes & Noble against Amazon.com that would be bad, we’d all agree on that.
Jeff: Well that’s exactly what happens in Europe, Leo. Where in Germany you cannot discount books. You’re not allowed to. I don’t know if they’re allowed to give free shipping or not, but the bookstores are absolutely protected. And institutions protect institutions. They don’t protect their disrupters.
Leo: Right. It looks like you’re continuing to keep this up to date, Mathew, which is cool.
Matthew: Yeah, I’ve been trying to add stuff as much as I can.
Leo: So go to Gigaom and look at Mathew Ingram’s article that is a continuing story — what you need to know about the court decision that just struck down net neutrality. And the only thing I’d quibble with is, I don’t know if it’s clear that it struck down net neutrality. It just told the FCC that it could not do it ‘this’ way.
Matthew: Well it’s certainly on hiatus.
Leo: It’s on vacation. Net neutrality takes a vacation.
Jeff: The only government statement on net neutrality was the FCC’s ruling and that is now voided. There is no protection for net neutrality.
Leo: I guess if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you could say the FCC, and I think this is what Ars Technica said, did in fact screw it up intentionally. Because everybody saw this coming.
Matthew: They did, yeah.
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: This is not a surprise. And the FCC surely has intelligent lawyers who would know that the court is going to say “Well, you can’t do it this way.”
Matthew: Yeah, I know Tim Wu, he’s the law professor who coined the term ‘net neutrality’, he wrote quite a rant about the FCC and how they deliberately, instead of using their big guns, they used the little guns, or the pea shooter, and it makes you wonder “Why?” Was it just arrogance? Or were they hoping they could somehow slide it through? It does seem strang.
Leo: I feel like Tim has a little bit of a bias here because his book, The Master Switch, the premise of it was, like every other innovative technology, it’s only free for a little while and then the big guys come in. He expects this to happen.
Matthew: Right, although to be fair, his view is that it goes in cycles.
Leo: Right.
Matthew: So, it’s open, then it closes because large players want to make money — they influence policy, then eventually it gets disrupted and it becomes more open, and then closed, and then open.
Leo: Right. We’ve tried to get him on, by the way, and he now consults for somebody, I can’t remember who, that makes it impossible for him to do a interviews.
Matthew: Really? He did one with the Washington Post.
Leo: Maybe that’s changed, I should inquire again. Because I think he’s very smart — he teaches at Columbia — he’s very smart.
Matthew: Yeah, extremely smart. I think he worked at Google or consulted with Google for a while, way back. I actually was on a TV program with him up here in Toronto and we were talking about, I think the Master Switch had just come out, and he was looking at the earliest days of the Net and phones, you know the cycle that tends to come: closed, open, closed, open.
Leo: It’s a good observation and he uses radio, TV, newspapers, and he starts with long distance telephone service. And he says, “This all started open and free wheeling and innovative and then the money came in and it shut down.” But I think you could also make the case, the Internet is not like anything else we’ve ever seen before, in many many ways. I mean, it’s truly global for one thing.
Matthew: Agreed. Although, the telegraph was global.
Leo: I don’t know.
Matthew: It didn’t have animated GIFs though.
Leo: It didn’t have cats.
Gina: It didn’t have cats and you couldn’t deploy balloons and get telegraphs.
Leo: Yeah there you go.
Matthew: That’s where they really messed up.
Gina: Balloon telegraphs.
Leo: Let’s take a break. When we come back, we still have the ChangeLog. I want to get Gina to do that before she has to run off and save the servers at ThinkUp. And then I would like to talk about a little thing called Nest. But first a word from 99designs.com, a great place to go if you need designer help. The world should be a more beautiful place, and if designers had their way, it would be. But so many of us who can program or do a lot of other things, don’t have that magical design sense, that’s why you’re going to want to go to 99designs.com, a community of 273,000, and growing all the time, designers who would love to create a design for you. It really is a great deal for both us, as design-challenged folk, and designers. There are right now 2,299 open contests. A million and a half dollars paid out last month to these designers. 66 million dollars in payouts to date. If you need a new logo, a mobile app, a business card. We’ve had t-shirts done at 99designs that are great. Any other kind of graphic design. There’s a designer waiting for you. 99designs.com. Landing pages, for instance. If you’re a business, and you’re Facebook site looks like it was designed by your 14-year old, maybe you want to try 99designs.com. Landing page design starts at $299.Your next graphic project as low as $199. And if you visit 99designs.com/twig, you’ll get a $99 Power Pack of savings free. You get more designers, time and attention. They’ll bold, highlight and feature your project in the 99designs marketplace, and give you twice as many designs. 99designs.com for web design, for logo design, for any kind of design. Make your stuff look better. 99designs.com/twig for that $99 Power Pack. We thank them for their support of This Week in Google. Let’s do the ChangeLog.
ChangeLog: The Google ChangeLog
Leo: And the Changer in Chief, Gina Trapani.
Gina: I’m actually going to ask for your guys’ help with the ChangeLog this week; I’m less prepared than usual since I’ve been in launch mode.
Leo: A little busy, are we?
Gina: I’m going to give it a little shot. I have to say I’m honored that you took my website down, Leo. You’re the first. It makes me happy that you were the first person to take down my app. It feels like I’ve leveled as an achievement unlocked.
Leo: Your right of passage. And don’t blame me, blame the TWiT army, my friends. It’s back up and it’s running just fine now.
Gina: It is back up. It is back up. I have great people. But thank you for doing that. Alright, the ChangeLog. Chrome 32 launches with my favorite feature ever in a browser in a really long time — noisy tab indicators. A new Windows 8 look, and better malware blocking, and supervised users. Man, I just love this noisy tab indicator. Basically, it’s just a little icon on your tab that shows you which one of your tabs is playing a video, streaming a sound, music, whatever, or using your webcam. Or casting to your TV, if you’re using Chromecast. So really really helpful. I’ve always got dozens of tabs open, and when you can’t find the one that’s playing that gosh-darn music it’s kind of a pain. That’s Chrome 32. What else do we have here?
Leo: Before you move on, let me mention, you talk a lot about the new UI, the new Chrome in Chrome 32 on Windows 8 and Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley on our Windows Weekly show were pissed off — they felt it was an anti-competitive move; that Google was trying to get people to embrace the Chrome UI because they wanted everybody to use Chrome OS. I disagreed strongly; I think Google wants people to use Chrome on Windows, but a lot of people are saying that the scrollbar is too narrow, the UI is not native.
Gina: So it’s not native Windows UI? That’s interesting. It’s a bold move. That’s like, “You’re going to use our UI.” We see that all the time with different apps.
Leo: In fact, Microsoft does it all the time. They did it with Internet Explorer 11. It’s not unusual. In fact, that’s what the Chromium team pointed out. They said “We have a new graphic engine, we wanted to unify the controls across the board, not just Chrome OS, and Mac OS and Windows, but everywhere because of this new engine.” And they say “Hey, Microsoft does it all the time.” But I have to say, it’s always a mistake to go non-native. Don’t you think, Gina, as a programmer?
Gina: To not go native?
Leo: Yeah. You got to use native controls.
Gina: Yeah. It feels better. It’s a jarring experience, I think, for the user when the app doesn’t feel native.
Leo: “Look at Microsoft’s Android apps,” says Jimbologic in the chatroom.
Gina: Good point.
Leo: I mean, they do it to Android. Do you think that Google and Microsoft hate each other so much that Google would do this just to piss off Microsoft? I don’t think so.
Matthew: Yes.
Leo: You do? Mathew Ingram says “Yes.” Paul and Mary Jo thought I was a naive innocent to think otherwise.
Jeff: I don’t see why they wouldn’t. Why not?
Leo: They do not like each other. I think that’s obvious.
Jeff: Flex their muscles.
Gina: I think Google is just standardizing on a particular look and feel across all their projects, and this is the one manifestation of that. You know, we’re seeing hamburger menus. We’re seeing some particular UI bits everywhere and it just kind of went to Windows. I actually haven’t seen it on Windows, so I don’t know how jarring it is.
Leo: It looks just like the Chromebook.
Gina: Right. It looks just like the Chromebook. Yeah, I see. There’s a screenshot here on TheNextWeb.
Matthew: I would say the noisy tab is one of those little things that’s not that big of deal, but it is so annoying. When you have 55 tabs open and something starts autoplaying, which of course all websites do, even though it’s a big middle finger to users, it’s just so annoying to be able to see that happening. So I’m bow down to Google for that.
Leo: I agree.
Gina: Yeah, that’s a really nice thing. And there are plenty of extensions that do this kind of thing, but it’s a nice implementation. And, hey, it’s a nice way to promote or show off the Chromecast as well; they got in the little Cast icon as well. What else we got? YouTube launches a new comments management tool in chat. I was going to ask you about this. I haven’t gotten a chance to look. It’s a new tool for managing comments on its site, it gives video creators a central inbox for all the comments their videos receive.
Matthew: Yeah, and so what happened was, when they did the big switch to Google+, they removed a way for you to look at one big inbox and see all your comments. And so now, these are my comments, I have a way to just go to a central location.
Leo: Can you moderate?
Matthew: Yeah, I could “thumbs up”, “trash” it, “flag” it, and so I don’t have to go into every individual place to find my most recent comments.
Leo: That’s nice because anybody who produces a lot of content on YouTube is going to have all sorts of comment threads.
Matthew: And as you can see, it tells you which video. You know, I just uploaded this one today, this one’s been out for a while now. And so it’s good to have it all in one location so that I don’t have to jump from video to video to check out all my comment. Much needed and very happy that we have it now.
Leo: Yay.
Gina: Yeah, very cool. Google+ is now showing up in your Gmail. This is a new feature that allows anyone on Google+ to email you and vice versa.
Leo: Not just anyone in your circles, anyone.
Gina: Anyone.
Jeff: Unless you set it otherwise.
Gina: Unless you opt out. By default it’s turned on and you can opt out, but you know defaults are a powerful thing, so Leo, you don’t sound too happy about this.
Leo: You know, I don’t read much email anyway, so it could be bad, I don’t know.
Matthew: Oh is that way you don’t respond?
Jeff: Leo, how many circles are you in?
Leo: Almost half a million. Fewer than these guys. So supposedly if you’re in more than 10 or 20 thousand, you get the special treatment
Gina: You get some special treatment, yeah.
Jeff: I tried to look at the opt outs and it wasn’t there.
Matthew: You have to approve it the first time though, right?
Leo: No, my default, and I haven’t ever looked at this before, says that only people in my circles can email me.
Jeff: You get that from where?
Leo: It’s in your settings of Gmail. That’s via your Google+ profile. That’s different. Or is it?
Matthew: That’s what it says on this article.
Jeff: Of course, that’s the problem too. My main Gmail is not my Google+ because my main Gmail is Apps.
Leo: In mine, by default, and I didn’t change it, currently it says “circles”, so I must be in that vaunted celebrity category.
Matthew: Yeah mine did too.
Gina: Mine did too.
Leo: Anybody with more than a few thousand followers. But the other choices are, and this is the default, for “Anyone” on Google+.
Matthew: I actually changed it to “Anyone”, which maybe makes me a mental case, but I did it.
Leo: No it makes you a Mr. Wide-Open-Mathew-Ingram.
Gina: No I mean, look, email addresses are not that difficult to find. It’s an interesting debate about “are our email addresses really private?” Like is somebody sending you and email? I guess people are feeling differently about this.
Jeff: Gina, isn’t it true that no one gets your email address.
Leo: They don’t need your email.
Gina: It just routes through Google+.
Leo: So I don’t think it matters that much that they don’t get your email; they can still email you until you turn it off.
Matthew: And you can say “Don’t let this person do this again.”
Leo: You can block them.
Matthew: So if they send you one...
Gina: Oh on a per individual basis, you can do that. That’s good. Jeff’s point is a good one. You could argue that it’s actually a privacy setting. It’s making your email address more private.
Leo: Yeah because I could set it to “no one”, unlike Mathew Ingram, and then nobody can email via my Google+ profile.
Gina: So they can communicate with you, without you giving them your email address, and then you can block them, right? Once somebody has your email address, you really can’t block them, unless you filter them or whatever.
Leo: Oh that’s a good point. I see what you’re saying.
Matthew: Yeah so I actually like that feature, so people will email me using the Google+ connection and then I decide, do I want to give them my real email address. Do you know what I mean? So it’s a filter in a way, do you want to extend that connection or do you want to just keep it at “you can Google+” and that’s it.
Leo: Oh that’s it.
Jeff: It’s like a dating thing.
Gina: It’s like the levels.
Matthew: It’s how far you want to go: second base...
Gina: Right, like you can have my Twitter handle, if I like you, you can have my email, if I really like you, you can have my phone number to text me, and then if I’m in love with you, you can call me.
Leo: Or you can have a push button restraining order, which is great.
Matthew: Click here for my DNA sample.
Gina: Another Google+ related change to Gmail is that you can now star your contacts in Gmail, much like you can star messages, but when you star contacts, if you’re using Android, your starred contacts sync with your Android Favorites. Those people show up in your Favorites on Android. Starring a person on your desktop will star that same person in your Android contacts, so you can keep that in sync and have your Favorite people.
Leo: Good.
Gina: Not a huge deal, but I do like that Favorites feature; I do use it.
Leo: I do too. And there are a lot of nice tie-ins. For instance, my Motorola X’s Assist program says nobody can ring you during “do not disturb hours,” unless they’re in your Favorites, so managing your Favorites is very handy so that way people want to call me can.
Gina: Right. And finally, thank you for this one, Jeff, you can find Creative Commons images in Google Image search a little easier now. You used to have to open up the main search page to restrict the results, but now you can click on the Search Tools button to the right. If you search for an image, click on “Search Tools” and then you can filter by usage rights. “Labeled for reuse,” “Labeled for commercial reuse,” “Labeled for reuse with modification”...
Jeff: I use this all the time.
Leo: Oh that’s great.
Gina: For anyone who publishes and writes and needs art for their work, this is huge.
Matthew: All of our art is Creative Commons and so I’ve used other search engines that do that, but it’s so much easier to just use Google Images.
Leo: Yay.
Jeff: You could always do it before, but you just had to go to the Advanced Search; now you don’t have to.
Gina: Right, it’s just easier, which I really like because it encourages people to be aware of credit, not just pulling photos and they can do it right there on the front page without having to know all the tricks.
Matthew: I think that was Larry Lessig’s idea.
Leo: Really?
Gina: Oh that makes a lot of sense.
Leo: Well, he’s the creator of Creative Commons, so that makes sense. And that, my friends, is the Google ChangeLog. You didn’t our help at all, you sandbagger you.
Gina: Thanks for the assists.
Leo: Let’s check out real quickly... I’m going to go to... So I got an email as one of the sponsors because you originally asked people to go out and...
Gina: Yeah we did a crowdfunding campaign, right, so you were one of our early backers.
Leo: So I got an email saying “Grab your name,” which I did: LeoLaporte.ThinkUp.com, and you’ve been importing tweets.
Gina: Importing data, yup.
Leo: 32 tweets so far, I don’t know what the total number of tweets is.
Gina: 3,200 is the API limit. That’s as far as the API will page back, but now that you have ThinkUp running, it’s running 24/7, for every new tweet or mention or link or favorite that you do from here on in, ThinkUp will capture.
Leo: Awesome. And in those, I spent 13 hours doing those tweets. I have a total, I’m just looking on Twitter, I have 6,861 tweets. Twitter just doesn’t allow to go any farther than 3,200.
Gina: Right, that’s right. But we’re going to have a feature where you can do the takeout, where you can export tweets and import them to ThinkUp so you’ll be able to fill in your archives.
Matthew: Oh yeah, great.
Leo: I’d like to do that. That’s great. So and then you get lots of insight, so this is just the front page. It tells me that I’m on 40 lists, and that people think I’m a techy, tech people, TWiT, an artist, producer, actor. It shows you on this day my most popular tweet on this day last year. And this is great stuff; I love this.
Gina: It’s just the beginning. You’ve only got a few insights here, but it’s just the beginning; it’ll show you a lot of cool information as the system gets your data and as you participate on the network. And you’ll also be able to connect your Facebook account once we get you logged in. You’ll be able to connect to Facebook and see it as well. But if you look at Jeff’s, Jeff I think has a lot more insights, and I think Mathew does too.
Leo: Why do they have more than me?
Gina: Well, it depends what kind of activity there is. It looks like Jeff tweets a lot, he retweets a lot.
Leo: Oh yeah look at Jeff. Did you see that Smriti Daniel followed Jeff Jarvis? Wow. One person in New York follows you, Wendy Kaufman. This is cool. Yeah you got a lot more insights. Because he’s a more active tweeter.
Gina: Yeah it depends. So it looks like Wendy is from New York, so it’ll match local followers, and if local people follow you, if you retweet a lot, if you favorited things in years past it’ll surface that stuff.
Leo: I never favorite anything, so...
Gina: Yeah, so it depends on how you use the network.
Jeff: I favorited them for a different purpose. I favorited people who said nice things about my book so we could quote it.
Leo: Look, 81,000 people saw Mathew Ingram’s tweet thanks to Jeff Jarvis.
Gina: Yeah, because Jeff tweets a lot.
Jeff: You’re welcome Mathew. You can’t say thank you? Huh, huh, huh?
Matthew: Thank you.
Leo: Wow.
Matthew: You should charge a cent per retweet.
Jeff: I’ll do it.
Leo: And what was that, you were showing, Chad, you have it too I guess? Here’s what OMGchad favorited on this day.
Chad Johnson: She was talking about favoriting, so I favorited this in the years past.
Leo: Seems like I should tweet, favorite, retweet, do more stuff.
Matthew: You should.
Gina: You definitely get more insights and you get more positive feedback the more you promote other people’s stuff and favorite their stuff and like I said, this is just the beginning; we’ve got a ton more insights coming out. And they’re kind of like, insights show up over time; they’re not all here, but as you use the system and as the system evolves they’ll show up. So, it’s going to be fun.
Jeff: What’s the basis of “it’s nice to be nice”?
Leo: Yeah, at the bottom — that sounds like a Gina-ism, doesn’t it?
Gina: You know it’s funny it was a Neil-ism, not making fun of me, but it was one of the really early mockups, Neil dropped into the footer and I loved it because we always joke about how people associate “nice” with me. So Neil said “it’s nice to be nice” and he dropped it in the footer and we just always kept it.
Leo: That’s your motto.
Gina: It’s a little inner-joke and you know the point of the app is to be positive show you the good parts of the network — pat you on the back for things you’re doing well, suggest things that could be better. I mean, the whole idea is to sort of make your interactions on these networks as meaningful as possible. And we have super powers with social networks and ThinkUp’s goal is to show you how to use the powers for good. So it sort of jives with our mission.
Leo: And Mathew, what are you using as your ThinkUp handle? “Mathew Ingram”?
Matthew: It’s “MathewI”
Leo: “MathewI” I tried that...
Matthew: One “T”, one “I”.
Gina: It’s one “T”.
Leo: Oh that’s why.
Matthew: Sorry about that.
Leo: Is that your mother we should blame?
Jeff: It’s your parents who should apologize.
Gina: See Mathew gets retweeted a lot.
Leo: Look at all of this. Wow. This is a new 7-day record for you, Mathew. 17 people retweeted you, 3 retweeted this one, 4... OK, I can play that game. I can say stuff people will retweet.
Matthew: It’s interesting to see the ones... because it’s not always the ones I thought, you know when I was using the ThinkUp plugin for WordPress, I would just go and check now and then and some things would get retweeted that I didn’t even realize. Do you know what I mean? It’s just interesting to see what people choose and what they don’t.
Gina: Yeah.
Leo: OK. I’m learning from this actually. This is teaching me what I need to do to get more retweets...
Matthew: Do not say “please retweet” at the end of your tweet.
Leo: That’s a bad one.
Gina: “No please RT”.
Leo: “No please RT”
Gina: Actually, that would be a really good insight. Like, “Hey stop begging for retweets.”
Matthew: Yeah, just don’t do it. Just don’t do it!
Gina: We have a “me tweet” insight so if you retweet tweets that mention yourself we have something to say about that. Yeah we really wrestled with the copy on that one because we’re like “well we don’t want to scold people, but we do want to bring it up.”
Leo: This is good. So how can people get this?
Gina: It’s a start. Well right now we’re only opened in limited preview to our crowdfunding backers. We’re not accepting new signups for another couple weeks because we’re just going to look at this data and improve it and listen to our early backers. We wanted to give all our early backers first dibs on checking out the data and giving us feedback. You should go to ThinkUp.com right now, if you’re interested in getting one of these yourself, and just drop your name into our mailing list and we will let you know when it’s open to the public.
Leo: Yay. Congratulations.
Gina: And thank you to all of you for being so supportive and for backing the campaign.
Jeff: Thank you for bringing this. I’ve been dying for this.
Matthew: It’s great.
Gina: I’ll be emailing each one of you, asking you what you think about your stream and what else you’d like to see in your stream, now that you can kind of get an idea of what kind of analytics we can do.
Jeff: Now when I signed in it said-- I’m not really signed it yet because it says that you reserved your name. When I sign in, are there other functions that we don’t see on this page?
Gina: When you sign in you’ll be able to connect another account, so if you’re a pro user you’ll be able to connect up to 10 accounts, or if you’re just a member you can connect Facebook accounts. You’ll be able to see Facebook and Twitter insights on the same stream. And not yet, but we have an Instagram plugin, a YouTube plugin, a Bitly plugin, Google maps plugin — they’re all going to launch as well. You’re going to be able to see those and be able to add your Instagram account, for example, later on. You’ll just be able to manage your account when you’re logged in. And you’ll be able to set your stream to private if you like as well. Little administrative functions, once you’re able to log in.
Leo: I’m loving it.
Matthew: One of the features I really like was seeing people you follow based on “are they noisy?” “are they communicators?” It’s interesting to see those, especially if you’re trying to filter out people, which I’m trying to do now because I’m following way too many.
Gina: That’s right, you know Mathew, you’re right. We used to have that in the old dashboard and I don’t think we’ve converted that over to an insight, but that’s a good idea. I like that one a lot. No, it’s true “show me my chattiest followers” or “show me my most quiet”, yep, I like that a lot.
Leo: It might make me use Twitter more. You’re good for Twitter. That’s what this is good for.
Gina: Facebook or Twitter. What are your social network? Google+?
Leo: Google+
Gina: We also have a Google+ plugin. We haven’t gone live with that on the hosted version, but we will. The goal is to give you these kind of insights wherever you are into a single stream.
Leo: Is it hard to do with Google+ because of the limited API?
Gina: It is. The Google+’s API is pretty limited. But we get posts and we get comments and we can tell a lot about the conversations you are having and the connections that you have just based on your posts and comments.
Leo: You don’t care about right access, you’re only reading anyway, right?
Gina: We’re only reading, yeah. ThinkUp doesn’t post on your behalf in any way. We don’t ask for right privileges. All it does is observe, for now.
Jeff: It’s the NSA of... no.
Gina: It’s very much not a Twitter client. We made it very clear, we’re not a Twitter client.
Leo: I think that’s smart. Twitter’s pretty much sent its signal they don’t want you to do that.
Gina: Yeah, exactly.
Leo: Alright, let’s take a break. When we come back I do want to talk about that Nest acquisition. There’s lots more to talk about too. We could go on for hours, but I promise we won’t because we have to let Gina go in about half an hour, so she can go send out that email to all of you who supported ThinkUp in the crowdfunding campaign. Gina Trapani here from ThinkUp.com, Mathew Ingram from Gigaom, from Buzzmachine.com, Jeff Jarvis. This is This Week in Google. Our show today brought to you by our friends at Squarespace.com — the place to make your website. Never goes down, Gina. Never goes down, just think about that. You actually have an appreciation of how hard that is to do.
Gina: Oh yes.
Leo: Imagine if you weren’t just hosting ThinkUp, but you were hosting hundreds of thousands of websites, anyone of which could go viral at any time. That’s a truly amazing thing and I think you really have to credit the Squarespace folks for making that a fundamental tenant of what they’re doing. “We want to be reliable, dependable, web hosting” and then on top of that, the best content management system you can get anywhere. You’ll start with 20 beautiful designer templates. Maybe you say “that’s not enough.” But believe me, it’s plenty because every one of them can be highly customized. All you have to do is pick a template, I’m looking at Forte here, and look at the different ways people have used it. One thing you’ll notice about Squarespace sites — they tend to be very visual; a lot of photographers, artists, designers use Squarespace. It’s a really good example — you may be a great photographer, but web design is a different discipline. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a place where you could put your website, where you could use your innate, aesthetic abilities, but you didn’t have to know CSS or Javascript — that’s Squarespace. Drag and drop, point and click. You could take that template, make it your own, make it reflect your sense, your style, who you are. If you are a programmer, they got a great developer platform, including color-coded syntax and editor for Javascript and CSS and all that stuff. It’s really “the sky’s the limit” with Squarespace. You can add social media via plugins, you can import into your Squarespace blog, from almost all of the existing blogs — that’s a nice feature — and export too, so you’re never trapped, of course, at Squarespace. What I’d like you to do, is visit Squarespace.com, click the “Get Started” button, you’re now going to have two weeks, you don’t have to give them a credit card or anything, just two weeks to create a site, import your data, you can try each of the 20 templates if you want because, of course, as with any good site design, content and design are completely separate. It’s kind of like CSS Zen Garden, where you press a button and all of a sudden everything looks different, but the content remains. You also, with Squarespace, have a very good price if you decide to buy. As little as $8 per month when you subscribe to the annual plan. And that annual plan will include incidentally, your own domain name registered for free and all hooked up for you. For $16 bucks per month with the annual plan you’ll get unlimited everything, including bandwidth. I don’t know anybody that could do this. No bandwidth bill ever. You could be the “Justin Bieber Egged My House” site and get all the traffic in the world, and you’re never going to see a bandwidth bill. You want to sell? They’ve got ecommerce too — fully integrated, no transaction fees, unlimited physical, digital and service products, unlimited pages, storage, bandwidth, of course, inventory tracking, built in. So are the tax, shipping calculations, the coupon controls, of course full SEO on all Squarespace sites, but what a great price — $24 bucks for the commerce site. I want you to try it today. You don’t need a credit card. You don’t even need an offer code to start for two weeks free, but if you decide to buy, please do use the offer code TWIG1 and you’re going to get 10% off on your new site because you mentioned us. TWIG1. And don’t forget to try the new Squarespace metric app. They have two apps — they have a blogging app that lets you post content, moderate comments, and they also have this metric app that allows you to check stats, pageview, unique visitors, social media followers, so you really could run an entire Squarespace site from a mobile device. Blogging, portfolios, sales on the run. Always mobile-responsive design too. Squarespace.com, please use the offer code: TWIG1 if you decide to buy. Big big story. This is another one where Mathew, you could have done your rollup of all the different opinions. Google spends 3.2 billion dollars, 5.8% of its total cash position, for Tony Fidel’s Nest, a company that makes two things: a very pretty, very expensive thermostat, and a very pretty, very expensive smoke detector/carbon monoxide detector. Why?
Matthew: Because the connected home is the future.
Jeff: Signals.
Leo: Signals.
Gina: Signals.
Jeff: Signals. Google is in the “signal” business and this is a signal to serve you better. Oh gosh, Leo, you’re home now.
Leo: Is it 3.2 billion dollars?
Jeff: Well, as an F-you to Apple, it’s a nice fun one.
Leo: That’s a lot of money, dude! Now I understand why Tony and Matt did it because...
Jeff: Dude, dude. When have you called people “dude”?
Leo: Dude.
Jeff: You’re too old. You’re over “dude” age, dude.
Gina: Not in California.
Leo: In fact, it’s going to be us, baby boomers who are going to continue to say “man,” “dude,” “far out” well into our 90s. Far out, man.
Jeff: Saying “far out” is a sad thing.
Leo: I’m growing a ponytail, get over it, dude. OK, my friend.
Jeff: Sorry.
Gina: 3.2 billion is not a lot to Google.
Leo: But it is. I beg to differ.
Matthew: But it’s a lot for Nest.
Leo: It’s a lot for Google, even. If you talking 5.8% of their cash position. That’s a lot of money.
Gina: OK.
Matthew: But they’ll have that much by the end of the week, right? Won’t they? I don’t know. I mean, don’t they produce, like, 40 billion dollars in cash?
Leo: I don’t know. When you talk about it in percentage, it’s nontrivial.
Jeff: You’re absolutely right. You have to believe there’s future developments and there’s patents and there’s talent and easy entry.
Matthew: I think part of it is the design. They picked up a whole team of really leading Apple designers, right?
Leo: Yeah, this is nothing that they have. I mean, Google does some hardware, but...
Matthew: But they’re not that good at it.
Leo: They’re not that good at it.
Gina: Let’s be honest, right. Google promised Android At Home two Google-IOs ago and they never shipped.
Leo: Right.
Gina: Nest shipped Android At Home, so Google wanted them. Period. They couldn’t do it and Nest did. Android At Home was the first thing I thought of when I heard about this news. The other thing I thought of was, my good friend Paul Ford wrote a piece on his website in 2002. I don’t know if you guys have seen this piece. It’s called “Robot Exclusion Protocol.” You should Google it. It’s really funny, it’s really good. It was 2002 so it was a long time ago, 12 years ago. And it’s a short story about how Google sent these little bots, I imagine to be kind of Roomba-ish, into his apartment to index all his space and he has this conversation with this little Google bot about indexing his space.
Leo: “Hi. I’m from Google. I’m a Google bot. I will not kill you.” “I know what are.” “I’m indexing your apartment.” “I don’t want you here. Who let you in?” “I am Google. I find many good things. I find that pair of underwear with little dice printed all over them. And I watch the tape of you with the life-size stallman puppet. These are good, unique things. Many keywords. Many links. My master will say ‘Much good job, little robot.’” Wow.
Matthew: “I put the Robot Exclusion Protocol on my door,” that’s my favorite part.
Gina: Didn’t you see it?
Leo: “I put Robot dot text on my door please.” “You understand Google, person? I index many things and if I am very good I get to go to Bot Park and have more processors. And an oil job! Thank you Google! Must come inside apartment and index. Must!” “I know my rights. I'm giving you 10 seconds to leave.” “Yes. I will leave. First I index everything. Everything! I am Google!” I like it. And that was 2002.
Matthew: He beats it to dust with a folding chair.
Jeff: We also have that German thing we showed once, where Google Streetview had Google Homeview and they went into your home and took pictures, remember that?
Leo: Yeah. First of all, I had a Nest. I installed the Nest. I got rid of the Nest. I have two Nests. And when we moved I didn’t install it because it kept turning on the heat at inopportune moments.
Matthew: Really?
Leo: It’s supposed to know...
Matthew: It learns, right?
Leo: What the hell does it learn? “Well on Fridays at 3 PM, Leo turned up the heat.” I’m not apparently consistent enough for it to deduce anything. So it was randomly turning on the heat. And I’d come upstairs and it’d be 80 degrees and I’d turn off the heat and say “Bad, Google bot!” “Bad Nest.” You know what, this was a solution to a problem that frankly didn’t exist.
Matthew: I don’t know. Maybe not the Nest, I haven’t used one, although I do know people that have them and swear by them.
Leo: Trust me. Trust me. Use it. No they don’t.
Matthew: They love it.
Leo: First of all, it requires a WiFi connection.
Matthew: True.
Leo: And does not work without WiFi. Period. It checks the weather outside. The problem is that it’s not smart enough.
Matthew: Well, maybe that is the problem. Maybe it needs more controllability.
Leo: I personally think that it doesn’t do as well as my thermostat that is stupid that I say at 6 AM turn on, at 8 AM turn off, at 5 PM turn on, at 9 PM turn off. That’s what it should do.
Matthew: Right. Although, I think the potential of the Nest is that if you do have regular habits and it learns, it can actually save money by reducing your heating requirements.
Leo: Yes. And I got an email every month from Nest. I personally think Nest is a classic example of brilliant marketing that people go “Oh this has got to be good. It’s WiFi-enabled. It’s got a color LED picture on the front. And it’s ‘smart’! And I get an email every month telling me how much money I’ve saved.” And none of this, really, is meaningful. It’s just magical.
Matthew: So maybe it’s just not smart enough, like you said.
Gina: Yeah the money-saving thing. So, this is interesting. You live in California Leo, I don’t know how regular your hours are. They seem to be pretty regular. Is it possible that-- I don’t know, I have tried it either, but...
Leo: Here’s the problem. It can’t be smart enough. OK, so if you’re really rigid then maybe the Nest learn. “He comes home every night at 5 o’clock.” But what if you don’t? There’s nothing for the Nest to learn.
Jeff: Wait. Alright. So you tie the Nest to your Android device, and that really knows when you’re on your way home.
Leo: But it doesn’t do that.
Jeff: But it could now.
Matthew: It will.
Leo: It could be bettered.
Matthew: I mean, my friend Kevin has a thermostat he can control remotely. He was telling me his story about how he accidentally was showing off the app to someone, and he was thousands of miles away, and he turned the heat up to 150 or something and his wife phoned him and said “Why did you turn the heat up? We’re roasting in here.” He had forgotten to turn it down.
Leo: That’s actually the only thing I found useful with the Nest, is I could turn my thermostat up and down when I’m not there.
Matthew: And that is useful. Especially if you have pets or something.
Leo: So maybe version 2. Well, actually, I had version 2. Maybe version 3.
Gina: It’s also refreshing to hear a critique from someone who used it and not liked it because I feel like I’ve heard everybody talk about how great it is. It’s good to hear — it doesn’t work for everybody.
Jeff: I’ve got one I have installed. I got it for my wife for Christmas, kind of.
Leo: Read the article in the Economist called the Folly of Solutionism.
Jeff: Don’t, don’t, don’t.
Leo: Evgeny Morozov
Matthew: Oh man, he puts his phone in a safe for God sakes.
Leo: But he’s not wrong that the notion that somehow technology is going to magically solve our problems because it’s WiFi enabled. Is not wrong.
Jeff: Who said it was? Who said it solved everything?
Leo: A lot of people. It’s very dramane. People are spending $250 for this thermostat and because $250 and they get a full-colored chart every month in an email, they’ve decided that this is solving a problem that it isn’t.
Jeff: Well if you do have a regular schedule, there are things that you can do that will move along that will maybe be worth it for you, or maybe not be worth it for you. I’m not sure on either, if it’s worth it for me. What I don’t understand is the smoke alarm. Don’t call me, call the freaking fire department.
Leo: Well here’s where the smoke alarm might be-- and I don’t own it, so it might be all said position. It does say where it is. So there’s a fire in the living room, or more to the point, the battery is dead in the living room. That alone is worth it.
Matthew: That is worth money.
Leo: By the way, they’re being sued by both Honeywell and First Alert, who also make talking smoke alarms.
Matthew: I was going to say that I heard the Nest version — your Google+ contacts will be able to turn your heat up or down.
Leo: I did see a lot of coverage worried about the privacy implications of the Nest acquisition and I don’t really see that.
Matthew: Think a little bit further. Think about, you’ve got a thermostat, you’ve got your smoke alarm, you’ve got window blinds that go up and down, you’ve got your toaster, your home phone, all of that stuff that’s connected to things, your fridge, your stove, there are privacy issues there depending on where that information goes. And there were a lot of people concerned about Nest — was it going to share the information with Google, was Google going to add that to the corpus of information that it has about you and all of your browsing habits?
Leo: at this time, Nest, as Tony and the Nest blog said, “we’re going to continue to honor our privacy agreement, which is that we will only use information from your Nest to make Nest a better product. We’re not going to share it with third-parties or Google.
Jeff: Right but at some point you’re going to voluntarily choose to share it because you’re going to get value out of it because when you connect it with your travel plans or something like that... So, if it knows you’re leaving town, and it asks you “Do you want me to turn the heat down for the week?” That kind of stuff could make it more valuable and I think people will choose to connect them.
Matthew: And I’ve gone away on trips and forgotten to turn the heat down. I’m sure other people have.
Leo: And this is nice because even if you do, you can go online and turn it down later.
Matthew: Yeah.
Gina: So Nest is promising that they are not going to share data with Google, but they’re being acquired by Google, and Google could expressly change their privacy policy to say that products could share data between them? That’s interesting.
Matthew: They said it for now.
Leo: Google said they’re going to run it like...
Gina: Like Motorola?
Matthew: A separate unit.
Leo: As a separate unit, like Motorola. OK, I’ll say what I actually think now. Which is that you’re absolutely right. The connected home, that Google had that promise of the connected home and never delivered. Every company, any big company, even small in this space, is trying to figure out what’s the next big thing. What is one area that has not been well addressed is the connected home. Everybody is talking about the Internet of things: wearables, removing the CPU power to the periphery. What better way to get into this, than a company that has two successful products and a lot of smart people, including programmers. I think this is Google’s announcement that the connected home is the next big thing.
Matthew: And think about, even just having those designers, whether they’re worth 3 billion or not I don’t know, but it’s one thing to come up with ideas like that and you there’s probably already people coming up with humorous version of what Google’s version of that thermostat would look like, but people who can design those things in a way that makes them appealing, makes them simple, easy to use, that is a hard problem in many cases. And so to be able to have that, is something Google typically hasn’t been that good at.
Matthew: People who can design those things in a way, that makes them appealing, makes them simple, easy to use, that does not, you know that is n a hard problem in many cases, and so to be able to have that, Something Google hasn’t been that good at.
Leo: We have a diversity of standards, it’s a towered fable, nobody has figured this out, you know we’ve all seen the video of the guy using his android phone to unlock the door and set everything. That was somebody who spent hours and hours of cobbling this together. What if Google could just offer this as a simple solution? That’d be fabulous. So I think it’s actually, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s worth 3.2 billion.
Matthew: (you’ve got a point there) I understand why Google Acquired it, I mean I think it’s a very clear signal from Google, it’s a shot across the bow, were going to do this, the connected home is big.
Gina: Microsoft has been talking about the connected home for a while and does it. I did a tour through Microsoft’s home of the future, which is a kind of thing that they have set up in Redmond and it was amazing! That was years ago and I’ve never seen anything actually come out of it.
Leo: No, everybody knows it’s the thing, Apple does too, everybody know it’s the next big thing.
Gina: It’s all about shipping right? Not very many people have shipped Host ;( Somebody shipped)
Matthew: Listen, it may not be the next big thing, the paperless office was the next big thing. Um maybe we get grips and grabs and stops
Leo: Finally for the first time, we make .we used to make the joke, the paperless office bathroom; I have now a paperless bathroom.
Matthew: Do I want to know this? Do I really want to know this?
Leo: The Japanese toilet!
Matthew: Get outta here!
Leo: It works! So, maybe it is time for the paperless office.
Matthew: Oh, visuals! Oh, visuals!
Leo: I know I shouldn’t have brought it up. Okay, changing the subject, changing the subject! Somebody in the chat room said, Next thing Google Buys if it than that.
Matthew: Yeah, I can see that.
Leo: Totally right? And then Hue Lights, and then….
Matthew: Hue Lights I don’t get at all!
Leo: Oh I love the Hue lights better than my nest. (Laughing) Okay so here’s an application Jeff, There’s an application on the I Pad and I phone called Exoplanet, that notifies you whenever another planet outside our solar system is discovered, You set it up, it has a little button, then the Hue light then changes to the color that the surface of that planet, depending on the sun that the planets in.
Matthew: Solar system… yeah I know that’s…author nerd I’m a nerd…sounds like a nerdometer.
Leo: That’s the geekiest thing I ever heard.
Gina: Author nerdometer, I’m a nerd, I like that! (laughing)
Leo: Hue lights are very big on the nerdometer.
Gina: I don’t think I’ve heard of these, these smart lights? What is it?
Host; Phillips makes them, they’re not that expensive!
Matthew: What’s smart about them is that they rip you off for how much money?
Leo: $60 bucks a bulb no, no wait! There are LED lights now, immediately LED lights have gone down, you can get them for ten bucks now, but I am sure these will go down at the same time. Phillips is rapidly reducing the price of LED’s, but LED’s are expensive, but they are 10,000 hour bulbs, these are RVG LED’s, which means they can make any color at all from this light, so much so that you could Gina, take a picture with your Smartphone, put it in the hue APP, click a part of that picture and say,”light bulb, you go to that color.” It can literally
Gina: Ooooh!
Matthew: Wait, wait a second! Can it stop me from looking pink?
Host Yes!
Gina (Laughing) now we’re taking…
Leo: I guarantee you.
Matthew: So for $60 bucks
Leo: For instance, I have a picture of a moonlit night I put it in my hue thing and I said okay bulbs, I want it to be a moonlit night, and you feel like you’re literally in the moonlit night. Um you can also you can use this and that, you can set alarms, you can say for instance, I want to slowly wake up I want the bulbs to ramp up starting at 6A.M. To give me a sunset or a sunrise in my bedroom. You can have daylight, you can have night light, Now adamantly there is no, this is not practical and there are some strong negatives, for instance, as I discovered if the power goes out and then turns back on the hue lights turn on full bright and so in the middle of the night I’m lying in bed and suddenly, Good morning! Cause I have a lot of them!
Gina: (laughing) take me to the liiiight!
Matthew: Hmmmm, How many do you have/
Leo: Nine! And I reach for my phone cause I know what’s happened, the hue lights came on! And I’m starting to open the APP and Lisa just reaches over and flips the switch, which was actually the right thing to do.
Gina: I feel like you live in the kingdom of modern marvels, between your toilet and the lights and yea...
Matthew: The future!
Leo: Okay the toilet; cover your ears Jeff, so you get up, you go in the bathroom, the toilet goes zzz to welcome you.
Matthew: (laughing) Does it play a song or..
Leo: No, No, on this one just the seat is warm, it’s heated,
Gina: That’s nice.
Leo: Very nice, never sit on a cold seat again. And also, the water is heated.
Matthew: Now there’s the creepy one!
Matthew: Stop there, I sit on a warm toilet seat so...
Leo: Yea I Know, this is a clean warm (laughing)
Gina: A clean warm, a fresh and clean warm, a sanitized warm
Matthew: Twenty nine years of visceral response.
Leo: You sit down, the fan goes on because it has a carbon filtered exhaust fan in the bowl, so that everything is exhausted out and then when you’re done, there are front and back washers, they oscillate or pulse or any combination thereof, its warm, you set the temperature, it bathes you!
Matthew: Is there a wiper blade?
Leo: There’s no touch and then it has a nice little blow dryer so after you’re done washing you press the blow dryer, it goes whoosh and it dries you off and then you stand up and then you walk out because the seat automatically, the toilet automatically flushes, the seat automatically goes down, it sanitizes and its ready for the next person.
Matthew: All right, all right were going to have a Howard Stern Moment here!
Leo: No, No, it’s okay
Matthew: Does it, does it deal with dingle berries?
Leo: Yes, it’s a very powerful thruster!
Gina (laughing)
Mathew: Oh Oh!
Leo: It’s, oh, I don’t want to go too far with that, it’s very pleasant.
Matthew: it’s ShowTime! On the Howard Stern Show!
Gina: Got to go…
Matthew: There’s no brushes though right?
Leo: No, see, I realized what it is; see you have to use these things to get it right. And to get the pros and the cons. And the one thing is, I mean, you can’t just, this is why some of the reviewers sometimes miss the boat, they try it for a week, then feel, okay I get it, then they go on. You’ve got to live with it. So what I realized is that the Japanese don’t care so much about butt cleanliness as they do about not touching anything. So what this really is, is a toilet where you could walk in like this and not touch anything; that’s the point of it.
Matthew: Right, well because you’ve gotten to the point in public restrooms, you don’t want to touch the water faucet, you don’t want to touch the paper towel dispenser, you don’t want to use your hand on the damn door.
Leo: That’s what this is, so the Idea and I think that they are probably right it doesn’t really matter how clean your butt is, is matters how clean hands are.
Matthew: Is the blower like the ones in the airport? Where it’s like 8,000 you know
Leo: No, No, No, No, it’s not like Dyson.
Gina: Dyson, yea.
Matthew: Well you know what I want? I want a Dyson in my shower, I just want to go zzzzzzzzz and be dry.
Leo: Yep!
Matthew: I hate getting out and being cold while I dry off.
Leo: They have those actually?
Matthew: They do.
Leo: Yea
Gina: I don’t think I could stand the flash out always freaks me out about my hair
Matthew: Yea I think it’s going to come off or something!
Leo: Laughing
Gina: So, Leo this is a yes or a no, this is an acceptable level of cleanliness for you?
Leo: Yes, you don’t have to go God I had, you can supplement it...
Matthew: While we’re on toilet technologies on the Howard Stern show on is potpourri
Leo: I have potpourri
Gina laughing
Leo: Do not buy potpourri
Matthew: laughing
Leo: This is sounding like I am sooo anally fixated, I am not!
Leo: What about the squatty potty man?
Matthew; No we have normal toilets, this is a whole side of you that I didn’t know about.
Leo: In Japan you’re talking about a normal toilet, it’s just an usual Japanese toilet, yea.
Gina: squatty potty yea I’ve heard about that
Leo; Potpourri doesn’t work, so the whole theory is that it creates a barrier in the surface it’s just fragrance, fragrance very, very, very strong fragrance and it does not have any magical properties in it
Matthew: so she carries it with her?
Leo: Yea because she smells like flowers everywhere she goes
Matthew: All right so that’s that one now
Leo: The theory of it sealing out the..
Matthew: The odor
But it does, it’s a very strong deodorant because it smells like whatever flavor you got, it’s very strong.
Matthew: So there’s the squatty potty which Howard now swears by
Leo: This is an image I don’t want, I reviewed it on Gizweb.
Matthew: (Laughing)
Jeff: I reviewed the squatty potty on Gizwiz
Leo: Is that the one, it’s not a hole in the ground that you squat over?
Jeff: No
Matthew: It raises your legs up so your angle is better
Jeff; It’s a step stool for the can when you’re sitting which is supposed to be better.
Gina: Which is supposed to be better?
Jeff: This is ridiculous, because all it’s doing is bringing your knees to your chest to make your organs all fit together. All you have to do instead of spending $30 bucks on a plastic stand ,
Leo: Put down the toilet seat.
Jeff: No! Lean forward, put your chest towards your knees! It works! Just lean forward! Don’t buy a squatty potty.
Matthew: What have we done? What have we done?
Gina: I’m really glad I didn’t miss this episode
Leo: in the beginning of the show we talk about Google and whatever the hell else we want to talk about
Matthew: laughing
Gina: (laughing) so were covered!
Matthew: Were talking now about a cloud of poop odor
Leo: Oh God, this show stinks
Gina: Smells good
Matthew: Anyway,
Leo: Nests thank you very much
Matthew: maybe they’ll do toilets might will yes, would you like a connecting toilet
Leo: Yeah
Leo: here’s a story, Moto G play edition is now out $179 bucks, blocked Google Edition Nice!
Matthew: Yeah?
Gina: Yeah
Matthew: What a price!
Leo: Highly recommended
Gina: Oh there so little I mean there’s going to be very little difference between the play edition and the regular I mean the regular Edition is unlocked and
Leo; I would prefer to get that one because the Moto is the few little things the Moto , the cameras Moto puts on there are good I would get them
Matthew: Yeah my daughter loves hers
Gina: Um hmmm
Matthew: In fact, Motorola just came up either a few new things that you can respond to text messages
Leo: That makes me go over the edge wishing I had that
Leo; I dictated my first text this morning
Leo: It’s so awesome, it says the MOTOX. So this Moto assist knows you’re driving and by the way they improved it uses Bluetooth and GPS so it really does know you’re in the car and it tells you, you are and when a phone call comes in it will handle it and you tell it, if a text comes in it will offer to use this nice female voice, hello, you have a text message from Lisa, would you like me to read it to you? I said yes and then it read the text which was rather humorous in a robots voice and then it says would you like to respond? And I said yes, and then it went bling! And I dictated a response, and it says ok and it reads the response back, would you like me to send this? I said yes and then it worked, it was great! It got it right.
Matthew: It got it right? Didn’t do anything wrong?
Leo: Well I’ve gotten good with dictating to Google, I know I pretty much know how to do it. So it works good!
Matthew: yea that’s a handy feature. You know me I change phones like every few minutes
Matthew: It seems like the MOTOX is really becoming sort of Google’s, maybe Gina has thoughts about this, maybe Google’s test platform for new stuff, things that can be sort of baked into the thing and take advantage of all that kind of Google Now stuff and phone and what not, so it’s like the leading edge of what you’ll see later in other products.
Leo: I don’t know, do you think its crossing over?
Gina: Do you think it’s like becoming the new Nexus basically?
Leo: I don’t know, I think we must be careful to fire Motorola off, I don’t know
Gina: Yeah, so how is that different from voice actions? Doesn’t Android have built in like a way to respond? IT SOUNDS LIKE IT’S JUST A LITTLE BETTER THAN VOICE ACTION. The answering, the being smart about the fact that you’re driving and answering and asking. Yeah, it seems like it just took it an extra step.
Leo: Yea, it doesn’t do it when I’m just sitting here, it only does when I’m driving, for instance.
Gina: Right, that’s really smart.
Leo: When I’m in a meeting, we’ve talked about this before; when I’m in a meeting it’ll send a text unless it’s a favorite. These are little Motorola things; maybe it’s a try out for
Gina: Yeah, maybe they’re using it as a tryout thing. The Google experience launcher, was that MotoX?
Matthew: I think so
Leo: Ahhh
Gina: Yeah, yeah, so two, so we got a trend, two makes a trend!
Matthew: We need one more.
Leo: It makes great pains at first to not scare off the OEMS like Samsung, HTC, LG.
Gina: Right!
Leo: I’m saying, look, they didn’t get any special treatment, they didn’t get Kit Kat maybe that’s not so much
Matthew. Moto had he halt with the
Leo: I love the hat I’m telling guy Jeff you blew it
Gina: The hat, the hat
Jeff: I would’ve felt bad paying for it for $600 when I could get it for $340
Leo: True, I think that was a little bit of a rip off, even at the time we thought this shouldn’t be this expensive. Yeah so, how’s your Nexus 7 working on Verizon now?
Jeff: growls
All (laughs)
Matthew: You know I should have been sending more letters to FCC I just got so tired of it,
Leo: They have been busy.
Matthew So it’s working on T-Mobile, thank you very much, and I had a slight problem and tweeted and somebody said, well you should tell the President, and indeed the CEO of T-Mobile responded and I solved my slight problem (snaps fingers) like that, so T-Mobile, hats off!
Gina: Wow.
Matthew: There’s a rumor that, from what’s his name, that Verizon is finally going to add the Nexus7 without branding to its sales lineup, but that’s just a rumor, we know anything yet and we don’t traffic in rumors here at Twit.
Leo: No, siree!
Jeff: To recaoo the Jarvis option,
Matthew: I still have it on T-Mobile and its working fine and I’m thinking now I’m going to use my Nexus 7 as my Hotspot and get rid of my (Verizon) Mifi. Does that make sense?
Leo: Is T-Mobile as goods Verizon where you are?
Matthew: No, where I live Verizon’s a little better but we should be okay. In New York, Verizon is awful, T-Mobile’s better.
Gina: T-Mobile’s great, I’ve got it here.
Leo: Yeah
Gina: It’s great for me in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Matthew: Okay Here’s the real question, I went out and I bought them and I don’t know if I can return them now, well I bought $60 worth of refill cards and a Sim for my old phone so I could, when I go to Europe I can take advantage of that wonderful new no-roaming charge thing. Well, first mistake, wrong size Sims, idiot, second mistake, while the nice lady called me from T-Mobile, I said, by the way, while I got you, how does this thing work? The no-roaming charges only work if you have a post-billed regular account and so a prepay doesn’t work for that. So I did all this stuff of prepay and the reason to do that was because it was my fault I should’ve looked into it. Nut, I keep on questioning, do I go ahead and make the shifts and the only real circumstance is to us we only have landline now at home which is for old farts. We still have one and yeah, we still got one.
Jeff: Is that like with a cord and everything?
Matthew: Yeah, well now that we have a whole house generator installed we may not need that.
Jeff: Whoa, ooh when the power went out you had no phones.
Matthew: Well, after 90 minutes or something the battery our FIOS has a battery to keep the phone alive for a while. So anyway trying to use T-Mobile, I live in the boonies so until we get up here I may not switch just for the cace of ethics, I should switch to T-Mobile.
Leo: I like T-Mobile. I have to say it really is specific to your region obviously, All right, we’re going to lose Gina so let us get from Gina Trapani a tip; you got a tip?
Matthew: She doesn’t have one she knew she’d be off by now!
Jeff; Sign up for ThinkUp that’s the tip!
Gina: I don’t, sorry!
Leo: Sign up for ThinkUp because I’m busy
Gina: That’s my tip, sign up for ThinkUp. I’m going to go launch this App, thank you for letting me speak to you about it and show it to you early and I’m sorry I’ve got to take off early but I’ll be back next week.
Leo: We love you Gina and even if it’s just for five minutes it’s worth it, so thank you and congratulations!
Gina: Thanks guys got to get my start up Hoodie on I’m going to go do this (laughing)
Leo: Start up hoodie baby
Gina: Take care, bye bye.
Leo: How about you Jeff, you got a number?
Jeff: Yeah, I do. I do right here.
Jeff: So look at this one, there was a story about on Business Insider five days ago that a startup was trying to hire a Google developer and the developer allegedly blew off a $500,000 salary because he’s already making three million dollars at Google, So there’s that and then IT World came along and asked, man or myth, based on this $500,000 and three million dollar number and went to a glass door and looked up the numbers for compensation so since its self-reported and you figure the guy makes three million dollars ain’t going to glass door he’s not the one.
Leo: He doesn’t want anybody to know, yeah.
Jeff: This is low but average total compensation from Google for software engineers is $144,000 ranging from 78K to 550 k plus bonus total compensation, average stock bonus ranges from 125K to 200K.
Leo: That’s more than what I expected.
Jeff: Senior software engineers average 210K arrange from 80K to 630K so that’s still a lot so could there be a couple 3 million people at Google? Yeah, I think it’s possible.
Leo: I think you’d get to 3 million by being poached and by saying got your supervisor Face book wants me okay what is it going to take to keep you
Jeff: If they give you 3 million you’re never going to have that conversation again because nobody’s giving you that thought
Leo: Right and you have to be pretty darn good right? We’ve heard of that happening that’s not unusual
Jeff: # million!
Leo: I’m not saying the numbers nit unusual I’m saying we’ve heard of people being protected at Google that Google coming to them and saying what is it going to take to keep you? We do not want to lose you Of course it could be 3 million in stock options too right? Is it cash?
Jeff: You got RSU; S which are restricted stock units, which is as good as cash so I think it’s possible I don’t think there’s many of them.
Leo: Matthew you have any tip or tool that you’d like to share with us?
Matthew: I didn’t have one prepared…
Leo: No need
Matthew: ThinkUp is great though
Leo: So this was actually in the news; this is how I found out about it. There’s a really cool website codecombat.com that is designed to teach, mostly I would say, high school kids but anybody who is interested in learning how to program java script, they say it’s the largest coffee script out there and they just went open source and I immediately signed up and I told my son who wants to learn how to program about it, it’s very cool, you’re playing a game in this case we’re attacking ogres, using Java script as the programming language but there’s an arena where you can compete against other people. This is free, it is very cool, they just open-sourced it, which makes it even more cool, cool, cool. I highly recommend it. There’s a great little tutorial. A lot of fun, it’s called codecombat.com. There are a lot of things out there now to teach kids to code and don’t you remember the hour of code just a couple of weeks ago and code academy and so forth is great but this is really fun. It’s the kind of thing where you start off giving commands, I don’t know how well you can read the text here, move up, move down, move left, right, attack nearby enemy, and now I’ve got to get them out of the dead end. OK, let’s continue on here, last rescue mission complete, you’ve learned how to control your troops, cast simple spells, moving and attacking using the play button lets you continue with your training. Are you getting audio out of this cause there’s fun little audio and so forth, yeah you have some. So if you know someone who’s probably like 11 or 12 through 16 or 17 this is pretty cool, yeah codecombat.com Well, what a good time we’ve had today! Talking about all sorts of subjects (laughing) the potty show, the connected toilet next! That’s something I don’t want Google to know much about no. just keep that to myself.
Matthew: You should be increasing the fiber
Leo: Well Dvorak always brings that up, he says nobody wants to know anything like that this is the insurance deal. He always brings that up like the insurance companies are going to deny based on knowing it. that’s the only example he can give I don’t care let them raise my insurance!
Matthew: You need more Fiber!
Leo: They already ask, do you smoke, they come and check your blood pressure and stuff like that. Matthew Ingram, thank you for being here again and everybody should go to Gigahome.com and if you’re interested in this FCC decison that’s a really good example. Great job Matthew is doing over there. We appreciate it, thank you for joining us! The book, public parts available everywhere, talk about living in public, Jeff Jarvis is an advocate, lives it every single day and he joins us every week!
