Transcripts

This Week in Google 243 (Transcript)

Show Tease: It’s time for TWiG, This Week in Google. Gina’s got the week off. Mike Elgan joins Jeff Jarvis and me. We’re going to talk about, of course, a big announcement from Amazon. The new streaming platform. Happy Birthday Gmail, the 10th anniversary of everybody’s favorite email program. And how many views on Google plus do you have? We’ll measure next, on TWiG.

Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by CacheFly, Cachefly.com.

Leo Laporte: This is TWiG, this week in Google. Episode 243, recorded April 2, 014

This Old Fart

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Leo: It’s time for TWiG. This Week in Google, the show where we talk about Google, Facebook, The google Verse. Gina Trapani has the day off. Mike Elgan is sitting in, nice to have you Mike!

Mike Elgan: Glad to be here. I came all the way from over there.

Leo: Across the hall.

Mike: Yeah. Glad to be here.

Leo: Also from his book lined study, where… did you buy those books by the feet?

Jeff Jarvis: They’re all props, it’s a green screen.

Leo: Oh ok. Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Somebody was saying, I think this is true, that as we get to this digital world, books will become more and more precious. In fact, books will never be as inexpensive as they are today, so buy, buy, buy.

Mike: That’s right. I’m a big book collector. I’ve had them in storage for a long time. It’s really a great time to go to book stores, buy old books, nice books. Look out for acid free paper because they’ll destroy themselves.

Leo: But you raise a good point, because I’ve got them in storage, because it’s not convenient to move them around.

Mike: No it is not.

Jeff: I went to the Strang bookstore the other day, and I was wondering what their business is like now. What’s the used book business like now?

Leo: Well I guess that is the point. And in fact, it’s going to get very good. Because…

Jeff: But there’s less…

Leo: It’s not a mass market anymore.

Jeff: No, no.

Leo: But as a specialty market it’s going to be quite good, and I think that most… I shouldn’t say must, but many people, like the three of us, love books, right? So it’s not going away.

Mike: The reality is that almost everything being produced nowadays will be with us forever. You’ll be able to find Gutenberg the Geek in three hundred years. Like search for it, download it, and so on. But before everything was being scanned and digitized, those copies are the only copies. And my wife buys these books that are about food production, making wine and stuff at home. And the content in it is amazing. This is lost information. And there are also a lot of books in lost languages. And the internet is sort of killing off lost languages, as well. So it’s a good thing to collect, not only from a collector’s point of view, but also from a cultural information point of view.

Leo: But I think that’s kind of the point, it’s not really killing it off, it’s just as a main stream interest it is not huge. But in fact, I think the internet makes it possible for us, those small few who care about these obscure books, to gather, to find them, to buy them. In a way it facilitates that as much as it’s killing it off.

Mike: Absolutely. I mean, in the old days you had to go from bookstore, to bookstore, to bookstore, asking questions, “ Do you have this book?” now you can have a running search for Craigslist, eBay, whatever. For a very obscure title, and you can wait for three years, I’ve done that. And then boom, it pops up and you buy it! It’s a great…

Leo: Let’s not forget that’s how Amazon started. Not only selling new books but they quickly went into used books. So speaking of Amazon…

Jeff: I’m going to go to my closet for one second, I’ll be right back.

Leo: Uh oh, he’s going into the closet folks. This is unprecedented.

Mike: He’ll come out of a closet.

Leo: Into and out of in the same show.

Mike: He’s going to have a cape when he comes back.

Leo: I’m thinking so. But let’s take a look at Jeff’s office while… oh shoot, he’s back! I was going to…

Mike: He has neither cape nor book.

Leo: You know we interviewed on Triangulation on Monday, we interviewed Michio Kaku, and he has the most, it’s typical, what you’d expect a physics library would be stacked. He’s a quiony as well, Jeff do you know Michio?

Jeff: No.

Leo: His office…

Jeff: Oh! The physics guy!

Leo: Dr. Kaku, the physics guy, yeah! He has books like worse than this, like piled everywhere. Your office is pristine, wonderland compared to his. But I could not resist looking at the spines, seeing what is he reading, it’s fascinating stuff.

Mike: Spiderman comics and stuff.

Leo: Mostly, yeah.

Jeff: This is the stuff that gets me too, drinking game folks, drinking game. Gutenberg printed in 1476.

Leo: So Jeff is now holding up, you have a page from Gutenberg press?

Jeff: Gutenberg Era, no, no, Gutenberg Era, out of Clone.

Leo: Wow, that’s so cool.

Mike: Somewhere there’s a Gutenberg bible with a page missing.

Leo: So is it a bible? What is it?

Jeff: No, this is a page from the memotracus super bibliam.

Leo: Oh, it’s a super book.

Mike: So the movie.

Jeff: Early commentary based on secret service.

Leo: It is sacred.

Jeff: But I just wanted to have it for that reason. I just wanted to have something that was this early. The printing press, will be by the 600 birthday will be a museum piece. Printing press.

Leo: Oh yeah, well today this morning at 11. Just a couple hours ago, I got to interview the man who made that all possible. Vince Surf, one of the architects of the interview. One of the guys who created TCPIP, he was at Darpa, in the earliest days of the internet, he then worked at MCI, where he created MCI mail. One of the very early email implementations. We talked a little bit about that. Founded the internet society with Bob Conn. Founded ICan, and was the chair of ICan for many years. And is currently vice president and internet evangelist at Google. And it was just really great to talk to him. And I had to say at the end, I teared up a little bit, because at the end I had to say, I just want to thank you because of the work you and Bob and others did, in those days, not so long ago, 30, 40 years ago, literally changed the world. And sometimes not, books aren’t as big as they use to be, or whatever, but it really did change the world. He said one of the things that became very apparent to them, I said did you in the early days, did you invasion what’s happened now? He said the obvious answer would be no, but in fact, many of us, as we started to use this thing, realized that it was not about technology or even computers, it was about communication, and as we started linking up people, the power of what was about to happen was very obvious.

Jeff: I think that’s the key to it, Leo. And still in my business, in our business, we still feed the internet in media terms as content, and publication, and pages. But that’s not what it’s about at all. It’s a connection machine. That’s the essential architect of the net, and that’s what it enables.

Leo: That interview will be out on a TWiT special, and there’s also a hangout on YouTube.

Jeff: It’s already up on YouTube.

Leo: Yeah, well it’ll be instantly up on YouTube, because it was a YouTube, Google Hangout. You know, we’ve actually created a TWiT google hangouts channel, you finally got to me Jeff.

Jeff: So let’s hang up Chad, I’ll go back to my Google.

Leo: I’m surrounded by Google Plus fanatics. But that is a great technology, speaking of communication.

Jeff: It really is.

Mike: Especially hangouts on air, if you think about what you can do with hangouts on air, and compare it to 5 years ago, to what it would take to do a global real broadcast, in real time. Capable of having an audience of hundreds of thousands of people. You’d need a truck, and a license, and a big van with a satellite dish, it’s astonishing.

Jeff: Leo, if you started TWiT today, what would your technology choices be?

Leo: Well pretty much what we do now, because as continually evolve as technology improves. When we started doing the screen savers on tech TV in 1998, even then we wanted to have video calls on the show. We actually god 3Com to give us ten thousand of those little ball cameras, and we called it, it was then ZDTV netcam, network. I said, they wanted to call them webcams. I said it’s not the web, it’s a netcam!

Mike: You lost that one.

Leo: I’ve lost them all! Netcast, netcam, I can’t win. But I think strictly speaking, it isn’t a webcam, and then it was very, such a primitive technology that we couldn’t really get audio and video, so we’d say do the video, and then be on the phone. So all of our callers on the show we on a phone. And then the video was one frame a second, so you didn’t lose lip sync because you could barely see their mouth move. But it worked! And then so as that was, what almost 16 years ago, as the technology has advanced, we’re using Skype now. Are you on hangouts, or are you on Skype?

Jeff: No, I’m on Skype, because I listen to you, boss.

Leo: Right. Well we’d like to get something better. And you know, we’re always testing stuff. The engineers are always in the basement, that’s what they tell me they’re doing.

Mike: The biggest limitation of doing Google plus, is as a policy is that you, a lot of people that you’re going to have on the show, you say let’s do a hangout, and then they’re like okay, so where is it? The internet discoverability for new users of hangouts is not great. And Skype is, you know, everybody understand it at this point, so that’s the only limitation.

Jeff: Mike, that’s a really good point, because it’s so ingrained a built into plus and mail, and stuff, that they almost should just make a hangout thing just for people to get into it, and understand it.

Leo: The future really is just Web RTC. And this is actually related to hangouts. And I suspect that in a year or two, that’s what we’ll be using. And the neat thing about web RTC, which Google has been supporting. They didn’t create it, it’s open, but they’ve really been the chief proponents of it. Is that I can give you a website, a URL, and you’d go to it, and the communication, the call would be established.

Jeff: We did that on the show. Right after it was announced we did it, and it was that easy.  Somebody wrote us an app for it.

Leo: That’s the way it should be.

Jeff: And that, by the way, that is a webcam.

Leo: That’s a webnet, yeah that’s a webcast. Actually it’s not really using the web, just the web for the signal. But that, I think, is exciting because then any link can be a call.

Mike: Right, you send people the link, and that’s done.

Leo: Yeah, and remember Kevin Marks has been talking a lot on the last couple of episodes, about content selects, and what he’s doing to kind of create this, you know, mobile page that allows you to just press a button and call somebody. It should be easier, you know. And so I think we’re getting close to that.

Jeff: Was it last week and I was late for the show, and before we got on air.

Leo: That was amazing!

Jeff: See I got the call from Chad, and I was in the car, and my phone is, you know, installed on the dash. And I hit answer, and there I am driving the car. And said, I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying, but it’s that easy to be talking to somebody!

Leo: Isn’t that mindboggling.

Jeff: It is! It really is!

Leo: in 1965, we’re going to the New York World’s Fair, and AT&T showed its famous video phone. On the future. And remember in 2001, the future, we’ll all be seeing each other in phone calls, and it didn’t happen, didn’t happen, because everybody said, you know you don’t want to see each other in a phone call, because nobody wants to brush their hair for a phone call. And yet we see a lot of video calls all of the sudden. Everybody is doing it all the time, we do it all the time. I think we’ve made Skype work for us. Wouldn’t have a network without Skype, but there’s going to be something to replace it soon, I hope. Yesterday, 10 years ago, boy was that a revolution, and Harry McCracken, great job, on Time Magazines technologizer sight. The 10th Anniversary of Gmail and he has the inside story with Paul Buchheit, and the Architect. And others from Google talking about it. It was a near thing. Almost didn’t happen! Folks at google thought, well, we’re really a search engine company, I don’t know about this email thing. In fact, even when it launched, you remember how hard it was to get an invite? There were people… I think Harry says in his article he bought an invite on eBay. There’s a picture of Paul Buchheit when he was first at Google, he was employee number 23 at Google. Then went off to start friend feed. Who can forget? Which I loved! Three of the google, Gmail folks went and…

Jeff: You and three other friends.

Leo: It was just me and my friends.

Jeff: That was friend feed.

Leo: I loved Friend Feed. Facebook bought it, and then the rest is history.

Mike: Yeah, swallowed it, digested it.

Leo: There was so little support at Google, that even when they launched it, it was running on what did they say? 300 Pentium two computers that nobody else at google wanted.

Mike: That’s right. That’s one of the things you learn, when you learn about how Google works. Everybody is jocking for compute resources, and it’s this big who gets what, and where they move it around. And Google historically has always made huge use of old and busted and lousy computers. They don’t care how broken down and busted the computers are, because one of their early innovations were to be able to use computers that failed with 2 digit percentages.

Leo: Yeah, Bail over. Actually it was Pentium 3 computers, I apologize.

Mike: yeah, well one of the interesting things about this is that, of course, this launched on April fool’s day. They did it on purpose, this is something I didn’t know. Google did it on purpose, and Larry and Surgay actually wanted to launch it on April fools because they know people would think it was a hoax, and they thought well this is a double April fool’s joke.

Leo: Surgay was the most excited about it said Ricouski. The Ultimate April Fool’s joke was to launch something that was kind of crazy, on April first. And have it still exist on April 2nd!

Mike: And the craziest thing about it was it was a gigabyte!  Gigabyte of storage, which nobody nowadays…

Leo: Even that wasn’t automatic, as Harry points out in his article that was something like 300 times the amount of space Yahoo mail offered. Yahoo mail existed. Hotmail excited. So it wasn’t one of the first web based emails.

Jeff: That was one of the points MCI made about it, was soon as mail became interconnected, charging for mail went up a window.

Leo: Yeah he’s talked about that. I talked about that with him. He was in his old office at MCI, where he had invented MCI. So that was pretty interesting.

Mike: I had an MCI account. I remember MCI that was pretty cool. So the other thing that was interesting about this was that everybody when you tell the story of Gmail everybody says oh this is a 20 percent time project. In fact it wasn’t, this guy worked on it full time for three years, more or less by himself. He got help here and there, but it was essentially just this single guys working on it. And he had this personal… And again there’s a great story by Harry McCracken, who uncovers all this stuff very nicely but he has this obsession with making sure whatever he’s using is functional. So after one day he had a function, essentially a search engine for email.

Leo: He said for him personally, but I think this is more than just Paul Buchheit. He said I find I lose interest in projects if I can’t use it right away. So my first goal is to immediately make something I can use, and then iterate on it to something useful.

Mike: We’re so use to a good search from Google that you have to pause and realize how much made search is out there. Even today…

Leo: Just look for something on the app store on Apple!

Mike: I know forget about it!

Leo: It’s impossible!

Mike: Right.

Leo: I always think search has been solved! Clearly not!

Mike: Yeah. But this is the great thing about Gmail, and it’s also the great thing about Google Plus, which is everything on google plus, everything on Gmail is essentially a search. When you look at your inbox you’re looking at a search result, which is kind of set up for you by google. It’s everything with certain attributes and that’s how they go at these things, and it’s brilliant. And that’s why these products like Gmail are so good, because they’re rooted in search.

Jeff: And not only that, Mike, it is really revolutionary to think that you didn’t kill your email.

Mike: Yeah.

Jeff: You know you want to keep your email because you can search it, and you don’t need to put it in all kinds of folders and stuff, because you can just search it, and so it really took search out of just the web, into your life.

Leo: As I remember that was one of the selling points, don’t delete any email, just save it all, and we’ll find it. And that was a revelation, although how much is it. Is it 7, or 8 gigabytes you get for free?

Mike: Well now they combine it with Google Drive, and so I have way over 100 gigabytes.

Leo: I have terrible gigabytes.

Jeff: I have 16.9 gigabytes.

Leo: Yeah, because we both have pixels.

Jeff: 1.1 terabytes.

Leo: Another thing that Time notes, actually I should really give Harry credit, Harry McCracken notes in the Time article, is this is probably the first time we ever used a web app. Unlike Yahoo, Hotmail, and other web pages. This was an interactive App. In fact, really the debut of Ajax to the World Wide Web. Now I said this on Sunday and somebody said, “You know Microsoft invented Ajax with Active X control.” I’m not talking about an Active X control, this is the first web app most of us used on a Windows machine, a mac, a Lennox machine. It would work if you had a good modern Brower, that it wouldn’t rewrite the whole pages when you opened the compose window. That was were Ajax came from.

Mike: And of course most users had no idea about that all they knew was that when you used Gmail 10 years ago, 8 years ago, since its beginning, lightning fast and just felt so good to use. Because everything you did was really zippy, and it was really kind of thrilling to use. And I think that most users assumed that it was because they had almost no interface, it was all text and links with no typography. Nowadays, google is very good with design, but in the early days there was a spectacular absence of design of any kind. And it was kind of nerdy for that reason, but the performance was so good that everybody loved it. Well not everybody, but you know, nerdy types did.

Leo: McCracken quotes Buchheit saying, “The ambitious use of java script was another thing that most people thought was a pretty bad idea. One of the problems we had was that web browsers weren’t very good back then. We were afraid we’d crash browsers and nobody would ever come back.” Now here’s the big story, there were debates within google whether it should be a paid service. And Buchheit, and others, according to McCracken, wanted the service to reach as many people as possible, which was the argument for it being free, and supported by advertising. They wanted little unobtrusive text ads, with Google search results. He, Rimouski says, we weren’t going to plaster it with banners, we committed to that from pretty early on, but the key was that the ads were keyed to the contents of your email. And I was curious as to whether they knew what an explosive thing that would be. Harrick says, in this interview, I’m not sure who Harrick is, we thought it pretty hard before doing what we did, we thought is this thing a perceived privacy violation, or a real one? And we decided it would be an issue of perception. So they think they knew that there would be an issue, but they also knew it wasn’t a privacy violation, because it was just automated. Boy they underestimated the reaction of the internet.

Jeff: They underestimated the reaction of that, but the funny thing is, and I’ve told the story before, when priority inbox came in. All they were doing in reading the email, is giving you ads and the truth is, I don’t know how much they make from that, I don’t even notice the ads on Gmail.

Leo: No, I don’t see them. Never clicked on one!

Jeff: Whereas priority inbox makes some really critical decisions, obviously understanding your email, who’s important, what’s important.

Leo: Nobody mentions that.

Jeff: Because the value is so great. Even in Germany Google’s own programming staff in eunuch is a privacy bargeman staff, and they’ve taken the brunt of everything about street view, and buzz and that kind of stuff. And nobody complains about that kind of stuff about priority inbox, because it’s valuable.

Leo: I disagree, I think they don’t complain because it’s not to support advertising. I mean everybody understands that if you have any spam filtering on your service, as everybody does, mostly not as effective as Gmail, but that means that something is reading your mail, looking for keywords. So people know that, what they didn’t like is it was tied to advertising Jeff, I don’t think it’s…

Jeff: Well yeah okay. I think that’s a really good point on how it ratchets it up. But I don’t know Leo, I always here this general complaint, Facebook knows too much! Of course, everything you tell them.

Leo: They know everything!

Jeff: They just know too much, they’re too big and they know too much. So I hear that kind of generalized eeoryish a lot.

Mike: I don’t think it’s because it’s tied to advertising. Spam filtering is a clear benefit where…

Leo: So you think it’s not enough of a benefit.

Mike: The reason is because you look in your… people who notice the ads, unlike you two, who don’t notice the ads, just notice you’re having this conversation about, you know, snipe hunting, and then you have a ad there for snipe hunting rifle! And it’s like Oh my God, they’re turning into our conversation. It’s the creep factor.

Leo: It creeps them out. Right.

Mike: And this goes back to search, the way Google looks at it, they have this huge advertising category, and then they use the content of your message as the search query. And they surface the most relevant search results within their ad inventory. That’s the way they look at it, and they see that’s their job. If they’re going to serve up ads, they’re going to serve up the most relevant ads possible, and it’s a brilliant idea. And it shouldn’t freak us out, and no longer does by the way, we’ve all gotten used to it, and we’ve all gone on to be worried about much bigger things. But it shouldn’t freak us out, because no human being is actually seeing this.

Jeff: Here’s another interesting story I just heard about Mike. I believe that the services could give us more value, but they’re scared of doing this. I talked to a journalist the other day, who was calling me about a story about privacy. And he told me that he has MS. And on Facebook, in just private messages, he was telling family, boy I have these weird symptoms, I don’t know what’s going on I can’t feel my hands, I can’t do this, I can’t do that. And then suddenly up came ads related to multiple sclerosis. It basically diagnosed him.

Mike: Wow.

Leo: That’s kind of creepy.

Jeff: Well your first reaction right?

Leo: And problematic if they then inform an insurer.

Jeff: Well the actual problem with it was that they were for grapefruit cures, and bad stuff. But the larger point here is, that in your communication, there is things about you that you don’t know that a smart algorithm could discern, or could be of value to you, if it’s your choice to turn it on. And I think that the googles of the world have to find ways to find these kinds of individual benefits, and give people control over them so it’s not just in googles benefit in their view, but it’s in your benefit, but then you’re going to have what Leos reaction was, which is oh that’s creepy.

Leo: The response form the world was quick and very angry. Remember this came out April 1st 2004. On April 6th, thirty one organizations and advocates co-signed a letter to Larry Cane raising a gaggle of concerns about Gmail calling it a bad precedent, and asking the service be suspended until they’re concerns could be addressed. This was there quote, “Scanning personal communications the way google is proposing, is letting the proverbial Genie out of the bottle.” California State Senator Jill Figueroa, sent Google a letter calling it a disaster of enormous proportions for yourself, and all of your customers. And then went on to draft a bill requiring any company that wanted to scan an email message for advertisement purposes get the consent of the person who sent it.

Jeff: And so let’s now look back folks, yes armegedden was torcher, 2005 was absolute torcher. There was no privacy in the world. Everything fell apart. Oh my god, everyone was running naked through the streets. Nothing happened! It was okay, it was fine! We figure it out. If Google had screwed everyone, and done something horrible, they would have lost business. They’re too smart for that. This is the same guy who proposed don’t be evil.

Leo: Do you think that people widely know that Gmail scans your mail? That’s pretty well known, is it not?

Jeff: I think it’s pretty well known. But you know, I was just looking at some mail and I’m finding it very hard to find an email of mine that has any ad on it.

Mike: Yeah, mine tend to not have ads, and I wonder about that.

Leo: I think they backed down. Frankly, a little bit, not completely but a little bit.

Jeff: Because I don’t think there’s much of a market for it. I think that’s the issue. I don’t think the ads perform there.

Leo: Advertisers have to want for it to be. So the point is that 425 million people actively use Gmail now. Almost half a billion people actively use Gmail. Obviously, I mean, if you assume even only 50 percent know about this scanning, obviously people have voted.

Mike: One of the things that Google does, the big companies like Google, and Apple for a living is they build a better user. And by that, I mean they are trying to change our thinking and our behavior and they’re always edging toward where we’re going, and this a perfect example. But I always wonder about people who complain about contextual advertising. Advertising has a bad rap for two reasons. One is that in the madmen days, when there were three channels on TV, and television advertising was the lead way of advertising, they had to manufacture desire, they had to tell you what you wanted, because there was no way to know what you wanted. And so advertising did, and should get a bad reputation because they’re always sort of trying to manipulate you into buying products you wouldn’t otherwise want. The other thing is advertising tends to grow and go places it hasn’t been before. You know tattoos on people’s faces, billboards, every surface is covered with advertising, this is bad and this is one of the reasons advertising is bad. Contextual advertising in your Gmail is good. Because it will show you things you want. It won’t show you weight loss creams and tampons, it’ll show you stuff you probably really are interesting. But the biggest problem right now is nobody is good at it, not even google. Facebook is terrible at it. They show you stuff that you don’t want, they show you stuff you’ve already bought. It’s horrible, but the idea is a great idea, it should get to the point where it’s like hey every ad is like oh I want that, that’s a great price for it. Click, buy it. That’s good, we do buy things, we do want things. And so I think that in general the complaints against contextual advertising is totally misplaced. I think that’s one of the good types of adverting.

Jeff: I agree, and not only that, but I know of news companies that spend a lot of effort to contextually advertising and serve ads to you, but don’t know the same things with the content. And I’m squeezed about that these days. You’ve heard me say on the show before, Google knows where I live and where I work, and my newspaper doesn’t. My Newspaper gives me the same 300 to 500 pieces of content it gives everybody else, in the world, exactly the same as if I am the member of a mass. It needs to know me as an individual, and serve me with a greater relevance. And so the skills that we bring to advertising actually to some extent, we now have to bring to content.

Leo: You know I had the same conversation in a more hostile environment and Sunday with TWiT, because box Alex Lindsay, and Jolie O’Dell, both feel like there’s all sorts of…

Jeff: Jolie was practically crawling into cave.

Leo: Well she actually at one point retired from the internet but then found out her job as a manager of adventure required the use of the internet, so she changed her tune.

Mike: Remember it was the publisher and not venture beat.

Leo: The publisher said, you know you really, you ought to be on the internet. You do have a choice, you don’t have to use Gmail.

Jeff: You gave a really good defense of the internet to the two of them, I think, on Sunday.

Leo: I feel like we get so much out of it. I do want targeted ads. Well I’m inspired by you Jeff, because you’re the one who’s hammered this into my brain. This is my moral panic of what might happen should the government or insurers get this

Jeff: That’s the great example for what you just have from time from Harrys piece, is that all the cries, this is disaster, what Gmail is doing is disastrous, I have to pass a law to say stop this right now, I have to stop this right now because this is so terrible. That’s technopana.

Leo: And the final point on this is what a success Gmail is, not merely because the number of customers, but can you name another app, that you still use basically unchanged, and this is a point many developers made with Harry, this is pretty much the same code we’ve used for 10 years! There’s not a lot of apps like that, where you can just, you know, yeah it’s worked, and worked well for 10 years. They built it right, they built it to last, and it’s scaled like crazy.

Mike: And its competitors like Hotmail have completely reintroduced, totally new apps, totally new sites. And this one they haven’t, they haven’t had to. But at the same time they’ve upgraded it for the modern world.

Leo: I like the new features, many of the new features a lot.

Jeff: It’s still fairly ugly.

Leo: You know Harry was singing the praises of it, and I’ve always thought it was too many buttons, too difficult to use. I never really quite understood why they called them filters, not folders, but that’s that search mentality. This is search, not a folder.

Mike: And speaking of filters, I can’t leave Gmail now, because I have so many filters holding back the ocean of spam. If I were to ever go without those filters, I just couldn’t, I couldn’t function.

Leo: Well and the other thing they’ve done really well, of all the other email services I use, the only one that really stops the ocean of spam, and they’ve really nailed that.

Mike: Anything with Dr. Oz in it gets through though, I don’t know why!

Leo: They think you like him!

Mike: The world is trying to tell me I need to lose weight or something, because I get weight loss things.

Leo: We talked last week about the new promotions tab, and I applied then, and I finally got it and this is what it looks like now. Remember if you use the priority mail box…. The priority mail box didn’t work quite well for me, but these tabs, social, updates, and forums…

Jeff: Where do you get the tabs, I never did them, so…

Leo: I like them.

Jeff: But how do you get them? I don’t even know.

Leo: Oh it’s a setting. It turns the promotional emails, all of which, these are not spam because they’re newsletters, I said okay to, things like that, turns them into things like kind of a pintresty magazine layout, which makes them a lot easier to scan. Yes I know they are, for the most part, bacon. Which is spam I signed up for. But I can go through it quickly, it doesn’t bother me as much, and the fact that it’s not in my primary inbox really solves the problem for me. Gmail has gotten better and better and better.

Mike: Yes. Jeff, it’s the gear icon, and then choose configure inbox. I tried the tabs, I don’t like it.

Leo: You don’t like it? Neither of you guys are doing that?

Mike: I don’t like it. I really tried hard to like it but…

Leo: You don’t use it Chad, either?

Chad: I Love it! It’s the only way that I can manage my inbox because…

Leo: If it gets to primary it’s almost always a person, primary. And if it goes by accident to one of the others, I just make it primary and vice versa and it really, I have a lot of filters, as you see I have a lot of folders, I actually usually use a desktop client, apples mail client to read this because I fetch it from Gmail, so it has its own rules and folders, but this works, in fact, when I need to see what’s in my inbox quickly, I don’t go to my apple mail, I go to this! I go to the interface on the web!

Mike: I’m a former fan of getting things done on the book.

Leo: Former?

Mike: Well I’ve veered so far away from the, whatever, but it’s I use my inbox as my one trusted place for where I put things. And so I want one trusted place for everything, I don’t want three or whatever. So I just use, I don’t want promotions, I don’t want things that are in the other tabs.

Leo: But you don’t have to look at them!

Mike: But that bugs me! Maybe I’m anal retentive or something, but it bugs me to know that they’re there! I want them to not be there! You know what I mean? And I’m also a zero inbox kind too.

Jeff: Well I’m confused.

Leo: Uh oh, we’ve ruined Jeff’s mail now.

Jeff: Yes you have. Well I did it, now my priority inbox is gone. Now I don’t have the important and everything else.

Leo: Oh no, it doesn’t do priority inbox, it does primary instead.

Jeff: Oh screw that! That’s off.

Leo: I hope you can turn it back off!

Mike: Look at the benefit! You don’t have any priority inbox to worry about!

Leo: They’ve deprecated priority inbox.

Mike: Don’t worry about it Jeff.

Leo: It’s going to be okay.

Mike: Don’t worry about it Jeff.

Jeff: Oh no! It’s gone! I can’t get it back.

Chad: You can get your priority inbox back. All you have to do is hover over your inbox, and then on the right side there’s a drop down, and just choose priority inbox at the bottom.

Leo: There it is, I see, it you can show mine Chad, it’s okay.

Jeff: Chad you saved my life!

Chad: You’re welcome!

Leo: Inbox type, and then it says try them all. Keep what fits. So you can have default, which is what I’m using, Important first. See I want them in chronological order, unread first, or starred first, of Jeff’s’ fitcatca, priority inbox.

Jeff: Priority inbox, I think beyond spam, priority inbox the brilliant thing the miss rate, when I look down at everything else, the things that I ever want in there, are nil. And it’s not just bacon, its people I don’t pay attention to.

Leo: Right.

Mike: I use the star feature. The starring email, and I have filters that automatically star certain things to determine what goes into Google glass, and what doesn’t. That’s all I use it for.

Jeff: Well aren’t you the super user. Oh my!

Mike: Yes. Glass hole number one. Right here.

Leo: Unfortunately you can’t combine the tab interface with the priority inbox.

Jeff: Yeah, because priority inbox is a life saver for me. That’s anything that…

Chad: It’s funny to hear you say that because I could never get behind it, because I was so afraid that it would use an algorithm that would miss something. That’s why I use the tabs.

Jeff: No Chad I’m telling you, do it for a week, and you’ll be amazed.

Leo: Don’t do it Chad, don’t do it Chad!

Chad: I didn’t do it, I mean like the moment that an email from my grandmother is sent away because I didn’t…

Jeff: No just check to everything else.

Chad:  But that’s an extra step. If it’s in the tabs at the top.

Leo: This thing works perfectly. If twitter goes to social, YouTube goes to social, promotion is bacon. Updates is exactly what I expected. It works.

Chad: I’m totally in Leo’s camp. I feel like these are two different products for two different types of people, and me and Leo are one type. And you and Mike Elgan are another.

Jeff: Listen, Leo’s an old fart, don’t be a young fart.

Chad: That’s what I am!

Leo: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Chad and I are the young farts. You guys are the old farts.

Jeff: I’m telling you, the more I trust the algorithm of the priority inbox.

Chad: I don’t think it’s an algorithm, all its doing is categorizing, and you’re never going to miss anything because it’s still going into the folder. I don’t trust algorithms, that’s why I like twitter over Facebook. Is I followed people because I want to see what they write. I don’t want Facebook, to do it’s stupid Facebook algorithm.

Leo: Hey, this old fart likes the new fart way. I’m just telling you!

Mike: I’m using the new fart filter and it stinks everything for me.

Leo: We’re going to take a break. Mike Elgan is here, ably filling in for Gina Trapani, who has the day off. And Jeff Jarvis as well. We’re talking about Google, Facebook, the Cloud and more, lots more to talk about. No change lock though, because without Gina it wouldn’t be a change lock. So, we’ll just have to leave that for next week. Our show today is brought to you by 99designs. Actually that’s such a bad name, because it’s so many more than 99 designs. It’s an unlimited number of designs. Look, the world deserves to be a better looking place, and if you’re a restaurateur, or a plumber, a web designer, or rather a website guy, or an app guy, or gal, don’t do your own design. You know, a tip, so many people think they can both, cook and design, program and design. Designers, it’s a different breed, they’re not really human, there a new species. They have aesthetic since, they can tell mauve from purple, you know what I’m saying.

Mike: They use Macintoshes.

Jeff: My theory, Leo, is there is no such thing as mauve, it’s a color made up by women to fool men.

Leo: That’s why you should not do your own design. Right there! Right there!

Jeff: I need mauve protection from 99 designs.

Leo: If you don’t know what curning is, don’t do it. And you should go to 99 designs. There’s a designer waiting to help you. Actually there’s 291,742 designers there waiting to help you. The way it works, you put up a design contest. That is you say, hey look I need a menu, you say something about what you do, what you’re looking for. Then designers will submit ideas to you, you go through them, you refine them, you pick the one you want and then you pay often very affordable prices. As low as 199 dollars. Right now if you go to 99designs.com, you’ll see there are 2,280 open contests. They have paid out….sometimes people say oh come on you think they’re going to pay? They’ve paid out 2.2 million dollars last month! Last month! To designers! So designers, this is a great way for designers to get work, and a great way for you to get design. This is how we did our TWiT hoodies, we’ve been doing a lot of stuff with 99 designs. In fact we got so many great designs with the hoodies, we bought five of them, we made the hoddie, we’re going to make some t-shirts, and other things. Wouldn’t that be great if you could start your next design project right now, have dozens of designers to choose from in just a few days. Selection, speed creativity, just a few benefits of having these designers work on your project. When you launch a contest you’ll get lots of ideas, you’ll give the designers feedback, you’ll end up with a perfect design within a week. The process is fun, fast, and 100 % satisfaction guaranteed. So, do me a favor, go to 99designs.com/twig, and get a 99 dollar power pack of services, free. The power pack gives you more designer time, and attention on your contest. They will bold, highlight, and feature your design project in their market place. You’ll get twice as many submissions and that’s all for free. Because you went to 99designs.com/twig. Don’t curn it yourself, let a professional do it. You wouldn’t do your own open heart surgery, why would you do your own design.

Jeff: Back away from the font sir, back away from the font.

Leo: Step away from the font. It really, I have such respect for designers because they have some sense that I don’t have that gene.

Jeff: I heard something amazing yesterday at lunch. That IBM is hiring 200 designers a year.

Leo: Wow.

Jeff: The belief is the technology is going to get easier and easier and all those CS degrees, blah, but experience and design, I think it’s very important and young students should be learning more design.

Leo: It’s unfortunate and somebody like Steve Gibson, an old timer like Steve Gibson would say this, he hand codes his stuff for, it’s tight, it’s fast, it’s small, and he writes an assembler. The problem is that programming has become a little bit more hack profession, because you just throw more power at it. Ah don’t worry about it because there’s plenty of memory and plenty of power, so programming is not the type of art that it was. But design still is. So, and UI still is. That stuff still is. So I’m going to get in trouble, I’m going to get some nasty emails from programmers, but there are plenty.

Jeff: I remember back in the day I use to work on a program called Coyote terminals by a company called SII. Back, way back in the newspaper days, and what a huge deal it was when somebody wrote Hand J. Hyphonation, justification to fit inside a terminal. This was just beyond belief! Genius, to be able to, it was like hiku to get that in there so you can decide where to put the hyphen in a word.

Leo: We were looking at, where was that MacBreak weekly, Woz’ original schematics and design for the floppy drive, and what an artist he was, because in those days every chip meant it was huge. And he was so proud of the fact that he got the entire design into one chip. I guess it was Gibson actually.

Mike: Gibson was talking about that.

Leo: It was just amazing.

Jeff: So what happens when, we need Gina here for this too. When space isn’t an issue, and code becomes aluminous, is there an issue for that? Does it all become messy like my eyes?

Leo: Uh, yeah! I would guess that half the security issues we see today come from poor programming. Something as simple as using, when you’re copying a string into memory, using stir copy, instead of stir and copy where you don’t check the size of the string. Sloppy programming or the assumption we don’t need to worry because we’ve got lots of ram, that’s where you get these buffer overflows, that are lots of problems. So sloppy programming. Just look at go to fail. That’s all you have to look at. One other thing Google has added but not to Gmail, and the desktop, but Gmail for android. Apparently and according to gadget, they’re allowing you to snooze and pin messages.

Mike: I love that. I need to snooze messages. I use something called follow up pin. If you’ve ever heard of that. It’s a very simple way to make things go away, and then come back later. And it would be nice to just be able to do it in the app. I’d like to see this on the desktop too.

Leo: According to Geek.com, Google is testing an army of new features for Gmail. They always do, and that’s why I always look in the labs to see what’s there. Pinning would make it sticky so it would never go away.

Jeff: What’s snoozing? I don’t get snoozing.

Mike: Something comes in and say you don’t want to deal with it until the day after tomorrow. So you basically tell it go to away for two days, and then it comes back into your inbox.

Jeff: It doesn’t stay in your inbox, it reappears in your inbox?

Mike: Right. I would assume that’s what it is.

Jeff: See I’ve got a problem here Mike. When it rolls of the screen I’m screwed.

Leo: Right. You’d love snoozing.

Jeff: So I think I would, but then what’s going to happen, I just picture in my mind of 3,000 emails at my window, like let me in, right! This is bad, I don’t know.

Leo: Well that’s getting things done right, is the idea that you don’t, you can defer it but…

Jeff: Here’s the tyranny of email, the tyranny of email is that the sender controls, not the recipient. Bob White taught me that lesson years ago.

Leo: Right.

Jeff: And once the sender controls, it’s screwed. You know, you think about it, it’s actually pretty rude to send somebody a message and expect them to respond. Just like it would be rude to just show up out of nowhere to a front door, and knock on the door and expect them to answer and let you in.

Leo: That’s email. But remember, now, that’s a little more opanic, because remember people didn’t want the telephone in the house because it would ring at random, and you can’t stop it!

Mike: Imagine a bell in your house that anyone in the world could ring at any time, for free!

Leo: Actually that’s a terrible idea!

Mike: It’s a terrible idea!

Jeff: Chad, wasn’t it you who was saying you sleep with your phone and answer things in the middle of the night?

Chad: Yeah!

Leo: So what I do, and all good Android phones do this. Moto X has a do not disturb that you can set either for a time, or when you’re in a meeting. You can say do not ring the phone. I use it, HTC one is not quite as elegant as the motto X, but there is a do not disturb, and I’ve actually written a schedule seven days a week of when I do not want this phone to ring. Some of it’s when I’m sleeping, some of it’s when I’m on the air.

Jeff: How are you with the HTC versus the… because you loved the Moto X.

Leo: I did! And I’m going to talk about it at the end of the show, it’ll be my pick of the week this week. What’s the latest with Turkey, Mike I know you cover this on TNT every day. It seems to be an automatically updating story. The prime minister of Turkey got a little upset with social media, and he started blocking Twitter, so the graffiti of the walls of Turkey had Googles DNS of 8.8.8.8, so you could just basically instead of using the officially broken Turkish DNS, you could just use Googles. But now that’s not working anymore.

Mike: That’s right. So what they did was first they blocked Twitter, and then they viral campaign, then Turkey blocked google DNS, and some of the other DNS services. And then they did something pretty astonishing. They spoofed it. So they had the actual DNS service were in Germany and other countries. They spoofed it so at the ISP level, any attempt to go to some of the major Google public DNS, or some of the other major ones like that, would be rerouted to a fake DNS page, within Turkey at the telecom level. And there was this not only prevented people from going to YouTube and Twitter, it also enabled them to harvest the IP address and so on, and essentially spy on whoever was trying to use the services. So it’s really an astonishing thing because this kind of thing has only been done at the large scale by the Chinese government, but not in this exact way. This was the first use in this particular approach to spoofing it. And it’s called DNS tampering. The first time it’s ever state sponsoring DNS tampering has ever taken place at this level.

Jeff: Really? Wow!

Mike: In this particular way, because of the way they’re doing it. And so it’s really, you know, it’s the horrible thing about it is it’s really effective. It’s really a great idea if you’re trying to control information, to hijack essentially, the thing that people are using to get around your block.

Jeff: here’s a question Mike, so because of the graffiti turkey knows that 8888, everybody is going to that. But they can’t control every DNS, or can they make every DNS in the country go to their DNS?

Mike: They’re doing the major ones. So they’ve hijacked the two by Google. Level 3 DNS and open DNS, are the big ones. So they’re going after 80 or 90% of the usage. So what they’re really tapping into are the viral information of people sharing it and saying, “Hey everybody go use this.” And then they’re tapping into that information. And they’re going after it.

Jeff: Which is what I feared when I saw the graffiti on the streets staying to go 888. You’re just saying to the government, okay, we know what to block. Is there the idea if there were an explosion of good DNS’ around the world that the people in Turkey could go to, does it become a game of wack them all for the Turkish government then.

Mike: I would be but the problem though is they’re both playing it for the masses, essentially and the masses are going to be slow to find these more obscure services. So it’s really a question of communication, plus there’s a lot of censorship in Turkey anyway, over porn and things like that. So they’ve really got quite an infrastructure to tamp down on this. Now the Government itself is divided as well, so it’s really a problem, and it’s probably going to lighten up after their election, which I think is in a couple of days or something.

Leo: I don’t know, once you figure out how to do this, it’s tempting just to keep it up right? That’s the problem with this, its slippery, oh we’ll only do this until after the election, and then of course, they keep doing it. I asked Vince Surf about this specifically, and also about the move to end the US department of Commerce contract with Ican, and this whole notion of the internet, somebody controlling the internet. Control is a funny word, you can’t’ really use the word control when it comes to the internet. But what he did say was within the extremities, the in points of the internet can be controlled. Within a nation, you can control the internet.

Mike: Sure.

Leo: Or your internet service provider can act inappropriately with regard to net neutrality. But the internet itself heals itself, protects itself, is designed to not to be susceptible to this kind of stuff, so no one can, Turkey can’t screw up our internet, but they can screw up their own internet.

Mike: That’s right. Because the government, the ISPs are just companies that have to function with permission by the government, theoretically. And China has done, if you’re going to be a conasuer of fine authroitarion internet.

Leo: They’re good at that.

Mike: They’re so good. They have multiple things. They have the great fire wall of China. They really go after the intelligence, they don’t really worry about the bumpkins in the country side and so on. But they really crack down on the eastern side of the country, and the southern part of the country. They have this 50 cent army, where they have just huge numbers of people out there saying nice things about China, and criticizing anybody who criticizes Chinese policy. Plus they have huge numbers of internet sensors on social media. So they’re censoring social media, twitter like sites and Facebook like sites, painstakingly. Huge numbers of people going through all these messages, and just blocking and ratting out people. It’s a daily constant…

Jeff: On top of all of that, they have intimidation.

Mike: Yes.

Jeff: Those are all the known and seen things. Even though we don’t know exactly how many but those are the explicit activities of censorship. But there’s the more heinous government activities which is intimidation.

Mike: That’s right. And Combined, all of that combined is what makes their control information so effective essentially.

Leo: Yeah. My thought has always been, you’re going to see this in localized areas, but it also hurts the country so much, in terms of, because the internet really is about free communication, it’s good for a country, that’s why we want to preserve the internet. It’s good for innovation, it’s good for consumers, it’s good for commerce, it’s good for so much stuff, that you only do this at your own peril. So I would, I believe ultimately that the Chinese government will back down on this, because ultimately it’s not good for China. China wants to be part of the global community.

Mike: But the Chinese communist party, which controls the government, doesn’t. What they’re concerned about other political parties, entering in and participating in their government. And really that’s the same thing in turkey, it’s a political party doing this to defend itself against another political party. So you don’t really have a democracy in most countries. You might not have it in any country, but in places like China, and to a certain extent, Turkey, you have political parties who are competing with other political parties and you have censorship…

Leo: So the party can control it.

Mike: yean.

Leo: But ultimately it’s bad for the country. And if it’s bad for the country it’s ultimately bad for the party. And you know, of course you’re going to have to totalitarian regimes. Those aren’t good for people at any respect. But I think that the internet is a great threat to those in the long run and I feel like it’s such a democratizing power and the people always seem to get around these things.

Mike: Well as they’re learning in Turkey. Turkey is a functioning democracy, and the party that’s doing this is just going to get hammered. In addition to the fact that they were committing this censorship to cover up some apparent graft and so on, but in China it’s a different story, there is no alternative political party in China, so that’s a different story.

Leo: And there is no history of democracy in China.

Mike: That’s right. But what they’re learning in Turkey is you can’t do this. It doesn’t work at all, it makes you a laughing stock. It brings attention to the things you’re trying to hide. We’re sitting there on this tech show, talking about a really inside baseball Turkish political thing. Everybody now knows about this corruption. We wouldn’t have been talking about Turkish corruption unless they did this, so this is a horrible idea.

Leo: Nexus 10 might be coming back soon. A listing on the google play store, maybe that’s a mistake, says….

Jeff: It still says coming soon.

Leo: Does that mean the old nexus 10, and they’re out of stock?

Jeff: Well it’s been gone for some time.

Leo: We’ve been waiting for a long time for a new nexus 10 tablet.

Jeff: And they kept the price up there, so if they were going to come up with a new nexus 10, they would take some details ou,t and say coming soon. It’s a bit odd.

Leo: It’s hard to know what it means when they say coming soon.

Mike: It’s got to be a new one. It’s got to be a revamped edition.

Leo: But the specs currently aren’t any different.

Jeff: It stills says a 32 gig for $499. 16 gigs for $399.

Leo: yeah. 5 megapixel man camera and 1.9 megapixel front.

Jeff: Funny, I have zero desire for a big tablet anymore.

Leo: I like my nexus 7 plenty good.

Jeff: Yeah my seven.

Leo: It’s just the right size.

Jeff: Cat’s meow.

Leo: Cat’s meow. Google normally, in fact, I gave them a little trouble for this last year, really goes wild on April fools. Do you think they’ve backed down a little bit, they realized its

Jeff: I think it’s a little more than that, Leo. I hate April first. I just want it to be April 2nd, I cannot stand it.

Leo: Who doesn’t?

Jeff: My, this year my Twitter feed had virtually nothing, I didn’t see any of the usual stuff. I just think maybe last year was the Armageddon of April firsts, and this year it’s calmed down.

Leo: Thank God.

Jeff: It may not just be google. I do have to say that the mac cuts one was cute.

Leo: What was the Mac Cuts one?

Jeff: It’s a video. A visual gag. He’s not going to stop changing, and it’s a visual gag so you probably won’t…

Leo: For our audio listeners it’s not going to be much fun. I’ll give you the play by play. Here’s our beloved one from Mac Cuts.

Video: We have a Dave asks, When will you stop changing things? Look, I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that. The web is always changing, the things that we think we need to do for users, will always be changing, and of course, spammers, and their techniques are always changing.

Jeff: So for our audio listeners, what’s happening his shirt is just constantly changing colors.

Leo: It is? I didn’t even notice!

Mike: Yeah!

Leo: Oh it is! It’s gray.

Mike: Violet, purple.

Leo: How do they do that?

Jeff: I don’t know how they did it. It’s kind of brilliant.

Video: Based on what our users are looking for, you know people are starting to do more…

Jeff: That’s it. Matt keeps on blabbing on and on and on about things that are changing.

Leo: (Laughs) I didn’t even notice it!

Jeff: And his shirt changes colors. That’s it. That’s the gag.

Leo: Okay, that’s pretty subtle. For Google that’s very subtle.

Mike: I thought that Hassel Hoff thing was great.

Leo: Oh I got Hoffed! I got hoffsomed.

Jeff: I couldn’t get it to happen to me, I’ve been taking pictures of me to make it happen.

Leo: That was kind of the beauty of it, you couldn’t force the Hoff. And they had a David Hassel Hoff bot that would, if you mentioned David Hassel Hoff in a post on Google Plus, he would respond. And I’ll show you some of the things that happened to me. Did you see the pictures they Hasselhoffed of me. Let me see if I can find some of them. Here’s some obvious ones. Let me just show you the obvious ones first. The first one that happened to me. What is that Chad? Who’s that?

Chad: This is my only Hoffsome.

Leo: Oh, I got three.

Chad: yeah. I know.

Leo: So here’s one. I was testing out the HDC one camera. Took a picture of Jason. I thought there must be a human doing this because this is too perfect.

Jeff: It is perfect. Jason’s looking mournful. And the Hoff is looking like, hoffish.

Leo: Like something. But notice where it would have the auto awesome mentioned, it says the April Fools. And this photo was created by adding David Hassel Hoff to your photo. Which is so random as to be hysterical. And then I got another one. Because I was testing out this camera out a lot. This is John Slanina. Oh wait a minute! This is a new one! This is one that I hadn’t seen before, so there’s new stuff because this is the one I saw earlier. So they put more Hassel Hoff with Jammer B.

Mike: And if the listeners and viewers want to check out what happened to other people you can go to Hoffsome. The hash tag hoffsom.

Leo: And you’ll see them all. But this one was my favorite, and I thought my god, this is got to be a human.

Jeff: wow.

Leo: Because you see this chess set here? Zoom in a little bit and you’ll see Hassel Hoff is peeking out behind one of the bishops. A little tiny Hassel Hoff.

Mike: A mini Hoff.

Jeff: That’s some great algorithmic work, man.

Leo: And I figure it has to be algorithmic because these are not public photos. So there’s no way google is going to go into my photos, some humans going to go in and modify my photos, right? Tell me that. But how do they do that?

Mike: Well they do some, you know, amazing things with some computer image recognition. For example, they know the difference between a dog and a cat. They know the difference between a baby and a child.

Jeff: They know smiles.

Mike: They know smiles. They know facial expression. So their image recognition algorithms are killer.

Leo: I will submit, I got the best, Hoff some.

Mike: That is amazing.

Leo: That blows me away.

Jeff:  He’s exactly the same size of the chess pieces.

Leo: And he’s peeking out from behind one! How could a computer know that?

Jeff: well the computer has to silhouette the chess piece. And have him behind it. His hand is behind another chess piece.

Leo: Right!

Jeff: It layered the photo.

Leo: it layered it!

Mike: In this case, it may have made what they considered an error. It may have thought those chess pieces were actual people. It may have recognized them as humans and just put him into a group photo. But it’s brilliant the way it looks, it’s perfect. If you were to do this by hand, it would actually be kind of hard.

Leo: Oh, there is one more good one and I have to play on my android. Why shouldn’t I show it on Google Plus, maybe that’s the best thing and I wonder if it’s still there. They added a new translator to chrome. So, If you go to text page and chrome, OH it’s gone. Oh, was only there for one day. How Sad. You can translate a page into MoG. I am glad, I captured this, I went to ndnarcos blog on the mobile and translated into MoG. Oh, they should have left that it. I am so disappointed. However, they do this without updating chrome. I did not get a chrome update in either respect.

Mike: It’s like magic.

Leo: These guys at Google are good.

Mike: Ways dates. Ways shows you single person a hub

Leo: That’s another rightful hobo. Look at behind from the people, maybe I am not the only one who gets that.

Jeff: Look at that.

Leo: That’s good one

Jeff: It did not realize it was her hand, so eating her hand. They cut the edge

Mike: Yea, it did not realize it’s the table that like. That make me does feel they go better.

Leo: it’s slipping off

Jeff: Yes, I don’t even realize the content

Leo: You young people live under profanity. Anyway, I thought that was pretty good. Again, we did not see a massive number of Google likerophol jokes and I for one am thrilled. Remember the toilet internet. Let’s see, oh there was one Poki man. Goggle is going to focus on poetry shorts and facts by offering an camera app for everyone on Google store.

Mike: And then you fancy HTC one, people wont

Leo: I am feeling already ripped off. They are also working on raw support. This is clearly one of the big differentiate but the big battlegrounds in smart phones; it’s not the quality of camera but computational photography. Taking the photo and modifying it

Mike: Yes

Jeff: They say they are going to be able to do what your new camera does without second lenses. They are going to understand the depth

Leo: Actually Nokia does that with their refocus app and actually I does a very good job. We did a review on before you buy yesterday Brnaird head Icon the 929. He had a picture of rain drops on the windshield, it actually arguably better job than HTC one.

Mike: Really

Leo: well but the problem is you have to have a windows phone to use it.

Mike: The important thing though I think that companies like Google are realizing that 98% of what people  want from heir smart phone camera is to take picture, uploaded to the social media and  have to be like wow. Just have a wow effect

Leo: Instagram, that’s what Instagram realized.

Mike: Yea an Instagram is not doing it as well as Google is doing it. Google plus their auto filters and their auto modifications is really astonishingly good. It’s really so good, I take all these lousy pictures with Google glass and stich them together and do all kind of really amazing things. The settle improvements that make and hopefully this feature of blurry feature will make it to the Google plus. Because they have the auto backup things, every picture you take just goes right into Google Plus, you can have every picture on your laptop. Just go right into your Google plus, they will modify it, you can undo the modifications with single click. It’s really really nice the way they do that and it’s really improving photography which is great. Because the Instagram process, Instagram corrects your pictures, Facebook correct your pictures. I have done a lot of side by side pictures. Of what Facebook does to your photographs with it’s aggressive compression and this is the direction we want to go in. Improving the pictures rather than creating them and make them look lower resoling kind of stuff. 

Leo: here smart, combination of Google plus, a great android app. It’s frankly almost so good nobody use their camera anymore. So, 4.4.3, Oh, I am sorry this is not right that’s settle be I guess 4.4

Jeff:  No actually the camera stuff is supposed to be a separate update from the android update…

Leo: Do we have to have Nexsus5 or..?

Mike: I don’t know.

Leo: Hmm… but increasingly they put the Google apps on the play store, which is really great for those of us who don’t have.

Mike: Yeah, it will become a default thing in 4.4.3 but in the meantime they are going to come out with a stand-alone app, which is great

Leo: Awesome, we were up early this morning. It’s been a long day; 8 AM. Actually you were up early, I got here late. Mike Elgan and Peter Kafka from recode watched as Amazon revealed a set-top box, The Fire TV; $99. It is Android; looks like, they did not say the word Android but it’s pretty obviously Android powered…

Mike: It’s Android, yeah Peter Kafka and some of the top rated developers said that it’s just Android

Jeff: Some of the stories said straight out Apple Android

Leo: Yeah good chase, it’s just Amazon that did not say that but of course it is just like the Kendall and it will have a Quad core processer. They did not name the processor and a dedicated GPU and that’s important because unlike the Roku and the Apple TV, all have some gaming but this is going to be a significantly larger amount of game impact. Amazon has a game studio, they’ve put together. It will have all of the requisite Netflix and obviously Amazon streaming, Hulu Plus; they mentioned Vivo I think they mention.

Mike: Yeah

Leo: so it’s just a streaming box and at the same price as Apple TV and the IRoko.

Mike: Yes, with some benefit’s. One of them is that it’s an X-Box like game controller…

Leo: For additional $40

Mike: Yes, but to play casual and mobile style game as opposed to like, you know, Call of Duty and so on. The other thing that I think is kind of a killer feature for parents is this parental kind of thing. You can sign your kids up for all content…

Leo: Free!! Is that free?

Mike: No No. It’s..

Leo: For special paycheck

Mike: yes.

Leo: Alright.

Mike: And but then they already have it for the tappets, 4 for the Kendall Fire and their parental controls, all that kind of stuff. But now, they are extending it to TV. So now if you have, you know, small children, you don’t want to expose them to the horrors of the TV commercials, you can sort of turn them loose on this, they get to choose their own content and it’s a great idea. They, you know, we don’t really pay a lot of attention to this cause it’s like children’s culture, you know to certain extent but this is really. They really are hitting it hard in the same way that the McDonalds did with, you know, playgrounds and Rama McDonalds which really is secrets of McDonalds is you get small children loving your brand and lifelong…

Jeff: Yeah and they’re bribed..

Leo: They’re hooked.

Mike: Yes. And so this is a big and it kind of under the radar because who else is really targeting children so aggressively.

Jeff: That’s the point. Well then, there is the Voice command, which I think going to give me a turn off.

Leo: well a lot of things have voice command like I was pointing at my Television, my Samsung TV as a remote control over the microphone; of course the Xbox One is a voice command. This is not unusual.

Mike: but overall, performance is something they are touting and singing. Everything’s… Zippy voice search is very fast they say. And well we’ll see the reviews and of course you’re going to have one of the box in soon.

Jeff: Here’s a question about that in mind.

Leo: I have one tomorrow.

Mike: Yeah.

Jeff: I have a question

Leo: I wasn’t going to be here tomorrow. (Laughs) I guess I am coming in. You know if ... I tell you what Mike it’s coming here, if a box from Amazon arrives here… to me. You have my permission to open it and demo it.

Mike: OK

Leo: That’s for you

Mike: Great

Leo: With any luck we’ll have it on TNT, if not then Tech News tonight.

Jeff: Here’s a question. After the Netflix…was it…Chromecast deal. Were you streamed to the Amazon box? Are they going to have to be per viewing fees? They could perform well.

Leo: That’s a very interesting question. I mean probably not. Iroko doesn’t but Netflix does, and gets some benefit on Iroko.

Jeff: but then Netflix goes to the Amazon box. Is that what two Chromecast, like it’s Amazon or Netflix?

Leo: It’s Netflix. That’s what I believe was different about the Apple TV. Is that the Apple TV…Apple has its own CBN and all contents of the Apple TV comes from Apple CBNs. I believe these are arc mines. So that’s very pricey for Apple. But it gives a much better user experience even if you’re on Chromecast prior to the deal.

Mike: Yeah and Amazon brings up another thing is that Amazon is doing which is that they have a recommendation engine toward any given time they say, based on what you’ve watched so far probably based on the what books you’ve ordered, things like that. Here are the TV shows we think you are going to like and starts to download them In advance. So when you choose one, it just plays it instantly.

Leo: As it knows you are going to love see this.

Mike: Right. And here we go.

Jeff: hmm…

Leo: I tell you what, you are going to love seeing this crazy Gary at... Is Gary actually crazy or is he just making…?

Mike: He has some… I believe he has some brain damage from motorcycle accident.

Jeff: He does but he’s also just…

Leo: He’s making hay on. I mean, he was on… was it Entourage where he appeared in… absolutely crazy crazy?

Jeff: Yup.

Mike: He mostly plays himself.

Gary: If you’re like me? You like talking to things. Like Hello lamp!

Lamp: Oh Gary!

Gary: See, Hello pants!

Leo: Maybe the weirdest ad a major America company has ever made.

Gary:thank you beach for bringing home…

Mike: One of that’s really is his house

Gary: ….especially high tech planes…Find Gary …FIND GARY BUSE. Additional Amazon Fire TV, this is to me and this is exactly what I say Gary.

Mike: He’s pressing hold but…

Jeff: (Laughs)

Gary: Yayyyyyy, Amazon Fire TV (Laughs)

Leo: It definitely gets your attention

Mike: Yup.

Leo: (Laughs)

Jeff: Awwo Why do they kick on Iroko specifically?

Leo: But It all asks direct competition and…

Jeff: And I know what it’s kind…

Leo: The truth is it’s just another, you know, it’s a Me Tube product. I submitted but I think I was wrong that maybe this is just Amazon saying what we got to get the starring point so that we are equal to all these other companies so that when the big deals come down the pipe, we can basically replace the cable, we want to be there.

Mike: Yeah I think the streaming box is going to get much more compelling this year and I think they are afraid that people who were using their streaming services are going to say You know what I don’t need Amazon anymore cause I get better deals with this other box. Now they have a box with games and you know they are hitting all the high points a couple of vaguely unique features, it’s enough to keep people and keep growing. They bragged in the beginning of the event how fast they’ve grown, so on. And they want to keep that going and they want to sort of hold off the competition and who knows. You know, I think the real play here ultimately as we were saying in the broadcast this morning is they want to get people using their TV to shop, to engage with Amazon content, to see advertisings and promotions on Amazon to, you know, across colony, across the various Amazon… it’s tappets.

Leo: it’s not a big market. I mean the total, if you include the Apple TV, Iroko and all these set-top boxes, were all under 20 million unit’s.

Mike: Ahmm

Jeff: How about the…

Leo: And Google which added this market and has left it. I mean the Chromecast is something completely different and almost as if Google though about it and said you know what “Nobody really wants this! What they want is a Medius”. Yeah you liked the Google TV, Chad. I liked the Google TV! But it’s dead.

Chad: Yeah I know but that is one of the reasons I brought; I wore the shirt today because…

Leo: yeah, You knew.

Chad: I knew the Amazon announcement thing, that’s like: Hey Amazon! Don’t forget that the…it’s a hard space.

Leo: The Chromecast is a different idea, the idea is whatever is on your smart phone or your computer or your Chromebook Jeff, can be sent to the TV and that really the responsibility for it lies with the device sending it to the Chromecast. If you want voice, you do it on the device, right?

Jeff: I am happy with Chromecast. I don’t know why just bought the Amazon box.

Leo: Oh! You bought it too huh! I am owning the fact that I have to buy it to review it. I don’t want it. Last thing I need is another thing attached to my TV.

Jeff: I am cancelling…

Mike: I don’t know…

Jeff: It’s no advantage

Mike: They certainly have the means to market the crap out of it and I know that people will… you know the…Amazon has some real fans, people love Amazon. They love the prime service, the shipping and all that kind of stuff and this is a way for them to leverage that kind of a fandom. So you can imagine little pop ups; pop ups popping up and saying your package is going to arrive in next ten minutes and you know this weird stuff like that. Amazon is moving to having their own trucks…

Leo: That would be interesting

Mike: Yeah but this… so there’s lot of opportunities everywhere

Leo: “Stop watching the Americans, your package has arrived” would be interesting.

Mike: And that’s the other thing; there’s data. There’s a lot of data here, they’re be able to look at people’s habit’s…they’re be able to…you know remember this is a company, not only came out with a tablet but its own silk web browser cause they want to harvest data more and more data. They were the original data harvesting company that there book recommendations in the early days was the first real glimpse we saw of the world of contextual marketing and advertising, essentially. Cause they said “Here you going to love this book” and you’re like “How do they know? That’s exactly the book I would love” and do it with these algorithms and so on. And they just want a lot more than that…

Leo: This is paranoid. This is just another device watching what you do in your house.

Mike: They can deliver the washing and post right to your TV.

Leo: I do wish, I I keep waiting for; yeah right cause we own it. I DO wish that that flood of Chromecast as set, we keep expecting what would happen….

Jeff: Well was it coming more, haven’t it been from the last two weeks?

Leo: I guess… guess. Yeah YouTube…Yahoo wants to cover a little of YouTube Glitter by luring YouTube stars over to a new video service presumably they’re creating according to the recode and they’ll give you more money if you do it. They haven’t come in to me yet.

Mike: Hmph

Leo: I am YouTube star, oh no I am not a YouTube star, there’s the problem.

Jeff: Believe me we used to be a star.

Leo: oh God what is our total downloads on YouTube? 5000?

Mike: It’s cause you have your own YouTube.

Leo: (Laughs)

Jeff: Oh alright

Leo: I need to start, Chen and I’ve both tried to figure it out, Chad wants to be YouTube star. I know that, I know that fact; Chad’s crazy cause he did not come make any money on YouTube but maybe that’s…
Chad: well there is a lot of… The thing is I was watching something, Jim Lauterbach had to talk about “Can you make a business on YouTube?” and he had a whole panel about it with all these people….

Leo: Because he thinks so, we revision through it. That was you model

Chad: Well at the end, the panel was NO.

Leo: NO

Chad: You at the moment you can’t make business on YouTube, but I think that individuals can create a business for themselves.

Leo: Barely with a lot of, you might make a 100,000 a year.

Chad: With a lot of work.

Leo: You might be working 50 hours 60 hours or 70 hours  a week or you're making 100,000 a year. You're not going to get rich.

Jeff: Somebody’s like Marques Brownlee

Chad: Right, But he is...

Leo: he is the exception that proves wrong , I am sure MKBHD pulls in a ,you know, 6 figures.

Chad: Right

Leo: But if I may pay him 6 figures to work here and he wouldn’t be editing all the time.

Chad: But the point is he'd...

Leo: wouldn’t be his own thing

Chad: he wouldn’t be his own thing

Leo: It would be a lie. I think it’s a lie that’s being told, propagated right now by Google. Because I don’t think he need to, but but just that’s a notion that you can become a rich YouTube star if you just make videos in your kitchen.

Mike: it’s a... it’s a but it talks about Marques Brownlee and even his success and hes one success story who we have to compare with million much less successful people

Chad: Well...

Leo: that’s not a bad thing

Mike: Right but the point is even his incumbents is very...

Leo: He deserves more

Mike: well, he could get less if you know, when you succeed even in an environment like that, they're going to be hundred imitators, the market, the economics of advertising in that environment are just completely unpredictable and they tend, they always tend to downward toward less and less valuable and there’s such a glut of content on YouTube, it’s just, it’s not anything you can really build a business on, you can’t really count on it, because you can’t control the market if there’s another recession like that, you just never know what can happen. It’s not a good reliable business model. It’s great if you're in college and making a ton of a money and you're going to buy a convertible, it’s great but it’s really not a place, a good place to build a business.

Leo: I got to say, I really, the more...as much as I pop this, I still think YouTube is a million years better than the mainstream...Hello! Is that me or ...

Chad: yes, it’s your computer

Leo: god I just

Chad: your phone ringing here just a second

Leo: well you know what the problem is Hangouts, not everybody does much Hang outers. So did you see the story on Tesla's 60 minutes? So once again, the mainstream media, let me play this if I get this video going here

Chad: if you play, we're going to hear Hangout music

Leo: I don’t know where that’s coming from, I don’t have the Hangout open

Mike: We could just do the audio

Leo: Well lets close everything

Chad: (laughs)That will fix it?

Leo: Nothings making noise, let me pull that up again. So apparently 60 minutes to the story (laughs) on the Tesla, in which they added car sounds, because it was too quite

Jeff laughing

Chad: quite

Leo: It was too quiet and 60 minutes even admits that it was an editing error. P.S. an editing error. Chad tells me it was an editing error.

Jeff: Moment of the week

Interviewer: ... how did figure you were going to start a car company and ....

Chad: it’s feels like 60 minutes is a laughing stock of news

Leo: It shouldn’t be, it’s our most prestigious television news

Jeff: at CNN, chad

Leo: CNN a laughing stock, by the way lets switch to CNN. Oh that jet's still missing. Oh ok, thank you.

Jeff: we sure know nothing

Leo: we still know nothing but let’s talk about it

Mike: but in a...in semi-related story, the EU has just ruled all electric cars have to make artificial engine

Leo: that’s because French people like to wander in the streets

Mike: is that right?

Man in TV: ...right before the 250 miles on the charge and Musk's building a network of charging stations where the driver pays nothing for a fill up...

Leo: Did we miss...

Man in TV: he hopes to make the station on solar power one day.

Elon Musk: drive for free on pure sunlight ...

Leo: that’s a The End

Elon: ... that’s the message I convey, even if you like....

Leo: it’s still a great ad for Tesla but  come on you don’t have to act corny, it’s insanity.

Chad: he’s going to drive into the future

Leo: I guess it was over here, somewhere that looks like Google's charging... that’s the super chargers

Man in TV: ...right before the 250 miles on the charge and going over ...

Leo: (laughing) that’s not what it sounds like

Man in TV: right before the 250 miles on the charge and Musk's building a network of charging stations ...

Leo: (laughing) that’s indeed, there you go, thank you 60 minutes for that (Chortles) In my day you did not edit footage and add sound effects to it, I think? Maybe we did, I just forgot.

Jeff: Did you cry on camera?

Leo: (smiling) Yeah, what was that...who was that for...

Jeff: Broadcast news

Leo: Broadcast news, that’s right. That was a movie, that wasn’t real right?

Jeff: No

Leo: ok

Jeff: Well, it’s more real than CNN news is

Leo laughing

Jeff: I wrote a, I really do this for a, just a spoof post not April 1st the same and then they were going to reprint in CNN, the missing network.

Leo: Yeah I saw that and you're right on

Jeff: ...recover missing people, Jesus. I’ve seen that, been disgusting me.

Leo: but obviously they fan out people who want to think about this jet 24/7, it’s only, seems to be the only story they're covering. There was a really good piece on Wired by an amateur pilot. I actually think it, is this is a true story and I don’t know they want to think space aliens...

Mike: black holes

Jeff: black holes

Leo: Black hole, now they are saying the criminal investigation but this piece in Wired, seems pretty straight-forward. The guy’s a pilot he said. Well, first thing I saw when this plane took this hard turn, I looked in to see what was on that trajectory, it was... it’s a, the nearest landing strip that has sufficient capacity to land the Triple 7. He said as a pilot of course one of things you always keep in mind, I always keep in the back of my mind is "Should anything go wrong, where is the nearest place I can land?"

Mike: They train you to do that every minute you say word alert Land...

Leo: that’s your job. So he says what it seem like say there was a fire, there’s been several cases of fires in tires and then there’s working them up through the plane fuselage taking out the electrical system, sequentially. He says it makes perfect sense that the fire was deducted they immediately made that turn towards the safe landing place and he believes that they then were overcome by smoke inhalation and the plane continued on its course until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

Jeff: Yeah

Leo: That makes no sense

Chad: To CNN
Leo: slides say that it makes no sense either, so (chortles) I guess we're now succumbing to this...

Jeff: if you go to the CNN right now, guess what they’re talking about?

Leo: oh no, I have it in my office and it’s almost comical. It’s all they'll talk about. Alright.

Mike: I think it’s Al Capone’s vault

Leo laughing

Jeff: The problem is, it’s a tragedy

Leo: It’s a terrible tragedy

Jeff: It’s a terrible tragedy, the real tragedy, the real lies and it’s been exploited  

Leo: By the way, the Google Connection of the good fellows strain, why is it on Google Earth to find out. Why it is that he use Google earth to find out, where that plane was headed.

Mike: I think the bigger issue with news just, coverage like this is that they used to be for a while mistaken. Now worth news organizations made was that the amount of coverage and the time spent on the coverage of story how big the story was. That to me is kind of a mistake, if there is no information you shouldn’t be spending hours on a story with everybody taped in and making stuff up. But now, it’s like instead of what’s the most news worthy thing, it’s what’s the most 

Leo: Holy ratings driven

Mike: And it’s, the problem is that you attract more people, but their their their people who don’t buy stuff like from is trying to boost their advertising and stuff and so on. But people spend all day on, people speculated by black holes long in the their playing, are not buying their advertising.

Leo: Microsoft, billed conference is going on in San Francisco, are billed conference coverage is really going to happen on Friday on Mari John Pal, coming here and do windows weekly live from 4 o’clock Friday afternoon. I think we have a full house already. That going to be a lot of fun. Windows phone 8.1 was announced on windows phone handsets at the end of April or early May. And It will have a very Google now like Cortana.

Mike: Yea

Leo: I think they might compare more serious than Google. Google now doesn’t have personification. Mike: Right

Leo: Cortana that does some interesting things like

Jeff: Things like rij curtain leather

Leo: Yes, you are watching Jo Bill Fury, do the demonstration in his sister called. And he said, Zoe and Cocktana is my name is to ask about her dogs. What they did not show is , how Cocktana knows about that

Mike: That’s creepy

Leo: laughing, now Jeff, don’t you mind. But you know I pointed out at the time that what happen because of their conscious decision of rescue their privacy cannot do Google now style feature very well. Microsoft can, they have got Bing they have good search engine, they have got the ways to gather those signals. They conceivable do that Google now style

Mike: They could, and I think public is ultimately going to embrace that kind of thing because of it’s so cool. People love Google Now and problem with Google Now is that they still are not really putting in front of view and when they do in front of view, they don’t really give you enough stuff. I want to torrent of Google Now   

Leo: I want more

Jeff: Yes

Mike: I want more and I face the whole time but..

Leo: There is some flaws and may be they are still working on those, I keep getting told. I searched once, long time ago, for a window a glass replacement company and I still to this day Google Now cards get is only eight minutes to Curtis windows. I need and I want to go there in the first place.

Jeff: Enough already with windows 

Leo: Enough with the Windows, and there is nowhere I can turn that particular thing off’

Mike: I had a really interesting experience. The other day, where I got information about a flight in Google Glass which went from the Google Now app and Google Glass. It said, oh flight Toronto is on time is going to be leaving at this time and I am like what what flight. So, I asked my wife and she said oh yea that’s her brother was flying. She had the received the email. Now they are looking at my Gmail, they know that my wife is my wife and they are looking at her Gmail to tell me about

Leo: That’s weird

Mike: Yea

Leo: How do they know she is your wife?

Mike: Probably because I have

Leo: Did not it appear in your Gmail

Jeff: How do you if it’s her brother?

Mike: I am pretty sure, did not. But they

Leo: That’s strange

Mike: They tend to know that I am also got her brother circled. I have a lot of communication with her brother. So, they also know that I have a relationship with her brother. So, it’s kind of, I don’t know, they are doing something

Leo: That’s, I think that’s one place you do get a creep line when you can’t figure out how they know.

Mike: Yea

Leo: That’s really what freaks people out

Jeff: That’s key that they have to revile that and give control over it. Otherwise, you creep

Mike & Leo: yea

Mike: So, there is another thing at billed conference that we cover this morning. I thought it was kind of interesting which is that a website popped up yesterday called windowsondevices.com and I don’t know if they announced this yet at the billed conference by Microsoft. This website called windowsondevices.com popped up and then it went away, before it went away people went through it and found all kind of stuff about talking teddy bears, robots, smart coffee mugs. The internet running windows and this is going to be powered by Intel Golay Platform. So, they are going to do something roughly equivalent to Android ware. But less about wearable and more about the internet things and it seems to be aimed very securely at makers and builders, educators and you know that sort of hardware hackers market. Which I think is great and in fact, it has to be said and is probably more coincident than anything else. That ever since Saint took over Microsoft; they seemed to be a much better company. I don’t know if you guys have perceived that but they seemed to be doing all kind of stuff

Jeff: How could you make that much shape? I mean, this is the Queen Marry and so a guy comes on with a new pedal. I think that’s a wishful thinking

Leo: laughing

Mike: Well, could be I mean. The thing is Microsoft, the forestry thing about Microsoft is they are always working on great stuff and they withhold it. One Example is, Microsoft research, which is one of the best research labs in the industry and you never see their stuff. They withhold it somehow; either the internal politics of the company or something prevents them from executing on many fronts. They really could get home runs and just for the last ten years, you have to hear they have failed failed failed, to execute on the stuff they have and have been working on. So, here I don’t know how much it take, it’s just turn things on, let thing go forward, announce things that have been in works for several years. I really don’t know, one possibility is that Ballmer, certainly achieve the enlightenment in his last year and got a bunch of things in emotions that are now such a delicate state clarifier. The other one is that such and Delos basically, you know things like you know nose squelching Android Nokia devices. Things like, you know, the big having an announcement almost entirely about an iPad product. I mean that was that they did not see that   

Leo: They did not even mention windows

Jeff & Mike: yea

Mike: That was, you know, and is that can Ballmer be given credit for that? I am not so sure

Leo: That Ballmer was one holding back, I think this is such an announcement coming out. But it’s a long standing tradition technology, remember the book Fumbling the future how zero ax invented the first personal computer. Blas went to Packer and said, I just invented the Apple one, would you like to sell it? No

Mike: They did that twice

Leo: Long standing tradition

Mike: Hp purchased Palm, which has web OS, which was a third alternative multi touch user interface and very innovative one

Leo: Beautiful

Mike: Different from the others, that has that huge feature on all the devices even onto the desktop. The once again they had the future of computing in their hands and they like No, we spend a lot for it but you know what we just going to ignore it and then sort of let it go. Idiotic

Leo: It happens a lot

Mike: Unbelievable

Leo: Anybody, as always asks confident long enough, we have seen it happened. Time and time again, Chad you will see it too some day

Chad: May be with you too

Mike: will you grow up, will you. We will see it all happen

Leo: Fumbling the Future, we are going to take a break, come back, get our number, tip, anything you like to submit Mike to our pool of stuff, just a second I am sure they brought you by a friends of personal capital. I had personal capital’s founder on trianglish company, couple of years ago, Bill Haris. He was former CEO within intuit and PayPal learn a lot about how people use money, keep track of money. He wanted a solution for people to track their investments. He realized before you can even talk about wealth creation or investing you have got to understand where all your money is. That’s so hard. You got bank accounts, charge cards, stocks, 401K. Do people still call them charge cards?

Mike: No idea

Leo: I think I just did myself, charge cards. Credit cards, 401Ks. They are all on different websites with different years names and passwords. You can’t see it all, it was the landscape. So, he created personal capital, you set it up and within a minute you seeing live real time dashboard of your financial situation on your tablet, on your phone, of course on your desktop. Then of course you see, the investment checkouts, if you are paying too much. Your fees and investment advice, they gave you tailor investment advice. So, you can start building your retirement, building your future and best of all and this make sense it’s free. It has to be free, why spend money on this. When you should be putting that money in this, your savings, your investments. Personalcapital.com/twig, I think he created a great invention, a great idea. Then if you are curious, the way they monetize is, it’s just like their other products and by giving you personalize recommendations and that take their commission if you decide to buy. They do a very nice job and they give you a great advice. Personacapital.com/twig reliant our chance to Mike Elgan to share his break pizza oven on twig 

Mike: I can bring it in I think. It could have fit in Prius

Leo: Mike and I was talking yesterday about I want to build one. So great Idea

Mike: Yea, well when we move to Paddle Move, we looked at a lot of houses and there are some my wife likes and this one I just. When I saw that Pizza oven, I am liked this has to be the house. We getting this house

Leo & Jeff: laughing

Mike: I don’t even care if there is a roof, keep drain out or whatever

Leo: is that door you throw in and it heats up and then you cook cook cook

Mike: That’s right, the big steel door. When you open it, it make noise, and then you like shove pizzas in there. It’s like 700 Degrees and it’s fantastic.

Leo: it’s Awesome

Mike: Yea

Jeff: Cheeesssee

Leo: Yea, so, Jeff I think you need to come back

Leo: Pizza party is at Mike

Mike: Are you coming back

Leo: look at that, it’s Google plus picture. What about the hat, tell me about the hat? What is that?

Mike: That’s a chef’s hat

Leo: You wearing a chef’s hat

Mike: I want people to know, who has the charge of this oven. That’s how you do it. I own a Chef’s hat

Leo: Now, I have to have a chef’s hat, we need chef hat parody

Mike: It gives you authority

Leo: Is he wearing glasses in that picture

Mike: Yea, Google glass, and I posted the Google glass video of the whole pizza process as well, so it’s really

Leo: I want to build one.

Mike: Yea, keep going down if you want to play, I don’t know if you want

Leo: If you don’t follow Mike on Google plus, you are missing one of the best most prolific posters on Google Plus, he really

Mike: Yea, keep going  

Leo: Now, have you looked at your reviews?

Mike: Yea, Three Hundred and Thirty Three Million

Leo: Jeminy, Creaky Christmas

Mike: it’s a lot, I was so astonishing to saw that.

Leo: What the heck? That’s amazing, but you know of course the king of all this is Trey Ratcliff. Let me see if I can get a trace. Let me see if I go to his pager. That’s the only trace

Mike: Yea, you will see it  

Jeff: Oh, they put followers backup, they took followers down along. Now they have, I think this is which sometime they don’t show any numbers

Leo: Look at this, Three Hundred Thirty Three Million views

Jeff: I have got 43 million

Leo: Awwwww, I am some pathetic numbers, I don’t even want to mention

Mike: Really put things in perspective, Google Plus is. They are in also some recent reports about

Leo: They are in ghost town. So, Trey has 4.5 Billion views, 7.3 million followers. He is probably the most followed, I don’t know who is, but he is probably one of the most followed

Mike: Did I tell you about my Morocco Story and Trey Ratcliff. I went to Morocco by the year ago and thing where I loved it. Trey Ratcliff of all photographers that I know of should come to Morocco and I posted some stuff saying, you got to come to Morocco. He just went to Morocco.

Leo: Good

Mike: And my God, the pictures he posted from Morocco were just

Leo: Larry Page has more followers, 8.1 million, but he is only got a poultry 29 Million views.

Mike: Yea, he doesn’t really get Google Glass.

Leo: laughing

Mike: Like Trey and I get

Leo: laughing

Mike: I am thinking he needs to work on it; he needs to spend more time just posting.

Jeff: How well know Trey was before Google Plus

Leo: he was well known but Google Plus really helped put him out there

Mike: yea

Leo: I have a mere 16.9 million views, so phatic. I don’t know how you all getting millions of followers. I have half a million followers in Google Plus and never been lacerate that. I don’t know why that is

Jeff: I was on recommended was spare some time

Mike: Yea, I am still on it.

Leo: Why am I not on the list. Oh I feel better about myself

Jeff: Mike Geno was on it too

Leo: I know, you all have millions of followers. It’s not like I don’t post it on time

Jeff: It doesn’t matter because..

Leo: What

Jeff: The algorithms still decides to, what to show to whom. It’s very much like Facebook, but it’s not business oriented. You know what, we it folds both ways. Because I only see what algorithms chose to show me one feature. Hey, Google if you listening, one feature I would like to have; is the ability to turn on or off the people I follow.

Mike: Yea

Leo: OK, you can’t, like Facebook you don’t see everybody’s allover post. That’s not good, I thought the slider.. you can go all the way

Mike: you can do a Slider but it doesn’t go to hundred percent. It goes to a lot but not everything. I got that. The other thing is, there are five thousands circles count limit. You can’t circle more than five thousand people and that bugs me to now and every other day I have to go and uncircle bunch of people so that I can circle the people that I want to circle. So, If you are listening, whoever,

Leo: More circle

Jeff: This is the real test, how much does Scoble have.

Leo: So, followers are 

Leo: Scoble has 91 million views. He is not even in the ballpark.

Mike: The interesting thing about Google plus though, is that there is no automatic traffic. As Jeff is saying, you really see it in the comments and engagement. If you put a boring post up there that would waste all the time. You get hardly any traffic, if you put something that is really hot, it goes crazy even if you don’t have a bazillion followers.

Leo: Scoble has got five million followers and 91 million views, which I think that a low number of views for the number of followers he has, frankly. Really, Trey got seven million and he is got what was it four billion views

Mike: yea

Leo: Four Billion!!!

Mike: I can give Scoble hard time about that. I got three hundred thirty three million

Leo: You got billion dude!!

Jeff: You really worked it

Leo: That’s how we get into this. One of the most prolific posters on Google Plus and that shows you really do is the quality posts. Good posts, you do consistent work people will follow you on Google Plus. Mike you have a pick or a tip or something you like to share.

Mike: I do, things are little birdy. Little bird told me, which is the new book by Beston. This is a, I mean this is not getting a lot of buzz but I think it’s really great book. We recently saw the excellent book “Hatching Twitter”   

Leo: let me see it

Mike:  which gives us origin story of twitter. This is about Beston’s, mostly it’s like a cross between manifesto and an auto biography. But it talks about how he ended up as a billionaire, almost by accident. Multiple stages in his life, I want to point out, the dumbest thing ever seen in a book

Leo: This book is limited to 140 pages, it would be over. It would end here

Jeff: Can’t

Mike: The tree has to die here

Leo: By the way, it continues on for another 100 pages. 

Mike: That’s right, but it’s an engaging book. It’s pretty well written and I am really enjoying it. It’s a nice

Leo: This is by the way why, know why he is talking about this book and why people don’t hear about it. Their impression of biz that he maybe is little bit or egoist. The first chapter has his business card. Biz Stone Genius

Mike: Well, he actually tells the story of why had that business card that he got it from, where most good ideas come from, which is a roadrunner cartoons. While E. Coyote had a business card, I think that said E. Coyote Comma Genius something like that. So, that’s where it came from and he talks about how he has... It’s very personal book actually, he says, there are two Bestons. There is the interest perspective. Nerdy Beston, who does this kind of self-effacing sort and then there is the eagle maniacal Beston that he turns on when he needs to. He needed to when he was hung over and had bunch of interviews at Google. He was like, Oh yea, started telling him you know sort of re-interviewing him. But It’s really an interesting book, talks about how one person made it from just obscure blogger to becoming this zillionaire

Leo: So, You recommend it

Mike: I do recommend it, it’s very enjoyable book. Just came out Tuesday

Leo: You know I tried to get it for triangulation. Steven Stephen Colbert says, in things little bird told me Biz give away all his secretes to access, I advise him against it. If you are not inspired and informed by this book then you haven’t read it. That’s pretty good. I praise from Colbert and little bird told me. All right, Good pick. Mr. Jeff Jarvis you have number of the week

Jeff: So, Google has forty-nine percent of mobile advertising according to microbe.

Leo: Who has the rest?

Jeff: Facebook has eighteen percent and other apps thirty three percent. Now they say that time spent Google has 18%, Facebook has 17% time spend  

Leo: Oh, that’s terrible

Jeff: But, I am not so sure either. I questioned, I don’t know what’s the methodologies behind that because same problem is saying time spend on Google.com. Google puts ads on a lot of places

Leo: Right, so their numbers brought down by the fact that people see search results and then quickly

Jeff: Oh, I don’t know the methodology. So, Google brought in 14.5 billion mobile add revenue, Facebook shared rated under half of that 6.8 billion but let’s not forget Facebook was zero with mobile, not very long ago at all. Now it’s stocks is going up because it’s doing so well in mobile. So, I think it’s important

Leo: Here is why While E. Coyote business card. Just in case you are interested, that says genius. Now, is that have brain will travel?

Mike:  Yea, that’s a good line too

Leo: That’s going to be my business card. Mine have brain

Jeff: What was Zok CEO SUCKER?

Leo: I am CEO bitch.

Jeff: Bitch, right

Leo: I am CEO Comma Bitch

Mike: There is another guy who has a business card and he was a kind of an academic type and he just told the Google that he can make up his own title. So, he came up with the title Jolly Good Fellow. Great title

Leo: I think my tail chief twig is pretty good

Mike: It’s pretty good   

Jeff: Yes

Leo: it’s both aggrandizing and deprecating at the same time

Jeff: and it’s true

Leo: True!!!

Mike: yea

Leo: It’s who I am, the chief twig. Chad it carries no power. So, I am sorry Jinni is not here because you remember last week we trying out new HTC One the M8 I guess what all called. She hit her old one had broken and she brought the Google play addition but she hadn’t checked out yet. Now, if you get Google play addition so it’s going to be couple of weeks away. This is actually not a Google play addition; this is the One and all HTC sends scullery. This is amortizing one, I would tell Jinni don’t. But Chad, I have told this before, she told she doesn’t buy. Don’t be put off by this set skin because actually it’s pretty tolerable. It’s much more Googly then the original HTC One. I love for instant the original HTC One has those capacitive buttons at the bottom. They were none standard. Now, they have gone to the standard, you know back

Jeff: By the way Leo, as I remember

Leo: I hated that

Jeff: Yes, you hated that

Leo: Yea

Jeff: No, You are the one who wanted to visit those buttons

Leo: I did and I was wrong

Jeff: Ok, Alright thank you       

Leo: I did, I was wrong. I did not like the HTC One, I at least wanted, you know I did not wanted to be completely none standard either. But I did like the fact that all my phones up to that point had a home physical home button that new where the home was. Now I was wrong, I guess my complaint was that all wanted weight screen space with the menu on the screen. These screens now are so damn big that you could have afforded it and the HTC menu bar at the bottom is actually smaller than the standard Google. Kick that menu bar, so doesn’t take out much space. I do agree with the thinking behind it, which is as you rotate the phone and so forth. I thought they would move the menus around, the menus stay where they are and that was my big complaint. You don’t want menus moving, remember that. They don’t, they stay where you expect them to be. They are always here, that’s fine I don’t have a problem with that. The screen is gorgeous, 5 inches. That’s up to the Nexus’s 5 is, this is bigger than the Genesis old HTC One. Still 10 AP, 441 dots print, really gorgeous. I think the camera, that’s what we are talking about, is pretty remarkable on this. In fact, I wasn’t crazy about original HTC One C1 Camera, she liked it. It’s 4-mega pixels, the ultra-pixels ID, better low light photography. So, they don’t things to take it to make it better. So, actually I am pretty happy with it, so you asked the right question though , Jeff; Do I give up the Moto X? Which...

Mike: right

Jeff: true that!

Leo: ...Mike and I both are Moto X fanatics!

Mike: Yup

Leo: The Moto X camera is so bad, I think it comes down to how important is a camera to you...

Mike: Yup

Leo: ...If a camera were not important for me, I wouldn’t give up the Moto X...

Mike: Right

Leo:...because I really like the "always listening", I liked it ;it knows when you're driving, when you're in a meeting; it will read you. This is I am going to miss this on the HTC One, when you're driving and a text comes in, that reads you text. It’s says "you want to respond?"; that is great.

Mike: It’s great, It’s... Somebody came out with a phone that was essentially the HTC One with the Moto X "always listening" stuff and the and that; plus the Lumia camera, the Lumia 1020 camera...

Leo: then you've got something!

Mike: I will pay anything for that phone...

Leo: yeah, that’s a $1000

Mike: anything... I will pay $5000 for that...

Leo: What?! you so...lets be...

Mike: well it’s easy to say cause they're not going to do it so I...

Leo laughing.

Mike: ...just say that but but I want, you know...

Leo: I agree!

Mike:...why do you have to pick over a good camera experience and you know...

Leo: right

Mike: ...voice command?

Leo: I...I do think there’s hope for you because Lenovo has said; or somebody I don’t know; whoever’s on Motorola now; has said that this summer there'll be a Moto X and I...if I were Motorola, if I were Lenovo, that’s exactly what I would do is I would say "Ok we got it down , the Moto X was great but the screen wasn't great and the camera wasn't great. Want to make them better. If I make those better I might go back the Moto X this summer". But for now I'd made the choice, I am going to carry the HTC One. It’s hard to give up that great camera, that great screen which is...

Mike: yeah, I know

Leo: ...i guess it’s just hard to give it up. So. Alright, we found somebody with even more page views. I don’t know how this is possible. Bert's found, a guy named "Romain Guy"...

Mike: Romain Guy? Who’s that?

Leo: Romain Guy...

Chad: You guys don’t follow Romain Guy?

Leo: who is he? He got 15 billion page views...

Chad: The guy from Romain...

Leo: He works at Google, he attended...Oh he’s French...No

Mike: 86,000 followers.

Leo: Is that 15 Billion, it is? He must be a very... Oh he’s...I actually follow him (Laughs)... he’s in my photographer group, so I guess he’s a photographer.

Mike: Ahan

Leo: It’s not surprising that the great photographers are the ones who get the most attention on Google+. It’s such a photogenic...

Jeff: Yes

Leo: ...site. WOW,is he number one, Romain Guy?

Chad: I don’t know.

Leo: (Whistles)

Mike: It’s astonishing.

Leo: 15 BILLION Views!!!

Mike: He’s following you too.

Leo: That must make Trey feel terrible. He’s following me?

Mike: Yeah, the arrow goes both directions, which means you're following him, he’s following you.

Leo: Ahhhh. Well now I feel better. Even if I don’t have a lot of followers who views, at least I have Romain Guy. 

Mike: (Chortles) I am not following him and he’s not following me.

Leo laughing.

Mike: This is outrageous!

Leo and Mike Laughing.

Leo: Hey it’s so nice to have you, Mike Elgan. Mike is our news director here at TWIT and can I say what a great job and I know that the people are going to say...

Mike: Thank you

Leo: ...oh that’s self-serving you, hiring me the. No, you're doing...you're knocking the other part...You're doing exactly what we brought you here to...

Jeff: He is doing a great job

Leo: ...which is to really raise the tenor of conversation here. If you don’t get to watch the new TNT every Monday through Friday at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern time 2000 UTC; you're really missing what it’s becoming a deep news show with great guests, great insight and I...it’s exactly what I was hoping we would get from you, so...

Mike: Well, Thank you...

Leo: ...Thank you.

Mike: ...I am loving it because I am such a fan of great journalism and every day I get to howl these great journalists in and we talk about the news, we also talk about the journalism and so it’s really a joy. And I am really enjoying it.

Leo: I...Good. And I, I know again this sounds self-serving but I am really very very happy with what you've done. Mike also kind of runs the entire news operation so Tech News Tonight, Wall Sera Lain Jose is also Mike Elgan's joint and and and and all the breaking news stories in the live news stuff and we're going to get better and better. In fact we're going to build little set for Mike in his office. So he could feed us quick breaking news hit’s.

Mike: Keep me out of the general area of office area...

Leo: well...

Mike: ... just Keep me in there. So...

Leo: So if he'd wear shoes, I wouldn’t feel so bad. But I just...

Mike: Not going to do it.

Leo: (Laughing.)

Mike: Not going to happen.

Jeff: It’s the pants I would...

Mike: ...come to the man

Leo: He’s got a glass. He’s also got chef’s hat. Shoes? Not so much.

Jeff: He needs pants.

Leo: (Laughing.)

Mike: Don’t follow society rules.

Leo continues laughing.

Leo: And of course it’s always a real pleasure to have Jeff Jarvis on, another guy really consider; not only a great friend but a brilliant and wonderful commentator on this world around us. Jeff blogs BuzzMachine.com, his book is public parts and Goodwin Bart the Geek anything else with Professor McQuiny, anything else you want to talk about?

Jeff: No, not yet, not yet.

Leo: You're working on anything or you're just scribble scribble scribble? You're writing something?

Jeff: No I am working on something for the school but later.

Leo: But and we do have to get together and talk about the basements...

Jeff: Oh yeah in fact we're probably going to be back there on May 15th.

Leo: Alright deal. We are going to negotiate.

Jeff: We start before then so we can, so we can...

Leo: I am desperate to do this. The more I think about them the more I like it.

Jeff: We are, we are telling people about it but we are absolutely desperate to it.

Leo: Thank you everybody for watching.

Jeff: I think you should read email.

Leo: Say again!

Jeff: I will send you at least an email and we'll schedule it all...

Leo: That’s the problem, I never read email...

Mike: That will end up in your promotional tab.

Jeff: ...

Leo: update.

Jeff: you got to have a priority inbox.

Leo laughing.

Leo: We do this show 1 PM Pacific; 4 PM eastern time Wednesdays on the TWIT network. Please watch live if you will that is 2000 UTC, if you can’t watch live please do watch the after effect on main or on the video available anytime at twit.tv/twig wherever finer netcasts are aggregated. I realize I’ve told the people the wrong time for TNT; 10 AM Pacific; 1 PM Eastern time 1700 UTC, so please tune in for that. Thanks everybody on the chat room, everybody live in the studio and thanks to all of you watching it at home. I am Leo LaPorte, we'll see you next time on TWiG!

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