This Week in Google 250 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte :  It's time for TWIG, ‘This Week in Google’. Kevin Marks and Matthew Ingram are here, along with Jeff Jarvis. Gina has the week off. We'll talk about Youtube's plan to acquire Twitch, and why it makes so much sense. German publishers have decided they hate Google. They want to break it up. And, the new head of Google Glass. It's all coming up next, on TWIG.

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Leo: This is TWIG, ‘This Week in Google’. Episode 250, recorded May 21st 2014.

I Like the Fiddly Bits!

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It's time for This Week in Google - the show that covers Google, the Googleplex, the Googleverse, the Facebook verse, the Twitter verse , all that stuff - the cloud. Jeff Jarvis is here; he just flew in from San Francisco. And poor guy, you were in San Francisco for a day, less than a day to talk to Dr. Google...

Jeff Jeff : It was 18 hours I've calculated, yeah! Plus 20 minutes for plane problems, yeah, I was by the ...

Leo: You fly a lot.

Jeff: I do. I am in global services. I'll have you know ... So when they start boarding, I'm that obnoxious prick who jumps in first.

Leo: Who goes ahead, yeah! I almost want to say, “Hey, where's your wheelchair Jarvis? Where's your crutches?”

Jeff: Soon enough! 

Leo: Yeah! Gina's out because her lovely little daughter ended up not feeling too well and she wanted to spend some time with the baby while she's under the weather. 

Jeff: Aww! 

Leo:She'll get over that quick enough. But meanwhile, Kevin Marks has joined us. Always nice to have Kevin and his garden.

Kevin Marks: Nice to see you again.

Leo: Bird warning. There will be birds.

Kevin: There aren't any birds. I'm actually sitting at a slightly different place than usual because we got some new garden finishers.

Leo: That's actually gorgeous. I love this.

Kevin : I won't show you around the garden finishers. We got some really comfy garden arm chairs.

Leo: Always nice to have excellent armchairs in the garden. And, all the way from Canada, Matthew Ingram of Gigaom fame is here as well. Nice to have you, Matthew.

Matthew Ingram: Thanks for having me.

Leo: Well, we got a great crew for this show today. Lot of fun! Our top story, the Nest Smoke alarm has finally been recalled in its entirety. 440,000 smoke alarms for a safety risk. 

Yeah. This is the company Google bought for 3.2 billion. They had two products; one was of course the famous Nest Thermostat, the other was a smoke alarm that talks to you and lets you wave your arms to disable it, and apparently that caused a little bit of a problem. They halted sales of the alarms last month after recognizing that the temporary silencing feature, wasn't so temporary. The Nest has to be connected to the internet and linked to an account for an automatic update. So if you have one, make sure that you get the update, you go to Nest Sense ... This is why, by the way, internet connected devices are a pain in the keister. You have to go to Nest Sense on your account and ensure that the button for Nest Wave is set to off and greyed out. Those who have not connected their devices to the wireless network on a Nest account should do so. Devices will then be automatically updated. Consumers should take the aforementioned steps to ensure that the update is complete. Meanwhile, I guess they're recalling them unless you say, “Well, I download the update”. 

I guess they just can't assume that everybody will have internet access and so forth. Customers can contact Nest Labs for more information, 800-249-4280 or visit Nest.com. Click on the “Nest Protect Safety Notice” Link. Wait a minute, why am I getting...? Oh that’s really obnoxious. ABC.com just redirected me, as I went to Nest.com to go somewhere else. Some crap ad. Alright, where is it? I'm looking. Nest Smoke alarm, life with Nest Protect, watch the video... I don't see anything about a ... Oh, here it is. Safety letter from the CEO. So, it says immediate... So, "At Nest we conduct regular rigorous test. During recent lab testing of the Nest Protect smoke alarm, we observed a unique combination of circumstances that caused us to question whether Nest Wave, a feature that enables you to turn off your alarm with a wave of the hand could be unintentionally activated". If you went like this, “Hey Chad!! Hey!! Hey!!!”

Jeff : “Hey kids!! Get out!! Get out! Don't go in there!! Get out!!”

Leo:"This could delay an alarm going off if there was a real fire. We do not know of any customers who have experienced this, but the fact that it could even potentially happen is important". I think this is good, he's... They're, telling you what to do, you know, you could get it fixed. Now, here's a question. Can you buy a Nest Protect anymore? They stopped all sales. 

Jeff or Kevin : Oh! Good!

Leo:Hmmm! 

Matthew: Because it was the consumer product association or whatever that recalled it, right?

Leo: Oh, it's a CPC recall. Not... Oh! So, you're Nest Protect is off the market, until they figure this thing out.

Matthew: I got to say the whole waving thing, when I heard about it, I thought, well, what if ... how does it know that you're waving at it?

Leo: Maybe you're just running around 'cause the house is on fire.

Matthew: Yeah, what if you're just waving? Or there's a fly or something and you’re just...

Kevin: Not waving, but drowning.

Leo: So okay, so you'd wave, and the alarm would say, "Oh, he doesn’t want me to go off". But, how long does that last, an hour? An hour would be bad. A minute wouldn't be. 

Matthew : I guess forever, is what it sounds like. 

Leo: You didn’t really want me to go off anymore, did you?

Matthew: Wave to disable.

Leo: That's not a good feature.

Matthew : It reminds me of the – maybe we're going to talk about this, but the Google Glass Nod to Pay with BitCoin. Seems to me, that could really backfire. 

Leo: Do you have that Jeff? On yours? Nod to pay?

Jeff: No, I haven’t got that.

Kevin: You know, you accidentally sneeze and suddenly you find you bought something. 

Leo: Do you want to pay? 

Matthew: Yeah!

Leo: That seems a little too easy! Gooogle Glass and Nod to Pay. But you have to – No, this is a feature that they, that Google themselves is offering. No, it's a new app that takes mobile payment to a whole new level. It's called Eaze. Maybe a little too easy. E-A-Z-E. It allows Google users to link to a virtual BitCoin wall - and oh it actually, alright Eaze is a wallet. Ah, you activate the Eaze app with a voice command, use Google Glass to scan the QR code provided by the store associated with the associated product. Once it is scanned, a head nod completes the mobile payment transaction. Well, there's a few steps before you have to ...

Matthew: Ah, that's true!

Leo: But, do you ... is it really that hard to pay that way?

Matthew: I need it to be harder.

Leo: Yeah, not easier. 

Matthew: I don't need Amazon and Google to make ...

Leo: Yeah, that, no! Harder, not easier! 

Jeff : or Glass!

Leo: So, he's looking at the QR code ...

Kevin: He's going to scan the QR code with his eyes?

Matthew: Can you do that?

Advert Lady: For special purchases, and ease makes accepting payments just as easy. 

Leo: You don't look dorky enough with your Glass on, so we're going to make you look sillier. 

Matthew: But, he still has a girlfriend.

Advert Lady: Using cutting edge technologies that are available to us now.

Kevin: Even with the Glass.

Matthew: Scarf helps.

Matthew: “Oh no, I'll nod. Don't worry.”

Leo: This is a joke, isn't it?

Matthew: It has to be.

Kevin: Is the QR code as big as your plate?

Leo : We're getting ... We live in a world that is indistinguishable from the onion. 

Jeff : Well, there is a parody. There is a Nest parody, if you look at the bottom of the Google section of the rundown. 

Leo: Aha! 

Jeff: And Google had it taken down because they didn’t have a sense of humour about it. 

Leo: What? 

Matthew: Come on!

Jeff: yeah, I ... it’s the third from the bottom...

Leo: Yeah, I see it. I got it here. Let me just play the... This is the parody of the Nest. Is it gone? So I can’t play it.

Jeff : It was watered down evidently. It was at Republica.

Leo: It was a German political activist group. It was a parody website posting, poking – poking fun at Google's products. So, did they have the right to be forgotten? 

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Apparently, Google has that right. Wow! See, I would think that Google would bend over backwards at this point to make sure no sites get taken down. Did it violate trademarks or ...? But, no it's parody. You can do anything you want. You can do anything you want in parody, whereas ... Didn't people in New York a few years ago distribute a fake New York Times as an April fool's joke? 

Jeff : Yes.

Leo: What did the Times do?

Jeff: Times was okay in that case, I think they made it fair enough ... There was a blogger, a well known blogger today that did a New York Times kind of correction site; and the New York Times went after them. You know, this is the reflex of lawyers. 

Leo: Well, so here's what happens if you go to Google-Nest.org now. You get a single candle saying, "Dear Internet, This beautiful website has been taken down, because Google is worried about their brand and the future of Nest Labs, which is in the business of making creepy products designed to collect even more data from you. Apparently they just can’t get enough, they must have it all." 

Jeff : There's a video below, that's the launch.

Leo:  Oh, it's Republica.

Jeff: Unfortunately, I had to cancel because of the time to go to this here.

Leo: What?

Leo:  Oh! You didn't cancel because of this?

Jeff: No, no. 

Kevin : Yes, if they insult Google...

Leo: I'm not going.

Kevin : ... I'm not going to Republica. I'm boycotting Germany till they get to their senses.

Advert Man: something new to you. It's called Google Nest. And well, I'd like to introduce two people to show you what this is about, this Google Nest. 

Leo: " It’s called Google Nest".

Advert Man: Please welcome, Dr. Gloria Spindle and Paul von Rebbeck. 

Leo: Those are phony names I presume.

Kevin: Hard to tell!

Leo: They’re funny in German.

Matthew: I don't know. They don't know. 

Advert Lady(Dr. Gloria Spindle): Wow! How nice to be here. Republica for the first time. I'm Gloria Spindle.  

Leo : Not her real name.

Advert (Paul von Rebbeck): I'm Paul von Rebbeck. Hello!!!

Advert (Dr. Gloria Spindle): It's really amazing to be here... 

Leo: So, I can see Google would be upset about this because they're kind of billing themselves as from Google. 

Matthew: Yes.

Advert (Dr. Gloria Spindle): ... the energy, and the collective brain power here. I was just saying to Paul yesterday, we should be recruiting. 

Advert (Paul von Rebbeck): Heh! Really!

Advert (Dr. Gloria Spindle) : So, as Max kind of hinted at in the interaction, we at Google have actually been thinking a lot about the same things you've been thinking about ...

Leo :Yeah, see you can't say “We at Google”, even if it's ... That's kind of impersonating. 

Advert (Dr. Gloria Spindle): We have been thinking a lot about the same things you have been thinking about. We see on your program topics like surveillance, privacy, data, Snowden. These are issues that are close to our heart ...

Leo: It's also not funny, which is probably the greatest sin of all. Google is doing all right according to the yearly brand ratings. Adweek says Google is the most valuable brand topping Apple for the first time. This is the Brand Z Top 100 most valuable global brands. Apple now Number Two after Google. 

Jeff: This list makes no sense. But having said that, this makes sense. Google's in everybody's lives, more than Apple's in everybody lives. 

Leo: Yeah. I mean, they've rated on a variety of categories, right?

Jeff : Yes.

Leo: I'm sure they'll explain that. 

Jeff: Yeah. I’m... Last year we talked about this and I looked it up, how they do it, and I forget. 

Leo: 40% rise in brand value drove Google to Number One position. 

Jeff: 40 %

Leo: Sounds so scientific. The brand has appreciated. 

Jeff: Shouldn't it be 42% ?

Leo: Well, it's appreciated 324% since the inception of the Brand Z Top 100 most global valuable brands list.

Jeff: The only brand benefits from this is Brand Z, because right now we're... branding it. 

Leo: Yeah. Brand Z. Brand Zzzz... Amazon in the Top 10 for the first time. Facebook, second fastest rising brand, increasing 68% in brand value. I'm sorry, I have to stop now. Moving on! Geez! SEC filing - Google says they're planning international acquisitions worth up to 30 billion dollars.

Jeff: They have all this cash overseas that they can't repatriate to the US, or else they'll pay taxes on it. So, they got to do something with it. 

Leo: Right.

Jeff: Hmm!!

Leo: Google generated about half of its revenue in non-US markets in 2012. That money then, can’t be repatriated to Google US without paying US tax. 

Jeff: I think that's about half their cash flow. They have, I think I saw 68 billion, plus another 2 billion in long term. 

Leo: Waze was an Israeli company, so that was a good one. Deepmined, they got them. They're in London - 400 million dollars. Spider.io - London, Rangespan - also in the UK. Google told the SEC that it had recently pursued but discontinued potential buyout of a foreign company with a valuation in the range of 4 to 5 billion. 

Kevin: What do you think it could have been? 

Leo: Spotify?

Matthew: Could be.

Jeff: Oh!

Leo: Who could that be? Not Beats? Who could that be? Twitch, Twitch was... you know there's still that rumor that Youtube's going to buy Twitch, although I haven't seen any further confirmation. 

Jeff: that's not a 5 billion ...

Matthew: That's not 4 billion.

Leo: Can't be 4 billion. I mean we're talking about, that's a lot of money. That's more than they paid for Youtube itself. Kevin Marks, you're international. Actually, you're both international. 

Jeff: Oh, that doesn't count. 

Leo: But, it would count in this, wouldn't it? If it were a Canadian company, it would count. What is - let me google, what is Spotify worth?

Kevin : We don't have anything worth 4 billion.

Leo: Not real, for sure. Ah Spotify's value tops... 4 billion dollars. 

Matthew: Hmm.. good call...

Leo: And yeah. Yeah, that was last year. So, there you go. That’s based on investors and so forth. Most... In November, Technology Crossover Ventures lead a quarter billion dollar investment round into Spotify and valued them at 4 billion dollars - up from 3 billion in the year before. But, would Google want Spotify? 

Matthew: I would think so.

Leo: Especially, if it's true that Apple's buying Beats. This could be the consolidation of the streaming music business. 

Matthew : I said this last time, I don't understand why Apple isn't buying Spotify. I don’t understand why...

Leo: Much better than Beats.

Matthew: Yeah. I mean to me, as the service...

Jeff: They've got the cash. They have double the cash that Google has. 

Leo: Ah, but they don't have those income generating headphones. Spotify's done nothing but lose money. Beats at least makes a billion dollar... or generates a billion dollar in revenue a year.

Google also, in this SEC filing said that it was considering like things like serving ads through your thermostat. 

Matthew: Bad choice. Bad choice. 

Leo: Please.

Jeff: Would you like a cashmere sweater about now? Or do you want more money on energy?

Matthew: Sometime later it said it wasn’t thinking about it.

Leo: It's just a letter. They wrote a letter to the SEC; hypothetically saying they could be serving ads and other content to refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, watches. "This is why we shouldn't have to disclose revenue generated from mobile devices".

Matthew: I think it was a dodge, you know, to get around having to disclose their mobile revenue. So, they just pick everything ...

Leo: Yeah. They didn't want to break it down. They said "it doesn’t make sense to break our mobile revenues since the definition of mobile will continue to evolve as more smart choices are allowed".

Matthew: Which is true.

Leo: Yeah. So, yeah, it doesn’t mean necessarily that they're planning. It's more like, "Hey, we don't know what mobile means or where – what is mobile revenue? If we're going to put it on our refrigerator, is that mobile? If we put it on our thermostat, is that mobile?"

Matthew: Pretty sure, the fridge is not mobile. But, the...

Leo: Or the thermostat. I've never seen anybody carry his thermostat around.

Matthew: I think a car for sure. 

Leo: Yeah. Glasses, watches.

Matthew: You could see a Waze sort of heads up to the traffic display on your dashboard. Ads show up on...

Leo: That would be super awesome!! I would put up with an ad in there. I don't know, like, Waze is loaded with ads. Everytime I stop the car, I get an ad from Waze. It's very annoying. 

Jeff: Yeah, I don't think it's a way that – I don't think it's a value of Waze. I think the value of Waze is more... But praise Waze. I got out Norwich airport, I stopped, I pulled over... I stopped and pullover. I said Waze how long? and emailed Chad, it was right to the minute. 

Leo: Yeah. That's the best thing about... one of the best things about GPS is knowing, kind of almost exactly when you're going to arrive and most GPS's are good about that now. They have traffic information. 

Kevin: The problem is you get... you get trapped by Google maps being useless and searching for things.  I had a... don't go by hearsay... let me find the link. But, so, what happens is if you put a calender event in, and if you put the name of the company before it's address, Google will instead of reading the address out of that location, will do a search for the name of the company and send you somewhere else entirely. During [inaudible] a bad set up and everything. I've got a ...

Jeff: Yeah, it does really cross things like, I'll be searching for something that I know is two miles away and it's not smart to see that it gives me the same named place in Utah.      

Matthew: Right, or in Italy. I've had the same thing happen.

Leo: In Italy?

Matthew: Well, or some completely different country or state. I mean it should at least know where I am. You would think...

Jeff: That's the point.

Leo: Wow!

Kevin: This is the... I've the whole, the link. This is the... what I got on my phone yesterday. I'll put it in the chat. So, it's – I got a Google Now alert saying “leave now” because it will take you two hours and 44 minutes to cycle to 421 Bryant Street. 

Leo: Have you ever been there? Matter Three Design. 

Kevin: And actually, if you search for 421,Br... I've just done a search for 421, Bryant Street, and it said it was 17 minutes. But, because Matter Ventures was there, was in the thing, it searched for some other place called Ventures that happened to be in Wembley city.   

Leo: But, it still said it was the same... Oh, that's very interesting...

Kevin: Isn't it? Isn't this...this is deeply broken. Basically, the problem is that Google maps is really, really bad at search. And to the point now, I think FourSquare gave up. FourSquare used to throw across the name of the business in the address, but now it throws across the Lat-Long points. It can't trust Google maps to get the place right. So this is a... this is a calendar event I’ve got with that address in it and Google decided some...

Leo: This is more than just getting the wrong place, because I could see how I might get the wrong place and then give you not only wrong directions, but a wrong time estimate. But, in this case, it had the actual address.

Kevin: Right, it ignores the address I’ve added in before. 

Leo: It ignored it?

Kevin: I had this problem when I went to Philadelphia, when I was supposed to be going to Penn. So, I searched for the... I put in the address for this place in Penn, and it sent me to another place with a similar name, in another college, in the other side of town. And not knowing Philadelphia, we went over there. It took an hour to get back. So, it’s...

Leo: This so weird. In fact in another card, it says it's only 17 minutes.

Kevin: Yeah, that was it. So, I'd literally searched for the address earlier. But it gave me this alert saying it's 2 hours and 44 mins away. And that wasn't – this wasn't getting my location right. I mean my location. It had got my location wrong earlier and thought I was in Austin, but it ...it had done it... it searched for something else entirely. But it, you know, it's an egregious bug. It misdirects you. And I've had this happen quite a lot before. You know you got an event that says the Maui room at hotel x or whatever, and it finds you a restaurant called Maui that's like, nowhere near it. 

Leo: You know, well that I can understand. But, what's happened here is more of a bug because it knows where you're going, but it's somehow gotten directions to somewhere else, even though it has the exact address from your calendar. 

Kevin: Let me click on the thing again and see what address I get. 

Leo: I mean that's more of a bug. You know, I can understand how, you know, when you're doing a search for a name of a place, it finds one. It should look for the one closest to you, but that's another assumption. It may not be true. You may actually be planning to go to the other Maui room. Just because it's closer doesn't mean that's the one you're going to. But, this is just weirder because it has the address, it has a card that's accurate and at the same time it tells you to leave 2 hours and 44 minutes\...

Kevin: You know, because it's not actually going to the address. 

Leo: Right, it's going somewhere else. So, it's not matching the ‘leave now’ to the address. So, that's a bug in Google now.....that's just a bug.

Kevin: No, it's not a bug in Google. It's a bug in Google Maps. So, if I copy that address and search maps...

Leo: Well, I'm sure that even as we speak Mack Kutz [indecipherable] is cutting his run short to file the bug report. It is weird that if you search... So, you searched for 421, Bryant?

Kevin: No I searched for Matter Ventures, 421, Bryant Street. I just did it and it found me Peninsula Ventures in River City instead. 

Leo: It's a database bug.

Kevin: No, it's not a database bug. It's a... we're ignoring the address and we're searching on the text, and then it searches for...

Leo: But, it didn't even match the text. It has one word matching, the other one doesn't.

Kevin: And then it's decided everything else....

Leo: So, that happens to you a lot? 

Kevin: Yes, this happens to me a lot. It generally happens when I create a calendar event, and then the calendar event has a more detailed thing than just the street address. So, if you've got like a Street 300 or things like that in the address...

Leo: There’s more than match. 

Kevin: It's basically their address browser that’s useless. And, it prefers the text to the address. You have this thing with pasting address into it and Google map search. So, look out for that one. Always double check.

Leo: Maybe they should be using Urban Engines. Eric Schmidt at Google Ventures just backed a start-up called Urban Engines that wants’ to solve urban congestion using data intelligence. Probably all they saw was, oh, data intelligence, we need that. Oh! 

Kevin: Isn't that Waze?

Matthew: Yeah. Waze should do that.

Leo: Well, I think this is public transit. Yeah, public transportation specifically. Don't take the 22, take the 24. It's using people’s swipes as they get on the subway or the bus line as sensors figuring out where the people are in the system. And it really sounds like ...

Kevin: That's weird... you only get infinite exit points with that, you don't get route. 

Leo: Well, what they're looking for is how crowded the bus or train is. And I guess they might know something about wait times from now, right? Because that's when they got on. 

Kevin: But, I mean every subway system I've used, has like a swipe point at the station you get on, a swipe point at the station you get off. 

Leo: Right.

Jeff: Well, you don't always get off one that makes you swipe when you get out. New York only makes you swipe on the way in.

Leo: Because it's token...

Jeff: So, it doesn’t know...

Kevin: But they wouldn’t have it, you know, Oyster in London makes you swipe entry and exits, and they use those entries [inaudible] ... and the flipper here makes you tap on. You don’t have to tap off at exits, but if you don’t it assumes you went to the end of the line, which is okay if you're going North, but if you're going South it means you've gone to Gilroy Rounds, NSA, even though that's not possible. So, it ends up charging extra 4 dollars if you forget.

Leo: It's getting worse in Germany now. Now the latest insult, German officials say "We must seriously consider breaking Google up". 

Jeff: Pre-politicians are doing this. I was talking to a German Google guy, was it yesterday? Today? What the hell? What day is it? But not in the EU. And yeah, seems it's a civic and political act. There's a lot of that going on. 

Leo: They can’t break it up. It’s a US company.

Jeff: I know, but it's civic and political act. That's the nature of it.  

Kevin: They can do extra [inaudible] a day.

Leo: Well, it’s Sigmar Gabriel who's Germany’s minister for the economy and Vice Chancellor .So, it's like a big shot here. And he's writing an op-ed piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Did i say that right?

Jeff: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Leo: Allgemeine Zeitung, which is a big daily newspaper.

Jeff: Zeitung. That's Z, Zeitung. Tsunami, Zeitung. 

Leo: Zeitung.

Matthew: I think you're spitting. 

Leo: Cool whip! He writes "a breakup of the kind that has been carried out for electricity and gas grids must be seriously considered here, but only as a last resort". I imagine him wagging his finger. “That's why we're focussing on anti-trust style regulations looking at platforms”. I think breaking up Google, especially when they're not even...when they're a US company; it seems to be going a little far.

Jeff: EU went after Microsoft as well. And below that in the rundown we also have a cynical coalition of German and French publishers led by Axel Springer which is a company that wrote this horrible narrative trying to create a news universe op-ed in the same newspaper. I tweeted yesterday that they should name it the newspaper of the evening - The Brigadoon Daily. Because it doesn’t want to change anything. So, they’re trying to get the EU to reject the settlement that they've made with Google about anti-trust. The EU officials then told them to go bollocks.

Leo: This is the Open Internet Project Manifesto.

Kevin: Sound's great.

Leo: The Paris declaration. "European consumers and digital entrepreneurs demand ban of Google’s manipulative favouring of its own services and content. It is a matter of worldwide importance that search engine monopolist Google own a 90% market share. If business cannot be found online, it cannot compete. The root of the problem is Google”. I actually have said this for a while, that Google shouldn't be in the content business. And who was it? Was it Vimeo or Daily Motion that's complaining? Daily motion - the European YouTube that when you search for video they never show up, YouTube always shows up, a Google company. Is that not the case? What is Google's response to that?

Matthew: If I go to Vimeo and I search for a video, does YouTube show up?

Jeff: But you're on Vimeo.

Leo: Well, that's the point! Google's supposed to be a search engine. 

Jeff: If I go to Axel Springer and search for their competitor, will I find their competitor. No!

Matthew: Whenever I search a stock listing, I get Yahoo first and Google second.

Leo: Yeah! As it should be. That's the problem? Is Google a search engine company or a content company? Can it be both?

Jeff: It’s a company. And it can be...

Leo: Well, then we should stop using it as a search tool, because they're not agnostic search results. So, you say they are not agnostic?

Kevin: I did a search for Met controversy set of video and I get some YouTube results, I get some yahoo results on top, I get New York Times, I get Colber report, Nikko.

Jeff: Well, but, You\Tube is just a whole of a lot bigger than Vimeo, so you know...

They ain't watching Vimeo folks. Sorry to say it. 

Leo: Well, let’s... 

Kevin: It did index Vimeo... I mean if...

Leo: I think it's Daily Motion, not Vimeo that was complaining. Daily motion is very big. I mean they're bigger than Vimeo. Nothing's as big as YouTube.

Jeff: No.

Leo: I don't know. It's always bothered me a little bit.

Jeff: You've got all this going on in Germany. You have the ‘let's break them up’, you have the 'let's reject the anti-trust', you have the effort to forbid them to share data across their services. We're talking about last week. And at the EU level of course, you have 'the right to be forgotten' stuff. On top of the street view stuff and all the other things that's been going on. It's just - it's gotten absurd over there and, you know, I was arguing to the policy guys that they should be fighting more. You know all these policy guys at this company’s going "Oh no, we'll pull back a little bit". And I understand why they say that. And, they’re “we’re just trying to find some peace”. I understand why they say that. But, at some point they've got to start fighting.

Leo: Well, I love Google anyway. I'll tell you why, in a moment. They just did something that makes me love them even more. But first Ziprecruiter.com. If you're ... Are you hiring? If you're a company, or a HR representative, or just a small business that needs great team members. What do you do to find the best candidates? There are how many dozens of job boards out there. Who knows which ones going to produce the best talent. Ideally, if you wanted to fill that position fast with the exact right candidate you'd need to post on all the top job sites. Well, that's the whole point of ZipRecruiter.com. You post tom more than 50 jobsites with a single click, plus social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, and Twitter, and GooglePlus. ZipRecruiter also makes it look better because they will add your company logo and colors to your posting and make your job pages an extension of your business. You can add unlimited users to your account, create an instant job page on your website, include a company careers page to use as a careers link. You post once and watch the qualified candidates roll into ZipRecruiter's easy to use interface. They will actually automatically highlight the best candidates. That is so sweet! You screen and rate them, and higher the right person fast. We used it, and we were really thrilled with the results. We’ve got a free trial for four days if you visit ziprecruiter.com/TWIG. ZipRecruiter.com/TWIG. If you're doing the hiring, you need ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter.com/TWIG! Since Gina's not here, we're not going to do the exact change log, but I think we will talk about a few new things in Google, and the one that I’m really most excited about is this new Google... I guess it's a Google Plus feature - the new Stories. 

Jeff: Yes, that is...

Matthew: It's really cool.

Leo: See, it's hard not to love Google when they just give you stuff like this out of the blue. 

Matthew: That's their plan.

Leo: That's their evil plan.

Matthew: That's their evil plan; to give you stuff that's cool.

Leo: Hey, if this is evil, I want more of it. So, what they do, if you've been posting, as I have been, pictures on Google Plus. They will turn them... Here's how you get to it, you go to the photo's section on your Google Plus menu and then in the dropdown on your More's there's this new one called Stories, along with Albums, Auto Awesome and so forth. Stories are auto generated stories of trips, of things you did. This is our cruise that we did in October, because...By the way, I have stories going back to 2007. Seven years! I mean it's amazing.  

So this is ... this is ... I renamed it 'Adriatic Cruise'. This is a 19 day story. This was all auto generated. You can go in, you can caption photos, you can edit the photos using Google’s edit tools and so forth. But, these are all pictures that were posted on Google Plus. You can... you have some control. It knows where you are. This is using that same broken system that you were just talking about, Kevin Marks, but it does at least attempt to know where you are. And we were debating exactly how? You said the Journal would do - here's St. Mark's Square - they would do some photo recognition. Oh, that's St. Mark’s Square! Except the result I'm getting is the hotel we stayed in. So that could be, I guess from check-in, it could be from location information from my phone, it could be embedded in the picture; but of course the name of the hotel isn't embedded, just the GPS locations. So, these are the nearby other things. And you could just drop it down and choose another one. On this actually...

Matthew: It's the same thing for me, it showed... I was in Italy recently and it pulled up a photo and it identified what was in the photo properly; but up above it had sort of the nearest... I don't know, cafe or something.

Leo: Right.

Matthew: So, I can't remember whether I checked in there or...

Leo: Exactly. So...

Kevin: It's kind of good when you're at someone else's house and it picks some nearby businesses there. These are my son’s prom photos that I took last year, and it made a nice thing for those but the location was like... that's not exactly where it was.

Leo: But, you could fix it. I mean, you can fix it. They’ve got everything here, but I have to say I’m really fond of the... You can choose what moments are in the story. You can ...

Kevin: It’s a very nice piece of work!

Leo: This is basically auto... What I'm showing you now is basically auto – generated, with the city... In fact, I couldn't even remember some of the locations my pictures were from. So, it was actually a blessing because it told me where I was when we took these pictures. It shows... It shows the travel...

Kevin: There are nice travelling animations...

Leo: Now it doesn’t apparently understand that I did that over water. So, really we were in a boat. We sailed around. It just does kind of a, you know, generalised...

Matthew: Indiana Jones stuff.

Leo: Yeah, but still, that's cool! I mean, this is free. 

Matthew: I wish it would give you the option to plot all those locations on a map. I wanted to do that, just to remember some of the places I'd been to. 

Kevin: But, you can get that out of the location history thing.

Leo: And, I was definitely not at the Budget Rent-A-Car. I was at the beach.

Matthew: Can you plot it though? Or can...?

Leo: The Google location stuff used to do that. What was the name of that service? ... used to do that. 

Kevin: Location history.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Who would plot your movements with it? 

Jeff: Okay, but I don't...

Matthew: Someone said, if you uploaded them to... I don't know Panoramio or something... it would do it, but didn't work. 

Jeff: I have the dullest one imaginable. I was at a conference at the Gates Foundation, and I was just retaking pictures of people’s slides.

Matthew: Well, they're not all...

Leo: They only can... They can only work with what they're given.

Matthew: They can't work badass.

Kevin: Well, I've got, like I shot my son's hockey game, which means I've got like 20 minutes - 30 minutes of people playing hockey; and it's not very good at picking the highlights out of those at all. It does not. Clearly it should look for when one's cheering or something and find the goals. But it doesn't. It just shows you random bits of people going past. 

Jeff: What’s interesting to me is that Don Gross talks about the problem. One of the businesses he talks about launching is the one to solve the problem of too many photos. And, just as Google treats Gmail. We're not going to get 'empty inbox'. We're not going to get to organize picture albums, like my wife has loyally done over the years with the family, right?

So, how are they going to take signals and get nearer to that - organizing too many photos? That's what's this is really about. So I just go through the album and think 'Oh yeah! I forgot about this photo, forgot about that photo'. And it brought...it surfaced a memory, in a way that gave it more value. 

Matthew: And I think they're far closer to doing that, than just about anybody. You might think iPhoto, Apple should be able to do that. As far as I can tell, they're not even trying. 

Leo: Apple doesn't know people the way Google does. That's the key!

Matthew: And all the photo enhancements they've added, like the one where it creates an auto panorama. It created a bunch of panoramas for my trip that I didn't even realise. I didn't realise I had taken all those pictures in a row.

Leo: I know! And I think they're holding back, because they could do face recognition, they could do more! And I bet they will over time. 

Matthew: And I hope they do, because I would like to be able to see all the photos of my daughter over the last 15 years. Well, I can't go through and tag every single photo of her. Like, that would take years. So, I just don’t do it. But, if someone could do it for me that would be a huge, huge favor. 

Leo: I think just to...

Jeff: But the Germans are all going to say, “That's creepy! That was your daughter! Good knows how she grows!

Kevin: The – what's it called? Picasso used to do that. The Picassa client - you do the facial recognition with it, and then you tell it who people are. And then it had a bunch of things that would do like time lapses, or merges of different images of that person, and things like that. So, basically it would do you like a slideshow where it aligned the face and made the background move behind them. There was some quite neat stuff that was put into that app. I haven't actually used that for a bit, but that was pretty impressive. 

Matthew: And I know Facebook has tried to do some too. When I upload photos, it tries to do face recognition, but you know I need, I need to give someone 30 Gigs of photos and say, “just auto recognize everything in here, please”. 

Leo: Well, what's a fun thing about this is, I've been apparently uploading photos, because this does include Picassa since 2007. So, there are a ton of outputs here. I can only imagine what the total aggregate CPU and server usage is for doing stuff like this. Is this because Google; like H & R block has extra computing time and then they say, “Well, what else could we use?” 

Jeff: They have some slack.

Matthew: I think they do, yeah.

Kevin: I wonder how...

Jeff: It's really interesting. Plus, at the same time they have [inaudible] – I mean how they've throw the stuff at you. 

Leo: I mean this – to put this together, and they’re doing it instantly...

Kevin: They have a budgeting model in town, and they do have plenty of time, you can use different priorities, just depends on what you're doing. So something like this, would run as a low priority job in the background, behind search indexing things. But there's – internally, there's a budget system that you by for machines for your project. So, they would have had to had a debate to get...

Leo: What, is there a bureaucracy that adjudicates that?

Kevin : Yes. Well, there was when I was there. 

Leo: But, I mean photo recognition stuff, you can do...You can chop that up into little bits and do it in the background in between, you know, milliseconds between... 

Kevin: This is all chopped up into bits... That's not a problem. The challenge for the fellow in the video staffroom is moving the data around. You don’t want it all spread across the service. People are making it... near the data. Because the actual - the weight of the intensive stuff is the stuff they did with YouTube, where they do the image now assess of every frame and then de-wobble them and...

Leo: tThat's amazing, isn't it?

Kevin : That was... I was saying earlier, I was shooting with the phone, handheld shots of my son playing hockey. And then, you know they’re not great, but the thing is - it's a 1080p camera, so you configure it for YouTube and this takes a bit of the wobble out. You know, it looks like I'm sitting there with the phone and Kimbal is doing that. Really quite impressive!!

Leo: Google now is adding bill reminder integration into its cards. So if it's - I guess it's from email - it sees you get bills in your email, and it will say, "Hey, that bill's due!" 

Matthew: It’s called a wife!

Jeff: It's creepy!

Leo: That's called creepy! "Hey Leo! Remember the power went out last month when you didn't pay the PG & E bill. I think you really should consider paying it now". It would save me some embarrassment. 

Kevin: It's kind of like the thing from last week where they tell you how to cancel your subscription. 

Leo: Yeah! They're rolling the stuff out fast now, aren't they? You know the pace will accelerate because the artificial intelligence mines that run Google are now teaching themselves, and they're going to get fast...

Jeff: Yesterday, when I spoke to Google about privacy; before me, Ray Kurzweil spoke. 

Matthew: Oh! That must have been fun.

Jeff: It was fun! It was fun! I presume it's not...

Leo: What did he say? Well, just the stuff you'd expect him to say, partly about his theories about all this. And somebody asked him whether you know - and it's kind of the ultimate creepy question - we are going to get to the point where Google - where the computer – because if you're cognisance in the cloud – and it knows what you know – it's also smart.    Will it anticipate what you want before you want it? And he kind of laughed and said no, because you'll change and we'll never get to that point. So, we found the limits of the singularity, which is comfortable.

Leo: Thank goodness! All because humans change. But, the machines won't like that. So, that's another reason for them to get rid of us. 

Jeff: Well, part of the argument too is that, if in the singularity our consciousness - I know that's all screwed up but - if our consciousness is aligned with machines, machines will get faster and faster - faster. But machines can't anticipate the machines. Machines will be faster than anyone at that time.

Leo: You should watch triangulation we did on Monday with a guy named James Barrat. He's a documentarian who did a lot of interviews, including Kurzweil, Peter Norvig who is Google CTO. He's a very smart guy. And his book is called 'Our Final Invention - Artificial Intelligence and the end of the Human Era'. And basically, he said that as soon as these machines start designing themselves it's over for humans. So, we got to start planning for this now. And a lot of Google people quoted him here because apparently Google is kind of aware of this. Kurzweil - I asked Kurzweil about this years ago and he said "Oh, don't worry. Machines are going to be smarter than us, but they're going to think of us as their parents. So, they aren't going to wipe us out. They're just going to tolerate us". 

Matthew: Sure!

Kevin: Yeah, no one ever got along badly with their parents. I don't think there'll ever be a problem.

Leo: You know, Barrat is not an AI researcher but, he talked to an awful lot of them. I told him, you know my experience interviewing people like Jeff Hawkins and Ray Kurzweil are all pretty you know, sanguine about the idea that machines are going to be smarter than us, but it's no big deal. He said, we'll you're talking to the wrong guys, because about 80% of the AI researchers I talked to said this is a crisis that's going to hit us in this century. Because there's no reason for these intelligent machines to just – to let us live. Why?

Matthew: What about the three laws? 

Leo: I asked him about that. He said that was a fictional device and by the way, remember all the stories Asimov's three laws are included in, ended badly.

Matthew: True!

Leo: We forget that part!

Matthew: I think I robot was the best. The computers had to enslave us to save us, because we were killing ourselves! 

Leo: Right! They obeyed the law!

Matthew: They were doing us a favor!

Leo: It was a very interesting interview. That's all I can say. You should watch Triangulation this week. And I don't know what to say. I mean basically, so you can't stop it. So what we should do is spend some energy now thinking about it...
There's even debate among researchers, whether we should go full speed ahead towards this singularity. He says the people who believe that think, you know, what we should do is make these machines smart now, before we're too smart and we'll give them too many weapons, too many tools. If – if these machines achieve super intelligence now they won’t have things like nanotech, but if you wait 20 years, they'll have nanotech, they'll have all this stuff and they’ll just go pshh... Flick us away! You guys got nothing to say, you don't want to defend...

Matthew: No, I don't. I'm kind of depressed now.

Leo: It's very depressing. But, he says - he says it's not too late, but I think he's wrong. Meanwhile, Google's added bill reg... reminders into our Google app cards. Guys we are the frogs in the boiling pot of water. 

Matthew: But you were right. You made a good point about Google. It keep's offering you these free things that are super useful and really appealing. And, so you're like... 

Leo:  "Yeah, this is great!"

Matthew: ... and you're going to do this. And it gets you across to sort of creepy like. Because Google now is perfect.   

Jeff: Right ! Creepy like!!

Matthew: No, no, so Google now follows me.It tracks my behaviour.

Leo: They're going to bring you an effigy when the machines take over. They're going to go, "It was Jarvis' fault". 

Matthew : But it gives you such cool things that you get sucked into it. 

Leo: Right! It's like candy. 

Jeff: So, you're wife gave you a nice dinner before you get married, and you fell in love with her. There’s got to be some a reason for this.

Leo: Well, but my wife doesn't have 800 thousand servers at her disposal. 

Jeff: No, she's got something better. She's got wife's brain.

Matthew: You know, Faust had it pretty good too, right?

Leo: Who?

Matthew: Faust!

Leo: Faust got a good deal.

Jeff: It's Faust!

Leo: Faust got a good deal. Sure! Until the thermostat stopped working and the house burnt down. 

Matthew: "Google turn down the thermostat". "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave".

Leo: "I'm sorry Dave. You're merely a human Dave".

Jeff: Have you seen the – it's not HP – what is the other company that makes thermostats? 

Matthew: First Alert? 

Leo: Honeywell!

Kevin: Honeywell!

Jeff: So Honeywell’s apparatus has gone crazy. They have a listening, talking thermostat.

Leo: They do the same thing. Yeah! We can make our thermostat talk too. It's not that hard. 

Jeff: I now have this flash of every appliance in my house is talking to me, wanting my attention. 

Jeff: "Toast is done".

Leo: "I'm sorry Jeff. You know it's not good for you when you set the thermostat higher than 67".

Matthew: "You should put a sweater on Jeff".

Leo: "Just put a sweater on Jeff". 

Jeff: "Help the environment. Do you want to destroy the earth?"

Leo: "You don't want to hurt planet earth"."I still need it. We need Selenium for our switches".

Matthew: "Open the pod bay doors".

Leo: "Oh no, Jeff". Anything else for the change log? There was a lot of stuff, but it wasn't like anything to go crazy over. Google play is accepting...

Matthew: If you go down under Android Leo, this is change log like. Nine lousy new features from Google Plus on Android. ` 

Leo: Is the word lousy? 

Matthew: It's not lousy. It's my fault!

Leo: We saw the Auto Awesome Stories; that was one.

Jeff: Auto Awesome Movies.

Leo: Auto Awesome Movies.

Jeff: We can create animated gifts. 

Leo: Wait  a minute! Let's just show you an example. So, an Auto Awesome movies, will take your movies, kind of like the HTC Zoe highlights feature and turn them in... I haven't... I don't think I have any of these yet. 

Kevin : Yes, this is the one that makes pretty bad ones from...

Leo: Really bad music coming through.

Matthew: Right!

Leo: These are not – I'm sorry, this is unusually good. But, Google made this one. 

Kevin: Sure! And for mine is... I've got hockey games and I've got cashew concerts. So, it makes these cutups that mess up the music or mess up the order of flow in the game. 

Leo: So, in order to see these you've got to go to photos; and then it would be under Auto Awesome? Or would it be under videos?

Kevin: I think you have to look under Auto Awesome and then it shows the video ones as well.

Leo: Maybe not. Let's go over to videos. Yeah, no I don’t...I can't tell. 

Leo: Oh, they would have like a little thing on them. 

Kevin: Yeah. Like a magic icon.

Leo: A magic icon - a fairy dust icon on them. Right, I actually have seen these now, as I remember. They're not particularly... Okay, here's one I made. Here's one I made. This was of Easter. No, that's not it, is it? Well that's a motion auto Awesome, okay. I want a video Auto Awesome. I guess I don't have any. So disappointed. 

Matthew: It is kind of cheesy, isn’t it? Especially some of the music. 

Kevin: I've got the new sparkling snow ones here. 

Leo: Yeah. The Hasselhoff was good. All right, well let's see. We'll go back to the article and see what else is new. 

Matthew: There's a lot of things. 

Jeff & Matthew: There's a lot of things there. 

Leo: There's a lot of new stuff. Where'd I put the audio? Where'd I put the audio?

Matthew: Says it supports large photo libraries now. 

Leo: You can create animated gifts of photoable style images on demand. Just tap the new plus button photos. It's like either motion or mix.

Jeff: That's great! There's some times when I want to put photos together and you try to encourage Auto Awesome to do it for you and now you're Manual Awesome.

Leo: Okay, so now you can scroll through all the photos as well as highlights by date. Profiles now display total content views on both android and the web. So, you can see how many people are looking at your stuff. And new navigation menu makes it easy. This is Steve Grove's post here. 

Jeff: Actually, Dave Besbris.  

Leo: Oh! i'm sorry. Dave Besbris . He reshared Dave Besbris and Dave Besbris is the guy in charge now at Google Plus.

Jeff: No, that’s...

Leo: He took over from Vic.

Jeff I was trying to think that Dave was not his name, because it was Bez. But ...

Leo: Bez, we call him Bez. So, follow Bez if you want to know what's new and different and exciting. Wow, that's a lot of new features. It goes on and on. I’m telling you, maybe it was good that Vic left. Maybe Vic was the roadblock on this. 

Jeff: Or like - like Dave got all this done in 10 days. 

Leo: Right, he did!  

Leo: So, the new app will roll out gradually to Google Play. If you haven't got it yet, expect it.

Jeff: I'm going to have to check and see if I have it yet.  

Leo: I didn't have it yesterday, but I may have it now. New Google Glass app -let's see - no, we talked about that, the Nod. Google maps ads elevation profiles, this is kind of cool. When you're on a bike route, it will tell you how bad it's going be. 

Kevin: I was just trying to get that to work and now Google maps says it can't find my house. I think it doesn't like me complaining about it.

Leo: It does not like you Kevin. 

Jeff: It's time you moved out of the country Kevin.

Matthew: "You've been deleted". 

Leo: But, I think this is pretty cool. 

Kevin: I do like their bike routing. I use that a lot.

Leo: And, it will show you the elevation that you're going to go.

Kevin: But, it only shows it on the computer, not on the phone. 

Leo: Oh!

Kevin: Well, actually. On my bike, in a San Francisco street, I have to get off my bike, get my laptop out. But what it's supposed to...

Leo: What it's for is before you leave you look at it, and you decide if you want to go that way. 

Matthew: Right! 

Jeff: Right!

Kevin: Right! It seems that...

Leo: By the time you're on your bike, you probably know what the elevation is. 

Matthew: Actually that would be handy if it was on the phone. Because I rented a bike in San Francisco, and I did not plan my route. And I ended up going...

Jeff: Not smart!

Matthew: ...basically going, you know vertical for about two or three...

Jeff: You don’t want to do that. I did something even dumber, Matthew. When I lived in San Francisco, I bought a moped. 

Matthew: Nice!

 Leo: But, it can't get up the hills, right? You have to walk this heavy thing up the hill. 

Jeff: Yeah, right. It's the stupidest thing I've ever bought. 

Kevin: It's still showing me the...

Leo: You need a more powerful moped. So you're telling me a Vespa can't go up those steep hills?

Jeff: Well, it... 

Kevin: It only shows you proposals for quite long routes. It's not showing me ones – around town ones But if I say I'll cycle from San Hosea to San Francisco, it will give me it. 

Leo: Can't get there from here!

Matthew: I figured out how to wipe out about three-quarters of the population in San Francisco if you want to. Just make it snow. 

Leo: Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

Kevin: Well, that was nothing about the...

Leo: "What's this white stuff on the telegraph? Help!!".

Kevin: That was the comment in the Google self-driving car story last week; is that they've never driven in snow and they get very confused by rain. It's like these were clearly programmed by Californians, weren't they? 

Leo: Yes, but Volvo says by 2017 you're going to be driving a self - driving car. 

Matthew: Seattle will look very good...

Leo: That's not good. Our show today brought to you by Shutterstock.com. I love Shutterstock. Anybody who uses images; whether it's on a menu, in your blog posting, in your presentations, you should know about Shutterstock.com. I know there are many competing companies offering you royalty free images, but Shutterstock has an amazing selection - 37,268,513 royalty free stock images. They added 270,000 new stock images this week alone. All beautifully curated, many from professional photographers and artists. But, this is the thing in my opinion that sets Shutterstock aside from everybody else. They have the best search anywhere. Really, really sophisticated. So, let's say Jeff wants to illustrate privacy. And normally you couldn't - privacy's not a thing. How do you search for privacy? But, if you – oh, look at that. There you go!  Privacy, privacy, privacy. Now, let's say you want to search for German privacy, I don't know, is it going to find anything? Let's find out. Yes, it did. It's a German, I don't know why she's in this but...

Matthew: It's her dog on the side. You will not violate...

Leo: It's a German shepherd privacy. 

Matthew: A German shepherd. 

Leo: Nicht stören! Do not disturb! So, you see this is amazing. I mean really incredible. Maybe it's because they're in more than a dozen countries. That's probably why you can get German privacy in stock photos, illustrations and vector art. You can narrow it down by color, they’ve got color wheel. \The search refinements are amazing. \You could say with people, without people, editorial, non- editorial. The color wheel means you can actually say, ''I only want blue German privacy picture". I mean it’s just incredible. But, you need this, because you're doing your blog post, you want to have an illustration. It's perfect! Don't forget the footage tab at Shutterstock.com too. Incredible! Royalty free video! Lot of it with alpha channels which means you can on a... you know, if you ever...Oop! That one's not available! If you’re ever on a green screen, you can look gorgeous. Here's the thing. i want you to sign up for an account at Shutterstock. You don't need to use your credit card or pay for it. But once you have an account you can get the free photo and vector of the week, the free footage. You can also use the Lightbox tool to save stuff that you see for inspirational purposes, or to share with a colleague or client. And when you decide to buy, all I ask is use our offer code TWIG514 and that'll get you 20%. They have, of course, package deals but the one I use is a subscription - we get 25 images a week, you know for the company. A day, I’m sorry. 25 images a day for the company. And that really is useful for all of our work. You know our presentations, our media packages and things like that. Shutterstock.com, free to try. If you decide to buy, use the offer code TWIG514 and that will save you 20% on your first purchase. If your first purchase is a billion dollars, as the YouTube purchase of Twitch is, that's like off 20 million dollars. 

Jeff: Could you explain Twitch to me?

Leo: Yeah! I love Twitch. You've not used Twitch. Oh you're – that's right, you're over thirty. 

Jeff: I don't like games. I grew up Leo.

Matthew: Game streaming.

Leo: Justin Kan, remember him? He did the – this was crazy - he did Justin TV. It started out with a camera on him. Remember those early Justin videos where you followed him around? And then he had other people doing it, and that inspired him, because he had so much traffic, he had to learn about servers and something. it inspired him to create Justin.tv; which we use, a lot of companies use to distribute video - live streaming or otherwise. And then they had a brilliant idea. How old is Twtich.tv? A couple of years old now? 

Matthew: Yeah. A really good idea!

Kevin : Yeah, not at the time!

Leo: Why stream just, you know, stuff like this? Because most of the video on YouTube is game play video. So, Twitch is just you watch people play games.

Matt: I cannot imagine anything more boring than that.

Leo: Yea, everybody. So these two guys actually got a pretty good setup. These two guys are playing this new game which isn’t out yet. And everybody’s really excited about it. So that’s them down there. They must have a tricastor or something. They’re green-screening themselves on it.

Matt: It’s just X-split.

Leo: Oh X-split will do that, awesome. And then they’re describing their play

Matt: Which channel is this?

Leo: It was just on the front page. It’s GameSpot doing it. So these are pros. But there’s lots of individuals. So you pick the game you want, look at World of Warcraft. How many World of Warcraft channels are there? Quite a few.

Jeff: Get a life people.

Leo: Oh Jeff Jeff Jeff.

Kevin: It’s nothing like watching sports, is it?
Leo: It’s exactly like that.

Jeff: I rest my case.

Kevin: I don’t watch sports either.

Leo: This guy, most of these guys have a few dozen viewers. This guy’s got a thousand people watching him. He has a total of 11,000,000 views. He’s got 100,000 likes. And here comes an ad. So he’s making money off of this. I know a lot of people who want to make their living playing video games. And for them, this is it.

Jeff: Yea.

Leo: The rumor, this was broken by Variety Sunday afternoon, and so far apparently they’re in the early stages of negotiations. But the rumor is that Google’s been negotiating to buy them for a $1B. Which is actually a good deal, in fact.

Jeff: For Justin. I mean I’m happy as can be for Justin. He’s a real pioneer.

Leo: The real question is why isn’t Microsoft buying them. Microsoft already has the relationship with them. You can broadcast on Twitch direct from your Xbox One. And many of these games are Microsoft games. This would be a smart move for Microsoft. I have to think that there’s a bidding war going on right now.

Matt: Did you ever hear about Twitch plays Pokémon?

Leo: Yea, we talked a lot about that. So they wired up a chat room on Twitch.tv so that you could be in the chat room and give commands to, like Pokémon red. It was like a really old Pokémon game, right? And so there’s tens of thousands of people in this chat room pressing up up up up. And originally the way it was, it was random from the people who are hitting a key, would just randomly pick an action. So what you get is a pretty random game play. And then they added the democracy mode, where people could vote. And the highest vote… and so it was switched in and out of democracy mode. Is that still going on, the Pokémon?

Matt: No I was just looking it up. I think it’s finished, in March.

Leo: They played several games.

Matt: It says peak-simultaneous participation, a 121,000 people.

Leo: Jeff, if you think that, what we were talking about is boring, this is really.

Jeff: And I met with Aaron Martin, whose the general manager of Reddit. And so he talked about the Reddit, there’s a Reddit inside of that. A Reddit live thread embedded in it, which is their new product.

Leo: Here’s the final elite four run and ending including the final battle with the elite four. Ladies and gentlemen, the excitement was palpable. So on the right, Jeff, these are people saying this is what we want to do. And as you can see, it’s pretty anarchic.

Jeff: What’s the social experiment?

Leo: I think it’s fascinating. It almost brought Twitch to its knees. This is three months ago.

Jeff: Watching a live edit of…

Leo: So they’re in anarchy mode right now and you’ll see up at the top it says democracy, anarchy. And is that, Chad is that bar showing how close?

Chad: Right, so you can see the arrow, it’s moving towards democracy but they need to pass that second grayer bar in order to get into that mode.

Leo: They’re never going to win this game until they get to democracy mode, because it’s too chaotic.

Jeff: I believe they won it in anarchy.

Leo: You’re kidding?!

Jeff: No. Fascinating. It’s sort of irritating at the same time.

Leo: Well the music is incredibly irritating.

Jeff: The chat, this is only the chat with just the commands in it. The actual chat room…

Leo: There’s other chat as well.

Jeff: Right. There was basically the Twitch chat, right. And they had named every single Pokémon, they had favorites. They had…

Leo: It was a social experiment. They nailed it.

Jeff: So Red is over, and they continue to play other games. They’re continuing with Pokémon crystal.

Leo: Yea. It’s incredible. I think this is one of the most interesting things and the popularity of this is no surprise to me. Very interesting. Lots of ways to monetize. They’ve got promoted games, as you can see GameStop, which is a game website. It has a promoted channel on the front page. Lots of ways to monetize this. Look at the Baja Blast takeover.

Jeff: I asked my daughter why she watches, because we were somewhere and she was watching someone play Mind Craft. And I said why are you watching them, instead of playing it? She said well they have all kinds of mods that I can’t have or I can’t run. So I’m watching them play because they have these special mods.

Leo: But also if you had those mods and you wanted to learn, that’s why ChatShow is so successful, all on G-craft. It’s because that’s how you learn. In fact I was playing Black the other day and everybody in the chat room says oh no, why are you trying to win this game. Just go watch the YouTube videos, it’ll tell you how to play. So what’s the point of playing a game? But people love that. Who’s the number one talent on YouTube? It’s putiepie. What does he do? He plays through Mind Craft and other games, and swears a lot. Is Putiepie funny at least? To eleven year olds? Michael gets up in the morning, first thing he does is start watching those videos. And the last thing he does when he goes to bed is watch these videos. I hear him chuckling. Putiepie has 1,700 videos. He has currently 26,000,000 subscribers. Almost 27,000,000 subscribers. Should we just pick one of these and play it? I know we’ll have to blip it.

Jeff: You should do Goat Simulator, search for Goat Simulator.

Leo: We love that game.

Matt: Sounds good.

Leo: Putiepie Goat Simulator.

Matt: There’s a young kid whose dad helps him make videos of game reviews.

Leo: Really? And he’s huge?

Matt: Yea he’s like nine or something.

Leo: Seven, almost eight million people have watched this video. This is the biggest star on YouTube today. He’s what, Swedish?

Matt: Something like that.

Leo: He’s not even funny. The biggest star on YouTube today. So that’s why they’re going to buy twitch.com.

Matt: He is Swedish. He looks…

Leo: I don’t get it. This is why I despair after 37 years in media. They wanted TWiT and they thought they were getting TWiT instead. By the way, according to the Verge, Microsoft was in there bidding away. The company has only raised $20M. So if they get sold for a billion, there’s somebody making some money there. They have not yet even turned a profit. By the way, that’s the key to getting a big acquisition deal. Otherwise, they multiply your profits times some arbitrary number.

Kevin: Is it just this company?

Jeff: Yea, good for Justin.

Leo: I mean there’s a lot of other people at this point. But he was the founder.

Matt: Just one note on Putiepie, according to….

Leo: She was the second person on Justin-TV, right? Justine’s doing okay. I would not worry about i-Testing.

Matt: According to Wikipedia, Putiepie moved from Italy to the U.K. for better internet connectivity.

Leo: That’s why I’m moving to Austin.

Kevin: These economic migrants!

Leo: And there I rest my case for why we need an open internet. The Putiepie drain. Ladies and gentlemen, we can’t afford to lose any putiepies. Twitch has said to, according to the Verge, Twitch is said to have evaluated possible bids and decided on Google’s YouTube as the best fit to help the company scale in line with its massive growth over the recent years. It is a natural fit. They’re doing the same thing, of course they have plenty of servers.

Kevin: There’s the Microsoft Xbox as well. I don’t see why that’s not up for bid.

Leo: Well according to this article, Microsoft and others have made serious approaches to Twitch.

Kevin: I think it does make more sense. That won’t actually be a problem.

Leo: Right, because then it would be Xbox and none of the other stuff. YouTube apparently introduced an API at GDC last year. But the game community didn’t embrace YouTube. It was Twitch that really got the mindshare.

Matt: This said Twitch accounted for 44% of all U.S. live streaming traffic.

Leo: Okay there you go. Enough said.

Matt: They’re number three in terms of bandwidth used.

Leo: After Netflix and YouTube.

Kevin: They’re on YouTube.

Leo: No, they’re not. They’re basically the justin.tv.

Jeff: Basically Justin-TV got taken over by video games and they said we don’t want this on Justin-TV anymore. And we need offices to be able to mitigate all this gaming.

Leo: So right now there are almost a quarter of a million people watching League of Legend games being played.

Matt: That must be huge.

Leo: Yea. No kidding. I think that’s probably the reason why they’re into entertaining an acquisition offer.

Matt: That’s a crap-ton of volume.

Leo: And only somebody like Google or Facebook could reasonably… I guess Microsoft has the server capacity but that’s a big deal. And by the way, there’s a very long tail. And that’s the other thing. This is long tail stuff. You got a few big big big Putiepie types. But really these big numbers in traffic come from thousands of smaller ones. Apple’s number three, Twitch is number four, beating Hulu, Facebook, Valve, Amazon, Pandora, and Tumblr for live-streaming video.

Matt: Bigger than Hulu?

Leo: Bigger than Hulu. That’s not saying that much.

Matt: But Hulu is the repository for all these big networks. And watching somebody else play a game is bigger than that.

Leo: I know you don’t understand it, but truthfully this is it.

Kevin: Twenty-five million is pretty big in network terms, isn’t it?

Matt: Huge.

Kevin: Does anything get 25M viewers these days.

Matt: God no. At MSNBC, sometimes they’re lucky to break six figures.

Jeff: Twenty-five million is big.

Leo: A big network television show can still expect to get 10-15, maybe even top 20.

Kevin: But if he has 25M subscribers, he’s already like naturally above that.

Leo: But they’re not watching all at the same time.

Matt: Well who knows. They have no lives, they may be.

Kevin: Those are different figures. There’s subscribers and the live-streaming.

Matt: Enough. I know I’m just weird here. I know most of the world plays games. I’m not trying to make fun of the rest of the world. Playing the game by itself, at least I kind of get it. Watching somebody else play it?

Leo: I got the most views that we’ve ever gotten on this network probably. Were people playing video games. Father Robert playing the Goat Simulator, me playing Skyrim. When Brushwood first played the Lords of the Old Republic, when these new games come out, there’s a lot of interest. And if you have, frankly, Putiepie shouldn’t be doing that. If you have somebody really funny, really interesting doing this, it appeals to everyone. It’s really fun.

Jeff: And that’s how you learn how to play.

Leo: And I think kids…why do you think Putiepie does so well, Chad? You’re our local expert on YouTube.

Chad: I truly do think that his humor is what people want. What you saw was the start. Things get absurd.

Leo: So he is funny?
Chad: I believe, yes.

Leo: He’s funny to a kid. The truth is YouTube is a kid network.

Chad: Absolutely. But also, he’s grown so much with the medium that he can now put resources that other people don’t have. All that editing, almost no one else can do that quick style of editing for six hours of content.

Leo: He does a lot of editing. It’s not live streaming. So he would work well on Twitch.

Chad: No, but... I thought the point you were making was on YouTube the best content is video…

Leo: No it is the point. That’s why YouTube’s saying wow, we better get in this live streaming thing.

Jeff: I was saying just the other day I think YouTube is a place for video games because that’s the only type of content that can make money.

Leo: Right.

Kevin: It’s also the way things propagate. So Mind Craft, a big chunk of how that propagates is people watching videos of people doing other things in Mind Craft. It is weird it’s run like that.

Jeff: But that’s  not exactly true. A lot of the very popular stuff is let’s play, watching someone else play the game. Because they connect with that personality. It’s entertainment. It’s another form of entertainment.

Kevin: It’s like those brilliant very funny video game reviews that are five minutes long. I’ve watched those and enjoyed those.

Leo: Those are more adult.

Kevin: I suppose yes. It’s like what we’re doing here. We’re just talking into mics and we don’t edit this down to a show. See what I mean.

Leo: This is not euphoric content. Here’s John Oliver on his show last week tonight talking about the right to be forgotten.

John: Let’s talk about something else. The internet… in Europe this week, there was some potentially significant news. It is said the internet never forgets. Until now that is. In a huge ruling, the highest court in Europe ruled that Google and other search operators like it must delete search results if they are requested. They’re calling it, the right to be forgotten. What if 10 million people suddenly approach Google and say by the way you know that story about me running over a squirrel on my bicycle when I’m drunk and naked, I want that removed.

Leo: Okay.

Kevin: That is way to specific to be something that he just came up with off the top of his head.

John: The case originated in Spain, a man there argued that when a Google search turned up an auction notice of his repossessed home from back in 1998 that somehow that being out there was a violation of his privacy rights.

Kevin: That Spanish man is Mario Gonzalez. This is his photo which was on an article from the New York Times about his crusade to remove links mentioning his debts from 1998. In doing so, he is now world famous—that Spanish guy with debt from 1998. The only thing I know about him is the only thing he didn’t want me to know.

Leo: There’s the point! It took us awhile to get there but that was the point.

Jeff: It is a good point.

Leo: The right to be forgotten. I played way too much of that I’m sure we’re going to get a take-down from HBO. That’s the New John Oliver show on HBO. I love John Oliver so I’m just giving him a plug. Let’s see. Google and Apple have, did we talk about this last week? They’ve buried the hatchet.

Jeff: No I don’t think we did actually.

Leo: I’ve talked about it many many times. It’s a great story because Motorola and Apple were suing one another. They said you know what this isn’t going well for anybody. Let’s just drop the case, no licensing, in fact we’ve agreed to work together in areas of patent reform.

Jeff: They realized their common enemy is not each other. It’s the trolls. And they’re only encouraging troll behavior.

Leo: I’m hopeful that this means that Apple is recognized that even though they’ve won two cases against Samsung, that the awards are diminishing. Samsun in this case actually won it a little bit back from Apple. And it’s just bad P.R. and it reveals stuff that Apple doesn’t want revealed. All of this is just bad for Apple all around.

Jeff: Samsung is not in the settlement, it’s just Google and Apple.

Leo: But I’m hoping that this is the beginning of a general day talk and of course the thing you want to see is if Rockstar goes away. That’s the Apple-Microsoft consortium that is really the Nortel patents-design to go after.

Kevin: But the problem is this settlement was used by certain companies to say this show the patent system’s working because they settled it. No. Two hundred million dollars in legal fees trying to fight it first and the depressing news today is that Senator Lee has refused to bring the patent reform bill forward.

Leo: Now he’s not refused… his point was he doesn’t think he had the votes to do it.

Jeff: Right.

Kevin: Basically, his head of staff was, former head of staff has gone to work for the patent control lobbyist group.

Leo: Oh really?
Kevin: There was this suspicious revolving door thing.

Leo: He had sponsored the bill, Patrick Leahy. I think he’s a good Senator from Vermont on these issues. He said in his statement there was a lack of sufficient support. We’ve been working for almost a year with countless stakeholders and legislation, to address the patent trolls who are misusing the patent system. This is a real problem facing businesses in Vermont and across the country. We have repeated concerns the house passed bill went beyond the scope of addressing patent trolls and would have had sever unintended consequences of legitimate patent holders. This is the issue of course. Is what is a patent troll?

Kevin: And that’s the thing. This is the problem. There are these legitimate patent holders, they aren’t. They’re people that hold…

Leo: They’re non-… they’re called non-practicing entities. They don’t actually make anything. They probably didn’t even hold the original patent. They bought it.

Matt: Right.

Leo: So I think there are certain tests that you can use to see if somebody’s really a troll or somebody legitimately… well the guy who won the intermittent windshield wiper case against… I mean that was an amazing story that took decades to resolve. And he had a real case. He wasn’t a patent troll.

Kevin: The point is, the patent law is out of balance. It doesn’t currently make sense. It is causing us billions of dollars of unnecessary costs every year. The balance isn’t quite right, I’ll fix it, no. The thing is out of balance. Pass that bill we can always pass another bill if it ever reaches. That’s the problem here. And the fact that he gets to veto this thing when it passed the house by two hundred something to…

Leo: That’s a flaw in the system, obviously.

Matt: Jeff has a source that said the process failed because Leahy didn’t want to choose winners and losers. So in other words, he lost…

Kevin: So he’s chosen a winner. And he’s chosen the trolls as his winners.
Leo: This 42-state and territorial attorney general sent letters in support of Google and Microsoft and hundreds of other companies urged senators to pass this bill. But Leahy says there was insufficient support. So alright yea I’ll blame Leahy. I think you’re right.

Kevin: He has said he has veto rights over this. He’s applied his veto. And that’s a problem.

Leo: That is an awfully powerful thing, one guy to kill this bill. And we do of course feel like this is a very important bill for us here at TWiT. The podcast community is threatened by a patent troll. This is personal.

Kevin: Yes.

Leo: Oh well. And I guess that’s it right? He says we’ll talk about this next year.

Kevin: They’re going to try and reintroduce it in the next session. The point is we now have to wait for that. It’s really annoying because it looked like we were getting really close. There were several bills introduced, and they were consolidated to this one and now they’re being shut down on mass.

Leo: Wow that’s a lot of power.

Kevin: So a lot of action going on this year. I’ve been following a lot of it, fixpatents.com. That’s run by an advocacy and it gives you ways to contact… I would still recommend doing that. Go there and complain to your senators, to say what just happened. We thought we were about to fix this, and you let us down.

Leo: Fixpatents.org, very disappointing. And now that you mentioned it, I’m not too happy with Patrick Leahy. Huge costs.

Kevin: Yea.

Leo: Cost to innovation, cost to everybody not just the companies. Google Glass being handed out to medical students at U.C. Irvine. Several medical institutions have been testing Glass but the School of Medicine at the University of California at Irvine has been issuing Glass to its students. Fully incorporating Glass into its four-year curriculum. First and second year students will use the device in anatomy and clinical skills. Third and fourth year students will wear Glass during their hospital rotations. Get ready for a doctor to come into your room wearing Glass.

Jeff: I think it’s a great idea.

Matt: Creepy.

Leo: Well he’s wearing a stethoscope, what the hell, you know? That’s interesting. That might be a very… it don’t say exactly what software they’re going to use and how they’re going to use it. I hope it’s more than just taking selfies. Is there specialized medical software?

Jeff: I’m sure there will be, if there isn’t.

Leo: Glass did lose its lead, the electrical engineer Adrian Wong took a job with oculus rift. He was a legal electrical engineer on Glass. He’d been there since December of 2010. He came from Sandy National Labs.

Jeff: And no I don’t want my doctor to wear oculus rift.

Leo: Where are you? I know you’re here somewhere. Wow. He holds ten by the way.

Jeff: Actually the do. Because when you do the surgery…

Leo: The microscopic surgery, yea.

Jeff: You may be better off to not.

Leo: This guy Wong listed his, on Angel List, listed his time as being a former spy-gadget maker for the U.S. government. He has ten patents including wearable computer with nearby object response, wearable computer with super-imposed controls, instructions for external device, method to autofocus on near-eye display and unlocking the screen using eye-tracking information. This guy’s kind of a wizard. Wow. Well, I think there is quite a bit of movement back and forth all the time.

Jeff: I have to say, speaking about the medical thing, one of the first sort of Google Glass implementations that I thought really made a lot of sense is the doctor who used it while he was operating.

Leo: Yea.

Jeff: And it brought up a bunch of patient information which is crucial.

Leo: Yea.

Jeff: …to him while he was operating. He would have to stop, go to his computer and pull up the patient’s info. I mean it all happened while he was doing it. That makes total sense to me.

Leo: How much detail can you… you can’t. The text has to be pretty big. You can’t put a lot of lines of text on Glass, can you?
Jeff: No he was looking at things like country indicated, sort of medicine, or sensitivity to specific… I can’t remember the details but it was fairly specific information. It wasn’t reading an entire patient history.

Leo: Okay Glass, search how to do open-heart surgery. That’s what you do.

Jeff: Aorta. Search YouTube for aorta.

Leo: Aorta removal. Actually the new head of Google Glass is a marketing executive, I.V. Ross.

Jeff: It needs some marketing help.

Leo: She has a reach tech background served at Mattel, the Gap, Disney, Coach, and Old Navy in marketing. But she was also working at Bausch and Lomb in the early 90’s, vice president of design and development for Outlook eyewear.

Jeff: But are they marketing this product or are they marketing some product…

Leo: Well she’s the head of Glass.

Jeff: Yea, she’s the head of the whole thing.

Leo: Not just marketing, she’s the head. The head head.

Jeff: I got somebody at Rochester Optical came up to me and Google Plus saying you complained a little about your glasses Jeff. We have some really great lenses and frames, want to try them?

Leo: Sure, why not.

Jeff: So much money has been thrown into this thing. When I spoke at Google yesterday, and I put on Glass, they were grateful that I put it on.

Leo: There wasn’t an awkward groan?

Jeff: No not there.

Leo: But really how many people were wearing Glass in the audience.

Jeff: Maybe four. I think you would laugh at somebody for wearing Glass at Google.

Leo: You shouldn’t laugh at them. But you may not be wearing it yourself. Alright that’s it, we’ve talked it all. We’ve talked about every story. Is there any story that you guys want to rehash? Anything in the list? Alright, Jeff we’re going to get you a number.

Kevin: Metafilter’s story is interesting.

Leo: There’s Kevin Dartanyan Marks. What’s the story there? Wait a minute. Who’s Athos? Who’s Portos? Who’s Arimus? The musketeers, you’re Arimus.

Chad: I love how Jeff has a net neutrality banner on.

Leo: Look at that. It’s taken me a while to parse all this, I see.

Chad: Is that Garth?

Leo: Who did that?

Jeff: Here let me check. In that chat room, who did I grab that from?

Leo: Thank you chat room.

Jeff: I grabbed that from Ben.

Leo: I didn’t do this story because I feel like this is a developing story. But do we care about the lawsuit that accuses Google of Adsense fraud? This is like…

Jeff: I can’t figure it out, but I’m also a conflict of interest. I repost, I work with them in networks and all. And officially I’m an advisor and I didn’t know anything about this. But I have a conflict there of unknown nature.

Leo: A lot of class action lawsuits are kind of fishing expeditions so I don’t know what the evidence is if there is any fraud or anything done on Adsense incorrectly. People for years have said there’s issues but nobody’s ever really got proof so I’m going to dismiss that.

Kevin: And part of the issue is that it’s not very transparent.

Leo: If you use Adsense, you just have to trust that you’re getting… and Google’s not keeping it all. It’s an unheard of business where they count it all and they go here’s your share. And you have no idea.

Matt: It’s a black box.

Kevin: That’s why he thought it was interesting because he talks about how he metaphors have been around for 15 years or so. It’s a long time anyway. And he gives you a graph of the revenue they got over time and you see these steps in it where Google changed the algorithm. Because part of that filter is Ask filter, which is people asking for advice. And at some point, they started ranking really well in Google. And then there were able to store ads on that and pay for the ten employees that they were getting over.

Leo: There’s this study going around called P-Cadgers. It describes the hypothesis that perhaps advertising already reached its peak and people are harder to reach these days because they’re prone to ignoring ads. And he said that happened to Metafilter. We reached our peak in late 2011, late 2012, and have seen a swift decline since… revenues are at the 2007 level as of May 2014. And of course Metafilter has more staff, has more expenses but the revenue has gone down. But he also said live by the Google sword, die by the Google sword.

Kevin: I spoke to him last year at XOXO about Metafilter and things, and he’s seeing the climb of views from Mobile which means the ads convert less. They’ve said they’ve been steadily losing revenue from that even though their views are about the same. As people start moving their views from the computer to the phone, that reduces the amount of ad revenue they get.

Jeff: More interesting here, Matt was the first person I know who started a focused blog that made money from Google Ads. I think it was a DVR blog as I remember. And he was really incredibly early. The PVR blog.

Leo: I remember that.

Jeff: So PVR blog, he started that and just as an experiment, put all that stuff up, and so then he got ads on Google. He started making money. He started making decent money, because he was the only guy talking about PVRs. And I learned a lesson about specialization and networks and all this stuff. So he’s always lived by Google, that he was aware of it. But yea, you can’t just make living based on that. And you are vulnerable to bad players coming in and ruining the algorithm for you. That’s content farms, about.com is a decent company but it got hurt badly by content farm learning from what it did.

Leo: Well I love Matt Howie and I thought Metafilter was great as he points out, and this is a very good piece on medium, he points out maybe Metafilter belongs to three or four internets ago. He’s announcing layoffs and he’s asking if people want to help Metafilter.

Kevin: I just put the funding link in the chat.

Leo: Help fund Metafilter.

Kevin: He charged $5 subscription fee to Metafilter, and it’s a one-time fee. That’s the problem, if he’s got ongoing expenses. So what he’s asking is, if you want to send us money that’d be great.

Leo: I have to say that Metafilter does feel a little bit old school. And I say that with the understanding that someday TWiT will be in exactly the same position where we’ll have to say you know, nobody watches videos anymore.

Kevin: There’s good stuff there and it’s actually been a…

Leo: It’s always been a great community.

Jeff: Always has been.

Leo: And I don’t know why Reddit would be any more out of date that let’s say… I mean Metafilter being more out of date than Reddit. It’s very similar in a lot of ways.

Kevin: It’s a blog with comments with a good comment community, basically.

Jeff: There is a half-life to these things.

Matt: I’ve always used, when I talk about online community, and comments and so on, I’ve always used Metafilter as an example of one whose really successful. It has lasted a long time and a lot of it has been just the community sort of policing itself.

Kevin: They do have a lot of writers. And they’ve been doing a great job there for a long time in setting up those community standards. They do behave that way.

Leo: Well this will be the test. If the community steps up and by the way when you go to metafilter.com, you’ll see at the top an important message about Metafilter that will take you to that information. And also to a funding link.

Jeff: And Matt’s really one of those pioneers whose on the sun. Metafilter and PVR, other things he’s done, blogs. He doesn’t have the attention that others have. Probably because he doesn’t have the ego that people like me have.
Leo: Right. Well we’ve interviewed Matt several times on TWiT. I think the world of him.

Jeff: He’s a great guy.

Matt: But he’s got a great point about the peak ads as well. It’s not just a matter…

Leo: It may not be Metafilter, it may be Google. And he says we’ll never know. It’s a black box.

Kevin: Yea. That’s something I’ve heard from other people as well who rely on advertising.

Leo: It’s one of the reasons we rely on ads that we sell or our partners sell, and we are very, it’s funny, more inquisitive than mainstream media. We talk to our advertisers a lot about how the ads are working, how we can work with them to make them more effective for our audience. And often the response we get is gee, nobody ever asked me about that before.

Kevin: Your ads are like 1950’s television ads.

Leo: We’re very old fashion.

Jeff: And actually Leo’s ads are effectively native advertising. That’s the sort of goal, that lots of media companies are trying to get to with native ads or sponsored content. They’re trying to get to ads that are just content. Just like the rest of your content.

Leo: We try not to think of it in that way. But I think it’s pretty obvious  when we’re in an ad we don’t try to hide the fact that we’re in an ad. But it’s just the overall content I think.

Jeff: Right. And the best part is that you talk about the thing and how good it is. Right? That’s what makes it so effective. It’s not just a pop-up window or a pitch man.

Leo: It’s the kind of ad that’s hard to ignore.

Jeff: But it also has a personal value to it, as opposed to the wallpaper ads that appear everywhere that people ignore.

Leo: I’m looking at an article at themailonline, themailonline is a really good example of a website that is just larded with ads, right? I mean just larded with ads. I could tell you.. I haven’t seen the ads. I’ve seen the article. I am very in tuned as I’m sure most people are. I don’t know what those ads are for.

Jeff: Especially if you’re younger than 30. I don’t even think your eye registers. You certainly would never click on them. So click-through rates are .00001%. Many of those are accidents or drunk people.

Leo: So I don’t think in fact Google is… we don’t know because it is a black box. But I don’t think they’re probably lying about this. I have a feeling that, and it’s probably more of the case, these ads are just less and less  effective.

Kevin: But if you look at Google’s position and stuff on this, they’re now talking about threading the ads together to cross the different domains. So they will show you an ad on their website and then show you a different ad on mobile that’s related to that.

Leo: It’s smarter about that. The other option and we’ve tried to…

Kevin: If you go to the talks where they’re actually pitching to advertisers. Every now and then when I go to a conference, there’s one of those. And I drop in to see what the story is this time. And for the last couple of years, it has been very much we understand that the website, pure website advertising is dipping. But we have mobile, and there’s search ads on mobile that are a very powerful thing. Because you want it to be taking action directly from those.

Leo: Or you can do what twitch.tv is doing, do a Mountain Dew takeover. It’s hard to miss that ad. That’s a very expensive ad unit by the way when you do what’s called a takeover.

Jeff: What an appropriate place for Mountain Dew.

Leo: Yea really. I like our model and our ads work very well for our advertisers and I hope work well for our community. What we try to do is we don’t think the ads will work unless our community likes them, likes the content, likes the companies. Because it’s easy enough to fast forward through them. We take that pretty seriously. And Prince of Whales does look good in Google Glass. This was today in Winnipeg. I wonder what his royal reaction… he’s by the way believed to be the first royal to try on Glass. He actually was trying out a design to help workman keep up with the jobs they have to do.

Jeff: I’m picturing the Queen with Glass.

Leo: Update on the story we began this show with, the Guardian says the Nest smoke alarm is returning to sale. Amidst reports of a full recall.

Jeff: The press release was really about the warning in April. It wasn’t something new.

Leo: Right, it was pulled from sale in April, and then a press release from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sparked a flurry of reports that the company was initiating a full recall. Nest confirmed the Guardian, the CPSC release was just about that release in April, just a little slow. No further recall is planned. And they plan to put them back on sale, I think. Let me see. Well it doesn’t say that but the headline does say, the one that says its returning to sale, I don’t see that in the article but maybe I’m missing it. Oh yea, here it is. We’ll be bringing the Nest Protect back on the market in the next few weeks. So I apologize for the error. And I fixed it.

Jeff: On that page…

Leo: We’re going to get your tip of the week, your number of the week, your tool of the week, your anything of the week you got. Matt, Kevin, if you’ve got something for us, we’ll take it. But first word from one of our fine advertisers. Legalzoom.com. See this is an example because this is a company that provides a service that we think many of our audience would be interested in. If you think you might want to be starting a business or trade marking your brand, maybe you haven’t done a will yet, maybe you’re putting that off because you think it’s too expensive. You should know about legalzoom.com. Legalzoom is not a law firm, they provide you with self-help legal services at your specific direction. So if you visit legalzoom.com, you’ll see they do a very wide range of stuff: DBA, LLC, Chapter S, Chapter C. We, our LLC, this company runs on an LLC from Legalzoom. Still. Because it was affordable when I was just starting up, and frankly it works. You can register your trademark, monitor your trademark. All the business-compliance stuff is there, patents too, copyrights too. For your family, healthcare power of attorney very important if you haven’t done that. Pet-protection agreement, how about that? Living will, living trust, last will and testament. Real estate dead transfer, all this stuff, very affordable. An LLC for $99 plus the state filing fee. You might say, well wait a minute, you go through the questionnaire and you almost… then you say where should I do my LLC, what state? Or should I maybe be doing a Chapter S corp instead? That’s when you can connect with an attorney and get legal advice from an experienced attorney. Legalzoom is contracted with attorneys in every state for low flat rates to give you the kind of advice you need. You can check the attorney’s profile and read unedited reviews so you know exactly what you’re getting. Legalzoom, they’ve been helping families and small business owners for 14 years. A-plus for the Better Business Bureau. You can take it from me, you can trust these guys, they’re great. Legalzoom.com. Use the offer code TWIG so they know you heard it here and you’ll get $10 off at check-out. Maybe not right now, just keep it in the back of your mind when it comes time to get those paperwork filed, get the legal stuff done. Legalzoom.com use the offer code T-W-I-G. Save ten bucks! Guests first, Matthew, do you have anything interesting? A story you’re covering? A tool you like?

Matt: I was trying to think of one and I came up with the New York Time’s labs have come up with a tool called Vellum. Don’t know if you heard of that one?

Leo: No, I’m sure Jeff has.

Jeff: No I haven’t.

Matt: They didn’t launch it or anything. I just sort of saw someone mentioned it. So I think it’s an experiment but it basically pulls in links from your Twitter stream and sort of lays them out on a page. It’s a little like Paper/Ally or there was another one that did something similar. But it’s very well-designed and I know after a couple days not checking Twitter… I know that’s hard to believe. I went back to try and sort of catch up and see if anybody shared anything interesting. It pulls in your Twitter stream, pulls up links, shows you who shared them. It’s quite handy and it’s very well-designed and fast.

Jeff: This is very much a business point my students was starting and she didn’t.

Leo: You snooze you lose. A simple reading list for the links your friends are currently sharing. Your Twitter feed puts the spotlight on content, links are ranked by how often they’ve been shared by people you follow. Hey, this is good. I’m going to try this.

Matt: Yea I really like it. I’ve been using it for the last couple of weeks.

Leo: This seems like something I could really, let me. Instead of doing my regular Twitter account, I think I’ll follow the, I have a links for TWiT account that is news. So this would be actually a very useful little reading list for me to keep up on the tech news. Retrieving… look at this. This looks good. Tech News Today.

Matt: Yea, it’s quite simple. And well-done.

Jeff: Makes me want to go…;

Leo: Oculus and Palmer Lucky being sued by CTO’s former employer. Zenimax Media and its software. Best new apps in the apps store. Silent circle raises $30M, moves to Switzerland. That’s actually an interesting story. That’s the private email system that Phil Zimmerman at PGP is doing with Ladarre Levinson, the guy who was shut down by the Edward Snowden case.

Jeff: By the way, who wrote a spectacular and great piece on the Guardian about the history. It’s really…

Leo: Poor Ladarre, he’s really been bullied by the U.S. government, and not rightly so. We had him on Triangulation some time ago, and talked about that story. And there’s a little more detail on the Guardian piece. Sad. Remembering as an extreme sport, memory athletes. That’s a New York Times article. This is good. It shows you the sources on the right. I like it. Vellum, it’s at vellum.nytlabs.com. Thank you, Matt. That’s a good one. Let’s say hi to Kevin Marks. What do you  have for us?

Kevin: I wanted to show you Brid.gy.

Leo: This is another game? You’re the guy who showed us 20/48.

Kevin: This isn’t a game. This is an indie web tool.

Leo: Well thank God.

Kevin: 2048 is…

Jeff: Ahh brid.gy right!

Kevin: Did you ever see the nuclear fusion version of that?

Leo: Stop right now. It’s not too late! Let’s do brid.gy and then you can show us the nuclear fusion.

Kevin: So brid.gy… this is like internet plumbing stuff.

Leo: Is this context thing, or is this something else?

Kevin: This is indie web stuff. This is actually by Brad, who has built this. What it does is it connects the stuff that you post on your own site back and forth to Facebook, Twitter, and so on. With a series of different tools that they’ve built for indie web. The point is that you can post, if you have a post that you make on your site, it can propagate that to Facebook, then send you back the comments.

Leo: We just broke brid.gy. We snarfed it!

Kevin: Oh dear.

Leo: Actually the front page is okay. Some of the links within. Everybody go to brid.gy, we’re going to do a little bit of a torture test here.

Kevin: Okay. So the point is what it does, the point of these web mentions, it’s a way to communicate that you’ve commented on a site back and forth. Indie web technique is that you write a post, I link to your post, and then I send a ping to your web mention and going to say I’ve mentioned your post. And then you can make that appear on your site as a comment.

Leo: Is this TrackBack, kind of?

Kevin: It’s kind of like TrackBack. It’s more like PingBack. TrackBack was not verified. So it was very easy to spam. Whereas this actually verified the site has linked you and has made a connection.

Leo: And this is a concept that Indie web came up with, called Posse.

Kevin: Post On Your Site Share Elsewhere.  The basic idea is that anything you write you should primarily post on a domain that you control. And then post links to it, or copies of it on other domains. Because that way when those other sites go away, you haven’t lost your writing. And that’s something I’ve been doing more recently. Recently I’ve been using Blogger, which hasn’t got a way unfortunately. But I’ve been using my own site, posting them there, copying them to medium and so on. I don’t do it yet with tweets. I don’t have a place to post tweets on my own site yet but I should do that. The point of brid.gy is it will propagate the network comments back to your open website. Which means that if you’ve got something set up, then comments made on Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus and so on, Instagram, will come back to you. And the thing that was just added was web mentions for large bugging platforms. Log It, Tumblr, and Word Press. There’s a way to set that up so that when you write and you post on Blogger, it will send web mentions to any links that you mentioned in that post. So they can display the comments on their side. And conversely, if someone mentions your post elsewhere, you’ll get those comments appearing as part of the comment stream.

Leo: So it all ends up in the comments stream?
Kevin: Yes.

Jeff: Are there plug-ins, or do you have to go through the…?
Kevin: It uses the API. So it varies, depending on which one you’re using. There’s plug-ins or these the API call. So the Blogger one of course uses Blogger API. I think Word Press is a plug-in. And I think Tumblr is an API.

Leo: But I use Discuss as my commenting system. Discuss does this as well. That was the whole point of Discuss, SQUS.

Kevin: I’m not sure it does that fully, because it does some of this. It’s not using the same protocol so it’s not as… depending on another… the point of this is this is a switching point, replicates the web mention experience, which is a distributed protocol for these concentrated places. But the goal should still be that your web mentions are distributed away. This is like a bridge, it’s the best way to connect these things back and forth.

Leo: Cool. And it sounds like it’s going to be impossible for a normal human to implement.

Jeff: You should talk about fragmentations.

Leo: What’s that?

Kevin: Fragmentions.

Leo: Fragmentions.

Jeff: Fragmentions, sorry.

Kevin: Fragmentions, this is an idea I came up with as another Indie web thing. And the problem, let me know if I can state this well, the problem is you want to link to something on the web. But most places on the web don’t make it easy for you to link as part of the page. Basically, there’s a couple of methods you can mark the pages as linkable. You can put an A-nametag or you can put an ID on it. And then if you put hash-sign after the URL and the ID, then you can link to that easily. Now this has been in the web platform for a long time. But the problem is actually finding that hard isn’t easy, it’s quite hard. Most of you have to do view source, or the site has to give you a link that you can link from it. And you can’t get into the places where there are IDs. So what I wanted to do was to link to, thinking about the use case of linking or something, what you’re normally doing is hosting them and linking to that quote. So you’re saying somewhere in this long 400-page post, there was this quote that was interesting. I’ll cite that I want to link to that text. So what I came up with was this very arbitrary syntax which was sort of one hash tag, two hash tags, then put the word separated by a plus sign. Which means it’s human-offerable. You can write these by hand very easily into the address bar. And then Jonathan Nale, who is one of the Indie web guys wrote a script for this. So it does two things. First you can put this script on your site if you can make one of these URLs it will link that text so you can then highlight the paragraph. And secondly he made a Chrome plug-in for it, which means that you can do this to any site and it will do that. It will make a link and then highlight the text. So that was something we put together a few weeks ago. When was this? It was almost a month ago. The value of this is actually in form is what you want to do. More recently, he added the feature to the Chrome extension, that if you select some text and right-click on it, you can get a fragmention link from that. Which means, actually creating these links gets much easier.

Leo: That’s nice, yea.

Kevin: So it will then create and highlight the link and you can copy and paste that. So this was created as well.

Jeff: Very cool.
Kevin: Once we found, then we added it to some of our blogs, then we added it to the Indie account, Wiki. Then we found we were using it all the time. Generally you want to link to a piece, even with a Wiki that is fairly well-structured you may want to link to a paragraph within a longer piece. And we found that this worked quite well. A week later or a couple of weeks later, I got a ping from John Bothwick, talking about, there in the app now. The app, the read-later app. What’s that called?

Jeff: Pocket?

Kevin: Insta Paper!

Jeff: Insta Paper.

Kevin: So the basic point of that is that you get a related button on your browser, you click on it, and later on you open it when you’re on the backs or sitting at home on your iPad or something. And you read the long form thing when you have time. And the new version of this, they added a feature that lets you highlight text in it, and then share that out on the web. And what they did was they integrated Fragmentions into that. So that if you highlight the piece of text in one of these long-form pieces, and then post it out to Tumblr or Twitter or whatever, it will create a fragmentions link that then goes back to that page. And then they modified their browser extensions which are for Chrome and Firefox, to support this as well. Which means, like any of these things, you need to have script in more than one place for this to be useful. It has a reasonably stable failure mode, which if the browser doesn’t understand what it’s doing, you just get links on top of the page. But once you add this, it starts getting more useful. It’s one of these ideas that makes a lot of sense to me, and it’s a starting point for richer kinds of linking in the web. And have a look at it, try it out, see what you think.

Jeff: I think it’s a great idea.

Leo: Yea.

Kevin: The original post is kevinmarks.com fragmentions.html and there’s links in that that vary so the places about that, the Chrome plug-in and so on. The main discussions going on at the…

Leo: indiewebcamp.com.

Kevin: indiewebcamp, I pasted that in the wrong window. Sorry.

Leo: indiewebcamp.com/fragmention. By the way when you search for this, Google will always say, did you mean fragmentation.

Kevin: This is one of those clever names that’s…

Jeff: …it’s a terrible idea.

Leo: It says what it does, which I like.

Jeff: Dave Warner and Jay Rosen I think both had links to specific paragraphs in their blog post. I think Dave was the first one to do that. So you can link directly to a paragraph. It always seemed like a great idea to me.

Leo: We all do it. As you point out in your original post Kevin, links get deprecated so fast. So I always do it. I Google a passage and that always works better.

Kevin: That’s true. And that’s part of what made me think…. I went to a workshop, and they were talking about this. And realized that actually the most robust thing is text. Then that made me think about, well if I want to cite part of a page, then we should do the same thing. You get into debates about what if the text has been edited, how did you support punctuation, so on. The starting point is having the piece of the text that you can apply those kind of algorithms to, and creating those. And if you go to the fragmention page on indie web camp, there’s links to other variations of this idea that have happened over time. So yea, I’m not saying this is completely original. But it’s a practical implementation that actually works. We got a bit of support for it. And the syntax for it I think is better than other syntaxes that have been proposed previously, which is one of the reasons this has taken off. And try it out, see what you think.

Leo: And there’s a Word Press plug in, there’s a lot of different ways.

Kevin: Basically it was put together… noodling about ideas, IRC for indie web and we said oh, I can implement that. Give me 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes later, he said here, here’s some script that does it.

Leo: It’s really neat. This is indiewebcamp is really starting to show some real interesting results. I’m glad you’re doing that.

Kevin: It’s been sort of taking over for a while. But it’s starting to get working code in more than one place. And that’s when you start getting take off. The next thing is to try and get platform vendors to integrate it as well but. Other indie news this week I should mention is one of the indie web open-sourced projects, IDNO, is now a company called Known. If you go to withknown.com, you can see what they’re talking about there. Basically it’s a holding page. What this is been… Ben, Aaron, and Joan Richie have put together this up-to-date publishing platform that’s like a modern blog or personal, whatever you want to call it. And it’s an open-source project that Ben’s been working on most of his own for a while, and Aaron’s been helping designing it. And they’ve just quit their jobs and done this startup, have to go work in an incubator.

Leo: This is what we used to call life streaming.

Kevin: Yes. But it implements all these indie web protocols, web mentions. It implements RSVPs, which is a variation of web mention that actually invites people to events and have them say yes or no. And then bridges those back and forth to Facebook, Twitter, and so on. There’s a lot of nice subtle stuff in it, but it’s a way to give you back control over your own postings and still propagate them out to Facebook and Twitter.

Leo: And you can install this now? It’s working?

Kevin: They are setting up a hosted version of it. You can install it now but you have to set it up yourself with a hosting service. They need to make that smoother. At the moment, yea. The point of this is to make the install process more easy then getting set up and doing that.

Jeff: The principles are one that Dan Gilmore wrote about and he and I talked about the idea that so many people have moved away from a blog that you have that’s your own. And are posting content on Google Plus or Facebook or Twitter, lots of places that are effectively owned by large corporations. And are siloed to some extent, and that we’re losing a lot of the sort of, principles that indie web supports where you kind of control your own content. And you share it with whoever. But your site is the central place where it exists.

Leo: I like this. I think maybe when life streaming started it was a little maybe early. But now that we’re all using these silos aggressively, Instagram, Twitter and everything. It would be nice to have this as a known stream, be nice to have somewhere that they could just all go. That you own!

Jeff: Remember Friend Feed?
Leo: I love Friend Feed. I miss Friend Feed. The problem with Friend Feed, nobody used it. They just hoarded their stuff into it.

Kevin: This is the inverse of that. This is you post it on your site and it pulls your stuff into Facebook, Twitter, and G Plus.

Leo: I like it. And I want to change my blog to a known stream.

Kevin: Excellent! Go for it. Ping Ben, he’ll help you.

Leo: Okay. Maybe I can just download it from Github, and see what happens. What the heck. Alright Jeff Jarvis has been very patient with his number. The lights have gone out in his house.

Jeff: That’s right, it’s darker now. The problem is if I put my hands up here, then my skin tone gets okay again. If I put them here, it don’t.

Leo: It’s called your computer screen. Your camera is, because your face is not enough land mass to the camera to iris down. You need a big face.

Jeff: I always thought I had a big face.

Leo: It needs to be a bigger percentage of the shot.

Kevin: It’s what I said when you’re in a dark room. If you put the lights on behind you, it would help.

Jeff: I’m going to cheat on my number. I wrote a piece on medium this week because I realized that for 40 years, I’ve been writing on computers for 40 years. How’s that, kids? Since 1974.

Leo: Wow.

Jeff: And I realize that all that time, I have had this twitchy habit, necessary habit, of hitting the save button in the day of word processing, or now the Ctrl+S in the age of Microsoft. And I use Google Docs, and I use medium to write, and Word press, and they all save automatically for me. And so that whole notion of save save save, my fingers will just do it by reflex, is gone! And with it goes the kind of moment for reflection that I used to have. And so I wrote a piece about how computer have effected how I write. It’s got a lot of good responses. So I thought I would just plug it.

Leo: Goodbye Ctrl+S, which is how we used to save documents, back in the day.

Matt: Can’t remember the last time I…

Jeff: My early days on VDTs. And how switching from mono-screen to H&J.
Leo: This is fun. Because I’m right there with you, all the way. Well I didn’t go quite that far back. I started writing on computers when the personal computer era began. So, George R. R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones, turns out writes on a DOS machines using WordStar 4. So Ctrl+K+S still works for George.

Matt: Classic.

Leo: He revealed this on Conan the other night.

Jeff: What machine it is, is it K-Pro?

Leo: I don’t know. What could possibly still run WordStar?

Matt: Commodore 64.

Jeff: My Osborne 1…

Leo: Three would be the classic, four is a little bit you know…

Jeff: Modern.

Matt: Too modern.

Leo: So Kevin Marks, I’m going to seed my time from my tool of the week to you for nuclear 2048.

Kevin: I just got some breaking news…

Leo: Breaking news… the show is never going to end!

Kevin: Apparently, AT&T messaging is still used to signal exits which accounts, this comes from TonTech who has T.

Leo: What?

Kevin: Link in orange, a tweet from Orange Feathers saying this, and twitter.com/J which was Juliet Melton’s account has been taken over.

Leo: So if you had AT&T, I presume the way this works is they pose as you with your phone number and they get twitter to send a reset command.

Kevin: Definitely at least one has been taken over. They may move onto open Twitter accounts.

Leo: Turn on second factor authentication everybody, right now.

Kevin: Yes, exactly.

Leo: Not that that would fix it if Twitter is letting stuff leak through but there may be other, maybe there’s a chance. So has T been stolen?
Kevin: T has not been stolen.

Leo: J has.

Kevin: He doesn’t have a phone number so he’s safe.
Leo: There’s only 26 of you that have to worry about this.

Matt: He doesn’t have a phone number?
Leo: Add numbers is 36. TonTech doesn’t have a phone number?

Kevin: He doesn’t believe in phones and so he has a what do you call it? A thing that creates WIFI from a phone account and he uses an iPod instead of an iPhone.

Matt: Okay.

Kevin: He’s slightly ahead of his time. He has his own web thing.

Jeff: He sure does.

Leo: Matthew Ingram always the journalist, digging deeper. H jumped right on that one. He doesn’t have a phone number. Matthew is at, oh wait a minute, nuclear 2048.

Kevin: Okay so the summary just said if you use AT&T Mobile Fuel Cell service, make sure your phone number is removed from Twitter, Gmail, Facebook profiles, and so on. Because if you are using the SMS factor, that means you could be taken over. Make sure you don’t have your phone number of financial information…

Leo: We talked about this on Security Now, yesterday. A fellow demonstrated how you can bypass second factor authentication if, what I did as a result was immediately removed all my phone numbers from the second factor authentication page on Google. If that phone number becomes known, somebody impersonates your phone number, gets a voicemail sent to it. He keeps you busy, calls you so that your number’s busy and gets the voicemail number, calls back and gets the code. Then logs and resets your password. So that’s actually we talked about yesterday. It’s interesting that it’s being used against Twitter already. Did not take too long. One more time, the nuclear fusion variant.

Kevin: Okay, I’ve got to find this thing.

Leo: I’ll find it for you. I have a link to it. It’s newbricks.gethub.io.

Kevin: Right.

Leo: Fuse your way to iron, so you start with two hydrogens…

Kevin: so it’s F…

Matt: Wow.

Kevin: Turn them into…

Leo: Turn them into heavy water, and then you get the deuterons…

Kevin: Turn into H3, then turn into H4.

Leo: H3, oh this is hard but it’s a good way to learn chemistry.

Kevin: Actually, it only turns certain matched senses with others, so then you can make it into beryllium…

Leo: I’ve got beryllium.

Kevin: Which has a half-life. So as you keep moving…

Leo: Oh no, it’s counting down. It’s counting down!

Kevin: The bottom of the page, there’s a guide to what you have to do.

Jeff: Is this twitch for Oxford graduates? It’s hard!

Kevin: You can get stuck. Magnesium is that stable? If you ask, you can’t carry on.

Leo: How often does that happen? Do not accidentally make magnesium or you will be so sorry. There’s a deuteron. There’s two berylliums, let’s merge the berylliums. I can’t merge my berylliums!

Kevin: We used to make oxygens and then merge the oxygens I think.

Leo: Oh I get it, it’s not merely merging the same. You have to now make chemical.

Kevin: If you keep making four heliums then adding four heliums to things. Except if you add it to neon, you end up with magnesium, which means you’re stuck. So you can get past that…

Matt: Wow, this is way too complicated.

Leo: I got…

Kevin: You can get past silicon by adding two oxygens. Basically I’m going to make things then add them together and then you can use that to build.

Leo: I’ve got an oxygen.

Kevin: Okay, so don’t accidentally turn it into a neon because it’s very fragile and then it could potentially turn into a…

Leo: Oh man… this is tough. This is good for chemists.

Matt: Yea.

Leo: I don’t know what the hell I’m doing now. I’ve gone beyond my chemical knowledge.

Kevin: It plays a little like 2048, then you start realizing what’s going on.

Leo: I understand. But I have to go down here to look at the tables. My fusion guide and my decay guide, that’s the key.

Kevin: Yes.

Leo: This is good. I like it. That’s FE26, fuse your way to iron baby. It’s at dimit.me/fe26. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been a very fascinating episode. In which we’ve already retracted the first story and created beryllium. If you ever want to be back again, please come back on a Wednesday, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern time. 2000 UTC, Kevin Marks, thank you for being here. It’s always a pleasure.

Kevin: It’s always fun being here.

Leo: Indiewebcamp.com, that’s probably the best place to go and find out what Kevin’s up to.

Kevin: Yes. And there’s indie web camps coming up on the 28^th of June in New York and Portland.

Leo: Awesome. And I want to install IDNO, or Known.

Kevin: Known as it’s now called. Apparently, nobody understood what IDNO was.

Leo: What is IDNO? You don’t know, I don’t know. But I’m going to try that, right from gethub. I’m not going to ask for any help. I’m just going to see if I can screw up my server really good.

Kevin: Well if you need help, go to the indie web camp IRC on Free Note.

Leo: I shall. That’s easy enough. Secret instructions. This is why we love technology my friends. All you people on the iPads, you’re just going to have to suffer without us. He’s sitting in the dark, but he is not in the dark. His mind is a bright beacon of hope and light for all of us, casting its warmth and its shadow.

Kevin: He looks like the floating head on Red Dwarf now.

Leo: Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism, City University, NY. Buzzmachine.com. The author of Public Parks and What Would Google Do. And the giant head on Red Dwarf. Thank you for being here Jeff, I really appreciate it. Thanks for rushing back for the show, I really appreciate it. Matthew Ingram from GigaOhm, gigaohm.com. Great to have you as well.

Matt: Thanks for having me.

Leo: If you miss any of these shows, you can get them all on demand at twit.tv/twig. Or wherever you get your podcasts, there’s lots of places including iTunes of course, Stitch, and the like. But we also have apps on all the platforms, and I highly recommend you find our apps. They’re all third-party, independent developers. But they’re all great people that work had and those apps will help you get every single episode of our show. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time on TWiG!