This Week in Google 270 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It’s time for Twig. This week in Google.  We’ll talk about the latest moves by Google and uhmmm… a very interesting conversation about a recent blog post by Kathy Sierra.  Jeff Jarvis is here, Gina Trapani.  We’ll talk about the new HTC Periscope, as well. It’s all coming up next on Twit.

Netcasts you love, from people you trust.  This is Twit!  Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by CacheFly. C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com.

This is Twit, This Week in Google, episode 270, recorded October 8, 2014

The Jarvis Virus

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It’s time for Twig.  This week in Goooogle. The show that covers Google, The Cloud, Facebook, the Twitter verse and all that jazz. Here they are, our regular hosts, back again, Gina Trapani from SmarterWear.org.  And...that’s her blog, and of course, Think Up, that’s her product.  And, of course, All About Android—that’s her show.

Gina Trapani: Hello!

Leo: Hello!

Gina: Happy Wednesday.

Leo: Happy Wednesday. Jeff Jarvis, from The City University of New York, CUNY.

Jeff Jarvis: Welcome back, mate!

Leo: Hey, thank you. I had said I love London.

Gina: Did you guys have a good time?  It looks like you had a good time.

Leo: I had a great time.

Gina: Good for you.

Jeff: What was the best thing you did?

Leo: Even Song at St. Paul’s. 

Jeff: Oh!

Leo: So, you know, you go to St. Paul’s, which is the beautiful cathedral Christopher Wren built in the 17^th century.  It’s in the Old Town—the city of London.  And, it’s just a beautiful cathedral.  And then you go up to the dome, which is really cool and they’ve got a beautiful view.  Did a bunch of panos (panoramics). And then at five o’clock they do Even Song.  And I was going to do Even Song either at Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s. We were at St. Paul’s, and it was so neat.  So at five o’clock, you know, they chase the tourists out and I said, “But we want stay for the service.’  So they said, “Oh yes, of course.”  So you sit there very nicely and then the minister came over and said, “We’ve got seventy seats in the quire.  You know that’s the wooden—the Q-U-I-R-E—the wooden seats that the lords and ladies...It was weird that the royal wedding was held, not Kate and Harry’s, or Will’s or whoever, but where Charles and Diana’s wedding was.  So you remember, probably, that...that...all the fancy people sitting in these beautiful wooden seats.

Jeff: Uncomfortable, no doubt, but true.

Leo: Yeah, and creaky.  But seventy of us got to sit there. And then the boys’ choir comes in, and they’re sitting there, right there next to you, and singing, and it was the most beautiful thing.

Jeff: Oh, wow, so....

Gina: Neat!

Leo: Yeah, it was really great.

Gina: Really neat!

Leo: Really enjoyed that.  It was very beautiful to hear a boys’ choir, a really good boys’ choir.  Also, changing of the guard was fun, of all things.

Gina: Oh, yeah.

Jeff: You were a tourist there!

Gina: You liked the eye.

Leo: I did all the tourist stuff.  I did the Lenin eye.  Good.

Gina: I like the eye—I mean—you know

Leo: I love the eye!

Gina: --giant thing in the middle of the—but some incredible views.

Jeff: I wouldn’t like that at all.  It’s like a bridge, a turning around thing.

Leo: It’s not so scary.  It merged so slowly that they don’t stop at you to get off.

Jeff: You get stuck up there.  My palms start sweating. I’ll be stuck up there...for an hour!

Leo: you’re not stuck up there.  It moves.  It’s like half an hour.

Leo: And it goes all the way around.

Jeff: I don’t like these happen slowly, either.

Gina: [laughter] It’s like, right, the do it, move or don’t, right?

Leo: You know, I am with you.  Some comic (I think it was Jimmy Fallon) said a ferris wheel combines the worst of both worlds: terror and boredom.

Jeff and Gina: [laughter]

Leo: It was fun.  And then The Tower of London.  You know, just all the usual tourist things.  It was really a double decker bus.

Jeff: You really hit it all up.

Leo: we only had four days.  I had Toad in a Hole.  Didn’t have Bangers and Mash. I had Toad in a Hole, which is a sausage stuck into a Yorkshire pudding, surrounded by mashed potatoes, so it’s kind of like everything.

Gina: Wow!

Leo: That’s the only English thing I had.  Everything else, we went to French restaurants.  They had wonderful food.  The food in London is fabulous!

Jeff: The food in London now has gone from a horrible, horrible food city to a great food city.  It’s an amazing story.

Leo: Yeah.  I had a great time.  I love London, and I apologize, because so many people so kindly asked to—you know—I got an e-mail from a guy who drives the tube—drives an underground car, and said, ‘Would you like to run in front of the train sometime?’ And so many people said, ‘Would you like to come up in the gherkin or the shard and, you know, we were there for so...for such a short time that we just did the tourist thing, and that was it.

Lisa and me, just hardcore touristy.  The only weird thing is we’re walking real quickly down the street.  We have a restaurant reservation. We’re going to the West End. And Will Harris is at a bar, just like standing there, the one guy I know who lives in England. He says, “Hey!”  And I said, “Will!”  Gave him a hug and then I gotta go.  That’s it.

Leo: Ok, let’s talk.  Right now as we speak HTC is doing another bizarre event. They’ve announced a new, is it the Desire I-Phone, which is an all-plastic waterproof HTC phone.

Jeff: Joule 13 megapixels.

Leo: 13 megapixel out. Remember now, the HTC I, they made a  big deal about having four megapixels, but they’re ultra pixels.  Now they’ve finally realized nobody wanted that.  So it’s thirteen megapixels in the back, but also thirteen megapixels in the front, and flash on both sides, so it’s the ultimate selfie cam.

Gina: Without gimmicks, right?  It’s like the ultimate selfie.  It’s just a good front-facing camera.

Leo: Right

Gina: Which is all you really need for a selfie.  No flip-out screens.  No crazy software.  Blah blah blah.  It’s just a thirteen megapixel camera for front-facing.

Leo: As it should be.  You know, HTC is famous for the software that they add in their phones.  You have an HTC I, but you’re using the Google Play edition, or you used to, anyway.

Gina: I used to.  Right. I’ve got the 1+1 right now, but, uh yeah, I was using the HTC 1 M8.  But, yeah, it got destroyed by the infant I live with. But I loved it.  Great phone, great phone.  But that, thirteen megapixel front and back, that’s something I really would like.  That appeals to a selfie.

Jeff: What did she manage to do to it to destroy a phone?  It’s not actually easy to destroy a phone, except of course an i-phone, but…

Gina: It isn’t, and that’s a solid phone, you know.  She...I heard her banging something on the floor, and didn’t look up fast enough.

Leo: Oh!

Gina: In time to catch.  Like, she was really like…yeah, and then the screen just never came up after that. 

Leo: Oh, wow.  Etta’s got some real skills.

Gina: Yeah, she does. She’s good.  Oh, she loves the phone. She always wants the phone. She wants the phone. She wants the tablet. But, yeah, we had to have a few discussions about not banging it on the floor.  You know, we naturally sort of used...tend to handle these devices with a bit of reverence.  Even me, I’m against cases.  I feel like these computers are here for us to use.  I want for the computer to be there for me and not for me to adapt to the computer. But I still am very carefully [sic] handle it.  She has no such instinct about it.

Leo: That’s very telling, isn’t it?  Its’ very interesting. Um, HTC also announced they’re going to do new software...new camera software for all HTC 1 owners.  And a new Zoe will be on i-phone as well as Android.  That’s a good idea  I think the Zoe, which is one of the features I love about the HTC 1.  It takes movies and still at the same time.  I think it’s a really nice feature and it would be great on an i-phone. So we’ll keep watching and let you know if anything else is announced, with HTC doing its event right now. And we’re HTC fans.

Jeff: Is the show still on?

Leo: We were watching before the show, and I just don’t understand why these companies do this.  Who is that to appeal to?  You’ve got 50 tech journalists. They don’t want to see a fashion show—especially bad fashion.

Gina: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.  It’s like just get a great speaker with a lot of personality—someone like you, Leo--who’s got just a great voice and can project enthusiasm—and but sort of clearly explain something. It doesn’t have to be the CEO, necessarily. In fact, sometimes I think it SHOULDN’T be the CEO.

Leo: No. No.

Gina: It shouldn’t be! Just get someone good who explains what the product is and that’s it.  Just show it.  Period. It’s weird.  I think it’s partially a cultural thing, too.

Leo: I guess?!  I don’t get it.

Gina: It’s some idea that it’s gotta be a big show.

Leo: Yeah.  Mock show.  Well, we’ll try to parse the fashion show and give you the actual tech facts, as they emerge.

Gina: [laughter] “Parse the fashion show”???

Leo: [jokingly] What are they talking about?  Why are they doing this? Why???  We could talk phones.  Now Moto X, now you guys, you’re still using the 1+1, and I have to say, I’m really tempted to go back to the 1+1 for one reason: the battery life!  The 20-hour battery life is so nice!

Gina: Ah!

Leo: This is twelve!

Gina: Oh, no!  I’m sorry, Leo.

Jeff: [whistles]

Leo: Twelve doesn’t make it. I don’t care if you get a leather back.

Jeff; That’s the one thing they did really well on this thing.

Leo: The one is kind of very generic, right?

Jeff: Yes, yes.

Leo: It doesn’t scream anything.

Jeff: It has no soul.

Leo: It has no soul, but it goes all day.

Gina: [laughter] It has a hacker soul.  Talk to me about the hints.  That’s what I want to hear about, Leo.  Uh…

Leo: I couldn’t get it to work.

Gina: Oh.  Jason had it last night, but he said, “This has been in Leo’s ear, and I am not going to put it in my ear.”

Jeff: Ahhh!

Gina: I’ll talk to him about it on Twig.

Leo: So yeah, I got the hint.  So of the three I like the Moto 360 the best.  I think it is the best Smart Watch of all out there right now.  The phone, if it had good battery life, would be good. I did a review on BeforeYouBuy, and I wasn’t able—I had reprogrammed it to be something like, “Ok, MotoX,” and it never would, it just wouldn’t wake up.   So I went back to “OK Google Now.”  Well, it’s still not listening very well.

Jeff: Didn’t you change it to “Wake Up”?

Leo: No I changed it back.  It said, “For best results…”

Jeff: Like clear your password, yeah.  Is there a way to remind yourself of the word you put in?

Leo: Yes!  Oh no, in fact they say, they make you enter it in as text before you go on, because they know that you will forget what it is.

Jeff: [laughs]

Leo: And you know, a lot of the people at Motorola were going, “Hello, Jarvis.” One thing I’ve learned from the new i-Phone, you know, the new i-Phone wakes up when you say, “Hello, Siri,” but that’s only if the new i-Phone is under power.  And one thing I’ve learned from that, is that’s too short a phrase because it wakes up when I’m listening to an audio book. It wakes up when I’m talking. 

It wakes up when President Obama says the word “Syria” on the T.V.   Siri goes, “What?  What?”  So that’s too short, and then they say this on the MotoX when you’re programming it.  In fact, they’ll even say that’s too short.  More syllables is better. And probably more distinct syllables.  But it doesn’t work very well.  And the hint—

Jeff: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Leo: Try that. ‘Ok, Google Now’  [speaks to phone]. Yeah, there it worked.

Gina: That’s five syllables, Leo.

Leo: [speaks slowly into phone] Ok, Google Now. Yeah.

Jeff: You count fast, Gina.

 Leo: Ok, Google Now.  Yeah, now it’s working reliably.

Gina: That’s a lot of talking!

Leo: Well, I know.  I wanted to say, ‘Ok, MotoX.’ That wasn’t very reliable. But ‘Ok, Google Now’ seems to work.  Um, you train it and blah blah blah.  Uh, it’s calling somebody.  Oh, no, stop!

Jeff and Gina: [laugh in amusement] 

Leo: Seriously, please!  It did that…Didn’t it do that to Chad when I was doing the review on BeforeYouBuy?  It started calling.  Chad said, “You’re in a phone call.”

I said, ‘What?” and I had to hang up.  Well, whatever.  ‘I’m sorry. Butt dial.’  So, the hint is the earpiece that makes the full set.  You’ve got the watch, you’ve got the phone, you’ve got the earpiece.  You’ve got the full legendary armor set. The hint is very small.  It has no microphone protrusion or anything.  It just fits in your ear like a little gauge.

Gina: That’s not it.

Jeff: It won’t fall out easily?

Leo: No, this is not it. 

Jeff: ‘Is Jason here?’

Leo: No, it doesn’t fall out. It’s pretty good.  You just kind of screw it in [grunt, grunt] and it has a face that will, if you wish, match the back.  I got the brown cognac leather, so it matched it, which doesn’t really make you look more fashionable.  It just makes you look kind of weird.

Gina: But not as weird as the generic BlueTooth Dopple.

Leo: And it doesn’t blink blue.  It’s pretty unobtrusive.  Um, and the sound is pretty good.  The problem is the microphone is in your ears, so it never does seem to respond. 

Can somebody go on Jason’s desk and steal my hint back? John will do it, ‘cause I want to show you.  A battery life something the size of a dime obviously isn’t very long—three hours. 

Jeff: Ooh.

Leo: But then you get a container that you put it in that has two more charges.  So you charge the container overnight… 

Find it?  Yeah…

And then so when you’re not using the hint, which by the way will be dead now, because it discharges even when it’s not in your ear… So you put it in here.

Gina: Oh, so you have to charge it like two or three times a day? 

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: That’s what that blinking is?

Leo: Yeah.  That’s another problem, by the way.

Gina: Whoa!  That’s a battery...that’s a charger.  Whoa...so the charger’s cool.  That thing looks cool, but I didn’t realize…

Leo: It’s a good idea…

Gina: It’s a good idea, but I didn’t realize you have to take that thing out of your ear and stick it in the chargertwo or three times a day.

Leo: Yeah. Three hours of talk time. 

Jeff: It gets all waxy…

Gina: Three hours of talk time. Okay.

Leo: It doesn’t get waxy. It’s not waxy.

Jeff: I’m just joking.

Jason: I don’t know.  It looks pretty interesting.  There’s something yellow on that.

Leo: No, the yellow is the pogo pins for the...

Jason: Oh, ok.

Leo: locker.

Gina: Oh, we’re getting real…that’s quite a close-up.

Leo: I’m not sure which is the microphone.  I think that is the microphone, and the problem is, that’s in your ear!  Um, you CAN touch this, so it will work with any Bluetooth cable with phone…

Gina: What’s that little jammy on the little outer, the brown part?  There’s like a little hole there.

Leo: I don’t know if that’s the mic or this is the mic. There’s two different ports. 

Gina: Ok.

Leo: Maybe that’s just a light.  I don’t know.You could tap it and wake up the phone, but you could also, if it’s attached to a MotoX, say, ‘Ok Google Now,’ or whatever your phrase is, although I never was able to get that working. Uh, because the microphone’s stuck in your ear.  So, then I called my daughter and she said, “I can’t…What?  What? Can’t....What?  Hello?”  So then I think that’s going to be retired.

Oh, and ok, one more complaint.  You see, it’s glowing when it’s uh…charging the device.  It goes solid when it’s fully charged.  That’s really bright.  It doesn’t look bright in here, but in a darkened bedroom that’s a flashlight. 

Jeff: [laughing] Oh, no!

Leo: I mean it’s that bright.  And so, this....you.

 

Gina: And it’s the breathing…yeah.

Leo: Yeah, and it’s breathing. That is not conducive to sleep.

Gina: Yeah, there’s a Mac. I forget, not the recent models, but there’s a model of Mac that did that when it was charging.  It would breathe, and it would make my better half crazy.  She would cover it in shirts.  Like, she would...like...she just could not be in the bedroom at night. 

Leo: You’d have to charge this in another room.

Gina: Yeah…

Leo: But, it makes it easy to find [laughing], on the bright side.

Gina: [laughing]

Leo: It also senses that it’s in your ears, so you don’t have to push any buttons.  It just makes some music.

Jeff: Oh, because the thing that upsets me most about earpieces is that when I’m trying to hold it in my ear so I can hear better, of course that’s the off button.

Leo: [muttering, trying out the device]  It’s telling me, ‘Go to Bluetooth menu on device to complete pairing.’  So, because it’s not paired, I’m gonna go to bluetooth and I’m gonna say, “Pair this.”  Search for devices. So that’s the nice thing.  Pairing is very easy, very quick.  And now it’s going to be paired.  It’ll pair to up to two different phones, so you could pair this if you had another phone.  Or, actually I’ve paired it to my computer.

Gina: Hmmm…

Leo: Ok, so now it’s saying, ‘Paired.’  It wants to access my address book.  Ok, so let’s just see now.  OK Google Now.  Eh, it’s working!  Maybe I just has a phrase that wasn’t great.  OK Google Now.  OK Google Now.  ‘While watch is listening you should speak to it.’  What?!

Jeff: Ohhh, your watch is what responded, not the…ho, ho, ho [laughter].

Leo: Oh, I have too many things listening!  OK, Google Now.  Oh, see, the watch is responding.

Jeff: The watch is doing it.

Leo: Oh, crap.

Jeff and Gina: [laughter]

Leo: Ok, they obviously haven’t fully thought this out yet.  Um, the reviews have been fairly positive, but I don’t think it’s because…I think it’s because the reviewers haven’t used it.  I don’t think it’s usable.  So that’s too bad, but on the other hand, remember, when you’re using stuff like this you’re on the cutting edge.  You’re using new stuff and you can expect some bumps along the way.  I wouldn’t recommend this for somebody who just wants a Bluetooth earpiece.  I was listening to an audio book.  This was great, because it was just so small.  It just sits there.  Um, it’s kinda fun.

Leo: All right, the reason I bring this up is because next week (Right, that’s the rumor, right, Jeff?) next week Shamu comes out.

Jeff: Rumor, rumor!

Gina: Rumor, mmm—hmm.

Leo: Next is Six, which is rumored to be an almost six-inch version of this: The MotoX.

Jeff: With…

Gina: Right.

Jeff: great specs.

Leo: Yeah, more RAM.  Three gigs of RAM.  Bigger screen.  5.9 inch, I think, screen.

Gina: Five-nine!

Leo: It’s pretty big.

Gina: Five-nine!

Leo: It’s still smaller.  It’s still smaller than the Mondo Six, right?  The i-Phone?

Leo: Yes, it’s still smaller than the i-Phone 6.  They have bigg bezzles.  I like big bezzles.  I cannot lie. Uhm…

Gina: No, no, no… The 6-Plus is 5.5 [inches], isn’t it?  I thought that…

Leo: It’s five and half inches, but the total phone size is bigger than the rumored size for Shamo, because of the bezzles.

Gina: Oh, ok, I gotcha.

Leo: Anyway, if it has better battery life it might be a good pick, because I’ll tell you what, if this had the same battery life as the 1+1 I’d say, it’s equivalent to, or even maybe even better because it listens.  You know, I like the little things that it does.  I’m sorry that they went to 5.5 inches.  4.7 was really great, but…[tongue smack]

Gina: Yeah, the battery life on the 1+1 is pretty great. I’m pretty spoiled at this point.

Leo: Yeah…

Gina: Like, I don’t even think about it anymore.

Jeff: That’s the one thing…

Leo: Go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff: No, that was it.

Leo: “That the one thing”?

Jeff: That’s the one thing about the 1+1 I love.

Leo: Yeah!  By the way, the 1+1 screen is, I believe, and others do too, the same part as in the i-Phone 6+. 

Jeff: Really?

Gina: Oh, really?

Leo: It’s exactly the same size. It’s definitely.  It’s got all the same specs as the same.  I think it’s the same part. It’s the in-cell touch and all of that stuff. So, if you asked me what I should do…what you should do. I’d say wait for Shamo and see.

Jeff: I think that’s where I’m headed.  Yep.

Leo: Not that there’s anything wrong with the 1+1, and for the price, gosh, that’s the phone to go!  And I’m sad to say I was a tryout for the MotoX.  I’m gonna keep using it because hope springs eternal.

Jeff: Can I give you a little watch update?

Leo: Yes.

Jeff: So, if you have the latest update on the watch itself, you can now turn Ambient back on, and it will last all day.

Leo: I did that, and you’re right.

Jeff: They fixed the battery pretty well.

Leo: Yes.

Gina: Yeah, that lay’s update did really make a huge difference.

Leo: And then I found a little program called IntelliCon Watch Face.  Have you played with some of the third party Watch Face apps?

Jeff: No, not yet.

Leo: This one’s great because it lets you...you could have a Ferrari logo.

Jeff and Leo: [laughing]

Leo: It adds some features. This is the battery life of the watches displayed on the watch now.  You could have this stay awake now for five seconds or ten seconds after you turn it on. That, of course, will kill the battery. And that is, you can, programmable.  That is east coast time, you would probably recognize, since it’s your time. So, and, uh…all of this is programmable. So you can make any face you want, which is kinda nice.

Jeff: So I want…I’m gonna be in Seoul next week.

Leo: Yes...?

Jeff: And the LGR goes on sale in Korea on Monday.

Leo: You should pick it up.

Gina: Oooh! Well, you should!

Leo: 250. I think it’s expensive, right?  Something like that?

Jeff: Is it? Well, I haven’t bought one yet so you know…I’ve two free.

Leo: Come on, you better!  The LGR—so the round one?

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, and no flat tire problem because it has the whatchamacallit?

Leo: Well, it has a flat tire. You just can’t see it.

Jeff: Well, yeah, but that’s clever.

Gina: Yeah, the flat tire doesn’t exist if no one can see it.

Leo: That doesn’t bother me.  I would rather see more of the watch and half the flat tire than less of the watch with no flat tire.  In effect, it’s got a flat tire all the way around.  The bezzle’s hiding up.

Gina: ‘Cause it’s a thicker bezzle

Leo: Yeah, all the way around.  I think it’s... I don’t know.  Okay, so there’s your phone wrap-up.  Really, I was just stealing All About Android’s thunder.  I’m sure you talked about all of this last night. 

Gina: We did, we did. We did talk about a lot of it, but, you know, Android’s Android…

Leo: We’re all interested.  We’re interested in Android.

Gina: Mmm hmm, mmm hmm.

Leo: But, let’s talk about Google.  Whaddya say?  We’re gonna do that in a sec.  We’re going to take a break.  As soon as we come back, we’ll have some Google stuff, and we’ll have their Google change log. Umm, I want to ask you about some fascinating journalistic stories, Jeff Jarvis, because you’re our king of journalism. Uh, did you, I presume you both read Kathy Sierra’s post of yesterday?

Gina: Yeah,

Jeff: You know I would run to!

Gina: God!

Leo: Ok, while I’m doing the ad, Jeff, run to...What is her pony?

Gina: Serious Pony.

Leo: Seriouspony.com. Ok, run to seriouspony and read it.  She said she is gonna take it down soon, so you might want to read it now, Jeff, and we could talk about that a little bit, too.

Gina: I’ll drop it in the dock, Jeff.

Leo: It’s more of that troll stuff, Jeff, um…

Jeff: Oyyy.

Leo: and it just, you know, breaks my heart. It just breaks my heart.

Jeff: I think it may be down.

Leo: Really? 

Jeff: Presentation Skills Considered Harmful?

Leo: No.

Gina: She didn’t link to it from her blog. It was kinda like a hidden link.

Leo: Oh, maybe it’s hidden.  Okay.

Gina: I’ll hump it down.  You do the reading , Leo…

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Leo: Who is…Tell us who Kathy Sierra is, Gina.

Gina: Uh, Kathy is a technologist and author of many educational programming books.  For years and years and years.  Early, early blogger.

Leo: Great writer.

Gina: Yeah, great writer.

Leo: Just a powerful writer.

Gina: Great writer.  Great work.  Great speaker. A teacher. I would call her a teacher, but in technology.  And, long story short, in 2007 she is...uh...people are starting to pay attention to her work because she does really good work and she gets trolled by an infamous troll and, uhm, horribly attacked by hundreds of people who dox her and publish her social security number and home address and a bunch of lies about her...

Leo: So sad!

Gina: her family and her kids and her work, and she goes offline because she’s afraid for her safety and for her family’s safety.  And she comes back online, oh, I don’t know, the last year, 2013, I think…

Leo: Yeah

Gina: under a different handle—Serious Pony.  And starts to publish a little bit more. And, I don’t know, maybe I should pass this over to you.  Her troll was involved in a court case…

Leo: “Weave”

Gina: Uh, “Weave.”  Uh, right, was involved in a court case.

Leo: And this is the thing.  This is where I got in a little bit of trouble because the case against Weave was terrible.  It was another one of those Department of Justice bogus prosecutions.

Gina: Right.  It was a computer fraud and abuse act.  It was overreach. Right, it was a terrible lawsuit, but this guy’s also a terrible person.

Leo: But Weave is a hideous person!

Gina: He’s hideous, exactly!

Leo: He was the guy who apparently doxed Kathy Sierra.  He admitted it in the New York Times.  Now he denies it.

Gina: Yeah, now he denies it. He admitted it.

Leo: Not a nice person.  Really, kind of, in many ways, and she talks about this, not just a troll but a sociopathic troll with real skills.  That’s kind of the worst…

Gina: Yes

Leo: possible…part

Gina: Extremely smart, extremely manipulative…Yes, just a constant liar.  You know, what got hard, what got difficult for her, and what I can’t imagine what must have been so real for her, is that you know a lot of people in the tech community were against the case against him, right, because it was a bad case against him, separate from…

Leo: We were torn!

Gina: what he did to her.

Leo: We were torn because it turned out AT&T had misconfigured its servers and you could get e-mails of customers—iPad users, very simply with a script.  And so he did it.  He downloaded something like 114,000 addresses, and as far as anybody knows, never did anything malicious with them, and although given his personality I don’t know—but the prosecution seemed misguided, and they were really going for the works.  On the other hand, it’s hard not to celebrate getting this guy in jail because HE’S A CREEP!

Gina: Right, right, because he’s a horrible creep. Yeah.

Leo: Anyway what she’s talking about in this—and it’s a very powerful article—is how—and this happened to her ten years ago…

Jeff: How it doesn’t go away…

Leo: And how it’s gotten worse and worse.  She’s making an interesting point because I’m the one who says, ‘Well, just ignore them. They’ll go away.’ She says it doesn’t work.

Jeff: She has a great list here. Here are your choices.  One: leave. They win.  Two: ignore them.  They escalate and make life more miserable. DDOS ruin your career, etc. They win. Three: fight back! If you’ve already hit the Kool-Aid point, which I’ll describe in a second, see option two: they win.  The Kool-Aid point is brilliant. I think it’s a real insightful point, which is that it’s not so much that your troll hates you. The troll hates the attention you’re getting, and you don’t deserve that.

Leo: Especially if you’re a woman.

Jeff: And you’re all wrong.

Leo: Especially if you’re a woman in tech, then you REALLY don’t deserve it.

Gina: Right.

Leo: That’s the logic.

Gina: And so this campaign of discrediting, you know, begins. ‘You slept your way to the top.

Leo: [disgusted] Uch!

Gina: You know, you made all of this up. You’re actually, you know, whatever…All the things.  And actually, Anita Sarkisian did this great talk at XOXO about how...the ways in which trolls kind of discredit women, and all those things were done to Kathy. Just lies, basically, about her. And things would escalate.  Like, she posted this blog comment—a comment on a blog—saying that she supported people who moderated their blog comments, and that escalated into this giant lie about how she had issued DMCA complaints against websites and had people censored, and so she herself was a censor and against, like, you know, a free and open web, and people would…just these stories would just sort of grow, and the mime would catch on, and then suddenly she was someone who hated a free and open web, because she had said in a blog comment she thought someone should be able to moderate the comments on their own blog. I mean...like…insane, surreal, I cannot believe what this woman has been through., kind of moments.

Jeff: And, and, I mean it is.  It’s surreal and it’s beyond appalling and disgusting, and she’s felt fear for her life and such. And it’s the extreme.

Leo: Well, but it’s not really an outlier.  That’s the point.

Jeff: Yeah, but what I was saying is that it may seem like the extreme, and there’s a lot of that, but there’s also a lot that’s short of that is also irritating and difficult, and not good for the net. And honestly…

Leo: Well if you wonder why there aren’t more women in tech…

Gina: [laughing]

Leo: ‘Cause I think there are very few women—publicly visible women in tech—who haven’t experienced this in some form of fashion. Am I right?

Gina: Very few, very very few. Yeah, you know, one of Think Up’s investors, Diemnian said, “Have you ever experienced anything like this? It just seems like you’re a little more visible.  Is this common?”  And I was like, ‘Ohhh, I can tell you stories.” And I’ve talked about it a little bit here and I won’t go into my whole thing, but I love that Kathy made…she differentiated between—and this is something I know that’s subjective and you know it when you see it, but she differentiated between, like me being mean to someone, and then stalking them, right?  There’s like saying to someone like, you know, “You’re fat and stupid” online as like someone being mean on the internet.  You know, ‘block’, ‘ignore’, whatever. And then there’s like, ‘I’ve taken a photo of your child and superimposed them on a porn image and published that. Or, ‘I’ve published your home address and encouraged other people, egged other people on, to go show up there,’ right?  And then there’s a difference between those two things.  A BIG difference.

Leo: She talks about, uh, trolls hosting flashing images in epileptic forms designed to put people in fits.

Gina: Yeah, to induce seizures.

Leo: To induce seizures.  And that’s for the lulls, and that makes it ok. And people go, ‘Oh, boy, that’s terrible, but that’s sure funny.’  It’s not! It’s horrible. It’s horrible behavior.  And the reason I bring it up, you know, I mean, look, if you’re a celebrity, if you’re a movie star, this happens all the time.  And the general thing is just not to mention it. And not to—you know—you have security. You’ll go to the police, you know, if there’s a fear for your life or a tangible threat, and they will—because you’re a celebrity—they will prosecute, and we see that happen. But what we don’t see happen is this kind of continuous drum beat that goes on all the time.  What’s changed is, now, first of all, it’s many, many, many more people are exposed to it, and the tools for doing it, like—and Twitter comes up again and again in this—and Kathy talks about Twitter—our new technological tools really facilitate this.  And I’m starting to feel like we’re taking a really bad turn here.

Gina: Yeah

Leo: And it’s not…it’s bad.

Jeff: You know, a couple of weeks ago I said we have the case of the naked celebrity photos and the beheading videos, and I argued on the show (I don’t know if it was last week when you were off, Leo), but I argued that we might be headed to a point where I saw people say it’s wrong to share them, it’s wrong to look at them, and I saw the beginnings of a norm come out. That’s among civilized people. There’s a huge swath of people who aren’t civilized or who are, in fact, and we had this story on in June.  Trolls are psychopaths.

Leo: She says that as well. She says that as well—that Weave is a sociopath.

Jeff: You know, and I’m going to get in huge trouble here,  because I’m going to make an equivalency here that I don’t mean to make at all, okay, and I don’t also want to mention this guy again at all, but my little mini thing of my impostor who promised to change the name, Azage, not a man of his word, he just went into L.O. and used my name there...Uhm.

Gina: [laughing]

Jeff: You know, this is a guy who has a respectable job and a company with trust in his name.  That’s all I’ll say, I can’t trust him.  He’s not a man of his word. He’s a lying little creep.  And, umm, we can’t say that because what’s going to happen?  I’ll get crap now for I’m not into humor and I’m not into this and not into that, if you all. But it’s just the fact that people think they have the right to irritate other people. The fact that if you’re in any…the weirdest part of the pathology is interesting to me is that if you’re the least bit famous, people think that they can go after you.  By “least bit famous,” now means that you publish anything to the public. That means that you have a Twitter account.  You have a blog.

Leo: And that’s kind of what Kathy Sierra is saying...is just by sticking your head up in the world means that people are gonna want to try to cut you down.

Gina: Yes.

Leo: And but, especially if you’re a woman who sticks her head up.  That’s REALLY not okay.

Jeff: Right.

Gina: And for the first time in history, in a culture, we have a whole group of people who are like famous enough to not have bodyguards, but famous enough to have stalkers.   And the system isn’t built to deal with them.  And you know, I went to the police when I had my guy, and they couldn’t do anything!  You know, like you have to have pri—Whatever, I won’t go into the details, but they basically are just not equipped and can’t help you unless there a very specific…

Leo: That’s what she says.  They’re not interested.

Gina: They’re not interested. They’re not equipped, and you know, there’s bigger things going on in the world.

Jeff: Couldn’t or wouldn’t, Gina?

Gina: You know, in my situa…

Leo: It’s a little of both.

Gina: yeah, it is.  I mean, Leo, you went through this a little bit...

Leo: I did.

Gina: when the issue happened with your daughter.  You know, you have to have a documentation of a credible threat within your state, and it has to be said in a certain way that there’s no way that you can be misinterpreted any other way.  You know, and these guys know how to, you know, skirt the line and send you creepy pictures and write things about you that make you know that they know all these things about you, right, without making a direct threat. And the police are like, ‘Print out the e-mails and the Tweets.’ I mean like, literally, that’s what goes on. That’s the level that they’re at.

Leo: I know, I know. This kills.

Gina: So it’s useless.

Leo: You know, Jennifer Lawrence said it’s a sex crime.  It’s not even a crime.  It’s a sex crime.

Gina: That was an amazing, an amazing response.  The fact that she said that was a sex crime and anyone who even looked at my photos without my permission was perpetuating that crime…that was just such a huge… I mean, she’s the first celebrity.  Every other celebrity, and it’s generally women, right, who has had leaked nudes, have apologized, ‘Oh, it was a lapse in judgment. I’m very sorry. They were shameful.  Scarlet Johansen kind of played it out (Was it Scarlet Johansen?) I forget which one was like, ‘I know my best angle.” Was kind of coy about it.  I love that Jennifer Lawrence came straight up and said, “I was about to write an apology and then I thought, ‘I don’t have anything to apologize for.  This was a sex crime.

Gina: That was an incredible...that interview was in Vanity Fair.

Leo: Ironically, owned by the same company that owns Reddit…

Gina: [laughing]

Leo: which I doubt she knew. She might have thought about going somewhere else to do this. But, nevertheless, it got the attention it deserved, and you can’t disagree with her.  Here’s the reason I bring this up. We had...I had such high hopes for the internet. As of being a democratizing medium. And a number of people said, even in the earliest days, ‘Yeah, but it’s going to give people who shouldn’t have a voice, a voice.’ And I always said, “You know, but if it’s in the light of day the really bad stuff has to stay under a rock to survive. In the light of day, in the free agora, in the marketplace, it’ll go away.  It will shrivel up.  It will dry up in the sun. And the true nature of humans will triumph. And I’m afraid I was really wrong. And it’s very sad to me…

Jeff: Don’t give up. I’m not ready to give up. Not by a long shot.  Again, I point to the Jennifer Lawrence case. I think the people, all in all, rallied around. You didn’t see them spread all around. You heard people say, ‘Don’t look at them. That would be wrong.’ There are always going to be trolls, assholes, sickos, creeps, idiots, crud buckets in the world. Right?  They’re always going to be there.  They always have been. They always will be. Now, you’re right. It’s the point you’re making.  The internet makes them more visible. Only because we link to them. Only because we say, ‘Hey, look at them!  Fight, fight over at that!’

Leo: You said norms would fix this, but norms aren’t fixing this.

Jeff: Not yet. No, but I’m saying, but this takes time. Insert Gutenberg lecture here. Uh, a hundred and fifty years to invent the newspaper.  It takes time for these norms to take over. When I was researching telegraphs, and you know, from 1858 to 1885, they still hadn’t figured it out.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: Even the telegraph was still causing people problems. They were still, ‘Oh my God!’ People were getting married over the telegraph, and this is dangerous. Um, women have to stay at or away from the telegraph. 1865: Women have to stay away from the telegraph because it will expose them to the coarse corners of the world, on New York Times letter sell.

Leo: Yeah, but imagine what that New York Times writer would think today about the coarse corners of the world.

Jeff: Yeah, but part of the problem is, so I spent my flight back from San Francisco last week writing an essay that I’m trying to place somewhere in German media. I’m starting with the Frankfurt Algemeiner Zeitung. It’s like The German Problem. And at the end of it I argue we’ve got to have a discussion about the wonder. And the entire conversation now has been taken over by the techno panics and the protectionists and the controllers and the negatives and the trolls. There’s also amazing and wonderful things going on with this net. And I argue that we outta have a World’s Fair of the net.  Yes, there’s crap, but there’s also a countervailing wonder that’s occurring that we’re ignoring, what I’m talking about.  We’re looking at all the bad stuff that comes up.  We’re allowing that to win the conversation.

Jeff: We’re also…it’s the fault of the public. We’re giving exposure to trolls, impostors, bozos, et cetera.

Leo: People need to get indignant, and instead of saying, and Kathy Sierra points this out, there’s just this general, ‘Oh …yeah.’ There must be some merit to what he’s saying kind-of-a-thing.

Jeff: Right, because you’re public, and public people deserve this.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: You put yourself out there, so you’re exposed, so what happens to slap you in the face, you deserve. I’m obviously wrong, obviously ridiculous, and we need more discussions. I mean, I’ll make another horrid, ridiculous equivalency that I don’t mean to make literal. But what do we hear in the discussion about terrorism and Islam? ‘Why don’t we hear more Islamists...dah dah dah dah dah?’  Well, we do! But what gets attention is the terrorists. It’s the fault of media to a great extent. It’s the fault of conversations, and you know, when you look at... in London there were stories that when the Brit was beheaded, the Muslim community in the UK expressed outrage. There’s a story where it got there. You know it’s always been there. You know it’s been, no doubt about that.

Leo: There’s a hash tag not in our name.

Jeff: Yes, right.  So it used the tools to try to turn around and…

Leo: We need more of that.

Jeff: Exactly. And we need the same thing with trolls. The problem is, this is where you get into the Kathy Sierra, you know, horrible thing here.  The first step is we all have to ignore them. If you point to a troll, you are equally guilty of whatever that troll has done, full-stop. You are complicit troll’s crime. ‘Oh, isn’t that funny?! Look at the fight.  Oh, it’s just funny. It’s just lulls.’ No, sucker! You just did it yourself. You were an accomplice to the crime. If you look at pictures of Jennifer Morris, you are committing a sex crime.

Jeff: She’s right.  If you can’t look at child porn because it’s wrong, then how could you look at the stolen photo and say it’s right?  You are responsible for the behavior.

So, at a level of ignoring we have to get to there. Then there’s the question of, ‘Do we get to the level of condemnation?’ Doesn’t that just give the trolls what they want? ‘Oh, I kicked up a storm.’ Maybe, but at least we have to get to the level of ignoring and what we have to do is, rather than shaming the troll, shame the people who point to the troll. And I’ve done that. And I’ve gone to people and said, “Do you really want to give that guy attention? Did you really want to do that?” and reasonable people say, “Ooh, ok.  You were right. I was wrong

Leo: And that’s using social norms to correct this.

Jeff: Yes, it’s the only thing that’s going to happen.  No walls, no technology.

And if we don’t succeed at this, everybody worthwhile is going to pull back. We’re going to lose the discourse; we’re going to lose the potential of the internet. It’ll become a wasteland because anybody who has any sense will just stay out of the public eye.

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: And you don’t want that.

Jeff: No.

Leo: And you want women in the game industry.  You want women in technology. You don’t want women just to say, ‘God, this is a crappy place to be. I don’t want to participate.

Gina: Well, you know, that’s funny.  That’s kind of the insight that I had about all this, and I have to say that Kathy’s—that essay she wrote—really was, uh…

Leo: Everyone should read it. If you have any doubt. If you say, ‘Oh no, this isn’t that bad’ read it, and then decide.

Gina: It was definitely a bit of reckoning for me, right, because I build a product whose premise, Think Up, whose premise participating on the public network is a good thing, period, right. And I don’t know. This situation, the more I think about it, the more I wonder about that.  I mean, I do believe it. I want to believe that, but it gets harder when this stuff happens, and one of the insights that I’ve had is that when this stuff happens, the social networks that I love and feel safest, especially around sharing, are not public networks. Like, my favorite social network is a private mailing list that a friend of mine set up, that is friends of friends.  Everybody knows someone else through someone on their contacts, and it’s incredible.  And I grow from it, and it feeds my soul, and it makes me feel happy, and it makes me feel safe. And I share. 

A similar thing: I subscribe to a friend of mine who has a tine e-letter, which is like an e-mail newsletter, and she wrote a response, actually, to Kathy’s post saying that she, you know, she didn’t have a public response, but these are some of the thoughts that are going through her head after reading it three or four times.  And that was like one of those things, I was like, ‘Yes, this is going on.’ It was a level of discourse that wasn’t going on in my public feeds. I mean, part of it is that Twitter isn’t meant for long form. This discourse, because it’s 140 characters, but it feels like the networks like Twitter and Facebook are more about sort of public performance; whereas the networks where I share with my friends and interact and sort of you know, and learn and grow, are semi-public.  Not totally public.

Leo: Google, at least, is responding. A Google spokesperson. This is in the face of an attorney who sent a letter threatening a hundred million dollar lawsuit to Google.

Jeff: Does he really represent the stars...[muffled]

Leo: We don’t know who he represents.  He may not represent anybody, He might be an ambulance chaser, but a Google spokesperson responded, saying, “We’ve removed tens of thousands of pictures within hours of the request being made. We’ve closed hundreds of accounts. The internet is used for many good things. Stealing peoples’ private photos is not one of them. Typically they’ll wait until they receive a copyright notice. In this case, because, it’s a violation of community guidelines with respect to nudity and privacy, we’re turning this around in days, in hours…not weeks.”

Gina: Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone got the same treatment that Jennifer Lawrence gets?

Leo: Well, that’s another point somebody made after Robin Williams passed away and his daughter was getting horribly harassed. Then Twitter took action.

Gina: Right.

Leo: Umm, but, uhh…

Gina: because it’s a PR issue for the company.

Leo: because it’s a black mart. But when normal people complain, no. And the other thing I came away with was, boy, a HUGE amount of respect for any womean who dares to raise her voice in public these days.

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: And I just, it makes me so sad, uhh, you know you could talk about STEM education and all of that, but it has to start in the public spaces, and it has to be safe.

Jeff: It does.  It’s the responsibility of all of us, and to defend someone. You know, if you’re in an office place, and you see someone sexually harass a woman and you sit back and don’t do anything, you’re complicit.

Leo: Yeah

Jeff: Right.

Leo: Just like that.

Jeff: It’s the same in virtual space.

Leo: Just like that.

Jeff: And you know, there’s a discussion in the chat room about, ‘Well, what about the right to be forgotten, Jarvis.’ And I was thinking about this today, and my argument was, I spoke to a bunch of Germans last night about their problems, as far as I was concerned, and talked about the right to be forgotten, and, umm, my general argument is that there are already laws in place and we don’t need laws infringing technologies and changing the technology, and that Jennifer Lawrence’s photos were stolen, and it violated the rules, and Google takes it down. And there isn’t a right to be forgotten. It’s just somebody coming along and saying for whatever reason, ‘I didn’t like this.” And there isn’t a principle at work except ‘I didn’t like it.’

Now, would it be nice if Weave’s stuff could be erased all across the net? You could argue yes, but you’re never going to succeed at that. It’s a whack-a-mole game that’s never going to end. No erasure, no technology is going to solve that problem. And there are free speech issues.  You know, we in America let the Nazis march in Skokie, because we know that most people are smart enough to realize that they are the idiots. The problem, I think, with the net today, Leo is, your point is—we’re not acting like the idiots are idiots. We’re celebrating the idiots.

Leo: Somebody’s pointing out, and this happened before in a very small way—in CB radio. Remember CBs? Record Breaker 1-9?

Gina: Oh, yeah!

Leo: Uh, it’s still around.  It’s been re-branded as a family radio service, but if you go to those CB channels, it’s horrific.  It’s awful.

Jeff: Why did that happen to HAM radio?

Leo: Because you have to get a license.  Because you had to pass a test.  You had to get a license.  And maybe even more importantly, and I’ll ask the HAMs because our HAM Nation show is tonight and they’re coming in the studio.  But I think there’s a very strong culture in HAM radio of following the rules and doing the right thing, and this is okay, and this is not okay.

Gina: Mmmm.

Leo: And it’s a culture that is perpetuated by the elders in the HAM community, and passed along, and it’s…

Jeff: Ok, but stand down for a second, Leo. You could still have somebody who needs their meds. Somebody who’s psychopathic. They could pass the test, they’re smart. They could get licensed, and they could go on HAM…

Leo: And they’ll be very quickly shunned by the Ham community.

Jeff: Ok, now talk about that.  What does that mean?

Gina: Yeah.

Jeff: Why did that happen in HAM?  Why not here? Why aren’t the grand elders of blogging and Tweeting behaving rather than saying, “Ah, fight night!”?

Leo: Well, good. That’s what we need to do. You know, I don’t know why, but that’s what we need to do. I think partly because HAMs…there’s something about HAMs.  They...the people who are attracted to HAM radio are often very public-minded.  It’s a culture that’s fascinating. I’ve always been fascinated. They’re...

Jeff: They’re people who wanted to connect with people, and that was the essence of the net, too.

Gina: But no one had to take a test to get on the internet.

Leo: No, or on CB radio.  And CB is useless now, by the way.  It’s dead, to anybody except the trolls. This is what happens with these guys. If you don’t do something about it, if you don’t weed your garden, then all you have left is weeds. All the flowers die.

Jeff: Well, that’s Kathy’s point, and I had learned that lesson when I ran news sites, and I thought all people comment. Just let them comment. Let it go. Let it go. No, it’s the broken glass problem of poor Guilianni. You do that long enough and people will ralize, ‘Oh, I can do anything here.’

Leo: Right. But Guilianni cleaned up New York by getting rid of the squeegee men.

Jeff: Yes.

Gina: Right.

Leo: And other minor crimes like broken glass…

Gina: Graffiti, broken windows…

Jeff: I’ll tell you, on 49^th Street, the squeegee men tried to drag me out of my car and put my wife in premature labor.

Leo: Geez!

Jeff: It was not so minor. These were scum bucket people who were there, ‘Oh, we’re just cleaning your windows...’  No. If you didn’t pay them, they tried to go after you.

Leo: Wow!  Well, New York went through a real Renaissance after that—after this small policing effort. Uhh, putting more cops on the street, and not ignoring minor crimes.  And I bring these up because maybe these are models for what we need to do on the internet.

Gina: Hoh, this is a kind of different thing, though, isn’t it, right?  I mean, there’s no government. There’s no police force.

Leo: But we can do it. We keep our neighborhood up. We do this in our chat room, by the way, because you learn very quickly, because if you don’t immediately ban just the people who are taking the subject off-topic, the thing just disintegrates.

Gina: Right.

Leo: And most IRC is like that. If you go to a normal IRC chatroom it’s like [cat growl]. But we got, thank goodness, 12 or 13 or 15 or 20 great moderators—all volunteers—who keep it on point. And that makes a big difference.  And people often bridle.  They say, ‘Well, free speech.  I should be able to get to do whatever I want.’  And, um, no.

Gina: Not in your living room. Yeah, not in your living room.

Leo: No. And we have a goal for our chat. We want it to be on topic, and to the point, and no ad homonym attacks, and that kind of thing…

Jeff: And we need to do that in general.  “Cause look what happened with the society in Hong Kong, and the young people there. Right? They knew what would come down upon them if they went over certain lines, and so they self-enforced their own lines and said, ‘We’re here to make our own point. We’re here to do this and not this.  And it was an incredible community starter.  People showering things and benefitting each other and using technology. MESH networks, you know, and phenomenal efforts.  We are a society on the net.

Now, the net is the whole world, so it’s all the good and all the bad of society. But we have to set our own rules here. We have to encourage the good and ignore or discourage the bad or discourage those who encourage the bad.

Leo: Meanwhile, federal agents are fake-setting up fake Facebook pages in real peoples’ names using real peoples’ pictures from their real peoples’ phones. 

Jeff: I guess my impostor is a federal agent, then.

Leo: This blows me away. A DEA agent commandeered a woman’s identity. She was arrested but never convicted of a crime. They got her phone. They took pictures off her phone. They put them on the fake—some fairly sexy pictures—on the fake Facebook account.

Jeff: With her child.

Leo: They put pictures of her kids.

Gina: Oh, my God.

Leo: Um, she was apparently sentenced to probation. So she was convicted, but she pled guilty.  While she was awaiting trial, the DEA used this stuff that

They had guarded in the investigation to create a Facebook page, in which they “friended” felons, but it was a honey pit...a honey pot. The woman, now 28, sued, accusing him in Federal District Court of violating her privacy and placing her in danger. The government says, ‘Hey, when she was arrested she gave express permission for the use of photographs contained on her phone simply by granting access to the phone and consenting to the use of that information to aid of an ongoing criminal investigation.’ Whether she actually knew they were going to make a fake Facebook page is in dispute.

Gina: I’m sure she did NOT.

Leo: I don’t think that’s what she thought [laughing].

Gina: I don’t think she imagined that was going to happen.

Leo: Yeah, or pictures of her kids. Umm…

Gina: Can we just all agree to leave the kids out of it? Can we just leave the kids out of it?

Leo: [Groans]

Gina: I kind of feel like, ‘Say whatever you want about me. Photoshop me to your heart’s content. Just keep the kids out of it.

Leo: That was one of the things Sierra complained about—was that her family was dragged into it. [sighs] Let’s take a break. I don’t know.  We’ve got to find something fun.

Gina: Sorry, that was depressing. I didn’t mean to give you a downer.

Leo: [laughing] You?  I’m the one who brought it up!

Jeff: The whole fling.

Gina: I’m glad you did.

Leo: No, when I read that, I thought, ‘We’re talking about that today.’

Gina: I’m glad.

Leo: Yeah.  Hey, I do want to talk a little bit about what you can tell about you from your Facebook “likes.” Quite a bit, and we’ve got our change log coming up in just a little bit. 

Gina: Yeah

Leo: Yaay! But, before I do, how about I tell you a little bit about making the best darn website you can make? One of the ways actually, one of the ways you could make the internet a better place, is by creating your own content on the internet.  your own positive content. Putting out your contribution. Telling a little bit from your point of view. That means having your own website, and SquareSpace makes it so easy. A better website for all.  They’ve updated their technology now.  I don’t know, are they calling it SquareSpace 7?  I’ll tell you, they’ve got engineers working all the time so it’s the best hosting, plus the best software.  Yeah, they’re calling it SquareSpace 7.

And this is the beauty part: You don’t have to do anything.  You get the benefit of this. Their sites always are state-of-the-art stuff. Mobile responsive design. They’ve got e-commerce on every template. Really good e-commerce, too. Rally well-done e-commerce. Of course, live chat 24-7 right from their offices in New York, so you’re getting the best possible support. There is a great help site with webinars and videos and self-help articles.  I’m just a big fan of SquareSpace.

So, a couple of things. First of all, if you want to try it out, just go to squarespace.com. Click the “Get Started” button.  You can play with it to your heart’s content. And for three...a couple of weeks, two weeks, and there’s no credit card required to do that. You know, if you’re done…when you’re done, you just leave. And that’s it.  They won’t contact you. However, if you do decide to buy, make sure to use the offer code T-W-I-G—Twig—to get ten percent off and show your support for This Week in Google. Squarespace.com.  Try the new Square Space 7. I think you’ll like. And, as a special promotion for our show, and for you, our audience, SquareSpace is giving away a full year of its premium top-level services, worth more than two hundred and eighty-eight bucks, to one of you, randomly selected!  All you have to do is Tweet, ready?  “Better web sites for all,” and use  #squarespacetwig@thisweekingoogle to be considered. If you currently have a Squarespace site, post your URL as well and we might talk about you in a future episode. Just got a tweet from somebody who won a year’s worth of premium service from Squarespace and is very very happy. We use it for our Inside twit blog. Squarespace.com, try it free, tweet “Better websites for all” with the hashtag squarespacetwig@thisweekingoogle and we'll have a drawing of all the people that tweet and maybe you'll be our winner. Details and information, rules for the contest are at our website, which is the Squarespace site. So you can all go there once now inside twit.tv. Squarespace.com, bang the drum slowly, it's time ladies and gentlemen for...! The Google Changelog!

Announcer: The Google Changelog!

(music)

Leo: He says it so much better than me. And now ladies and gentlemen, Gina Trapani with the latest from Google.

Gina: Well, I've run out of things to complain about regarding Google Voice because the one thing that I've always complained about, I think all of us complained about, the one thing this would be a perfect product if... is getting resolved. Google Voice is finally supporting MMS, multimedia messages baby! Photos, in Google Voice, across 100 different North American carriers. There's a lot. Google's been working with a ton of carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile...

Leo: And as Jeff would say, a really big but.

Gina: There's a big red check mark sized but. It doesn't work on Verizon.

Leo: Aaaah!! 100 carriers, except Verizon.

Gina: Except Verizon, which is a big except unfortunately. But you know, so you get many MMS messages, not all of them. Which is an improvement. Before you got none.

Jeff: Well good, you won't go over your bandwidth limits on Verizon then, see?

Leo: What is with Verizon?

Gina: (sighs)

Leo: Alright, go ahead. Sorry.

Gina: I'm going to save that rant for Jeff.

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: But we want to feed the fire a little bit more, the Verizon fire.

Leo: T-Mobile.

Gina: A little update to Google Play, especially movies, you can now pre-order movies on Google Play. This feature's only going to be available in the US, although other countries will be added soon Google says. It means if you see a title that's going to come out on Google Play, you can pre-order it and you don't get charged until it gets released and you get an email letting you know that the movie is in your library. They're going to be shooting to offer things for pre-order that are in theaters now. It should hopefully go somewhere.

Jeff: You know what I want next Gina?

Gina: What?

Jeff: Here's what I want next. When there are some obscure... because I live way out in the suburbs. When there is some obscure foreign movie that I'm interested in, that I'm never going to go into Manhattan to watch because I leave Manhattan to come home.

Gina: Right.

Jeff: And it's not going to be out on video for 9 months, I want to bookmark that in Google Play. So when it comes out it says “Hello, bozo! It's here! Your stupid boring foreign movie!” And then, you know, that's actually useful. So next step Google. We're never satisfied.

Gina: Yeah I mean, my tastes are much less intellectual than yours. But there will be times when I'm like when's the next Hunger Games movie, just do a Google search for the next Hunger Games movie and sometimes there will be that Remind Me button. So I'll say okay, yeah remind me. They always come out in like November and then it's exciting because whenever the week in November it gets released and it will let you know. I don't know if that will work with the not huge blockbuster movies though. I don't know if it will work for your indie foreign films. But that should work for every movie honestly. Let's see what else we have. Oh, so Google Now can now surface your past and upcoming bills from your Gmail account.

Leo: That's going to drive people crazy. “What, they know my bills? How could they possibly?”

Jeff: Yeah.

Gina: The Google app for Android and iOS now has access to your Gmail account because you gave it access to your Gmail account and if you get an email with a payment due and an amount, information about a bill...

Leo: That's creepy!

Gina: ...you'll get a card in Google Now letting you know. I need help...

Leo: I love this.

Gina: I automate everything, but every once in a while there's that month where something happens and I just don't have enough money so I'll take it. I'll take whatever reminders I can get.

Leo: I think the next step is to pay my bills Google.

Gina: Just do it.

Leo: Just pay it.

Gina: Move the money, do what you've got to do.

Leo: Do whatever it takes.

Gina: Yep, yep.

Jeff: I had a thousand great reasons to get married but number one was my wife handles my bills now because I was awful at it. You get yourself a CEO as a girlfriend.

Leo: Let me tell you. Nothing like it. Everybody that should have somebody that understands money in their life.

Jeff: Who does the money stuff in your house Gina?

Gina: I actually really enjoy the per person finance stuff so I do it.

Jeff: I thought you'd be the one.

Leo: Me too.

Gina: Yeah, I enjoy organizing those things.

Leo: She can do arithmetic.

Gina: Something tells me I'm not as good at it as Lisa, so good job Leo.

Leo: Well, anybody's better than me. Have you ever had your water or your electricity turned off because you forgot to pay?

Gina: No. Okay, okay. Yeah see you did good.

Jeff: No. You did?

Leo: Oh many times.

Jeff: Huh. (laughing)

Gina: But you had plenty of money. You just forgot to pay.

Leo: Oh it's not that I didn't have the money, I forgot to pay. For months.

Jeff: Was it that you forgot, or that you said “Oh I'll do it tomorrow.”

Leo: I don't know.

Gina: Who's thinking about your water bill, until you don't have water?

Leo: They get your attention when the water stops. And then you have to go down and say I'm sorry, here's the money. Please turn my water on. “We'll send a guy out on Monday!” But it's Friday! “That's when they work.” (fake crying)

Gina: I do pretty much automate everything but every once in a while I get like oh I have to transfer some money. Yeah, of course.

Leo: I was using a service called Paytrust. I don't know if they're still … well I know they're still around, I still pay them $10 a month. For nothing. But they were in Sioux City or Sioux Falls, Idaho, and I thought why are they there? And I realized because there's a big prison there, and all my bills were going to this prison and being entered by prisoners.

Gina: Oh jeez.

Jeff: Oh my.

Leo: What could possibly go wrong?

Gina: What could go wrong? (laughs)

Leo: Anyway.

Gina: Anyway. So reminders about your bills so Leo's water never gets turned off.

Leo: Thank you Google! If you don't have a Lisa at least you've got a Google.

Gina: Yeah if you don't have Lisa, you have Google Now. I don't know, Google Now will never be as good as Lisa, but we're getting there.

Leo: No, she's amazing. Never misses a bill.

Gina: A little update to Chromecast. I know, I think Jeff was kind of making fun of this a little bit last time. I think that we talked about this a while ago that it was on its way. You could basically set the images that your Chromecast shows, kind of like a screen saver or slideshow.

Leo: Well it already shows gorgeous pictures.

Gina: It does, it shows some gorgeous pictures but now you can customize them to be your own photos. Your own photo albums from Google Plus, or you can choose artwork from galleries in museums, via they call it Google Cultural Institute. You can choose news and lifestyle images from The New York Times, The Guardian in the US or you can choose, I like this one, satellite imagery from the hardest to reach places on Earth from Google Maps. I like a good Maps slideshow. So in order to do that, in your Chromecast app open the Chromecast app on your phone or tablet and select backdrop from the left menu. And then you can choose what images you want to see. And Jeff I see you just added something to the changelog here.

Jeff: I added something because I don't understand something. Somebody on Twitter, who was it here, nice person on Twitter, Blankenship I think it was, Brian Blankenship said there was an update to Chromebook, update makes it easier to juggle multiple accounts and Brian said we'll let Jeff Jarvis be the judge of if it's easy to  do now.

Leo: But they've always been able to do that, I don't understand.

Jeff: I don't know what's new about this.

Leo: When you first turn on your Chromebook it shows you the...

Jeff: Well that's not easy... you should be able to go back and forth within in one session.

Leo: Oh maybe that's what they can do. I just log into my account or there's a guest account or you can have other accounts.

Jeff: I horned my way into the changelog here.

Gina: I'm glad you did.

Jeff: What is the SAML standard, do you know?

Leo: ASMAL.

Gina: The enhanced identity features primarily focus on enabling the SAML standard. Used by common enterprise. Oh that's why I don't know what it is.

Leo: It's Enterprise.

Gina: Enterprise Authorization Providers. So it sounds like this is a way for you to switch between your personal account and your organization's. Your sort of Google for work account. Easily, using that Enterprise Standard. I actually don't know what SAML is.

Leo: Something security authorization markup language.

Gina: There you go, oh of course it's a markup language. It's a mole.

Leo: It's a mole.

Gina: It's a mole.

Leo: Security Assertion Markup Language.

Gina: Enables users to bring their own Chromebooks to the office.

Leo: I bet you it means you could authenticate with some additional hardware.

Jeff: If you click on the link on the bottom of that. There's a link to the Google blog post.

Leo: Single sign on solution.

Gina: Right, right. More manageable for IT. Okay, they want to bring Chromebooks and the enterprise that's already using Google Sign On.

Jeff: Alright, never mind.

Gina: That's neat. No, it counts. It's a change, it counts. Thank you Jeff. That's all I've got.

Leo: And that is the Google changelog, thank you Gina Trapani.

(Changelog outro)

Leo: So how much does Facebook really know about you? A study by researchers at the University of Cambridge gathered data from 60,000 Facebook users and with their likes alone predicted a variety of personal traits including gender, religion, sexual orientation and substance abuse. So I thought I'd try this. The article in sleight talking about this explains something kind of weird. If you like curly fries you're likely to be intelligent. And that seems counter intuitive since those things will kill you. But it turns out that people swim in packs and so at some point somebody who was really smart did a like of curly fries and their equivalently smart friends because smart people seem to like each other, were influenced by that. They liked curly fries and this is an actual signal, and eventually enough smart people liked curly fries that it seems more likely that if you like curly fries you'll be smart. Huh?

Jeff: Well I would say Facebook doesn't know about me.

Leo: Ha, well let me see. Because I ran the program. They have two versions of this, there's one called youarewhatyoulike.com and one called applymagicsauce.com. They're both from Cambridge. Apply Magic Sauce gives you a JSON feed of your traits which you can parse in your brain, but this one is a little bit easier. So apparently I am conservative and traditional. Not liberal and artistic.

Jeff: Same here.

Leo: That seems wrong to me.

Jeff: It's way wrong and it says, by the way, that I am because one of my conservative traditional friends is Chris Hughes.

Leo: Well I've made the mistake of befriending some republicans. There's my problem right there. By the way Alex Gumple you're my most liberal and artistic friend as is Will Harris. How about that huh? You're very liberal and artistic, did you know that Alex? Based on your likes. I am well organized, apparently Facebook does not know about those bills.

Jeff: So am I, we just argued against that. We can't even do our bills.

Leo: I am not spontaneous and flexible, I am shy and reserved.

Jeff: I'm shy and reserved too.

Leo: But you notice these aren't overwhelming percentages one way or another. So it's not a strong signal right? And also how I use Facebook may not reflect my real personality. I am assertive and competitive.

Jeff: Gina go and do this because you're going to be the same.

Leo: We're all the same.

Jeff: We're all the same.

Leo: Well we would be because we're in a cohort.

Gina: Yeah it's true, we're in a cohort.

Leo: I am calm and relaxed as opposed to emotional and stressed.

Jeff: Well I'm not.

Leo: Really? What a shock. My most common relaxed friends are Kevin Rose and Steve Wozniack. It says so right here.

Gina:Nice

Leo: Personality twins, Jeff Jarvis you showed up!

Gina: Nice!

Leo: And David Pogue I think. Jeff Jarvis, David Pogue, Carlie Perkins who works for us, Martin Sergeant from TechTV and Jenny Moyer who is a friend and then my opposite, Alex Gumple, well look at him. Dan Farber of Cnet, Kevin Rose, wait a minute he's my opposite? So this is very interesting. I don't find this very accurate. Who is yours?

Jeff: Randy Zuckerberg.

Leo: Is who you are?

Jeff: My personality twin, yeah.

Leo: Huh.

Gina: I don't use Facebook so much but I really liked analyzewords.com which looks at Twitter.

Leo: See you do, in fact I saw you or somebody and Neil talking about whether you're analytics or not. At thinkup.

Gina: Uh huh, yeah.

Leo: So which, analyze words was it?

Gina: Yeah, analyzewords.com. You pop in your twitter handle and it tells you, kind of gives you a personality analysis.

Leo: This stuff is very close to astrology I think.

Gina: (laughing)

Jeff: Yeah.

Gina: It says I'm very upbeat, very worried and a little bit angry and not so depressed.

Leo: Well on Twitter I'm extremely angry and extremely upbeat. I'm highly plugged in, highly personable, I am only an average spacey/valley girl.

Gina: I think I got high on spacey valley girl.

Leo: I think this is so.... apparently my thinking style is very high for analytic. That's the strongest signal.

Gina: Mhm.

Leo: And look at all the tweets it's analyzed. Huh, then you can analyze a friend. And compare yourself. I don't know.

Jeff: I'm plugged in.

Leo: You eye. Let me compare myself to infosec Taylor Swift. She's very angry. (laughing)

Gina: Yeah we were having this discussion about whether or not thinkup is analytics. I mean certainly it is but we were talking more about how that turns off, because it's a consumer product but it's called analytics, there's some dissonance there. John Gruber actually said when you say social analytics I hear tool for d-bags.

Leo: Yeah. It's like a step above SEO.

Gina: Yeah exactly, and he compared it to SEO. Exactly. He said that there's plenty of good worthwhile SEO but the word has become so sullied at this point, and that's happened to analytics and we've had a really hard time explaining what thinkup is, it's not an analytics dashboard that a brand with a CMO is going to use. It's for regular people, but regular people aren't asking for or looking for or relate to analytics. So yeah we changed our taglines to daily insights about you and your friends.

Leo: Insights are better.

Gina: I think so.

Leo: It isn't exactly analytics because it's not analytical in that sense. You don't get a graph or anything. It's just little insights, little nuggets.

Gina: Mhm, exactly.

Leo: I have more followers than 89% of the people I follow.

Gina: Mhm.

Leo: That's a new one, you just added that one.

Gina: That is a new one, yeah. So 2,000 of your friends would...

Leo: Would reach a bigger audience if I re-tweeted them.

Gina: Mhm, mhm.

Leo: Hm. And for some reason I reply to that guy a lot. And I don't even know who he is. Probably a troll. And here's the...

Jeff: What was your percentage Leo?

Leo: Huh?

Jeff: What was your percentage?

Leo: 89%, I have more followers than 89% of the people I follow.

Jeff: Maybe 4%.

Leo: That makes sense.

Gina: Yeah that's like with great power...

Leo: Comes great responsibility.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: My most popular tweet 4 years ago, one word: Imagine.

Gina: Huh, that must have been...

Leo: It was probably the 20^th anniversary of John Lennon's killing. I would guess.

Gina: That must have been it.

Leo: Or 30^th? Yeah it would have been 30^th. Holy cow.

Gina: Yeah, wow.

Leo: Anyway.

Gina: Anyway.

Jeff: I just learned from Gina that I'mReadyForHillary is following me.

Leo: I'mReadyForHillary. Right on.

Jeff: I am.

Leo: Is that Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Everest?

Jeff: Craig Newmark, wrote a great post yesterday. And my favorite line was “Not the John Locke on Lost.”

(Leo and Gina laugh)

Leo: Not that John Locke.

Jeff: It was just...

Leo: I like it.

Jeff: So.

Leo: More bizarre news from the HTC announcement. They have announced a new camera called the HTC Re, I kid you not, this is a little black plastic periscope. Kind of a go pro, $199.

Jeff: They make a point of saying “If you're going to climb a mountain, use a go pro, this is just for you nebbishes who don't do anything.

Leo: Yeah if you don't ride crazy bicycles off....  it's a strange form factor there.

Gina: What do you do with that?

Leo: You tap the button on the back to take a still, you long press it to record a video in 1080p or you front press the button on the device to record in slo-mo. So it's a very simple UI. There's no viewfinder. I don't know how you then can... oh, the camera can automatically backup to Google Drive, Dropbox or your phone. When you're connected to WiFi.

Gina: The camera connects to WiFi or the camera's Bluetooth to your phone?

Leo: This is an internet of things play. You're going to see more and more of this stuff where this stuff sits on a network and then the intelligence is not in the camera, it's in the phone.

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: And then they're both on the same network, and then the phone goes “Oh I see my Re, and let me send the pictures to Dropbox” or whatever.

Jeff: I still contend that you're going to end up wearing your computer. It's going to be that big.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: And you're going to have one computer with a great battery in it and it's going to talk to peripherals, and everything else in life becomes a peripheral.

Leo: I want to replace my spleen with a computer, can I do that?

Gina: Who needs a spleen anyway?

Leo: You don't need the spleen. It's just kind of extra.

Jeff: Why do I have to vent it all the time then?

Leo: You're venting your spleen again huh?

Gina: I don't know what that means, I don't want to ask.

Leo: No, don't. It's not, it's...

Jeff: It's okay Gina it's okay.

Leo: It's okay.

Jeff: You ever heard that phrase?

Leo: It's okay.

Gina: It's okay.

Leo: He's venting his spleen.

Jeff: Which means you're being a...

Gina: It's a phrase okay.

Leo: It's ranting.

Gina: I was worrying that it was a Jeff medical procedure, I wasn't sure.

Jeff: It's not one of those prostate moments, don't worry.

Gina: Okay. (laughs)

Jeff: But, you know, now that you've raised that, we could go down there but we won't. We won't.

Gina: Yes, vent your spleen, Google tells me.

Leo: So, James Frey. How do you pronounce his name?

Jeff: I think it's “fry.”

Leo: “Fry” or “fray.” It's spelled Frey. I liked his novel, which was A Million Little Pieces is that what it was called?

Gina: Yeah, he's the dude that made up a bunch of stuff?

Leo: Yeah he got, it was a really good... it was supposed to be a memoir, but it really was just a novel. And so for some reason I don't really understand he got in trouble for that.

Jeff: Because Oprah loved him, and he came on Oprah and then he had to go back on Oprah and get beat up by Oprah because he lied to Oprah and the world.

Leo: But you know what, it was a really good novel.

Gina: But he went with the marketing part around it being a memoir, he didn't correct anybody on what they said.

Leo: I guess he's rehabilitated now. Because Google's working with him on a project which would combine, it's this is all a, what do they call it, transmedia. It combines interactive novels with augmented reality games. This is the next step for ingress. By the way you have a bunch of ingress devotees around here. How many miles have you walked Jeff on Ingress? Like you said you've lost 173lbs or something?

Jeff: Wow.

Studio: It's always in kilometers so he never knows.

Leo: We don't know, it's kilometers. How many kilometers?

Studio: 91 in the last month.

Leo: He said 91 kilometers in the last couple weeks.

Studio: 91 this month.

Leo: Playing that stupid game where you try to take over post offices and IHOPs. Anyway, so the next thing is going to be Endgame: The Calling. Augmented reality interactive game, the idea is to build a whole world around these novels. So they're going to have puzzles but I guess they'll be in the real world.

Jeff: The video right there, she is not a good actress.

Leo: Okay let's see.

(Video begins)

Girl in video: Dad was right.

Leo: She's acting right now.

Girl in video: I didn't want to believe him, but he was right. The world has been mutating.

(Leo, Gina and Jeff laughing)

Girl in video: The last 10,000 years the world has been mutating and now it's unrecognizable.

Leo: Is it the actor or is it the script, really?

Jeff: I think it's both. On top of each other.

Girl in video: He was always telling me that I can't help things.

Leo: Okay I can't watch any more, what is going to happen here?

Jeff: She's really, I'm sorry she's bad.

Leo: I'm sure she's a very nice person.

Jeff: I'm sure she's very nice, she's about as lucky as the runway models on the...

Leo: What she's doing is hard though.

Jeff: Hard, I agree.

Leo: It's a terrible script and she's trying to make it real in a camera and there's like five Google guys looking at her. So it's hard.

Jeff: It's hard.

Leo: She needs a James Cameron to come in there and work with her.

Jeff: It's hard to say the world is metamorphosing and look sane.

Leo: I wouldn't want to be in those shoes. I would be just as bad as that.

Jeff: So they have a site.

Leo: Nyantic labs.

Jeff: It doesn't do anything until you buy the book.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: When you buy the book, it's very unclear to me what actually happens here and what you get.

Leo: Wait a minute now this is at Nyantic project, there's something called the Jarvis resurrection.

Jeff: What??

(Leo and Gina laughing)

Leo: What?? Let's click on this and see. Parting words number five.

Jeff: That means I'm dead, thank you very much.

Leo: Wait a minute, the Jarvis virus? What the hell is that? It turns all the blue ones green, it's very rare. Wow. You are a very... oh wait a minute, bring it back. Bring back the Jarvis virus, there it is. The Google guys, they have something with the name Jarvis don't they.

Jeff: They do, and it's not me.

Leo: Is it because of Iron Man?

Gina: Yeah it's Iron Man right?

Leo: Oh. Just, that's nothing. Okay, she's still talking but now she's stopped. And now it's ancient societies. I don't know what it means.

Jeff: The world is changing.

Leo: It's mutating!

Jeff: Dad was right!

(Leo and Gina laughing)

Leo: D... d... dad was.... riiight. Anything else?

Jeff: I was an unlikable person as a critic.

Leo: Yeah, have you read Mr. Schmidt's new book?

Jeff: I started it.

Leo: I went to speak at Google and all I got was one a stinking book though.

(Gina laughing)

Leo: How Google Works Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg.

Jeff: It's very much a managementy book.

Leo: Yeah, see that's not my thing. If they would actually say how Google works I would read that.

Jeff: Go look up Larry's forward.

Gina: Does he actually talk about, I mean is it just celebrating all the awesomeness that Google is, or are there any lessons learned, are there any failures, what they came out of it, or is it just about how great Google is?

Jeff: How you get creative people. No, it's more presumption. Because you want to be us, you might ask, what would we do?

Leo: (laughing) It's been done.

Jeff: This is how you can do that, this is how you hire really smart people, this is how you do blank blank blank.

Leo: There's chapters called Culture Strategy Talent, Decisions, Communications, Innovation. The funny thing is the Wall Street Journal assigned Steven Sinofsky, the failed architect of Windows 8 to the review. And now we know what Sinofsky's been up to. It's actually the shortest thing Sinofsky's ever written. They must have had somebody add to it.

Jeff: Let me go to the Larry, I've got it here. Because they did a half price deal if you pre-ordered it on Play. So I bought it.

Leo: It's not nice to remainder a book before it even comes out.

Jeff: So if you go, by the way, to Jonathan Rosenberg's, or no Erin Schmidt's Google Plus feed he has a really funny cartoon.

Leo: Alright, alright. I'm up for that.

Jeff: Here's... here Larry says: “Over time I've learned surprisingly that it's tremendously hard to get hard to get teams to be super ambitious, it turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible rather than starting from real world physics and trying out what's actually possible. It's why we put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google and setting big goals, because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there. I envision this kind of grin now. And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important.

Leo: Alright, I'm bored. Moving along.

Gina: I would like them to hire a creative thinker that can come up with word other than moonshots.

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: Can they really make that happen? I'm tired of hearing moonshot. Let's come up with a different word.

Jeff: I want them to hire a creative thinker who can figure out how to do multiple accounts.

Leo: Oh that.

(Gina laughing)

Jeff: When I spoke at Google last week, at the work group and I just said I'm going to start there, I'm going to berate you people. I want multiple accounts to work well and it doesn't work well. I'm pissed.

Leo: And what was their response? Did they look at their shoes?

Jeff: That's why they made the announcement today huh? It must have worked.

Leo: Hmmm.

Jeff: Do you also see, interesting too I think Leo, it's similar to the Endgame thing is Google doing cross media, cross platform marketing for the movie Interstellar. And this starts to show how Google Plus becomes a monetizable thing.

Leo: Ah, so not an ad, but native content?

Jeff: It's Interstellar.withgoogle.com.

Leo: Interstellar.withgoogle.com that's a good title.

Jeff: There's a story there too.

Leo: So the idea of transmedia, Lucas is a perfect example is you have a world, a universe like the Star Wars universe but you give people a variety of ways to get involved with it, not just watching the movie, not just reading a comic book or a novelization but also action figures, video games, Lego pieces, whatever you can think of that will get people introduced to the world and then of course they consume the rest of it. So what do I do? Launch space hunt? Alright.

Gina: I'm going to let you do this. I'm going to watch you.

Leo: What is it? Now what? Here we are at Saturn, distance from the Earth is ... a lot. If you had to walk here in Ingress...  Star HD 11506 Identified. Oh and now I can download this, is this like a wallpaper? It is. So is this going to be a movie, Interstellar?

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: So now it's just by doing this it's convinced me to download this crappy wallpaper.

Jeff: Remember those days when you had wallpaper?

Leo: Wallpaper. Oh wait a minute, back to the moon, what's this? That's not the moon Leo! Back to the Death Star. The universe is always expanding, keep searching. Jupiter's red spot is actually a massive high pressure storm, it's been going on for hundreds of years.

Jeff: No no, not Matthew McConaughey. I can't abide him. Have you seen his Cadillac commercial?

Leo: No, it's not a Cadillac it's a Lincoln.

Jeff: See how effective it is? Oh my lord.

Leo: That is a little bit of an annoying commercial. I loved him in True Detective. I think he's a good actor, but he is kind of an annoying person. I don't know what this is, and this is, companies every ten years, companies come back to this. We'll make this mysterious puzzle.

Jeff: You will immerse yourself in us.

Leo: You will immerse yourselves in, and then we can sneak ads onto your system. Remember the BMW ad that was at the very bottom of the page? And you'd say what is this strange thing? And you'd click it. This has been going on since the Internet was invented. Now I can hear the golden record. So some of this is real content. Oh well it just pushed me to YouTube.

(Golden record plays)

Leo: (laughing)

Jeff: They could have been a little more excited.

Leo: The sounds of Earth.

Jeff: Welcome to Earth it is very boring.

Leo: By the time Vger exited the galaxy we no longer were using vinyl records so we should have sent a CD.

Golden Record: ...and we believe this committee...

(Different voice): My dear friends in outer space, as you probably know my country is situated on the west coast of the continent of Africa.

Leo: I don't think they know that.

Jeff: No they don't know that.

Leo: I don't think they know that.

Jeff: What's a continent, what's a country?

Leo: Continent? Africa? What's that? Samsung 60% profit drop as sales slow.

Gina: Yikes.

Leo: Yikes! People are finally catching onto the crap that is the Galaxy phone series. Or no.

(Gina laughing)

Leo: That's mean. I shouldn't say it that way. But I feel that way. Deep down.

Gina: We couldn't tell.

Leo: But that's weird, I mean I thought you couldn't stop them. They were a juggernaut. They spent more than a billion dollars in ads last year.

Gina: We talked a little bit last night but Android, they're kind of getting hit by both ends. Their high end phones are available much cheaper from new manufacturers, the OnePlusOne for example, and also the iPhone now that you've got a bigger iPhone, people might be switching to get the big screen size.

Leo: But this happened, oh well no this is a prognostication. It hasn't happened yet.

Gina: It hasn't happened yet. But it is going to happen. But it's an issue of they're just not selling phones.

Leo: Right.

Gina: Which is amazing given the amount of marketing and advertising they do.

Leo: Alright well let's take a break, when we come back, are you ready for a tip and a number? I have a tool. Our show brought to you today by GoTo Meeting. From Citrix. Oh we love Citrix, GoTo Meeting, the perfect solution for meeting and collaberating online. Right now if you sign up for GoTo Meeting you'll get another Citrix product free for 6 months! Communicating in business, so important, it's how we solve problems, how we get things done. When communication doesn't happen, when it breaks down, that's when you're in trouble. With GoTo Meeting, you're always in touch. Even when your clients and colleagues are anywhere in the world, all over the world. GoTo Meeting lets you share the same screen so you're literally on the same page, and with built in video conferencing you get crystal clear video. On your web cam, because everybody's got a web cam whether it's an iPad, an iPhone, a desktop or a laptop, it really is great. It helps your team work smarter, anywhere they are. Sign up for GoTo Meeting today. Visit gotomeeting.com, don't wait this offer ends just a few days hence. October 10^th. You still can try it free but the 6 months free of another product, only for a couple more days. GoToMeeting.com. Let's start things off with Gina Trapani and her tip of the week.

Gina: So my tip of the week is an Android Wear app, that I really like and I'm actually ripping this off from Arron Carston who was on All About Android last night, this was his app in the arena. It's called Wear Mini Launcher, it's a launcher for all your Wear apps that you just, you pull over to the side and you get a grid of icons in order to launch your apps. So by default on Wear, you have to go to okay Google, and then slide down, and then go through all these menus and go to more and it's a bunch of swiping and this Wear mini launcher actually just, you swipe in from the left, you get a grid of icons, you can launch whatever app that you want and I use the stopwatch, I use FlopsyDroid.

Leo: FlopsyDroid, what's that?

Gina: It's like Flappy Bird but for your watch. I've got Google Keep, your settings, I've got a baby lock app which is really what I need, and I need to be able to launch that baby lock as quickly as possible.

Leo: Lock it!

Gina: Yeah, because the Moto 360 will not have the same fate as the M8 had. So yeah I like it a lot. If you have Android Wear check it out. And I have to say, I'm backtracking here, I sort of mocked the Apple Watch a little bit because I said “Oh look at that grid of icons, that's crazy that's stupid!” I've got to say this is basically a grid of icons of your third party apps but I really like. It's a really quick way to just launch something rather than have to go through the regular default rigamoroo. That's not default Google app that's in a card for Google Now. So that's the Wear Mini Launcher and it is free in the Play store.

Jeff: Installed, just installed it.

Leo: I really like it. Also, as long as we're talking about Wear stuff. Intellicom makes some customizable watch faces which I really like on the Moto 360. It comes with its own really pretty nice watch faces, including a dual face that lets you do two times. But this is from Intellicom, you could put the Ferrari logo or the Google logo there, I actually have an LCD that shows the East Coast time. I showed this earlier, battery life on my watch. It's free, it's really great. Intellicom, I think it's called Wear Faces. But I like the fact that it's really, this is, we're starting to see customizations for this. For instance you have to download a little program but normally if you say, take a note it goes to Google Keep, but you can have it use Evernote. Phil Lyman was on the triangulation on Monday, he told me, it's replaced a little Evernote stub that doesn't even show up as an app on your app launcher. But somehow modifies Evernote so that can be the note application. I'd like to see more of those, that's really great.

Gina: Yeah that's really cool.

Jeff: My watch by the way, nothing happens, yesterday just suddenly I realized I haven't had any notifications on it all day, and I couldn't get it going. And it had a little mute thing on, I couldn't remember how to get it off so I had to rebuild the watch.

Leo: You slide it, okay let me show you.

Gina: Yeah you slide it down.

Leo: You slide it down.

Jeff: What it was...

Leo: Okay you've go the watch face, two things to know about with the watch face. You already know you double tap it or just say “Okay Google.” If you press and hold, oops never mind, I wasn't talking to you this time. This one time! You press and hold, you can change the watch face.

Jeff: I do that, right.

Leo: And if you slide down, you can mute or unmute notifications.

Jeff: Oh. Oh never mind. Well now it's not unmuting. I can't get it to unmute. Oh okay, got it, alright. Thank you! Never mind.

Leo: I actually am, are you guys liking your Moto 360?

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah, when we were in London we used it for navigation. So you could have Google Maps, you tell it navigate to the tower of London and it will show you an alert... okay Google, navigate home. It will show you an alert as you get close to the corner you've got to turn on. Let me just put my home address in here. And I'm going to navigate, you can choose driving, bicycling, I'll choose walking. Navigate, and now what it's going to do is it's going to calculate the route, and as you're walking your wrist will buzz as it's time to make a turn. It'll even talk to you. So it tells you which direction to go. And then, you guys with Glass are probably already familiar with this but I think that's really a good use for the watch.

Gina; Yeah that's me. At first I was like wait, do I just need to walk like this the whole time? And no.

Leo: It buzzes you.

Gina: Yeah, you walk in the direction you're supposed to go in, and it buzzes you when you're supposed to turn. It's really nice.

Leo: It was great for getting around London where we didn't know where we were going, it really worked well. Your number of the week Mr. Jeffery Jarvis.

Jeff: Oh right, I'm on. Okay so well I'm going to be a boring old poof talking about my favorite topic the right to be forgotten. Just a little number update here, so far 135,000 requests representing 470,000 URLs, this is the new part, Google has refused 30% of them about 50% have been taken down, and the rest required more details. This comes from a story talking about how some Irish people were complaining that Google didn't do what they wanted.

Leo: Well there. So there.

Jeff: There.

Leo: My tool comes from Paul Thurott, on Windows Weekly of all things. It's a Microsoft product that is kind of cool. Microsoft Xim, spelled X-I-M, a free download, it's for Windows Phone or Android, I put it on my Android and you're going to like this. In fact, if you check your Gmail, Gina, you might have a Xim invitation.

Gina: Oh.

Leo: From me, what it does is it allows you to share pictures and control that share on your phone, the other person does not need to have Xim installed. They just need to check the, I can text, or email. And I'm going to create a new Xim, I can get the Xim from if you show my phone, I can choose it from my camera roll, OneDrive, because it's a Microsoft product, DropBox, Facebook, Instagram, I'm going to choose my London slideshow, these are pictures I took in London. Select them all, I'm going to have them go to Gina and Paul, and let's start it, and now in theory you don't even have to be in the same network and you don't even have to have Xim installed, and you should get a text and it's web based. Oh, I think we pick them and now it started. And it's web based and so you'll get a link to a website and then I control the slideshow. Isn't that cool?

Gina: Hm, very cool.

Leo: Are you getting it? Did you get it?

Gina: I'm trying to find, I haven't gotten the email.

Leo: It would have come to your Gmail, maybe I screwed up. I couldn't get Paul to see it either but, this is nice because you don't have to hand your phone around the table, you can just add your friends. If they're in your contacts list it's quite easy and you can just show them your pictures.

Gina: Weird, I don't see the email.

Leo: I don't know, maybe it doesn't work. It's free to try.

Gina: I tried, I searched, I don't know.

Leo: I might have done something wrong with the address.

Gina: Very cool though.

Leo: X-I-M. Microsoft Xim. Alright, that's it. We're done. Thank you very much lady and gentleman. No, no iOS, sorry folks. Gina Trapani is at ThinkUp that's a great place to go where you get your free ThinkUp trial account and get insights into what you're sharing on Facebook and Twitter. And make yourself a better sharer.

Gina: And I'm blogging again at my old old domain which is new again. Scribbling.net.

Leo: What?

Gina: Yeah, I'm actually doing the Ohm's 30 day blogging challenge, I'm three days in and actually today I got a pass because my talk from XOXO got released on YouTube so it's now on my blog so yeah, I decided SmarterWear decided too much like underwear, you got me on that Leo.

Leo: I said that? I'm so mean.

Gina: This is my new site.

Jeff: Oh, cool.

Gina: So my XOXO talk is there on my blog and I've got a transcript of the talk if you'd like to read and set a watch. A couple other posts, just little things.

Jeff: What's this, scribbling.net?

Gina: Yep, that was my first blog ever that I started in 2001, the domain was anyway. Going back to old new first principles.

Leo: Very cool. You know, I hadn't mentioned but we had the with known people on and I actually set up a With Known blog at leoville.net I really like this, the old idea, this is you post on your own site and then it syndicates it out to Facebook or whatever and so I've been posting pictures and stuff, there's kind of like a tumble blog but what's cool about is when you do post something, you can have it go out to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and I imagine they will add more in time and Foursquare you can even do check ins via open street map.

Gina: Yeah, I've been seeing your posts around the different networks and seeing that they're originating from your With Known site and I've had to say that they're really, they look really good. They look very native. They don't look like they're syndicated. I just really like how you've been, how it looks like the software works really well.

Leo: I think so, I mean it's very early days, it's an open source project but all you need is a Lamp server and you do have to have PHP 5.4 a fairly recent version, that was a little stumbling block at first, thanks to Bear who helped me set that up, we were able to get that going. And it is primitive, it's early days. There's lots of features I'd like to see, but I like the idea of posting on my site. The pictures live on my site, the posts live on my site, but they get syndicated out to Facebook and Twitter and Flickr, and I think that's a good way to do it. Let's see, we're done. Mr. Jeff Jarvis oh he's gone. Well, bye Jeff.

Gina: I heard the sad hangouts goodbye sound.

Leo: Jeff Jarvis, we hardly knew ye. He is professor of journalism city university of New York. The author of What Would Google Do?, Public Parts couple of great books. Gutenberg the Geek which is an Amazon single and he blogs at buzzmachine.com and is really a public intellectual, somebody who's really out there in the world and talking about heavy stuff, deep stuff. Even though people may not like it. He's holding his own. Thank you all for being here, we do This Week in Google Wednesday afternoons 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern Time that's 2000 UTC. At least for another month until our time changes. And I hope you'll stop by live and watch the show, but if you can't, on demand audio and video are available after the fact at twit.tv/twig or wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes and all the other, instacast, DogCatcher, Pocketcast, all of those. And don't forget we have some really nice twit apps created by some of our third party developers on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Roku, yes. So make sure you look on your mobile device for twit. Thanks for joining us, we'll see you next time on This Week in Google!