This Week in Google 303

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google. A little preview coming up of Google IO. It's next week. And we'll talk about self-driving cars, how safe are they? Jeff Jarvis is coming up along with Kevin Marks. It's time for TWiG.

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

Leo: This is TWiG, This Week in Google, episode 301, recording Wednesday, May 20, 2015.

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It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google. Hello, everybody. Leo Laporte here with Mr. Jeffrey Jarvis from the CUNY Labs in beautiful downtown New York, New York.

Jeff Jarvis: Meatballs make you mellow. That was a very mellow beginning.

Leo: I am mellow. I've been eating meatballs. No, you know why I'm mellow? We'll talk about it in a sec, let me introduce Kevin. Kevin Marks is also here. We also love Kevin from his garden, chirping birds signal the arrival of spring or of the new Tone extension for Google Chrome. Hi, Kevin. Kevin, a Googler, Appler, British telecomm-er, a salesforce-r and now he's out -

Jeff: Now gardener and indie.

Leo: Indie web is a wonderful thing. We're going to talk a little bit about some indie web stuff but the reason I'm a little mellow - it's not merely mellow, I'm kind of sad because this is Letterman's last night and boy, I just - I remember Carson's last night. Remember, Bette Midler sang, “One for my baby, one for the road.” I just -

Jeff: It's the end of the - you know, Carson was the comic model for my father's generation, Letterman for our generation, yours and mine. I would argue Jon Stuart for today. But Letterman definitely was the voice we tried to emulate in comedy, telling a joke, and a story, and an attitude and he changed - he just did so much. You know, I feel bad to this day about the whole Leno thing but in the end, I think what this proves right now is he won in the end. He's much more respected, much more loved, much more of an innovator. Leno turns out to be a blowhard buffoon, bore, bore, lump of nasty humanity.

Leo: I'm kind of with you and it's funny because Dave's known for being kind of cranky, snarky and sarcastic but there was - just as with Johnny, there was an undercurrent of kind of Midwest, good old boy, nice guy.

Jeff: Think about how Dave started, and this is Howard Stern for me, too, is honesty. Leno was just one big fake blah.

Leo: It's showbiz. It's the old showbiz and that's what Letterman was an anecdote to in the '80s and '90s. He was to that whole showbiz thing, he kind of deprecated that and hated it.

Jeff: So I just put up two letters David sent me when I was a TV critic. These are my most prized possessions.

Leo: Where do you put them?

Jeff: As a tweet. They're very minor but they are my absolute prized possessions. Find it?

Leo: Under other as a TWiT tweet. Oh, you mean on Twitter? What do these say?

Jeff: He said, “I just wanted to thank you for saying such nice things about me. I appreciate the support.” This is when he was going through the Leno fight, losing the Tonight Show.

Leo: Kind of blows me that was 22 years ago, blows me away.

Jeff: That was NBC letterhead and this is a CBS letterhead just thanking me for reviewing the show. So it's signed, “Your friend, Dave.” He hated critics and wouldn't even let us into the show. I went there once, we weren't allowed in, despised us. But still, I have such respect for him and to have gotten more than a mile of him is amazing. So I'm going to miss you, Dave, even though I was too old to stay up late and watch you.

Leo: That's the sad story is none of us watched it.

Jeff: Now, who watches Jimmy Kimmel or Colbert? We watch them all - not even TiVO, we watch the best bits on Youtube.

Kevin Marks: To admit, I'm a bit quiet here because I barely watch any of these things and only have the loosest idea of Letterman. I understand the cultural big deal of it, but.

Leo: That's it. Carson really was the kind of show where everybody watched it and kind of wanted to talk about it the next morning. It was a water cooler conversation and for some reason, it really was must-watch even though it was really late at night. But I think the habit of late night television viewing kind of died out thanks to TiVO, VHS and stuff.

Jeff: I mean, Jimmy and Jimmy are both good, both wonderful. But what young person watches anything scheduled?

Leo: Thank God, that saved Saturday Night Live because there were usually only one or two good skits, so the fact you could just watch a clip saves you hours of wasted time every week. I'm going to miss Jon Stuart. When's his last show or did he already have it?

Jeff: No, no. It's coming up.

Leo: I think I'll have the same kind of feeling, although I guess for our generation - because Letterman was on for 33 years. He's really, I mean, we started watching in our 20s, so that's why, I think, it means so much to our generation in particular. You young people will know. When Conan retires, you will understand. Colbert's taking over, I think that's interesting. Is he going to be Colbert (pronounced with a hard T) or Colbert?

Jeff: Colbert, but without the Colbert character.

Leo: I'm dying to see what he's like without the character.

Jeff: I think he'll be good. I was talking about this with Jake last night and he's a little nervous about it but I think he's very - Jake, thanks to Jake, I went to see the show. He does the pre-warmup stuff. He's quick and clever.

Leo: Oh, I love Conan. He started with Letterman as writers and then of course, John Oliver who is the dark horse who surprised everybody except me because I listened to his Bugle podcast for years. The funniest podcast ever. So I knew Oliver was a gem, although I was a little disheartened when it looked like HBO so blatantly copied the Daily Show.

Jeff: Though I think he's found his niche. It's a hard niche, though.

Kevin: It's actually different because it's almost a documentary show, which is very interesting.

Jeff: It takes on a big topic which is risky, because most of the topics that really work - the school testing one was great but not every one is the gem and he's committing to doing a 12-minute gem. It's hard.

Leo: But boy, he's made a big difference in our world. I think many people give him credit to turning around the net neutrality conversation.

Kevin: I think patents, software patents and other ad patents recently.

Leo: He's taken on some big sacred cows. He did a PCD on testing a few weeks ago which I hope make people aware of what is going on in education in the United States. It's not good, not good at all. I love the birds, they're really active. Must be mating season because that's not chirp.

Kevin: We've had - the nests have hatched. There were nests in our canopy here but they seem to have hatched.

Leo: You need some cats to cut down the population.

Kevin: Oh, we've got a cat. Cat's getting by. We've got cats, dogs and birds here so we've got the entire Tom and Jerry show.

Leo: Next week, Jeff will be in studio with us because he's coming to town. Google IO starts a week from tomorrow and already some rumors - according to Bloomberg, Google will be unveiling a new photo service separated from Google+. This would be another nail in Google+'s coffin. I know, it makes me sad. I was sad when Buzz closed.

Jeff: When I was at Newsgeist in Helsinki, which is a news thing Google did to lube some squeaky wheels in Europe, I'll say it's Googlers and newspeople. I did my standard joke about how I still like Google+ and it always gets a laugh. It is the constant laugh line now. But I like it.

Leo: I do too, and I like it more because there's fewer people there. It turns out, I've realized that I really like social networks when it's people like me and as soon as normal people get in there, it's like, “Come on. I don't need any more Upworthy posts.” You're starting to see that in Google+, that same sort of Facebook sharing of garbage. That, to me, is the beginning of the end for any social network. Twitter has gone and past that, it's something completely different. I don't know what Twitter is, something completely different.

So the new photo tool which will let users, according to Bloomberg, post images to Facebook and Twitter.

Jeff: Yay, at last!

Leo: Finally. Greater autonomy in photo tool, more freedom to take on rivals - in other words, because Facebook and Twitter were seen as competitors to Google+, you couldn't share to them.

Kevin: I thought there was some mutual bad blood there, as well. The other thing that was announced is that Google is indexing Twitter again, which is another one of these strategy attack things they - I think there was some - there was at least partly Google and partly Twitter but the fact they couldn't come to an agreement on that was a big shame. I suspect that was in-fighting within Google as well.

Leo: Yes, because Google had the firehose and then Twitter turned it off, I think, or they couldn't come to an agreement.

Kevin: Well, they had Google real-time search, which was primarily Twitter but was obviously valuable for them as they were ramping up +, other things as well. Then they couldn't make a deal on the firehose. Twitter asked for too much many, Google got grumpy or something, or there wasn't Google+ strategy attacks and it's quite possible that was part of it too. So that ended up with them getting rid of Google real-time search completely and that was a shame, because that was actually a useful thing. I don't know if you remember using that, but it was something quite helpful and -

Jeff: Someone's going to act irrationally these days. I'm going to bet it's Twitter over Google.

Kevin: No, I think there's - we can see some of this as + being de-emphasized but there was definitely some strategy attacks coming from there as well and certainly, with the photos discussion and the Twitter FiOS thing as well, there was definitely a, “We should be using our thing, not their thing,” from the + group. Now, I suspect that wasn't what the search group wanted and that was an internal in-fighting thing because otherwise, why would they have got rid of the real-time search thing if the goal was Google+ and real-time search.

Leo: So how do I get this new thing - do I search for - I see on SearchEngineLand the story there was #izombie.

Kevin: You have to do mobile, apparently.

Leo: Oh, it doesn't work on desktop?

Kevin: The report said it's mobile-only at the moment and I'm not even sure it's everywhere yet.

Leo: Let me try it on my S6.

Jeff: #izombie?

Leo: Let me do #DavidLetterman because that's trending right now on Twitter so presumably, there would be a lot of content there. Do you have to use a # if you're going to do this search to get the carousel?

Jeff: I'm not getting it.

Kevin: I've not seen any examples.

Leo: Here we go, popular on Twitter. Here's the carousel, yes. Interesting, so that's above the normal search results.

Kevin: That's a very high placement, wow. It's also a lot of real estate.

Leo: You get a follow link. Can you zoom a little bit? I think it's hard to read right now and my camera is too far away, but at the bottom, you get a follow link that says, “More tweets for #DavidLetterman.” So it's popular on Twitter and then you get this carousel. These are tweets, just somebody on Twitter.

Jeff: It's weirdly curated. I'm getting KRQE News 13.

Leo: I'm getting that too. I don't know why - here's some guy named Steve.

Jeff: Who is an ass.

Leo: Who says, “Good riddance, David Letterman. Please keep Jimmy Kimmel with you.”

Jeff: What do you do, Steve, go to funerals and say, “Good riddance?”

Leo: That's what's wrong with Twitter is everybody unfortunately feels - it makes you feel like every little thought that goes through your head is important and everybody has to weigh in on everything, however trivial, silly or irrelevant their thoughts are. “A lot of grown men crying this month,” says Sarah. I agree. Diane says, “Look what I found, David Letterman sponges from ABC Burbank in the '80s.”

Jeff: Steve's putting bible verses in his Twitter bio. Nice and Christian of you, Steve.

Leo: “Good riddance, should have been dead long ago.” But I wonder - then, if I do more tweets, this is a link from Google back to Twitter, so that's not really more Google search results. Then you get the Google search results and the hashtag turns into the knowledge box and all that. Wait a minute, holy cow. So you get CBS, right out of the tweets, David Letterman's knowledge graph with the Wikipedia stuff and then a link to his Twitter account. Boy, talk - when you change tunes, Google, you go all the way. Twitter is very important, now.

Jeff: I just searched for David Letterman, I don't get the -

Leo: Look how far down Youtube is. This will give lie to all the EU folks who say they favor their own - I mean, Youtube could have very reasonably been the top there.

Kevin: Did you put the hashtag in to find this?

Leo: I did, #DavidLetterman.

Jeff: Just David Letterman won't do it.

Kevin: Say you search for - search for #TheVoice, because that was last night and had a lot of Twitter stuff in it.

Leo: I'll give it a shot by doing “TheVoice,” no.

Jeff: I just did #TheVoice, nothing.

Leo: Huh. Here we go - wait a minute, if I scroll down far enough, there's NBC, the knowledge graph, episodes, Youtube, Facebook, and then tweets about #TheVoice on Twitter which takes you back to Twitter. That's not a search result.

Kevin: They use hashtags for voting, so you'd have to look for whatever it is, #Save - whoever they were.

Leo: That's why I used #DavidLetterman, since that was a trending topic. I knew that, if anything was going to work - that would work. You want to use a trending topic, I guess.

Kevin: It also implies there is a strong time compare because I imagine that would be high last night.

Leo: I for one wasn't crazy about the idea of including tweets in search results because tweets are kind of unpredictable.

Jeff: Well, as we just saw.

Leo: I feel like, I don't know, is that really what I want when I go searching?

Jeff: I think they're not that prominent. I think it's like a side one box, maybe.

Leo: Google researchers create amazing time lapses for public photos. This is kind of an auto-awesome thing but not to photos uploaded to Google. Wow. This is out in the public domain. A team from Google in the University of Washington have created a completely automated way to create time lapse videos. They scour through Flickr, Picasa and other photo sharing sites. They sort them by geographic location looking for widely-snapped landmarks, order the photos by date and then obviously, you have to then modify the photos so that everything matches up.

Jeff: Like the video below has some creeping ice, there.

Leo: Time lapse mining from internet photos, University of Washington.

Jeff: So it's going to go through.

Leo: Right, these people take pictures of glaciers, right. They have to color correct and match, and then you can actually see the glacier melting, wow. That's really neat. I mean, its not a good thing, but - here's the building we just saw. You can see it when you see the timeline, all the images that they're using. Holy cow.

Jeff: What computers can do.

Leo: It's amazing.

Kevin: This is interesting. It's like the thing Microsoft did but in time rather than space.

Leo: They did PhotoSynth which made the 360 out of multiple pictures.

Kevin: From multiple people whereas this is doing it across time which is a very nice piece of work, I like that.

Leo: Thank you science and math.

Kevin: Also, was that an annual cycle of the glacier or was that every year.

Leo: That was from 2000, ten years. So I would say -

Kevin: Glaciers like to melt, grow and shrink every year.

Leo: But over ten years, I think that's a little more significant. There's definitely a trend.

Kevin: Years ago, when I was doing multimedia stuff, one of the things we did was a thing called [0:20:05.9?] which was an exhibition in a museum where we did time lapse stuff. It was all satellite done stuff and that, we had then polarized cams in holes, things like that. It took a long time but it's great to see good ground-based stuff because satellites stay in the same place.

Leo: Emerge data, the fact that we store everything and it's not all kind of accessible with computation, some pretty specific computation, it's very interesting what you can get. It's not just the one, just having big data. It's being able to parse it, massage it to get something out of it. Maps was hacked again.

Jeff: Oh, badly.

Leo: By jerks. I thought Google had fixed this. Boy, this is shocking and not exactly like peeing on an iPhone. This happened yesterday. Google, which had said, “We are going to change who we let change Maps and so forth.”

Jeff: We lose the opportunity to get people to contribute to public knowledge.

Leo: There's trolls everywhere, jeez.

Kevin: This is an indexing more than labeling thing, isn't it?

Leo: Oh, so this is different - oh, searching for a particular phrase. So this is sort of Google bombing, it's the opposite. So they aren't using the Maps tool, I misunderstood.

Kevin: There was a weird thing people were doing, like, search Google Maps for your Twitter handle and see where it puts you and for mine, it puts me with Tantech, apparently, which is kind of fun.

Leo: That's probably accurate. So wait a minute, you search Maps for your Twitter handle and since Twitter is - if you turn it on and I do, telling - yes, I'm right here.

Kevin: So yes, you're likely to be accurate.

Leo: I tweet with location turned on.

Kevin: Lots of other people are finding very, very strange ones. Somebody was collecting them.

Leo: Where does Jeff live?

Jeff: This is going to freak people out. I just started a countdown clock to freakout in Germany.

Leo: Why, what's going on?

Jeff: “They've pinpointed where I am!” You actually tweeted where you are, but -

Leo: Here you are, too, Jason. So is this the most recent tweet in time or is it based on all your tweets?

Kevin: I'm not sure what it's based on because -

Leo: You're not with Tantech now.

Kevin: [crosstalk] - getting very strange results, like they were searching for [0:22:45.2?] and getting -

Leo: Yes, because you're not with Tantech in San Francisco now. So it's not your most recent but do you have location turned off?

Kevin: I turn it on and off.

Leo: Let's see where POTUS is, at the White House.

Kevin: So maybe they have a way to do this a bit.

Leo: Doctor Mom says she's - is it @doctormom on Twitter? No, there's a company called Doctor Mom Presentations, that's not you. Doctor Mom, what's your Twitter handle? There's a little delay between saying and hearing. Oh well, it's kind of interesting. Is that related to the Google/Twitter relationship? It is @doctormom.

Kevin: I'm not sure. I think this goes - there was a little [feedback] - where you were searching for politicians, there were strange things, especially UK ones where they were turning up in really odd places.

Leo: POTUS, of course, it President Clinton - it will be President Clinton's account, I think. Did you see Bill Clinton tweeting - Barack Obama tweets from @potus. “Finally, after six years, they've given me my own Twitter account.” What did Clinton ask, he says, “So is it yours or does it pass on to the next owner? I've got a candidate in mind.”

Jeff: Obama goes back and says, “I don't know, but is somebody interested in the @flotus?”

Leo: Of course, Clinton will be the first gentleman, we've learned, by the way, if - yes.

Jeff: Is that what it is?

Leo: It's a question Bill Clinton asked. Obama, “Good question, @billclinton.”

Kevin: He would be @fgotus. I wonder if they reserved that yet.

Leo: How come @potus was available?

Kevin: Twitter has the ability to keep people off. Yes, @fgotus has been assigned.

Leo: There you go, first guy. Dual purpose, it could be first gentleman or first guy.

Jeff: Among those walking on David Letterman's finale, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Jim Carrey, Peyton Manning.

Leo: Oh my, oh my. That's a pretty good lineup.

Jeff: Yes, it is.

Leo: Let's take a break. When we come back, we've got more. We've got Kevin Marks and the birds.

Jeff: We do? Oh, good.

Leo: We've got Jeff Jarvis and the lettuce. We've got here in the brick house, FreshBooks. FreshBooks was a lifesaver for me when I was a freelancer still and sending invoices - truthfully, not sending invoices at the end of the month. I couldn't bring myself to - it was such a pain. I had my invoices in Microsoft Word. I wasn't using Excel, I wasn't that sophisticated. It's just a pain and every month on the 30th, I was supposed to make my invoices, send them off and the problem was, if you don't make your invoices, you don't get paid. Fortunately, Amber Macarthur knew about FreshBooks. This is when I was going to Toronto one week a month to do the show up there - I had to bill Rogers not only for my visits but for expenses, hotel, meals and airfare. That's just such a pain. She told me about FreshBooks and what a lifesaver it was.

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Self-driving cars hit the road - let's hope they don't hit pedestrians. In Mountain View this summer, Google said, “We're going to put them out there.” The speed will be capped to 25 miles an hour and you know, it's going to be those weird little Tonka toy rounded cars that Google showed. They have no steering wheel, no accelerator, no brake. But that's illegal, so Google's going to put a temporary steering wheel, brake and accelerator in there along with a human.

Jeff: That's like being the monkey on the first Sputnik.

Leo: It looks like it would barely fit Laika the dog in that thing.

Jeff: There's no reason for me to be here.

Leo: I don't know. If you were in a self-driving car, would you - I feel like we talked about this on Sunday.

Jeff: No, I'm just saying the Google employee who has to be there.

Leo: Bring a sandwich, something to read.

Jeff: “I'm working for Google.” What are you doing, son? “Sitting in a car all day.”

Leo: Do you think they designed these because these are the right design for this car or just to make people feel better like the Asimov Sony Robot that looks like a human?

Jeff: That's very Chromebook Pixel, that little light bar on the side.

Leo: Do you think when it hits somebody, it pulses red?

Jeff: It looks up your name and -

Leo: “I am sorry I have hit you.” So they'll be going through neighborhoods, this is not going to be on highways. They've been doing about 10 thousand miles a week, 1 million autonomous miles on the road, 10 thousand autonomous miles a week.

Kevin: It's effectively a self-driving golf cart, isn't it?

Leo: It looks like that. I want a real car. I like the -

Kevin: It's about the same speed and power so it may actually therefore be legal in those terms and may be one of the reasons it's that shape.

Leo: So cute. There's no human in that one.

Kevin: It also looks less resistant from being crashed into by a traffic passersby than the previous Prius.

Leo: There have been since September four accidents but in every case, Google says, they were low speed, under 10 miles an hour and it was the human's fault, not the car's fault.

Jeff: I put something in the rundown, Chris Sacka? He's doing an AMA in Periscope.

[video plays]

Leo: I'm so bored of this stuff.

Jeff: I know, I am too. Shouldn't it be sideways?

Leo: You can turn it sideways, I think. We asked Ben Rubin, the founder of Meerkat, why Meerkat when it first came out forced you to do portrait mode and he said that's native to the phone.

Kevin: Right, if you're watching it on the phone, this makes sense.

Leo: It only looks bad on a desktop and you go, “Why am I looking through a -” Especially with this particular shot where Sacka's half cut off.

Kevin: It's too small to get both faces.

Leo: It's a one and a half shot.

Kevin: They should lean in from opposite sides, I guess. I mean, this is the eternal problem of TV, which is, what shape should it be?

Leo: Not that shape. Somebody said, “You have two eyes, turn it on its side so you can use both.” I think when you're looking at a phone, that makes perfect sense to me. I don't have any problem with that. But it doesn't work for this particular thing, so why should we care that Sacka's doing a Periscope? Is there some excitement?

You know what they did, Periscope? The Spotify announcement this morning was not streamed publicly in New York. The press were invited and Mashab.le, I think, or Fast Company decided to Periscope it. Interesting, huh? Spotify announced they are going to do an updated app. You know what's happening here is everybody - this is anything that happened before the Apple Watch came out, everybody is trying to get their bit of the news cycle before Apple announces its streaming music service in June at WWBC. So Spotify is going to do video, which is a big, big deal. They are also going to feature podcasts, including ours.

Jeff: Oh, good.

Leo: This show and all the TWiT programs will be available, audio and video, on Spotify.

Jeff: Any cost to you? Any revenue?

Leo: No cost to us. I don't know what the deal is. We might get revenue, I don't know. I don't think so, because they're not modifying - they're not putting ads in it or anything. They don't do ads, nor are they taking our ads out, though. So they also announced the new feature I really like, if you're a runner. They'll automatically make a playlist that matches your cadence as you run because the phone knows your -

Jeff: Jesus, I'll get a funeral dirge.

Leo: [sings funeral dirge] “Jeff, you're not running very fast.” He says it's like dancing, you wouldn't dance to music that didn't match - you wouldn't dance one way and have the music be different, so it makes sense. We're thrilled to be part of that. We knew about it because we had to provide them with content, make sure it worked and all that stuff. So if you're a Spotify subscriber, good news. Along with all the great music, you'll be able to listen to TWiT or TWiG, this show.

Jeff: Please, TWiG.

Leo: Russia threatens to ban Google, Twitter and Facebook over extremist content. There is a move afoot, not just in Russia. Look at Great Britain. To mark some kinds of speech so threatening that it's going to be blocked. I hope we don't get to that situation.

Jeff: I agree. I also think it's just the nearest excuse to try and ban these things that threaten tyrants.

Leo: That's really the real reason. They want to ban - Russia says, over extremist content, illegal activities. It's that bloggers law that they passed. The 2014 legislation requires popular bloggers in Russia to register their real identity with the authorities.

Kevin: They did that a while ago, right?

Leo: Yes, that was last year. So they're going to use that, though, to also regulate social media and of course, David Cameron. We talked about this last week, he said Great Britain - that if you're - what was it? It was such a depressing quote because it sounded like 1984.

Kevin: I can't believe he said that. It was shocking. He said -

Leo: Let me see if I can find it because I want -

Kevin: “Up till now, we've said that as long as you obey the law, we won't bother you, but that's got to change.” It was -

Leo: “We've been a passively tolerant society for too long.” “For too long, we've been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens, as long as you obey the law, we'll leave you alone.”

Jeff: Is this Putin or Cameron, it's hard to tell.

Leo: This is David Cameron!

Kevin: That's David Cameron, which is shocking.

Leo: “This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach. As a party of one nation, we will govern as one nation and bring our country together.” This sounds like nationalism to the extreme.

Kevin: One nation has a different nuance in the UK but it does sound that way, yet. There's a notion of one nation notorious as opposed to divisions between rich and poor. So that's what he's throwing on there. But from the outside, it does sound like ein Reich, which is bad.

Leo: “Ein Volk, and if you say anything against us, that's your problem!” Wow.

Kevin: It is a bad departure and the Open Rights Group in the UK is ramping up how to deal with this, seeing how they can respond.

Leo: What is the reaction in the UK?

Kevin: I'm not in the UK, so I only see what's there through social media, but it was widely heralded as a shocking thing. The other half of it is also a shout out to the law and order wing of his party and the UK crowd as well, that's the other deal.

Leo: To me, it kind of sounds like the Ukip[?] rhetoric, the very highly nationalistic rhetoric.

Kevin: Ukip[?] was very shocking for the conservatives because they won the most seats in the European Parliament last year.

Jeff: They've got what, one seat in this election?

Kevin: Party-less PR where the election is done by [0:37:43.2?]. But it did - they got one seat, yes, but they got 5 million votes or something so they effected the results by moving stuff around, which is how things work in the UK. It worked out in the conservatives favor, mostly, I think because they managed to persuade some of the UK types to swing back to them rather than laborers. But it was a short result. The pollers had no idea what was going on because all these different parties and their model of left/right didn't fit any more. It was also this sort of - there is now this sort of - Ukip[?] has moved the rhetoric such that there is this very, very strong anti-immigration turnout, anti-immigration policy which sounds very un-British to me but then, you know, I've been away for a while. So it's hard for me to tell.

Leo: Feels like nationalism is growing and nationalism in Europe has always been a problem. There's a bad history.

Google wants to put “Buy” buttons on its search results pages in the coming weeks.

Jeff: This is a slap at Amazon.

Leo: It's like a OneClick. Google says - well, Google doesn't say anything. This is from the Wall Street Journal but the idea is, with the buttons, when you do a search on mobile, will accompany sponsored or paid search results. You might see, according to this article, a “Shop on Google” heading at the top of the page. The button will not drive you to Google but to the sponsor.

Jeff: Which will still have Europe go berserk because that's been the essence of the fight - that is the essence of the antitrust is Google and shopping. So it's Google putting a bit of a poke in the eye, though I'm fine with that.

Leo: Google won't show “Buy” buttons when users shop on desktop computers, just on mobile.

Jeff: Why not?

Leo: I think they figure it doesn't really matter on desktop. Where they're really facing the battle is mobile search, right?

Jeff: But if it's a user - I don't think that - it's still a user. Treat me as a user appropriately across all platforms.

Leo: Yes, what's good for the mobile is good for the gamut. It's a good point and it's kind of an inconsistent user experience that way. I don't mind a “Buy” button. It's already an ad. All it's doing is giving me a way to act upon the ad.

Jeff: “But Google's promoting its advertisers over neutral listings of shopping services.” Yes it is. It's called capitalism.

Leo: I don't think they're going to complain because this is in paid advertising, not search results.

Jeff: That was the same problem as Google promoting its paid advertisers. That's the essence of the suit, of the investigation.

Leo: Where do you guys come down on -

Kevin: What? I'm sorry, this suit? I must have missed the lawsuit part there.

Leo: There wasn't a lawsuit. There was proposed action by the EU - wait a minute. They investigated.

Jeff: The antitrust, they're going after them. They'll charge them 6% of their revenue.

Leo: You didn't hear about that one? That's a good one.

Jeff: Might help pay off Greece's debt.

Leo: Probably would. Internet.org and the EFF - we talked last week about Zuckerberg. You're going to Facebook on Tuesday, you can ask Mark about this. Internet.org is not just Facebook but others proposing a way to bring the internet to undeveloped nations with the support of Facebook and others. It would give them kind of a special version of the internet. Remember, we - Mark Zuckerberg addressed this notion that it wasn't net neutrality. EFF now has published an article. Internet.org is not neutral, not secure and not the internet. Internet.org offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites and has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two-thirds of the world who don't yet have internet access.

The EFF says, “We agree the global, digital divide should be closed but is this the right way to do it?”

Jeff: So what is the right way to do it? That's Zuckerberg's point, that you can't give away the whole internet for free. That's just not going to work. There are commercial interests here. They don't put it up to more than Facebook. The original offer was, it was going to just be Facebook free.

Kevin: It was Facebook and Wikipedia. Facebook was the fig leaf.

Leo: Fig leaf, well done. 

Jeff: “Get rid of that Wikipedia stuff.”

Leo: You've got to Wikipedia. If they did Wikileaks, then I'd be impressed.

Jeff: They opened up to more and so what do you - you know, I certainly get the argument. I'm all net neutrality, but is there - does the fundamentalism go too far if it prevents something here? So I think that - I'm not going to do it again, but this is kind of the argument I had with Mathew Ingram. Is when you say, “I just don't like that,” stop, take a deep breath and say, “What are the terms that might make you like it?” What are the principles you want Facebook to accede to that would make this acceptable to bring free internet to a lot more people. Are there certain times you can imagine that happening? That's the kind of conversation we ought to have and I think it's something about Facebook being open to other services, which they're doing. I don't know what they're limitations are - is it too limited? Let's get into the arguments, or you're just saying, “No, Facebook cannot give away free internet access, full circle, stop.”

Leo: Get ready for this. You can debate that and maybe reasonable people can - get this.

Jeff: I'm unreasonable.

Leo: No, I'm on your side on that one but maybe you could make an argument, “Hey, maybe that than nothing.” But internet.org prevents encrypted HTTPS connections. It's a proxy servery. Traffic must pass through and some devices, like Android phones, that have the technical ability to make encrypted connections through the proxy server, will be prevented from doing that. Internet.org's Android app can automatically bring up the interstitial warning brought up on the phone by using the app to analyze links an more importantly, traffic must pass - for phones -

Okay. The most inexpensive feature phones that can't run an Android app support for phone-based warnings that would say, “Hey, this is not a safe connection, it's not encrypted.” For these phones, traffic must pass through internet.org's proxy unencrypted, which means any information users send or receive from internet.org services could be read by local police or national intelligence agencies.

Jeff: What do you imagine the rationale for that is?

Leo: It's because these are low-end phones.

Kevin: It's also because it's very hard to proxy HTTPS because there's a point of issue. You know, there's a proxy, you can man in the middle it, whereas a proxy in HTTP exists in plain text.

Jeff: So Kevin, you have to proxy this because that's the only way to make it free, because it's a free connection versus a paid connection?

Kevin: I think it's a rewriting proxy? That's my understanding of it, it's transforming the pages.

Leo: Let me read this. Clients - blah, blah, blah. “Will be reviewed by internet.org, a team that's making the site available.” So there's a compliance standard of guidelines, “Any website operator could submit their site for inclusion in internet.org provided it meets the guidelines. Those guidelines are neutral as to subject matter but do impose technical limitations intended to ensure the sites don't overly burden the carriers' network and that they'll work on inexpensive feature phones as well as modern smart phones. Their site will have to then be routed through the internet.org proxy server which allows the sites to be zero rated by 'participating mobile phone operators' and allows the automatic stripping out of content that violates the guidelines that includes images larger than a megabyte, videos, VOIP calls -”

Jeff: That's why it has to go through the proxy, so it can do that filtering.

Leo: Strip out Flash, Java, applets, even Javascript and inserts an interstitial warning if a user attempts to leave internet.org's zero rated portion of the internet. In other words, “You've got this for free but if you leave this, you're going to be billed for data charges.” So you still have access in some cases to a broader internet but you'll get billed for that whereas internet.org is free.

Kevin: To some extent, remember the Google proxy? Google.com/dwt/n? That was an old one they wrote a few years back when browsers were already ground and it takes your webpages, strips them down into a nice, lean version and it works - it does a fairly good job of making sense of the pages but it will rewrite the [0:47:02.6?], dump out the starting scripts, make smaller versions of the images and that sort of thing. So it's a way of getting some kind of rendition of the page on a mobile connection and so there - they seem to be doing something similar to that and to some extent, so is the new Facebook Instant Pages thing, doing something similar to that, reading the HTML and rendering it in a different way.

You know, there's - you can argue this in different directions. You can see a re-running proxy can be a useful thing because it's - to some extent, readability is that some of the reader-type apps do that in order to make a more stripped down version of the page it's easier to make sense of. But it's stripping out things that the site put there for a reason. But in those sense, that is kind of the spirit of the web. The spirit of the web is, you declare a bunch of stuff and then a browser makes a choice about which part of it to render to you. So that is - doing that as an answer is one way of doing it but obviously, if it's still under the whole thing and then deciding which bits to display, you're still creating a lot of data and transmission to do that. So they're basically doing that in between and sending something different through.

The question there is, how is that affect the in between? So there are some nuance here because there's obviously value - you don't want to outlaw sites that transform other sites. That would be a bad idea, so like this Google proxy or some of the indie web tools we have feeding off HTML pages or something like that. But you know, there is a challenge when this is being sold as, “This is the internet,” to people who don't have much of an alternative. It's like, “Facebook works, great. Everything else works in some slightly damaged way.” It's a bit problematic.

Leo: EFF concludes, “While we applaud Facebook's efforts to provide more websites for support on low-end feature phones by stripping out heavy content -” That would be the right way to do it, by the way, is to put the burden on the site to offer a special version. “We would like to see internet.org try harder to achieve its very worthy objective of connecting the remaining two-thirds of the world to the internet. We have confidence it would be possible to provide a limited free internet access service that is secure -”

Jeff: So here's the principles. Okay, good.

Leo: “Doesn't rely on Facebook and its partners to retain a central list of approved sites -” So there's two things. It's insecure but also, Facebook's a gatekeeper. “Until then, internet.org will not be living up to its promise or name.” What the hell?

Jeff: Well, this is a case where - oh. Kevin's been eaten!

Kevin: Notice the birds have gone quiet as well.

Leo: “My god, there's a predator down there, quick!” Super predator.

Jeff: So I think what I - does internet.org have an independent org?

Leo: I don't know.

Jeff: That's what I've long argued. We've had discussions about Google and cases where they knock off a shopping site because they think it's spam and the shopping site argues. There ought to be an independent jury of peers. Same here. Fine, then have a board that makes independent decisions based on principles. What is it that makes free internet for the world okay and acceptable, which they're starting to answer that.

Leo: Do you feel good about - how do you like dubstep? Apparently, no idea.

Jason: That was quite a transition. These two topics are so close to each other.

Leo: I'm changing the subject.

Jeff: What's to do with dubstep? Can a Kind dubstep?

Leo: No, I'm just moving on.

Jeff: Was ist das? (German)

Leo: What is that? You know who Scrillex is?

Jeff: Oh, yes.

Leo: It's funny, I love it. The new Google Store, store.google.com where they sell Nexus phones and tablets now has a limited edition Scrillex Live case. Ask Jake about it, Jake will know. It's got special companion wallpaper, the view from Scrillex's satellite - I don't know what - Scrillex has his own satellite?

Jeff: It has NFC built into the case so the phone knows which case it has on and it reacts.

Leo: Each Scrillex Live case is - I've got to get this. I'm not a Scrillex fan. My son is.

Jeff: It's $40.

Leo: Each Scrillex Live case is individually numbered and comes with built-in smarts, a customizeable shortcut button on the back there gives you one-touch access to your stuff.

Jason: It's like a built-in Pressy. Remember Pressy, that Kickstarter?

Leo: You can set it to launch the phone's camera, open any of your apps, go to Scrillex's site - which I bet you is the default. When they do a Yoyo Ma case, that's when I'm going to buy one. This is for the Nexus 5 and 6, Galaxy S5, Samsung Galaxy S6 and Note 4. I'm going to order it right away and I'll demonstrate it when it comes in. Wait, there are three different companies - Space Shield, Circuit Bay and Planet. Or are those just the styles?

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: Which one should I - what's Circuit Bay?

Jeff: I saw it because Google retweeted the Google Store Twitter account.

Leo: Which one - chat room, which one should I get? Scrillex Live Space Shield, Circuit Bay or Planet? Let's see Planet. Do you think my son will have more respect for me if I get one of these cases?

Jeff: No, he'll say, “Dad!”

Jason: I'm not sure.

Leo: I'm leaning toward the Space Shield.

Kevin: He's going to say, “Scrillex is so overdone.”

Jason: “Scrillex is so 2010, come on, Dad.”

Leo: He is, kind of. Isn't he? He likes now - oh, I can't remember. All right. Deadmau5 is also gone. Who's the -

Kevin: He's in Florence at the moment.

Leo: Is he? How nice for him.

Kevin: He's gone there.

Leo: Here's an article from Wired magazine on how it works. “Google and Scrillex (?)” I like the question mark. “Are Making Smart Phone Cases Way Smarter.” Oh, I hate takeover ads. You know the new thing they do with takeovers is move the close button around so you really have to look at the ad to figure out how to get rid of it?

Jeff: It's so awful, they hide it. We got rid of popups and they're back.

Jason: It keeps you guessing for at least three seconds so they can register you as a view.

Leo: Where is the X, it's a new game. Oh, Scrillex designed these himself, what a surprise. His real name is Sonny Moore. Phone cases are supposed to be fun, you know? Baron of Bangerang? “I really like crazy phone cases are out right now.” I don't know, is he British? I don't know where he's from.”

Jeff: “We did like 20 designs.” His favorite was, “Like Windows 95. It was a super vapor-ware one.”

Leo: He's not even making sense.

Jeff: No.

Leo: He is a DJ - is he a DJ or what is he?

Jason: DJ and producer.

[video plays]

Leo: Oh, lord. The dumb-ening of America.

Jeff: Oh, I'm fascinated.

Leo: This is so horrible. Google hopes this is a model for other artists and creators, more addition partners coming. Okay, okay. Somebody at Google, probably Larry Page, really likes Scrillex.

Jason: There has been a rumor floating around for a few months now and Android Police has kind of been all over it about customizeable cases. So I don't know if this ties into that. One of the rumors is actually using Google Maps to create totally custom cases for Nexus devices and stuff so who knows? Maybe this is going to be something we'll hear more about at IO, kind of the broadening of this? This is a teaser and we get to IO, “Remember what we just did with Scrillex? Now you can do it with whatever.” How would you use what?

Jeff: How would it snap on? What do you do, put on different cases based on your mood?

Leo: Yes, buy more cases. I Kickstarted - I put some money in this one. I'm a backer, I pledged $109 for the Nexpaq. Didn't we talk about this on the show, the first truly modular smart phone case, see all the little bits and pieces? I'll be trailing bits of my phone case as I walk around.

Jason: It will prepare you for Project Ara when you get that.

Leo: Yes, it's kind of just a warmup. So what did I get? $109, what - oh, here it is. Special Edition Magenta Nexpaq and four modules. So the modules, you can have an SD card reader, an amplified speaker, a flashlight, more power, temperature and humidity sensor, hotkeys, USB flash drive. See, this is better than Scrillex. There's an air quality sensor, a breathalyzer, a laser, a backup drive and a dummy slot. My luck, I'll get two dummy slots. I guess they're funded, look at this. They wanted $50 thousand and they got $200 thousand with nine days still to go, Nexpaq.

Jeff: Thanks to schmucks like you.

Leo: Thanks to schmucks like - you know, I like to every once in a while and look at all the Kickstarter projects that I've backed and never got anything from, just a reminder of what a true sucker I am. Ah!

Kevin: Did you see the $9 computer one - chips?

Leo: Yes. Is that a Kickstarter? It's called Clip, I think?

Kevin: Chip.

Leo: That's it.

Kevin: I just put the link in the -

Leo: We tried to get them up last week for the new Screen Savers but they were busy. So it's a $9 computer. They've raised $1.5 million, $9 at a time, 28,848 backers. So it's like a Raspberry Pi, right?

[video plays]

Leo: If a $9 computer can do this, what do we need internet.org for? Connectivity is the tough part, isn't it?

Kevin: This is kind of weird, this is like [0:59:16.2?].

Jason: We're going to have them on this week. Jerry just confirmed.

Leo: Watch Saturday, they're coming up. They still have 16 days to go, it's not too late. I doubt there's any $9 pledges left, those are gone. Yes, there are - there's still some - you get a - “Make your very own $9 computer with a Chip and composite cable for maximum bare bones enjoyment.” That's cool. We'll find out what's going on with that. Let's take another break, I guess. Why don't you guys look through the rundown and see what you're interested in while I talk about something I'm interested in.

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Weird, we talked about this on Security Now yesterday, mobile operators in Europe are saying, “We're going to block online advertising,” ad block for you.

Jeff: Talking about net un-neutral.

Leo: You know, the examples they give are a little scary - free games that are ad-supported, they just take the ad right out. You didn't really want that, did you? So what's the story here? Again, this is Europe.

Jeff: It's sources, who knows.

Leo: The Financial Times says one European wireless carrier has already installed the blocking software and its data centers have plans to turn it on before the end of the year. It comes from an Israeli startup called Shine. The details are pretty good here. “Tens of millions of mobile subscribers around the world will be opting in to ad block by the end of the year,” said the chief of marketing at the Financial Times. “At this scale, it could have a devastating impact on the online advertising industry.” He says that with a smile.

Jeff: And every site supported by advertising.

Leo: That's what worries me a little bit and it wouldn't affect us but the video they show - let me see if I can find, of this technology just shows them stripping the ads out of stuff.

Kevin: This is like the next toxic version of internet.org putting proxies in the middle and you know, some of the carriers have done this kind of thing, ad projection rather than ad stripping and -

Leo: They put ads in, yes.

Kevin: One of the Canadian ones did, didn't they?

Jeff: Long ago - there was one ten years ago, I think I mentioned on the show before that we fought at Konde Nast as well as other big publishers and won in the United States. You couldn't take over our page and do something to it with a browser add-on.

Leo: Shine says, “Eliminating intrusive ads is a consumer right, even if it undermines the business model of online publishers that rely on advertising. Online advertising is out of control and polluting the user experience.”

Jeff: How ridiculous.

Leo: I'm not completely un-sympathetic. It can be annoying, can't it? We were just talking about popups and the X's and -

Jeff: The equivalent would be if your cable system cut out the ads for you. You didn't have to fast forward -

Leo: That's a good point, yes.

Kevin: We had that, it was called TiVo.

Leo: You had to do it, though.

Kevin: We had a version that would actually find the ads and skip them, and they're like, “No, you're going to be shut down if you do that.” Then they had the 30-second skip forward button. They took that out, too. You actually had to fast forward.

Leo: Let's see if I can find this website, because it's kind of wild. It also brings down the size, look at this. This is also from Shine - a five-minute session of a gaming app with ads, 5 megabytes of data downloaded, 50 kilobytes without the ad. So maybe that's why the carriers want - they want to delete data.

Jeff: They'll do lower resolution versions of photos next.

Leo: “Ad blocking is a right,” says the CMO, Roy Carthy. It just shows you - I mean, I can't disagree with them but at the same time, I worry about, there's lots of free games that are ad supported. Those are going to go away.

Kevin: Right, it is a problem. But it ties back to the Instant Articles thing as well, which I know we talked about at some length last week but there, they're saying - the actual argument is, “Wow, you publishers have really made a mess of your websites. Let us clean that up for you -”

Jeff: Isn't this though - under American net neutrality rules now -

Kevin: This is being done by somebody else.

Jeff: In the U.S., under net neutrality, you're interfering with bits upon their appointed rounds and it's un-neutral.

Leo: Interesting.

Kevin: It depends the way you're doing it, that's the question. The problem is, if I'm doing it client-side, running and ad blocking thing in my browser that basically sits there and gives me nothing every time it fetches things on the blackness of avatars, which is basically how most of them work, then that looks - that is not affecting net neutrality directly but it is affecting the revenue market.

Jeff: Yes, but it happens on this - on the proxy side that it's prejudicial to certain kinds of bits.

Kevin: But it depends on where you're putting the proxy. I potentially want to put things through proxies sometimes, using that Google GWT proxy that I linked earlier will do that. It'll take ads out of a lot of things because it's stripping out Javascript and large images, and Flash, you know. So if I put - I don't know, think of some large, ad-infested site. TechCrunch. If I put TechCrunch through the Google proxy, all the ads have gone.

Leo: But that you doing that. That's different than a carrier doing it and of course, the suspicion is that the carrier may at some point say, “If you would like - TechCrunch, if you would like your ads to go through to the viewers, we could arrange that for a small fee.”

Kevin: This is just going around in circles like this. Part of the reason that Instant Articles is attractive is it's stripping out a lot of this cruft that makes these websites - [crosstalk]

Leo: No question, users don't want all that junk. Right.

Kevin: So that is - and we go through these arcs in technology as well. So when we went to mobile websites, the M-dot version of the website appeared to be doing that. You are booting a version of the website that didn't bring the browser to its need because the mobile phones weren't capable of it. So that was a reason - a way to get out from under the weight of [1:08:40.7?] law that makes your website - turn it into a mirror of your org chart and have anybody able to inject, you know, alleged to be revenue-generating stuff into it, which is the problem the publishers had. So Instant Articles is another version of that, people saying, “Okay, we're going to write a special browser that's really fast and responsive because it's ignoring all the cruft your business department put in, but we'll give you a little loophole to put in some certain kinds of ads in our worldview here.”

Leo: This is - you know, this exists because users hate all the junky ads but at the same time, users don't trust what's going on because it's, in the long run, not in your interest for a variety of reasons. Gardner in our chat room is telling me that Shine, the Israeli company, is financed by Three, the UK mobile carrier. So there you have it, now we know. But isn't that the temptation if you're an ISP and boy, this one looks good because you can always say to your customers, “See what a great experience we're giving you?”

Kevin: You know, it is an issue with these sites that have had their sort of cruft freed, that's a problem.

Leo: The advertisers brought this on themselves and so did sites.

Kevin: The sites more than the advertisers but the advertiser -

Leo: Well, the advertisers push. They keep pushing. It's up the sites to say, “No, I want to protect the experience of my readers.”

Jeff: I talked to somebody recently on a site that's doing membership stuff. They said the conversion rate - going after people who had ad blockers and saying, “Would you like to join?” actually got a very high conversion rate.

Leo: “Would you like to join ...”

Jeff: “You want to support the site, if you feel guilty about blocking the ads.”

Leo: If you're blocking the ads, give us $1 a month.

Jeff: It's like Amanda Palmer, people came up to her and said, “I ripped your CD, I'm sorry. Here's $10.”

Kevin: That's the thing, they give those subscribers -

Leo: Cat butt!

Kevin: Popup cat!

Leo: That was a cat takeover of Kevin's video feed.

Kevin: If they're targeting the ad block people, do they then serve a version that hasn't got ads in or do they still keep running their ad blocker to keep the ads out? Because that's a quid pro quo that I would be happier with, like, “Yes, okay.”

Leo: You're happy for the first five sites but how many sites a day do you visit? Do you want to pay each of them a buck a month? No.

Jeff: No, no.

Leo: There's a reason why there's ad-supported media.

Kevin: There's a reason there's ad-supported media but you could amortize over different numbers of users. That's the point. You don't have to get a fraction of a penny for every viewer. You could get some money from some of the viewers and that would work out. That's the thing we have learned from Kickstarter, Patreon and all these things. There's something, you pay.

Leo: We could also learn from Google that plain text ads don't bother people as much. Maybe they don't work as well -

Jeff: Relevant ads, too.

Leo: Relevant ads, yes. Oculus has sent out invites. I think we have one somewhere lying around, for a special event June 11. We're trying to decide, should we cover this? What's it going to be? Facebook owns the Oculus Rift. That's a VR helmet. Is this going to be the announcement of an actual product or what? “Step into the Rift,” is what the invite says.

Jeff: So at the same time, up above, Google moved ahead Search design of Cardboard. So there's a VR/AR war.

Leo: Waking up. I bet you - I actually predicted this on Sunday. We'll see at Google IO some AR, I think.

Kevin: I'm sure you will.

Leo: Not VR but AR. So I'm curious what's going on here. Maybe you could - maybe you can preorder the -

Jeff: Just to be sure here, is Cardboard just AR or also VR?

Leo: Cardboard is VT only.

Jeff: Well, just -

Leo: Google has some AR technology.

Jeff: We also might see more VR, then.

Leo: I personally am not sold on the VR thing.

Jeff: I'm just saying, we might see more of it.

Leo: Yes, Google's going to do VR sure, too.

Jeff: Invest in Cardboard, as it already has.

Leo: They shipped Cardboard at the last Google IO and of course, I wish we could see sales numbers for the Galaxy Gear VR, but that's - Samsung is selling it cheap, a couple hundred bucks because it's really just a plastic holder for your smart phone, your Galaxy S5, Note 4 and S6.

Glass is not AR, either, I should point out. It's looked like Glass might be augmented reality, but it's not, just a little screen over your eyebrow.

Jeff: Why is that not augmented reality?

Leo: Augmented reality is superimposed, a heads up display. It's augmenting reality.

Jeff: Well, yes, it's giving you directions and saying, “Turn left up there.”

Leo: That's no different - that's putting your phone interface over your eye.

Jeff: That's still AR, isn't it?

Leo: Kevin, is it AR?

Kevin: Is which AR? Sorry.

Leo: Glass.

Kevin: Not really. I mean, it is - it's AR in the same way that having a phone is AR, but it's not doing overlays.

Leo: We've all seen the browser you can run in your phone where it uses the camera and superimposes on top of the picture information about the businesses on the street. That is, to me, what I think of as augmented reality where as you're looking - glasses would be even better, looking at something and more information is provided to you on a user interface or something like that. I feel like Glass is - that was kind of the disappointment for me. I was hoping it was augmented reality but as we saw it, it was just really, a little screen over your eyebrow.

Kevin: There were definitional arguments about it but that's - you know, there's - because if the information coming up is the location of where and has some sense of what you're looking at even if it isn't a realistic overlay, that's still potentially useful, like the terminated view where it puts little captions on things. You can imaging that as a form of AR that is more practical than replacing other peoples' faces with masks and things, those kind of ideas. You could superimpose nametags on people which is something alleged Google built and then backed away on.

Leo: Interesting.

Jeff: Facial recognition to identity, yes.

Leo: Even more than that, what I'd love to know is reputation score, email address, whatever, that would be great. So Google had that and thought, “Oh, crap.” Creepy line.

Jeff: What was it, Kevin? You had the creepy cruft creepy line.

Kevin: Creepy cruft is a different problem.

Jeff: I just like the alliteration is all.

Leo: Letter to the President from Google, Apple and others, “Dear President Obama,” it went out yesterday, Washington Post obtained the letter. “We, the signed, represent a wide variety of civil society organizations dedicated to protecting civil liberties, human rights and innovation online as well as technology companies, trade associations, security and policy experts. We are writing today to respond to recent statements by some administration officials regarding the deployment of strong encryption technology in the devices and services offered by the U.S. technology industry. Those officials have suggested that American companies should refrain from providing any products that are secured by encryption, unless those companies also weaken their security in order to maintain the capability to decrypt their customers’ data at the government’s request. Some officials have gone so far as to suggest that Congress should act to ban such products or mandate such capabilities. We urge you to reject any proposal that U.S. companies deliberately weaken the security of their products. We request that the White House instead focus on developing policies that will promote rather than undermine the wide adoption of strong encryption technology. Such policies will in turn help to promote and protect cybersecurity, economic growth, and human rights, both here and abroad.”

It's my guess that these signatories have some weight with particularly Google and Apple. ACLU is in here, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, (unintelligible) committee, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Demand and Progress, EFF, Epic, the Free Software Foundation. They actually got Richard Stallman to sign this, I guess. The GNOM Foundation, Adobe, Apple, Automatic - that's Matt Mullenweg's WordPress company, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook.

Kevin: It's a good list of people who know what they're talking about with software security.

Leo: Google, Hewlett Packard.

Jeff: I say, God bless Edward Snowden.

Leo: This whole conversation wouldn't even be going on. Hal Ableson[?] at MIT, Jacob Applebaum, the Tour Projects - these are the top security researchers in the world, Whitfield Diffy of the algorithm. These are, you know, big names. You don't get bigger names than this and they all agree. Seems like it's a no-brainer. Then on the other side, you have the NSA, Bruce Schneier, Phil Zimmerman - creator of PGP. So anyway, that letter went to the President yesterday. We'll see what happens. Anything else you fellows -

Oh, I know what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about MicroPub since we've got Kevin Marks on here. Kevin is doing the work of angels, I think, with indie web. He's one of many, of course, but at indiewebcamp.com, you can find out more about the indie web. He posed a question on his Twitter last week for you, Jeff. We were talking on the show last week about how Medium incents people like you to put stuff there because of their interface because it's such a pleasure to write and Kevin, you were saying, “Well, if that's all you want, we can give you that.”

Kevin: That was the thing. There was an Indie Web Camp in Dusseldorf last week because we're doing people in all different places. Andy Perecki[?] built a Medium-like editor for Macbook Pro.

Leo: What's cool about this is I'm using Known, we talked to Ben and Aaron on the show maybe a year ago now, withknown.com. Because Known supports MicroPub, which is a protocol - does it use Oauth? I think it does, that allows me to authenticate with a MicroPub endpoint, in this case, indie web. I can merely enter in my properly-configured website, I'm going to do that, at this Quill site and once I authenticate - you see, I can authenticate by Twitter, Google+ or Github. That's because I set that up, or by phone, but let's just do Google+. I usually do the phone, it'll send me - I can do that right now. It'll send me a text message with a four-digit code and when I enter in that four-digit code, it will authenticate as it has and now I'm in Quill.

What Kevin wanted to show you is the Quill editor, watch this. It's slow, hold on. I'll do it again. Waiting, there we go. This looks a little like Medium, doesn't it, Jeff?

Jeff: Yes.

Kevin: It looks a lot like Medium. It's based on a Javascript clone of the Medium editor.

Jeff: So mark a word. There it is.

Leo: Bold, italic, a link. It automatically formats it all, H1, H2 -

Jeff: Oops, no H3. That's it!

Leo: I can also do it in - as code, if I'm doing a code editor. Yes. This is really nice.

Kevin: I think with Medium, that's hidden.

Leo: Can I drag images into it, too? That's one thing Medium does nicely. Here, let me - posting from Quill! We're demo'ing this on TWiG and I guess I should really make that a URL, shouldn't I? We'll do a little link here, to http://TWiT.tv/TWiG. Check that and then publish it and - clicking publish now will send a request to your MicroPub endpoint. So I'm doing this from my browser and from quill.p3k.io. It's posted and now if I go to my website, magically - this is my Known site, that post is there, which is really cool. Aaron has also written a tool called Own Your Gram, which will take things like this, which I posted on Instagram and copy it to my blog.

So the idea of all of this and the reason I'm strongly encouraging Jeff to consider other choices is - I realize then, Jeff, the whole time you've been writing, your stuff has been in somebody else's hands.

Jeff: Not my blog.

Leo: Much of the time. No, but even if you - you've been writing for magazines and newspapers. You're used to the notion that stuff you write goes somewhere else and I'm such a - the whole - I think Kevin will support me on this idea, the idea of indie web is that it would be great if you had one website where all your stuff lived but was syndicated elsewhere.

Jeff: It is. That's what I want for Medium is to put it on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, everywhere, fine, but have your own home version of it, which is what these guys do, which is wonderful.

Leo: Quill did a nice job, by the way, of embedding your tweet, Kevin. I wasn't sure what would happen if I posted the embed code in and it knew exactly what to do, which is great.

Kevin: It also does image insertion, which it does by data URLs, which is a wonderful but of HTML voodoo which means you can inject images directly into the HTML itself.

Leo: The other thing that's cool about this is you can comment on somebody else's blog if you have the URL and if its blod is an indie web, MicroPub supporting blog, it will - it's - there's some nice stuff. The syndication of comments as well as content.

Kevin: The comment stuff, that isn't MicroPub. That's Webmention. So the point of the indie web stuff is, we've been getting a lot of very focused, very small protocols for doing these different pieces. So MicroPub uses the indie authorization thing you saw to say - to prove it's your site, then it lets you post to your site, which means we can build a variety of tools that will let us post to the sites, including this new Quill editor, Own Your Gram and so on and also mobile clients, whatever. It says to the general posting API - [crosstalk]

Leo: [crosstalk] I - because of course, I can use Known's own mobile bookmark to post to it but this was another little indie web project called Mobile Pub - so this is an app on my Android device that when I post, will post to my blog, which is kind of wild.

Kevin: Again, that's using the MicroPub API and posting it from an app, yes.

Leo: I can even like - this is what I really like. You want to do Facebook-style likes. If I have the URL I'm liking, I can post that in here and this will actually syndicate to that blog and put a like up there, which is fantastic.

Kevin: Yes. So that's the sort of - the point is, we're building an app with these protocols we can start putting together and have this thing work. There was another thing I wanted to show you which is a new one.

Leo: Oh, good.

Kevin: If you go to silo.pub -

Leo: Silo.pub?

Kevin: Yes. The point of this - this is a micro-card bridge that goes to certain hosted sites. So Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger are hosted blogging sites, wordpress.com, not .org. The problem is, you can't necessarily install code on those, so what this does is gives you a way to add MicroPub to these hosted sites -

Leo: Because they have an API.

Kevin: And you have to do a little bit of work - there's a little bit of setup work you have to do to put the right headers into the templates, but it walks you through how to do that as well, which means you can then use these MicroPub clients with these hosted services as well. So you can use [1:26:46.4?] or Own Your Gram, those. It's another sort of extension of this model and again, this was one of these ideas where we were chatting about it in the IRC channel and I said, “Oh, it would be nice if we could do this.” Then Ryan said, “This is how you could do this.” Then Kyle said, “Oh, I'll go and do that then,” and built this.

Leo: That's nice, I love it. If you know how to code, the world is your oyster. Just stay up with web technologies.

Kevin: Somebody is asking what about Medium integration for this. Medium doesn't have an API which is why we can't post with Medium.

Jeff: But when you cut and paste from text, it's very good and picks up all the links. It picks up everything.

Kevin: If you click on the thing on the right-hand of Medium, there is an, “Import post from URL,” thing, something like that. That - you can then give it the URL of the indie web post and it will do a reasonable job of pulling it in.

Jeff: Yes, yes. It's pretty damn impressive.

Leo: But it would be nice to have a full API, I suppose, too.

Kevin: It would be nice if we were to be able to do it directly. Also, it would be nice - Medium did announce this week that they're going to start letting you have Medium hosted on your own domain which is a step in the right direction. That's good. They've only done it for a couple of big publishers so far but they said they're going to let you do that. So that's encouraging, but it still - they're still hosting it and you don't get much control in mark up and things. So that would be a step toward the indie web idea and it was good to let people have control of their own domains but the challenge is, you wouldn't be able to plot a gain because they haven't got the hooks for us to do that.

Leo: It is currently silly difficult for most people to do this. You have to do all sorts of little fiddly stuff and I guess it always will be a little bit.

Kevin: There are a couple of ways to make it simpler. So yes, they -

Leo: I can do it. It's not that hard.

Kevin: Noticeably, one great simplification is, it gives you a standalone thing you can install or a hosted service that will let you get these indie web features. We're also encouraging people to invest in two other systems. There's a series of WordPress plug-ins, if you've got cell posted WordPress, you can install indie web plugins and get these features. I think that might suit you, Jeff. I think your buzzmachine is self-hosted, right?

Jeff: Yes, yes. By the way, I went to a meeting today at the New York Times from Pointer at the [1:29:14.5?] Foundation on annotation, things like Genius there. Annotation is a fascinating structure of wanting to leave comments on top of things in a way that's open and having multiple conversations around the same thing. I argued, too, that embedding content is like a reverse annotation because where was this embedded? What does that tell you about the content? Huge new layer of possibilities now that are going to be fascinating.

Kevin: Yes. That's another set of bits and pieces we've been doing on the indie web sites to try and think about this. So the idea of web mentions can work for annotations in that there's an example - let's see if I can find the link for this. There's - Cartic[?] wrote this thing called Marginalia, I'll put it in the IRC. This does that thing where it uses the frag mention idea, which I discussed last time - web mention annotation where you put the piece you're linking to in the URL hash - so it says, “I'm linking to this piece of text.” SO if you scroll down this post, you'll see little green things at the end of the paragraphs, little speech bubbles. They're a little subtle and if you click them, it'll pop out the comment in line.

Leo: Anybody could post that =

Kevin: That is a post that -

Leo: Wow. I don't see any.

Jeff: They're not green bubbles, just bubbles.

Kevin: I think if you go to frag mention - just past frag mention, there's one at the bottom there.

Jeff: Other way -

Leo: Oh, I see. Yes.

Jeff: At today's meeting, Kevin, you were quoted “frag mention,” people loved the name.

Kevin: Oh, good. So you see he's got this little speech bubble over there. If you click that, its exposing the comment but the comment is actually on somebody else's site that is linking back to this.

Leo: That's amazing.

Jeff: Oh, I see.

Kevin: It's using the frag mention to say, “I'm targeting this paragraph,” and using a web mention to say, “I commented on this paragraph.” So we basically built the components to do this. So far, Cartic has built this Marginalia script to do this on his site and I'm not sure he's been able to deploy this, yet. Again, we have this set of building blocks that says, “I want to refer to a piece of this page,” that's the frag mention part. “I want to let you know when I've mentioned you,” that's the web mention part. Then by combining those two, he's able to go with something like this that works very nicely. So again, it's like the Medium comments you've got in the paragraph except that it doesn't all have to be on one site. It's distributed in that same idea. So this is -

Jeff: [inaudible]

Kevin: Right, so the point of this is that by expending - the point of indie web stuff is to think about how we can do this so it doesn't have to be hosted in one database, but we define a protocol that will work within two sites and because they're independent from others, they try to keep the protocols small and not overcomplicate them. Then you can change to these interesting kinds of things and that, the nice - then, potentially you can build these bridges that go into the site or the site is just implementing these protocols as well There's nothing to stop Medium from adding these - adding the markup we need to do this or making this stuff work cross site. They are quite capable of doing that. The question is whether they want to give people that power or not, and that's the tradeoff. But if they've already got a mechanism for extension comments, arbitrary comments on paragraphs and people, it's just another way of them being posted.

Leo: There's no security - is this opening any security issues?

Kevin: Well, your site is in control of what is posts so that - the comments it's posting there, it has power of the HTML of the commenting page in deciding what piece to post. SO it is doing a - you know, it's not just injecting an I Frame with the whole page in, it's constructing the piece that is the comment. So it's - there's a potential injection issue if that script isn't sanitizing but that's no more than any the system.

Leo: Yes, that happens everywhere, yes.

Kevin: We're fairly well know how to deal with taking one page and putting it into another page, now. That's something we're - yes, you can get it wrong, but we know how to sanitize that stuff now.

Leo: If you want to know more about this indiewebcamp.com and go to an Indie Web Camp if you have an inclination, if you're intrigued.

Kevin: I should also give a plug for the homebrew website club, which is down there art the bottom of the page, They're held every other Wednesday and there's actually a homebrew website club today in New York, San Francisco and Portland. The New York one is starting soon, I think, 6:30, I think. Click on the New York one?

Jeff: Rush, I got to go.

Leo: Where is the New York one?

Kevin: If you click on that one, there's a link to New York somewhere. There is it.

Leo: At Schnippers Quality Kitchen, get down to 8th and 41st.

Jeff: That's right at the corner.

Kevin: Is that near you?

Jeff: Yes, at the New York Times building which is next store.

Kevin: Jeff, drop by. I think it's - when we finish this show, you can drop In. It starts at 7:30, I think, but there may be place - go back a page, there's a time and date on it.

Leo: It says 10:30 but I bet you it's adjusting for my time.

Kevin: No, that's - there.

Leo: Quite writing hour, 6:30 to 7:30. The meeting begins at 7:30.

Jeff: Quiet writing hour?

Kevin: Stop in, Jeff. They'd love to see you.

Leo: Just go in and write, open Medium and see what happens.

Jeff: I can't stop in when they're quiet and writing. They'll say, “Get out of here.”

Kevin: The quiet writing hour, this is a thing that Andy thought of, which was we set this thing for 6:30 so you could get there after work, but some people could get there a bit earlier and work on something they were working on before we have the pulpit, basically.

Leo: I like this for all this -

Jeff: Schnippers has good burgers.

Leo: Oh, good. You've got dinner and indie web. I just really like the idea and I know it seems a little counter-cultural. It's an antidote to the highly-corporatized, commercial web. A web that's made of people, I like the idea.

Kevin: It's also, think - you know, it's tackling a lot of the same issues we've talked about, about how to give access to the web to more people, make it easy for them to publish but with an answer that isn't, “Everyone should use Facebook and Google+, whatever.” It's how can we do this in such a way that means you're not required to log into a large company's server?

Leo: When you see these $9 computers and Rasperry Pis that are completely capable of running a good quality web server, it just seems like there's - we could have a much more human scaled fragmented web - fragmented in the best possible way instead of a monolithic web, a Facebook web. This is the antidote.

Kevin: You still need to root the servers, which can be tricky but yes.

Leo: They'll figure out a way.

Kevin: The other thing is that Cloud servers aren't expensive pieces either, so being able to put this up on -

Leo: That's probably better, I suppose.

Jeff: Indeed, I think Google just lowered its prices by 30%.

Leo: Every house should have an ethernet port in the wall that you could plug your Raspberry Pi server into. It should just be.

Kevin: Get V6 working, there you go.

Leo: Then, gosh, your refrigerator could be your web server, everything could be your web server. Anyway, when you're on I always want to give a plug for this and people glaze over it like, “I don't know what this is. Can I just use Facebook?” That's fine, go ahead and use Facebook. But there are some few proud hippies out there who want to kind of -

Kevin: It's also that just because you're using Facebook doesn't mean we can't communicate. That's the other part of this is that part of this is the idea of publishing your own site to share elsewhere is that we can share it on our site and then send the link over to Facebook. Then you can see it on Facebook. The other subtle thing that's been set up with Bridgy which translates the Facebook comments into web mentions, so those can be your site as well. You're able to move this stuff back and forth between the different servers. Now, that gets harder when they change things. Facebook has just made that a lot harder for us by changing their auxillaries. I'm not sure that was necessarily intentional, I think that's more they didn't think about this use case when they changed their API. They're reacting to the perception people have that Facebook is too public and they want to give you more control over what happens to it. What that ends up doing is making it harder for us to take the bits that actually are public and make sense of it. That's been a bit of a shame and that's -

That was one of the most fascinating things, watching people sign up for Known because part of what Known does is when you sign up for the site, it asks you how you want to connect to your social media and publish out, I'll give you buttons to share out what goes where. A lot of people are really, really wary of taking that, “Connect to Facebook” button because in their mind, publishing on the web is kind of public but publishing on Facebook is really public because it goes straight to the people who actually know you. So they were much more concerned with connecting to Facebook than they were with integrating a website.

Jeff: That's so funny, since you have more control over Facebook than you do over the web.

Leo: Here's - by the way, this is my site.

Kevin: You don't really. Conceptually, you don't. In your head, you don't understand quite what Facebook - when you watch older people rather than those of us who actually understand ACLs and things. In their head, if I post something to Facebook, it's going to go straight to my mom and my mom is going to complain about it. There's a mental model of how that works and that's probably true, because my mom on Facebook follows me and my sisters, and that's about it. So everything I post in there, she will see and you know, my sons have a more [1:39:32.8?] and they understand this stuff, so they know there's more on Facebook. But that is the mental model, is Facebook is this place that is a social performance to a set of people you already know, whereas the web is a place where you can talk in a less focused way. That's a really interesting reversal and I think that's part of the - trying to adjust that was the thinking behind the new Facebook API changes but in practice, we end up with the worst of both worlds. Instead of people who don't want to connect to Facebook because it could be scary and then they break the API and say, “We can't do the things we were doing with this,” it has been a step backwards in that respect.

Leo: Now I understand why Ben and Aaron are slow to include some of the features we asked for. They're busy fighting Facebook's API changes every three months.

This is - I'm on my own site. I hosted it with Known.com but I was hosting it locally for a while. I decided I didn't want to pay for a server. I can write a post here and then because I've already connected Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, I can automatically - or for an image, I could do Flickr and so forth. Now, when I publish this, it goes to all of them but stays on my website, and you can do long articles too. This is just a short status update. So I think that's very cool and I like it's centered on my own site as opposed to those sites.

Kevin: It just showed up in the indie web IRC channel as well.

Leo: Why is that?

Kevin: Because you said indie web and the IRC channel looks for -

Leo: That's hysterical. All right, let's take a break and come back with tips, numbers, tools. We'll show you all that stuff, the back of the book.

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You're watching This Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis from the City University of New York, author of Geeks Bearing Gifts, What Would Google Do and Public Parts. He blogs at buzzmachine.com. Kevin Marks is also here, he's a legend in the micro formats and standards business. Nobody better, kevinmarks.com. Kevin, you've shown us a bunch of stuff. I think you're off the hook if you don't have a tool, tip or anything. But if you've got something, we already showed you - in fact, I see your links, Silo, Pub and Quill. We're done and you're muted.

Jeff: I want your bird sound maker.

Leo: Yes, I'll show you that. Go ahead, Kevin.

Kevin: Let me unmute myself. There's another little app that a friend of mine is building - I helped him build some of it, which is - it's called Will Comeone. So it's ask.willsomeone.com.

Leo: ask.willsomeone.com, all right. I've got it. “Will someone sign in with Google?” That's the first one, I better sign in. All right. Yes, I will sign in with Google. Allow. Now, “Will someone, my name -” What is this? What am I going to do here?

Kevin: It's basically a to-do list except that the task manager - you can give the tasks to other people to do for you as well. So you can ask people to help you.

Leo: Love it. So, “wash my windows.” Okay, that's the task. I'm going to add that. I didn't have any tasks, so now I have one. I can add details and a due date and now I can ask somebody to do it?

Kevin: So if you hit the ask button, you can share it out publicly or pick someone and it becomes a global task that appears on the front page of the site.

Leo: That's hysterical.

Kevin: So it's a real simple idea. This is Chris Hugher[?] who had this idea, but the challenge is that task managers - everyone has their own but it's nice sometimes to ask for help too. This is fairly new, it's just been out a couple of weeks but try it out and let me know what you think.

Leo: ask.willsomeone.com, right? That's cool. Is this another indie web kind of thing?

Kevin: Well, I helped build it, so it has some indie web features in it. It does have the markup so you can subscribe to it with indie web feed readers and things but it's not directly indie web. It's a Silo app but it's indie web friendly, that's the phrase you can use.

Leo: The first page I was looking at, now I understand. That's my profile, so I have to customize that a little bit with pictures and so on. Jeff, you've got a number for us?

Jeff: Yes, I do. I found it - there was a dnaindia.com, says there was survey of 12 thousand Indian students age 8-12. 90% of them use Facebook, no surprise. Coming in at number two, Google+ with 65%. Number three, Twitter at 44%. So you know, maybe Google+ is popular in ways - people make fun of us for it. Maybe it's a little popular elsewhere in the world, I don't know.

Leo: Just like Orkut.

Jeff: Exactly.

Kevin: I think they migrated the Orkut users to Google+, didn't they? So I think that's what it is.

Jeff: Is that it? Maybe that's it.

Leo: I don't think there's anything wrong with Google+ functionality-wise. It's fantastic.

Jeff: It's wonderful.

Leo: I wish it would - I don't know.

Jeff: Make sure little Mike Elgan there doesn't give up.

Leo: You think that was a mistake that they never gave us the right API?

Kevin: They gave us one but it was weird. You could write to it but it was like uploading photos from your phone. They would appear in a place that only you could see and then they were very strict about not giving access to it. I think that was a reaction to what happened with Buzz, which people used as a place to syndicate to and so they were trying to avoid that and make it more native. I'm not sure that was completely successful. It would be nice if there were a way of doing it more generally.

Leo: This article just came in - no, it didn't just come in. This is an old article, never mind. It is not a new article. Let me show you Google Tone. We didn't use it once. I should have used it. Let me use it real quickly for, Ask Someone. So if anybody has Tone installed, ask.willsomeone.com. I'm on the page now and am going to press the Tone button. You will hear a sound. [sound plays] A rather pleasant sound that if you have this Google Tone extension installed in Chrome and the speakers and microphone turned on, will bring you - I know, it's funny, isn't it? It will bring you to ask.willsomeone.com. Your browser just goes there. They say this was something just cobbled together in an hour or two as a joke, kind of as a lark, as a laugh.

Kevin, what do you think that tone - how is that tone communicated? It doesn't seem like it would have enough in there to communicate a full URL. How's that working?

Kevin: Well, it sounds like it might do. The question is, is the bottom one turned in there? It's probably a short form equivalent.

Leo: Oh, they do a URL shortening, of course.

Kevin: My guess is, they're sending something that's like a lookup in their database. It sounded like -

Leo: If you give it a URL like I just did, ask.willsomeone.com, it shortens it to, you know, goo.to/13419 and then modulates it somehow. Yes, that would be easy, wouldn't it. Do you think these would get longer as more and more people use Tone?

Kevin: Yes, it'll be like URL shorteners where they're now often longer than some URLs with 24 characters after the t.co now.

Leo: The tone will go on for hours, hours. It's nice and short right now. That was funny.

Kevin: That's like I've got ja.mp/k goes to my blog because I caught it on the first day.

Leo: Perfect.

Kevin: Now the URLs are very long, so people can't do that anymore.

Leo: We have our own shortener, TWiT.to, so we can use some nice short ones.

Kevin: You can pick your own space out of that.

Leo: The use case that Google gives - there's not really any use case. Actually, we're the best use case. If you're listening to a podcast and you turn it up - that's actually a good use case.

Kevin: It's kind of a horrible way to do it, but yes.

Jason: It's a good use case for people who actually want to use it. For everyone else, it's annoying.

Leo: We used something a few years ago called chirp.io that did the same thing, for one show. But the use case Google gives is you're in an office situation and you want to hand off some websites to your colleagues - just what you want, somebody in the office playing [sound plays] out loud, holding up a speaker. That's not a good idea. Anyway.

My friends, we have come to the end, the conclusion of this silly little thing. I'm so glad you could be here, Kevin. Always a pleasure and always fun.

Jeff: Always a pleasure, sir. Always.

Kevin: It was good to talk with you guys.

Leo: He's fighting the good fight for indie web. Now you've got Quill in your quiver. Mr. Jeff Jarvis, you don't have to use Medium any more. Yes, you will.

Jeff: I was sitting next to two Medium people this morning.

Leo: That's the other thing Medium brings to the table is a community.

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: What you really want is a way to syndicate from your posse, your Withknown blog to Medium and for that, Medium has to cooperate by giving an API.

Jeff: You know what? I think that we're going to embed stuff around the web more and more, and the architecture Kevin is working on enables you to write once and embed multiple times. That's going to be beneficial.

Leo: I like that idea.

Kevin: That's something - part of the challenge is what to embed? How do you decide what the preview is? That's what - if I write a tweet length post as a comment on yours, it's straightforward what to embed. But if I write a full blog post and cite you and you've got to work out how to construct a preview for that. That's something we're experimenting with.

Jeff: All right, I'm pissed.

Leo: What?

Jeff: I just see this story on Buzzfeed - oh, now I'm pissed that my light's off. Jesus. Double pissed.

Leo: You know, we went an entire hour and 51 minutes without a Jeff Jarvis rant.

Jeff: Buzzfeed reports that the Camp, Google's Sicilian DAVOS returns for a second year, the secret conference known as the Camp in the illustrious golf resort in Sicily and we were not invited.

Leo: Who gets invited to that?

Jeff: Not us!

Leo: Look at that beautiful bay there. Business leaders, tech luminaries and celebrities, that's who gets invited. We are none of the above. It's the Illuminati or the Digerati.

Jeff: Elon Musk, Travis Kalanik, Evan Spiegel, John Door, Lloyd Blank, fine. Yes.

Leo: It's all the usual suspects. I don't want to talk to them, anyway.

Jeff: I don't give a damn.

Leo: I would never join a club that didn't have me as a member.

Jeff: I'll be at IO.

Leo: All right, well, you're going to be. We'll be back next week, doing TWiG at its usual time which is 1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern time, 2000 UTC on Wednesdays at live.TWiT.tv. Jeff will be in studio because the following day is Google IO and you're going to go back and go to the keynote, but we'll broadcast the keynote and stream it. You can of course watch Google's stream but if you want our commentary on top of Google's stream, Gina Trapani, Aaron Newcomb from All About Android and I, Ron - what's his name, Richards! Will join us. Just Ronnie. Jason Howell, you're going to go. Mike Elgan's going to go. They're both going down to Google IO.

Good, so coverage - special coverage beings 9:30 a.m. Pacific, 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, 1630 UTC at live.TWiT.tv. That is a week from tomorrow, so 5/28, May 28 for our special Google IO coverage. I think it's going to be a good Google IO, I'm excited.

Jeff: I think it is, too.

Jason: I think it's interesting we don't really know a whole lot about it this time. I feel like at about this point of the year leading into IO week, we feel like we are pretty confident we know a lot of what Google's going to talk about. We really don't this time around.

Jeff: Here's the question. Next week, will we say, “Wow, that was a big surprise,” or, “It was an okay IO.”

Leo: There's some risk because last year was kind of an okay IO, there was nothing really exciting. I think it's going to be something like that but you never know.

Kevin: We know we're getting a new version of Android but we know what it'll be.

Leo: We got a new version last year.

Jeff: Everybody gets a Google refrigerator to take home.

Kevin: I imagine there will be some more VR stuff, I think that is quite a likely thing.

Leo: VR and I hope to see some AR stuff because I'm more excited about AR. All right, thank you, gentlemen. Thank you all for being here. We'll see you next week on This Week in Google!