Category Archives: techie

Articles like this make me ill

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Verizon Executive Calls for End to Google’s ‘Free Lunch’. There is so much wrong with this argument that taking about it makes me want to hit someone. A few bullet points instead:

  • Hearing a corporation begrudge another for earning money is so hypocritical and anti-capitalist that it makes me ill
  • There’s nothing “free” about the infrastructure. Google pays some backbone for connectivity to the Internet. Verizon’s customers pay Verizon for connectivity from their homes to that backbone.
  • Verizon and Google, near as I can tell, have no legal relationship, no contract, and even from a strictly technical perspective are hardly related.
  • Google is just one website. When is Verizon going to send a bill to Lianza.org? (insert sarcastic remark here)
  • If Verizon built a billion dollar infrastructure with no plans on how to profit from it, aside from crying to congress, then they’re idiots.
  • It’s nonsense like this that’s probably causing Google to look into, effectively building their own internet. In general, I hate when companies go to congress. It usually means something bad. In this case, I hope it’s the first step in Verizon’s road to irrelevancy.

37signals site – is it even usable?

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Here’s an experiment:
1) Sign up for a basecamp account at 37 signals.
2) Close your browser
3) Start over at 37signals.com, and try to figure out how to log into the account you created.

I tried this – I can’t.

From what I can tell, the only way you can ever get to the account you created is to save the e-mail they send you when you sign up, and bookmark the link. The link, amazingly, isn’t even on the basecamphq.com domain! These guys write so much about usability, but this incredibly simple task can’t even be done on their website.

Why Bill Gates is better than Steve Jobs

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This is an interesting article comparing the two. While I don’t see a person having wealth as an obligation to give charitably, I still admire people who do and look down on people who don’t. I’m fairly disappointed that the 67th Richest American in the world hasn’t given back to charities.

That’s not to say a rich individual doesn’t give back to society (almost whether he likes it or not) via:
– All of the people who work for, and get paid by, Apple Computer
– The people making money from the stock which he helps drive up
– All the companies and companies’ employees who exist and profit by making iPod accessories (the entire iPod sub-economy).
– The amount of taxes he pays individually, and Apple pays on a corporate level, plus sales taxes on their products in the various states.
– The actual products they make, which people find enjoyable and willing to purchase because they benefit their lifestyles (computers, software, iPods, music, videos, etc).

All that said, an individual worth $3.3 billion should be giving to charities in my opinion, so I think it’s good that people are writing articles like this to, hopefully, shame him into doing so or reveal to consumers that maybe this guy isn’t worth supporting.

read more | digg story

Google being sued – what's going on?

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The lawsuit against Google is all over the news today. I don’t feel like I really understand what’s going on. First, I was trying to figure out exactly what information the government wants. Most of the news articles are vague on this except this Reuters one which says:

a subpoena issued last year for one million random Web addresses from Google’s databases as well as records of all searches entered on Google during any one-week period.

Even still, that’s not very specific. All search terms? All search results? IP Addresses? I have no idea. I understand the whole purpose of this is supposedly pornography-related as part of the Child Online Protection Act but it is totally unclear what good this information is. There’s a lot of free data about where people surf at Alexa.com and Google has some public information with their Zeitgeist summaries. I imagine that’s not good enough for what the government is looking to do, but then again I have no idea what the government is looking to do. I don’t understand why anything about this would be top secret unless it actually has something to do with some terrorist/national security hunt, but that’s not what they’re saying.

Let’s say Google sends the government a list of all of the search terms in a given week. Three years ago it was reported that there were 250 million Google searches per day and there haven’t been any updated statistics since. Let’s conservatively estimate that number has increased to 300 million a day (it’s probably much higher). So, Google turns over a week’s worth of search terms – 2.1 billion phrases (assuming they don’t aggregate duplicates). What does the government expect to do with those? Probably fumble around with how to manage all that data and sit back and wonder how to get anything meaningful out of it. I assume they plan on some number-crunching. Let’s say 40% of the search terms involve pornography, and 5% of those the illegal kind. So what? Where does that leave us? Are they writing a research paper or investigating a crime? The fact that this is so mysterious is what bothers me, and why I’m glad Google didn’t roll over and cough up the information.

More rumors – Microsoft to buy Yahoo?

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I guess $80 billion isn’t enough. This would be crazy if it ever happened. A clear squareoff then between Microsoft-Yahoo and Google.

I hope it doesn’t happen because I really like Yahoo. They acquired some breakthrough companies like flickr and del.icio.us while Google bough up a few noteable flops…

  • Urchin Software which later became Google Analytics which had to shut down to new users not long after they released because they couldn’t scale (as I experienced).
  • Dodgeball which I presume no one uses since I use it only 2-3 times a week and am consistenly among the top 15 users in Seattle (and I know 7-8 of the other top users).
  • Picassa which I installed but don’t use and have no idea how it will make them any money.
  • Deja which was a sweet acquisition in theory because it brought us Google Groups but ended up being painful because people couldn’t actually post to newsgroups for years after the acquisition (which they could do with the original Deja, pre-acquisition).
  • Google has also built some lame things. Orkut never really caught on compared to Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn and all the others. Their RSS reader has some cool features, but is ugly. GMail is pretty cool but at the end of the day they’re way behind hotmail and yahoo mail in terms of users.

To Google’s credit, their acquisition of Pyra (which brought us Blogger) was probably pretty good. Where 2 Technologies, which helped give us Google Maps is awesome (“Double True!”). To the extent that Sprinks helped with AdSense that may have been a strong acquisition too.

But, I have lately felt that Yahoo! “gets it” a little better when it comes to acquisitions… possibly because the last two have been great companies. As long as they don’t screw it up they’re on the right track.

The Rumor Mill says… Google may acquire Opera?

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It would be very interesting if Google bought Opera. Opera is a pretty sweet browser which I’ve always liked, and even paid for back before they went free (which, as it turns out, was partly due to Google).

Let the speculation begin on what might happen if they owned a browser. My hunch would be that it’s some kind of pre-emptive defense against IE. If all of the crazy theories are true that Google is setting it’s sights on being your Operating System, but in a browser – as long as 90% of the users out there are using a browser built by a company that has a vested interest in you buying their Operating System and not Google’s, that would be an extremely weak point in their strategy. Microsoft would still control what you can and can’t do.

With Opera you get a cross-platform, fast, mature, secure browser that is closed-source and proprietary (which may be an advantage). You can start building features on it via the same “embrace and extend” philosophy that Microsoft used with IE. It must kill Google to have to say “Google Desktop – requires Windows” or “Picasa – requires Windows and IE”. How much nicer it would be for them to say – here are all of our apps, Google Browser required, underlying OS – meaningless.

Why Jakob Nielson Sucks (Most of the Time)

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Ok, I guess he doesn’t really suck most of the time, but his recent alertbox was half amusing and half ironic. First, as he mentions at the bottom, it was a near clone of an old article he wrote about frames. Although, realisitcally, I think we can all think of a bunch of times we’ve been pissed off at frames on a website, but probably have some trouble coming up with a similar list of sites that use AJAX. In any case, despite the fact that he makes some good points, he lists this near the bottom: “Next month: Micropayments will take off in 2006.”

For god sakes, will he please stop talking about Micropayments? He started yammering about them in 1998. In his 5 year retrospective in 2000, he said that “I repeat my prediction from 1998: micropayments will happen in about two years (of course, this now means 2002, not 2000).” In his 10 year retrospective in 2005, he doesn’t mention them at all. Now I guess he thinks they’ll be hitting the scene big in 2006. Well, I admire him for sticking to his guns but he should really give up. Micropayments never took off, and never will, for the reasons Clay Shirky outlined in 2003. And now, with the dawn of Google AdSense, I think it’s fair to say that Micropayments are dead. If my content is really good, I’ll charge a subscription to see it (ex. the new york times). If it’s not great, I’ll give it away for free (ex. this blog), and if it’s pretty good but I’d like to make a few bucks off it, I’ll set up Google AdSense (ex. digg). Someone tell Nielsen to drop the micropayments talk before we start treating everything he says as irrelevant ( even though most of it is pretty good).