Category: Google
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Initial Thoughts on Google Offering Droid for @font-face Use
My initial thoughts on Google offering a hosted version of Droid:
This is more an extension of their mobile play than getting into the font hosting.
- Here’s why:
- The Android handsets only display the Droid family of fonts.
- Google’s stated a number of times they’re serious about being successful in mobile.
- Google is a web app company – not a native-software-on-the-device company (i.e. Apple, Microsoft).
- By offering a hosted version of Droid – they’ve made it much easier for their internal teams to simulate what their web apps (i.e. Google Docs, Calendar, etc) will look like on Android devices w/o needing to actually use a phone.
Of course, I reserve the right to change my position when I see Google hosting something other than Droid. 🙂
- Some relevant articles I’ve written on how I interpret Google’s product strategy:
- Users are Side Effects
- The Difference Between Yahoo and Google
Update – I’m now changing my position 😀
This guide explains how to use the Google Font API to add web fonts to your pages. As I mentioned on the Kernest blog – this is a huge win for openly licensed fonts.
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Users are a Side Effect or Why Google’s Web Applications are Free
Exactly.
Just as I wrote about Google’s AppEngine last year, Google’s applications – whether Gmail, Wave, Maps, or the recently announced Buzz – are about reducing costs and streamlining their business.
In the long run – it’s significantly cheaper for Google to build the tools its employees use (especially if the same employees build them) than it is to negotiate licensing or usage feeds to someone else.
This is why the significant majority of Google’s applications are free to us non-Google employees – the cost of opening up their apps to the outside world is so close to zero, they treat it as zero. Google’s development costs were paid by their operating budget.
I feel the same way about all the products I build, Cullect, Kernest, etc – I use them and I’m building the same technology infrastructure whether 1 person uses it or a thousand.
The incremental cost of sharing it with the world at that point is, well, zero.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Verizon Droid Hands-On Review
The Verizon / Motorola / Google Droid, released later this week, is a solid, tactilely satisfying handset. I suspect it’ll be Motorola’s most well-received handset since the RAZR.
Verizon’s marketing is correct – the Droid is the first real peer to the iPhone. More importantly – the Droid is the first significant competitor to the Blackberry in the corporate environment – since the iPhone.
The 4 buttons (‘Back’, ‘Menu’, ‘Home’, ‘Search’) below the Droid’s touch screen remind me of the 4 similar buttons on my long obsolete and much loved Palm Treo 650 and Handspring Visor. The level of UI customization and promise of easy app development of the Droid also recall my love of the PalmOS. These things make me happy and want to see the Droid succeed.
In an earlier post – I criticized Verizon’s Droid TV ad for being the anti-1984 – for bringing the sense of an oppressive, non-descript, technical figure. Unfortunately, this notion is also in the device itself….the Droid starts up with a HAL 9000-esque glowing red eye.
Ominous. Foreboding. Completely out of place.
Nothing else in the Android v2.0 interface is red, threating, or sci-fi-y Everything is clear, polished, crisp, and at no point did I feel the device wanted me dead.
Slightly annoyed in parts, sure, but not dead.
For example:
- There’s no affordance on which direction the screen slides to expose the keyboard. Once I figured it out (left-to-right), both the smooth slide and the quietly, confident click-into-place confirmed a very high build quality.
- To type numbers or punctuation – the ‘ALT’ key needs to be pressed simultaneously as the desired key – just like on a regular 2-hand desktop or laptop keyboard. But, this is mobile phone, so I expected ‘ALT’ to be sticky.
- The continuously blinking green (not red) light is very distracting. There’s no need for it. And it doesn’t look like it can be turned off.
- The multiple search buttons in a single view confused me a couple times. For example, if you’re searching the Droid Marketplace – with the soft keyboard display – there are 3 search buttons presented; on next to the search form, one in the soft keyboard, the one below the touch screen. In my tests – they’re not all contextually smart.
I made a few calls with the device and found the telephony app enjoyable and again reminiscent of the Treo (again making me happy). Though, as the iPhone showed us, telephony in these devices isn’t really that interesting.
Smart phones are about pocket-sized mobile messaging, mobile maps, and mobile internet access in general. To that end, the Droid is very small, very fast computer with a telephony app and a persistent data connection.
With the keyboard slid out, the Droid looks like a mico-laptop and I started wondering about the differences between this device and a netbook with a VOIP client & mobile broadband service. Depending how much the camera is used – and how cramped the keyboard feels…they could competing with each other. Mobile phones (handheld computers) and netbooks (lap-sized phones) at the same price point? Such an interesting world we live in.
This mobile computing angle is where Droid Marketplace comes in. Finding and installing apps in the Marketplace was on par with Apple’s App Store. Installing an app is clear and effortless – with the added benefit of clearly stating which Droid functionality is used (data call, location, etc) prior to download.
Though, I had the same problem I have with Apple’s App Store has – I don’t know why I’m there or what’s worth using. Usefulness is difficult to gauge from ratings or reviews.
I grabbed a few of the usual suspects; Pandora, Skype, Twitter, Facebook (Facebook conveniently imported all my friends into the Contacts app). Though, even then, after installing them, I didn’t use all of them. Primarily because I didn’t feel like going to my desktop, opening up Keychain.app and re-entering my name/passwords for each 3rd party app.
While my laziness is partly due to knowing I only had the Droid for a few days, it’s also a larger usability problem I have with the iPhone. The Droid’s integration with Google’s apps (and the underlying Google Authentication APIs) has the potential to minimize the multiple-credential problem (as would Apple putting Keychain.app on the iPhone).
Like my Samsung flip phone – the Droid has little interest in talking to my MacBook Pro. It refused to receive files via Bluetooth. When plugged into a USB cable, OS X didn’t mount Droid’s SD card or its internal storage by default. Turns out, it’s a 4 step process:
- Touch the status bar at the top of the Droid screen
- Drag it down (again, there’s no affordance indicating this is a possible action)
- Click “USB connected”
- Click “Mount”
Once mounted, iPhoto automatically launched and was “Ready for Import” and images imported as expected.
The photos were in a directory marked ‘DCIM’ and both the Droid’s file structure and Motorola’s Droid customer service page were less clear about where I put audio and video files. For example, the support topic for to ‘downloading music files:
Not exactly the answer I was expecting. So, I just dumped some MP3s in the root directory of the SD card.
Worked perfectly. The Music app automatically found them and played them. SimpleHelp.net has a nice tutorial on copying music from Mac to Android
For contacts and calendars syncing with the Mac there are 3 options:
- Have everything in Google (it’ll be on the phone after you sign in)
- Review Todd Ogasawara’s tutorial on syncing Macs & T-Mobile G1s
- MarkSpace’s Missing Sync for Droid. Since Missing Sync was responsible for all my unhappy Treo memories- that’s not my preferred option.
The Droid handset and Android 2.0 UI is a significant improvement over the initial version. If Windows was my primary OS, if the bulk of my stuff in Google, or if I was a Verizon customer – I’ve have one on pre-order already. Easy.
Thanks to Albert Maruggi at Provident Partners for providing the review unit.
Elsewhere:
Graeme Thickin’s review of the Verizon Droid
“Again the feeling I got from this was ominous and forbidding.” – from David Newberger’s Droid review.
Justin Grammen’s covers the marketing confusion I’m seeing in his Droid Review
(reminds me of what I wrote earlier, “Yes, the iPhone does have weaknesses – humanity isn’t one of them“).
Sunday, 18 October 2009
DroidDoes is the Anti-1984 Ad
25 years ago, Apple announced their new, friendlier, easier-to-use personal computer with the iconic 1984 ad where a heroine throws a hammer – taking down a non-descript technical figure.
Tonight, I watched Verizon’s new DroidDoes.com ad. Verizon is declaring Apple’s iPhone is too friendly, too simplified, too limiting – what you need is a non-descript technical figure to remedy that.
This ad is more than a direct attack on the iPhone – it’s a direct attack on more humane technology offerings. A return to 1983.
This is not a position I encourage other Android providers to take.
Yes, the iPhone does have weaknesses – humanity isn’t one of them.
Monday, 22 June 2009
What if Google Blocked Your Site?
While net neutrality advocates are focused on the bandwidth side of net neutrality, this is the fourth instance in the past couple months of Google causing collateral damage in the name of safety, and not-being-evil.
I’ll agree that malware is an issue that should be stopped early.
I’m just not sure how far away malware is from communism.
Ultimately, issues like this are why Google (and Twitter) needs a number of viable competitors.
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Calling Double-Sputnik on Google
One of my favorite past-times is to dissect competitors within a business sector. Sometimes the pairings are obvious (Barnes & Noble vs. Borders, Honda vs Toyota), other times I’m less confident (Target vs. Wal-Mart3, Facebook vs. Twitter). These pairings (or groupings) point as much at commonality across market offerings as they do project the direction of innovation with a sector.
My interest in these pairings can be traced to this scene in The Right Stuff marking the beginning of the Cold War1.
Reading through Cullect today, I found two people running, Jeff Goldblum-style, into Google proclaiming Sputnik was launched. From two – seemingly unlikely -places.2
Twitter and Ad Blocker Plus are far more interesting competitors to Google than the search and productivity offerings of Yahoo, Microsoft. Plus, they lay out 2 very different vectors for innovation.
As intriguing as these 2 potential-competitors are for Google and as tired as Google’s search product is. I’m not ready to declare ‘Sputnik’.
I mean, come-on, re-searchr is still very young. 😉
“The world is big enough for both the paperclip and the staple.” – David S. Cargo
1. It’s taken a reading of both The Forgotten Man and 194X to have an understanding of why the USSR was our partner in the Cold War. It pains me to imagine American democracy as fragile as it appeared to be in the first half of the 20th Century.
2. The “Our Germans are better than their Germans” line cracks me up every time.
3. A more comfortable comparison to me: Wal-Mart vs. USDA Rural Development, Target vs. Minneapolis Parks and Rec.
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
A Proposal for Shorter Google Maps URLs
I was adding a link to a Google map into my iCal and noticed Google is encouraging me to share the the map URLs in email and IM.
But there’s a problem with the Google Maps URLs.
They’re +/- 155 characters.
Here’s the full URL:
http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&q=the+red+pepper,+plymouth,+mn&fb=1&split=1&gl=us&cid=1854680882426337660&li=lmd&z=14&iwloc=A
This URL is neither short, nor easily memorable, nor easily guessable. Which means it’s a completely un-usable – and barely shareable URL. Plus, something tells me this breaks both email and Twitter’s box.
CampaignMonitor says we don’t even get to the geocode.
Really Google!?
Even something like this is more share-able (in that it’s short).
http://maps.google.com/1854680882426337660
For the exact same character count, we can make it more guessable and more memorable (therefore more usable).
http://maps.google.com/RedPepperPlymouthMN
Yes, this is the exact same complaint Dave Winer had 5 weeks ago in Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem. Hell, if I’m only 5 weeks behind Winer, I’m cool with that.
Thursday, 9 April 2009
Unspoken, Unfortunate, Synonyms
From what I can tell;
- “SEO” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Google”
- “Social Media” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Twitter”
Both of these are unfortunate for they:
- turn something easily understandable into something vague and amorphous – the exact opposite of good framing
- mask the monopoly those companies have on their respective service.
This is analogous to using “entertainment” as synonym for not just “television” but the specific televised offering from BBC Four.
Of course, promoting yourself as an expert in Twitter (without having a Twitter-issued business card) should elicit giggles from anyone within earshot. But at least it’s being honest and authentic – the first step to being more social.
“That tweeting it is a private breed of microblogging verges on irrelevance. Twitter is now as necessary to tweeting as Google is to search. It’s a public activity under private control.” – Doc Searls
Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Google AppEngine: More About Google Labs than You?
There’s a long history of tech companies developing there own applications because it’s cheaper long-term than licensing, especially for core applications like: email, calendaring, text processing.
I’m confident Apple employee use Mail.app, iCal, and iWork in-house and those apps are cheap or free for the rest of use. Same for Sun and StarOffice/NeoOffice. Same for Google and Google Docs. One guess on who isn’t getting ongoing licensing fees for those apps? 😉
This is not only why ‘HuddleChat’ was the first AppEngine app but also why it was pulled. HuddleChat made it obvious.
I can easily imagine this conversation at Google:
“Campfire is a great tool, we should pay for it.”
“That sounds like a lot of money for something not built here. It’ll be cheaper long term if we build a clone in-house.”
Take a look at the number of applications in Google’s Lab page. Many of them need; some form of authentication, the general look/feel of Google, integration into Googles infrastructure, to be built at Google, etc.
What a perfect candidate for an abstracted framework like Google AppEngine.
Elsewhere:
Confirming this theory and that AppEngine is all about future acquisitions (i.e. ‘Want to increase the chances of being acquired by Google – build on AppEngine’).