Currently viewing the tag: "google"
Google is striving hard to promote Google Plus, and that’s not bad. But the way it does it, altering the search results – that’s bad.
Facebook shows you what your friends are doing, reading or watching; that’s not bad either. But the way it does that, by capturing you in your own “relevant circle”, all over the web – that’s bad.
Being evil is not a full time job, but mainly a constant (wrong) way of doing things. Being stupid – likewise.
The secret solution for getting out of this vicious circle, where the user is captive in his own circle of relevant content (be it relevant for the user or just important for the ones keeping him locked in) is simply to let the user out.
A single query can be run in two instances, on two tables: one table can contain the data relevant to that person, the other one – the data relevant to humankind (or whatever you’d like to call a generic interest, like war news, politics, culture). Therefore, by simply splitting the screen, the user should be able to see both the search results that are relevant for himself and the results that are relevant “per se“. Somewhere between personal relevant results, relevant ads could be integrated as well and I’m guessing that would make them even more visible.
Imagine the left side of the screen page showing what your friends are saying about the subject you’re searching for, while the right side of the page / screen – what Times or “Some Important Opinion Maker” are saying about the same subject. (The two buttons that Google is showing in the upper right corner are not exactly it: you should not have to switch between personal and non-personal results, but to be able to see them both, distinctly, in the same time).
I believe people are able to follow two streams, although most marketing researches may show the opposite. We do not process the two data streams in parallel, that’s true, but we are doing serial processing so fast that it becomes more convenient to say that we can do parallel processing in short bursts.
On the other hand, splitting the results may just save the newspapers, that are right now unfairly fighting against your friends, for your attention; it just shouldn’t be the case for a search engine to ponder wether you should first read what the president is announcing or look at your friends’ new pictures. These two types of content belong to separate categories that are mixed together only by accident.
There should be no way mixing the results so badly that no one could tell what’s being pulled and what’s pushed; the two columns of your search page should be called “only for you” and “for everybody, including you“.
I see no strong argument against this split (besides some technical elbow grease), given the condition that no player wants the information to be truncated or misinterpreted.
Simplicity and elegance are said to be the optimal minimum, but not less than that. If showing only one feed that is the main stream of revenue and customers for so many people, generates so much discontent and disorientation, then it’s time for two feeds of results.
As you know, iPads and iPhones are selling very well but for a price, while Androids are selling even better, given no price concerns of any kind.
Therefore, the operators selling Apple and Google / Samsung / LG / Huawei / ZTE products, should come up with this kind of solutions:
Family offers:
for each iPad bought, get 4 Android phones for free
for each iPhone bought, get 2 Tabs for free
for each SmartCover bought, get one free Android phone.
Corporate offers:
for 20 new iPhones, get 100 Android phones for free, 2 year contract;
for 20 new iPads, get 50 Tabs for free, 2 year contracts
Prepay:
for one unsubsidized iPhone, get 8 Androids with a $5 top-up condition;
for one iPad, get 16 Android phones, with a $5 top-up;
Loyalty:
iPhone 3GS buy-back, get 5 new Android phones
iPad 1 buy-back, get 3 new Tabs
iPhone 4 buy-back, get 3 new Android phones and a Tab.
Oh, and they should also invent the 2000-local-minutes-per-second offers. In prepay. Double win!
Although we only build the software, we feel somehow responsible for the hardware Samsung is copying from Apple.
Unrelated to the first issue, we don’t hate patents, we are just like Apple being attacked by patent trolls.
Although we are going towards lowest-end smartphones, the mobile operators may rejoice as they will sell billions of mobile internet options to subsidize even those 200 bucks.
Full PR release here.
I didn’t hear anything about “open operating system”, but I heard a lot about “protecting the Android”. Is anybody saying “proprietary”?
Techcrunch’s MG Siegler, There Will Be Blood:
“Why is Google now a villain to many in the industry? I don’t believe it’s because they’re evil, I believe it simply relates to the Plainview quote. Increasingly, Google is trying to do everything. And they have the arrogance to think that they can. And it’s pissing people off.“
The Plainview quote? “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.“
Yeah, everybody’s problem is “Google trying to do everything”, not that “Google wants no one else to succeed”.
You know what’s funny? MG Siegler is the author of both quotes! Like the guy in the joke “Doctor, I have a problem: I am undecided. Or aren’t I?…”
The main question remained unanswered, back from Android Mystery Numbers‘ comments and the Macalope’s Saturday Special, seems to be this:
Why would Google care more about selling the Android brand than selling a smartphone?
“But Google is an advertising and search company. An Internet advertising and search company. So, how does Android benefit Google if a whole mess of Android users aren’t actually using their phones to access the Internet?”, says the Macalope.
I love Macalope! Here’s the answer to the riddle above:
Google is not selling ads to Android users; they are selling ads to companies that are selling products (to the Android users, perhaps); “How many mobiles do you have there?”, says the Company, “70% of the market, boss”, goes Google. Deal signed, money changed pockets.
Selling Android brand is selling audience, i.e. clicks.
The same thing happens to the developers: “Dear Google, we’ve seen reports saying you own 70% of the market, so we, uh, would like to make some money out of it”, “Uh, good luck with that, we’ve built that market share especially for you! Only for you!”. Double-dipping, yummy!
To cut the long story short, Google is far more interested in pleasing the buyers, not the ones to which it is giving away stuff. And Google’s buyers are always suckers for numbers, as they were already educated. By Google, with love.
No, ads are not served to an offline device. But, seriously, who cares?
Put on top of that a bit of weekend-cream: maybe Google cannot serve ads on a ZTE Android that’s only used for voice and texting, but, gosh, that offline phone of yours comes to know so much about you! You may have to plug it into a computer, at some desperate point? Then it’s not only your phone that knows so much about you. That’d be triple-dipping!
Hey, after all, I’m not the first one who said “when you get something for free, you’re not the user but the product”.
[...] for all Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, the company has now reached a point where the more it excels, and it often does, the more it is perceived as a threat by individuals and governments around the world.
I’d add a corollary: The more it tries to bring solutions to everybody and for everything, the more their “Each individual served with relevant ad” goal becomes just a mere byproduct.
There’s no difference between Google reaching its goal and an increasingly powerful and over-responsible government; they both can say they pursue the best for each and every individual, but never mention the cost that individual has to pay. That cost is very hard to measure until it’s already too late: it’s usually called freedom.
When I say “ugly”, I say futile, un-beautiful, hard to understand, non-intuitive, crooked, difficult, sterile thing.
An ugly GUI is something you only use because you need the service behind that GUI. The companies that don’t care about it, they don’t care about their users. Or, worse, they are so lazy and are making so much money, that there’s no way they would change anything for their customers.
The uglier an interface, the more probable the developers forgot they were building things for human beings; instead, these developers are building things for… things.
The Silver Medal goes to Gmail:
The Gold Medal goes to Facebook settings panel:
The only problem is those two giants are spreading their “ugly love” in almost every digital soul of the WEB.
This is “Microsoft-ugly”.
Because nobody can censor, curate or gate-keep a twitter-like architecture. Not even Google.
