Google Latitude: Search without Entering Keywords
February 8, 2009
I have been fascinated by the media and public reaction to Google’s Lattitude service. For a representative example, check out the Scientific American’s story here. The idea is that a Google user can activate a tracking feature for friends. The Lattitude service is positioned as a option for users. The GOOG’s intent is to allow friends and maybe people like parents to see where a person is on a Google Map. Wow, I received several telephone calls and agree to participate in two live radio talk show interviews. The two hosts were concerned that their location could be tracked by anyone at any time. Well, that’s sort of correct but Google Lattitude is not the outfit doing that type of tracking as far as I know.
A couple of points I noted that caught the attention of the media personalities who spoke with me:
- There was zero awareness that triangulation is a well-known method. GPS equipped devices that transmit happily even when the owner thinks a device is “off” is a standard in certain law enforcement sectors. One anecdote that made the rounds in 2001 was that a certain person of interest loaned his personal mobile phone to a courier who was fetching videos from a city in a far off land. The homing device in the nose of the missile destroyed the courier’s four wheel drive vehicle. The person of interest switched to a pay as you go phone, having learned an important lesson.
- The details of the Google Lattitude service, which is flakey and crashes even in Chrome, did not sink into the media personalities’ knowledgebase. Google makes clear what the service is and does. The words don’t resonate. Fear does. Little wonder that there is a thriving business is discussing this immature Google service which works only with certain software on the user’s mobile device. Gory details are here.
- The chipper Googler who does the video about he service sounds to me as if the speaker was a cheerleader at a private school where each student had a horse and a chauffeur. There was what I think one wacky college professor called “cognitive dissonance”. Tracking my husband is, like, well, so coool. Maybe it is my age, but this eager beaver approach to friend tracking troubled me more than the unstable, crash prone service. The video is here.
Next week you will be able to navigate to a Web page and run a query across Google’s USPTO documents and have one click access to a PDF of the patent document. The service is up now and one vendor’s search system is available at this time, but I hope to add additional search systems so you can explore the disclosure corpus yourself. These “innovations” are several years old if you have been reading Google’s technical papers and its patent documents. The baloney that a patent document does not become a product does not hold for Googzilla. If you have been reading my analyses of these documents in The Google Legacy (2005) and Google Version 2.0 (2007) you already know that what is now making its way to alpha and beta testing is three, maybe four years old.
My take on this is that Google watchers are getting blindsided and overly excited too late in the game. When the GOOG rolls out a service or allows a Google wizard to appear in public, the deal is done. Concern about tracking is like fretting over the barn fire three years after the fact. Silly waste of time. The GOOG does a lousy job of hiding its technical direction but few take the time to dig out the information.
Radio hosts should start reading Google technical papers. Would that raise the level of discourse? The tracking service has significant implications for medical device vendors, shipping companies, and law enforcement. So far few pundits are tackling these applications in a substantive way. I touch upon these issues in my forthcoming Google: The Digital Gutenberg here.
Stephen Arnold, February 8, 2009
Google’s Medical Probe
February 5, 2009
Yikes, a medical probe. Quite an image for me. In New York City at one of Alan Brody’s events in early 2007, I described Google’s “I’m feeling doubly lucky” invention. The idea was search without search. One example I used to illustrate search without search was a mobile device that could monitor a user’s health. The “doubly lucky” metaphor appears in a Google open source document and suggests that a mobile device can react to information about a user. In one use case, I suggested, Google could identify a person with a heart problem and summon assistance. No search required. The New York crowd sat silent. One person from a medical company asked, “How can a Web search and advertising company play a role in health care?” I just said, “You might want to keep your radar active?” In short, my talk was a bust. No one had a clue that Google could do mobile, let alone mobile medical devices. Those folks probably don’t remember my talk. I live in rural Kentucky and clearly am a bumpkin. But I think when some of the health care crowd read “Letting Google Take Your Pulse” in the oh-so-sophisticated Forbes Magazine, on February 5, 2009, those folks will have a new pal at trade shows. Googzilla is in the remote medical device monitoring arena. You can read the story here–just a couple of years after Google disclosed the technology in a patent application. No sense in rushing toward understanding the GOOG when you are a New Yorker, is there? For me, the most interesting comment in the Forbes’s write up was:
For IBM, the new Google Health functions are also a dress rehearsal for “smart” health care nationwide. The computing giant has been coaxing the health care industry for years to create a digitized and centrally stored database of patients’ records. That idea may finally be coming to fruition, as President Obama’s infrastructure stimulus package works its way through Congress, with $20 billion of the $819 billion fiscal injection aimed at building a new digitized health record system.
Well, better to understand too late than never. Next week I will release a service to complement Oversight to allow the suave Manhattanites an easy way to monitor Google’s patent documents. The wrong information at the wrong time can be hazardous to a health care portfolio in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, February 5, 2009
Mysteries of Online 4: The Bits Are Bits Fallacy
February 5, 2009
In a meeting last week, a young wizard said, “Bits are bits.” The context for this statement was a meeting to move an organization’s databased information and unstructured text online. The idea was that the task was trivial.
In fact, the task was a mixture of trivial and non-trivial sub tasks. So, bits are not the same because a zero and one may not behave like grains of salt. The ones and zeros may look the same, but one of the mysteries of online is that many factors bedevil the would be online entrepreneur. Google, for example, wants out of its AOL deal. Obviously the bit wizards at Google know that AOL bits are not Google bits here. But the GOOG dumped some serious coinage into the online company direct mail spam made famous.
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Bits are bits just like penguins.
Here’s my list of factors, which is not complete and represents my thoughts to myself:
- Digital objects have stages. The source may be transformed, indexed, tokenized, and manipulated by two or more sub sub systems. Get these processes wrong, and weird behaviors become apparent. What’s wrong? Who knows. A person or persons have to figure it out, find a fix, and implement it. As this process goes forward, it becomes apparent that the bits are a tad mischievous
- A fancy search system cannot locate a document or other object. Indexing systems may skip malformed documents, indexes may not update, and other issues annoy users. What went wrong? Who knows. A person or persons have to figure it out, find a fix, and implement it.
- A document returns a 404 or file not found error. The document used to exist because it is in the index. Now the document has gone walkabout. What’s wrong? Who knows. A person or persons have to figure it out, find a fix, and implement it.
Causes
I wish I had a fool proof way to prevent errors caused by this “bits are bits” fallacy. Much of he frustration generated by search, content management, and business intelligence systems have their roots wrapped tightly around the facile assumption that electronic information is no big deal. Electronic information is a big deal and for many organizations electronic information may be their undoing. The reason? Many assume that once a file is in electronic form, the rest is easy.
Google Versus Big ISPs: A Battle Brewing
January 29, 2009
“Google Begins Effort to Find Internet Blockers”, a Reuters story here, caught my attention. The GOOG is making servers available so researchers can find chokepoints where “net neutrality” is violated. As a former Bell Labs’s contractor, a Bellcore contractor, and a USWest contractor, I’m not going to jump into this stew. I think that is news item, if accurate, marks a turning point in Googzilla’s trajectory. I am going to stick close to my nest in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, on this skirmish. The “new” AT&T versus the remnants of the “old” AT&T. Should be interesting.
Stephen Arnold, January 29, 2009
Dead Tree Publishers, Dead
January 29, 2009
PaidContent.org ran David Kaplan’s “General Print Mags Are Dead” here. I had to shorten the article title because it was tough for me to figure out the “@”, the “Wolff”, and the “Best Advice”. On re reading the article, an information trade association called SIIA (the 2009 version of the Information Industry Association) sponsored a panel. On that panel various wizards, mavens, and pundits discussed print magazines. One speaker–Michael Wolff, an author–alleged said, “General print is dead.” Tough for me to disagree with that statement. You can read observations made by other traditional media flag carriers. What surprised me is that it has taken until January 2009 to figure this out. I don’t agree with the notion that magazine publishers should stop “letting Google win.” Exactly what is a magazine publisher going to do. When you fire staff writers and squeeze what one pays stringers (which happened to me today), what are these companies going to do about Google? Build their own Googleplex. Sue Google some more. Strong arm advertisers to buy a full page ad in magazine with several dozen pages? Pout? Leap frog Google technically? I bailed out of traditional publishing in the early 1990s when Bill Ziff began selling the Ziff Communications’ properties. Google is the new digital Gutenberg and has been for many years. Waking up to today’s economic reality is a useful step forward, just a decade too late. I am willing to wager $1.00 that the Washington Post does not believe that Google is a new medium. What do you think? Check out Google Channels before responding, however.
Stephen Arnold, January 29, 2009
Amazon and A9’s Limitations
January 28, 2009
I don’t think too much about Amazon. It’s A9 search engine remains an okay system, but it has morphed into an ecommerce search system. Search innovation seemed to stop when Udi Manber headed to the GOOG. Amazon took A9 down a very different path that includes stop overs in Clickriver and Open Search (yep, that iVillage and About.com content is exactly what I need). You can even find out about job openings at A9.com, which surprised me. Check out the jobs. One is for someone to tackle relevance. Good idea. Those Yahooligans are available. Some defecting Xooglers are available. Amazon could even tap the Powerset wizards. With companies nuking nerds, it’s a buyer’s market. I use structured information if I know the name of the author or a book. If I want books “about something”, the system is not too helpful in my opinion. In fact, the interface fights with the search box. For example, I wanted to look at Kindle titles which were new releases in a specific category–Greek history. No luck. The interface on the Kindle, as miserable as it is, is more informative than the one on the Amazon Web site. Let’s hope that the Kindle Web page gets some attention when version 2 of the Kindle becomes available. (Fewer weird buttons would help too.)
Amazon blipped my radar today when I read Eric Savitz’ “Amazon: The World’s Most Expensive Internet Stock?” here. The point of the article is that Amazon has a high price earnings ratio. Skipping the MBA double talk, this means that you pay a lot and may not get much back in the way of dividends.
When I scanned Mr. Savitz’s Wall Street story, I seemed to recall seeing references to investments by Bezos Expeditions. What’s interesting is that twice in the few days, I saw references to this investment outfit having taken stakes in search vendors: Mahalo.com and ChaCha.com. If my recollection is correct, this is suggestive that A9 can’t deliver the type of “social” search that seems to be some pundits’ entrant in the Google tug of war.
Forget these alleged investments. Let’s focus on A9:
- When will the system permit winnowing to be released new titles from real new titles on Kindle?
- How can I find bargains without recourse to a third party tool?
- When will the system support concept metadata so I can locate books “about” a topic without the trial and error fiddling I have to do now?
- Why not fix up A9 with some social features?
Maybe A9 is a bit of money pit? If anyone has information about the new features of A9 that I have overlooked, let me know.
Stephen Arnold, January 28, 2009
Google Web Drive Silliness
January 27, 2009
What’s the big deal about the Google Web Drive. A couple of years ago a programmer developed the Gmail drive shell. The unauthorized application converted Gmail to a drive letter. I could drag a file to the GMail Drive shell icon and plonk my file as a message in my Gmail account. Google would break GMail Drive shell. The developer would fix GMail Drive shell. You can still find this unauthorized Google service here. I just got tired of this.
At the time in 2005 or 2006, it was quite clear to me that Google had storage plans. Otherwise, why hassle a person adding a useful function to Gmail? Google’s too busy to fiddle with this level of programming granularity. As you know, regular Gmail runs on top of other, far more sophisticated Google plumbing. Based on my research, the GOOG can deploy a number of nifty functions, applications, and services without much effort. I recall that it released Recommendations within 48 hours of the StumbleUpon.com change in ownership.
Rumors of a Google Web Drive have been appearing in my newsreader and I have ignored them. Old news. In fact, the rumor was not even in the category of “sort of interesting” until I read Scott Gilbertson’s “Why a Google Web Drive Won’t Kill Windows, the PC or Anything Else” here. Like much of the info in Wired’s publications, there’s some good information and some commentary with which I don’t agree. The point of the story is to use the term “GDrive” to refer to the service. Obviously the original GMail Drive shell developer has dropped off the radar at least for Wired. The person behind Viksoe.dk probably would prefer to be on Wired’s radar. But the Wired writers are indeed busy working in the midst of cutbacks and budget machinations.
In my opinion, the argument of the article is that I will have quite a few options for saving data to the cloud. Mr. Gilbertson reminded me that trust is one concern and
The other big issue with online storage is that, for most of us, documents like spreadsheets, word processor files and the other formats that Google Docs understands are not what’s taking up the majority of space on our drives.
My thought is that the significance of a GDrive is that it is one more service that makes life easy for the Google centric. Google doesn’t have to do much work to provide a GDrive. It is timing. I think Google has decided that it is tactically advisable to add another convenience to the Google service. Whether this GDrive becomes part of Google Apps or finds its way into any function is not clear. What is clear is that incremental step by incremental step, Google is put honey in the pot. With Google’s market share and viral marketing expertise, those wanting this convenience will find their way to Google. Once at Google, it’s one more hook to keep the customer in the Google fold. For competitors, Google’s incremental approach to capturing markets is a pain in the backside. Google doesn’t give competitors a big target at which to shoot. Google doesn’t really move very quickly. Google is a pretty savvy outfit.
For me, the big question is when, not if. Then I want to know, “What will the competitors do to keep Google from poaching their customers?” My first reaction is, “Not much.” It takes money and technology to ace the GOOG. Technology may not be the problem. Money may be the “great decider”.
Stephen Arnold, January 27, 2009
Knol: One More Thing
January 26, 2009
The GOOG’s Matt Cutts, writing on his personal Web log, offers up a parental “Four Things You Need to Know about Knol.” Gentle reader, the story is here. I assume the use of “you” by Mr. Cutts meant me. I looked at his points from my goose-like perspective.
I liked the idea that Google doesn’t favor its own products and services. The assertion may be accurate in terms of Knol but if you search for “enterprise search” you get some results that place Google as the seventh hit in the results list this morning. There’s an ad for a Google Webinar. This supports the assertion that Google is not favoring Google services.
Second, he points out that Knol is “doing fine”. This is a bit like Amazon talking about “objects” in its cloud services. The problem is what’s an object and what’s “fine” mean. Knol has about 100,000 articles. I assume that 100,000 is fine. If so, then why is there a Knol for Dummies campaign underway here?
Third, the Knol team is moving. I agree. Subtle changes creep into Knol; for example, the notion of “authoritative” has obviously been tweaked by the Knol team. Mr. Cutts enjoins me to “write a quick article or put some information on the Web.” My question is, “What’s authoritative mean?’
In short, the “four things” are interesting. The one thing that my research Knol is / was supposed to do was provide inputs to the Google knowledge bases. “Some information” does not match up with the disclosures in Google’s public documents–for example, US20070038600–about its knowledge bases.
Knol certainly warrants observation. More on Knol appears in my forthcoming Google study, The Digital Gutenberg.
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
Web Ownership: You Know the Answer
January 25, 2009
I get a kick out of articles with titles like “Will Google and Microsoft Own the Web?” You can read an exemplary version of this question in PCWorld here. The article is a bit different from the question in my opinion. The core of the story is a view expressed by Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz that the Web is drifting away from the openness of bygone days. Keep in mind that Sun has fallen from grace in the eyes of Wall Street, and the company has begun hooking Microsoft’s technology into Java. What’s bubbling under the veneer of this article is the dominance of Google. Forget Microsoft, Facebook, and MySpace. (If you want to believe that Facebook is the real Google killer, read this story. I just don’t buy the argument, however.) None of those companies is in a position to become the Internet in North America, big chunks of Europe, and a number of other countries as well. Instead of coming right out and saying, “Google is in a position to become the Internet, we get the tap dancing around the elephant in search. For me the most interesting comment in the write up was:
Schwartz argues that developers should avoid the “hostile territory” altogether. Instead of the browser, he says, developers should build applications using Sun’s new JavaFX technology. But this seems somewhat disingenuous, considering that JavaFX is so far almost entirely the brainchild of Sun, and is therefore less open than any browser. But there are other reasons to be concerned about Google’s stake in Firefox and Chrome, too. Some privacy advocates worry that Google’s influence over the browser market gives it access to too much user data, which the company collects for the purposes of its massively lucrative online advertising business.
Good point. Just about seven or eight years too late based on my research.
Stephen Arnold, January 24, 2009
Microsoft Cedes Data Center Leadership to Google
January 24, 2009
I was surprised that there was not more coverage of Microsoft’s cut backs in its data center plans. Microsoft has been building data centers like the $650 million facility in San Antonia. I had heard about engineering innovations that would make these new data centers economical to build, maintain, and operate. I poked around a few technical papers and concluded that Microsoft was still saddled with the legacy of decisions made as long ago as 1999. I will put links to my writes about Microsoft’s data center writes up at the foot of this news item. Frankly I didn’t buy what I was hearing and reading about these leapfrog data centers but I am keeping an open mind. However, the financial reports from Microsoft have not been what Wall Street wanted to hear. Accordingly, this story “Microsoft Postpones Iowa Data Center” here, in my opinion, cedes leadership in data centers to Google. Microsoft is like a runner who drops out of a 5,000 meter race. The Google wins. If you think I am off base, make sure you check out these previous articles before you tell me that I am even more addled than I admit:
- Architecture in 1999 here
- Architecture in 2006 here
- Microsoft capital expenditures here
- Architecture in early 2008 here
What my research revealed is that in 1998 Google was behind Microsoft. Microsoft hired some AltaVista.com engineers but went a different direction. Google hired some AltaVista.com engineers and choose a different path. I document this in detail in my 2005 The Google Legacy. That decision allowed Google to pull ahead and eventually create the gap that exists today. Now Microsoft is taking a breather allowing Google to widen its lead. Google wins the data center race in my opinion. Microsoft now must win in software.
Stephen Arnold, January 24, 2009
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