Precognitive Search
February 17, 2009
Charles Hudson’s “The Database of Intentions Is More Valuable than the Database of Musings for Now (Google and Twitter)” is an interesting article. The notion of putting Google at one end of a spectrum and Twitter at another intrigues me. You can find the write up here. A number of buzzwords have been pushed off the cliff in an effort to capture the shift from historical search to real time search. For example, there was the word attention as used in the phrase “the attention economy”. Then there was the word “conversation” to describe Web log posts and the ripostes that would appear in the comments section. With the publication of Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom, a clever bit of word play, provides via brain scans that people make decisions without conscious thought. The closest the average Web user will get to this type of precognitive thinking is by running a query on http://search.twitter.com. Certain entities of various governments have somewhat similar functions, but those are not available to anyone with a Web browser. Twitter.com is a public stream of brief comments. Mr. Hudson’s tackles this notion, and he offers some excellent observations. If you are interested in the future of real time search, read his essay. He doesn’t provide context for some of his assertions, but he does make the spectrum clear and sets the stage for additional thinking about these services.
Stephen Arnold, February 17, 2009
Google Blood Hound: The Movie
February 13, 2009
Privacy mavens will want to read Gizmodo’s “My Tracks for Android Logs Your Day via GPS, Uploads to Google Maps” here. I don’t want to spoil your fun or your paranoia. For me the most interesting comment in the write up by John Mahoney was:
Along with the mapping, the app displays statistics in real time like elevation, distance traveled, speed, etc. My Tracks can also use Google Docs’ little-known but very cool ability to receive the output of web forms in a spreadsheet, so you can track your routes and see your average speed over time.
And, yes, Mr. Mahoney includes a link to a video to make the potential of the My Tracks application quite clear to good guys, to bad guys, and all the guys in between. To crank your fear knob, read this article.
Stephen Arnold, February 13, 2009
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 Squeezes into Mobile Books
February 6, 2009
Before noon, the ebook publishers were looking forward to the weekend. Sure, Friday was an office day, but in the new America, not too many people grind out an 18 hour day on Friday. Well, maybe some blue chip consultant fodder and Type A attorneys with a client who has deep pockets. But for the ebook crowd, Thursday is a run up to the TGIF cheer.
But at 11 56 Eastern time on February 5, 2009, ebook boffins got a surprise. The Google delivered 1.5 million books “in your pocket”. You can read Viresh Ratnakar’s and his colleagues’ chatty little blog post here. I not going to trouble you with the implications of this announcement.
You can surf the waves of Web log posts, pundit analyses and boffin bombast elsewhere. Just point your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m. I wonder is the “m” stands for mayhem. Any thoughts? Oh, if I have any ebook executives among my three or four readers. Sorry about your run up to the weekend. Bummer.
Stephen Arnold, February 6, 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
Google Checkout: Monetization Push
January 30, 2009
In The Google Legacy, I created a diagram that showed Google pushing its Checkout service toward several sectors. I identified merchants as an obvious target. Over the last three and a half years, Checkout has gained traction. You can see the reach when you navigate to Google Shopping and run a query for a common tech product like motherboards. Here’s a screenshot of the logo for Google advertisers:
When you view a Google Shopping results display in standard or grid form, you see a modest blue shopping basket. The blue basket identifies that the merchant accepts Google’s payment services.
“How do you want to pay? Google?” here, written by George Lekakis and Jason Bryce, is a very important write up in my opinion. The authors have made clear Google’s increased appetite for monetization of services running on the Google infrastructure, what I call the “digital Googleplex”, not to be confused with the tacky Silicon Valley buildings and the make shift cube hatcheries in other cities. Google’s taste runs to engineering, not sky scrapers at least yet.
For me, the most interesting point in the write up was that Google is probing Australia, where there has been considerable Google interest of late. My talk in 2007 at the policing conference sparked quite a bit of interest in the notion of dataspaces. Australia is moving forward with this type of technology with or without Google’s support. Google nailed the New South Wales education deal. There are other interesting “down under” activities as well. Australia has quite a few wizards and boffins, and most American companies find the markets in Chicago and Cleveland more appealing. Probably an error, but that’s another topic.
What’s going on in Australia? I don’t want to spoil your fun reading the article, but I can highlight one comment of interest to me:
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission recently issued Google Australia with an authority to provide deposit and payments services to local merchants and shoppers. While the licence does not permit Google to provide cash-based payments services to Australian clients, it will enable the group to facilitate digital or online transactions.
I know zero about banking. Oh, the one thing I do know is that the banks who were my customers seem to have disappeared. Some of the clients now wear orange jump suits, not Armani duds.
Here’s what I think is unfolding:
- The payment plumbing is in place and has been since Googzilla started doing ad sales
- The missteps of eBay have now shackled the company making it easy for the GOOG to cherry pick among buyers and sellers disaffected with eBay and PayPal
- Google has a brand that remains untarnished. What’s your view of banks, I ask? See what I mean
- Googzilla can monetize some information access. I would pay to use Google. What about you? What if you have no choice?
The regulatory approval is a nice touch, but I don’t think it matters. Google is simply playing by the rules. After all, who worries when buying an AdWord. Government regulators still don’t understand that business. When Google slaps matchmaking services into advertising, government regulators will really be in a bowl of vegetarian soup.
I dig into this monetization issue in my new Google study, Digital Gutenberg. Think of this Australian test as similar to printing money. Google bucks, anyone?
Stephen Arnold, January 30, 2009
Internet: One Billion, GSM: Three Billion
January 28, 2009
ZDNet UK published “A Billion Internet Users Can Be Wrong” here. I have a tough time figuring out who writes what where. This important story appeared in “Leader”, I think. Anyway, the point of the story is that GSM has spread faster than the Internet. Here’s the passage:
In the history of the world, the only technology to spread faster is GSM, the digital mobile-phone standard. That’s another European invention — and another one that went live in the wonderyear of 1991. This one, however, is in the hands of 3.5 billion people. Between them, the web and wireless have democratized data: since 1991, you haven’t needed approval from anywhere to store or share data with the world, and the world hasn’t needed an appointment anywhere to retrieve it.
So what? I look at these data in terms of search. Looks to me that companies eager to leapfrog Google need to focus on mobile information access. Apple and Microsoft are lagging in this department. Yahoo is struggling. The start ups have to spend to get traction. Web search is over. Mobile looks like the next big search battleground. What do you think?
Stephen Arnold, January 28, 2009
Search Microblogs
January 22, 2009
A happy quack to our goose-friendly pals at Pandia in Norway. The service published “Search across Microblog Services” here. The write up contains more information about services that index and make accessible posts on Twitter. You get useful tips on how to use these services plus some helpful links. For me, the most interesting comment was:
The signal-to-noise ratio on Microblog services is appalling. Still, these sites contain a wealth if information. With the right tool and a healthy amount of curiosity, Microblogs are a goldmine of information. It is a good idea to search across several Microblog services. Twingly presents the search results in an informative manner and the advanced search options are great. So this can prove to be a useful service.
The Beyond Search team has added these links to our bookmark file. Navigate to Pandia.com and snag this gem, please.
Stephen Arnold, January 22, 2009
Another Whack at Social Media and Search Experts
January 22, 2009
Michael Pinto’s “Social Media Experts Are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)” here made us quack merrily. The service that social media experts have discovered is Twitter. Our Beyond Search geese have Twittered and find that it works for our cousins defacing automobiles and the occassional hairdo in the area between San Jose, California, and San Francisco, California. The Twitterholics are an “in” crowd, and the Kentucky geese can’t take full advantage of Twitter’s micro-micro blogging functions. When we sit at lunch using Twinkle on an iPhone, a full 30 minutes can go by without one substantive Harrod’s Creek tweets. Sad. So sad. Mr. Pinto’s article goes into considerable detail about the woes the outsiders–in this case, self appointed social media and social search wizards–inflict on the more wired Twitterific users. For me, the most interesting point in his write up was:
Like drugs, social media can be a good thing in the right hands. But there are too many people out there who don’t know what they’re doing and just get carried away. Sadly most people just lack the good old fashioned discipline to keep their worse instincts in check. On a related note there’s also a related clan of zombies which are the SEO “experts” — these creatures are a blue collar variation of the social media experts and usually have the term “web master” in their bio. Sometimes the social media and SEO zombies can mate to produce a marketing strategy monster, but most of these are harmless as they don’t use the auto-follow technique.
Now shift the thinking to a large company, maybe a Toyota or Unilever. What happens when a technically adept employee decides to have some “fun” with the social media and social search system at one of these companies? This aspect of the next big thing in social media and social search needs a bit of thought… just not by the self appointed experts. Write on, Mr. Pinto.
You may find this social media push back interesting as well. Caroline McCarthy’s “New FriendFeed Feature Gives My Inbox a Headache” here.
Stephen Arnold, January 22, 2009
Dot Net Caution
January 18, 2009
Here in the mine run off pond, we geese heard a rumor that Windows 7 has no Dot Net code. That sounded good to us. Now comes a disturbing news item on MSMobile.com, which if true adds another log to the Dot Net fire. There article “Warning to Developers: A Monkey with Its Eyes Closed Can Disassemble Microsoft .Net” here seems to be a bit harsh. The lead paragraph asserts that Microsoft inhabits its “own reality distortion field.” We thought the RDF was an Apple speciality. The most important part of the article is this snippet:
.Net is great in so many ways but for commercial apps? No way! Anybody can just look at your source code. A high end obfuscation will help a lot but any determined hacker will fix your code in less than a day. I know this from sad experience despite spending $1000s on anti-piracy and obfuscation tools. Unless you wish to make your code ‘open source’ then maybe give .Net a wide birth.
The conclusion to the article is pointed: “If you intend to develop commercial software for Windows Mobile, then forget Dot Net.” The geese will watch for more Dot Net intel to validate or invalidate this point.
Stephen Arnold, January 18, 2009
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