The internet's potential

This blog post, "Beware The Internet As Liberation Theology," from Forbes.com pushes back against some recent claims that Peter Singer  has made about the potential of the internet.  But really, it pushes back against anyone who still thinks that's it's just a matter of time until the internet opens our door (soon!) to the new Golden Age that's impatiently waiting for us on our doormat.  From the post:

What does it mean to say that everyone now has access to the world’s greatest libraries when studies show that many Millennials – the generation born and raised after the arrival of the Internet – can barely use Google to search the web? What does it mean to say that the power of corporate media has been broken by independent bloggers when, increasingly, those corporations are crowd sourcing content from bloggers for little or  (as is mostly the case) nothing?

There are times when I think about the fact that out of, say, 50,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 years of human existence, I'm living in an era that's defined by technologies that have only existed during my lifetime. So what's with the cat pictures and the Youtube fights? 

Instant search

Google unveiled another new feature today: Instant search.  Start typing search terms into Google, and results appear as you type, in almost real time.  

I could be wrong, but I have a hard time imagining very many people who would get something out of this feature that they don't already have.  Search engines already predict what you're going to search for based on what you're typing as you type.  Google's page on Instant tries to make a case for the new feature:

Before Google Instant, the typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and we saw many examples of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type.

I can only think of one person I know who might take a minute and a half to type in a few search terms.  He types with one finger, and doesn't look at the screen while he's typing.  Would shaving "2-5 seconds" off each search, as Google promises, make up for this massive increase in complexity?  If you take a longer than average time to search, are you the kind of user that wants thousands of results flashing in front of your eyes and flitting away as you type each letter? 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, away from hunt-and-peck typists, I don't think power users will get much out of this either.  If I hadn't read about the new feature, I might have never even noticed.  I use Firefox's search bar for almost all my searches. 

But it is an interesting experiment, and I give them credit for continuing to roll out new features even though their search engine is already really really good.  Keep in mind, they're sorting through enormous amounts of information and presenting it all onscreen at a pace that was the stuff of science fiction a decade ago.

Priority inbox

I was ecstatic when I first heard about Gmail's new feature, Priority Inbox.  I was then furious when my Gmail account didn't get the feature until almost a week after they started rolling it out.

After I did get it, I was disappointed.  It seemed like it could be very useful for people dealing with very high volumes of email.  In Priority Inbox, emails from important contacts go in the "Priority Inbox" that sits on top of your regular inbox, where and all other messages go.  But I've already built my own system with a combination of filters and labels to assign different values for incoming mail.  I've got filters that "star" emails from a handful of really important people, as do notices from my bank.  My different newsletters, shopping notifications, and Facebook updates have their own labels.

Priority Inbox uses stars to indicate correspondence that needs a follow up, and I don't use them that way.  I didn't like how the new system left starred messages at the top of your inbox.  It if you don't have any unread, important messages, there's a big banner saying, "Woohoo! You've read all the important messages in your inbox."  That instantly went in my top-ten-most-annoying-things-ever list.  After a couple days of playing with the new set-up, I stopped using it.  Until I noticed that you have a lot of power to customize how Priority Inbox works.

Right now I've got it set up so that if I don't have any "important" messages, my inbox looks just like it always did.  If I get an important message (or a few) then the Priority Inbox kicks in.  I used to have any work emails that went to my personal account (either emails from coworkers or emails forwarded from my work account) get a certain label.  I wish I'd had Priority Inbox back then, because you can tweak your settings so that a particular label, like "Work," gets sent to what's basically an inbox within an inbox. 

I'm still playing around with the settings, but I love it.  I've seen a few gushing reviews for Priority Inbox, but I haven't seen any point out the customization that's possible.  (Full disclosure: I have not made an exhaustive search for any and all review.)   I just can't believe that I almost shelved a really powerful tool for taming my inbox.

I've missed reading Andrew

Today, Andrew Sullivan returned from his annual vacation from blogging, and one of his first posts he emphasized a theme that he's talked about a lot in his coverage of Obama.  I've been getting more and more dispirited over recent political turns, but now I see the same pattern that Obama has consistently followed in his dealings with his opposition.  Sullivan says it better than I can:

Yesterday's speech by the president, if you missed it, was a barn-stormer. Yes, it's the same old, same old pattern: he allows the opposition not just to vent and criticize (as they should) but to control the discourse for months, to drown out every other sound, to vent and crow and vilify and intimidate the cable news weenies into quivering puppies in need of crate-training. And then he comes back with a speech like that one.

Animated Google

Google changes the logo on their frontpage from time to time.  Most of the time, they just work the Google logo into an image that relates to something happening at the moment, like the football-related logos that were up throughout June. 

The most famous is very likely the Pacman tribute they posted a little while ago.  (Best of all, it's fully playable!)

Responsible for a global drop in productivity

Today, their logo is a bunch of small, colorful circles making up the letters in "Google."  If you move your cursor over them, they zip around the window, zooming in and out until they return to their starting positions. 

 

 Google's animated homepage

This looks just like a lot of pages that web designers have made to show off the power of HTML5, the next revision of HTML that would incorporate a lot of the things, like animation, that designers currently use Flash for.  They might just be showing off.  But they might be trying to make a whole lot of people sit up and notice what HTML5 can do.

Your language and you

This article, from The New York Times, has been making the rounds on the internet lately, and it's one of the most thought-provoking pieces that I've read in a while.  The title, Does Your Language Shape How You Think?, tells you what the article is about.  I'm a language geek, so it's natural that I'd be interested in things like this:

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

Back in the "bad, old days," the assumption that one's language reinforced nationalist and sometimes racist stereotypes was all too common.  That view has been largely banished, but this article is fascinating examination of the ways in which your language does color your perceptions

Did Apple just become the world's biggest Net Neutrality advocate?

Have you heard?  There are shiny, new products from Apple!  Of course, things got smaller, and better, and sexier.  The Apple TV caught my eye.  It fits perfectly into the portfolio of devices that allow people to consume whatever media they like on Apple devices, with an Apple user experience.  But I wonder if it's going lead to Apple going head to head with the likes of Verizon, Comcast, and Google to defend Net Neutrality?

The Apple TV is small box, about the size of a hockey puck, that plugs into your TV.  It has wi-fi, so you stream video straight to your TV.  Unlike other set top boxes, including the previous version of the Apple TV, you don't store anything on the device.  You don't own any movies or TV shows, you just rent them.  For that to work, you must have a fast, steady internet connection.  And that's where Apple's interests may run contrary to cable providers.

Right now, my cable TV service comes from Comcast.  I also get my internet access from Comcast.  There is a huge number of shows that I'll watch if they happen to be on while I happen to bored.  But there are only four shows that I make a point of watching.  With an Apple TV, watching four shows a week would cost $4, or $16 for the month.  That's way less than Comcast's cable TV.  Which begs they question, why pay for a redundant service that bundles literally dozens of channels I never watch with the few that I do?

Good question!  But this gets complicated because of the fact that in my case, three of the four shows I make of point of watching are on NBC.  Comcast owns NBC, and the network has not yet signed on to provide content for the Apple TV.  Fox, ABC, and the Disney Channel are signed on so far.  What happens if Comcast the ISP throttles the bandwidth for video on demand services that compete with Comcast the Media Company?  What happens if they offer one tier–speed or a monthly data cap–to customers who only purchase internet access and another (better) tier to customers who buy TV and internet?  Right now, that can't happen.  Internet service providers treat everything that passes through their "tubes" equally, but there's a big push to change that.   That's what the Net Neutrality debate is all about.

Consumers are still figuring out how they want to consume TV shows, and companies are still figuring out how they want to provide them.  Legislators and lobbyists are still figuring out what to do about Net Neutrality.  Apple's new product makes it look like one of the biggest tech companies in the world suddenly has a very strong interest in preserving Net Neutrality.