Posts tagged as: google

Adam Bosworth sighting

The last time I got to talk with Adam Bosworth was a little over a year ago, just before he vanished into Google. Now Garett Rodgers reports that his name appeared on the PC Forum attendee list with the title "Architect, Google Health." I respect Adam as one of the best database designers in the business. Heck, just designing Reflex in the early Eighties wins him a place in the software hall of fame. If Google actually lets him build a quality product, and doesn't rush it out half-baked and then leave it in beta for a few years, he could make a significant contribution to one of our nation's greatest challenges. Please, please, please don't let this be another Google Base.

Blodget on Google is a must read

Google is stumbling so badly in its relations with the financial world that I can hardly stand watching. At some point even a train wreck is beyond morbid fascination. How often can I find myself asking them, "So, you aren't the smartest, best executing people in the world after all?" I do, however, keep track through Henry Blodget's blog. His comments on the latest click-fraud settlement are a must read for anyone following Google. Google for someone like Blodget, is like George Bush for Jon Stewart.

Members of Congress don't want their search history made public either

I knew that the DOJ-Google lawsuit would have beneficial repercussions. CNet is reporting that there is a bill in Congress to force websites to 'delete information about visitors, including e-mail addresses, if the data is no longer required for a "legitimate" business purpose.' It makes you wonder how many members of Congress have been using Google to find out if the Hilton in Paris allows you to play videos. They may not all have iPods, but I bet they all use Google.

$1,000,000,000 for free software

If I hadn't already written my "Are they insane?!" post for the week, I would have more to say about Google's deal with Dell. Instead I'll let Henry Blodget say it for me.

Weekly "Google is out of control" post

It's more than a week since my last "Google is out of control" post, so I thought I would simply list the new ventures that Google is now rumored to be starting:

• Creating an online payment system to compete with PayPal
• Building a car navigation system with Volkswagen
• Expanding their advertising network to include radio and TV
• Expanding their advertising network to include newspapers.
• Creating their own desktop Linux distribution to compete with Windows

And best of all. Wait for it.

• Building their own Internet

Do I believe all of these rumors? Of course not, but the fact that Google is leaving them unchallenged is disturbing in so many ways. Notice something missing from this list of grandiose plans for expansion? Look closely. I'll give you a clue. It is the one thing that drives the advertising engine that provides almost all of their income. That's right. Search!

News aggregation is the next battleground

The blogosphere has come to accept the idea of online feed aggregators, as long as only excerpts of posts are republished. Now that Google has become everyone's favorite target, the subject of news aggregation looks to be the next area of dispute. The World Association of Newspapers is making the latest "they're stealing our content" accusations. They are objecting to the use of excerpts by search engines as a violation of fair use, and the group's president, Gavin O'Reilly, has adopted the catchy phrase of "Napsterization" to describe the process. Remember the old line about never picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel? I guess we will find out if the people who buy ink and paper can take on one of the world's biggest purchasers of networked PCs and bandwidth. (via Susan Mernit)

Google's future anti-trust problems

Steve Ruble has a very thought provoking post about the possibility of the DOJ wanting to break up Google at some point in the future. I agree completely, especially the point about this hinging on the outcome of the 2008 election. Certainly if a Democrat wins the presidency Google is in trouble. I'm sure everyone remembers how the DOJ went after Microsoft during the end of the Clinton years, and then seemed to lose interest after Bush came into office. A much less publicized parallel to this occurred in the early 1980's. I owned a software mail-order business at that time, and knew that the DOJ was investigating price fixing by software companies, which was pretty blatant. I remember George Tate yelling at the top of his lungs at Spring Comdex '82, "If those bastards don't raise their prices, I'll cut them off." A DOJ lawyer had been contacting me fairly regularly about this, but then in the fall of '82 he called and said the case was closed, because the White House had decided that "price fixing was good for the economy." This was during the 1982 recession. I guess Brin and Page had better start contributing to the RNC.

What do RSS readers and urinals have in common?

If you are a regular reader of the MIT Advertising Lab blog, you already know the answer. They are both locations for innovative advertising models. Most blogs tend to follow the crowd and the general buzz, but I never know what to expect when a new post from this unique blog appears in my RSS reader. My favorite post from the recent past was a plan to introduce heat activated urinal billboards or HAUB as they're known in the bathroom advertising industry. To return to the Internet theme of this blog, there have also been great posts on ads in RSS readers and Google Maps.

And Google expects cities to give them every keystroke typed by their citizens?

I've been saying that Google is out of control for months, but now it is hard to know where to begin in listing their present transgressions. I actually hope that they are trying to get all the evil stuff out of the way at once, so we won't be able to keep track. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that is naive. I fear that the truly evil act is yet to come. John Battelle reports on an exchange with a Google PR rep who acknowledged Google's practice of storing IP numbers of users with their search requests. Now connect that with the idea of Google providing free WiFi to a city the size of San Francisco. Will they record every byte passing to and from every computer in that city? You bet they will. Will they cross reference all of this data with IP addresses and user profiles? Of course.

It is interesting that all of this is happening during an election year. The Republicans and Democrats will finally have an issue they can agree on. The resulting legislation should be interesting. I used to think they would be the pin that popped the current bubble. Now I fear that they will drive our entire industry right off a cliff.

What did Google know and when did they know it

The MSM now has a hook they can run with. It's no longer a boring, legalist issue, although they were pretty good at playing up the fear angle. It is now the possibility that Google has been lying about the information they have been collecting. The press hates hypocrisy, except when its theirs of course. (via Tech Memeorandum)

GOOG indicator update

The GOOG indicator is my contrarian approach of buying Google stock when the lead tech bloggers say negative things about GOOG, and selling when they are positive. Yesterday there were several predictions that GOOG would fall, so I bought ten shares at $437. The stock closed at $443.03. I'll hold this position until I see positive comments on GOOG, at which point I'll sell. Does the current fuss about Yahoo supposedly conceding the search market count as a sell indicator? No, because these are statements about Google as a company. Companies and their stock are two distinct entities, which is my whole point. Too many people in the blogosphere mistakenly think they are the same.

Google privacy fallout

A few days ago I wrote that the DOJ-Google lawsuit was a good thing, because it raised the public consciousness about the lack of privacy when using search engines. This morning Squawkbox on CNBC is running a segment on anonymous surfing tools. What's next, Jon Stewart telling jokes about losing his PGP key?

GOOG contrarian indicator

With Google stock now the most visible indicator of the tech industry's health, many tech bloggers have turned into amateur stock analysts. This is starting to become reminiscent of the Yahoo Finance message boards during the later days of the Dotcom boom. The latest example is John Battelle's hot tip on Google's upcoming earnings report. He thinks they are going to miss the street's estimates. I've decided to treat this phenomenon as a contrarian indicator, meaning that I will bet on the opposite side of the blogosphere. Each morning I'll add up the consensus of the GOOG posts in my RSS feeds, and then buy or sell 10 shares of the stock in the opposite direction. This morning things look negative, so I'll be buying. I'll see if I can rig up a simple reporting mechanism on my navbar to show my latest move.

The Google subpoena is a good thing

This morning NPR teased a segment on the DOJ-Google lawsuit with the line "You may not be aware that when you use Google, the sites you visit are recorded." If this one fact enters the public consciousness, then the lawsuit will have done a great service. A few months back I started to write a post saying that I found myself restricting searches that I didn't want made public (Hey, I'm a heterosexual male), but I thought it sounded too paranoid. Now this is becoming common knowledge. This is an important moment for the Web. Next we can start arguing about the propriety of search engines like Google storing user search history in the first place. It's about time that debate was started.

Blodget Blogging

It used to be that people in need of refashioning themselves after a crash would enter rehab and/or appear on Oprah. Now they start a blog. My favorite example is Henry Blodget, whose InternetOutsider blog is fascinating reading. The irony of the blog's title is heightened by such posts as $500. $600. $2,000. Do I Hear $10,000? $0?, in which he makes the bear case for Google. For those who spent the late Nineties under a rock, Blodget was the poster boy (what a great cliche) for the Dot-Com stock craze, when he was a stock analyst for Merrill Lynch. His most famous call was a $400 price target for Amazon. Now that he is coming back after being knocked out of the game, his writing has a humility and gentleness that is refreshing. Definitely aggregator worthy.

What is with the lab coat?

You may not believe this, but I do try to limit my posts on Google. This was one I couldn't pass up. The Economist (the best written magazine on Earth) introduced their profile of Larry Page at CES with the line "DOES Larry Page ever get vertigo when contemplating his life and future?" I've heard about the lab coat, but I've never seen it. Why do I find it really freaky? Maybe because he isn't a doctor! Yes, he was a computer scientist, but that doesn't count. I'm willing to bet that we are looking at our generation's Howard Hughes. (Via Tech.Memeorandum.com)

Why do people think Google is a great software company?

Even more importantly, why does Google think so? Paul Thurrot's detailed review of the new Google Pack shows that it is just a random collection of applications that anyone could download individually from the Web. (Via Dan Farber) Even worse, many of them are older than the versions currently available online. What I can't figure out is why anyone would be surprised by this. Other than search and their ad system, has Google ever done anything amazing with software? Yes, it is very cool the way you can drag Google Maps around on the screen, but we all know now that this is a simple bit of Ajax programming that anyone could implement. I've tried most of Google's eternally beta offerings and have yet to be impressed. In some cases, most prominently GoogleBase, I'm actually furious at the lost opportunity. Are they great at making software because of their current stock price and resulting market cap? In that case, there are plenty of now moribund Internet companies that were once equally brilliant. I still use Google for search, but that is largely out of habit, since I know from tracking my own blog's findability that Google is way behind many other search engines. I've already written about Google's bad case of the God Complex, and the Google Pack is just another example. Do they really think anyone is going to be impressed by this offering, or do they think that we are all so stupid in relation to their obvious genius that we wouldn't notice how lame it is? I've seen this so many times with software companies. How can you tell a company that is doing better than anyone ever imagined that they are f***ing up? You can't. You just wait until it catches up with them, as it always does. Is it fair for me to keep bashing Google like this? As long as the computer industry and the press continue to describe Google as the leading software company in the world, it is not only fair, it is my job.

It's copy protection, not DRM

The blogosphere was so eager to suck up to Google last week that it missed the most important aspect of Google's video announcement at CES. Luckily, BusinessWeek's description got it exactly right.

That's right, you pay Google to "buy" a video, but you can only watch it in an environment that allows Google to control the delivery of ads.

The most important part of this quote is BusinessWeek's use of the term "copy protection" instead of DRM. They don't even mention DRM in the article. They go on to explain what is waiting for consumers because of this copy protection scheme. The only good thing about Google's move is that it accelerates the pace at which consumers will become aware of the massive scam being perpetrated against them. Don't get me wrong. I'm a free market capitalist. I'm not screaming "content wants to be free." Content providers and authors should and must be paid for their work. I just find it offensive that the word "buy" is being used when it should be "rent." The sooner consumers understand this, the sooner they will demand alternatives.

How can bloggers help? By dropping the term DRM in favor of copy protection. Digital Rights Management is one of those marketing terms like "enhanced experience" introduced by marketing scum. I actually heard the head of TIvo explaining on NPR how ads in the Tivo stream "enhanced the user's experience" while watching recorded shows. If we said copy protection whenever a publisher or content vendor said DRM we would make a major contribution to raising public awareness.

So far the blogosphere hasn't been following this approach. Blogpulse shows that DRM and copy protection are used as synonyms, but DRM is in much greater use. I want to see these positions reverse over the coming months.

What I would really like to see is the invention of a new term for copy protection that will instantly raise the alarm. Its like "web bug." When they were just called cookies, only people who didn't understand computers were afraid of them. Like Tony Soprano, who once warned a mobster to turn off his computer, because the feds could listen in with cookies. As soon as the term web bug was applied instead, even hard-core hackers flipped out. (Yes, I know web bugs are technically different than cookies, but the point is the effect of different words being applied to the same type of practice.)

Until this more frightening term comes along, my New Year's resolution is to be like SNL's subliminal man. Whenever I hear someone say DRM, I'm going to mutter "copy protection." That should make me real popular at David Berlind's talk on DRM (copy protection) at Berkman this week.

I hope I never have to say "paper" books

I spent this afternoon in the stacks at Harvard's Widener Library. For some reason I felt the need to be surrounded by old books. It was probably caused by writing about ebooks the other day. I love books, and Widener is one of the world's great libraries, although finding things can be a challenge. At Widener they laughingly refer to the Dewey decimal system as the "new classification scheme." But then Harvard people like to remind you that the university was there before America was a country.

My favorite part of Widener is D West, which is the farthest section in the library's sub-sub-sub-basement, not a place for the claustrophobic. The smell of old books is something I've loved since my father started taking me to used-book stores in New York and Philadelphia as a child, and this smell seems strongest in D West. Perhaps it is because this is where they keep the old magazines, like Punch and Harpers Weekly. Selecting a shelf at random I found myself in front of the First Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica dated 1771. They have stuff like this sitting on the shelves for anyone to read. Last year I had a bet going with the other grad students to see who could take out the oldest book. The best I ever did was a book on comparative anatomy by Couvier dated 1796. The Britannica was for in-library reference only, so I sat down and browsed through it.

I soon realized that this was exactly what I was yearning for. In this Google age we have come to believe that it is possible to find the "best" answer to a search. Sitting with this centuries-old book drove home the idea that there is no right answer, there are just answers that fit the context of their time. For example, the entry for America was only one paragraph long, and described it as "one of the four continents" with an indigenous population of "copper-coloured" natives. My favorite entry was for buccaneer, which described them in the present tense and seemed to have a sense of national pride (Britannica was published in Scotland) at the way they harassed the Spanish navy. Google, on the other hand, thinks they are a football team from Tampa.

This doesn't mean that Google is wrong. I'm sure most people looking for Buccaneer today do want the football team. The problem is that search engines in general make it impossible to recognize the changing context of information. I can't ask the Web "what did people mean by a particular term in the 18th century, or the 19th?" Soon even the 20th century will be overlaid by a new set of best answers. Once Google indexes all the world's books, will their algorithms determine the best answer to every question?

For some reason this makes me incredibly sad. Was my generation the last one to get most of its education from books? Even worse, will I live to see the time when the qualifier "paper" books will be necessary, just like the snide use of "snail mail" to differentiate it from email?

Seeing Google from a new perspective

My personal opinion of Google is that it is out of control and has a real chance of bringing the Nasdaq back down when it finally crashes. I also recognize that many website owners are thrilled by the amount of money they are making from running Google ads. Their perspective is worth exploring. When my RubyRiver aggregator is ready, I'll be including Google ads on the pages. I'm also going to be buying a small number of ads on Google to promote this site. These are both experiences that I need to understand. All of my web advertising experience is with banner ads. We ran millions of banner ads a day on the Andover.net sites with our own sales people and code, but we never used Google's ad system.

Another aspect of Google I want to learn more about is search engine optimization. This is a shadowy world that seems to be a magnet for hucksters. We did some of this at Andover, but nothing of the sophistication available today. One of the many ads that appear on Google when searching for "adwords" is:

This is so reminiscent of the nonsense that prevailed when the Web first got hot. Like TV ads showing how you could make a fortune without even owning a computer.

Don't be immature

Google's purchase of 5% of AOL is now official, and the issue that everyone, including the mainstream media, is picking up on is Google's agreement to start giving preference to AOL content in its search. Of course, nobody is passing up the opportunity to remind people of Google's "Don't be evil" motto. Google's promotion of this mantra is a perfect example of the immaturity of the people running the company. Idealism is great for kids in college or grad school, but an adult businessperson would have warned them that capitalism isn't based on good and evil, it is about profit and loss. Eventually you have to do things that are legal, but maybe unpalatable. Google is now entering that phase, and instead of being viewed as pragmatic and maturing, they are being painted as evil, just for doing what every other website already does.

If I sound a bit cranky when discussing Google, it is because I'm really nervous about having them as the perceived leader of the industry in which I work. For the next few years at least we will rise and fall along with Google. It's funny. Microsoft was the industry leader for so many years, and they were always viewed as evil, at least within the industry. When Microsoft slipped it was an occasion for joy and schaudenfreud. Now when Google slips, it signals a loss in the potential for the entire Web.

As I write this I'm listening to Squawk Box on CNBC. The announcer just teased the next segment as follows:

The press lives by building up icons and then tearing them down. If this pattern repeats itself with Google, we will all face the consequences.

Taking the God Complex to a new height

I've been reading a great discussion of Google that took place earlier this month. (via Matt Mullenweg)

One of the most frightening quotes is about Sergey Brin's expectations for Google:

I don't know why, but this gives me the creeps. Not the possible application of search to discover medical cures, but the almost megalomaniacal perspective. I especially like the part about "long-term perspective." Google is seven years old. It went public less than 2 years ago. Back in the Eighties, during the first round of explosive growth for software, we saw a phenomenon called the "God Complex," where a software company becomes so enamored of its success and imagined ability that its goals reach greater and greater heights of hubris. In theory, software can do anything, and if you are a software God, you too can do anything. In practice, great coders are still human. Brin seems to have taken the God complex to heart to an extent I have never seen before.

The first time I observed the God Complex in action was in 1984 at Lotus Development Corporation. This was about 16 months after the launch of 1-2-3, and one of the Lotus executives was describing their future plans. He concluded his rather grandiose presentation with the statement "Corporations will continue to buy from Lotus, because they have always bought from Lotus." I never forgot that claim, even though the world has largely forgotten Lotus and 1-2-3.

Google paranoia knows no limits

This interview with Larry Page in 2038 is best discovered in an RSS feed filled with headlines about Google killing industries with every move. (via Inside Google)

The coming SAPI war

If the Web, at least the interesting part of it, is going to look like a huge collection of search engine items, then everyone is going to start building search engines. It's easy to predict a two-tier business model in the future, with major search engines offering API access to their code and data, and a second layer of application developers building cool mashups, remixes, aggregates, whatever, on top of this world wide data base. A major choke point is going to be the Search API (SAPI) used to access this data. It is far too early to tell which API will win, but it is in the adoption of a defacto standard SAPI that the war will be fought.

There is a tradition within the computer trade press to describe such competitive situations as wars. The wide range of military metaphors this provides makes it an obvious choice. Headline writers alone are immensely grateful for its use. We have had spreadsheet wars, and OS wars, and browser wars. Now we can have a search engine war with SAPI as the ammunition.

Search engines have long been tools of individual habit and taste. I use Google, my wife uses Yahoo!. There are toolbar schemes to lock people into one search engine, but users are still able to migrate or use multiple engines of their choosing. If there is a viable business model for an application layer on top of search engines, something still to be proven, then the battle for SAPI lock-in will become brutal, because it will make customer migration or multiple use more difficult. Users won't know, or care, what search engine is running under the hood. To be Web 1.0 about it, SAPI will become the superglue of search engine stickiness.

Google Destruction?

Google launches beta of database that may capture a sizeable portion of the classified ads market, and three weeks later Verizon announces the sale of its yellow pages division. Coincidence?

Has Google jumped the shark?

John Battelle ponders this question on SearchBlog, and correctly identifies arrogance as Google's Achille's heel:

What do you mean it's free?

I had dinner last night with an old friend from the software business and once again had one of those conversations where we try to come to grips with a new Internet economic model. In 1995 I was telling my software friends to drop everything and start publishing web sites, but what is the business model they asked? Why should they give content away on public web pages when they could publish with AOL or Compuserve? In 1999 I was telling them to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and try to wrap their heads around free software. But how can we give away software and still make money they cried? Last night I explained what I knew about microcontent, and said that in their rush for customers the major content holders and search engines would provide unlimited APIs and RSS feeds for all of their content.

The next wave of freely available intellectual property will once again distort the Internet economy, but that won't prevent it from happening. I don't think that there is some inevitable progression to all IP being free. Each set of changes took place for different reasons and in different times, but it is clear that massive change can occur before there is an economic justification. The Internet doesn't care if anyone makes money or loses money, the Internet serves the crowd.

The "Berlin Wall" of this next burst of data freedom will be when Google unlocks the limits on its search engine API. I say to you Brin and Page, tear down that wall!

Google on cover of BusinessWeek

If you are a pessimist towards Google, you have to see this week's BusinessWeek as a peak that represents a top, probably not The top, but still a sign that things are getting a little crazed at the company. This is a one of a long series of articles about trying to do business at Google. The anecdote in this article is typical:

Always on the lookout for a good 767 reference

I agree with Jack Shafer's premise, but not his predictions in his article about Google's future in Slate, but the article does have a great 767 reference:

Dave Winer has the best week ever

Ever since I became aware of the Web 2.0 meme I've been telling people that Dave Winer was one of the pivotal forces behind this new wave, maybe the central force. Everyone would have to admit that with GoogleBase turning out to be the world's biggest RSS database, and Ray Ozzie announcing Microsoft's synchronization and replication protocol based on RSS, Dave Winer is having the best week ever! Ozzie's announcement letter can only be described as effusive in his praise of Winer's role:

Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it. My question is what comes next Dave? What are you working on for the wave after this, because I think this one is going to be pretty condensed.

Lest anyone reading this get the wrong idea, I should also make it clear that Dave and I haven't spoken in a couple of years and I'm hardly a sycophant, but that doesn't diminish my estimate of his influence on where the computer industry is headed. For right or wrong, we're riding the RSS train now.

Googlebase Criticisms

Sam Ruby is doing a thorough review of the Googlebase data formats and he isn't happy about their feeds:

2006: The Year the Web Explodes

Once I get past the annoyance at Google for dribbling out Googlebase in such a piecemeal fashion, I can see a much larger consequence than the simple issue of features within Googlebase itself. They have accelerated existing forces that will blow the web apart within the next 6 to 8 months. It is no coincidence that just as I'm thinking about Google's RSS reading database I'm also working to make my blogs able to deliver their content as customized RSS feeds on demand.

The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website's content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a "place" where data "is" and other sites "point" to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why "go" to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream.

So why the hyperbole? Haven't sites been publishing RSS feeds for years? Yes, but those feeds only included recent items. Google wants ALL of our data. If websites now start leaving all their content outside their internal database for anyone to collect, the data will propagate and then morph into a different web from what we have now.

Is the price of Google news?

Announcing the new highs for GOOG stock may or may not be a good sign. Its good that tech stocks are going up. That tide will raise all boats, but if we tie ourselves to the price of GOOG, are we tied on the way down?

DIY Googlemap

Wayfaring.com is genuinely useful and similar to a project I want to work on myself. Map apps are instantly and universally compelling. DIY map apps will be huge.

Everyone has their own Googlebase

The initial reaction in the blogosphere is very different from mine. Most people are reacting to the mere fact that Google has a "database," and filtering it through their personal view of Google, Ebay, Microsoft, etc. Few are actually looking at how it works, and the ones who do often say that they are intimidated. Dude! have you ever SEEN a database?

One problem, which Bosworth may have realized more than I, is that today's end-users may actually be less application savvy than even the average user in 1985. Many of them, especially bloggers, even A-list bloggers, use the computer purely as a communication and publishing device. They are extremely adept at IM, blogging, email, IRC, and even the new areas like tags, but they probably have no reason to use Excel, and I wonder how many users under the age of 25 have ever seen Access or any other database of similar complexity.

I'm not proclaiming the dumbing down of the average computer user, just the shifting of their experience to text oriented, social interactions. So are they ready for the type of database I want? Will they ever be? Surely if we have to start with tags and work our way back up to even flat files, which are still way beyond the capability of Googlebase, this is going to be a long education process. But there are still going to be application developers. Will they be solely professionals? Will we not see a new wave of user-developers emerge on the web as we saw during the PC revolution?

I still think Googlebase has to become much more, and that they realize it. For example, to drive the Google maps API, which is red-hot right now, you need a list of locations. Surely they understand that that list should be stored in Googlebase. So they must be planning to deliver the ability to store and manage lists. Which means they must deliver the capability of a flat file database at a minimum.

On the other hand

What if Googlebase isn't a database attached to the Google service, an online version of Access? What if it is just a database designed to post and manage Google search entries? Maybe I misread their intentions. I think I misread their ambitions. A Google entry form is just a glorified submit page. Even if it does take bulk submits, more on that later, it still is just a submit mechanism. On the other hand if it actually is a submit mechanism for search, the SEOs are going to be going out of their minds right now. I better spend some time wth their blogs. And of course, John Battelle's.

This is not Googlebase

This is not Googlebase. This is not a beta. This is not an alpha. This is not an app. This is a screen show. This will be the most actively tested and documented screen show in software history.

I can't blame them for wanting to put something up, but this will not help them. If they leave this up for a long time, people will dismiss it. If they keep dribbling out features like this, people will get angry. I'm already getting angry thinking about wasting time describing what is up now.

My best podcast was with Adam Bosworth describing why Reflex failed and Access didn't. He is too wise to get himself in this type of situation. Yet he apparently has.

Googlebase, Googlebase, Googlebase!

It's up. This has to be the first time the launch of a database has gotten people excited since Microsoft Access, another Bosworth effort. I can't wait until Adam is allowed to talk about this. That will be enough to get me podcasting again. (via Alex Barnet)

Ebay drops API limits

We'll see how long Google holds out against the competitive pressure to open up their search API limits.

If you love tags, set them free

It's clear from this morning's SSA session that control is going to be the key friction point between users and providers of a tagging system. I was struck by the way the knowledgebase and database guys immediately hit on the looseness of tags as a weakness of a folksonomy. Well, yeah, of course they're loose, that's where the "folks" come from. It is this looseness, which creates a tag cloud around a concept. That cluster of words can be just as useful (or even more) than the web objects they point to.

Google has convinced advertisers and the financial markets that a large text stream, such as Google search, is extremely valuable, so it would follow that a tag stream would be more valuable, because tags are more concentrated. A freely growing tag cloud can help advertisers find the magic words that users associate with their world. I was impressed by the wisdom of Jashua Schachter's comments that he wouldn't put constraints on the way users named tags. Now that I've thought about it for a few weeks, I agree. As soon as you try manipulating the tag stream you change it in unknown ways. I think there needs to more education of the public on the difference between categorizing databases and tagging systems. We can agree to allow both to exist for different purposes.

Besides, allowing variation within a collection of tags makes evolution of the language possible. As users get better at tagging there can be an open breeding ground of new tags and compound tags. Losing this rich potential is not justified in exchange for more consistency.

I was right, Google maps are easy

I got a chance to read over the Google Maps API documentation last night, and it looks like my guess that it would be easy is correct. I can see why so many map mashups have appeared. I should have my first one working within a few hours of starting to code, which will hopefully be tonight after I get back from the SSA.

Google maps API comes next

Based on the speed at which Google Maps mashups are appearing I get the feeling it must be pretty easy to do. I'm supposed to be at this conference later today and tomorrow, but Im going to see if I can fit in a quick check of the Maps API late tonight.

Google academic papers

The footnotes to Chapter 2 of "The Search" cited a 1998 paper, "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine," by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It described the early Google architecture and their plans for it. It's pretty readable, and provides an interest glimpse of their views before they dreamed of controlling the world from their own 767 continually circling the globe at 40,000 feet.

A little research revealed a set of additional papers by Brin and Page, or in some cases one of them along with other co-authors. Someday these papers may provide a historian of science with some valuable source material. I wonder if they saved their early emails?

• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
• What can you do with a Web in your Pocket?
• Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web.
• Data Mining: Exploring Large Rule Spaces by Sampling
• Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering
• Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data

I also came across Sergey's home page from Stanford circa 1998, where I found this adorable picture of him.

Book Note: The Search

After a long day of Ruby coding it's time for a little bedtime reading. Here's another installment of the abridged version of "The Search." Much of this chapter is a recounting of lost opportunities with search engines that preceded Google, which I'll spare you, but there are some fascinating factoids about search and some interesting insights.

Chapter 2. Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How (Much)

Book Note: The Search

I finished this book a month ago, but I was so impressed that I decided to go back and see if I could collect the key insights from each chapter to create an abbreviated guide. Hopefully this will encourage you to buy and read the whole thing.

Chapter 1. The Database of Intentions

The rumors of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated

The Web 2.0 bubble has reached the predictable stage of assuming that Microsoft will inevitably fail to adapt to this latest tech craze. You can get the feel for it by reading the comments on Scoble's post about this subject. Where have we seen this before? Oh yes, in December 1982 when VisiOn was announced at Fall Comdex and the press (this was before blogs existed) fell all over itself predicting that Microsoft would lose control of the operating system market to the new wave of integrating environments and integrated products. We saw it again in 1995 when Netscape's browser was going to wipe out Microsoft, because Gates just didn't understand the Internet. Now ten years later we are again hearing that Microsoft is a dinosaur and can't possibly catch up with the latest web services wave.

Let's get serious for a minute. Microsoft has control over 90% of the desktops on the planet. I haven't seen any stats that web based apps are being used by even a few percentage points of the real users out there. As keeps happening, especially in Silicon Valley, the bleeding edge sees everyone they know going crazy over a new set of technologies, and they extrapolate that onto the general public.

History has shown repeatedly that first-movers do not always win, and often disappear. VisiCorp died within a few years of announcing VisiOn, and Microsoft won that round with two products that they hadn't even started work on in 1982: Windows and Office. Netscape failed under the weight of their own arrogance, and IE is now the dominant browser. It isn't just Microsoft who has beat the early market leaders. When Google first appeared, Yahoo was firmly entrenched as the dominant search engine.

I'm far from a Microsoft fan. I've made plenty of jokes about Gates being the Antichrist. I just don't see how the race for a set of technologies that may be exciting (I'm excited by the potential of Web 2.0 too), but haven't produced any products that real people (not bloggers) are using in any sizeable numbers is already over.

Microsoft keeps winning these races for two reasons:

• They keep plugging away at an application area until they do eventually get it right. They have the cash and the fortitude to keep retooling until the market starts adopting their solution.
• Their competitors ALWAYS f*** up. This is the part where I may believe in the supernatural aspects of Gates' success. I've seen it too many times, Fylstra, Kapor, Andreesen. There is something about becoming a billionaire, or at least a hundred-millionaire, that warps people's minds and ability to innnovate. Gates has avoided this, but look at Page and Brin with their new 767 toy. The drumbeat for Google as the new evil empire can be clearly heard.

Do I think Microsoft will inevitably win this race? Of course, not. Nothing is inevitable. But anyone who says the race is already over, and Microsoft can't turn the ship around fast enough is either a fool, has an axe to grind, has no idea of the history of this industry, or all of the above.

Multiple bodies colliding with their heads cut off

Ah, for the simple days when it was just Netscape with a browser causing the fuss, and all Microsoft had to do was suck out all their air with IE to kill them. Today, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo all competing to do EVERYTHING anyone could ever want (even that is questionable) with a computer, it is almost impossible to tell where the leading edge is leading to. I guess the computer industry expanding in all directions at the same time is the definition of a bubble. The real reason why bubbles form and then expand to extremes is that there is no chance for customer feedback. The Web 1.0 bubble was funded by VC money chasing markets without any time to see if there was any money to be made. Web 2.0 is expanding because the Big Four are locked in a steel cage deathmatch and don't have time to see if any of their new projects in beta will find a positive response from the market. By market I mean actual users in the millions, not just tens of thousands of bloggers.

I agree with Dave Winer about the Google API

Dave has put forth the proposal that the Google search API be made a common standard, and more importantly that Microsoft implement it without limits.. I couldn't agree more. I haven't written about the Google API yet, but in the past when I read over Google's API terms of use they made my blood boil with their massive arrogance. Here's the part of their FAQ that really gets to me:

In other words if you want to build a business on this API, you can just take a flying leap.

It would serve Google right if their API became a standard, and others allowed it to actually be used by everyone to make money, not just Google.

Lots of balls in the air

I've got so many projects ideas that I think I should list them, if only to remind me of where I want to go:

• CSS: Redesign Darwinianweb.com site to use style sheets.
• Ruby: Amazon API based app to determine the best book on a given subject.
• Ruby on Rails: Rebuild the CMS for this blog from the current FoxPro code.
• Ajax: Google API based app using Google Maps.
• Ajax: A stripped down version of TiddlyWiki as a form of self-modifying page.

The return of FUD

I thought the DOJ agreement forbade Microsoft from engaging in the type of massive pre-announcement they performed yesterday with Microsoft Live. Could it be that the rise of Google has let Microsoft out of their box? Since Google has 50% of the search business and is using their position to dominate EVERY other possible use of software on the Internet, I wonder if MS can now argue that they are no longer in a monopoly position?

The biggest losers yesterday were the new crop of Web 2.0 start-ups. It is clear that they are caught in the middle of a battle between Google and Microsoft to spend billions to capture the next round of applications. One aspect of the DOJ's argument against MS was that bundling represented unfair competition because it allowed MS to undercut competitors on price. Now that MS has adopted the mantra of "advertising will pay for it," they are freed to give away anything they want, even if it "accidentally" crushes lots of little guys.

What the hell is going on with GoogleBase?

I can't tell if Google is playing some kind of elaborate hoax or just getting sloppy. After launching a flood of speculation by turning base.google.com on for a brief period last week, this page has been displaying a broken sign-in form for the last few days. Right now if you open the page it loads your Google membership cookie to get your account name and asks for the matching password. Entering a valid password causes a "loading" message to flashing tantalizingly for a few seconds and then the sign-in form reappears. The form isn't simply broken, since an invalid password returns an error showing that the membership database was queried correctly. So what gives? Since last week's tease there have been over 1,700 articles about Googlebase, according to Google News. Is this some kind of game? I think it is a sign that Google is out of control. A theme I will return to in the future.

Google Maps Mania

One type of app that I want to learn how to build is a Google Maps mashup. The rate at which they are proliferating shows that they must be pretty easy to throw together. Until I get a chance to start programming them I've been keeping up to date with Google Maps Mania.

Adam Bosworth + Google = GoogleBase

There is much buzz about a soon to be released online database at base.google.com. I guess that was easy to predict when Google hired Adam Bosworth. Adam is the author of Reflex, the prettiest database in history, and Access, the database that ate the Xbase world. You can listen to Adam's views on database design in a podcast I did with him this past spring.