Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Fri Mar 19

Videos may be spreading FUD but this one make me think (again) about how of much my data should I give out to Google by using their services.

Has Google reached the point where they are too big like Microsoft used to be in 1990s?

[via Hungry Beast and TechCrunch]

Fri Feb 12

Google Street View, ahem, Ski Slope View. :-)

[via ideasareawesome]

Wed Feb 10

Buzz about Google Buzz

Google Buzz is a new service from Google. It’s goal is to make it easier to share with your (Google) contacts interesting short messages (a la Twitter), photos (a la Flickr), (YouTube) videos, feeds and probably much more (maybe as many sources as FriendFeed supports). All that spruced by your location, either when you’re posting, reading, or searching for relevant information. Once you give Google that “last” piece of the puzzle, your location, empowered by your search history Google already has - you can expect some highly relevant information or sweat dripping down your spine, depending on you love/hate relationship with Google.

Why does it Buzz so much?

Surely, Buzz looks like a great technological achievement. Maybe not as technically challenging and advanced as Google Wave, but surely much more mature, though time will tell.

Great aspect of Buzz service is how it aligns with other Google services - most prominently GMail, Google Latitude and Google Talk at this moment. Google has become over the years a hotbed for innovation giving birth to wide variety of interesting services (some very useful blockbusters, some failures) creating a platform used by many small, medium or large businesses - either relying or completely depending on the Google platform.

My Buzz on Buzz

My gut feeling tells me (buzzes to me) that Google Buzz marks the beginning of new era for Google where it’s using its own platform for creating synergy of services through cross-pollination and integration. As if billions of people aren’t depending on some Google services and (mostly without knowing) are contributing valuable ~~usage~~ search statistics back to Google teams crunching data and deciding what service to create next, what features to improve, what bottlenecks need to be scaled next. At the same time, Google is tapping into the valuable connections that have been already established. If you’ve been chatting with someone - you’re likely to continue communicating via Buzz. The same goes for people you’ve been emailing back and forth. Particularly so for your contacts with whom you’re sharing your physical location via Latitude. The list will surely soon include Google Voice.

Dissecting Buzz about Buzz

What may prove crucial to the success of Google Buzz are two important factors that go in its favor:

Existing user base - your actual contacts are already registered in this Google Buzz social network. People you chat with are there. So are your email correspondents. Of course, people allowed to see where you are via Google Latitude - as well.
Open standards - developers are crucial to the organic growth of a social network. They’re the ones paving the way for a social network to grow. Such growth is meaningful to humans, not the one in PowerPoint presentations or Excel yearly predictions or architectural blueprints. Buzz is based on open standards like Atom, ActivityStrea.ms, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Social Graph API, Salmon Protocol, WebFinger.
Resources and motivation - Google is known for its great working conditions. As for motivation for making Google Buzz the next blockbuster service, it’s not a secret anymore - Google wants to conquer the internet and index everything possible while trying to keep the public perception expression with their famous motto (“don’t be evil”).

Surely, Buzz API documentation will grow as more developers jump onto the bandwagon. Have in mind, open standards are even stronger than open-source projects as several such projects are spawn and evolutionary principles allow the ~~best~~ most useful code to survive.

Who are the people behind Buzz?

It’s worth noting the the young blood Google has recruited for its Social Web initiatives. There people are almost definitely engaged in Google Buzz project:

Joseph Smarr - will be leading Social Web efforts at Google. Previously he was CTO at Plaxo and was leading Portable Contacts, and active in OAuth, OpenSocial and OpenID projects. He’s only 28 years old!
Brad Fitzpatrick - huge contributor to open-source community being the co-creator of OpenID and PubSubHubbub, as well as creator of memcached, Gearman. 30 years old!
Chris Messina - OpenID, inventor of Twitter hashtags (meh). 29 years old.

There are other people that will be involved with Google Buzz:

Chris Chabot who lead Apache Shindig PHP implementation of OpenSocial)
..

Do you know anyone else who’s missing here?

Final thoughts on Buzz

Another interesting fact to emphasize - Google Buzz is not just the first full-blown social networking service that was built inside Google (and not acquired like orkut or acquired and left to die like Dodgeball) but its much more. Buzz can become the hub for all data streams (realtime or not) on the internet, thus allowing Google to expand its reach beyond the search engine and ads, the main sources of Google revenue.

Dodgeball may be dead, but Buzz may be reincarnation of Jaiku.

As for Twitter and Facebook/FriendFeed - they’re must be thinking right now how to stay in the social networking game. Google Buzz probably spells openness and interoperability for Facebook, while Twitter will need to open up its streams of data unless it wants to watch its river go dry.

Buzz Trivia

Here’s Some trivia about the video. This is something interesting to someone from Serbia like myself: in the video, at 0:30 mark is an NY Times article about one of the most famous Serbian national meals - plljeskavica. This explains why I got hungry halfway through the video. :-P Thanks to Ćira from Google for the hint.

Sat Jan 23

Google: “Do no evil!”

China: “Show me your left jab!”

[via juliasegal]

Tue Jan 19

Hilarious Nexus One unboxing video. Ninja’s do it with ~~style~~ flair.

Nice little viral video campaign from Google.

Starting with the most valuable ad spot on the internet to efforts like this, they’re using their immensely developed brand and platform to deliver the same message - you want this ~~superphone~~ smartphone!

Wed Oct 14

How companies keep their employees motivated

This short options menu is short but pretty much sums up the options for Google which is suffering from the biggest brain drain so far in 2009.

Its worth emphasizing: you can replace Google with company X (say, your company’s name) and Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL with A, B and C (i.e. competitor companies’ names).

How does Google continue to keep the troops motivated and excited about their career prospects? A few options spring to mind:

Endorse title inflation in Google: This is the Yahoo route — if you can’t make all those managers into directors and directors into VPs based on numbers, at least do some social promotion so people think they’re moving up, even if their span of control hasn’t changed. Senior Engineers can become Architects in droves. They’re all smart people who in any other company would qualify, so who are we hurting here? The main thing that limits this is the peer review process. Prisoner’s Dilemma here.

Throw some money at training away the problem: This is the Microsoft route. Don’t tell people no, tell them they need to complete some complex multi-stage training program, and let that program lead them around in circles for a few years. During the process, pluck a few people left and right to keep the rest of the herd motivated, but effectively keep the misdirection up long enough so people feel they’re making progress even when they’re not. Bonus: some of that training might help mature the culture some.

Get radically honest and accept the fallout: This is the AOL route — we’re telling the overachievers that they’re not going to get to be a SVP soon and probably ever, and if they quit they quit. Backfill as appropriate with less driven, more status-quo people who can keep the peace and won’t be agitating for promotions you can’t give them. Sound harsh? Remember, the business is growing slower, and shuffling out some of the edgy risky people might be appropriate. There are plenty of A talent who’ve had a family and don’t want to work 80 hours a week any more who might be happy to be a Director for 15 years if it meant they could take off to be at their kids T-ball game. Hire those people to replace the guys who want a shiny new title every 6 months.

Thanks to the pseudo-anonymous commenter Sam Southie. I’ve quoted his comment and also an answer posed in the article from BusinessInsider - “How To Stop The Google Brain Drain”:

[via BusinessInsider]

Thu Aug 13

Google Opt Out

As reported by The Onion: Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village. :-)

[via TechCrunch]

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

As reported by The Onion… :-)

Thu Jun 18

Google has recently started reminding people that Google Search is the discovery engine in a response to Microsoft’s Bing touting itself as one, as if they’re doing something that hasn’t been done before.

The most visible part of this reminding campaign is the new line on the main Google Search page (classic, not personalized page):
Discovering the web: Explore the world of Google search.

Google has also launched a series of 15 second search tips - reminding everyone all the nice information you can get on Google Search. Out of all 17 of them, the video above is my favorite: Fill in the Blanks

[via Google and