Google Category Archives
мой инвентарь
16 July 2010 | Apple, Facebook, Google, Internet, Lifeform, The Great Game | No Comments
несмотря на то, что Google Buzz, кажется, начинает в конце концов работать[1], понятно все же, что ничего, кроме очередного провала, он создателям не принес. как и все предыдущие социальные проекты Google. как и Lively. как и Orkut. как и Wave. как и что-нибудь еще.
скорее всего, случилось это по целому ряду причин, зачастую, возможно, даже противоложных друг другу. интересны, впрочем, не отдельные какие-то аспекты, но срез вцелом: почему большие игроки провалились на рынке социальных услуг?
What’s the main difference between successful Google applications (search, maps, news, email) and a successful social applications? With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave.
натурально, так оно и есть:
Consider this example: Google Answers focused on answers and failed; Yahoo! Answers focused on social and succeeded. The primary purpose of a social application is connecting with others, seeing what they’re up to, and maybe even having some small, fun interactions that though not utilitarian are entertaining and help us connect with our own humanity. Google apps are for working and getting things done; social apps are for interacting and having fun.
хорошая статья, в общем. собственно, во многом именно поэтому я и не использую Facebook. а количество тех, за кем пытаюсь следить в Twitter, застряло на 12 — и никакой социальной цепи мы не создаем, поскольку вращаемся по разным орбитам, и, следовательно, непрерывно свободны.
но кроме разницы в целях, налицо, как пишет Адам Рифкин, так же разница в подходах:
Social apps are whimsical and fun; Google apps are whittled and functional.
и вот как раз отголоски этих различий можно увидеть не только на примере социальных задач, но куда шире. скажем, прошлогоднее наблюдение о дизайне:
Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
или свежевыпущенный App Inventor для Android:
I won’t even begin to argue about whether App Inventor’s UI components are as elegant as Cocoa’s. They aren’t. But Google has taken another direction altogether: the user’s experience isn’t going to be perfect, but the user’s experience will be the experience he or she wants.
замечательная платформа — там же, сразу в рекламном ролике и видно, что на самом деле хочет пользователь. но как бы ни было, Google в самом деле старается решать пользовательские задачи.
однако, многие ли понимают разницу между обычным молтоком, киянкой и скальным? да что там, хотя бы между столярным и геологическим? кто знает об инструментах и разбирается в них, кроме специалистов? хочет ли корпорация и дальше оставаться зажатой в своей нише? или все-таки стремится стать чем-то еще?
им решать.
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[1] — как выяснилось, я погорячился. он все так же с пятого на десятое, как и раньше.
делай сам
9 July 2010 | Apple, Google, Software | No Comments
к слову о разработке для мобильных платформ — вот различия между подходами Apple и Google. комменты тоже хорошие.
непутевые заметки
23 June 2010 | Facebook, Geography, Google, Internet, Privacy, Security, Software | No Comments
уже писал мельком о Google Latitude, и жизнь, как оказалось, не стоит на месте:
Right now, what people share on Facebook is usually pretty tame: a status update, photo, a link, a video, an action in an app. The ones with the greatest potential to creep people out are the geo-specific ones, which probably explains why Facebook is taking its sweet time to roll out its own geo features like geo-tagged updates and photos. If you think the current uproar over Facebook privacy is bad, wait until Facebook embraces location-based apps in a big way.
на любой вкус и цвет:
When it comes to geo-privacy there are two extremes. Foursquare makes you explicitly check into each place where you want to share your location. That is good for privacy—you only have yourself to blame if you broadcast your location from the strip club—but it makes using the application a bit of a chore.
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On the other end of the spectrum is Google Latitude, which constantly broadcasts your location everywhere you go, but only to people you allow to see it and only at the level of detail you are comfortable with (by city or general neighborhood, for instance). Latitude is a set it and forget it model.
хотелось бы, однако, чуть иначе:
Somewhere in between the concept of the explicit check-in and constant geo-tracking is the notion of geo-fences. The idea is that you would basically draw fences around neighborhoods or other locations from where you want to broadcast where you are and places where you don’t. So maybe anytime you travel a certain distance from your home or office, the geo-sharing could begin.
или вот так:
Drawing geo-fences is still a lot of work. What would be more helpful, perhaps, would be the ability to tell an application to broadcast your location anytime you are in a public space—a restaurant, a park, a bar, a conference.
как бы там ни было, потенциал в любом случае огромен, игрушки получились замечательные. но вот что делать с безопастностью?
все лишнее
12 June 2010 | Google, Software | No Comments
мой Google Reader теперь выглядит так. благодаря CSS.
война конкурентам
8 June 2010 | Apple, Google, Software, The Great Game | No Comments
кстати, Эппл старается заново изобрести и рекламу тоже:
Similar to AdMob, iAd will facilitate integrating advertisements into applications sold on the iOS App Store. If the user clicks on an iAd banner, a full-screen advertisement is going to appear in-app, rather than sending the user into Safari. Ads are promised to be more interactive than on other advertising services, and users will able to close them at any time, seamlessly returning to where they left their app.
плюс, заодно в очередной раз ненароком проехались по главному рекламному агенству в сети:
Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles.
физики шутят
8 June 2010 | Apple, Google, Hardware, The Great Game | No Comments
к слову о двух компаниях и свежепредставленном телефоне:
Google remains the default search engine in iOS 4, but on all the demo phones in the hands-on area for the media, the search engine was set to Bing.
хорошие.
кто ищет, тот найдет
18 May 2010 | Copyright, Google, Internet | No Comments
о том, как можно поплатиться за просто ссылки и, например, за торрент-файлы (которые тоже суть ссылки) уже было слишком много.
что ж, вот еще один взгляд на проблему:
In what seems like a role reversal, Google has filed a lawsuit against Blue Destiny Records in an attempt to assert that it has not infringed the record label’s copyrights.
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Blue Destiny Records first sued Google for copyright infringment in December 2009 over links to copyrighted content hosted on Rapidshare. According to the new lawsuit (PDF) by Google, Blue Destiny Records intended to hold Google liable “for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link”.
According to a Hollywood Reporter article by Eriq Gardner, that original suit cliamed that Rapidshare was running “‘a distribution center for unlawful copies of copyrighted works’ and that Google (and Microsoft’s Bing search engine) were helping to prop up the company.” Google states in this latest suit that it responded “expiditiously” to the record label’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaints “by removing, or disabling access to, links leading to webpages allegedly containing material infringing BDR’s copyrights” and that it should be protected by DMCA safe harbor.
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It seems that Google wants to preserve its way of doing business, wherein its search engine can index without regard for copyright and only needs to act when a DMCA take-down notice is issued. A decision holding Google responsible for copyrighted content, which it pulled down after the notice, would mean that the company would need to be much more discriminatory in its indexing of content
т.е., ссылки на противоправно распространяемые материалы, охраняемые авторским правом, Гугл все-таки будет убирать. но при этом хочет, чтобы сам факт их существования не вменяли ему в вину.
иными словами, незаконность подобных ссылок поисковой гигант все-таки признает. и оспаривать этот факт не собирается.
а между тем как раз в этом и заключаются основные, на мой взгляд, ограничения, которые пытаются навязать нам так называемые правообладатели:
Should links be criminalized? Or should this sort of copyright infringement claim be reserved for actual hosting of content? And as we asked when we looked at the case of DMCA take-downs and Twitter, how many degrees of separation must there be before a link is no longer a criminal act? If we link to Google, which links to Rapidshare, which is hosting the content, should we also be held accountable for infringing copyright?
вот именно.
признать забор виновным в брани
26 April 2010 | Censorship, Google, Internet | No Comments
Google has been fined 8,500 dollars in Brazil after an anonymous Internet user posted defamatory messages on one of its sites against a priest, calling him a “pedophile,” media reported Sunday.
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“By making space available on virtual networking sites, in which users can post any type of message without any checks beforehand, with offensive and injurious content, and, in many cases, of unknown origin, (Google) assumes the risk of causing damage” to other people, judge Alvimar de Avila said.
параллели напрашиваются сами собой.
перестройка
23 April 2010 | Facebook, Google, Internet | 1 Comment
добро пожаловать в новый дивный интернет:
Today at Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his plan to turn the Web into “instantly social experiences.” The building blocks to this super-social Web are Facebook’s new Open Graph and Social Plugins, which include new “like” buttons everywhere on sites outside Facebook.com, auto-login capabilities for those sites without clicking on Facebook Connect, and even a Facebook social bar which includes several of these plugins plus Facebook chat (goodbye, Meebo).
We’ve reported on all of these new features before, but today Zuckerberg put them into context: “we are building a Web where the default is social.” How is Facebook doing this? First and foremost, Facebook has redesigned its Graph API for developers so that not only can they see the social connections between people, but they can also see and create the connections people have with their interests—things, places, brands, and other sites. Zuckerberg calls it the Open Graph (as opposed to the Social Graph). It is really an Interest Graph.
и дальше уже Брет Тэйлор:
The most interesting thing Taylor said was that Facebook’s stance is that social connections are going to be just as important going forward as hyperlinks have been for the web.
ага:
So that’s Taylor selling Facebook’s Open Graph to thousands of startups out there. And many are likely to bite. There’s no denying that social graphs are the key to a service being sticky, and there is no better social graph than Facebook’s.
Companies will have to choose whether to fight against this, and attempt to launch their own graph, or get in line. “When we connect our graphs together, the web is gonna get a whole lot better,” Zuckerberg promised.
иллюстрации
9 April 2010 | Copyright, Google, Software | 1 Comment
перспектива всемирной библиотеки смотрится все сомнительней:
On Wednesday, the American Society of Media Photographers and other groups representing visual artists plan to file a class-action lawsuit against Google, asserting that the company’s efforts to digitize millions of books from libraries amount to large-scale infringement of their copyrights.
не загнать силком в рай, никак.
за Buzz, кстати, им тоже на днях досталось.