Google Category Archives
про игрушки
29 July 2013 | Google, History, Internet, Technology | 2 Comments
пару дней назад, кстати, оказался[1] в Chrome Web Lab, и был несказанно удивлен степенью анти-интуитивности и псевдотехнологичности экспозиции — у Google все-таки исключительно свое видение мира, безмерно далекое от всех на свете, и, судя по количеству посетителей, никому особенно и не интересное.
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в остальном же музей вполне милый, на радость всем. попутно так же было несколько стендов о Тьюринге, правда, совсем уж горемычные, никак не Блетчли-парк — однако, все равно не удержался и похмельными руками зачем-то сфотографировал Энигмы. ↩
врата ада
28 July 2013 | Google, Privacy, Software | No Comments
Chrome shouldn’t be thought of as a web browser; rather, it’s an optimized bi-directional delivery vehicle: the best experience with Google services for users, and maximum user data for Google. And it runs everywhere.
не страшно?
don’t feel ashamed of your Android tablet, huh?
25 July 2013 | Apple, Google, Hardware, Software | 1 Comment
вот, например, одни подсчеты:
[Yesterday] at a press event hosted by Android and Chrome chief Sundar Pichai, Google revealed that there have been 70 million Android tablet activations to date. Google also detailed that, in the first half of 2013, so far one in every two tablets sold globally is based on Android.
а вот другие:
Chitika’s monthly web-traffic report on tablet use published Tuesday shows that the iPad accounted from 84.3 percent of all U.S. and Canadian tablet web use in June. That’s up slightly from 82.4 percent in May and 81.3 percent in April. The 84.3 percent mark is the iPad’s highest share of tablet web use so far this year.
и эти цифры, в общем, даже не сильно противоречат друг другу, мне кажется. в смысле, покупать-то андроидное люди покупают, конечно. дешево, популярно, и так далее. вот только не пользуются затем. ибо <...>.
if you were not entirely committed to tablet computing, wouldn’t you be likely to buy the cheapest tablet available? And when the user experience doesn’t wow you, you tend not to use it.
snowflakes
18 July 2013 | Facebook, Google, Hardware, Software, Technology | No Comments
When I was watching the launch event for Facebook Home, a loud alarm bell started ringing for me when Mark Zuckerberg said words to the effect that “phones should be about more than apps – they should be about people” – by which of course he meant “about Facebook”. The problem with this is that actually, we’ve spent the last 6 years making phones about more than just people. People use Facebook on their phones a LOT, yes, but they do a lot of other things as well[1]. If all I wanted was a phone about people I’d be using a $20 Nokia with a battery that lasts a month.
The same point, I think, applies to Google Glass. If you spend all day in the Googleplex, thinking googly thoughts about data ingestion and Now and the interest graph, then having ‘Google’ hovering in front of your eyes instead of rubbing on a phone seems like a really obvious progression. If everyone you know owns a Tesla and is deeply engrossed in new technology, then the idea that there might be social problems with Glass doesn’t come up – everyone’s too busy saying ‘AWESOME!’. In much the same way, no-one on the Facebook Home team seems to have realised that most people’s news feed isn’t full of perfectly composed photos of attractive friends on the beach.
жизнь суть куда больше, чем рекламный всплеск. и в этом как раз и заключается искусство компромисса: отнюдь не все мы ездим на сегвеях, но все, да, пользуемся телефонами. так и Google Glass, что выглядит, я согласен, достаточно забавно, но — вместе с тем — и чересчур оторванно от действительности.
via.
будущие перемены
17 July 2013 | Facebook, Google, Internet | 1 Comment
или, например, что такое Facebook?
“On the desktop, they were a platform,” [BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield] says. “On mobile devices, they’re just another app. If their app becomes more interesting, they have to either create new ones, or buy new ones to keep people engaged.”
куда им надо идти завтра?
But while the internet moves fast, the world of social networking moves faster. Facebook, once a leader in almost every category it touched, now leads in almost none: It’s not the most exciting picture service, nor is it the next big messaging service, video service, mobile texting service, or news-sharing service. The only thing it definitely is is the leading identity service — something that a lot of sites are trying to take away from it.
“Online identity is under direct attack from Google,” says Greenfield, who sees Google’s service less as a social network than an identity layer — a hypothesis that explains why Google doesn’t seem to care that few use it to talk to their friends or share news, as long as they still sign up and sign in. With their invisible yet rich, real identity-tied, payment-processing identity networks, Amazon and even Apple pose a threat too.
и как?
Then there’s the issue of attention. Facebook has been, and still is, very good at getting people to spend a lot of time on its site — according to Facebook, its app logs more user hours than any other smartphone app. But winning users’ attention is not the same kind of fight as winning their allegiance for a specific type of service. Snapchat might not be a direct competitor to the Facebook app, but it’s drawing from the same limited pool of attention and time.
Early signs suggest that post-Facebook Facebook will be a company with the sole goal of taking back this attention. Its acquisition of Instagram, for example, pulled in tens of millions of existing, happy users and promised tens of millions more. But this is an expensive and difficult game, and one that companies typically play from a more established position (see: Yahoo and Tumblr). If this is the plan, says Greenfield, “the question is, should Facebook be far more aggressively using their currency — a very big market market cap — to acquire other companies?” Indeed, it’s easy to imagine a Facebook that had not only taken over Instagram, but Snapchat and WhatsApp, which together would rival Facebook in size.
эволюция происходит на наших глазах. что может быть интереснее.
maps are just nude pictures of reality
16 July 2013 | Culturology, Geography, Google, Politics, Software | No Comments
или, например, снова географические карты — что это такое?
I’ve seen maps that I find completely terrifying. Maps of uranium mining and of various illnesses in the Navajo reservations—they’re just insane. They just make you furious. Bill Bunge’s map [above] — which I still think is one of the great maps, the map of where white commuters in Detroit [ran over] black children while going home from work—that’s a terrifying map, and that’s an amazing map.
как они меняют нас?
It’s there, for example, in the way Google Maps redraws the city in relation to its own way of seeing. Maps, as we know, are a form of information that not only shows us the terrain in question but also reveals the concerns of its author. Maps are not neutral windows onto the world: they colour, frame and distort the world they describe.
<...>
As Slate magazine’s Evgeny Morozov explains, Google’s business model of targeted advertising is soon to merge with its description of the physical fabric of the city. Using the data that Google already knows about you through your email, your searches and so on, it will generate personalised maps of the city. As Morozov writes, “Space, for Google, is just one more type of information that ought to be organised.” And monetised too, we can add. The city, through the map, is remade according to the data held by Google, and according to Google’s idea of what a city is and what it thinks you will do there.
или как другие меняют их для нас?
Imagine how the experience of Google Glass might alter your experience of the city as it overlays information onto your view, with the city literally becoming framed by Google. This Googleopic way of seeing transforms space and the urban environment through how and what it reveals and excludes. Its ways of seeing, as John Berger’s 1970s book of that title explored, contain hidden ideologies in its visual depiction of landscape. What’s relevant here is the way an ideology is made invisible through the manufacturing of images. Increasingly, this frame is used not only to show the world, but to make the world. The map and the territory, in other words, converge.
можно было бы подумать, что карты — это только снимки реальности. но что это за реальность? кто ее автор?
своя рубашка ближе
11 July 2013 | Google, Internet, Software | 1 Comment
о самом главном, о поиске в сети:
Google won search by providing the best organic results users had ever seen. Ever since then, organic has been fading from the SERPS, losing ground to revenue generating Google products.
чудесные подробности:
13% — That’s the amount of real estate given to true organic results in a search for “auto mechanic” when I’m logged in at the Tutorspree office in TriBeCa.
<...>
7% — That’s the amount of on page real estate that the newest iteration of Google gives to organic results on a search for “Italian Restaurant” when I’m logged in at the Tutorspree office in TriBeCa.
<...>
0% — Open your iPhone.
все так:
It’s Google’s world, and from now on, you’ll have to pay to play in it.
it’s anti-monopolist
3 July 2013 | Facebook, Google, Internet, Software, Twitter | No Comments
Марко Армент написал хорошую статью вслед почившему Google Reader, и вот, что особенно привлекло мое внимание:
Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything. While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.
RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like.
или еще проще:
[T]he big players <...> want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).
так логично мы и приходим к вопросу о доверии:
I think that the presence or absence of an RSS feed (whether I actually use it or not) is a good litmus test for how a service treats my data.
- Instagram doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my uploaded photos.
- Twitter doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my tweets.
- Facebook doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my band’s updates
It might be that RSS is the canary in the coal mine for my data on the web.
If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?
именно.
между делом
17 June 2013 | Google, Internet, Software | No Comments
дневник наблюдений за природой:
There are many other alternatives, a Google search for “Google Reader replacement” (the entire phrase) yields nearly a million hits (interestingly, Bing comes up with only 35k).
я, к слову, уже давно перешел на Feedly.
pushed to the world we cannot control
2 June 2013 | Economics, Geography, Google, Privacy | 1 Comment
плюс, Google не оставит в покое и географию:
Last February, in an interview with the technology blog TechCrunch, a senior Google executive expressed a rather philosophical—even postmodernist—view on the future of maps. “If you look at a map and if I look at a map, should it always be the same for you and me? I’m not sure about that, because I go to different places than you do,” said Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps for mobile.
In the near future (Google says it will “be rolling it out to more people in the coming days and weeks”), the maps we see will be dynamically generated and highly personalized, giving preferential treatment to the places frequented by our social networking friends, the places we mention in our emails, the sites we look up on the search engine.
оно и логично — как и с любым другим сервисом, их волнует не решение задач (например, Gmail — это, очевидно, не подарок всем и каждому для управления электронной почтой), а доходы от рекламы:
In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.
мы отнюдь не пользователи Google, — наоборот, как известно, мы и есть товар.