God bless Danny Sullivan. You should read his latest post tonight in which he tries to squeeze some information — any information — out of Google chairman Eric Schmidt about today’s rather disastrous deep Google+ integration into Google Search. Unfortunately, all he gets are bursts of hot air.
Schmidt tells him that Google would be happy to talk with Twitter and Facebook about integration into the new Search+ features. So why didn’t they do that before, you know, they rolled the feature out? Well, never you mind that. Schmidt refuses to say one way or another if they did or didn’t. “I’m not going to talk about specifics.”
My understanding is that they didn’t. But perhaps more telling is the fact that they didn’t have to.
Both Twitter and Facebook have data that is available to the public. It’s data that Google crawls. It’s data that Google even has some social context for thanks to older Google Profile features, as Sullivan points out.
It’s not all the data inside the walls of Twitter and Facebook — hence the need for firehose deals. But the data Google can get is more than enough for many of the high level features of Search+ — like the “People and Places” box, for example.
So some fellow named Preston Gralla wrote up a Xoom vs. iPad 2 blog post over on Computer World.
To be frank, this is one of the more brutally awful hack blogs I’ve seen lately. It was so bad that I actually am doing something I pretty well never bother to do: blog a response.
“The Chrome-like browser built into Xoom trumps the Safari running on the iPad 2. Xoom’s browser sports tabs, will sync bookmarks with PC, Mac, and Linux versions of Chrome, and uses a single box for typing URLs and searching.”
Safari on iOS allows up to 8 simultaneous pages perfectly fine, with an interface that functions just as well as tabs can on a tablet device. Not sure how many simultaneous tabs Xoom can support, but if you can handle making use of more than 8 at once on a tablet without it becoming a sorry mess, I salute you and wish you the best of luck with your Xoom.
Safari for iOS also supports bookmark syncing, and having the address bar and search bar combined is generally inconsequential in terms of functionality, although admittedly a more streamlined implementation.
“Xoom, of course, will be able to play Flash relatively soon. The iPad 2 will never do it. Clearly, being able to run Flash is better than being banned from running Flash.”
Actually, what’s considered “better” will vary from person to person. As a web developer and advocate for open web standards, I believe Apple’s approach of pushing HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash is better for the growth of the web. Also, the blistering growth of HTML5-compatible H.264 is starting to render the “I can’t watch online videos without Flash!” issue moot. I won’t even get into performance, stability, security, and battery life issues associated with Adobe Flash on mobile devices.
“When you buy an iPad 2, you’ll be subject to the whims of what Apple wants you to download and doesn’t want you to download. Want to be able to get information from the WikiLeaks site using an app, for example? Don’t try doing it on your iPad 2 —- Apple has banned any app from letting you do that. It bans plenty of other apps as well. With the Xoom, you can download and use any app you want.”
I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just open Wikileaks from Safari and create a homepage shortcut. Ta-da, Wikileaks on your home screen. Apple doesn’t allow apps that present nothing other than web content specifically for this reason — they don’t want to clutter up the App Store with crap that you can just do with Safari. Speaking of crap, that’s pretty much all you’ll find in the wild west style mobile app stores like the Android Market, unless you get lucky and find a legit app instead of a malware-stuffed clone. It’s also a joke and a half to see someone try to take swipes at what is undeniably the most popular and successful mobile app store on the market based on the business model that made said market so popular in the first place.
“Finally, the Xoom’s built-in apps such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Calendar still trump anything built into the iPad 2. and using the Xoom’s Tegra 2 chip, you get nifty new features, such as vector graphics and 3D rendering in Google Maps.”
iOS has Apple Mail (which includes support for Gmail on top of any other email accounts you may have), Google Maps, and iCal. Preference between Google Calendar or iCal is really dependant on which ecosystem you make use of: Apple’s or Google’s. Apple Mail is far and beyond superior to only Gmail alone, and Google Maps is.. well.. Google Maps.
Will some people prefer having Adobe Flash and a more Google-centric ecosystem over the iPad 2? Of course. If you feel like the Xoom is a better fit for you, by all means snag one. However, the horribly unsubstantiated “X is better than Y because I feel like saying it is” remarks that plague Preston’s write-up do not constitute a good argument when arguing one product is “better” than the other. Especially when he ignores a lot of the drawbacks that are associated with the Xoom. Price was never mentioned, for one. Neither was there a comparison of the app stores for iOS vs. Android short of spewing some propaganda about how you’re “subjected to the whims of Apple,” although I touched on it a bit.
Blows my mind how some people are able to get jobs writing blogs like that one.
UPDATE: It’s a lot of fun reading through the comments on his blog. Glad to know I’m not the only one who thought it was a joke.
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball grabbed a quote from the folks over at the Official Google Blog:
Google:We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.
The Google blog post itself is titled “Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network” and is Google’s first foray into the wide world of network infrastructure. The claimed goal is “to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone.”
I just finished a post jabbing at Google’s recent “hand in every pie” mentality, but this is one experiment I think is really great. Why? Because Google’s entire business is reliant on a fast and open internet. Youtube, for example. Increasing download speeds means people can view video faster, which improves the experience of watching video on the web. That translates to additional page views, which in turn translates to increased AdWords revenue.
This is one of those scenarios where “what’s good for Google is good for us.”
Well, as you may or may not know, Google has recently announced its latest creation: Google Buzz.
There’s plenty of buzz about it on social media sites like Twitter, but I’m stuck here wondering, as though I’ve seen something like this somewhere before. Oh, of course! Google Wave. You know, Google’s attempt to re-invent email, which hasn’t exactly taken off like some people expected.
How is Buzz similar to Wave? Well, Buzz is essentially transforming Gmail into a Wave-like platform, minus what seems to be the widget flexibility and real-time document collaboration that Wave has. In that regard, Wave is more powerful and Buzz is more similar to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Which, to me, pretty well describes Buzz: an addition to transform Gmail from a powerful web-based email application to a Wave/Facebook/Twitter hybrid. It’s Wave-like in regards to focusing around — and adding on to — an email-esque application, Facebook-like in regards to keeping in touch with friends and posting content such as photos and video, and Twitter-like in regards to pushing out status messages and updates to everyone. Yet it doesn’t do any of these particular things as well as each individual service, in my view.
With services like this and Wave, both of which are restricted to an enclosed environment (either requiring Gmail or Wave’s proprietary messaging format, respectively), and random ventures like the Google phone (which has had its own problems), I’m starting to wonder what they’re thinking over at Google HQ. It’s almost as if they’re trying to get a piece of every pie available and making it proprietary to them, instead of focusing on just a couple of pies and doing great there. The last thing I want to see is Google going the way of Microsoft. *shudder*
