#“Well that’s my next Avatar sorted - Androidify”

via market.android.com

Love em.

#“Google Places Problem-Riddled vs Facebook Places Doing It Right”

This post has been in my head for a very long time and it’ll probably still not get expressed correctly, but here goes. I am convinced that Google is heading in a disastrous direction with their Local efforts and it is bad for businesses, bad for users and bad for Google.

Fanboi

I have been an unapologetic Google fanboi since the day I first entered a search term when they were on the Stanford domain and I immediately stopped using Altavista, Yahoo and Excite forever. I now spend my day on my PC and on my Android phone, using GMail, writing docs/spreadsheets in Google Docs and searching. By and large all of those experiences are superb except for one; Local Search.

Everyone knows how important Local is. Google didn’t move Marissa Mayer over to run their efforts for fun, it’s the next big landgrab. Most of Google’s effort around this have centered on Google Places and in less than a year they have seriously damaged their credibility and gone against their own founding principles.

Web-scale

Google is the ultimate web-scale company. They index the web automatically and they use algorithms to try and show you the best results based on your intent. It’s all done by machine without interference. And if they can make a “few bucks” with advertising where the ads are obviously ads, hey go for it. Google broke the old Yahoo/Excite/Blah model of eyeballs. They got you the result you wanted as fast as possible and then sent you on your way just as fast. That is why we have all loved Google for so long. No more goddammed portals shoving crap at us.

All Change

Then in 2010 that all began to change. Algorithms started taking second place to shoving stuff in your face. Here’s what you now get if you search for “Hotels in Austin Texas”. What is the basis for the order of those results? Places? Reviews? SEO? Ads?

Now click on one of the push pins:

Google Places = Content Farm?

That second screenshot doesn’t do justice to the pile of old rubbish on that page. We’re been reading about Google struggling with content farms for the past few months. Google Places is the ultimate content farm. A ton of aggregated unfiltered crap dumped on a page to get you to click over to it. Not only that, but there is no “web scale” here. Those aren’t the best reviews or the best content they have found about that hotel, it’s the stuff the scrape from their business partners with no de-duplication applied so the same content comes from multiple sources due to rampant cross-syndication.

Even worse, click on “book now”. A Google partner gets the first link ahead of the business themselves! That’s 20% of a businesses margin to Priceline.

As a business you are only allowed to add some basic information about yourself to Places (or buy tag-ads). All of the rest of the crap on that page is controlled by Google and its one-by-one business relationships.

And don’t get me started on “please fill out this form if you wish your rich-snippets content to be considered for inclusion in our index”. What is this, the Yahoo directory listing in 1995?

So total waste of time for the user and margin-damaging for the business. You, like me, will keep going to TripAdvisor when we just want to randomly search for hotels.

Social Search with Facebook

But of course we no longer want to randomly search, we want social recommendations. Going to Paris for the first time? In 2007 you’d either start with TripAdvisor or you’d Google “hotels in Paris” and spends hours filtering through the noise. In 2010 you did a Facebook status update or a Tweet and asked your friends and followers. You took those recommendations and you then went to the hotels’ own sites to check for their own reviews and hopefully their best price guarantee.

In 2011, you use Facebook search (powered by Bing!) and automatically see what hotels in Paris your friends have “Liked” or become Fans of. You then go to the businesses own Facebook Places Page and see what they have to say for themselves. You read about them, see what their fans are saying, see pictures, videos, competitions, you ask questions, you read verified authentic customer reviews (maybe powered by LouderVoice :-) ) and now you can even book directly with the hotel on their new f-Commerce Tab.

Facebook Places works brilliantly for users, brilliantly for businesses and brilliantly for Facebook. Win win win.

Google Hotpot

Or you can take the Google approach where you use Hotpot and say whatever you like about any business, even if you have never been there and that appears on their Google Places Page with no comeback or control. Note my rating of the Driskill Hotel above. I have no idea where it is in Austin.

I actually think Hotpot is a nicely designed app but it has the same basic failing as Latitude, Buzz, etc etc. Google doesn’t understand social and doesn’t understand people. I have 2000ish followers on Twitter, I have a few hundred friends on Facebook and, 3 months after launch, I have precisely one “friend” on Hotpot. One. Uno. Does a straight line between two points constitute a Social Network? Hell I even have more friends than that on Latitude. Four.

Hotpot has another huge problem, you can’t create spots. Recently I had dinner in our local gastropub, The Poacher’s Inn. These aren’t web-savvy people, they don’t even have their own web-site, they use the Good Food one. But they have had a ton of check-ins on Foursquare, they have some on Gowalla and I created their Facebook Places Page that night over dessert, which they can eventually claim for themselves. Google Hotpot? Zip, nada, nothing and no way to change it because Poacher’s haven’t created their own Places Page.

Google’s solution to this? Web-scaling? Crowd-sourcing? Nah! They have salespeople pounding the pavements of Austin trying to get them to create a Places Page and use window stickers with NFC for the 4 people who will have Nexus S phones at SXSW.

Reputational Damage

It’s shocking to see Facebook execute perfectly once again with Places and enable the users to build the ecosystem. And it’s equally shocking to see the ultimate web-scale company begin letting down their users, businesses and themselves. The reputational damage of pushing low quality Places crap in a desperate desire to remain relevant in a Social world may be fatal over time. Google won Search because it gave better results to the end user. It no longer does that.

Platform + Trust

There are many fundamental differences between Facebook and Google that have been discussed to death. The ones most appropriate to this topic are Platform and Trust. Facebook provides the platform, sets some rules and then trusts businesses, developers and users to build interesting and useful things. Google believes that it knows best and tells you what to do. Command and Control.

Turnaround?

Can Google turn this around? I think and hope they can. If a person can care about a giant company, I think many of us care about Google. And tho it pains me as an Engineer to say it, the primacy of the Engineer in Google must come to an end. Google needs to hire people who understand social and who would fail miserably at silly logic puzzles in interviews. They need to end the 72 step interview process and empower managers to hire people over a cup of coffee. They need people who live and breathe this stuff every day. They need Facebook Fanatics and Twitter Titans with heads full of ideas. And no, I don’t mean Social Media consultants following 22,000 people. They need to stop buying and killing start-ups for the Engineering talent and start buying startups for people with ideas who show they can execute. Even if those people can’t write a line of code. They need to put those people in a room with some humble but smart engineers who can listen and iterate quickly. 

Most of all, Google itself needs to become Social. Looking at Ireland specifically for a moment, how many Google people have we seen at BarCamps in Ireland? Any? Ever? How many tech events have they sponsored here outside of the school coding things which are just recruitment fairs?

Compare that to the Facebook Garages where Facebook supports the tech-community in organising those events. Platform + Trust. Even Zuckerberg was at the one in London last summer! When was the last time you saw a developer get excited about something Google did? Where is the Google Developer ecosystem to match the SEO ecosystem? What does Google do to enable non-advertising-related people to make money? The unstable, unloved AppEngine doesn’t cut it I’m afraid.

I’m not sure Skunkworks is the way to go. Whilst that might result in some cool individual products/projects, it doesn’t change the company culture. Some of Google biggest failings have been due to their current siloed nature where groups are clearly not talking to each other. The Anti-Social Network. For example, if they had managed to shoehorn Jaiku into the Android addressbook from day 1, this post would probably be irrelevant. My phone addressbook is infinitely more social-focused than my Gmail (I’ll be nice and not give Buzz yet another slap).

There is still no sign of Google Me or whatever it is going to be called. I can only hope that the rumours of it being a browser toolbar are nonsense. Fingers crossed.

Phew

Like I said this stuff has been bouncing around in my head for ages. Overly long and rambling I know. Am I totally off the wall with this?

#“Just got my first ever 500 Error from YouTube”

#“One guy in Netherlands vs Nokia+Microsoft”

Wow, it looks like I was the only person on the planet to write anything nice about Nokia moving to Windows Phone 7. One point I did make was that they have to move fast. A phone by the summer really is a necessity. But Nokia’s problems in recent years have always seemed to boil down to execution. Strategy by the bucket-full but bugger-all follow-through.

Elop said on stage that they will ship WP7 phones in volume in 2012. I hope that doesn’t mean people will have to wait a year for a phone. I mentioned in my last post that a quick port of WP7 to the N8 (with the mandated CPU and memory boost) would probably sell well. Now I seriously doubt whether they can.

Compare that to the situation on Android. Google released Gingerbread v2.3 on the Nexus S only before Christmas. Within weeks we had community ports for most of the major phones. I am currently downloading GingerVillain v1.0 for my HTC Desire. That’s Gingerbread with lots of knobs-on added by the Android community and packaged by a single guy in the Netherlands. 

Imagine if the same was possible with WP7 and the N8? But with two giant bureaucracies trying to work together, 2012 may even be optimistic. I wonder if there are drivers available for the N8 hardware? Imagine if some hackers got Android running on the N8 (like the N900) before Nokia ported WP7? That would say it all.

#“Developers Developers Developers —> Nokia + Windows Phone 7”

I’ll leave all the industry analysis to the experts and insta-experts on Twitter. I’m just looking at the Nokia and Microsoft deal from the perspective of a punter and someone who might consider getting apps built for Nokia+WP7.

So as a punter I liked the look of Windows Phone 7 and I love the industrial design of the Nokia N8. I’m also sick to death of the shitty cameras that HTC, Samsung et all are putting in their Android phones. My 3 year old N95-8GB takes infinitely better picture and videos than my HTC Desire. A Nokia phone with a good OS and decent Apps is still something I would happily buy. Thinking about average punters, a familiar brand like Nokia running an OS made by someone they’ve heard of seems reasonable.

But as we all know, it boils down to apps. Even my technophobe Dad is become App-centric and spends tons of time in GMail, the browser or the RTE News App on his Android phone. I don’t think he could ever go back to Symbian now.

I looked at App building on Symbian before and it was a nightmare. Nokia even made something as simple as signing Apps difficult and effectively killed the hobbyist developer market. I thought they were on to something with both Python Apps and WRT as a way of simplifying development and hiding Symbian but as with everything Nokia has done in software in the past few years, they were half-assed, unsupported and then left to die.

This morning I stuck “Windows Phone 7 SDK” into Google to see where it took me. App Hub is not the worst site in the world but is missing instant gratification. A video front and center showing how easy app dev is on the platform would be a big help. More importantly, it’s not even clear how/what you do development in. I had to Google off-site to find out that when they say Silverlight and .NET framework they mean C#. Maybe every developer on the planet knows that but I didn’t. The big plus is that the entire SDK is free and includes an emulator. So pretty much equivalent to the Android setup.

Even better, you can program in Visual Basic. I know I know but I built some really neat quick n dirty but useful apps in the 90s with VB. If you can get Apps out the door quickly with VB then that’s a big win. I was desperately disappointed with the Android AppInventor capabilities. Most Apps I thought of started as an RSS consumption widget and it cannot do RSS without running an App on Google AppEngine!

The only obvious downside is the mean-minded $99 to register to publish Apps. Get a grip MSFT, you can afford to drop that and it will encourage kids in bedrooms to get started. All that moaning about crappy Apps in the Android Store is just that, moaning.

The other thing that jumped out at me is that they co-host Windows Phone 7 and XBOX 360 development on the App Hub site. If the same toolset can be used to build apps that connect WP7 to XBOX Games, there is a myriad of possibilities there.

I remember talking to someone in Palm before the Pre was released. It sounded like they would “support” the porting of iPhone and Android Apps to WebOS. Turns out they meant they would give you early access to the SDK! Unsurprisingly, WebOS flopped completely. If Palm had taken a few million of their marketing budget and handed it out to developers, I think the result could have been different.

Is that something that Nokia and Microsoft has to do to seed development more? I know Microsoft are good at working with schools and colleges to get their tools and apps into kids’ hands. They also provide lots of support to startups. Do they need to go one step further with WP7 and start handing over devices and even “grants” to developers to get them porting and creating Apps? I’d be very tempted if they did.

Hopefully Nokia can get the first phone out before the summer. Even if they just ported WP7 to the N8 and put in a meatier CPU, I think they’d have something great on their hands. I still have a lot of affection for Nokia, as do many people, but time is running out. Fingers crossed.

#“Sorry Foursquare, Forget Europe, Facebook Wins”

I normally wouldn’t call a result a few days after a new release but bloody hell, Facebook Places has gone mental in Ireland in less than a week. And I’m not talking about geeks. Most of the people I am friends with on Facebook have never heard of Foursquare or Gowalla and yet they are checking in all over the place on FB. It’s amazing to watch.

How many years have we banged on about Location Based Services to no avail outside of the early adopter brigade?

All Facebook has to do now to keep the momentum going is to get deals/discounts in place everywhere.

I have been a dedicated 4SQ user since it launched here and an intermittent Gowalla user but I honestly think I’ll be giving up on both over the next few weeks.

I’ll finally get my thoughts down here in the next few days about why Facebook Places will slaughter Google Places too.

#“My 368 Days of Posterous - The Stats”

Hard to believe it’s been a full year since I started on Posterous. The idea behind it was simple - I was scatter-gunning techie posts across several blogs and they just didn’t belong there mixed in with foodie stuff and business. I wanted somewhere I could completely geek-out but with zero effort. Over the year I think most posts have taken 5 minutes to write and the bulk of them were sent by email when I was killing some time or on a lazy Saturday.

So the headline stats since Feb 3rd 2010 according to Posterous:

• 285 Posts
• 25 Posterous Subscribers
• 143,147 views

As we know, Posterous just randomly invents view numbers so take that last one with a big pinch of salt.

But if the Posterous numbers were right then my initial posts have had 200-300 views over the year and my more recent ones had 3000-4000.

I have to say I’m not tempted to move from Posterous despite the lock-in. The auto-tweet and auto-Facebook are the only ways I “distribute” the posts and that gives me enough feedback to keep me happy. Oh and in case you were wondering, yes, blog comments are dead, I get far more replies to each post as Tweets or Facebook replies. Pity Posterous can’t track those and show them in addition to retweet counts.

#“Sugru Shoes”

My mum bought some very funny flamenco dresses for my two girls recently in Spain. Total spotty horrors but the girls loved them. She just topped that by getting them spotty flamenco shoes with big stomping wedge heels on them.

As they were bought in a local mini-mart in Torremolinos, the quality ain’t great, to put it mildly. Síofra popped the clasp rivet on hers within a couple of hours and left too big a hole to just pop it back in. I tried a few approaches but nothing worked so I gave Sugru a try. I knew it wouldn’t be great as I only had blue sugru but I went ahead anyway.

Another result for the Kilkenny inventor, her Sugru worked perfectly!

I even went a step further and nicked some Airfix paint from her big sister’s kit (blogpost on that soon) and painted it red. Not ideal but the 4 y/o is thrilled her shoes are back in action. 

#“A new lease of life for the Nokia N95-8GB”

The only use my old and much loved N95-8GB has had in the past year has been as the backup phone for my Voda SIM when I go to the UK. But I hate seeing still-good tech lay unused.

#“Oops a bit late - Irish Blog Awards Nominations Open”

Dunno how this slipped past me. I'm way behind on my reading.