Google Saves My Internet from Itself

Yesterday Google made public its Measurement Labs series of sites, designed to analyze your internet connection and determine whether your ISP is throttling you or not.

This news makes it even harder to hate Google; with these tools the average joe can keep an eye on his ISP and make sure its not trying to sneak anything by him, and will help to keep those sneaky ISPs honest. Google may be the most massive company in the universe, but they sure are helpful.

This comes at the perfect time for men, because I’m beginning to suspect that our ISP is throttling us.

The Droids: Google Phones

Friday was the release date for two Google phones, called Droids, with Verizon Wireless. Both phones run Google’s Android Operating System and both look like they’re the start of some exciting mobile options for Verizon customers. Both phones, the Droid Eris by HTC and the Droid by Motorola, are both phones similar looking to an iPhone with large touch screen interfaces.

This is not surprising, as Apple’s iPhone is likely going to be the main competition for this new deal between Verizon and Google. The initial buzz surrounding these new Droids is positive. They’re powerful phones, with plenty of hard drive space and a good camera. They feature

QWERTY keyboards, WiFi, Flash, all the standard social application abilities, and a growing app library called Android Market. Predictably, the phones all include a full suite of Google features, such as Latitude, Gmail, Search and YouTube and Picasa. The Droid is supposedly the world’s thinnest QWERTY slider.

Presumably these are the first in a line of phones released for Verizon that will feature Google’s Android OS. Their main rival would appear to be the iPhone, and their first strike appears to be a good one. Apple has a head start, something that is very helpful in terms of available apps for download, but with the huge amount of Verizon customers now potential customers, I’m sure the Android Market will be growing fast. Couple this with the better coverage area and reception Verizon offers compared to AT&T and Apple could be in trouble.

Still, these are the first Droids on the market. They are the version 1.0 of the Google and Verizon deal. Similar to the initial version of C3PO that Anakin Skywalker was working on in Episode One of Star Wars, these are the first thoughts of what a phone equipped with Google and Android can do. As they refine what a phone can, and should, do the Droids will be even more exciting. Much like generation one iPhones still can’t do SMS these Droids are the first step in a long process of development. There will likely be bugs, and quirks, and things that just don’t feel right. My initial thoughts on the bigger Droid were that it looked a little boxy, and not quite as sleek as it could be.

The main thing to note here is that Verizon customers never had an option for an iPhone, or a G1 Google phone. Whether it was contracts, perks, quality or loyalty keeping customers with Verizon, the choices were between a couple of blackberries and a handful of Windows Mobile smartphones. Few of those options compare to an iPhone, or these new Droids. Now Apple may be hurt by keeping the iPhone exclusively with AT&T, when millions more would’ve purchased one given the option with another carrier.

Photo Sharing on the Internet

There are a lot of websites out there to share photos. They all have different features and prices and everyone has a different favorite that they use to share photos with friends and family. There are a couple of things I look for when I review a photo sharing site. I like to be able to order prints from the site. I like to be able to download the photos I like that aren’t mine. I want to be able to navigate through the pictures and look at them all, whether by slideshow or individually, and it’s also nice if it’s easy and simple for me to upload my own pictures.

Flickr is Yahoo’s photo sharing service, and it’s a popular one. Flickr allows you to friend people and follow their albums and updates as well, which can be interesting if you know someone that regularly takes good pictures. However, Flickr is more of an online photo share site, in that it seems to be designed to show and share pictures and albums across the internet, but no so much for personal albums. You can order prints, but only through a couple of third party sites. These third party sites encompass everything from book and mugs and postcards and prints, but it means having to pick and select from a variety of choices and compare prices. Flickr provides a variety of viewing options. You can sort your photostream into different sets and galleries, and join groups where you can have multiple photographers contributing to an idea, which is a great idea for weddings to have everyone upload their pictures to a common album. If you are looking to download a picture for your own use, Flickr only provides pictures up 1024×768, which is only marginally acceptable. One of my biggest knocks on Flickr is that it limits you to 100mb of photos a month, which is another reason why it’s not great for sharing photos of events. With the rising megapixels of cameras a picture can be multiple megabytes and this limit will limit you to a couple of dozen pictures unless you sacrifice quality and make them smaller. Overall, Flickr is good for online collaboration of different types of photography projects, but if you’re looking to share photos of Grandma’s birthday with family across the country, you’d be better off elsewhere.

Snapfish is Hewlett Packard’s photo site. HP is known for printers, and as would be expected it’s easy to order prints from Snapfish. They provide a variety of sizes as well as borders. They have poster prints if you need to blow up a picture. Mousepads, mugs, ornaments and clothing are just some of the different things you can get printed with Snapfish. Most of the complex stuff you need to have shipped, but for basic prints and posters you order them online and pick them up at a local Walgreens, which saves on shipping costs and allows you to pick up your pictures in less than a day. Viewing is a simple enough process, as photos get uploaded to albums and you can scroll through each picture or view them via the slideshow. Snapfish also has it’s own program you can download to aid in uploading pictures directly from your camera or memory card. However it’s not possible to download photos on Snapfish without paying a fee per download. It’s not much, but if you’re talking about an album of 300 pictures, it can add up, especially when you can ask the person who uploaded them to email them to you for free. Snapfish is a great service to use when you plan on printing physical copies of photos or ordering mugs or calendars, but if you actually want to share your photos over the internet with friends and family there are better services.

Shutterfly is perhaps a less commonly used service than some of the others, but it does have what you need to share pictures. Once you upload the pictures onto their site, it is organized into albums, and then you can share specified photos out of that album with friends. When your friends and family view the photos you’ve shared they have the option of saving them to their own album. The printing process is also pretty easy with Shutterfly. You can select which photos you want, with a variety of size options, and have them either mailed or pick them up at Target. They also have some photo books, calendars, and other products. The website itself feels a little older than most of the other sites, and it runs that way too. If you’re looking for a digital copy of a photo in an album, whether a friends or your own, you are out of luck. The only way is to right click and save it, but that gives you the photo in a rather small size. Shutterfly is an okay service, but it feels like it hasn’t changed in years or grown with the times. This definitely wouldn’t be my first choice of photo sharing services.

Google has their hands in everything, photo sharing on the internet included. Picasa Web Albums blows the other services away, offering more in just about every area. They offer up to one gigabyte of photo uploads per Google/gmail account, and you can upload them at the original photo size, or a streamlined version. There is a downloadable app that will upload and organize your pictures for you, and it’ll even search your hard drive and update albums as you put more pictures on your computer. You can then use it to upload to a web album viewable to friends and family, just you, or everyone. It’s a static URL so it’s easy to find all the albums by one user, and everyone that has access to view the file can also save it, at the size it was uploaded. After you upload the photo to the web, you can tag it, link to to it, embed it and caption it as needed. You can also print the photos in your Picasa albums. You can funnel them through Snapfish, Shutterfly or a couple of other sites, or you can print directly to Walgreens. If you’re going to print to a mug or something it’d probably make sense to upload directly to Snapfish, but otherwise Google’s Picasa is the way to go. It also has a tab where you can search through recently uploaded photos as well as search by tag for any public image across all of Picasa.

Of all the photo sharing services I’ve used over the years, Google’s Picasa is definitely the best. Snapfish and even Flickr have their uses as well, but Picasa is my first choice.

iGoogle Showcase: Finally I Can Pretend I am Using The Kutch’s Computer

Google’s iGoogle Showcase was revealed earlier this week, allowing everyone on the whole Internet to look at the homepages personally approved by the publicists of celebrities.

With iGoogle Showcase anyone can take a look at the widgets and plugins that barely likeable celebrities like Al Gore, Demi Moore, Ashton The Kutch Kutcher, Martha Stewart, Ryan Seacreast, and others use on their Google homepages.

Mind you, use should be taken very lightly here.

At first I wasn’t sure what the purpose of showcase was. Then later on I figured something out: I still had no idea know what the point of iGoogle Showcase was. To be honest as of this exact moment I cannot clearly discern any sort of useful purpose for Showcase.

The thing is, there isn’t any obvious use for Showcase. Unlike some of Google’s other neat apps, like Gmail and Google Docs and SketchUp, which are all immediately useful in some ways, Showcase doesn’t provide us with any sort of tools or devices that make things possible. It doesn’t even provide something as vague as an e-solution.

Let me explain. Each Showcase page is ostensibly the personal page of a celebrity, implying that the widgets on it were chosen by a celebrity. That these pages are personal also implies that celebrities make use of them regularly, but that seems unlikely, given how they look like they were designed by a soulless robot programmed to mechanically coordinate PR initiatives.

Are we really supposed to believe that Kevin Rose has a Digg widget on his homepage, even though he owns the freaking website, or that Ryan Seacrest looks up American Idol updates, even though he is literally the first person on the planet to know when someone is voted off? That would be like Wyclef Jean looking for updates about the new album that he himself is writing.

Oh wait, that is already on his iGoogle page.

So are these actually the personal pages of celebrities? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that Showcase doesn’t have any point because it is just marketing. Each page is a thin veil of celebrity publicity, crafted to reinforce a consistent public image while covering some pretty clumsy marketing. Andy Roddick is a tennis player, so his page has a tennis ball. Rachel Ray’s page has a word scramble, because absolutely all stay-at-home moms in the universe like little daily newspaper puzzles. Al Gore’s page has Jon Stewart quotes because the hip, young, liberal demographic is into that.

The only page that looks like it wasn’t pieced together by an army of assistants is The Kutch’s. I mock the guy, but his page is a messy jumble of stuff that real people would actually use, like sports scores and dumb youtube cartoons, instead of a Punk’d widget and a picture of a trucker hat. But other than the Kutchster’s, every page is so generically representative of the public’s view of these celebrities that you can’t help but feel an advertising firm thought it all up while Keith Urban or whoever played golf on the moon while rolling in million dollar bills in a suit made of even more million dollar bills.

So iGoogle Showcase is basically just a cross-promotional marketing tool. That’s fine, and marketing has it’s place. Maybe someone will find a widget they like from the page of their favourite celebrity, or discover some news about someone they’re interested in. But let’s not pretend that these are actually the homepages these celebrities customized and use every day. The sites are such flimsy, cookie-cutter representations of the celebrities’ public images that insisting they are personal is only contrived and artificial.

So why even talk about Showcase if it’s so shallow and pointless? I will make a feeble attempt at answering this question. It seems to me that iGoogle Showcase is representative of a larger trend in which technology is suddenly very cool. Some might even call it hip if they are so inclined.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point tech and tech-culture went from being simply a useful thing for some and a geeky obsession for others, to the prime way for celebrities and public figures to garner some cred with fans. Between The Kutchinator running a competition with CNN to see who could reach a million twitter followers first, and news sites and blogs all over the web obsessing over whether or not Obama is a Mac user, you can’t seem to avoid the new-found trendiness of technology.

Even late night, normally a safe haven where fads and trends are mocked mercilessly, has gotten in on the act. If you can manage to stomach an entire episode of the Jimmy Fallon show you will be exposed to an incredible amount of shameless pandering to the technology crowd, and even Conan O’Brien, who I distinctly remember mispronouncing modem during an old episode, has a skit about twitter every night.

Some of this new focus on technology is obviously very good. Obama’s change.gov site, with its technological agenda, is leap years ahead of the technologically ignorant stone-age that was the last administration.

But I imagine not everyone will see it this way. It’s probably safe to say that many people out there hold a personal attachment to the nerd culture of technology, and many of those people understandably feel as if Hollywood is merely cashing in on their beloved sub-culture. Like someone who suddenly sees their favourite band go mainstream and finds that the music that meant so much to them on a personal level is now being eaten up by everyone in the world, geeks the world over feel violated by the commodification and abuse of their geek and tech culture by celebrities who are merely using it to get a bit more publicity.

The angst of geeks who are caught up in the new Hollywood obsession with their world was summed up pretty nicely in the response to the I Am a Geek video, released last month. Wil Wheaton, star of Star Trek TNG and famous hardcore nerd, was involved with the video and said of it that it seemed like a promotional opportunity for celebrities who don’t know a damn thing about our geek culture, which sums up nicely how most geeks feel about the new found celebrity status of geekiness.

In short, the sorts of celebrities that are featured on the iGoogle Showcase are the exact ones that nerds are shaking their fists at right now, damning them for invading their castle and abusing their culture.

I tend to look at it a bit differently though: being a geek is suddenly cool. Not just cool among an ever-growing population of geeks, but cool among people with a lot of sway, geeky or not. Further, geekiness is not just cool, but influential. Geekiness has become powerful.

I guess that “The Bible” thing was right; the geek shall indeed inherit the Earth.

(I apologize profoundly for that joke. Please don’t melt my computer with your nerd powers.)

Despite Poor Economy, Google Shows Financial Growth in Q1

Google released its Q1 2009 results last week and (as usual) everyone was paying attention. Investors, analysts, SEMs, etc.; there are few tech companies that draw this much attention when it’s time to report their earnings.

Considering the many questions looming about the state of the economy and what may lie ahead, all eyes were fixed on Google as it did what it has always done.

Google beat analyst estimates and reported a net income of $1.42bn last quarter, up from the same period last year by 8.9%. Revenue was in line with analyst estimates at $4.07bn, excluding traffic acquisition costs. Google did resort to cost-cutting measures and prudent spending to help it meet it’s target estimates.

With Google standing as a tech bellwether, many regard it’s health as a significant sign of the Internet as a whole. Sticking with that standard, parts of the Internet economy clearly have performed admirably, such as search advertising.

But there is cause to view this quarter as both a glass half full and half empty, despite Google’s solid performance in this tough market. After-hours trading perhaps exemplified this appropriately with Google shares rising early only to fall back later on.

On the half full side, easily beating an expected 13% increase, paid clicks were up 17%. And Google delivered $5.16 earnings per share when analyst expectations were down at $4.93.

But, on the half empty side, it must be noted that Google’s quarter expectations had been lowered to match the economy. Many view it like Google was fighting an opponent that had one arm tied behind its back. Clearly revenue growth is slowing and, for the first time, Google reported a decline in net revenue. Executives for Google did point out that it is typical for the company to see slower growth in Q2/Q3, perhaps providing a not-so-subtle glimpse into the next couple of quarters for the company.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that the company is “absolutely feeling the impact” of the recession. To curb losses, Google has cut products that were not producing results and reduced staff for the first time quarter-to-quarter. Schmidt claims the company is taking a long-term approach and notes the company’s “priority remains investing for the long term to drive future growth in our core and emerging businesses”.

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