This Week in Google 268 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It's time for TWIG: This Week in Google. A great show for
you. Jeff Jarvis has the day off, but we've got a great fill-in with
Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land. He knows all about those new Google snippets,
why publishers might be a little bit upset, and the Google Change Log has some
good news for Gmail users. It's all coming up next on TWiG.
Net casts you love from
people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This
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Leo: This is TWiG, This Week in
Google, episode 268, recorded September 14, 2014.
You Had me at Blackberry
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code twig when you check out. It's time for TWIG: This Week in Google. The show that's all about Google, but not just Google. The Facebook, the Cloud, the Twitter, and all that stuff. Of
course Gina Trapani is here from thinkup.com.
Gina Trapani: Hello.
Leo: Hello Gina. Host of All About Android, Android guru. Jeff Jarvis has the day off. He's traveling, right? He's
in one of those travel loops that he gets in every once in a while.
Gina: Yeah.
Leo: It is a loop though. He flies to New York, then to
Germany, then back. Then New York to Bahrain and back. It's like—it's weird.
Gina: He's a travel animal.
Leo: He's a traveling man. But he'll be back next week I
think. I won't. I'll be in London next week. I'm going to take a week off.
Gina: Good for you.
Leo: Yeah. I'm excited. But look who has replaced Jeff. This
is great. Danny Sullivan is here from Search Engine Land. Hey
Danny.
Danny Sullivan: Hey.
Leo: He is obviously a skateboarder and a twitter—a
tweeter.
Danny: I'm well known. Tony Hawk is always saying,
"Dude, come on over."
Leo: Really?
Danny: No.
Leo: That's pretty awesome. Wow.
Gina: I bought it. You should have rolled with that, Danny. He
doesn't live too far from you. He's in San Diego, I think.
Danny: Yeah. That would be pretty cool. I actually did take a
few skateboarding lessons because I felt like I should, but I'm not very good.
Leo: You live in San Diego. I think everybody is supposed
to skateboard.
Danny: Yeah. We should all be doing that in Southern
California, but it's actually a Google skateboard. I liked the logo that was on
it, and I liked that it was a skateboard, so.
Leo: And then you have a snowboard too.
Danny: That's a Bing snowboard.
Gina: Is that a Bing snowboard? Oh sweet.
Danny: So, we have a lot of board meetings in California, as
you know.
Leo: Very fair.
Danny: But you can never see the Bing behind me, so people
are like, "You've got all that Google stuff," and I'm like, "No,
there's a Bing behind me, you just can't see the logo," so there you are.
Leo: Hey, I got something in the mail today that I'm a
little excited about.
Danny: Oh, is that the watch? The 360?
Leo: No, I did order the watch. I think it comes later next
week, or something.
Danny: Oh, you got the Moto X!
Leo: This is the phone, baby.
Danny: I saw that. I'm jealous.
Leo: I'm going to do a mini unboxing— actually, I already
opened it up, so it's not exactly an official unboxing.
Gina: Let's do it anyway.
Leo: Let's do it anyway. So I chose the cognac leather
back, and it is nice. It really does smell like leather. It's got that leathery
smell to it.
Gina: Oh yeah, the dimples in it really—yeah.
Leo: The dimples changed a little bit, but it's still
there. I think it's very attractive, and the flash is in the ring, although
it's not a two-toned flasher or anything like that. It's just a dual flash. And
now, for the first time, a metal rim all the way around it.
Gina: Yeah. That's a good-looking phone.
Leo: I think it's really gorgeous. Now compare it to
the—this is the iPhone 6 and you can compare the two. They're similar in size. I
thought 6 was 4.7 inches, which is what the old Moto X was, so this is
obviously a little bit larger than the old Moto X.
Gina: Wow. They actually don't look that different, although
the iPhone has those nice, those kind of shiny edges there. The
glass that sort of bends.
Leo: I love that.
Gina: It's rounder.
Leo: But this has rounded glass too, I think this must be a
new technique that everybody is doing. So this has the—it's edge-to-edge glass,
or it feels like it is. I think it is. And then it's rounded at the edge, which
it would have to be, otherwise it would cute you. I like this little touch. This
is the on/off button, and the volume rocker on the
same side, so to distinguish between the two, you can't see it, but they've
scored the on/off switch. It's like the edge of a dime. You can easily tell
when you're on the on/off switch as opposed to the volume rocker.
Gina: That's nice.
Leo: I think that's a nice little touch. And of course it's
the talkie version, and this time you can program it so I can say, "Hello
Moto X. Hey, what's happening? How you doing?" Instead
of OK Google Now, now you say whatever you want. And that's boring to say,
"Hello Moto X." I should probably make it say something else, like
"wassup?" So yeah. It's 1080 P now. OK. Thank you. Talkative little—I forgot what I was—It's a 1080 P screen, and a 13-megapixel camera, which is
still not as great as the iPhone, but better. After all the iPhone hype, Gina,
now you're really solidly in the Android camp, you have to be. Do you miss it?
Gina: Yeah, well you know the thing that I miss about it,
and I was talking about this on All About Android last
night, is I still have this creeping feeling that the iPhone camera is better. That the photos are better with less effort. In fact, Lisa Bettany just did a post, she did a great post. Side by side
photos in different lighting situations with every model of the iPhone, and I
got to tell you, the six photos, particularly when she zoomed in on detail in
low light, they were amazing. The OnePlus camera is
OK, and I'm not a photographer. I just want to press the button and get a good
photo every time. I'm not messing with settings, but I take a dozen shots every
single time and hope that one of them comes out well. And I've got to tell you
I think the iPhone still has the better—I think it's still producing quality
photos. And we were talking about this last night, and it's like, "why is this happening?" And I think it's because Apple makes
the hardware and they make the software, and I think from day one Apple just
prioritized the camera in a way that Android didn't. Partially
because Google wasn't doing the hardware manufacturing. So that's the
only thing that makes me want an iPhone, I'll be honest.
Leo: Well, and it's an important thing, because many people
consider this their camera more than their phone even.
Gina: Yeah, and I have a small child, and I think to myself,
"are the photos that I have of my daughter when she's a baby, should they
be better?" 20 years from now, am I going to hate myself retroactively for
not having a better camera on me? Because I barely get out
the DSLR.
Leo: So Lisa Bettany, who is of
course a friend of the network's and a pro-photographer, and the author of
Camera Plus, which is one of the number one camera Apps on the iPhone, had all
the iPhones, and took roughly the same picture with all of them, which is about
seven different or eight different devices. It's amazing that she had eight
working iPhones for one thing. But it's really valuable to see how they've
improved. But even more than that, in the industry, there's a company that
makes software for Lightroom called DxOMark, and they've become very well known for their acuity
testing of cameras. I think they're widely trusted. DxO Labs they're called, and it's dxomark.com. They gave the iPhone 6 and 6+ the
highest rating of any mobile phone on the market. The next one up is the S5,
then the Xperia Z3, then the Z2, then the Nokia 808 PureView, which is that 41 megapixel camera. Even better than the 1020, which is kind of middle of the pack. So now people will argue this with you. In fact, whenever I say, "I think
the iPhone camera is the best camera," the Nokia people jump up and say,
"you're wrong!" But even DxOMark based on clarity, based on color accuracy, exposure and contrast, accuracy of
focus—all the things that you care the most about, said it's really really good. Especially good in low light
compared to other cameras. So yeah. I miss
that. Actually, I don't miss it because I have it.
Gina: Well I was going to say, "You have it." So
I'm curious to know—
Leo: I wish it were in the Moto X, because then I wouldn't
need an iPhone.
Gina: Right. So that's the 6 or the 6+?
Leo: This is the 6, which is really what people should buy.
The 6+ is like clown shoes. It's too big. Apparently it bends like clown shoes
as well, which is another issue.
Gina: So only the plus bends. Not the 6.
Leo: Well, I think they're both bendable because it's metal
and it's thin. It's 1 millimeter.
Danny: The 6 would be more likely to bend just because it's
so much larger.
Leo: More leverage. Exactly.
Danny: I mean, if I put the 6+ in my back pocket, first of
all, someone's going to steal it because it's just sticking out of the back
pocket, but also it's just going to crush if I were stupid enough to sit down
on it. Whereas other phones that are a little more compact, they probably slide
around and work out OK.
Leo: And this is different because the iPhone users have
had a little phone that you could put in your back pocket, and all of a sudden
they have this giant phone and they haven't changed their habits much. So get a
man purse, or a woman purse, and put it in there, because otherwise you're going
to squish it. And I would say the 6 even will be prone to that a little bit. It
seems to bend right where the battery ends internally and the volume rockers
begin. That seems to be a particular inflection point.
Gina: Yeah, that makes sense, right? The iPhone 6 is a
good-looking phone. It reminds me of the HDC One the M8 a little bit, that band
across the back I really like.
Leo: But it's thinner.
Gina: Yeah, it looks really thin. So you've got the Moto X
and you've got the iPhone, so what's—
Leo: You know me. I thought the Moto X was the best phone
of the year last year; even though spec-wise compete with some of the other
really high-end phones, including the ones that we use, the OnePlus One. But I always felt like the Moto X was my phone. The other ones were ones I were using, but this was my personal phone, and I
think it's going to be the same with this one. Especially since it smells like
a men's club. The high-end kind, not the sleazy—
Gina: Not the sleazy kind.
Leo: Leather chairs and cigars. Yeah.
Gina: Gentleman's club.
Leo: That's even worse.
Gina: Yeah, that's bad too, isn't it? It doesn't work
either.
Leo: You've spoiled the name gentleman's club. And I like
the speech features on the Moto X. Sorry. It does respond. I'm going to have to
change it to Jarvis. That won't work either. And now, they've got infrared
sensors on the corners so when it's doing the sleep thing, you can wave over
it. Here, I'll put it to sleep and I'll show you. So it's sleeping, the
screen's off, but if I wave over it, it'll show me the time and if I have any
notifications they'll be available as well.
Danny: Does it not do—I read that it doesn't do the always on
fading thing though. Is that right?
Leo: It doesn't. It waits till you wave at it, which I
think is actually the right thing. It's easy to wave at it. It used to be it
would pulse up and down, and I imagine that killed the battery life somewhat. Don't
know about battery life, because I literally just got it hours ago. One thing
I'm a little concerned about, and maybe someone in the watching or someone in
the chat room can fill me in, last year Motorola, they had this Motorola Skip,
which is an NFC tag, either on a sticker or on a leather thing. You could put
it in your pocket, and you could tap a locked Motorola phone with a Skip in it
and say, "That one I want to unlock," either my skips are broken or
it doesn't work with skip any more. And I notice it's not in the copy anymore. They
may have turned that off. You can still pair it with trusted Bluetooth networks
now, which is really great, and if you have the Moto 360 I'm thinking that
that's probably one of them. So you can say, "As long as I'm in proximity,
I'm unlocked." I'm not sure that's a good idea.
Gina: Yeah, that's nice. That's really nice.
Leo: Because locking is a pain, and you'd like to use a
strong lock instead of a swipe, so if it's easy to unlock with a tap that would
be pretty cool. Screen looks good. Not great, but good. Super
AMOLED like last year, but again, higher resolution. Jury is out. We'll
see. I'm going to London with both it and the iPhone 6. Both will be on
T-Mobile because T-Mobile offers unlimited international calling and text as
well as 2G data for free.
Gina: Right. So you got the 6 unlocked so you can pop in
your T-Mobile card.
Leo: I didn't. I got the Verizon 6, but it turns out you
can pop in your T-Mobile card.
Danny: Yeah. That was the same thing that happened with me
with the iPhones was that I was really surprised I bought the T-Mobile unlocked
and I put my AT&T card in and that worked fine, which is what I expected, but
then I threw my Verizon SIM into the T-Mobile iPhone and that was all working
as well.
Leo: Yeah. I remember reading about it. In fact, you were
the one who inspired me to do it, and the reason is that the new iPhones have
all the bands. Verizon is doing voice over LTE and so everything now is—we're
rapidly moving out of the bad old CDMA versus GSM days.
Gina: Thank goodness. That's such a difficult thing to
explain to family members and stuff. It was like "no, no. That's a
different thing. You need this thing." I was like, "what?" Mental
maps of carriers and things and normal people don't know that and they
shouldn't have to.
Leo: So due to an FCC ruling when Verizon acquired the LTE
bands, they are required to not lock their SIM slot, so the Verizon phone can
be used with a SIM from, at least from AT&T and T mobile as well as
Verizon, and also from international carriers, because I think you've got every
band in here.
Danny: Well that was the other thing, is I took my old
Verizon phone, which was on my iPhone 5S, which was Verizon, and I threw my
AT&T card into that, which I'd never done before, and that completely
opened up and it was fine.
Leo: So I was able to get LTE and T-Mobile on the Verizon,
which is new, you couldn't do that before. And we'll see how that works in Europe, or in England anyway. Travel-wise I'm set.
Gina: You are. I want to see some photo comparisons.
Leo: You will. That's one of the things I'll very likely
do. I'm also bringing a good camera. And that's the other side of it is, while
I do use a camera phone a lot, if I'm serious about where I am, I'm going to
take a good camera with me.
Gina: Yeah. That makes sense.
Leo: Yeah. All right. So that's
the story of the Moto X they did start shipping—I'm sorry I've got to change
the name. And the Moto 360, they are back in stock and those are also shipping.
I think next week, and I did order the him, which is
their standard Bluetooth ear bud, but it’s designed to do some extra stuff. I think
it's touch-free with Moto X.
Gina: So when is that coming? Didn't get that yet? I want to
call it the Her. I don't want to—let's just call it the her.
Leo: Me too. Oh, hello Scarlett.
Gina: What was her name? I forget now what her name was.
Leo: Samantha. Sam.
Danny: Samantha.
Gina: It would be borderline a little creepy if you called
the phone Samantha.
Leo: I would like it because actually, if it had Scarlett's
voice. I don't know how you feel. Siri's voice I've gotten used to, but the
Moto X Google voice is strident. Here. I'll give you an example. Let's get out
of this. Let me think. What am I going to do here? Hello Moto X. What's the
weather in Petaluma?
Moto X: Unlock your phone to continue.
Leo: It's just a little—I don't know. A
little strident.
Moto X: It's 78 degrees and
overcast in Petaluma.
Leo: Siri just seems nicer. You disagree? You agree?
Gina: No, the voice is still a little robotic. I think it's
difficult to get it a little softer, but I haven't used Siri in a really long
time.
Leo: Well you want to hear Siri these days? I think she's
sounding a little bit better. I forgot what I do to start Siri. I have to press
a button. By the way, I have to be careful on the shows now, because if people
have their iPhone hooked to the power and you say, "Hey Siri," it
will actually wake her up and she'll start doing stuff. How long is the Golden
Gate Bridge?
SIRI: Golden Gate Bridge is 8,980 feet long.
Leo: Long.
Danny: Long.
Gina: Long.
Leo: She seems friendlier.
Gina: Yeah she does. Interesting. And
her voice is a little lower. Now we've got to get Cortana in the mix, but—
Leo: I actually like Cortana's voice. But my Windows phone
is in the other room so I can't. You have it there? There goes Danny. He's
going to get it. Can I upgrade—I can upgrade the voice on this right? I can
download a better sounding voice.
Danny: So you need to have celebrity voices, right?
Leo: That's a TomTom. I used to have great celebrity voices
on my TomTom.
Danny: My TomTom, one of the versions I had was great because
you could have all the—you could put your own voice and I had my kids do all
the turns. So they would be like: "Go forward. Make a U-Turn."
Leo: Daddy. Go forward Daddy.
Danny: Actually, whenever I had to do a u-turn,
because that was usually a sign that I was lost, it would say, my wife would
go, instead of saying "make a u-turn," it
would say, "why don't you pull over and ask directions?"
Leo: That's good. I like it. So let's hear Cortana. You got
Cortana.
Danny: Yeah. What do you want her to say? I don't know if
you'll be able to hear it.
Leo: It doesn't have a speaker?
Danny: Yeah, but I don't know if you can hear it through my
headset.
Leo: Hold it, just put it right up
there.
Danny: There we go. How long is the Golden Gate Bridge? How
long is the Golden Gate Bridge?
Cortana: It'll take 6 hours and 51 minutes to drive to
Golden Gate Bridge.
Danny: Did you hear that?
Leo: Yes. It said it'll be six hours to drive there.
Danny: That's not too long. Let's go.
Gina: It doesn't sound at all like Cortana in the game.
Leo: No.
Gina: They should have gotten Cortana from Halo to voice. I'm
so disappointed, because I love Cortana in Halo. And I know this is a different
Cortana, but I wanted the voice to be the same.
Leo: Ask Cortana what she thinks of Siri. Does she say
anything about that?
Danny: She's got a whole series of things that she does.
Leo: That's one thing that Apple and Microsoft do is there
is some personality.
Danny: What do you think about Siri?
Cortana: Hard to say. So far our conversations have
been kind of one-sided.
Leo: She's great. I mean there's inflection. That was
pre-recorded. That's one thing that Microsoft is doing which is intelligent. These
canned speeches, and this is obviously one, are treated differently than
synthesized speeches. So that sounded great. Morgan Freeman would be good.
Danny: Oh yeah.
Leo: Oh well. Someday. Ask who
Bill Gates is married to.
Danny: Who is Bill Gates married to?
Cortana: Bill Gates is currently married to Melinda
Gates.
Danny: I like that "currently" part.
Gina: I like currently. Like, right now this is the answer,
but you better check tomorrow.
Leo: I would fix that. Holy cow. Jiminy
Christmas. Well we don't know what's going to happen in the future, but right
now—
Gina: Right now things are good with Bill and Melinda.
Danny: Who is your father?
Cortana: Technically speaking that would be Bill Gates.
No big deal.
Leo: I like that. But again you heard all that
inflection—"Technically speaking" those are pre-recorded, obviously. They're
not synthesized. That's fun. All right. Enough. You notice one thing. Both Danny and I got speaker's
block when we have to think of what to say, what should I say? I think that's
kind of a problem with these systems in general. Do either of you use voice a
lot?
Danny: I've been using it more if I have something
complicated and I want to annoy my wife. She's like, "Just type it
in." But I was doing it yesterday and I was trying to look up something
and I just spewed out a bunch of things and it came up with it. I think this
was on Google Now. If it's something complicated and I think I'm in a quiet
environment and I just want a quick answer. I use it a lot more for commands
that I'm confident will work. It's very rare for me to set my alarm clock by
hand. I'm always like, "Set the alarm for 6 AM." And it's like: "I
have set the alarm for 6 AM. You will get 2 hours of sleep." And it's
great.
Leo: That's a great example. It's so easy. I agree. Those
timers, in fact I use the Androidwear watch to do
that. And those are really good examples of something you can do much more
quickly with voice. But searches and things like "how do I get here"—
I guess Navigation is pretty good.
Gina: Navigation is good. I do it while I'm cooking when my
hands are wet or covered in breadcrumbs. Set a reminder, how many cups in a
whatever. That kind of thing. But not as much as I
thought I would. I thought the watch would make me do it more; I really just
still use the watch to thumb through notifications and dismiss them. But I have
friends who love it and reply to text messages and do the voice commands from
their watch a lot more. I feel a bit like a doofus. So
maybe that's just me being too self-conscious.
Leo: No. I think you're not alone, and I think that's part
of the issue, isn't it. That's one of the things holding all this stuff back is
the voice interface is such a public thing. Last night we say a new movie
called "The Drop," and I really liked the actor in it, but I didn't
know who it was and I used Siri and it worked quite well. I said, "Siri,
who stars 'The Drop?'" She told me, and one of the names is Tom Hardy and
I said, "Siri, who is Tom Hardy?" And she said his Wikipedia article,
including what movies he'd been in. That was a very nice, very convenient
interaction that worked quite well. I think Siri is much better, by the way.
Gina: You're doing this during a movie that you were
watching with someone else?
Leo: Yeah, I got a few catcalls and some popcorn thrown at
me, but otherwise—No. It was after the movie. By the way, it's an excellent
movie. It's not what you think, it's a really really good movie. Really really good movie. All right. One of the reasons I wanted to know who the lead was is because he's so good in
this movie. Here comes Google 2.0. According to Larry Page. In the future, Google will build cities and airports. That's the headline in
"The Verge." Anyway. The information,
actually I should look up, I am a subscriber, so instead of doing the meta reporting I should actually—
Danny: The information thing. Yeah, it was good.
Leo: The problem with the information is that it's 400 bucks a year and a lot of people don't subscribe to
it, so all that happens is that "The Verge" just repeats it.
Danny: I kid you not. My renewal thing for the information is
on my screen. It must have been a year because it's like, "we need you to
renew."
Leo: I renew. Jessica deserves our support.
Danny: Oh yeah. They do a great job.
Leo: But is it $400 worth great? I don't know.
Gina: 400 bucks a year. That's a pretty— yeah.
Leo: And especially since you can read pretty much
everything in— or listen to TWIT, because I regurgitate. Anyway. Amira Fradi, who has excellent contacts at Google,
wrote the piece. Google 2.0.
Gina: So what does this mean? So, OK. Google is going to build cities and airports. I mean, many a time, I've been
sitting on the tar mat wishing that Google could point its smarts at making
airports more efficient. I just don't know what that would look like.
Danny: So maybe they could make the security check point more
efficient. Maybe after you put your thing through the thing they could split
into two areas, I mean, God. Let's redesign the entire area of the airport.
Leo: So this comes Amir, and his coauthor, Hunter Walk have combined a variety of sources. This is in an interview
they did with him, but what I thought was kind of interesting, this Google 2.0
thing, which is absolutely happening, Page cleared out space on his floor, he
has his own floor at Google headquarters to oversee a series of workshops run
by Google's vice president of business operations, Christian Gill. Apparently,
OK. This feels like there might be between Larry and Sergei something going on
because Sergei basically runs Google X. That's his R&D lab. Apparently
Larry wants to start his R&D lab that he would oversee personally. Some
call it Google Y. I wonder if it's like, well Larry's getting all the fun
projects. I need my own. And that does not bode well for a company when you've
got the two founders not feuding exactly, but in a rivalry.
Gina: Yeah, and for listeners it's not "why:
w-h-y." You might ask that. It's Y. The letter y.
Leo: That would be good. Google why.
Danny: I didn't read it so much like "Oh Sergei gets to
have all the fun with Google X, I want to have Google
Y so I can have fun." I read it more like Google X is doing all these
long-term things that are not going to immediately change stuff. So, Google
Glass is still lurking out there. But that's probably the closest thing that
you might have that a consumer might give.
Leo: Isn't Google Glass even Sergei's thing?
Danny: Yeah. But that would call it a Google—I think it's
still under Google X. I could be wrong though. It might have migrated out. But
like the auto-driving cars—we're like 5 years, 10 years away from that being a
thing, and my impression from the article is that Larry would like to have
Google Y to make Moonshots, maybe not Moonshots, but suborbital shots.
Leo: Shorter Moonshots. So Google X is on a 10-year time
frame.
Danny: Yeah. But the idea, although redesigning your airports
is not exactly something that happens tomorrow.
Gina: I don't know. This is even longer-term programs than
Google X. It seems to me that Larry is just obsessed with different problems. We've
seen Larry wearing Glass in public, that's always been a Sergei thing. Even
with the IO's, the different years were led by different founders, and we heard
a lot from glass and Sergei was wearing Glass, and we had the crazy demo with
the skydivers, and then the next year it was run by Larry and it was a lot different.
We didn't hear a lot about that. He did the Q and A. It was kind of a different
tone. I hope it's not a competition and more just a—these are just two
different people with different ideas as what the long-term problems to focus
on are. Although maybe if they're not on the same page, that's a bad thing. I
don't know.
Leo: You're right. If they have different portfolios, different goals, then it's not a rivalry. It's
complementary. Maybe that's it. Friday writes: "Some of the Google 2.0
workshops fizzled say people briefed about the event or the effort. One involved, Mr. Page's desire to build up a subscription
business so that Google wouldn't be so dependent upon advertising. Paid Gmail, for instance. Page even discussed with
colleagues the notion that ad supported services can sometimes be lower quality
than paid offerings." I guess Google Apps is a paid offering. That would
be the example. The problem is that paid services have smaller reach. And
Google is all about reach. Another Google 2.0 project involved location. Larry
determined that Google in the future should know a person's precise location
down to the inches, not just that they're in a particular room or store. That
way, people might be able to know who else is in a room with them. This is what
Apple's iBeacon does, by the way. It describes
exactly where you are in the room, and that's useful for merchants, because
they can have different things triggered on your phone depending on what you're
standing in front of. By knowing which aisle a person was at inside a store,
for instance, Google could potentially provide helpful information to the
shopper about what's there. This is exactly what iBeacon does. Google could also let people pair their Smartphone with another device. Ads!
Information! Hey, I got some information for you. You want a pizza?
Danny: You don't want that pizza.
Leo: Not this pizza.
Danny: You've already got pizza at home.
Leo: It's a great article. An interesting
article. New airports. He thinks that, for
instance, Elop's plan to create a hyper loop railroad
between San Francisco and LA so that instead of 6 hours and 3 minutes to get
here, Danny could be here in seconds. He thinks that's a terrible idea. But he
says planes work. Why don't we have better airports? Better flights? Friday
writes in the comments: "It didn't make the cut, but Larry Page also
thinks Wall Street is broken." Maybe a better way to do finance, that's
obvious, right? When you got a lot of money and you've got a lot of power, and
both these guys do, I think it's appropriate for them to think about it, as
long as they don't stray too far from the business.
Danny: They stray all over from the business.
Leo: Well yeah. I guess the business runs itself nowadays,
right? Google 1.0 is fine.
Danny: It depends on how you define the business, right? I
mean the auto driving cars don't make a whole lot of sense.
Leo: They're not the business, right. Autonomous vehicles
are not the business.
Danny: No. But they'll pour the money into it. The business,
sadly, is still people do these searches and they click on these ads. I don't
mean sadly, because that's my job.
Leo: That's your business. Search ads.
Danny: But I always joke every now and then on Twitter that
all those self-driving cars are being paid for by mesotheliomads.
That's what's bringing you the future. That and structured settlement and who
knows what else.
Leo: That's true in any business. We have our bread and
butter shows and those subsidize the newer shows that are not yet making any
money. That's how businesses work, right?
Gina: Yeah. That's very common. A lot of
businesses, yeah.
Leo: I reinvest 75 percent.
Danny: We just did another article yesterday looking at the
arbitrage stuff that goes on with Google and ask.com. Ask.com CEO is about to
run a counter saying that it's not like that, but you search for something on
Google like "what is mesothelioma" or something, and you get these
ads from other sites that when you click on them jump you from Google search
results to their search results, which have more Google ads on. And it's all this sort of like—There's a lot of money being made off
of stuff that is still very cruddy. And yet it goes further up the chain into
producing these things that seem very all pure and all clean or whatever. I'm
perhaps too jaded or perhaps I've been watching too much of the wire.
Leo: Oh. You're going through a wire marathon.
Danny: I'm in the middle of the series.
Leo: Which year are you in right now?
Gina: Yeah, which season are you in?
Leo: Which year are you in?
Danny: I'm literally in the middle of season 3 on episode 5
or something.
Leo: Three. Was that the school one?
Danny: I don't know. They just moved everybody into hamsterdam.
Leo: Oh Hamsterdam.
Gina: Oh, the Hamsterdam. OK. All right. That's a great show. Because there's the boats in
season 2, the first season is the—
Leo: I thought the third season was school, but maybe the
fourth season is school.
Gina: School and then the newsroom, because—
Danny: I'm waiting for the newsroom. I know that's coming.
Leo: But Hamsterdam. That's a
good one.
Gina: Hamsterdam is a great one.
Leo: That might be the best year. However. But now everything you say is going to be filtered through that, so now I
understand. I'm glad you gave us the disclaimer. That's a great show.
Gina: It gets in your head.
Leo: Let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to
do the change log. We'll find out more. There's lots more going on at Google. But
first, OK. So Glen who is a TV expert here, Glen Rubenstein in the network says
that season four is the best year. I didn't like the newspaper season. But Glen
says that season four is the one to look forward to. Wow.
Gina: That's the school one.
Leo: Is that the school one?
Gina: Isn't that the school one? The school one broke my
heart. Anyway.
Danny: Oh my god! No spoilers!
Gina: Sorry. No spoilers.
Leo: Season three is the second best. So you're in for two
excellent seasons, according to Glen. Is Glen at home, or is he over there
typing? He's over there? Which is? Never mind.
Gina: Now he needs a Wikipedia page.
Leo: Yeah. You have time. Go Wikipedia while I talk about
treats for your dog. You don't have a dog, do you?
Gina: I'm allergic. I have allergies, unfortunately.
Leo: Danny, do you have a puppy?
Danny: No. We have two guinea pigs, that's it.
Leo: One of the best parts of "The Drop," which
is the movie I was talking about earlier, is the dog. There's a great dog in
it. Really sweet looking puppy, and I wanted to send
him a BarkBox. It's not too late. BarkBox is treats. Yes, treats for doggies. We got our new BarkBox with jerky burgers. Dog treats made with real duck. Who wouldn't like that? These
are here from yumzies. So you see us talk about these
boxes that come in the mail, the BarkBox comes every
month, but it's not for you, it's for your doggie. Indigo smokehouse strips. Oh,
Ozzie would love this.
Gina: Yummy.
Leo: Premium cuts. Bacon for dogs. Pure pork. Fresh meat, vacuum-sealed, and then when
you get a treat. That's good; it looks like a Green Bay Packers shirt. That's
good. That's a little doggy chew. What is this? Crunchy rabbit chews? That's
good for his teeth to keep them clean. And a pennant from Barkeley, University of California Barkeley. It's our BarkBox. Every month. Treats for your doggie. BarkBox is a wonderful way to celebrate your four-legged friend. I think every dog
should have a BarkBox in the mail. It's a monthly
subscription, high quality, fun and healthy treats, toys and goodies. 4-6 awesome full size products. Everything from—Well you
just saw my BarkBox. Innovative
toys and gadgets to all natural healthy treats and more. Each box is
different. It's a great way to discover treats your dogs really like. Toys he or she really likes. All the treats are US and Canada
only. Not saying anything, but that's where you want to get your treats from. Chews
are made in the US, Canada, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Good
stuff. Edible products do not include rawhide or anything processed with
formaldehyde. See they really care about dogs. The BarkBox folks love their dogs and they want to love your dog too. No glycerin, no
wheat, no gluten, no soy, or fillers. Minimal processing, and
whenever possible, organic. Rest assured, everything
is paw tested. I love this site. Find the BarkBox office pups. Go to barkbox.com/twig and click "get started." You’ll
choose the size of your dog, between four different subscription plans. No, I'm
sorry, Josh. They don't have a birdbox. Josh says,
"What about my birdie?" Nope. You've got to get a BarkBox.
Ozzie, do you have the b-roll of Ozzie with last month's BarkBox?
We want to call it the BurkBox, because Burk gets the
box and feeds it all to Ozzie. Ozzie loves his BarkBox.
Is that a happy puppy? He is so happy. He loves his BarkBox.
By the way, BarkBox also gives 10 percent of the
revenue to local rescues and shelters across the US and Canada. You can save 20
percent when you sign up right now at barkbox.com/twig. Ozzie loved it.
Gina: He's so cute. That Ozzie.
Leo: Isn't he a sweetie?
Gina: He is.
Leo: I've got to get him to chew those chew toys because he
needs his teeth brushed. The veterinarian—
Gina: Are those the ones you put the peanut butter in?
Leo: You need a dog. I'm sorry that you're allergic.
Gina: I love them. But I just can't breathe around them.
Leo: That's not good.
Gina: But Ozzie I was actually good with. I react
differently to different dogs. I should find one that I can—
Leo: There are hypoallergenic dogs.
Gina: There are. It would be great for the baby.
Leo: You're going to get. That's why we have Ozzie. And the
kids had no interest. Kid says, "Oh, that's nice. You got us a puppy. See
you. Bye." So I have Ozzie. Me.
Gina: You have Ozzie.
Leo: But I love him. So it's OK. It's OK. BarkBox. Sebastian Thrun has left in his role as Google vice president and
fellow. He was the founder of Google X and did some really interesting stuff,
including Udacity, which was his online learning
startup. So apparently this has been on his linked in page since August, but
somebody finally told Tech Crunch. He does have an advisory role. In his linked
in post he says, "While I am now just an advisor, my enthusiasm for Google
X is as high as ever." But I figure with Audacity taking off that made
sense.
Gina: So that's his startup that he's working on separately
from Google.
Leo: Yeah. Google spokesperson said, "As the
co-founder of Google X and our self-driving car project, Sebastian made huge
advances in computer science and robotics that have paved the way for
autonomous driving technology. In his role as an advisor to Google X over the
past couple years, he has provided invaluable inspiration and perspective to a
variety of projects. In Udacity, Sebastian has his
own more-than-a-full-time-job Moonshot to take, and we wish him well." That's
very nice. That's a really nice farewell. So obviously.
Gina: That is a nice farewell. It was all OK. It was good
between them.
Leo: If you're in Google, this happens all the time. It's
normal, right?
Gina: Yeah. When these stories happen people are like,
"Oh, is something wrong? Did something happen?" I think it was in
Stephen Levie's book when he interviewed Marissa
Meyer who ran that management program and she said, "We want people who
want to leave Google eventually because we hire entrepreneurial types. And
entrepreneurial types want to build their own thing; it's kind of a problem
that you're facing too, Leo. Right? In
some degree. The best people, the ones who take initiative, who want to
do everything want to do it their way and this happens.
Leo: I don't know if you have this in the change log, I'm
glad Danny's here to explain it, structured snippets.
Danny: Oh yeah.
Leo: What are—they're now live.
Danny: I know that.
Leo: Yeah, well I'm looking at a Search Engine Land
article. OK. What are they?
Danny: Do a search for say, "Wonder Woman" on
Google and you will see that you get a description that comes up. I'm looking
ahead of time. This one is coming from Wikipedia, and you'll see underneath it,
not just that you're getting a description about Wonder Woman, but underneath
the description you discover her first appearance, her alter ego, and who she
was created by.
Leo: I'm not getting this. Why am I not getting this?
Danny: You're missing it. Zoom right in on the very first
listing.
Leo: Oh. First appearance— It’s tiny.
Danny: Yeah. So you can see this for a lot of the
superheroes. In fact, somebody was joking with me on Twitter about how is
Google making sure, like if Google is listing everybody's alter-egos, aren't
they revealing secret identities?
Leo: Spoiler alert. Princess Diana of Themesura—
Danny: What Google is doing is understanding that from pages,
they have been doing over the past year to two years now, understanding that
you are not just searching for words, which are patterns of letters, but that
you're searching for people, places, and things that are connected to facts. So
this is Google saying, "We understand that Wonder Woman actually has a
thing known as an alter ego, and in fact we know what that is. We know when she
first appeared. And they're getting that information by automatically
extracting it from web pages.
Leo: Is it all from Wikipedia?
Danny: it's not just from Wikipedia. You can see it from like
Nikon. Try and do a search for Nikon D7100, and you should see the third or
second listing, you'll see that it pulled off of this page the sensor
resolution type, the weight of the battery, the display size.
Leo: So this is a dp review article.
Danny: If you look at the page you will probably find that
these facts are on there. But these facts may be extracted from other pages and
Google is starting to learn that these are fact extractions. It's all part of
the stuff that Google has been doing to have facts and just present backed
research. Another example if you type in—this is before—what you're seeing there
with the Wonder Woman stuff, that is structured data being inserted right next
to a listing. But then other kinds of things that are related
to this. Do a search for "reset iPhone."
Leo: A lot of people are doing that today actually.
Danny: Let's not do that. Type in "how do I reset my
iPhone." See if that one does it.
Leo: Is it better to do—I was searching for something today
and I couldn't find it just giving it words, I think it was Moto X, then I
wanted to know if the skip worked, 2014 Moto X Skip, and then I thought maybe
if I say "does the skip work with the 2014 Moto X" it would be
better. Is that me, or is that a reasonable thing to do with Google?
Danny: In the past, those kinds of searches weren't good to
do, because you're searching in a way that somebody probably hadn't written it.
Like "how does" people hadn't written stuff that way. They would just
explain it. Then the search engines got smarter, but the content forums got
smarter and started writing all the content designed for the people that were
doing those kinds of searches. And know what's happening is Google itself is
becoming smarter and is understanding this kind of conversational question
better. It's understanding how to parcel it. So when
you go in there and you say something like "how old is Barack Obama"
it understands you're looking for that person, you're looking for an age, and
in fact that I have the exact answer so I can provide it out to you.
Leo: So that really changes—so you're confirming what I
have observed, it changes the way I used to think of a search engine. I used to
think that the best way to get the result you wanted would be to actually match
a string of text in the page and if you can't do that, then to use, as I did
originally, "skip moto 2014" in any order, but knowing that the best
result would be one that combined all three of those, so kind of outguess what
Google is going to do with it.
Danny: So these days now you don't have to try. And that used
to be good advice. I used to teach people on how to search, and I would give
them those kinds of techniques. Try to think about the person who is writing
the material and how you think they would do it, but these days, really search
however you feel comfortable searching and trust that the search engine will
probably figure it out. To give you that other example, try a search for
"how to reset iPhone" again.
Leo: OK. Yeah, in fact, I'm getting the answer instead of
the search result.
Danny: You get a big box of steps. So that's another example
of structured data, direct answers. It's also, and this goes a bit further,
this is becoming a concern for the content owners, right?
Leo: I was just about to say that. Because I don't have to
now click on this link at imore.com, I got what I wanted.
Danny: Exactly. And so as Google is doing more of this,
you've got content owners that are thinking, "is this going to steal
traffic away from me? And yeah, you're giving me credit." In the past,
people were happy to be lifted by Google because they clearly got lots of
traffic, because there wasn't enough just given away for free. So that's part
of the debate that's going on. But these structured snippets are perhaps more
of that. You don't necessarily need to go to those pages if you were looking
for some of this information, you just need to Google search and you are done. That
debate is going to continue on.
Leo: I understand what Google is thinking here though. Because
they're trying to serve their customer, and if a customer says, "how do I
reset an iPhone," and you know the answer, you should just put it there.
Danny: And I agree, and if they can provide it, that's great.
The problem is they're trying to serve their customer, even though they don't
actually know anything themselves.
Leo: that's a good point. They're serving them with
somebody' else's content.
Danny: And that is what their entire business model has been
built off of, right? Again, to go back to those auto driving cars, everything
you want to go to at Google, the built of their funding comes from the fact
that people search on Google and click on ads, and the content that surrounds
the search results comes from other people. And those other people have been
happy to supply that because the balance has been very favorable for a lot of
them. They get traffic that comes back to them. But as Google starts to say
more and more "You know what? We don't even need to send you these
websites. We already know the answer, here it is." Yes, that's good for
the user, but it's not so good for the websites, and it hasn't come along with
Google necessarily licensing that information from anybody. Because Google is
like "Hey, they're just facts."
Leo: This is what the publishers and Rupert Murdoch are upset about. Here I just searched for how to make jell-o shots. I'm telling you, this is serving your
audience. Right there, in a medium bowl stir together the Jell-O and boiling
water. This is like—
Gina: Well this is the "how to eat sushi" issue. Right? That we talked about last week.
Danny: That would come up. I was trying to get it to come up
again so you could see it.
Leo: Here's one. How to make Jell-O
shots. There you go.
Danny: But if you go to, you could see this example, if you
go to—
Leo: I think Danny spends a lot of time trying queries for—
Danny: You don't want to know the stuff I try. I always feel
like I'm going to get arrested for the things on my computer that I've searched
for too. It's terrible. But do a search for "how to eat sushi" and
see if you find my article coming up.
Leo: Yeah, because you wrote about—
Danny: So do the search on Google for "how to eat
sushi" and you should just get a set of search results.
Leo: I do now, I get Youtube, I get Wikihow.
Danny: Click on my listing, because my listing should be in
there. It says the NSFW. Do you see my article in those listings?
Gina: There it is. Not safe for work advice on 'how to eat
sushi.'
Danny: Now scroll down a bit further and you will see what
Google was showing. And you'll see that when you read it, the fourth step on
"how to eat sushi" was "don't shake the soy sauce off. That's
like shaking your wanker in public." Which is an exactly
correct British English for shaking your thing. That's what they mean. And
it's because. So you're like, really Google? You're kind of giving that advice?
And it wasn't that bad. I've heard worse. But the reason is is that's not Google's advice. That is Google extracting the advice from someone
else and offering it up as a direct answer. And the concern really is down the
line, if Google just takes all the answers and isn't giving enough to support
the sites that are producing them, the sites that
produce them no longer exist. And guess what? Then Google has no answers to
provide.
Leo: You're right.
Danny: Unless it just stores them all on some database, but
things change over a period of time.
Leo: You're right. People need to make a cut. How to change a flat tire. And boom boom boom. Everything is here, and I guess it comes from
dmv.org. Right? Because it's in the
box. That must be the original source. That's their way of saying if you
want to read more.
Danny: And I agree. It makes a lot of sense.
Leo: But I see the risk too.
Danny: Although dmv.org is not the DMV, it is just some
private website. So, in the past, that site might have gotten a lot more
traffic from this on how to change a tire. Thank you. Pull over. Whatever.
Gina: The amazing irony for me about the structured snippets
is that I've been a web developer for years and years and it used to be that
you used tables to layout your pages, and then everybody moved away from that,
you shouldn't use tables. But this is actually tabular data. The structured
step is. That they're pulling out of the page. So this Nikon D7100 page has a
table with a sensor resolution on the weight, the display size, and Google has
figured out a way how to discard tables that are using formatting and not very
interesting, and pull in data tables that are actually relevant and
interesting. So it's like everybody put a table on their pages, I feel like
that's the take away.
Danny: It can still do it even if things aren't in tables,
but that's true. There used to be things you'd have to avoid with tables, the
issue was more that the Google search engine used to consider the text higher
on the page more relevant than lower, so when you'd use a table the table would
sometimes would break apart, so all your—that hasn't been so much an issue. But
it's kind of related was that for a long time, Google didn't want people doing meta data. They're like "we don't trust meta data. People
lie. We don't support the meta keyword tags." And these days, Google wants
you to mark up behind the scenes, not just doing stuff with tables—
Leo: For their benefit.
Danny: But also mark up your content so they really
understand it, and OK, this page has a review. This review has five stars
associated with this product because you've marked all these sorts of things
that are up along with it from there.
Leo: Wasn't this the semantic web movement, this whole
idea?
Danny: Yeah.
Gina: This is kind of like the semantic web, except a lot
messier. Right? The original vision of the semantic
web was that everyone was going to have these amazing, perfectly structured XML
files with these pre-defined standard relationships, and anybody would be able
to build an engine and suck it all in and know everything about the world,
right? And that never happened. The reality is that web pages are messy and
they use lots of different tags, and Google has just gotten really good at
taking in anything and figuring out what's important. But it is, semantic web.
Danny: Exactly. And it's this hybrid, because in the Tim
Berners-Lee idea is exactly like you say. Everything would be nice and neat,
and that never happened. Not only was it not nice and neat, but you had people
actively trying to be misleading with their meta data.
So what Google has learned to do is both take the structured semantic data and
extract the data, even if it's not structured, and add it all up to decide when
they want to trust all that information together. And they're doing all this
cross checking and trying to decide whether or not they consider something to
be a fact. Because how old is Barack Obama? Well, if we have 100 different
places where we see his birth date we feel pretty good about that, so we'll
calculate it up from there. And that's why we're finally seeing this emerge,
where you get these structured answers, but it really is a slow revolution in
terms of what that means for publishers as well, and no one really knows the
answer to it yet.
Leo: Reavermike in our chat room
says, "This is just straight up plagiarism. Using other's thoughts and
ideas without permission."
Danny: Well, I have to say, if you type into Google
"what is a scraper site," that will explain to you that it cannot be plagiarism.
So you've got to type this in. OK? Type in "what is a scraper site,"
and then the first thing you should see is a thing at the top of Google search
results that says, "A scraper site is a website that copies content from
other websites using web scraping." Or effectively plagiarizing it, right?
Now scroll a little bit further down and you should see my article. It says,
"Tweet Showing how Google itself is a Scraper Site goes Viral." Click on that. So, what happened was, earlier this year—
Leo: Oh my god! That definition is scraped from Wikipedia!
Danny: So, earlier this year, Matt Cutts,
a good friend of the show's, he did this tweet where he said, "Hey, if
anybody spots scraper sites, please let us know here at Google. We want to try
to wipe these things out. We don't like it when people take content from other
people." So this guy named Dan Barker tweeted back "I think I've
spotted one, Matt." It was like up to 40,000 re-tweets. I've never seen
anything like it, especially for a topic that is so SCO oriented or whatever. Oh
my god.
Gina: I'm favoriting this tweet
right now.
Leo: Me too. You'll join 3,382 other favoriters.
And 33,000 re-tweets.
Gina: I think I spotted one. Note the similarities. It was a
well-executed tweet.
Danny: But it also crystallizes that conflict between the
publishers and Google taking their content and are you giving it back and
Google wanting it to have rules saying other sites shouldn't take content.
Leo: I have to say, it's a very fine line that Google
walks. And this is why they're being taken to task in Europe, in some cases. If
Jeff Jarvis were here, remember last week he ranted about the Murdoch article
about what Google is doing, but I could understand that there is opposition
from the content creators. Hey, wait a minute.
Gina: But if you don't want your content to show up in these
knowledge boxes, can't you just disallow? Isn't there—
Leo: But then you're not in the search results.
Gina: is that true Danny? You're either in or you're out? If
you're in, they get to display however they want?
Danny: That's part of the issue that had been going on in
Europe, and this is where the publishers, especially in Germany, have just been
going overboard. They complain Google stole all their content, and Google's
like don't be in Google. No big deal. But then they complain, well we want to
be in Google, but we don't want to be in Google news. So then they finally got
Google to pressure them enough to say, OK. You can be in Google news; you don't
have to be in regular Google. And then they said, even though the law changed
and they had to choose to be in Google News, they still said that they thought
that Google was using too much of their stuff, and they wanted to be paid even
more. And the answer is you don't have to be in Google news. You don't have to
be in Google. You can opt out of this stuff. And they don't, because by and
large, the mainstream publishers get a ton of traffic for free from Google.
Leo: And if you look at that Jell-O shots,
there is a link to the rest of that article, and it is at the very top. You are
number one on the search result, so there is a payoff in a way.
Danny: Everything that's going on in Europe has nothing to do
with these last two years worth of direct answers.
Leo: Oh, I understand.
Danny: Because the Europe thing is so old, and it's so—
Leo: They'll be suing about this in a couple of years.
Danny: Exactly.
Gina: And I've got to admit. When I'm on my phone and I want
a quick answer, and I search for something, I don't want to scroll through a
heavy page with flashbanner ads—
Leo: Well isn't that what Siri is doing?
Gina: Right.
Leo: Exactly the same thing. How do I make a Jell-O shot?
Danny: I think all this is correct, but it is that key thing
that if Google is going to provide answers, and it's just going to give the
answers, is it going over the tipping point where it needs to actually license
that content.
Siri: Let me check that. Okay, I've found this on the web
for how do you make a Jello shot!
Leo: Siri does not, it should read
me the recipe. (laughter)
Gina: It reads you the steps, yeah.
Leo: It does give me the same link. But
not the snippet. That's interesting.
Gina: Interesting, interesting. I have a hard time coming at
it from the perspective of like the content providers need to get paid. Like I
get that if the content providers aren't getting traffic then they don't
produce the content and then the answers don't happen, it's just it's hard to
get out of the mindset of like this is obviously the best thing for users, if
your content you know, if the Lifehacker tutorial
stats were at the top of the page, I would take that as a compliment, I'd be
like “Hey, Google's decided I'm the authority on this topic” if someone needs
to dig deeper they're going to click through and if they're not it's okay, it feels
like a free chapter for the introduction to my book on Amazon. It kind of feels
like here's a sample of what you'll get. But I know that not a lot of people
feel that way and I know that this tough, things are changing a lot and Google
makes one tiny change and it can change somebody's business.
Leo: Okay Moto X, how do I make a Jello shot?
Danny: I had that exact thing where I would search for like,
it was earlier this year I would search for what is SCO and they were listing
the definition from our page and our link and I was like “Wow!” You're just
going to take our definition and then you're done and then they switched over
later that year where they took the definition from Wikipedia rather than from
us and I was like “Why are you taking it from Wikipedia and from not us?”
Gina: Right right right, we've got the authority on this!
Leo: So there is some payoff, you get some authority. What
if Google said “And we'll cut you a penny for everybody that reads it or
something like that.”
Danny: Well I don't know that they necessarily have to pay,
it's still so early that we're digesting it, what I can tell you is there
hasn't been a whole scale reporting of people saying I no longer get as much
Google traffic as I've gotten in the past. Which is a sign
that these direct answers probably are not robbing enough traffic from people
as you might think that they would.
Leo: Yeah.
Danny: Right.
Leo: Right.
Danny: So and Google still seems to be sending a good chunk
of traffic to people so I think I'll sort of watch and see and I think the real
case will come into a situation where if you do see that it starts to tip the
other way where publishers might be like “You really are taking answers, there
really is no incentive on some of these queries for people to click through.
What way can you reward us or assure us that we're going to be better off down
the line?” and it could be that Google says “You know what..” I'm sorry I'm just.. I said okay Google and now I'm
trying to search on my Desktop.
Leo: It's, we've got to fix this. This is a problem, I
can't my phone, everything is all responding..
Danny: It's fine. But it might be that people say, you know we want to be paid directly but Google could as
easily say “You know if you want to participate in our direct answers program,
we're also going to consider you to be a trusted source, you're doing better in
rankings or a whole range of other stuff. Or maybe that's already happening too
and people might say “Well great, that's a good trade-off because sure you
could have these direct answers and I'm going to get a little credit but you know what, that's alright because I know on a lot of
these long detailed searches I'm going to pick up traffic from there. So I
don't know what the answer is, and again it is so early I think the real
concern is that Google has not really shown a lot of concern about what they're
doing to the publishers as they've rolled this out. Then now like “Hey
publishers let's all get together and talk about what you think about this” or
“What we should do?” or “Is it right?” just “We're doing it!”
Leo: Maybe they want to set a precedent.
Danny: Yeah, and they might want to get the Europe thing
settled before they start doing this stuff.
Leo: Let's not bring up another issue, yeah.
Gina: (laughing)
Leo: Let's take a break, come back. I want to do the ChangeLog, I'm going to do the ChangeLog. Actually Gina's going
to do the ChangeLog so get the trumpets ready because
we're going to do the ChangeLog, right after a word
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growing rapidly. Alright ladies and gentlemen it's time for, play the trumpets, the Google ChangeLog
(Trumpets play)
Announcer: The Google ChangeLog!
Leo: La la la la la. Gina Trapani has the
latest from Google.
Gina: Well if you're wondering what's going on with Google
Plus these days, Google isn't saying much but at least one new change might be
an indicator. Google is no longer requiring new Gmail users to connect their
account to a Google plus profile. So you sign up for a brand new Gmail account,
you'll get to a page which says “Create your public Google Plus profile” and
there is a “No Thanks” option.
Leo: That's wild!
Gina: There you go, I remember when
everyone was up in arms because you had to create a Google Plus profile if you
had a Google account period. This is kind of a big turnaround.
Leo: I think so.
Gina: But there you go, Google Plus profiles no longer
required for Gmail. Another nice, I think I would say user-friendly change, Google Play is going to start listing in-app
purchase price-ranges for apps. So starting September 30th, Google
will start to display the range of prices an app can charge within app
purchases within the playstore.
Leo: It's because they lost a court battle in Europe I
remember.
Gina: Exactly, yeah. This is no doubt in response to that
right? The dust up over children racking up purchases and
their parents footing the bill. So this is nice, you know, because when
you download an app currently in Google Play it just “an app purchased” you
don't know how much or, you know, if you can use the app without buying an app
purchase or if not. So this is a nice step towards letting consumers know what
they're getting into. Actually, Leo you could probably speak to this. Chrome
for iOS now added support for app extensions and this is a new iOS8 thing.
Which I actually haven't had time to play with very much, but so if you've got
Chrome installed in iOS, to share a website from Chrome to another app, you tap
the hamburger menu and select share and then you can send pages to any app that
supports extensions. Now extensions are new in iOS8 right Leo?
Leo: Yeah and in fact there are a couple of ways they're
use is a little surprising for example the password manager. For example, one
password and I just learned Last Pass does this as well, will add themselves to the share menu but when you share you're not
really sharing, you're going to get a password. Which is kind of cool, before
with Apple, I'll go back to the share menu, and this is of course with menu
Apple apps, all the Apple apps and many third party apps, and the good news is
Chrome has added this because of the capability which was added to iOS8.
Previously you could basically email, Twitter, Facebook. You could message, now
you've got.. this is just
like Android, right? So as you add apps, this list will get longer and you
could turn it off or on, so you get share capabilities which
is great.
Gina: Right so similar to Androids and Tens.
Leo: Very much like in Tens, I'm not clear because on one
of my phones it seems like the list is automatically populated and quite long.
I'm not sure exactly when it does that and when it gives you a chance to turn
it on. I don't know. But yeah, this is very much like what Android does. The
Android does it automatically. And in fact that's a detriment because you can
get an awfully long list.
Gina: You can get a very long list, and then you have apps
that help you manage the list right?
Leo: Right. (both laughing)
Leo: Extensions are iOS8's response to all of the
capabilities, the inner app capabilities of Android. Apple, which has
traditionally sealed each application hermetically is
now finally letting applications talk to one another. I think that's huge.
Gina: Right.
Leo: And to their credit, they understood that that was a
security risk and they didn't want to do it, now they've done it in a way
that's much more judicious. They've done it one step at a time and I think
that's a good thing.
Gina: Yeah it's very nice that you can turn them on or off
by default.
Leo: Yeah things like that.
Gina: Lifehacker reports that apps
like Glasspass work some of the time but not all of
the time, apps have to update to iOS8 to enable the hooks to share so you might
not see a whole lot right away, it sounds like this is still pretty new and
some apps are working out bugs but nice to see anyway.
Leo: iOS8 is very buggy in general.
Gina: Is it really?
Leo: Oh god yeah.
Gina: I'm fielding a lot of bug reports about my iOS app at
the moment.
Leo: It's not you.
Gina: It's not me.
Leo: It's not you, it's Apple.
Gina: I'm going to tell all my angry users “It's not me!”
Leo: It's not me, no. But everybody who does apps for iOS
is going to have to address it because, there's issues.
Gina: Yeah, and it's going to go out to everyone. Or it
already has.
Leo: Yeah, well adoption traditionally is very high in iOS, this one was a little slower than iOS7. I think it's
43% now. That's still pretty high, it's only been out
a week.
Gina: Wow, it's only been a week. Wow. That is fast.
Leo: And then there's the people who have 8.0.1 who won't
be reporting bugs for some time now. Because they don't have
any Internet access.
Gina: (Laughing) Oh right! This is what you were talking
about earlier.
Leo: Actually.. say again?
Gina: So the update to 8.0.1 cut off your Internet access?
Leo: It cut off your LTE, your voice, on not all but some
iPhone 6s apparently, and it cut off your touch ID. Your
fingerprint reader. But that's all!
Danny: Cut off your finger.
Gina: But the fix is out, probably functional.
Leo: There isn't a fix out, they pulled it pretty quickly,
like within an hour and the fix is kind of a restore your iPhone fix. (laughing)
Gina: Oohh..
Danny: Oohh..
Leo: You press the option key and you can restore 8.0.
Gina: Wow.
Leo: Yeah it's pretty ugly, about as ugly as it can get
frankly.
Gina: Sorry iOS users, woof.
Leo: Yeah.
Gina: Well.
Leo: It will slow down the adoption rate I think.
Gina: I think so. Go ahead Danny.
Danny: I was just saying MG Siegler tweeted something like “Good job putting an update that takes everybody's minds
off of bendgate.”
Leo: Yeah! Hey your phone bends? Who cares you can't use it
now!
Danny: Nobody's talking about the bendgate issue any more.
Gina: They have it in their back pocket just in case antennagate happens again.
Danny: Come up with something that really screws things up.
Leo: Just amazing.
Gina: Alright last item in the ChangeLog,
Google Maps update. Users in 20 new countries around the world just got
navigation in Google Maps. The expansion is aimed primarily at navigation
coverage in Africa, the Caribbean and South America. There are a few outliers
in Nepal and Malta. Long list of countries here which my
computer is currently loading, Angola, Bahamas, Bolivia, Nepal, Trinidad.
Leo: I didn't realize you couldn't navigate in the
Caribbean.
Gina: That's because you're an American just like me.
Leo: So if you were in the Bahamas and you fired up Google
Maps it just says “Well you're here. Good luck getting there.”
Gina: Yeah it was just maps, pre-navigation.
Leo: Wow.
Gina: Yeah, so it was something but it just wasn't
everything we were used to getting. Sorry I'm so pixelated.
Leo: You're fine. And you are Gina Trapani and that was the
Google ChangeLog.
Leo: (Humming) So it's funny because as we see the Apple
users who have been in their little cocoon of Apple Happy Secure Happy Land get
these new features like extensions and third party keyboards, the shock and
horror with which they're greeting these is interesting. Maybe we should
address this, you can now use Swiftkey which we've been using for years on Android and love. Swype, same thing. Flexkey, and a bunch of other keyboard alternatives on iOS
including one that I wish we had on Android which allows you not to respond
with text but with animated gifs. (laughing) It's an
animated gif keyboard! And it's got thousands, it's amazing! But when you
install a new keyboard on iOS you get a big bad warning saying hey watch out, third party keyboards can transmit all the
data that you type to their servers and you should be wary of that. And it's
scaring Apple users, the warning on Android is similar but not terrifying,
right? Can't remember.
Gina: Yeah I mean, I don't even know if keyboards, is there
a keylogger specific warning message? I don't think
so, although you know it's funny I've been watching iOS users try Swiftkey and one of my friends was like “This prompted me
to sign into Facebook and it uses my Facebook status updates to figure out how
I write!” He just had his mind blown like “This is creepy! This is too creepery like why is it doing this, it should have told
me!” And I was like “This is Swiftkey, it's been
around for a long time, this is what it does, yes it's
weird that you sign into Facebook with your keyboard.”
Leo: It's a good thing!
Gina: It is a very unexpected thing
unless you know about it, right? But it was an interesting sort of wake up
call. Oh this is a keyboard that has to tell you why you have to sign into your
social networks.
Leo: Right. But you do get, I'm pretty sure and I'm going
to install Swiftkey on my new phone because it's not
installed yet. I'm pretty..
Danny: I think the thing about the Android phones too that's
different is that even if you don't install Swiftkey,
most of them at this point will have Swype typing of
some sort already built into them.
Leo: The Google keyboard does.
Danny: Right but like every phone that I have right now I can Swype type as Android and I didn't have to install
anything or worry about any security issues that were coming on. Plus I didn't
have to kind of lose one of my keys so that I can switch back and forth whereas
when I did it with the iPhone it was like “Hallelujah” I can finally do the Swype typing but it's a little awkward at times that I have
to, if it hasn't come up with the Swiftkey I've got
to push a thing and then I have this little globe thing that's in my way and it
you know, it works. It's not as polished as I think it is when you're using
Android and then all of the security stuff that comes with it, it's like Apple why didn't you just find a way to make that native despite
typing. How difficult would that have been?
Leo: So you think that that's why people are using third
party keyboards on iOS, they just want Swype. They want Swiftkey flow or equal.
Danny: There may be other reasons why but I haven't gone
through to see which ones are big.
Leo: I think there are other reasons, I'll tell you the other reason. I'll give you the other reason. Apple still
refuses to do anything but uppercase letters on its keycaps. Even
when you're lowercase.
Gina: What is up with that?
Danny: What do you mean uppercase?
Gina: The letters are always uppercase.
Leo: Like a typewriter. Even if you're typing lowercase
letters, the keycaps of the keyboard are uppercase.
Gina: That was one of the first questions I got from family
members who got iOS. They were like, I don't understand, why aren't the letters
lower?
Leo: That's reason two that I immediately wanted to change
the keyboard. So maybe you guys don't remember but when you install a third
party keyboard on Android like Swiftkey which I do on
every Android device, you get this warning: “Attention: This input method may
be able to collect all the text you type, including personal data like passwords
and credit card numbers. It comes from the app Swiftkey.
Use this input method? Okay or cancel. It's very similar actually to what
Apple's saying, for some reason we Android users just go “Oh yeah, oh
whatever.” And say okay. And Apple users are terrified. I'm getting calls,
people “Oh is it safe? I heard Swiftkey sent stuff to
the servers and..” And then Steve Gibson said
yesterday, which I didn't want to say anything but, “Well Swiftkey sends stuff to the servers but Swype doesn't.” How do
you know you don't know?
Gina: Well yeah you'd have to set up a network sniffer right
and use it to see.
Leo: Yeah. Right.
Gina: Yeah. In a way I feel like Android users to some
degree have been kind of Windows Vista'd. Like we've
been asked permission so many times that we just give it give it give it. Dan
you tweeted the iOS prompt that said like “Hey, Facebook has been collecting
your location data.”
Danny: Oh yeah yeah.
Gina: Do you want to keep doing this?
Leo: Oh get ready. Every app will do this once, Danny. Every single one.
Danny: But you know what, somebody tweeted back to me how
they liked it didn't all happen at once. Every time I would turn on my phone I
got a different reminder and I didn't mind it. It was like “Oh.”
Leo: Wait a minute! Or it could just honor your.. because it asks you the first
time, it says..
Danny: Yeah but it wasn't violating anything.
Leo: And you say yes, and then a little later, a day or two
later it says: “You know, it's still doing that, is that okay?”
Danny: I thought that was fine, I thought that was totally
cool.
Gina: Yeah I actually kind of liked it because...
Danny: I appreciated the reminder that Facebook is doing this
because, you know. I just appreciated it.
Gina: What if I'm not using Facebook? Maybe I decided oh you
know what I don't need this to be using my location data in the background, I'm going to uninstall this. This is the issue.
If you want to use an app you have to grant it these permissions. Maybe I try
the app, I try apps all the time and then don't need them later, but they're
running in the background and I kind of want to be like no, but.. yeah this issue of constantly
being prompted for permissions or being prompted with this huge wall of
permissions with subcategories that have supposedly been made simpler, there's
got to be a better way.
Leo: Well the choice is clear. Android asks you once when
you install the app, and then presumes that you've read that and you've
approved it and that's that. Now you can get a list can't you? Of all the apps
using find location, that's all it is by the way is find location.
Gina: Yeah, yeah.
Danny: Yeah.
Leo: And on Apple same thing, you have to approve it when
you install the app, the first time you use the app, not instead when you
install it but the first time you use it it'll say do you want to give this app
location permission, you say yes, you still can go in the settings and see
who's getting location. But for some reason Apple's decided that a few days
later it wants to warn you on each app doing this. Now I'm hoping that's not
going to happen every few days because I have 159 apps and it's..
Danny: Yeah.
Leo: And it's happening a lot.
Danny: But the same thing to me also that I'm assuming that
there's some kind of logic going on. Because I did not get
hit with every app that I've authorized to do that.
Leo: You will. No, you will.
Danny: I, but it was the things that came up immediately or
the things that I'm probably using the most.
Leo: Right.
Danny: And that made sense so maybe it'll come down the line,
it's going to.. I'm wondering what the trigger is.
Like hey we've noticed that Facebook has now done it's 100th update at your location. To where as you
installed emoji keyboard.
Leo: Let's talk next week Danny after you've seen the 50th one of those.
Danny: Alright.
Leo: There's two problems. One
it's annoying, but two is fatigue. And as you pointed out we Android users are
so used to it we go “Yeah, yeah yeah.” There's a risk
if you warn people too much. I like what Apple does which is it warns you not
on install, but it warns you the first time it needs the permissions, you have
to explicitly say so. But that seems to me sufficient. To continue to warn you
is a little nanny, but that you know, I don't know.. whatever. It doesn't seem to bother you.
Gina: So you like the iOS approach of the in-flow initial
permission to stop the reminder.
Leo: I do.
Gina: Yeah I agree.
Leo: Because it's very easy to ignore the permissions
you're giving an app when you're installing it because it's a long list.
Gina: Just give me the app, yeah.
Leo: Yeah yeah yeah.
Danny: Yeah.
Leo: So many apps for instance want location information,
your contacts and your photos. On Android you'll see all three of those
requests only once when you install the app. On iOS you'll see it when you,
when it actually asks for those permissions when you first run the app and you
want to access the camera role say hey do you want to give this permission, I
think that's exactly the right time because you know right then why it's
wanting the camera role and what it is and I think that's when you can best
make that decision. But I question the need to continue to remind me. But this
is Apple saying, and by the way I guess this is a story for us because it's
very clear in the last few interviews Tim Cook's given, this is Apple saying
“Oh we've decided to be the privacy security company” and other companies are,
you know, our business is selling you hardware other companies are selling your
information. You know what we're talking about.
Danny: We'd never do that.
Leo: We'd never do that except with iAds but that's another story.
Gina: That's the marketing opportunity for them.
Leo: It's huge.
Gina: You know, they're capitalizing on peoples fear of what Google knows about them.
Leo: I think frankly that's good positioning and Apple has
done some things to make it better..
Danny: Or you know, we would never you know, target you. With ads or anything. But we would partner with a big
company that pays us lots of money to be the default search engine and probably
gives us 90% of all the revenues when you do a search on our device and go over
the search engine.
Leo: Yeah. Do we know how much Apple gets from Google each
year because it's the default search engine?
Danny: I saw some estimate that it might have been like $2
billion or so.
Leo: Two billion! But..
Danny: It's a lot, and they're going to get a lot off of it,
and they never disclose to you that they have paid or are getting paid from
Google to do that. You barely even know that there was a deal that was ever
struck so I appreciate it with..
Leo: So that's when you're using the Google search in
Safari, that information is being leaked. When you use it in Siri it masks that
information. I was told, and I may be wrong, that all of those searches are
coming from Apple not from you.
Danny: Well they're going to come from Apple, yes. Although
when you click to go through to a particular site if you do that, it might
change. And eventually maybe Siri will happen where they don't target you in
any sort of way, you know, with the third parties or whatever.
Leo: I wonder though, I thought I remember Safari was doing
this too. But that would be forgoing $2 billion a year.
Danny: I think Safari has moved to by default to HTPS
searches. But that just means you're going to have a secure connection when you
do your search with Google. Google still knows who you are and in fact you'll
probably be logged in, you know, with Google. You might be logged in with
Safari and even if you're not logged in, Google's probably still going to
cookie you even if you're on a secure thing because it's not like next time you
go to Google it says oh you're still on a secure thing, I'll throw away the
cookie I assigned you last time so. I appreciated what Apple said but what they
didn't say is “But we also have deals with these big companies and make a lot
of money off of them because they in turn make a lot of money off of you in
turn by doing that stuff that we said we don't do directly. So.
Gina: That's a good point.
Leo: I would hope, here by the way
is the Apple warning just so that you can compare it to the Android warning.
I've turned on Swype. It says “Allow full access for Swype Keyboards? Full access allows the developer of this
keyboard to transmit anything you type, including things you have previously
typed with this keyboard. This could include sensitive information such as your
credit card number or street address.” The Google warning's a little more
clear, it's coming from.. it's pretty much the same isn't it?
Gina: Yeah they're pretty similar.
Leo: But it scares Apple people more because they've never
confronted it before. I love it, somebody in the chatroom saying “Why are
always bagging on Apple, can't you just be..” (laughter) It's like, excuse me? I think Apple people
sometimes say I don't … nee nee nee,
I don't want to hear that!!
Danny: Everybody says that. You're going to have Android
people do the same sort of thing. Why do you always pick on Android? Why don't
you ever pick on Windows?
Leo: Oh no no,
I hear it from everybody. Absolutely.
Gina: People take these things very personally.
Danny: And then there's the three people still using
Blackberry who get really upset. Well you see there's only three people using Blackberry.
Leo: I'm just going to see really quickly, if I do a search
on the new iPhone if the default search is Google. By the way, immediately
before, yeah it's a Google search, before it does the search it pulls up a
Wikipedia entry, it does a search snippet right away before I even hit go.
Gina: That's the Google search app? No.
Leo: No this is Safari on..
Gina: Oh that's Safari. Mhm.
Leo: Safari on iOS. And then if I hit return, I get the
Google results. So it is it's actually doing it on Google. I thought it was
going to use Bing too. I think Bing is available if you wish. But against $2 billion worth of revenue.
Danny: It gets complicated, being as available for spotlight
searches and then Siri but Safari still defaults to using Google although I'll
have to go back and look because it's interesting that if they're pulling up
Wikipedia as you type, I don't know if that's Google doing that or if it's
Safari doing that.
Leo: I wondered too. Right.
Danny: I'm going to have to go look into that now. That just
bummed my afternoon, thanks.
Leo: (laughing) And, we trust Swiftkey right? Apple users if you wish to trust Swiftkey you can, I would trust Swype.
Here's to me the bottom line. These are all well-known big companies, it is
possible with the packets for them to see what's being sent back and I think
they would be discovered if they were to do anything nefarious, they'd be
discovered quite quickly. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Danny: And can I just say those, when I was typing in Gbac, that was just because I was trying to understand some
of the dope lingo from The Wire.
(Leo and Gina laughing)
Danny: If you look at my search history right now..
Leo: Have you noticed..?
Danny: Looks like a start up in the heroin trade or
something. What the hell is that?
Leo: I guess trying to understand The Wire. Have you guys
noticed that the, it seems like Google is doing a better job of catching the
stuff I search for and populating the ads in other pages as I search around, it
seems like it's really working well lately. I search for something and I see
ads for it all over from now on.
Gina: Yeah, I have noticed that.
Leo: It seems like it's working
better doesn't it?
Gina: Yeah, it follows you around. The
stuff that you're interested in. And you know, I continue to get that
feeling of like Google knows a lot about me from now and from ads and from
search suggestions of like things I've searched for before.
Leo: Right
Gina: Yeah. Yeah, very smart. They
have enough money from Google X and Google Y.
Leo: They're doing a good job.
Gina: They're doing a good job at their job.
Leo: Let's see what else before we wrap things up, we're
getting to the end of our program schedule. You can tweet a Wolfram Alpha
language program. Tweet a program and it will return, what is that? Where did
that come from? Let me try it.
Gina: Yeah, you can so.
Leo: Tweet Wolfram Alpha.
Gina: Wolfram Alpha is the coolest..
Leo: I love it.
Gina: It's such a cool product.
Leo: That nobody knows about or uses.
Gina: Nobody knows about or uses but there's the thing, I
know about it and I don't use it although until something like this happens I'm
like oh cool let me try this! I try it and I'm impressed.
Leo: Oh I get it, so you can tweet code in Wolfram Alpha,
obviously 140 characters or less. To Wolfram TAP and it will run your program
and tweet the result.
Gina: Which is pretty awesome.
Leo: Now, have you played, so this is a really good one, geographics text style hello 150 georange world will put “Hello” on a world map and it'll tweet it back to you. It tells
you two things, first of all that it's a very succinct language, it's a very powerful language. Have you played with this language? The Wolfram language? Look at this one, this is kind of like Mathematica, which is Wolfram's in the back.
Gina: Yeah that cube of spheres is amazing.
Leo: This is the RGB colors in a cube of spheres. And it
tweets it back at you.
Gina: I haven't actually done this but I am now.
Leo: You're a programmer, we count on you.
Gina: Yeah this is neat and they attach the results as an
image kind of as a twitter card, yeah that's very cool.
Leo: Wow look you can do fractals. Neato.
Gina: But again, it's like I just want, Wolfram just seems
like a thing I want to use every day in my life I'm just never rendering cubes
of spheres and the RGB scale very often you know what I mean? Like, it's not
something I need to do that often.
Leo: I know but it's fun. Well
here's one.
Gina: It's fun.
Leo: All the flags, of Europe, sized by population.
Gina: Yeah, that's cool.
Leo: Wow.
Gina: That's really cool.
Leo: With a 140 character tweet. Alright, tweet us your
best Wolfram Alpha language. That's just crazy. It makes me want to learn the
language which is obviously the intent. Are we still waiting on the Nexus 7
phone or 6 or whatever it would be? Nexus 6 it would be.
Gina: I don't know, what do you guys think?
Leo: Chad you're the one right? You're the one who'd be
waiting.
Chad: Oh my gosh, the rumors,
there are no solid great rumors.
Leo: Right, and the Moto X.
Chad: Everyone expects..
Leo: Sorry..
Chad: I don't know if I can in this office. As you've demonstrated.
Danny: What's the next Android version? Isn't that Android L
that we're waiting for?
Leo: L, the L word yeah.
Gina: L, yeah.
Danny: So we have to get a phone that comes out with Android
L.
Leo: Well it's due next month according to the Washington
Post.
Gina: Yeah, so might be looking at a new phone running the
L.
Leo: And by the way default encryption, remember this is
something Apple announced, Apple used to have a waiting line for law
enforcement to decrypt phones. You either fill out a form and send the phone to
Apple and in a few months you'd get it back decrypted, Apple has announced we
will no longer do that, there will no longer be a line because we don't have
the capability, we've changed the default encryption and it's strong encryption
and now L will do that too. Which is good!
Gina: Yeah that's great.
Leo: This is where companies influence one another. I love
it.
Gina: Yeah.
Leo: So yeah, you're right, they have to release.. do they always with a new
version of Android have a new phone? A new Nexus?
Chad: That's what some of the developers tweeted was
that listen if we're going to release an operating system we need to release
some sort of hardware. We're going to have hardware to bundle with, which was
from a tweet.
Leo: that makes sense
Gina: A reference device, right? A reference device about
what the default Android L or Limoncello or Lollipop
or whatever it is, what the experience is going to be.
Leo: Well you could just update the Nexus 5 and say that's
it.
Gina: You could but then you wouldn't get all the money
coming in on the holiday season on hardware.
Leo: Oh it's a profit thing.
Gina: I don't know.
Danny: But I don't know how much they sell for the Nexus 5.
Leo: Yeah, I don't think it's a big money maker.
Danny: You know, it's nice having it but.. I could see, is the Moto X out unlocked yet?
Leo: Yeah this is unlocked. And it's not exactly pure
Android but all the Moto customizations are in Moto programs the connect
program for instance, so it's pretty pure.
Danny: What I'm wondering is whether they just put out the
Nexus 5 L or something and it's just the Moto X or whatever.
Leo: Some nice little fun. I like it.
Danny: It will be interesting, you know. Potentially they
could just put the Nexus 5 back out and now it's... maybe it's time for a fablet. Maybe they're desperately coming out with the Nexus
5.5L.
Leo: The Blackberry Passport L.
Danny: Yeah, right.
Gina: What??
Leo: This just came out? Would you pay $599 for this
unlocked? It is a passport sized blackberry full physical keyboard, nice screen
actually.
Danny: Oh, no you had me at blackberry.
Leo: (Laughing) We shouldn't mock
it. I want them to succeed. This is a product that some who have been very
interested in. You know, there's such a limited store compared to the Android
store, compared to the Windows Phone Store it's limited so, it's also kind of a weird form factor. It's like a poptart. It's like you gotta have, they have a picture of people trying to hold it. It's not good.
Danny: Now, Leo, the Wablets are
going to be great.
Leo: What?
Danny: Wablets.
Leo: What's a Wablet?
Danny: A wide tablet. Yeah you'll see. They're going to be
the leaders in Wablet technology and you're not going
to be talking poptarts any more, you'll be going
every phone should be Wablet sized.
Leo: Wascawwy wablet?
Danny: Has anybody done that yet? Wablet.com.
Leo: You just invented it, go get it Danny.
Danny: No I'm sure somebody's done it. Oh, no there aren't
that many wablets.
Leo: Alright, I'm going to give you time to register that
domain name and when we come back we're going to get our fix of the week. Danny Sullivan that wascally wablet from searchengineland.com, Gina Trapani one of our
regulars. Do you shave Danny or are you just naturally boyish?
Danny: No I shaved for the show.
Leo: Thank you!
Gina: Aw thank you Danny! That was nice.
Leo: I appreciate that, did you
use your Harry's? Do you know about Harry's? I love Harry's. This is..
Danny: Oh my goodness, yes I do.
Leo: Do you? Yeah, Harry's is a shave club basically, I get
my blades every other month and the fabulous Harry's shave cream which is a
critical part of the whole thing. You know if somebody could go on my desk, I
don't know if they've announced it yet, but there's a
couple of new Harry's products you can get from harrys.com. The new foaming
shave gel, and the aftershave are here. Harry's is
founded by one of the founders of Warby Parker, Jeff,
he said just like Warby Parker, here's a business,
the shaving blade business that is dominated by monopolies effectively that are
keeping products artificially high. So high that now when you go to get razor
blades at the drug store, it's not just New York City, Gina, everywhere in the
country, here in Petaluma they're locked up. You have to get a clerk and he'll
check your ID and your passport before you can get the
shaving equipment. They're so expensive. Well Harry's is better for less, they
actually bought, they looked around and said who makes
great blades? They found a company in Germany that makes, the only company that
makes really great blades, this is the Truman set. I have the Winston at home
which is engraved metal but some people prefer the Truman. But you know, the
handles aren't really the key, the key is this amazing blade. Made in Harry's
own factory in Germany, they own the factory in Germany. Andy and Jeff said we
could do better than those $8 blades, if you visit Harry's.com shop around,
pick a set, I actually have to say I kind of like this Truman, it's pretty
nice, but the Winston is good too and you can get that engraved and then you
can get with the kit you're going to get the shave cream, the two blades, so
you're all set to go and then you can have your blades and your cream delivered
monthly. I haven't tried the new foaming shave gel. Ooh that's nice. Oh that
smells good too. Harry's.com, here's the deal you get $5 off your first order
when you use the offer code twig, this will be the closest shave you've ever
had. Harrys.com. Now what do I do?
Danny: Shave?
Leo: I couldn't resist.
(laughter)
Leo: I have to finish the show this way! Offer code..
Danny: Santa, will you bring me a Nexus?
Leo: Ho ho ho.
Gina: Can we have a Nexus?
Leo: A Nexus 6? You've been a good little boy and girl.
(laughter)
Leo: Ho ho ho!
Danny: One with encryption please!
Leo: That foaming shave gel really foams! That was a little dab'll do ya and it just
woo!
Gina: It did foam right up.
Leo: Whoa, I didn't expect that. And then afterwards you're
going to want to use...
(laughter)
Leo: What are you laughing at? I got gel everywhere.
Afterwards, you're going to want to use the Harry's shave lotion. Why's my
phone making music now? Oh it's time to do something else. Well I'll tell you
what, the Moto X alarm says it's time.. how do I stop this? Don't you hate new phones? It's time for
our picks of the week. Let's start with actually our tip of the week with Gina
Trapani, Gina?
Gina: So if you've got yourself an Android device and you
want to get a taste of material design before Android L launches, Google
actually released a little quiz app called Topeka and it's free in the Google
Play store, that's Topeka it's a quiz app, you log in, you get to take quizzes
about food or history or music, yeah! It's actually, they're actually good
quizzes. But it also gives you kind of an idea of what material design is like.
The cards kind of move around and slide, have the big numbers and sort of the
more material design look and feel.
Leo: Oh I gotta try this.
Gina: Yeah, this app Topeka was actually built with Polymer
which is a developer framework for making web apps that have the material
design look and feel so this is actually a web app running natively on Android
which is kind of neat too. And you'd never know, it
behaves just as if it were a native app.
Leo: It's pretty.
Gina: It's just a very simple kind of cute, yeah it's pretty
simple cute. Yeah a nice way to kind of get a taste of the material design and
it runs on Android 4.0 and up. So Topeka.
Leo: Topeka. And it's free.
Gina: It's free. From the Goog.
Leo: Such good blades.
Gina: (laughing)
Leo: You never cut yourself, that's what I love about
Harry's. I've been using Harry's for 6 months, and I've never cut myself
shaving. You know I don't know why, I just took it for granted that you would
always cut yourself shaving.
Gina: I wouldn't jinx it.
Leo: No, I'm not worried! These blades. So great. And because I get them every other month I
get them fresh so I always have a sharp blade in there. It's good. Do you have
a tip for us or a trick or a tool or anything you'd like to share with us Mr.
Danny Sullivan of searchengineland?
Danny: I do. Breaking fresh off the search
wire, if you have Google Now on Android.
Leo: I do.
Danny: And you have ever searched for a flight in the past.
Leo: Yes.
Danny: Google is now going to prompt you to tell you if that
same flight is coming up at a lower fare. That's right.
Leo: Wow.
Danny: In fact, interestingly this is something that when
being launched they made a big deal of the fact that you can fare track and
have predictions or whatever and then they abandoned all that stuff and now
Google is going to put it into Google now. So the way it would work is you
know, there was a flight that it knows you've done all the time, you may see a
Google card coming up telling you it's now a lower price and if you tap on the
Google card you can go through and do the booking.
Leo: That's awesome.
Danny: So watch for that on Google Now.
Leo: Thank you!
Gina: Wow, nice.
Leo: Is that because they acquired, what was it, ITIA?
Danny: That will help them do that where they can track that
more, and they were already doing flight tracking so it's sort of a good
extension of what they're doing other than that.
Leo: That's neat.
Danny: It's sort of surprising that you can't explicitly set
it up though right. But maybe if you're doing that on Google I'll have to go
back and look at Google flight tracker there might be a way to set up a
standard things that are going on.
Leo: Is this something that the airlines are going to hate
them for? Probably.
Danny: Probably not. Because you'll place the flight through
the airline so you know. The airline is still going to get the money. But I'm
sure if there's a way for someone to hate Google about something, they'll find
it so.
Leo: They'll find a way. Very nice. Well I don't have to tell you what my pick is and you'll hear a lot more about
it after I've used it for a little bit longer, the Moto X I have to say the Motomaker site Motomaker.com is up, they had Moto 360s and
Motorola hints right now, I think they're sold out on the Hint now. But I have
ordered all three and should have all three for the next time we're here on
This Week in Google. I'm going to be gone next week, taking the Moto X along
with me as I head to London with Lisa for a week! Who's doing the show next
week, do you know? Does anybody know Chad? Is it Father Robert Ballecer or Sarah Lane? You know what, it's Mike Elgin.
Mike is a Google fanatic, it's definitely Mike Elgin.
Gina: Great!
Leo: So he'll be hosting next week with you and Jeff.
Gina: Cool.
Leo: I want to thank Danny Sullivan for being here from
searchengineland.com, always a pleasure working with you Danny and I read you
religiously like every day.
Danny: Well thank you very much it
was a pleasure to be here.
Leo: Marketingengineland.com as well.
Gina: Yeah, thanks Danny.
Leo: Really really good stuff we
appreciate it. And thanks to Gina Trapani from.. we were just playing with thinkup,
I guess Danny uses thinkup too.
Danny: You know I kid you not, it's
on my calendar every week. It says right here, write thinkup review.
(laughter)
Danny: So it might be another week or two longer but if
anybody hasn't got thinkup you should really get it
before Twitter just buys it which is what they should do.
Leo: You're not for sale, right Gina?
Gina: We're not for sale, we're too
expensive I think for Twitter right now, anyway. Talk to me in a few weeks.
Danny the longer you wait the better the product will be when you write the
review because we're fixing stuff every week.
Leo: All the time.
Danny: That's perfect, because I can wait for a really long
time.
Leo: Now, don't tell them that.
Danny: No I'm going to finally get to it but you know, it's awesome. I look forward to getting my digest
of stuff that's coming and they're consistently giving me great things and better
feedback than what I get from Twitter directly.
Leo: Well it's updated regularly, because you know we
looked before the show and I'm looking in and I've got new stuff in here.
Thinkup.com you can try it free right now.
Gina: Thank you.
Leo: Thank you, Gina. Thank you Danny. Thank you all for being here, thanks for Chad Johnson who put together a great
lineup of stories for us. Today we do This Week in Google, every Wednesday 1pm
Pacific, 4pm Eastern time, 2000 UTC on twit.tv you can watch us live, participate
in the chatroom, we love it when you do but if you can't get here live you can
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