This Week in Google 272 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It's time for TWIG, This Week in Google! Jeff and Gina are here. We're gonna take a
look at a brand new e-mail program for your mobile and web from Google. A replacement for Gmail? Possibly. Twitter takes a pivot with its new developer platform;
we'll talk about that. And Jeff finally
understands why what's App is worth 22 billion dollars. It's all coming up next on TWIG.
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Leo: This is
TWIG: This Week in Google, episode 272,
recorded October 22, 2014.
Check
Your Inbox
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your new account go to shutterstock.com and use the offer code TWIG1014. It's time for TWIG: This Week in Google. A show not just about Google but about the
Cloud, Facebook, Twitter, anything we really want to talk about including New
Media, that's partly because we've got this guy over here. Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism at the
City University of New York, turning young minds onto the possibilities that
remain in the tattered wreck that is journalism.
Jeff Jarvis: Corrupting
them.
Leo: Great to have
you, Jeff. Also here, founding editor of Lifehacker, programmer, developer, host of All About Android, and the creator of ThinkUp,
Gina Trapani.
Gina Trapani: Hello!
Leo: Hi Gina!
Gina: Good to see
you.
Leo: Gina did a Mitzvah,
Jeff.
Jeff: She did
indeed. She did a couple of Mitzvahs. What's the plural of Mitzvah?
Leo: Mitsvi? Mitsuvishis? It's a Mitsuvishi.
Gina: What?
Leo: She sent us
invites to a new Google service that I think is kind of on the order of Gmail
when it first came out in terms of people wanting it. It's called Inbox, and it's—they say a
marriage of Gmail and Google Now.
Gina: Just to be
clear, before I start getting a barrage of e-mails, I do not issue the invites.
Leo: Yes.
Gina: OK. I just happen to have—
Leo: You happen to
have one.
Gina: A few Googlers who follow me on twitter, I asked, they sent
exactly three. So I sent them to my
co-hosts.
Leo: Thank you,
Gina.
Gina: I don't have
invites.
Leo: So it's a
really hard to know exactly what this. And by the way, you can go to google.com/inbox and request an
invite. That's where you should go.
Gina: Yes.
Jeff: And soon. You don't know when it'll open up.
Leo: Yeah. When did—Well maybe. I don't know. When did Gmail, remember when Gmail was invite only for some time.
Jeff: That was an
earlier Google.
Leo: So what is
this? And why should we want it.
Jeff: Explain it to
us, Lucy.
Leo: Yeah, because
both Jeff and I have it, but we don't know what the hell to do with it.
Gina: I'm also kind
of trying to figure out what this is. I've only had it for an hour or so and I'm still kind of confused by
it. But in short, it's a new, updated
client for Gmail, which exists on Android iOS and the web and inbox.google.com
and it adds features to, it's kind of like Gmail supercharge. It's got a little Google Now action where you
could say, set a reminder and remind me about this e-mail in two days. It's got some, you know, snooze this, mark
this as done, it bundles different types of e-mails. Similar to the way priority inbox groups
e-mails, by subject. It's all material
design. It's all kind of a new take
on—it's got lots of different cool interactions. But I'm still figuring it out. I'll be really honest. I haven't quite got my head around this.
Leo: it reminds me a
little bit of Mailbox, which is an app we've talked about. First came out on iOS then Macintosh, and I
think there's Android versions now. Same idea. In fact,
Mailbox really opened people's eyes to a new way of handling mail. You swipe left or right, mailbox has four
different states. You could swipe all
the way to the left to delete it, sort it the way to the left to archive it
all. All the way to
the right to make it—snooze it. This has those features in it, but as you pointed out, it also
incorporates those new categories that were introduced in Gmail a while
ago. Promos, but they have new ones too. They called these bundles, so there's purchases, Promos. Promos are, you know, basically stuff you agreed to sign up for but
don't really want to read. Purchases are
actually what you want. Nowadays,
especially with Google Wallet and Apple Pay, Purchases will collate all of the
receipts into one package. Your orders too. There's travel. I'm about to
travel. It would be kind of nice to have
you know, all of the e-mails associated with my flight, my rental car, my hotel
in one folder called travel.
Jeff: And again, it's
not just that you have the e-mail in one spot, it's that the preview and the
list in the loan tells you what you need to know.
Leo: Right. Right. So here's a Virgin America reservation on
their sample page, and there's a link that says, "check in." So yeah.
Gina: What's the URL
on the page we're looking at there?
Leo: This is
google.com/inbox.
Gina: google.com/inbox
Leo: This is their
preview page. And you can create your
own bundle. So I would create, for
instance, a TWIT bundle for e-mails from the twit.tv domain. There's, I see they have book club, weekend woohoo, ski buddies, as samples. So your bundles could be added to the list of
bundles. So bundles are essentially e-mail
filters. In fact the setup is very much
like setting up an e-mail filter.
Gina: Yeah.
Leo: So it's little
bits of pieces through
Jeff: Can you do a
"never show me this again" bundle?
Leo: Yes. Yes you could, I presume. But it's very easy—
Jeff: You can add to
do's.
Leo: But it's very
easy to get rid of stuff by swiping it off. Swipe it one way, it gets rid of it, swipe it
the other way it "snoozes it."
Jeff: So you swipe it
the one way, that's telling Google I don't care about this, you swipe it the
other way, that's telling Google "yes, I care about this."
Leo: Kind of sort
of. Well, it's telling Google
"Remind me about this later.
Gina: Remind me about
this later. I don't care if it's right
now.
Jeff: Because the
problem is, because here's an issue I can imagine for Google. Because you can now see the essence of the
e-mail in the preview, you might swipe it off, you might say "Thank you,
great! I found everything I needed. It was very important to me." And swipe it off. Or you could say "Ugh. I hate this. I don't want this. I don't care. Please don't prioritize this in the future,
Google." And swipe it off. If the same action is the same signal, I
don't know how they're going to prioritize well. But they'll figure it out.
Leo: It's
interesting.
Gina: Yeah. This is pretty interesting.
Leo: If you do it on
the web, by the way, obviously it's not a touch screen, so swiping isn't
available.
Jeff: Unless you have
a Chromebook Pixel.
Leo: Well I'm curious. Because if it knows that you have
touch because
Jeff: I'll go home
and I'll find that out.
Leo: On my desktop,
I don't have touch, but I have buttons for Pin, we didn't mention Pin. Pin is another category, what you could do to
triage your e-mail is pin everything you want to save and then there's a sweet
button, Microsoft invented this for Outlook Mail that will sweep unpinned items
off as done. So the, I think the idea is
somewhat like the triage capabilities of Mailbox where you're going toward
inbox zero. You're very quickly dealing
with everything. Either
get rid of it, do something about it, postpone it, or pin it. And then you sweep everything else away.
Jeff: But you see
that's not been my behavior. Google
taught me not to do that. Google taught
me to just leave it and it'll go out below.
Leo: Well it
doesn't—Sweeping it doesn't get rid of it, it just
puts it in—
Jeff: Well most of my
e-mail I don't even do anything to. I say,
"OK, I don't care."
Leo: If you look at
my e-mail, I have like 30,000 unread e-mails.
Jeff: And by the way,
on my wonderful pixel, the sweeping of an individual item doesn't work.
Leo: Yeah. You have to still use those buttons.
Gina: Dang. I was hoping the web based material design
would be touch sensitive. That's interesting. OK.
Leo: Anything you
mark done is stored in a "done" folder. So "done" just
means "I'm done with this one."
Gina: Is that an
alias to archive? It must be.
Leo: Well this is
the other question. What happen to your
normal Gmail? Are you affecting Gmail
itself? I should look.
Gina: You've got to
be, right?
Leo: Yeah. You are.
Gina: Yeah. Anything you mark done is simply stored
here. E-mails you previously archived
are here too.
Leo: So it's added,
has it added—let me look.
Gina: So it's
archive.
Leo: It is
archive. Because I
don't see new boxes with the labels that they talk about. Oh maybe they do, because I see—yeah they
do. So you'll also see, if you've turned
on categorization in the e-mail inbox on Gmail, you'll also see those
categories there. And I presume if I had
another bundle, I will see that category too. So bundles equal labels. In
Google speak.
Gina: They behave
slightly differently right?
Jeff: Yeah, I was
going to say.
Gina: It seems like
they'll group.
Leo: I can't put
bundles I create in the categories list. They now become the new label, so bundles I create are really just
labels. The bundles Google's created are
more categories. They go in the
categories section.
Gina: Right. They seem to group similar e-mails in a way
even beyond just conversation threads.
Leo: Right. I like that. I mean Google does—I think, as I remember, Jeff, you did not turn on
categories in your Gmail. You didn't
like that.
Jeff: I didn't.
Leo: The automatic
thing.
Gina: And this got, I
wish I could show you guys this. It's
got some Google Now action going on, so I'm checking in on a Virgin America
flight tomorrow. So I have my Virgin
America "it's time to check in" e-mail, and I've got the flight
number. It looked very Google nowish. It expands
down the flight number, the link to check in, New York, San Francisco. It knows that the e-mail—
Jeff: So the key to
this is to me that preview is that you don't need to open, you'll have to open e-mail a lot less of the time.
Leo: Well, what you
do is you open Inbox instead of the e-mail. An Inbox kind of is e-mail.
Jeff: That's what I'm
saying.
Leo: Yeah. I'll make a commitment to use this for the
next week.
Gina: I can't do
it. I don't use my vanilla Gmail account
as my—it doesn't open Apps.
Jeff: Yeah. I'll use this for my account I never
use. GOOGLE! You keep promising you're going to fix this
and you don't. I love you guys, but
really. Really, come on.
Leo: This doesn't—Are you saying this doesn't work with your Apps account?
Jeff: No.
Gina: Right, not
yet.
Jeff: It was even
worse than that, Leo. Gina nicely sent
the invite to me to my Apps account. I
opened it up and it says, "Sorry, sucker." So she had to send it to my Gmail account for
it to work.
Gina: Yeah. It actually detected whether it was in your
Gmail inbox. Just couldn't—you
know. They could do that, right?
Jeff: Let me just
say. Because I went
and talked to the work people. Those people are paying for Apps now. They're paying for app’s functionality. To make apps people second class citizens, not the best thing,
Google. Not the smartest thing.
Leo: I have to say,
I have some trepidation about completely trusting this.
Jeff: Leo, we all
said the same thing when Priority Inbox came out, and it has not failed
me.
Leo: You're still
using that. See, I don't use Priority
anymore, because I moved to the next thing Google invented, called
"Categories." Scategories.
Jeff: Scategories.
Leo: Well I don't
have a Priority inbox. I have a primary
inbox. Same idea though. And that's been reliable, so in a way, having
got used to the idea that promotional stuff is in one tab and updates are in
another tab, I am perhaps more likely to use Inbox. I'm glad they keep trying.
Gina: Priority inbox
just means I ignore more people without guilt. Which I guess is a nice thing.
Leo: This is part of
the problem. It's that e-mail is so
broken that everybody's trying to figure out a way to fix it.
Jeff: Well you can’t
fix e-mail as is. You can't add on to
the existing infrastructure. It's not
going to work.
Leo: And that's what
this is, I'm sorry to say.
Jeff: Oh yeah. It has to be. But you've got to totally create an entirely new e-mail infrastructure
and ecosystem.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: That's the kind
of ambition Google could have.
Leo: The other
problem I have is that you and I, Jeff, we don't do much with our e-mail. We just have massive 14,838 unread e-mails in
my inbox.
Jeff: You
especially. Because
the world e-mails you.
Leo: Well, I get a
lot of e-mail. But this is really about
inbox zero. It only makes sense if I
sweep it every day.
Jeff: No. Because I think those previews are key to
this.
Leo: I mean I could
scroll forever. I have all this stuff
from previous days. Maybe I should just
sweep that out of the way. The problem
is, doesn't it do that on my Gmail? But
now it's in the done. I don't know.
Jeff: I
disagree. It's not going to get you to
Gmail. You can sweep stuff off, but you
can also just let it go down the screen.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: And it has a
clear demarcation from today and yesterday, which is kind of nice. It says, "If it was yesterday, you can
deal with it. You can go back there, but
you don't have to. It's just still
there."
Leo: Yeah, because
you only sweep a day's worth of mail when you sweep. Isn't that right?
Gina: Yeah. It looks that way.
Leo: So you sweep
each day by itself.
Jeff: So in the
rundown, under this story, I put a report, there were a couple of them, about a
week of Gmail 5.0. Two days ago.
Gina: Yeah. I believe that this is a different
thing.
Jeff: That's what I'm
asking.
Gina: I think that
Gmail 5.0 is actually an upgrade to the native default Gmail plan.
Leo: For
Lollipop.
Gina: For
Lollipop. Yeah.
Leo: We're seeing a
lot of 5.0 versions. There is Play Store
5.0 as well. Basically Lollipopized.
Jeff: Ok. But the Gmail 5.0, according to the report,
will also handle Yahoo mail.
Leo: As it
should. Because doesn't the default AOSP
program do that already?
Gina: Yeah. Right, so there's a default e-mail client,
which is just a generic iMac, Pop, e-mail client. And then there's the Gmail app, which handles
Gmail.
Leo: Just Gmail.
Gina: Just
Gmail. You could always Pop or iMap or I guess just Pop to Gmail on the web, and then have
that bring down, or have your e-mail forwarded. This is different. This is
actually Gmail the client acting as just a straight Pop3 or iMap client.
Leo: A unified
inbox, as most mail clients will do. And
I think what that means is that they're going to deprecate the AOSP e-mail
client, and going forward, Gmail 5.0 will be the default e-mail client in
AOSP. That would be my guess.
Gina: I don't think
so, because I think there's proprietary code. I don't think they're going to open source the Gmail App since there's
proprietary code there.
Leo: You're right. So this is why you have to buy a Nexus 6 phone. Know what is official, what is open. But I would guess that on most Nexus phones,
Gmail will be the default e-mail app. Right? I don't even
know if they'll include an e-mail app. Because it will do everything the e-mail App will do. And just to make things more confusing,
they've introduced a third mobile e-mail App called Inbox, just because we
weren't yet baffled enough. I like Inbox
though. I think I could get used to it.
Jeff: Here's the
other question I'm going to have. Because I'm a chrome user on airplanes, I use offline e-mail Chrome App,
which is really useful, because I can read my mail offline. And the question is, will they make this an offline App as well.
Gina: Yeah. I mean it seems like it makes sense that this
would be an offline App as well, but probably not there yet. You have to install it as a chrome app, sync
it, and then you get on the plane and you've got everything.
Leo: What I'd almost
like to see is them turning Gmail into a true plain iMap client, because right now, it has extensions that for instance, in iMap e-mails are in exactly one folder. With Google's labels, you can have multiple
labels. So there's no direct mapping of
Google's Gmail organizational strategy to an iMap organizational strategy. What if Google
just went to true iMap? That's been a problem for instance for Apple,
in its mail app. What if Google just
made Gmail and iMap standard e-mail client and then
used the third, these other mobile clients and new desktop clients, as a way of
doing its oddball labeling system. I
think that would be good. Then we
wouldn't have an on-standard iMap on the Gmail.
Jeff: But there's
still back end functionality. For
example, priority Inbox, that adds a lot of value. Gmail is never going to be again just a
plain, vanilla, straight feed e-mail account. You can make it into that. The
real value add of it is priority inbox, and the thinking that goes into the
organization of your e-mail.
Leo: Because
priority inbox is one of many labels a single mail can have.
Jeff: And there's a
lot of thinking that goes in behind that. A lot of computing goes into that.
Leo: Well it's just
filtering.
Jeff: Yeah, it's
filtering, but it's very smart filtering.
Gina: Multiple labels isn't going to go away. I mean they're not incentivized to get rid of
that at all. There incentivized to get
more Gmail users. So their iMail implementation is a little janky,
it works. Technically it works, even
though one piece of mail can be several different folders. They're not actually folders, but I don't see
them backing off on the multi-label feature, because I think that's one of the
few things that distinguishes Gmail.
Jeff: Yeah. It's real value added. All right Gina, I've got a different
question. So this is presented as an
Android/iOS mobile app, but it also exists on the web. Does this indicate
anything about what they're thinking about Android v. Chrome and Android v. Web
in how things are being developed and what they're being developed for?
Gina: Well this web
App at inbox.google.com looks very material design. It's got the floating action button.
Jeff: That's why I'm
asking that, yeah.
Gina: Yeah, it's got
that floating action button. It's got
the transitions and the list items that kind of expand in place and the nice
sliding back and forth. I think that
they use Polymer to build this. Polymer
is a framework that lets developers create material design-ish Apps on the Web. So
yeah. I think that Google is
moving totally in this direction. I
think that we're going to see it on the web, I think we're going to see it on
their Android Apps, I think that this material design is actually going to
be—we're going to see influences of it everywhere.
Leo: I have to say,
I've just been playing around with this Inbox, and it is a nice thing to be
able to really quickly triage e-mail and then sweep the rest away. I just went through my whole updates folder
and picked one thing that I wanted to save and then swept the rest away. That's great. Same thing with my finance folder. I can go through here. And this is all the credit card warnings and
stuff, and I can just say, "got it." Sweep it away. This is good. This might really be a good solution.
Gina: I dig it.
Leo: I dig it, man.
Gina: But it is a
learning curve. But I like it a
lot. I want it for my Apps account. I want it for my primary e-mail.
Leo: So you can't
use this with your Apps account.
Jeff: When I tried to
do it, it said your organization isn't ready for this.
Leo: Yes, they are.
Jeff: Your
organization wouldn't Google.
Gina: I think it's terms of service privacy issue. I think that it takes them longer, for
whatever legal reasons, to opt organizations into the kind of permissions that
they—
Jeff: Give them
excuses. I still think they haven't
figured out the damned account thing.
Gina: That's
fair. Maybe.
Jeff: I love
them. They do amazing work. But you know, when Gina and I were doing the
e-mail back and forth, I just said: "Cue Jarvis fit."
Leo: It did say
that, didn't it. Hey I've just gone through all of my—While you have been talking, gone
through all of my e-mail, and swept away everything but three messages, which I
pinned. I got at least daily Inbox
zero.
Jeff: For ten
minutes. Congratulations. Check back by the end of the show.
Leo: That was really
easy. But that was great.
Gina: That certainly
was the purpose of Apps like Mailbox, right? And it seems like Inbox is following in those footsteps. It's giving you an easy way to clear out your
inbox.
Leo: It's very
influenced by Mailbox, isn't it.
Gina: Although not
everybody clears out their inbox every day.
Leo: No, I
don't. That's why it's such a big deal
that I did for the first time in my life. While you were talking. And it does reflect itself back in your
regular Gmail interface, which is nice.
Jeff: So when you pin
it, what happens with it?
Leo: It stays in
that inbox until you handle it. And when
you pin something, you can no longer sweep it away. So this is what I just did. I went through each bundle, scanned it,
pinned the ones I knew I wanted to act upon. Ignored the ones I knew I didn't care about, now that I've read them, or
at least, looked at them, and swept everything away. So I had basically—
Jeff: That's what
starring was, but instead of going into a separate star category, it now stays
in the field. You could also—
Leo: It has this
sweep command, which means that once you start stuff, you can get rid of the
stuff you starred.
Jeff: Right. And then separately, you can say "Remind
me about this in three days." Right?
Leo: Yeah. That's a separate thing. So there's pinning and there's snoozing. Pinning is saying, "Stay here, I'm not
done with you." Snoozing is
"remind me tomorrow." And I
did snooze three or four things.
Jeff: And there's
archiving and killing. Because before you basically couldn't kill Gmail. You could, but they made it difficult. They said, "why bother?" So now there's a
distinction between archiving and killing.
Gina: Yeah. Trash or archive.
Leo: You don't have
a trash button on this, by the way.
Jeff: That's new in
terms of the way they think about it.
Leo: There's no
trash button on this. The worst you can
do to e-mail is put it in "done." Which you say, Gina, is the same as the—
Jeff: There are times
when you erase things. Your own e-mail
you have a right to forget. Erase erase erase an e-mail.
Leo: Nope. Sorry. You don't get to erase erase erase in this thing.
Jeff: That's an
issue. For companies that have lawyers saying,
"get rid of the digital paper train
here."
Leo: Wait a minute,
I take it back. OK. So the big three buttons and the swipe
choices are pin, snooze, done. But
there's a menu. There’s a three-button menu thing. And in there, it says, "move to" and among other things you could move it to
trash or move it to spam or move it to bundles. Or unbundled.
Jeff: I have this
vision that somewhere at Google right now there are three people from this team
having beer, laughing at us. "NO! Leo, look over
there!"
Leo: I think what
they're doing is rooting for us. "He'll figure it out! Come
on!" They're not laughing; they're
like "OK. Do you get it? Do you get it? No. OK. Keep trying!" Actually, I'm kind of
liking it. We'll see.
Jeff: I am too.
Gina: its location
based for mine is pretty cool too.
Leo: It does that?
Gina: Yeah. So you can say, "Snooze
until." There are a couple of
premium set choices like later today or tomorrow. You can pick a day and a time, and you can
pick a place. So when I get to work,
remind me about this e-mail.
Leo: By the way,
even though I swept my inbox, now there's like 30 more e-mails in there!
Gina: That's the problem.
Jeff: Told you!
Leo: I just fixed
it! I just cleaned you out. That's when you're going to give up is what's
going to happen.
Jeff: Fan
e-mail? What fills you up
immediately?
Leo: Yes. Lots of stuff.
Gina: Bacon.
Leo: It's a lot of
Bacon.
Jeff: You sign up for
crap over the years.
Leo: It's also any
time I use my credit card, not present I get an e-mail. I also turn on alerts in financial
things. There's just a lot of e-mail. There's just a lot.
Jeff: The thing I
mentioned in the show over the years is the hyper personal newstream. Right? Google is trying to let you know at a glance
what you need to know in the context of your needs. That's Google's goal. They very cleverly bit by bit, piece by piece
find new ways. Here's the way I've been
putting it lately. In Seoul, they asked
me to do a "What would Google do" presentation thing that's five
years old, and "Hey great! What
would Google do five years later?" So, I look back and Android was new in that time, and I really saw
Google as a personal services company.
Leo: Yeah. I agree.
Jeff: That's the
key. That's so key to where Google is
now. There was this whole notion that I
talked about them being the signals business. The reason is because they, unlike mass media, unlike mass manufacturers
and marketers, unlike government, Google gives you personal service. That's their goal.
Leo: And what better
thing for them to put their big brains to work on than solving e-mail.
Jeff: But again, like
I said earlier in the show, I think that they have not moonshot this. The moonshot for e-mail is to invent an
entirely new—
Leo: That was Google
Wave and we saw what happened.
Jeff: Well it
was. Because it was recipient controlled
communication.
Leo: Right. Wave was absolutely a moonshot. In fact, wasn't some of the Gmail team was
involved?
Gina: It was a Google
Maps team. Lars and
his brother. It came from
Maps. Wave was a shot at that. You could argue that social networks are the
better e-mail. The reason I defend
e-mail and I want e-mail to stick around is because it's the only truly
federated system that everybody uses. You know what I mean? That's easy
to set up and everyone uses.
Leo: We're not
reinventing e-mail. We're reinventing
how we perceive it and process it.
Jeff: Yeah, but
you're trying to fix its inherent vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Google could invent something new that's
federated.
Leo: No. It wouldn't be federated. It would be Google. Then you'd have to get everybody else to
agree to do it.
Jeff: Here's the
difference, because Gina was right. My
friend Bob Weinman at Google lectured me years ago,
and he said, "The problem with e-mail, from day one, I knew the day the
decision was made, is when it became center controlled." And we talked about this on the show back when
Google Plus started. Google Plus is recipient
controlled. And that's the essence of an
entirely different communication schema. But you're right. That's just
Google. And that's the weakness of it is it's just Google. What if you truly could imagine a federated recipient controlled Google
Plus? Fine. You're still going to have e-mail, Gina, and
you're still going to get the stuff that you didn't ask forever. And Google is still going to try and help you
fix that as best as it can. But what if
all your really important
communication went through—What do we do instead? We try and Facebook. Facebook is controlled, not federated. It's the closest thing we have to everybody
being there, but it's not built to communicate. It's not what it's there for.
Leo: What is
federated? Would you explain that,
Gina? I think Gina could do this.
Gina: Federated is a peer-to-peer
network, where there's several different servers, and they're all on the same
ground. They all have the same amount of
power, and they exchange information peer to peer. They're equals. Versus a collection of servers controlled by
one company that serves out to clients.
Leo: So when e-mail
servers first started, it was that latter situation. You had MCI mail, or you had Genie, or you
had AOL, or you had Compuserve, and you could e-mail
anybody within that system. But getting
e-mail from MCI to AOL was very hard, because it had to go through a gateway,
and it was hard. You had to know how to
do it. You had to know the right
address. So they solved that problem by
federating. By saying,
"Look. Everybody has a canonical e-mail address that is some name @
and the host that hosts your e-mail. You
know. AOL or Genie or MCI mail, so they
had a system of naming that everybody understood. And then they set up the
interconnect, so you didn't even have to think about it. I would write to Gina@aol.com and it would
get to you.
Jeff: And this is pre
TCBIP.
Leo: Yes, it
is. Not exactly. It's pre-web.
Jeff: No, it was also
pre TCBIP. Wasn't it?
Leo: Yeah, I guess
it is. Because it's
using SMTP and pop or some other system.
Gina: Right.
Leo: But the
federation of all those pop and iMap servers, and
that's one of the cool things, is that not only could you be on disparate
servers, you could be on servers that use different protocols. Pop or iMap or exchange. And the e-mail would
still magically get to where you sent it, as long as you knew the address. And that worked quite nicely, right?
Gina: The problem was
that this was a different time. This was
1971, when we were just trying to get the network to work. Now, there's no company that's financially
incentivized to make a federated system. There just isn't. There's no reason
why any company would say everybody can have an equal copy of the data that we
can have.
Leo: Twitter doesn't
want to do a federated, they want to do Twitter. Facebook doesn't want to do federated, they want to do Facebook. Google doesn't want to do federated, they want to do Google.
Jeff: I would argue
that if you go the WordPress model—
Leo: RSS is
federated. RSS was an attempt to create
a federated protocol that would cross all of these systems. But I think Gina is right. There's no economic incentive to do
this.
Jeff: Let me argue
the WordPress model. WordPress
v. Google Type. Google Type said
"We own the software and yes we'll let it out there, but we're going to
limit it because we want to go into business and we don't want you to compete
with us." WordPress on the other
said "Nope. Software, open source,
stays at the .org, anybody can do it. And we're just the first company to build on top of it." Indeed it's a great business. Mullenweg has a
genius business there where he's built a great business. But I can use the WordPress underlying code
and I can start my own hosting company, competing with WordPress.com and Mullenweg still benefits, because I'm going to contribute
to the code base.
Leo: By the way,
we've conflated several different OSI levels. TCPIP is still the protocol on top of which TCP and Pop run. That's simply a communication protocol, and there
are e-mail protocols that are well understood. And similarly, WordPress is at a higher-level still than that.
Jeff: All I was
trying to suggest there was that even before we had standardized use of net,
you could connect MCI, which was not TCIP, which was not Internet to other mail
services who were protocol. That's all.
Leo: Yeah, there was
a gateway. But the best example of this
was the XMPP, which was a federated protocol, it was a jabber protocol, Google
user for gTalk, and what did Google do? They killed it. They said, "We don't want to support
that anymore, because exactly as you said, Gina, they have no economic
incentive to do that. They have every
incentive to create a proprietary protocol that you can only use on Google, and
not to interoperate with everybody else.
Gina: Yeah. The pattern is you make this amazing client
that works with the standard protocol. Anybody can implement right? But
then your client becomes so good and so specialized and so proprietary that
after a while, you don't support the protocol. I look at GitHub for example. Git is a distributed version controlled system, and everyone
that runs Git has an equal copy of the data. But GitHub itself is this amazing Git client with a bunch of add-ons per request. And social and tagging and
user profiles and wikis and website hosting. People love GitHub. It's a great place to collaborate, but it is
controlled by one company, but it's based on this open source software. Much like WordPress. Now WordPress has Jetpack, which is their
proprietary layer, on top of WordPress that gives you things like stats and
that kind of thing. But it all feeds
back to automatic, which is the commercial entity on top. This is ThinkUp's model. We're open source software, and
we're a company building a hosted service on top of it because it's too much of
a pain to set it up yourself. That definitely works, but there's definitely
tension between—you know, of course we're building this client, say this IM
client and we're going to have Jabber Support in it until it gets so big and so
good and so good and so proprietary and so imbedded into our system and you
know what? It's just too much work to
support Jabber anymore; you should just use our stuff.
Leo: Right. Because our stuff is
better.
Jeff: I'm just
wishing for some scenario where someone totally reinvents e-mail.
Leo: Let me say one
thing, is that that's the application layer, and all e-mail is, is a protocol
for exchanging messages using universally accepted canonical addresses. And there's a protocol for saying "I got
all the pieces." I mean there's a
lot of underlying stuff. The presentation
layer can be anything. That's what
Google is doing with Inbox.
Gina: This is a client.
Leo: That's the
client. I think what you want, Jeff, is
a replacement on the presentation layer.
Jeff: No. I'm going to disagree. I want people to not be able to send me
anything, unless I have approved it.
Leo: Well we've had
systems like that, as in anti-spam systems for some time, remember? I used to hate this. You'd get an e-mail from somebody
saying: "Well Jeff's not accepting
e-mails unless you prove you are who you say you are." That's annoying,
Jeff. You don't want that.
Jeff: How does Google
Plus operate? Google Plus is a model for
this. I don't get—Listen to Mike Elgan on this. Mike Elgan is Dvorak 2.0, right? Dvorak, “I get no spam” Dvorak. “I
get no trolls,” Elgan.
Leo: I agree. And that's why I have completely moved my
social interactions to Google Plus.
Jeff: So the question
is, the big complaint about Google Plus is what? Nobody is there. Just our geeky friends.
Leo: Just us. And everybody with a Gmail account could
conceivably be on Google Plus.
Jeff: What would make
Google Plus explode? Opening
it up.
Leo: I don't want it
to explode.
Gina: In my circle of
friends, my team, my company, they laugh when I mention Google Plus. It's a punch line. I mean, really. There's a certain community who's heavy
iPhone, Twitter users, for whom Google Plus is some weird—It's a cultural indicator of some weird aspy Googler. I apologize
if that's offensive.
Leo: I like that
though. I know what you're saying. I've never heard that phrase before, but I
like it.
Jeff: I haven't
either.
Leo: It is a little
offensive, but that's OK.
Gina: It is
offensive.
Leo: We all know
what you're saying.
Gina: I'm actually
really regretting saying that, I'm sorry.
Leo: I've never
heard that before.
Gina: But there is
something about it.
Jeff: She's trying to
move on.
Leo: Jeff and I will
not let her. Move on. But I find that interesting. Because I would think that everybody you know
would understand and love Google Plus.
Gina: I come to you
on All About Android to be with my people, my fellow
Google fans, but there are a lot of folks out there who aren't about it. They use Gmail, but that's it.
Leo: And they think
Twitter is great.
Gina: People love to
Twitter. I know. Listen. Everybody's got —
Jeff: The Twitter
numbers. All this week, I have the top
editors from Burda, the big German publisher and I'm
brainwashing them. And we visited
Twitter, it was a great visit, but the numbers on Twitter, especially in Europe
are really small. WhatsApp is bigger in
a lot of countries. And what's the deal
about WhatsApp? WhatsApp is more
recipient controlled.
Leo: That's true. You can't WhatsApp me unless I approve you, right?
Jeff: Yeah! So maybe WhatsApp is what I'm looking for
even though I don't use it.
Leo: But there are a
lot of cases where you want somebody you haven't previously approved to
communicate with you.
Jeff: That's what
e-mail becomes, so that's OK. E-mail is
a separate system.
Leo: Then Jeff, you
don't want to reinvent e-mail; you just want to stop using it.
Jeff: I want to make
it less important to me.
Leo: Well I think
Inbox is kind of about that. It's kind
of about saying "if we do this organizational stuff, you can quickly find
the stuff that you want to get an e-mail, and all of your more important
transactions can happen elsewhere." It would be nice if Inbox could say, "You seem to be talking to
that person a lot, why don't you go move to WhatsApp?" That would be good. So we just change that to a WhatsApp account
and maybe that's what Google needs to do.
Jeff: Well Facebook
has WhatsApp and Facebook has Messenger, and I was just saying a few minutes
ago that Facebook isn't a communications company, well right. Facebook is not a communications application,
but Facebook Ink is becoming a Communications company.
Leo: And you know
what happens is people want me to use Messenger. And some people insist on communicating with
me with messenger, and this is the problem with Messenger, Jeff, because unlike
WhatsApp, if you have a Facebook account, you have a Messenger inlet. So WhatsApp, you have to explicitly say
"I'm going to allow that person to share with me, unless he knows my phone
number, he can't. Anybody who has a
Facebook account can bother you.
Jeff: So your
canonical address in this world becomes your phone number, and OK. I see the brilliance of WhatsApp now
suddenly. Knowing that everyone has a
canonical address, you can build something across that—
Leo: But it's not
widely known. Only your friends know it.
Jeff: But you can
choose how—It's on my business card. You can choose how to put it out there. You also have some choice whether to accept
or not. My point is this. Google and Google Plus tried to make
everybody get a canonical account called a Gmail address. And they finally gave up. WhatsApp more cleverly said "No. Nobody can make this happen. Nobody is going to build that. There already is a new canonical
address. It's a phone number. What can we build on top of that?
Leo: And people are
saying in the chatroom, "Well you can WhatsApp anyone if you know their
phone number." Well that's the
point is that you control the phone number much more tightly than you do your
e-mail address.
Gina: Well we're also
speaking as people who publicize our e-mail address a lot more than normal
people.
Leo: Maybe that was
the mistake, yeah.
Gina: I mean you have
to think about the fact that e-mail, electronic mail was built on the model of
an electronic version of postal mail, where someone has your street address and
they can send you a letter. But the
difference between postal mail and electronic mail the onus is on the
sender. They have to pay for a stamp, they have to get the envelope. It's a pain to send somebody a letter. With e-mail the onus is on the recipient
because it costs so little and because it's so easy for the sender to send
e-mail, if you publicize your e-mail address on websites that gets millions of
hits versus a postal address in a white pages, you're
going to get killed with e-mail.
Leo: So here's the
easy fix. I don't know why I didn't
think of this. Jeff, this is all you
do. And many people do this. You have different e-mail addresses. You have a public e-mail address; you have
one you give to a close circle of friends, and one you only give to
intimates.
Jeff: I have enough
trouble dealing with the two I have.
Leo: But that's really what you're doing with
WhatsApp. You're saying, "Well, my
phone number is a little more secure, so I'm going to use that for the most
intimate conversations."
Jeff: No. Here's why. Leo, here's why that won't work. Because, inevitably it
leaks in the spammer world, and it gets ruined.
Leo: Well I have a
friend who has solved this. My friend
changes his e-mail address yearly, in a regularly known fashion. His friends will know what to do each year
when he changes his e-mail address, and to be able to get through to him. And he deprecates last year's e-mail
address. He doesn't use it any
more. It's brilliant!
Jeff: What a
pain. What a pain.
Leo: But I know, as
his close friend, I know how to e-mail him. I'm going to start doing that! I'll whisper to you my secret.
Jeff: Leo, here's the
deal on WhatsApp. On WhatsApp, not only
do you have everything Gina just explained, you also have at the moment of
someone trying to communicate with you, you have the option at that time to say
"nope."
Leo: Can you block
them?
Gina: Or do you just
decline?
Jeff: Yeah, I think
so.
Leo: Decline and
they can never contact you.
Jeff: Yeah. I think so, can't you?
Leo: But you're just
doing what you could do with an e-mail address, which was have a higher security one and a lower security one.
Jeff: You can't spend
WhatsApp. If your e-mail address leaks
out in any way, your e-mail will propagate against spam world.
Leo: So if your
phone number leaks out in any way, the idea is that your phone number is not as
easy to use as an e-mail address.
Jeff: And you will
get invitations, but you have the opportunity at that moment to refuse the
invitation. I don't use WhatsApp folks,
so tell me if I'm wrong.
Leo: That's why
WhatsApp is worth 22 billion dollars right there. You nailed it.
Jeff: I'm now seeing
the architectural insight into it. And an appreciation for it.
Gina: Well this kind
of Segways the e-mail address versus phone number
conversation—It kind of Segways a little bit into the announcements that Twitter made today. Did you guys see that they're trying to
basically get rid—
Leo: Let's take a
break and talk about those. We also have
third quarter results for Google, lots of news, but we are going to take a
break now, because we're brought to you be a fine
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name. They know you want privacy. They just include it. They don't give you 50 check boxes and up
sell you five ways from Sunday before you can buy the domain name. Right now is a great time to get a domain
name at hover.com. They've lowered the
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running. They even have a valet transfer
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hover.com. They've got great customer
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you will get a representative who is empowered to fix your problem. Not that you're going to have any. They're so good. I've never had to call them. They also offer volume discounts, if you're
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Gina: Hover is
great.
Leo: See? Unsolicited. We've all suffered so much. And I've moved—I keep trying to
remember. Who's the first one that
everybody used? Can't
remember. Anyway.
Gina: This is
pre-dead elephants and Nascar.
Leo: Yes. Pre-dead elephants and Nascar babes. I admit, I had an account with them at one
time.
Gina: I did too.
Leo: And it felt so
nice to move over to hover.
Gina: See you.
Leo: Bye bye. So what did
Twitter just do?
Jeff: You're going to
have to explain this one to me.
Gina: So Twitter had
their first developer conference in several years, it's actually going on today
in San Francisco, but they had a live keynote this morning. And they introduced a bunch of stuff. Basically they're trying—a bunch of stuff for
developers. None of this is really
consumer facing yet, but essentially a mobile tool kit of a bunch of tools that
help developers imbed tweets and sign in with Twitter.
Leo: They're not
telling people to develop Twitter clients; they're telling them to put Twitter
in their application.
Gina: Put Twitter in
your mobile Application and one of these tools that they introduced is called
"Digits" and it’s their effort at removing e-mail addresses and
passwords from signing up for mobile Apps. So Twitter project managers traveled the world to do some research on
how people use the web and how does Twitter get new users, and one of the
things they found is that the farther that you go away from the United States,
the less likely it is that someone has an e-mail address. Everyone's mobile
phone is the way that they identify themselves. So what Digits does is it's a beta UECT you can imbed into your mobile
App that lets users sign up for your App using your mobile phone number. So you enter your number, your App SMS's
them, SMs you the authorization code, you enter the code, and you're in. No e-mail address, no account
activation.
Leo: No
password. Nothing.
Gina: Right. Exactly. So similar to the way WhatsApp and Yo works. So it just
reminded me, because what Jeff was saying earlier was like "Oh,
right."
Leo: This makes
sense.
Gina: Yeah. This makes sense.
Jeff: OK. Gina. But this is a bigger, huger strategy shift for Twitter, and it depends
upon developers trusting Twitter. Notice
where you started to say "Well Twitter hasn't had a developers conference
in a few years," because the developers would have thrown spitballs at
them for the way they've treated developers before. So explain to me what you, in an App, would
get out of doing this in your App. And
then explain to me while Twitter, as far as I can tell, gets to be the center
of things and gets to sell add revenue and gets data. What does the developer get? Why would you build on this?
Gina: Yeah. So from what I understand, this is a mobile
developer’s toolkit. I think that it's
still really hard.
Leo: Is this
Fabric?
Gina: Yeah. Fabric is part of it.
Leo: Is it like
material? Or Textile?
Gina: The idea that
Twitter is offering are tools, development tools to help mobile developers get
particular tasks done in their App, like single sign on. Like embedding a tweet. Like getting crash
statistics. Crashlytics is one of the things they're offering. So as a developer—
Leo: They should
have Failwelllytics.
Jeff: Does this mean
it's hosted by Twitter and you're going through Twitter's services, or does
this mean this is just a standard separate from twitter.
Gina: These are like
bits of code that you can embed into your mobile app—
Leo: It's an STK.
Gina: So yeah. It's an STK. You embed them on your mobile App, so Twitter is collecting, for
instance, your crash reports since you logged in at Twitter to see what those
look like. And yes. Users are maybe signing in with Twitter, so your using Twitter's authorization, but that's the same as
using sign-in with Facebook or sign-in with Google. Basically Twitter is trying to make life on
mobile developers as easy as possible, and they're trying to make Twitter a central part of any mobile App. The way that they're trying to do that is to
offer these best in class developer tools. Now Twitter has basically said that they've learned a lot developing
their own mobile Apps, and they want to share what they've learned and the
tools that they have internally with the developer community. And this isn't unprecedented. If you look at Bootstrap. And actually, Twitter open sourced and released a lot of different frameworks and things. In fact, I use Bootstrap all the time. It's
great. It's a fantastic framework. They're good at making developer tools. Most developer tools are pretty crappy. So as a developer, this is attractive to
me. Maybe they're offering something for
me, something here better than the App Store's crashlogs or the Play Store's crashlogs. Android is a first class citizen in this
effort from what I understand. Really good tools here for Android as well. So you have Twitter, which is not Apple, and
it's not Google. It's this kind of
neutral third party that lets you build add in components to your mobile app
that you don't have to code yourself. So
the thing is your building your App. Your
App does something. But it also needs
all these other things. It needs sign in, it needs crash reports; it needs all
these little bits of functionality. As a
developer, you don't want to spend time on that. You don't want to re-invent the wheel. You don't want to have to do that for every
app that you build. So that's what Twitter
is trying to offer here.
Leo: Twitter has
done this before. Didn't they have
Bootstrap? Wasn't that—
Gina: Yeah. Bootstrap was one of the frameworks that
Twitter offers. Yeah. Twitter makes really great developer
tools.
Jeff: If you put in all
of these things into your app, what is Twitter getting out of it?
Gina: Twitter gets
more users, particularly with the sign in stuff.
Leo: And they get
Twitter in your app.
Gina: They get
Twitter in your app; they get tons more tweet impressions. They get to control, or they have some say
about the way that you're displaying their content, so the way that they're
displaying tweets. So that when you
display a tweet, there's generally functionality shown with it like favorite
re-tweet, reply, DM, etcetera.
Jeff: Is this even
about Tweets?
Leo: Well it is,
because what it does is it kind of changes Twitter to be an infrastructure. People often thought that Twitter would be
like the dial tone of the Internet. And
it kind of makes it more of that. It's
not so much about the public presentation of Twitter as a whole, but how
Twitter is used as a communication medium within your app.
Gina: Yeah. It makes it a mobile platform company, is
what it does. Which is
a huge shift. So this isn't at
all about the consumer product.
Leo: Very
interesting.
Gina: Yeah, it is
interesting.
Leo: And I like it
because that eliminates the whole trollish nature of
Twitter, because you control the community, because it's whoever uses your
app.
Jeff: Hold on. Explain that, Lucy.
Leo: Well, right now, there's a public facing Twitter
that's everything, right? Whoever you follow and all the garbage that goes into that and
whoever @s you and whatever. And
it's just a big mound of horse poo with the pony buried somewhere in
there.
Jeff: With a bird
flying over it.
Leo: Many birds
dropping more horse poop, so I would think that this would be, let's say I'm
the voice. Right now on The Voice what
they do is they say, "Vote on twitter, put the hashtag, the person's
name," and it becomes part of that pile of poo. But a voice app could incorporate this all in
it, use Twitter as more of a backend infrastructure and surface just the
appropriate tweets into the app, making it much more useful for the voice in
its users and viewers and much less a part of the massive car wreck that is
Twitter today. And Twitter still gets
the benefit right? In fact, it's better
for them, because they can now say to advertisers, "Hey, by the way, we've
got all these people using The Voice" and they can monetize it.
Jeff: And what has
Twitter's problem been? Witness the
discussion I had with Germans about Twitter. They need more sign ups, so they become infrastructural. You sign up. So the question you have to ask, and maybe it's just twitter smokes more
now and is nicer, but if Twitter does what it has done before, and pulls the
rug out, what happens to your apps?
Gina: This is the
grand question of any developer that depends on a third party service when they
build their app.
Leo: This circles back to the discussion of federation vs.
silo.
Jeff: It does.
Gina: Well, it's the
convenience versus risk thing. I build
an app based on Twitter, we use Amazon payments. My company is dependent upon these third
party services that could, at any moment, change their mind, or take it down,
or block us. And it's one of the trade-offs
you make when you decide to make an app. Twitter did, in a lot of developer's views, totally screw over the
developer community. Mark wrote a post
about this. I think it was a little
heavy handed, personally, but I get it. I get that client makers felt really burned by Twitter doing a 180 from
a very open API to a very limited API. These announcements that they made today are pretty separate than that. They're orthogonal. But I was at the original Twitter developer
conference. I think it was called
"Chirp," and it happened in 2010, and at that conference, they
announced a thing called "Annotated Tweets," which was a way to pack
lots of information into a tweet. Like
any sort of meta-data that you wanted, it never happened. I don't think it ever launched. So I actually think that Fabric is not—
Leo: That was
treating Twitter more like XMPP. That
was exactly what XMPP does.
Gina: Right. They were trying to figure out a way. Hey. We want to push packets across the network and however developers—It was a very exciting big idea, but it never really
happened. Fabric appears to be less vapo wear. I think
you can actually download some of these components and use them now.
Leo: I think debs
understand this and are always using it by using the Twitter authentication
system. Look. I don't think this is a
risk for a developer. You get all these
benefits, and if Twitter goes away, which it doesn't look like it's going to do
any time soon, you do Facebook.
Jeff: It's not about
Twitter dying; it's about Twitter changing the rules.
Leo: Well if they
change the rules, then you change to Facebook. I mean we all have Facebook, Connect, and Twitter.
Jeff: But now here's
the problem, Leo, listen. Twitter
sign-up is extremely convenient. Twitter
and Facebook sign-up is extremely convenient, Google sign-up has never really
taken off, but it's there.
Leo: I use those
like crazy on Android devices, you use it like crazy.
Jeff: But at some
point, if I sign into a service through Twitter, that's where my linkage is,
and if Twitter changes the rules, or I'm violating Twitter's rules and Twitter
pulls back on me or whatever, or my light switch goes off—
Leo: Well I hope,
and it may not be, but it almost feels like Twitter is reinventing itself.
Jeff: It does. I'm trying to understand that. And I want to trust it; I'm trying to put it
in the context of Twitter's culture and behavior previously. I think that's important.
Leo: Well maybe they
want to turn over a new leaf, Jeff. Maybe they want to be better now. Maybe they want to turn over a new leaf.
Jeff: That's
fine. But they've got to acknowledge the
past, and they've got to give us reasons for future trust.
Leo: I think Twitter
must see the writing on the wall at this point. The public facing Twitter has some real problems. Don't you? It's obvious to me, with all the harassment in gamer gate, how has it
happened? Twitter. Twitter is, yeah. Arab spring, blah blah blah. Great. But the truth is, Google Plus and Facebook don't have nearly the problem that Twitter has with
harassment. Twitter has become the
channel for harassing people.
Jeff: Yes.
Gina: Agreed.
Leo: They must know
that.
Jeff: How does this
fix that? It lets you have a little
world, maybe for The Voice where you see The Voice stuff.
Leo: People use
Twitter to create communities, and it's a form of federation, because they're
all through Twitter, but it's all owned by Twitter.
Jeff: So what do I
do? Do I belong to a hundred different
Twitter communities?
Leo: Well you have a
single Twitter sign on, and you'll notice when you use an app it has a Twitter
interface. Hey, good news! And you will see in that app only the stuff
that's germane and apropos.
Jeff: Stop using Twitter or come across Twitter like an Intel chip here and there.
Leo: It will be everywhere!
Jeff: I hope.
Leo: I don’t know. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part.
Gina: You have a point, Leo. I think this is a completely separate issue from the
harassment issue. And I like to think there are going to be developers that say
Twitter does not make any effort to protect its users or doesn’t take enough of
an effort to protect its users. So I’m not going to use its tools. I mean I
wouldn’t use Four Chan sign-in.
Leo: I kind of like that. And I think Twitter must say gosh we’re turning into Four
Chan. Don’t you think? If they’re paying attention, they must be thinking that.
Jeff: The brand is effected, yes.
Leo: How long before the voice says gosh we cannot use these Twitter hashtags
anymore. Because our fans are going to Twitter and are going ah! Ah!
Gina: I don’t know. I wonder if we’re a small community of people that are tuned into
this happening; how many people are friends with an Indie game developer who
got driven from her home with threats. I don’t think that many. And Gamer Gate
at this point is so convoluted and we haven’t talked about it, but it’s tough
to understand. Dead Spin did an article, which is a sports blog, and a friend
of mine who’s a big sports fan was like this Gamer Gate thing, what the hell?
Leo: Well nobody knows, right.
Gina: A 10,000 word article explaining; I wonder, it’s a big
deal to me and a big deal to us because we care about these things. But I
wonder if it’s really, does Twitter really know how bad it is? I don’t know.
They haven’t even verified Anita Sarkeesian’s Twitter
account. She’s got tons of accounts that are clearly impersonating her. Ripping
her profile and her cover photo and the whole reason why verification exists is
to address the impersonation.
Leo: And they’re not even doing that.
Gina: And they’re not even doing that.
Jeff: And it doesn’t do any good when you’re looking at the imposter site. What do
you expect it to do? Background research on all these Twitter
accounts to find the right one? The green check doesn’t mean crap.
Leo: I just feel like if a normal person, first of all, normal people probably don’t
use Twitter. My mom isn’t going to use Twitter. But let’s say my mom goes to
twitter.com, signs up, and of course Twitter does its best to do the intake and
give her some interesting stuff to follow. But she starts seeing streams and
maybe she starts following people. It doesn’t take very long before even, okay
maybe it’s not even offensive. It’s just chaotic and it’s a strange culture.
It’s weird! And there’s weird abbreviations.
Jeff: Leo, but why does every weather person in America push their Twitter stop? Why
do all these big shows push Twitter?
Leo: You tell me why.
Jeff: Why has it not taken off more than…?
Leo: You tell me why they’re all using hashtags. Why does every show use a hashtag?
Jeff: And Twitter’s not mass.
Leo: That’s why I’m wondering. Why?
Jeff: I don’t know why. I’m agreeing with you. Here’s my bottom line.
Leo: Chad’s going to tell us why because he’s under 50.
Chad: There’s no other service that does that real-time public posting.
Leo: That’s why I think America’s angry. Because Twitter recognizes that it does
have a lock on a certain market. And what it’s looking at is better ways to
provide that service for individual communities that will be more appealing to
communities that will eliminate the heat it’s getting from things like Gamer
Gate. That’s why I think fabric would make sense as a strategic shift for
Twitter. And who knows what they’re doing.
Jeff: Here’s my issue with Twitter…
Leo: It’s like IRC. What if people wonder into an IRC channel? Ours is pretty
well-protected. But just a normal IRC channel.
Jeff: What if wonder onto Reddit or Four Chan?
Leo: Yea, exactly. If you’re trying to be a mainstream business and get the approval
and appreciation of Wall Street, you got to start thinking about how do we
present better.
Jeff: Okay but this goes back to our email discussion, Leo. Twitter has two options. One, which they avoided until the Isis videos would be to try to
censor the content. Trying to make them do that, and it’s nearly
impossible. You cannot stay ahead of it. But, maybe they do. In
which case it’s no longer an open platform. It’s no longer an open
stream. Ferguson might not bubble up anymore. Governments can control it more.
Which is Twitter? Is it open? In which case if it’s open, this is the
discussion we’ve had; I think it inevitably fosters instability and trolls. If
it’s not open, then it’s not Twitter and it’s not as useful. That’s the choice
they have.
Leo: Google announced its financial results for the quarter ending September 30th. Revenue up 20% year over year, $16.5B. Let’s see, net
income: $2.81B. It’s nice. It making almost a billion
a month, that’s a good business. It’s a nice little business. The Motorola
stuff, the sale of Lenovo kind of messes things up a
little bit. I don’t know when they’re going to close that. They entered that
agreement believe it or not, in January. And there is a charge of $378M related
to a patent licensing royalty asset acquired in connection with Motorola.
They’re writing off the patent library. Anything else I’m looking?
International revenues: $9.55B, more than half of all revenues outside of the
United States.
Jeff: Cue the tax battle.
Leo: They actually broke out their United Kingdom revenues because that’s the double
Irish. They said 10% of total revenues went to the U.K. But they did for those
who have not been following this story, they set up a subsidiary in Ireland
that they license the search technology to them. They collect the search
revenues and then none of the money gets taxed in Ireland. It gets transferred
to the Canary Islands or somewhere, Bermuda.
Jeff: Bermuda.
Gina: It sounds shady, but completely legal.
Leo: Cost per click went down… completely legal, for now. Cost per click went down
2%.
Jeff: That’s the big issue.
Leo: Yep. They’re making less money on banner ads. However aggregate paid clicks which
included clicks related to ads served on Google sites and sites of network
members increased 17%. So the cost went down but so many more clicks, they made
more money.
Jeff: But is there a limit to that volume?
Leo: Yea, well interesting.
Jeff: There’s a post that somebody sent us on Twitter that I put up on the bottom of
the Google section of the rundown asking whether-what’s the phrase…
Gina: Peek Google?
Jeff: Peek Google, yea.
Leo: Peek Google? You mean it’s all downhill from here, is that what they’re saying?
It’s Ben Thompson, he’s going to be on TWiT on Sunday. We’ll ask him about it.
Gina: Oh nice.
Jeff: I think for example he’s arguing that mobile is now bigger than web. And Google
was web, and it’s mobile. But Google is conquering mobile as well as anyone. So
arguing that natively advertising takes over search advertising; I don’t think
native ever joins the world. Takes over the world, because I think it’s a fake
on users. And I think that attention according to Chart Beat is where we go.
And I think relationships is where we go. But Google’s
not invincible. And Google knows it.
Leo: In a way what he’s saying is web search, which is Google’s business, is going
to be replaced.
Jeff: Yea, but Google already is a mobile company. And Google already is the best at
generating singles. Google as a personal services company; I think it’s a
little simplistic to say they were a search company. They haven’t been a search
company in years.
Leo: I think it’s no accident that you’ve seen on the World Series and playoffs, ads
for Android. For the first time ever. Not for Google
Phone or a Google device. Not for Chrome or Search for Android. I think Google
knows the future is mobile. And I hate to say it, but I think they have a
pretty incredible thing they’re going with on Android. I think that Android is
going somewhere. Just my guess. I don’t know! We’ll
ask Ben, that’s an interesting…
Jeff: It’ll be an interesting discussion.
Gina: And his blog post is sponsored, so there you go.
Leo: By?
Gina: Man Troll actually, but it’s not bad. It looks integrated into his blog theme.
Yea, I think we’ve talked about native advertising. And we’ve talked about how
it can be confusing to the reader, viewer, or listener. But I think that a lot
of people really think that native advertising is the best thing.
Leo: Because it tricks people. It’s so effective. You know the best thing is fooling
people. Ads work so much better when they look editorial.
Jeff: I was at the New York Times today with the board of editors. And they showed off
a lot of the native we’ve seen. We talked about the Orange is the New Black,
and so forth. It dawns me that native advertising besides selling some of your
brand value to your advertisers and letting readers thing this is a period on
your site even though the label is up. That’s the goal in one hand. The other
hand is that advertising has been Google’s been a part of this completely and
absolutely commodified. So you have to sell something
that specials won’t advertise. You’ve got a few choices. You could sell them to
your special relationship with your users. But you don’t have such a thing. The
world does but you don’t in media because everybody’s the same, it’s a mask. Or
you can sell them special content that we made for you. Aren’t we nice? And so
it’s an effort to de-commodify advertising but it’s
expensive. It doesn’t perform that well. Chart Beat has also found that people
scroll three-quarters of the time of real time, only one-quarter of the time
when they hit native advertising.
Leo: So people intuitively know they’re reading crap?
Jeff: Exactly. And yea, is it possible to do native advertising that has an
interesting piece? Yea. But if people won’t read a
four-word banner ad, why do we think they’re going to read a 600-word native
ad?
Leo: Well only if they don’t know it’s an ad. If they think it’s content they might go for it.
Jeff: It’s so subtle that you don’t know it’s an ad, then well is it an ad?
Leo: You said Orange is the New Black, is that native content? Is it brought to us
by the color orange?
Jeff: No, the New York Times did a native story about women in prison.
Leo: And by the way, if you’d like to learn more about women in prison, there’s a
fabulous show on Netflix.
Jeff: Bingo.
Leo: Oh my God.
Gina: Wait, this was a New York Time’s story?
Leo: It says paid posts, just those of you who are watching at home, see if you can
figure out where it says paid post. It’s obvious, it’s right here in this
little light-blue; there it is!
Jeff: Well, Leo, it also uses Sans Serif type. It’s not enough!
Leo: There it is! It’s obviously a paid post. Ooh, I like it. Pretty.
Gina: Did Netflix write that? Who wrote that? Did the Times write this piece?
Jeff: No, a business-side writer wrote this. It’s very well-done.
Leo: It’s like got all that fancy new media stuff that New
York Times has.
Jeff: The videos and interviews are good, it’s well done! But if you’re a reader of
the Times you have to ask: if this story is so good, why didn’t an editorial do
it?
Leo: In an August op-ed in the New York Times, Piper Kerman, author of the prison
memoir, Orange is the New Black, which inspired the Netflix series of the same
name, calls the distance between… boy that’s just horrible. Horrible!
Jeff: That is being argued over and over, that industry is the future. Now Leo, of
course they’ll say It’s no different from you reading
the spot.
Leo: Well we say here comes an ad. There goes an ad. And
that ends the relationship with the advertiser. It doesn’t bleed into
editorial.
Jeff: I agree. But that’s the model. You try to say it looks compatible with the
environment.
Leo: Look it’s the Times Brand studio that did it. Look here.
Gina: From a web perspective, the images as you scroll and stuff are really cool.
It’s beautiful.
Leo: It’s beautifully done. Because they can afford to do it. Because Netflix gave them a million bucks.
Jeff: Check the URL?
Leo: URL is paidposts.newyorktimes.com/netflix.
Gina: Okay.
Leo: They make no bones about that. But who reads that?
Jeff: They’re trying to put signals out to make sure there is some caveat at the
bottom…
Leo: It’s funny because Apple in its Safari browser would cut that all out except
for the New York Times part, but okay. Just some domain. It’s on the Times.
Jeff: If you go to Forbes, of course Forbes has made an entire business of what they
call brand voice.
Leo: So yes, we’ve talked about that before. This is though for the most part except
for that paragraph I read, good content.
Jeff: Yea, it actually is.
Leo: So the content’s there. Although, is this a clip from the show Orange? Or…
Jeff: No, these are interviews.
Leo: These are real people; looks like a clip from the show.
Jeff: They went and spent a lot of money to make this stuff and of course they charge
the sponsor for all that money.
I think it strengthened my
character and made me a better person.
Leo: Does this make you watch the show? And is this is in some way deceptive? If the
editorial content were slanted somehow… the only thing is that they have this
segment that is Piper Kerman, the author of Orange is the New Black. And then
they move on. And she was in women’s prison. It’s not like she has some
standing.
Jeff: They showed another one from United about United taking all of the athletes to
the Olympics. And they said United has some data about this that only United
has. United has stories, but only United has. We’re just helping them tell
their story.
Leo: Now how does this… the other question would be how do
I get to this? Does this appear as a story?
Jeff: There is, if you go to the home page of the New York Times, right underneath
the big main news, there is a coaster of a half-dozen boxes across. Scroll
down, scroll down, I’ll tell you when to stop. Keep going, stop! That insider
on what happens dot com, if there was one-there isn’t right now-they would have
it in there.
Leo: It would be one of these.
Jeff: You would see a big post. And it would be there.
Leo: And it would say paid post?
Jeff: Yea. And they’ll sell ads I believe. They’ll sell ads on the Times to drive
traffic to the post. So they’re selling media in that sense.
Leo: I have to say this is hard to find whose damage to buy this.
Gina: Yea, I’m somehow not really offended by that because it’s like the show
actually is about trying to raise awareness and trying to create prison reform.
People care about this now. It actually looks like a well-researched article
with great assets. Does that hurt anyone? It offends me when it’s done really
badly. But it’s the same thing.
Jeff: I think it’s fine as long as you know. We need more
research and I think they’re doing that research now. And the industry needs
to, on whether readers are indeed fooled. I fear that they were. If you listen
to Chart Beat, they say actually no. People recognize it’s crap but they don’t scroll.
Leo: Well that might be when it’s really crap. This is well-done content. And I have
to say I would feel a lot better about it if this paid post indicator were a
little bit more obvious.
Jeff: I agree.
Leo: That was very hidden on the whole thing.
Gina: Competing with a giant header image there.
Jeff: The interactive advertising bureau did some research, and I hosted their panel
of the announcement of it two months ago or so. And what they found was that
entertainment sites and lifestyle sites, people pretty much knew the
difference. Given the site, they could go that’s and ad, that’s an ad, that’s
not. They can do it only half as well on news sites.
Leo: This looks like news. Now everybody’s seen this. For crying out loud, my local
paper has had a paid real estate section. As long as I’ve been alive where your
local realtor writes a column on why it’s a good time to buy a house.
Jeff: And the auto section.
Leo: So we know. This is not new.
Jeff: No. Here’s the issue. In the example I gave when we discussed Forbes. When I
see a Forbes link on Twitter now, it could be excellent content by a Forbes
staffer and they have really good stuff. It could be very good content by a
Forbes contributor. It could be crappier content by a Forbes contributor. Or it
could be a really long and wordy ad. I don’t know which it is when I click. And
when I get there, I see something labels brand voice. And next to that it says what’s this. If you have to put a link that says what’s this, obviously the label isn’t good enough. So when
the law will run, I think publishers risk. It demands their trust and equity.
Leo: I wouldn’t do it but that’s more because I’m an old fuddy-duddy.
Jeff: Now what happens is the Times has to say, the Times puts itself in a position
where-and they will, they are! They reject ideas for native ads. They won’t do
them. They have to hold them to a standard. I heard another publisher this week
say that the editorial staff is asking the ad department to do better native
advertising so it holds up. But at some point what that says is, it’s been seen
as part of your brand. And so you become responsible for your advertising in a
way where you weren’t before. All I’m suggesting is it’s not the future of all
advertising because I can’t see consumers reading thousand-word pieces and just
getting the subliminal message that I feel like watching some women in prison.
Leo: We have the Google change log coming up in just a little bit. But first, an ad.
Gina: Good job, Leo.
Leo: You know I don’t know what the difference is.
Jeff: Have you listened to Alice Blumberg’s podcast about making a podcast company?
Leo: No, I have to listen to that.
Jeff: You really have to. And the funny thing is he goes on his way to do this and he
plays special music when he goes into the ad and he explains that’s how you
know I’m in the ad. I’m going to explain this to you. But you of all people
should listen to that. And I’m sorry I’m doing this now over the…
Leo: No, I should actually. Paul Harvey used to do that. He’d go page two, and
unless you were in the clue, you didn’t know. But that’s what that meant, this
is an ad. I think it’s always the case that one of the reasons they want hosts
to read ads is a little bit of confusion.
Jeff: No, it’s just you can’t escape it. It’s part of the flow.
Leo: I don’t know. I wish I didn’t have to make money. I wish I was independently
wealthy and could do this whole thing…
Jeff: If you were independently wealthy, would you really be working as hard as
you’re working?
Leo: Well I wouldn’t be doing three or four shows a day, no. But I might do one show
a day, just too leisurely fashioned in my jammies. Yes. It’s not that I don’t
love doing these shows. But we employ 20 people, full-time staff. There are
several dozen hosts like you guys, but you get something. All that money comes
from advertising. It’s our only source of revenue. We get a little bit of money
from donations, thank you donors. But it’s mostly it’s from advertising and
that’s how it works. If I had a couple hundred million, or if I were Steve
Ballmer, I might just do this for fun. Pay you guys. I told Kevin Rose, really basically I’m paying to have some friends.
Otherwise I’d be lonely. Our show today brought to you buy Smart Things. This was a Kickstarter project, in fact
Gina told me that she actually invested in it. The whole idea of which was to
solve the problem of how do you automate your home. There’s all these different protocols. Nobody talks to anybody else. So the smart folks
at Smart Things said what if we made a hub that talked to everything. And then
you wouldn’t need to worry about it. You’d just put the hub in your home,
connected to the internet. And then start getting little solution-kits or
security-kits and adding features. They have all sorts of do-hickies that work with the Smart Things. And the Smart
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which I love. The Wemo from Belkin. Those great LED lights from Philips, the Hue, the drop cam. We use those. Nest thermostats, Orion, or Honeywell, Schlage locks, or GE. So this way you’ve got this infinite capability of stitching
things together. You can use if, this, then, that if you want. You can even
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in your home or if someone’s opened a door. That kind of
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shipping in the U.S. Smartthings.com/twit. I’m not exactly handy and I was able
to set these up and make them work with my Hue lights and the Wemo. It’s so neat. I love my Sonos. Sonos welcomes me home. It will hail to the chief,
it’s so nice. Wouldn’t that be great? I should do that actually. Alright,
speaking of trumpets, it’s time for the change log. Play those trumpets.
The
Google change log.
Leo: And now, ladies and gentlemen, Gina Trapani with the newest stuff from Google.
Gina: Google Play music adds Songza’s… can you hear me
okay?
Leo: Yea, I’m just making funny faces.
Gina: Google Play music adds Songza’s contextual playlists
for all-access subscribers. And using the new material design
UI which we’re going to see a lot of in the change log and in the coming weeks. So that means if you’re a Google Play music all-access subscriber in Google
Play music on Android, iOS, and on the web, you’ll see a brand new section in
the listen now area. That’s basically a take on Songza’s concierge functionality. Depending on what time of day it is or what you’re
likely to be doing at the moment, Play music will show you a list of possible
playlists or stations you want to listen to like working out, getting ready for
work, studying, sleeping. Hey it’s Wednesday afternoon, do you want to work to
the beat, boost your energy, do you want to relax? And
it offers you a list of playlists. I’ve been playing with this today; it’s
pretty great, I’ve got to say. Look at that the blog 50. I like that. All the music blogs songs that you’d want.
Chad: I’m a huge fan of Google Play music and I have all-access. When
I saw this come in I was so excited because it’s discovering music is the best
thing to do when you have unlimited music.
Gina: It’s really great. We were looking at this last night on All About Android. Jason has his young kids like me, and he had family and toddler tunes.
Ron is a single guy and hangs out with his friends and his suggestions for
Tuesday night were going out to dinner and going out with your friends. We were
commenting how scary it was that it knew so much about our lives.
Chad: If you look at mine it has working to the beat, having fun at work, boost your
energy. It seems like I work too much.
Leo: But that’s the Songza stuff. It always had stuff like
that.
Gina: It knows what time of day it is and what you’re likely to be doing based on
earlier choices. It’s basically Google Now for music. So it’s pretty great.
Leo: They bought Songza a while ago. They just started
integrating it. I love Google Play music. The more I use it the more I love it.
Gina: I was thinking about my all-access subscription and was thinking about maybe
cancelling. This, I’m in. I’m good.
Leo: I know there’s now Spotify and Beats is more interesting. You’ve got a lot of
choices.
Gina: That’s true. This one, Leo, I wonder you must have talked about this with
Steve. Google beefs up its two-step verification with a physical USB security
key option in Chrome.
Leo: Yes.
Gina: So basically this is two-factor authentication is your password but this other
physical thing that you have. Normally it’s your phone. You get your
authorization code on your phone via SMS. This is an actual USB key that
supports a standard for this kind of authentication. With this enabled in
Chrome you plug into your computer and Chrome knows yes, this is you. Ah, you
have one.
Leo: This is from Yubico. They’ve made these keys for a
while and is it Fido that Google is supporting?
Jeff: Fido, yea. I ordered one yesterday when they announced this.
Leo: So this is the Neo. The idea is that you leave this in your USB port and it
just checks it. I worry about this because I’m afraid of losing my dongle.
Gina: Right.
Jeff: Here’s my question for you, Gina. Does your phone still work? Because your phone doesn’t have USB.
Gina: That’s a good question. I haven’t actually tried this myself. Leo, does the phone work or is the USB just for your computer?
And do I need one for each individual device?
Leo: You could. Each of these have little holes that you
can put it on a lanyard or something and carry around your device with you.
Jeff: In case you want to put it into a work computer and then leave for someplace
else and leave.
Leo: Right, but what about when you’re on the road. Would an authenticator still
work? I don’t know. I would love it if it did. And I just don’t know.
Jeff: When I spoke to the work people, head of…
Leo: Look! It says use a verification code instead. Right there on the verification
screen. So that means you could either have your security key in there or you
could go to your authenticator and use the code.
Jeff: The head of security gave a fascinating talk and said we acknowledge that not
many people use two-step. And he said we’ll soon have something-I presume this
is it-that will get more people to use it. My guess is that,
and tell me if I’m wrong, NFC on your phone operates in essence like
that. It says I’m me. But I can see Google doing other hardware things that
will help with this besides having a bulky USB device.
Gina: Thank you Doctor Mom. Doctor Mom in the chat room said that the key has NFC. So
you can use it with your phone or tablet.
Leo: This one does and this one doesn’t.
Gina: So some keys do.
Leo: Some do, some don’t.
Jeff: Oh that’s the difference in price. They go from $4 to $50.
Leo: The little one does not. It’s too small. And the big one does. But there’s more
than that. These are from Yubico. And we like them.
Jeff: How does that work? Does that have one special number and it says I’m a
hardware thing so you know I’m really real?
Leo: No, it actually has a processor in here that does calculations. So it gets
queried, it’s my understanding-Steve did talk about this on Tuesday but I was
sleeping-it gets queried. I was trying to pay attention; I wouldn’t understand
it, that’s the problem. It gets queried and makes some calculations then comes
back with a response, I believe. Or is used by the computer
to do the calculations. So there is a processor in this, believe it or
not. Isn’t that wild?
Gina: What if you lose it or it breaks?
Leo: That’s the point. Then you use your verification. I’ll tell you what, before
next week I will set this up and start using it.
Gina: Sweet. We’ve got you on Inbox…
Leo: I’m set.
Jeff: I have one arriving from Amazon tomorrow so I’m going to try it too.
Gina: Great. Change log, what else do we got? Google Earth for Android got some
updates, including new 3D rendering technology, faster updates, and some KML
updates. So first we’ve got the new 3D technology. This is Google Earth for
Android. This gives users faster, smoother, crisper transitions as you zoom
around to your destination. And Google says it’s the first major 3D overhaul
since Earth launched since more than 10 years ago now. I can’t believe Earth is
so old.
Jeff: How much do you use Earth?
Gina: I haven’t because Earth was kind of slow.
Leo: Maps replaced it.
Gina: And Maps replaced it. I think they’re trying to make Earth relevant again with
this update. This update comes with and is going to get updated faster. Google
said the new Earth app will get updates at the same time as Google Maps to add
access to the most up-to-date information for things like places, names, roads,
businesses. So I might spend a little more time with it if it’s faster. Earth
for me was always hey I want to fly around and explore. Whereas Maps was always
I need to get somewhere. Tell me how to do it. So it’s more of a utility. The
new Earth updates also introduces support for opening
KML files, custom map directly from Google Drive. That’s kind of nice. You can
store your KML on Google Drive and open them up on the new Earth app for
Android. Finally, Google Play games added new nearby multiplayer capabilities
to make it easier to play with your friends nearby. This is actually for
developers. This is part of the Google Play games API and it lets developers
more easily create synchronized challenges. If Jeff and I are in the same room,
I can challenge him to a game and sync players at the same time. It’s similar
to the functionality on the Nintendo 3DS. So hoping to see
more nearby game playing come to your favorite games on Android soon. And that’s all I got.
Leo: Neat. That my friends if you play the drum slowly is our Google change log!
Jeff: In the chat room, Cool Breeze just put up a link to Yubikey comparisons and features.
Leo: Yes, they have all the different kinds of keys. What did you buy, Jeff? You
didn’t get a Yubikey?
Jeff: I don’t even remember.
Leo: What I have is the Neo N. So you want something that supports U2F. That’s the
Fido technology.
Jeff: Now you tell me. Well I’ve got Fido.
Leo: If you’ve got Fido, then you’re good. The blue one that I showed is a Fido
touch key and then the Neo N which is… so the Fido touch key even though it’s bigger, is $18. And the Neo N is $60. That’s touch one time
password generator smart card. And it supports other protocols like Java card
and so forth. There’s a lot of protocols. Google
points out that the reason you’d want to do this is you can’t get spoofed by a
phisher who might grab your text messages somehow and get the authentication
code. If you have it on your phone as authenticator, I think you’re probably
okay. I bet you businesses would like this because you could say alright, this
is your Chrome. This is your laptop; this is your chip. Put that in there, only
you can use it. Take the chip home with you, or
something like that.
Jeff: Hand in your chip, Mr. Laporte.
Leo: Yea, hand in your chip. Business likes hand in your chip. And so that’s a good
page. It shows you all the different kinds of stuff.
Gina: So you got the basic $18 one?
Leo: I have both.
Jeff: If you lose your phone, you’re okay. If you lose your chip, you’re okay. If you
lose both, then you’re screwed.
Leo: Yea I guess. You know what I do, I put the… the way you get authenticator to
work; and by the way this is a standard. It’s not just Google’s. There are
other companies that make authenticator apps including Microsoft. But the way
these apps work is they need your secret key which is issued to you by the
company you’re logging into. Most of the time they do that in
a QR code. So the authenticator lets you take a picture of the QR code
so you don’t have to enter in this 30-digit key. Then that says oh yea, that
came from Last Pass and that’s this. And so I’m going to now start generating
numbers based on that secret key. The number is some hash of the secret key and
the time. And the reason that works is because you don’t share that secret… it’s secret! So only Last Pass and I know
the secret key. We both know roughly what time it is, pretty accurately.
So Last Pass knows based on my secret code hashed with the time, which
six-digit number I’m going to give it. If it matches, I must be the holder of
that secret key. But you know if that secret key leaks out, you’re in trouble.
What I do is actually put those QR codes for Google. I use Google, Tumblr,
Evernote, Outlook, Last Pass. In my Last Pass secure
store, I save the image. So even if I lose my phone, it’s only because I use so
many phones, right? Every time I get a new phone, the first thing I do is set
up authenticator on that phone. And because I’m using the same QR code and same
secret number each time, I get the same numbers on all those phones.
Jeff: The industry has to make all of this easier.
Leo: It’s easy! What’s so hard?
Gina: I really like Authy.
Leo: Authy is a really good one. I’ve used Authy.
Gina: I’m glad you explained that, Leo. Because I wondered, how does Authy know? So this is just a standard; this is the key and
the timestamp and that’s why they’re time-dependent. The clock counts down.
That helps a lot. Thank you for that explanation.
Leo: I hope I’m right. Again, I drift off during Security Now and I may miss the just
of it. Yea, Authy is not from Google but it works.
You’ll get the same number that Google would give you.
Gina: Right, an authenticator. I find Authy is
nicer-looking.
Leo: Maybe I’ll switch to Authy. I’ve used it on
non-Android platforms. Okay, hey anybody order a Nexus 9?
Jeff: Nope.
Gina: My phone’s…
Leo: Me neither. Tablets are over. They’re over!
Jeff: No they’re not! I just think it’s too big for my pocket. I like my 7.
Gina: This giant phone. You’ve got the 7, yea.
Leo: Yea, I still have the 7. I don’t use it. I haven’t used in ages. Do you use it?
Jeff: I use it constantly.
Leo: Do you use it on the train?
Jeff: I use it on the train and on planes.
Leo: So it’s travel.
Gina: I’m going to get lollipop on it.
Jeff: Who’s ordering a 6?
Leo: October 29th apparently, the order date. I will get up early in the
morning to order a 6.
Gina: I’ve bought too many phones this year already. I want to, but I’ve bought too
many phones. I’ve been through two HTC One’s and now I have the One Plus.
Leo: No you can’t.
Gina: And honestly it’s just too big for me.
Leo: It’s really big. Six inches. They’re going to still
sell the Nexus 5. I thought that was interesting. So it’s pretty clear the
strategy. We hypothesized last week. The strategy is the developer platform, the cheap lollypop phone will be Nexus 5. And
Google’s actually going to sell the 6 as a real feature phone through all the
carriers and all of that, at a steep price. $650.
Jeff: I’m ready to buy.
Leo: I’m not clear. It looks like it does everything the Moto X does. Does it do the
always listening?
Gina: It does the one plus one thing where you can tap the screen and it turns on.
Leo: That’s lollypop. Lollypop lets you tap the screen.
Gina: I was saying this on All About Android last night and
you said last week you think Cyanogen is the best Android. I’m really
surprised; it was so interesting to me how many features in Cyanogen made it
into lollypop. Like clearly Cyanogen is this bleeding-edge
thing. And Google’s paying attention or they’re mind-molding. I don’t
know what they’re doing. But it seems like there’s just certain features. And
I’m like oh that’s already in Cyanogen. And now that’s going to be part of the default; it’s nice.
Leo: I still think the One Plus One is great. I gave mine
to the Catholic Church. I don’t have to use it anymore. Father Padre. You’re
not allowed to give him anything. It’s always to the church and then they let
him use it. I said do you want my phone, he said yea. But I do like the One
Plus.
Gina: They’ll get you every time. Those bells of poverty.
Leo: It’s a nightmare. Poor guy. I think he’s actually
doing pretty well.
Gina: What are you using right now?
Leo: Note 4 which I’ll talk about in a second. And the real question is going to be,
now this is 5.7 inches, the real question is what happens… I have to order a
Nexus 6, it’s my job. Chad, you went iPhone 6.
Chad: I went iPhone 6 Plus.
Leo: Any regrets?
Chad: I don’t know yet.
Leo: Missing Android yet?
Chad: I’m going to wait until you get it. I’m worried that 6 is the half-inch that
pushes over. It’s an inch away from the Nexus 7, it’s so close! Although in Photos…
Jeff: Well just look at the comparison of these two. This is a 5; I’m not sure it’s
going to feel that way.
Leo: The One Plus One which you’re holding up there, that’s
a One Plus One right? That’s 5.5 inches. That’s the same size as the 6 Plus.
Jeff: You said, if you guessed this would look like a 5 to a
9.
Leo: The other thing that’s hard to understand, for instance this Note 4 which is a
bigger screen than your 6 Plus, is a smaller phone
because of big bezels.
Chad: Absolutely. Basically I am holding out until you have it in your hands.
Leo: I will bring in the Nexus 6 for you to look at. And you’ll say I’ll take that,
thank you very much.
Chad: Then I’m hoping that the resale value on the 6 Plus is good enough if I decide
to jump ship on iOS.
Leo: The Nexus has a couple things: it has dual front-facing speakers. That’s nice.
Chad: Out of the features of the iPhone I will miss, I will miss touch ID. And it
seems like they’re doing Apple Pay right.
Leo: No, now wait a minute. You’ll still be able to touch and pay with the Nexus 6
or the Note 4. The Note 4 does in fact have a fingerprint reader that works.
It’s not quite as good as Apple’s but it gets the job done.
Jeff: It’s not a button though.
Leo: Yea, you have to swipe it. And it does mean you have a physical button which
I’m not crazy about. You swipe it. And by the way applications like Last Pass
use it. So I swipe and it unlocks. So I no longer have to enter that PIN in
Last Pass or the password. I swipe and unlock. So I wonder how long before
Google starts doing that. You know Apple bought the company that it uses, AuthenTec. And they seem to have the best technology.
Samsung is kind of more like those Lenovo laptops, you have to swipe across it.
Anyway, I’m going to talk more about this in my pick of the week. So I don’t
want to preempt myself. What else? Some people are starting to see the Nexus 6
I guess. We won’t be able to order it until the end of the month. And I’m not
sure when it will arrive at that point. I have to say given the number of
people saying I’m going to buy one, it may be in short
supply. Be prepared. Lollypop, we’re starting…
Jeff: It will come on the 29th.
Leo: No, preorder on the 29th.
Jeff: What time of the day will that probably happen?
Leo: Midnight. I come in and log in at midnight and every hour thereafter.
Jeff: Midnight California time?
Leo: I don’t know. No, Google is not like Apple. Apple says midnight and then
doesn’t do it. Google doesn’t say a time and then just does it whenever they
get around to it. Right? I’m trying to remember other
preorders. You just have to keep checking.
Jeff: I’m going to be in Madrid.
Leo: Uh oh. You want me to buy you one?
Jeff: I might need that, we’ll see.
Leo: You just tell me and I will buy two if you need it. I presume I can get two.
Blue, they come in midnight blue or moonlight white. Or something like that.
Jeff: I don’t want the white. Are you going to buy the 64?
Leo: Oh yea.
Jeff: Yea, so will I.
Leo: You have to get the most memory you can get.
Jeff: I agree.
Leo: So we’re starting to see more about Lollypop. That’s the negative on something
like the Note 4. And the positive on this Nexus 6 is you’re guaranteed to have
Lollypop faster than anybody else. I like that phone. It looks just like a Moto
X on steroids. Swollen up Moto X without the fancy colors and
the wood and bamboo.
Chad: The first reviews are also saying the camera is really good.
Leo: Well yea but remember they’re comparing it to the Nexus 5. So, wow, it looks
like the thing I took a picture of! Notice this hands-on, this is the Verge’s
hands-on Peter Bohn wrote it.
Chad: You don’t see any hands.
Leo: I’m wondering, this seems like maybe in an event he
had hands-on. I don’t think he has the phone yet.
Gina: A whale of a phone.
Leo: A whale of a phone, code name shamoo. This is the ad
you’re seeing and all that stuff. I think it looks pretty nice. We’ll see. I
want Lollypop.
Gina: Yea, I do too.
Leo: Google’s got a little bit of a problem because they moved everybody to Hangouts
but they still have to offer a messenger app. So they will continue to have a
messenger app, a stock SMS app in the Lollypop as well as Hangouts. Which is
weird but I think they have to.
Jeff: Yea.
Leo: There is an opt-in kill switch in Lollypop. Not default. Opt-in. The new Gmail
5.0 which as we mentioned will handle all accounts. The new
Google Play store 5.0 which is already out for some people. Some people
have that.
Gina: I don’t have it yet.
Leo: I don’t either. What else is going to be new? This material design, have you
been playing with that at all?
Gina: I haven’t installed the preview images or anything. So I haven’t had a chance
to play with it. I think it’s the biggest most noticeable change; everything’s
going to look different and be faster, and seem spring-loaded.
Leo: It’s pretty snappy. Did you see how fast those windows move on it?
Gina: Yea, last night we had on the lead developers on the Tumblr on their Android
app. And he was saying that on other versions of Android, Tumblr scroll
mechanism was sort of janky, a little stutter, and it
had all these internal project to make it smoother.
Then they installed the Tumblr app on L, and it’s smooth as butter. And they
didn’t change a thing. So there’s clearly speed improvements that you get just for free. It’s very snappy. Even with all the transitions and
sliding and effects, it looks really good.
Leo: Here’s a page turn on a book. Is this Dieter doing that? It looks like Dieter.
Chad: Yea it is.
Leo: Dieter Bohn of the Verge.
Chad: The keyboard looks nice. They’re competing one-to-one with iOS now. Their
design is so top-notch.
Leo: It’s pretty. We had Nelay Patel from the Verge on TNT
and he said something I’ve been saying for a while is that iOS is out of date!
They really haven’t, Apple, been able to keep up with Android. UI-wise, I
really feel like Android has lapped iOS.
Gina: Material is really great. I’m excited about it.
Leo: Let’s take a break, when we come back, a tool, a tip, and a number as we wrap
this thing up. Our show today brought to you by Shutter Stock. We have a
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use the offer code TWIG1014. And now Gina Trapani has her tip of the week.
Gina: Alright this is one of those tips that is not news at
all. But it’s one of those things that isn’t obvious
and it’s super handy when you need it. So when you’re in and using Google Maps
navigation on your phone to get somewhere, if you tap the compass you can
toggle between first-person view and the route view. Which is
really handy when you want to see what the entire route is. And again, not obvious.
Leo: I do that all the time because I always want to see where the hell are you
taking me?
Gina: Exactly.
Leo: What is this route?
Gina: When I read this, I was like oh right, okay. This is good to know. Because the compass doesn’t exactly get asked to be tapped. So the next time you’re in navigation, tap on the compass and you can switch
between those two views. Both of which are very handy.
Leo: Jeff, your number of the week?
Jeff: I’m going to cheat a little bit. First, Mark Zuckerberg’s
first interview in Mandarin.
Leo: He answered in Mandarin?
Jeff: He answered in Mandarin. I haven’t watched the video yet but there’s a video
there on the rundown.
Leo: What an over-achiever. Skip ahead. He’s talking to students in China. He sounds
pretty good. He’s got to work on his tones though. I studied Chinese in college
for years and I couldn’t do this. That’s pretty impressive.
Jeff: Somebody said in Twitter where I found this, he did this while running a
company. What did you do?
Leo: And killing and dressing his own meat products. And tearing
down his block.
Jeff: Yea!
Leo: I hate over-achievers. Wow, that is very impressive. Chinese is not an easy
language.
Gina: That’s great. Good for him. The crowd loved it.
Leo: I got to tell you, Chinese speakers love it, even if you’re terrible. They go
oh, your accent is excellent.
Gina: My favorite moment when I was visiting China and walking through a public
garden and happened upon what I assumed were locals. And my group raised our
hands and said ne-how. And they said hello. And then we all just cracked up.
Everyone just started laughing and it was fantastic.
Leo: I like to go and get the mani-pedis and they’re
talking in Chinese the whole time. And at the end I go chin-chin-neen-si-jen. And they go oh shit.
He understood. I didn’t but I like to pretend.
Gina: You like to pretend.
Leo: Oh no! That guy knew what we were saying about him. So I did a full review of
the Galaxy… did you want to do another number, Jeff?
Jeff: Nope.
Leo: First is a number, it counts.
Jeff: I counted. I could go into a whole bunch of numbers about Android.
Leo: No, I like seeing Mark Zuckerberg speaking Chinese. So I did a full review of
this on Before You Buy. This is the Galaxy Note 4, I got the unlocked edition.
People are starting to get them now from the major carriers.
Jeff: How much did that cost? $1000?
Leo: No, not that bad. $850.
Jeff: $850, okay.
Leo: You can get it for $300 subsidized.
Jeff: In Korea, it is more than $1000.
Leo: It’s beautiful. This is a 5.7 inch super-ambled screen running at quad-HD. So
it’s what, 2560 by 1440. You can see it, it’s really gorgeous. Here’s the inbox
app running on it. Texts are crisp. You can’t see any dots at all. Just really
is a beautiful phone. Very fast. Quad-core
processors, 2.7 GHz quad-core processors. That’s desktop speeds now. And
the main thing, you know I’m not a fan of what Samsung does to Android or
haven’t been. I am a fan of the Note because I like the giant screens. And I’ve
had every Note: 1, 2, 3, and 4. And have always loved
it.
Jeff: Do you use the pen?
Leo: Yea, the pen works great.
Jeff: I kind of would like to use it once in a while.
Leo: When you want to take written notes for instance, this is very handy. They’ve
got templates you can fill in. You can if you work really hard at it have the
hand-writing converted into text. But you have to write very nicely and in a
straight line. Which I do not do. It also as I pointed
out has a fingerprint reader that works. And can be used for Google Wallet and
other things. You can train up to three fingerprints. The only thing about the
fingerprint reader, you see it’s kind of wide. That’s because you’re scanning
your fingerprint. So you have to cover it entirely. You learn how to do it
pretty good. But it isn’t as easy as Apple’s where you just rest your finger on
it. Apple’s seems to work every time. This one takes a little practice. But the
main thing I want to say, and by the way I’m running Novo Launcher. I’m not
running Touch Wiz as you can probably tell from the normal looking dock. Not
the Touch Wiz weird dock. Samsung is king of junking stuff up in the interface
and so forth. But they have obviously listened to people and they have junk.
And they have junked it up so much less. For instance, remember the camera used
to have 800 different modes. They still have the same number of modes but you
can manage them and hide the modes you don’t want to use. We were talking about
how good the camera is going to be on the Nexus 6. I think there is no question.
This is a 16 megapixel shooter that’s spectacular. 3.7
megapixel front camera with 120 degrees. So it’s really a great selfie
camera. It has some interesting useful modes but you don’t have to see them all
which is nice. One of my biggest complaints about the
Galaxy’s phone is the S-voice. The Samsung voice, they’ve replaced Google
search voice with… I just want to use Google. You can. Okay Google, I’m talking
to you. Okay Google. And it does the okay Google thing. And every Android phone
has done that since Kit Kat. You can also get Google Now by pressing and
holding. So it’s a much purer version of Android than Samsung has done even on
the Galaxy S5.
Jeff: How’s the battery?
Leo: The battery is massive. I think the biggest argument for these phones is this
is one of the few phones still remaining where you can take the cover off and
put in a new battery. So if you have two batteries, it is a 32-20 mA battery to
begin with.
Gina: That thing is huge.
Leo: Which means it’s going to get you through the day. I don’t have good battery
numbers yet because I’ve only had it for a few days. I like to let the phone
settle a little bit before I really get battery numbers. But I think it’s going
to be comparable to the One Plus One. And for $20 you
get a second battery and you never have to worry again. And SD card support.
The Nexus 6 isn’t going to have either of these capabilities so I’ve always
liked the Samsung phones for that reason alone. I can buy an extra battery.
Jeff: Is it possible you like it more than the Nexus 6?
Leo: It’s possible. I’m going to buy a Nexus 6. Nexus 6 doesn’t have a removable
back, doesn’t have a stylus. But it has Lollypop. This is Kit Kat. And I don’t
expect Lollypop to show up for a Samsung phone right away by any means. But
again, you put a launcher of your choice on there and I tell you the screen is
spectacular. We’ll have to see what the Nexus 6 looks like. The Nexus 6 has
roughly the same battery but it isn’t replaceable. It doesn’t have SD cards. So
you’re going to have to get 64 gigs internal and hope that that’s enough. Let’s
see. Nexus 6 has 32-00, this has 3220. So they have 20 little mA-hour better.
I’m not saying rush out and get a Note 4. But if you did get a Note 4, you
shouldn’t feel left out. This is a pretty darn nice phone. It is a gorgeous
phone. If you show my pocket, Chad, it’s not that big. It’s so funny. When the
Notes first came out, people said oh my God, that’s huge. We’re so used to big
phones by now. I can pocket it. It’s not so different.
Chad: How big is that one?
Leo: It’s a little smaller than the iPhone 6 Plus. I don’t know the exact dimensions
of it. Because it’s almost edge to edge on the screen, the bezels aren’t as
big. Crappy back, single back speaker; that’s one thing the Nexus 6 will do
much better. So I don’t know who’s going to win on that one.
Jeff: I said to my Korean host, the world laughed at you for your big phones. But you
got the last laugh.
Leo: I think so. I love a big phone and I don’t use a tablet. I think you could use
this on the train very happily. A couple other quick notes: if you have a
Samsung phone, you can go to the Samsung store and download Nokia’s Here maps and driving directions. Those are very good,
everybody loves those. And they have one advantage over Google Maps. You can
use them offline. They will download maps before you head out the door. By state, by city, by country. So you can just use them
offline. Also, get the Fox app if you have FX or FXX on your TV. Because the FX Now app now has every episode of the Simpsons ever. Twenty-five seasons, 522 episodes on your phone. Those are a couple little tips
for you if you’re getting on an airplane as I am. Thank you, Gina Trapani.
Gina: Thank you.
Leo: Thinkup.com. Everybody should sign up today for that great insights, Twitter
insights app.
Gina: Thank you, yea. A lot of fun today. A
good show.
Leo: And she’s back to blogging on Squibbler!
Gina: Scribbling.net, yes.
Leo: Scribbling.net.
Gina: My writing muscles are pretty rusty but I just decided to, even if it’s just a
paragraph I’m going to publish it.
Leo: Do. Keep doing it. It will be easier and easier and easier.
Gina: Yea, it gets easier, right? It’s a muscle for sure.
Leo: And I love your writing. As a reader, I want you to do it. Same
with you, Jeff Jarvis. He blogs pretty regularly at
Buzz Machine.
Jeff: Twitter kind of ruined me.
Leo: Twitter ruined everything. Twitter is why we can’t have nice things. Twitter is
the problem. Jeff is at the City University of New York where a bunch of very
lucky students get to study journalism with him. Both of them join us virtually
every Wednesday at about 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern time. 2000
UTC. For This Week in Google. If you can’t
watch live, don’t worry about it! On demand audio and video is available after
the fact at twit.tv/twig. That’s our website. Or wherever podcasts are
aggregated: iTunes, Stitcher’s a good place. We have
third-party, lovely third-party apps for almost every platform including Roku
so you can download those and watch. We’ve got a lot of people watching on
their big screen TVs in their living room on Roku. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Gina.
Thanks, Chad Johnson, our producer. Thanks to you for watching and we’ll see
you next week on TWiG! Bye bye.