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Sunday, March 6, 2005
Oh well 
| | Well, the skiing sucked yesterday. Mt. Baldy was up in the clouds, where the temp was a snow-friendly 32 degrees, but the moisture came in the form of blowing mist that quickly froze into little beards of ice on everything. Visibility was about 50 feet at best. After an hour or so of waiting for the sky to clear, we bailed, and were back in sunny Los Angeles in a remarkably short time. The Baldy folks were kind enough to give us a rain check, which was nice. Hope we get another chance this winter. |
Blessing in retrospect
| | It's been more than two years since Ev Williams announced Blogger's sale to Google (right next to me on stage in Los Angeles, when my first words on the matter were "holy shit"). There was a widespread assumption at the time that Google would crush all competition in the market space. Instead, Google has done remarkably little with Blogger, at least as far as users can tell. From the users' side it looks like the deal was mostly about grabbing up a few million pages for advertising placement. |
| | Google has caught a lot of undeserved crap for the high positions blogs often get in search results. So in one way, at least, Google understands blogging. But the irony of Google's relative lack of participation in the blogging conversation (beyond the blogs of a few folks) disappears when you consider the customer/consumer split that afflicts ad-supported media. (See below.) |
| | There's also the monopoly problem. Just as Microsoft all but quit innovating with its browser after it achieved a monopoly (as Apple later did with Safari), Google all but quit innovating with Blogger. Not because it had a huge market share with Blogger, but because it had a monopoly role in advertising on blogs. |
| | Key trick: ask The market for what? Not just here, but in any case where large numbers of people don't pay for a service they take for granted. |
| | There is enormous room for improvement in blogging tools. Does anybody believe that the current assortment of instruments for writing on the Web is the End State of things? |
| | We have a long way to go, folks. I mean that as a very optimistic statement. |
Markets are Relationships, Part N
| | So just when everybody thinks there is no new Borg, along comes Larry, Moe, and Sergey to take over the show. The thing that's making me angry is not that history is repeating itself, but that stupidity is repeating itself. How hard is it to realize that delivering a service that makes users feel powerless is not a good thing. Particularly users with loaded weapons called blogs and 'casts. Who cares if you can do it because. Forget the stuff about do no evil. Do no stupid. |
| | I still believe this feature as positioned now is either evil or stupid or both. But, it could be fixed. But, it doesn¹t matter that much because AutoLink is actually kind of useless and anyhow, the Google Toolbar is doomed. ... |
| | The issue is simple: Who owns your desktop? You, or the owner of whatever webpage you happen to be browsing? |
| | A meatspace analogy should make this clear: Imagine I have a butler whom I task with going through what drops into my mail slot each morning. His job? To annotate my snail mail. He goes through the advertising circulars and researches whether better prices are available anywhere else. He gets me a map of every return address. Maybe I ask him to anticipate needs I don't even know I have yet. If he does something I don't like, I replace him. |
| | When I visit your website, and you send me a page in response, I should be able to do whatever I like to manipulate it on my end. Display it in purple, suppress images, block pop-ups, compare prices from other vendors, whatever. In the words of my colleague, Cory Doctorow, "it's my screen, and I should be able to control it; companies like Google and individuals should be able to provide tools and services to let me control it." |
| | Dan Gillmor: ...it's still a bad idea, and an unfortunate move... |
| | Dave and others have asked me to weigh in on the Autolink Issue. Since people I respect were on both sides of the thing, I decided to hold off until I had a chance to try it. |
| | So this morning I rebooted my Linux laptop in Windows, something I do on the increasingly rare occasions when I need to check out something that only runs there. |
| | First I fired up Firefox and found that the Google Toolbar only runs on IE. Not good. |
| | Then I spent half an hour trying to find Autolink and make it work. Then I noticed it was there at the far right of the toolbar. Or one of them. In the Microsoft toolbar-proliferation tradition, the Google toolbar occupies the fourth and fifth menus (toolbars) down, not counting a huge sixth bar that appears automatically: a "tray" of search results that consists mostly of advertising. Search for something in the second "search the web" form and the results (from Viewpoint "Graphically Enhanced Search), which load advertising first, push the wanted results down out of the window entirely. It's a mess. |
| | I tried clicking Autolink on a variety of pages and couldn't get it to work with anything. In fact, it appeared and disappeared, and seemed to go by different names and/or symbols. Confusing. [Later: ubermostrum in Kuro5hin explains, AutoLink, by default, does nothing. It only adds links to a page when you ask it to. And it only adds links on four types of items: US street addresses, package tracking numbers, Vehicle Identification Numbers and ISBNs. That's it. My test pages didn't warrant those, I guess.] |
| | Anyway, here's the problem: Google is an advertising company, more than a search company. That's becoming clearer with this feature, and the company's apparent lack of interest in the feedback they've been getting. |
| | The problem for commercial media from the beginning has always been the separation of customers from consumers. (Which I've been writing and talking about for a long time.) This problem is worst where the consumers pay nothing. (This separates subscription media, where the consumers are customers, from broadcasting, where the consumers are not.) |
| | Google's consumers pay nothing. Google consumers are very much, in this respect, like commercial broadcasting's consumers: powerless. They can't say "I'll take my business elsewhere," because they have no business to take. |
| | Usage, maybe. But not business. |
| | Google is, no doubt, completely revolutionizing the advertising business. But they have a lot of work to do on the other side of the consumer/customer split. They need to start treating consumers as customers. They need to see that markets are not just conversations, but relationships as well. |
| | [Later...] I notice that the toolbar also features a little Blogger logo, which appears only to work with Blogger. Talk about proprietary. That's the kind of stuff Microsoft and (especially) Apple do. Here, have a silo. Is there a plug-in architecture for this thing? Doesn't look like it, though maybe I'm wrong. |
| | So I'm with Dave, Steve and Dan. Autolink is bad. Actually, more like Craig Burton's calls EBWU: evil, bad, wrong and ugly. I'm also with Tim: The whole toolbar is doomed. |
| | Meanwhile, Google needs to pay more attention to the customer/consumer split. It's a huge issue. And this is turning into Exhibit A for why. |
| | Note: Microsoft dropped whatever-it-was [later: SmartTags] that Autolink does as well. Why? Because Microsoft listened to its customers. |
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