reDesign

Some interesting reads from the last few weeks:

• Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo on the cognitive surplus (Web 2.0 video) - Author Clay Shirky spoke recently on how much could be done if only a fraction of the time spent watching TV is put to other uses. He estimates that 2,000 Wikipedias could be created with just the time Americans spend watching TV in a year. (I just clicked off the TV to write this post.) While Shirky focuses his talk on production of content, all that production also has a significant effect on consumption. Time is a zero-sum game. The time I spend on Facebook or reading about Jon’s exploits in Russia is time I’m not spending with TV or traditional media. And for every producer, there are at least 10 to 20 consumers.
• Larry Page on how to change the world (Fortune) - Google co-founder Larry Page lays out the challenges we face in changing the world. The core problem is that not enough people and companies take risks. Part of this undoubtedly is due to the risk/reward systems in most companies. Innovation (and the people who chase it) are often the first to go when belts need to be tightened.
  I was at a conference last week where Erik Jorgensen of Microsoft demoed some amazing technologies in mapping, such as 3D map tours. A questioner from the audience, a Microsoft shareholder, asked what the ROI was. Fortunately, Microsoft and Google do well enough in their core businesses that most investors give them the freedom to innovate.
• ‘CSI’ sleuths out Microsoft’s latest technology (USA Today) - CSI:NY producer Anthony E. Zuiker is teaming with folks at Microsoft labs to bring bleeding edge technology to viewers. (And no doubt frustrating real life criminalists with increased expectations.) Last week’s episode featured Microsoft’s Photosynth technology. CSI:Miami used variations of Microsoft’s Surface computing. Microsoft isn’t the only one in the CSI product placement game; many of the pictures processed by the Photosynth technology in that episode were taken with iPhones.
• Honda system to warn motorists of crime hotspots (AFP) - In-car navigation systems and PNDs are getting more data rich all the time. On recent Acuras you can get Zagat ratings. With a Dash Express PND, you have access to Yahoo! Search results. Now, in Japan, your Honda can tell you when you’re in a dangerous neighborhood. I suspect that fears of redlining and disparate data sources will keep that from happening here. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising Dash users use create and share localized feeds for such an app.

The announced Microsoft bid for Yahoo! means a lot of different things for lots of people. An emboldened competitor for Google. A stronger ad network for advertisers. Heightened acquisition hopes for AOL. Better benefits for Yahoo! employees. (Microsoft has the best benefits I’ve seen in the industry.)

But what does it mean for every day consumers? The biggest impact is likely to be in the mobile space. Microsoft’s ownership of the Windows Mobile OS and Yahoo’s large audience and mobile applications could revolutionize the industry.

As revolutionary as the iPhone is, it’s not a true network device. Apple did a terrific job integrating four devices – phone, Internet tablet, media player and camera – into one.

Even as our lives get more and more digitally connected, the cell phone remains a remote island of information. Someone needs to build a device that integrates the Internet seamlessly.

Some of the things I’d like to see:

• A network address book. You no longer have to use the 10-key keypad or a sync cable to keep your address book up-to-date. In fact, you don’t have to update it all – as your contacts move, those changes are automatically reflected. The address book would incorporate network presence so that you don’t call people when they’re in the middle of something.
• A network calendar.
• Integrated photo applications. I’ve been looking for a way to view pictures from my friends on flickr through my mobile phone or iPod Touch. The best efforts have been clunky. When I take pictures, they’re seamlessly integrated with my flickr account, without the hacks that are currently required. (Sprint has done a nice implementation of this kind of integration with Picture Mail, but their Web application is awful and little used.) The pictures could also be used for picture Caller ID.
• Richer data push to the phone. It amazes me that we’re still stuck sending 160 character text messages to each other. A network-integrated phone would allow for a better experience. Want to invite someone to dinner? Send them a message which appears complete with photo, address, review and link to driving directions.
• Web access to text messages and integration with IM. When you’re at your desk, text messages come in on your IM client. Leave and they get routed to your cell phone. All of your texts are available in your mail app. The carriers are an obstacle to making this happen (text messaging is highly lucrative), but a combined Microsoft-Yahoo might be able to pull it off.
• Network control of your phone. Phone stolen? No problem, send a bullet to erase all of the data. Forgot where you left your phone? See a map of where it is.
• Local search integration. Found a business that you like? Add it your network address book for quick and easy access. Click to rate right from your cell phone.
• Location-aware presence. The option to publish location to other networks, including IM networks. More on that later.

Some variations of a few of these features, like the network address book and calendar, exist in enterprise-focused devices. Yahoo! Go is an excellent consumer application that includes features such as a flickr viewer, but without integration into the OS isn’t as great as it should be.

Microsoft’s ownership of the phone OS, deep integration of Yahoo! Go and their combined consumer audiences could be combined to create a phone that out Apples Apple.

See also:

• iPhone as your social network
• Remote control for your cell phone

ObDisclaimer: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of my employer.

Creative Commons image from flickr user listentoreason.

Google’s LatLong blog reports that The Ledger in Florida has published a Google My Map of Christmas lights in and around Lakeland, Fla. It’s great that newspapers are finally starting to use open Internet tools to help tell the story. I’ve written before about how news outlets used My Maps during the California wildfires.

It would’ve been nicer if The Ledger included pictures. Instead, they have descriptions like this:

North Pole scene with polar bears and igloos; forest scene with 15 lighted trees, Santas and deer; inflatable snow family; inflatable Santa; two Santas in sleigh with reindeer; nativity scene with shepherd, angels and wise men; Santa and Mrs. Claus and elves; candy canes and lollipops, 12 lighted trees; lighted deer; holographic snow family; wreaths; stars; lighted arches; eight-foot lighted star.

How many times does the “picture is worth a thousand words” have to be repeated for it to stick? Kudos to The Ledger, however, for allowing users to edit the map by adding their own favorite light displays.

Now if you had a Dash, you’d be able to see the map of light displays as you’re driving around.

More on: Google, maps, newspapers

Google is continuing its efforts to turn its My Maps personal mapmaking tools into a geographic blogging platform. Back in October, they added profile pages for map creators. I wrote at the time that it would be nice to have user comments on the maps to introduce flickr-like incentives for map creators.

Today’s release allows viewers to rate maps and leave comments. You can also see statistics on maps, including the number of views and the top referring links to the map.

More on: google, maps, Web 2.0

Google has integrated AIM into its chat in Gmail, delivering what Google and AOL announced nearly two years ago when they renewed their search deal and Google invested $1 billion in AOL.

The integration is not true interoperability, like what exists between Yahoo! and MSN’s IM products. Google/AIM works like a multi-headed client, such as Trillian or Pidgin. In order to chat with someone on AIM, you must have an AIM account. You provide your AIM account information and Google logs you into AIM and displays your AIM Buddy List integrated with your Google buddies. (AIM buddies have the AOL running man icon next to them.)

The integration worked reasonably well. I could see and chat with my buddies. Just as with Google buddies, chats were automatically stored in my Gmail account. Unfortunately, the indexing is less than optimal. If a user’s screenname is “jsmith2000923″ but displays as “John Smith,” you can only search by “jsmith2000923.”

Another flaw is that AIM’s mobile indicators don’t show up reliably. You might think that someone is available, when they’re really just available on their mobile phones.

A bonus with the addition of AIM integration is that you can use AIM to send SMS messages from within Gmail. Just add the phone number as an AIM buddy.

The AIM integration isn’t yet incorporated into Google’s downloadable client, Google Talk. Without carpet bombing the United States 100x over with CDs, it seems Google Talk hasn’t gotten a lot of traction. Given that Google was very late to the IM party, I suspect that many of the people likely to download Google Talk use Trillian or Pidgin instead.

That’s OK, because integrating chat into Gmail was a genius move. It drew many Gmail users into Google’s chat and I know a few people who went from just Google Talk users to Gmail users. In the two years since the announcement, I’ve seen many of my non-AOL friends become Google chat users.

I already run Pidgin at startup on my computers, so this integration isn’t critical for me. But it will be useful when using someone else’s computer. Now I can just log into Gmail and have access to my Google and AIM buddies. This poses a threat to Web-based IM providers such as Meebo. (Meebo does a whole lot more, but this might be “good enough” for many people.)

That still leaves out my Yahoo! and Microsoft buddies. Sadly, this is one of the few areas where the Web companies have trailed the wireless carriers. Wireless operators in the United States have had true interoperability for several years now. But they had a financial incentive to do it: they charge for each message sent and received.

Disclosure: I worked at AOL Search.

See also:

• Gmail <3 AIM (Google Blog)
• Google Talk + AIM = Now! (Justin Uberti’s blog)

More on: AOL, Google, SMS

In the last week or so, I’ve seen a few of our favorite geek topics appear in pop culture. Twitter provided key clues in CSI. The Simpsons finally got Tivo. Doonesbury featured Pandora.

Tuesday’s Jeopardy! had as the Final Jeopardy! clue:

This company’s name is a variation on a word coined by Milton Sirotta & used in the book “Mathematics and the Imagination”

Answer after the video.

Jeopardy! answer: What is Google?

Google is a variant of googol, which is the number 1 with a hundred zeros after it. Larry Page was in my high school class and was fascinated with googol even back then.

Two of the three Jeopardy! contestants got it right. The other answered Yahoo!

Yahoo, by the way, originally stood for Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle.

Bonus question: What is the name of the first search engine developed by Larry and Sergey?

(Bonus question courtesy of Adam Lasnik.)

Google’s latest changes to My Maps allows you to collaborate on personal maps with others in much the same way you can share a Google Document or Spreadsheet.

You can also allow anyone to edit a map.

Group editing is great for maps that are too hard for one person to scale. Before this release, I started maps of free Wi-Fi and restaurants with outdoor dining. Now I can invite my friends and the public to help build out the maps. Although some of these data is captured by vertical players such as JiWire and Skyhook, the integration with Google’s Local Search brings it to a much wider audience.

Google could use the same platform to have users build out vertical directories to augment data from providers like InfoUSA by actively soliciting users to contribute places on specific topics. This is already happening on an ad hoc basis as users follow their passions and create maps.

We’ve seen news organizations use My Maps to cover stories such as the California wildfires. They could open that up to a collaborative process with their readers.

See also:

• Google Maps gets social
• The quest for buried treasure in mapping
• Using Google Maps as a virtual notepad
• Map your world with Google Maps
• Personal mashups - letting users re-draw the map

A longstanding problem with online maps and navigation devices is that your destination is often not where they say it is. When you reach the “destination”, you’re often a few hundred feet from where you wanted to be. There are three common reasons for this:

• No one has walked every street and identified where each address is. Addresses are approximated based on standard numbering schemes. On a block that goes from 200 to 300, 250 will be placed in the middle.
• Businesses sometimes use vanity addresses. The business may have an address on Madison Avenue in New York, but the real entrance is off less glamorous 54th Street.
• The business address is incorrect or malformed in the database.

Google Maps is now tapping users to help fix this problem. Users can edit the location markers for a given address. To prevent abuse, any movements greater than about 600 feet are moderated.

This is especially helpful for addresses that are incorrect in the Google database or can’t be accurately geocoded. These appear on Google Maps with a circle to mark the location and a warning.

The Pentagon Post Office is listed with an address of “The Penagon, Arlington, VA 22201″. As a result, it appears about three miles from where it really is. I was able to move it to the correct spot, on top of the Pentagon. Because this is more than 600 feet, the change will be moderated. I’ll be watching to see how quickly that happens. (Update: Google has since removed the Pentagon Post Office record altogether.)

If this feature takes off, it will make Google’s Street View feature much more useful. Right now, when you pull up a Street View of an address, there’s a good chance you won’t see the business you were looking for because it shows a view of the approximated location.

More on: Google, maps, satellite navigation

I travel frequently and have friends scattered throughout the country. I usually do a bad job of keeping track of who is where, who has moved, etc.

Last week I was in Boston. As I headed out to dinner, I updated my Facebook status:

Later that night, I got a Facebook message from a friend I haven’t seen since high school. He lives in Cambridge and wanted to get together.

Unfortunately, the message arrived after I had gotten back to my hotel.

This almost-connection was facilitated by Facebook’s social graph and status updates. Next time I’m in Boston, I know to look Chike up. Twitter, Jaiku (acquired by Google) and Pownce can be used in the same way. But none of them know geography; they require that someone look at the message and determine that Cambridge is nearby. A friend who lives in Los Angeles is just as likely to see that message as someone in Cambridge.

There are a number of companies trying to turn that missed connection into an actual connection. Among them are Loopt, uLocate and Whrrl. Google purchased a pioneer in the field — Dodgeball — but hasn’t done much with it. (Dodgeball’s founders very publicly left Google, complaining that they couldn’t get engineering resources.)

Although the details vary based on site, you can publish your location from the Web or a cell phone. You can also see where your friends are on a map. I could have checked a map before I headed to Cambridge to see which of my friends were nearby. Some services will even alert you when a friend is nearby.

More on: location-based services, maps

Disclosure: I have a consulting relationship with uLocate.

Google has added a profile page for its My Maps and local reviews products. The profile page allows users to roll up their maps and reviews onto one page. Here’s a screenshot of my profile page:

In addition to links to the reviews and maps that I’ve created, there are a few fields to tell people a little bit about myself. It’s not as robust as Yelp’s profile page, but it shows the beginnings of a social bent to Google’s local properties.

Among the things I’d like to see:

• People-friendly URLs. The URL for my profile page is http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=110282169465175925759&hl=en&gl=us. On Yelp, my URL is http://rocky.yelp.com.
• The option for people who use my maps to leave comments. The feedback options on flickr and Yelp are important drivers of continued participation; if I hear from people who find my work useful, I’m more likely to contribute.
• A Facebook application that distributes my maps and reviews to my friends. Google has already released a Google News application and a third party has created a Google Reader app.

More on: Google, maps