John Battelle on "Focus On The User"
Recently there’s been much controversy over Google’s apparent hard-coding of Google+ profiles into Google search results. In response developers from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace have produced Focus On The User, exposing the negative impact on more relevant search results. John Battelle, co-founder of Wired and author of the Google book The Search, explains how this happened and what it means for search:
Last week I spent an afternoon down at Facebook, as I mentioned here. While at Facebook I met with Blake Ross, Direct of Product (and well known in web circles as one of the creators of Firefox). Talk naturally turned to the implications of Google’s controversial integration of Google+ into its search results – a move that must both terrify (OMG, Google is gunning for us!) as well as delight (Holy cow, Google is breaking its core promise to its users!).
(Continue on Battelle Media)
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Roboto vs. Helvetica
The Understatement by Micheal DeGusta:
Google announced the mouthful known as “Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich” today. The first bullet point of their presentation was a new system-wide font, Roboto. John Gruber quickly pointed out what had caught my eye as well: Roboto sure looks a lot like Helvetica, the typeface so famous they made a movie about it.
Source: understatementblog
Who Will Create iTunes for the Cloud?: Tech News and Analysis
If you’re like me, your digital media life is messy. If I were to take inventory of where all my digital media resides, the list would include Flickr, Facebook, iTunes, Android, Netflix, YouTube, Picasa, Flipshare, Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Windows PC, Mac, iPad and so on.
Like I said, a mess.
And while I’m an early adopter, I’m probably not very different from tens of millions of consumers who face digital media anarchy every day across the various screens, accounts and software populating their life.
Apple is the first company to even come close to helping us manage this chaos, with iTunes. After it was first introduced a decade ago, the service became hugely popular partly because it was the first cohesive management tool for first music, then later other types of media.
But iTunes has gotten flabby with age, and the creaking has gotten more noticeable lately as the cloud becomes more and more important for digital media storage. In a way, iTunes has become the Windows of consumer media management — dominant but a relic of a past era.
The bottom line is that consumers want their media storage simpler, not more complicated; the push of content upward into the cloud presents that opportunity, not just for Apple, but for a handful of competitors as well. Proximity and control over content management and playback means a bigger stake in consumer purchase behavior (both for content itself and, in the case of Apple, the playback devices). The bigger the stake, the more monetization through a direct storefront, affiliate/partner, or advertising.
So who could — and should — create iTunes in the cloud?
(Continue on GigaOm)
Oops: No copied Java code or weapons of mass destruction found in Android | ZDNet
Sometimes the sheer wrongness of what is posted on the web leaves us speechless. Especially when it’s picked up and repeated as gospel by otherwise reputable sites like Engadget. “Google copied Oracle’s Java code, pasted in a new license, and shipped it,” they reported this morning.
Sorry, but that just isn’t true.
It all started with an article written by Florian Mueller, who by the way is neither a lawyer nor a developer although he plays one on TV. I downloaded and examined all the files he wrote about, and my analysis as an expert developer comes to a completely different conclusion than Mr. Mueller. Here’s what I found:
(Continue reading on ZDNet)
Oops: Android contains directly copied Java code, strengthening Oracle's case
Florian Mueller has been killing it these past few months with his analysis of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog, and today he’s unearthed a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java. That’s a big deal, seeing as Oracle is currently suing Google for patent and copyright infringement in Android — which isn’t a hard case to prove when you’ve got 37 Android source files marked “PROPRIETARY / CONFIDENTIAL” and “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE” by Oracle / Sun and at least six more files in Froyo and Gingerbread that appear to have been decompiled from Java 2 Standard Edition and redistributed under the Apache open source license without permission. In simple terms? Google copied Oracle’s Java code, pasted in a new license, and shipped it.
Now, we’ve long thought Google’s odd response to Oracle’s lawsuit seemingly acknowledged some infringement, so we doubt this is a surprise in Mountain View, but we’re guessing handset vendors aren’t going to be so thrilled — especially since using Android has already caused companies like HTC and Motorola to be hit with major patent lawsuits of their own. We’ll see what happens, but in the meantime you should definitely hit up Florian’s site for the full dirt — it’s some 47 pages worth of material, and it’s dense, but if you’re into this sort of thing it’s incredibly interesting.
(via Engadget)
Replay it: Google search across the Twitter archive
This will be remembered as a big one for search on the web. All Google really needs is the ability to search the real-time Twitter data.
How Apple could slay Google at WWDC 2010 — RoughlyDrafted Magazine
Apple is a company with thick skin. It takes an awful lot of prodding to rile the company or even provoke a response from its executives. Those jerking the company’s chain better hope this resilience to their attacks continues, because a single response from Apple at WWDC could wipe out Google and the bloggers that support it. Here’s how. .When Steve Jobs talks, people listen
On the rare occasions that Apple does respond to an issue, it does so in a brutally open and devastating way, such as when Jobs lambasted the idiot chatter about music and DRM with clear cut reality, or his more recent donkey punch delivered to Adobe’s Flash.
Jobs is also famous for succinctly explaining what he thinks about technologies or specific approaches to design, such as his castigation of the mini keyboards covering a third of the face of smartphones or mouse or stylus-based interfaces in the modern era of mobile multitouch devices.
Pundits and competitors, from John Dvorak to the CEOs of Palm and RIM, spent years explaining why Jobs was wrong about all this until meekly changing their collective tunes once they realized that it was them, and not Jobs, who had all the trouble seeing plain reality.
(Continue reading on Roughly Drafted)
Source: roughlydrafted.com
Reality Check: NPD’s Android vs. iPhone sales headlines
Headlines tell such a sensationalized side of the story. Here’s the missing bits of recent tech media events that have been reported with a slant starting with:
NPD says Android has surpassed iPhone in US unit sales . The suggestion: the reign of iPhone is over because Google’s Android platform is taking over the market in terms of sales and installed base.
The reality: Android sales are certainly not eating up iPhone sales, which are higher than ever–especially in the first quarter, when Apple’s hardware sales have historically plateaued. Rather than taking on the iPhone, Android is really just replacing the plummeting sales of Windows Mobile and the old Palm OS (and even webOS) and the embedded software that formerly ran a lot of HTC and Motorola phones. Consumers are upgrading away from pseudo-smartphones from LG and Samsung, and buying more advanced smartphones, which looks good for Android.
Globally however, Android sales are still well below the iPhone. According to IDC, Apple took 16.1% share of smartphones in the quarter, while HTC and Motorola (the only Android makers, who also sell other non-Android smartphones) amassed a combined global share of 9%. Android’s total share is less than half that of second place RIM’s BlackBerry sales and less than a quarter of the smartphones sold by Nokia, but Android is getting a lot of press to suggest that it is taking over the market, at least in the US.
Why is Android doing so well in the US? It’s the same reason RIM’s BlackBerry sales have kept pace ahead of the iPhone, despite failing to best or even match Apple’s platform in terms of technology: most of those phones are being given away for free. That’s an easy way to claim market share, but not really a way to actually create sustainable growth. And if you look at RIM’s global sales in the last quarter, they’re only up 45% year over year compared to Apple’s 131% growth, despite all of RIM’s promotional free giveaways contrasted with Apple’s actual sales to customers.
(Continue reading on Roughly Drafted)
Source: roughlydrafted.com
