What I expect from Google Me (2)

Better control over privacy and the news feed

Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber. Lev Grossman’s profile on Mark Zuckerberg for Time

Much has been said about the (in)ability of Facebook to model real-life human relationships or that they should allow unidirectional connections – the ‘follower’ model – like Twitter. Not to mention the convoluted and ever changing privacy settings. In my opinion, a system with three levels of privacy would be more flexible, while remaining relatively easy to manage:

• The inner circle – friends: this would hold your real-life friends, people you trust and communicate with often. Naturally it will contain a small number of people, but they would have access to pretty much everything you do on the network: your real-time location, your current and future events, are allowed to tag you in photos and can see them, have access to your full contact details, can chat with you, add you to groups, etc. This will basically function like the early-days Facebook, a private network with people you actually know and want to actively keep in touch.

• The outer circle – connections: containing more casual connections, people you worked with or members of the same club or gym, old friends you no longer keep in touch with, it should have tighter default privacy controls. People on this level can only see some of your contact details – no home address or phone numbers, maybe only one more generic email address, location restricted to city-level and events to free/busy indicators; if they tag you in photos you should be able to approve the tags first. And I wouldn’t mind an option to prevent them from inviting me to play games or use apps. This could become similar to LinkedIn or to the present-day Facebook, but without limits on the number of connections you can add.

• The public realm. Here the two-way connection would be replaced by the follower model to create a network similar to Twitter or FriendFeed, where you could follow people with similar interests, publicly share links and status updates and comment on them.

The profile should also reflect the three privacy levels: display everything for friends, less information for connections and even more closed for the public; at this level users could also be allowed to replace their real name with a pseudonym.

What I expect from Google Me (1)

In an online world marked by Facebook’s seemingly unstoppable growth, rumors about a competing service built by Google have spread for the better part of last year. It has been talked about in numerous blog posts, on Google Buzz and it even has its own topic at Quora as well as sparked debates about social networking in general; the big tech blogs have published every bit of rumor about possible features or launch date. I have my own ideas about what Google Me should offer, which I will outline in a series of three articles; a single one would likely grow too long for comfort. So let’s begin with:

Search, search, search!

Web search was Google’s main area of expertise from the start and helped propel the company to the giant status on the Internet it enjoys today. Some even argue it’s still the only thing Google is clearly successful at. But with the rise of social networks and real-time updates, a new, more personal facet of the web developed that eluded the established model of indexing, diminishing the power of normal search. Right now, I can easily locate conversations I had with my friends years ago or even Google chats, which are stored in Gmail. But if you try that on any social network, you will come up frustrated and empty handed. So large chunks of your online – and personal – history are drifting away as I write this, never to be recovered again.

New Twitter expanding short URLs

Shortened links have probably been one of the factors that fueled Twitter’s explosive growth and have in turn benefitted from it. But their biggest advantage holds at the same time possible security threats, since the user cannot see where the link is pointing. Over time many solutions for expanding them appeared, from sites to scripts and Twitter clients. Now, it looks like Twitter has introduced the feature in it’s web version: hover your mouse over a short URL and the tooltip will reveal the original link. It’s similar to the concept presented some time ago by Chris Messina, although without the ability to copy the expanded URL. 

I’m not sure how long ago the feature was introduced; I don’t recall reading about it anywhere and I rarely use the Twitter website. I prefer to alternate between Brizzly and TweetDeck for Chrome, both of them having different advantages over native Twitter. But since the surveys are showing that most users are checking Twitter through the site, it will be a welcomed addition for them. Personally I still prefer the way Brizzly implemented URL expansion, replacing the short URLs inline. This makes it much easier to scan the addresses and enables you to see the destination and browse tweets with keyboard shortcuts at the same time.

So I got the New Facebook Messages. Now what?

Launched amid a big media hype, touted as the future of communication and a possible “Gmail killer”, the New Facebook Messages finally made it’s way to my account last week. So let’s see what it has to offer!

Mozilla’s “Flight of the Navigator” demo

As the browser makers are implementing the newest and shiniest in HTML standards, a parallel competition is running to showcase the advances to the public, to present the own product as more performant and standards-compliant. Even the runner-up in this race, Internet Explorer, launched an entire site to prove it’s more or less catching up or even surpassing other in some areas. With the launch of beta 8 for Firefox, another interesting demo based on HTML5 became available to the wider public: “Flight of the Navigator”.

We built the demo in order to integrate and showcase the various JavaScript libraries and browser features we were creating together. As a result the demo exploits a number of features in HTML5, namely, <canvas>, WebGL, <audio>, and <video>. It also uses some of our JavaScript libraries (CubicVR.js, processing.js, dsp.js, beatdetektor.js), as well as the various JavaScript speed and feature improvements in Firefox 4. Finally, the demo is driven by the new Firefox Audio API to synchronize the audio and 2D/3D visuals.

Built by the Mozilla #audio hacking team, it’s aim is to show how the new standards can reduce the reliance on plugins for rich online content, with a little help from hardware acceleration. If you visit the live demo here, you can see the page doesn’t use Flash or Silverlight, it’s only the browser doing the rendering. You can even right-click to open the usual context menu of the browser, just like on any webpage. Furthermore, when you resize the browser window, the demo resizes itself to match it – not something you regularly get with online video.

Open Google Reader shared items in Buzz

Google Reader didn’t get a particularly good start for the year, between the search being broken for a couple of days and the (accidental) removal from the Google navigation bar, which fueled speculation that the product could be abandoned or sidelined in favor of other projects. Despite the largely unjustified concerns, new features are being added all the time. Just today I noticed the shared items have a new ‘Options’ menu in the lower half next to the comments section.

Right now, there is a single option available: ‘View this shared item in Google Buzz’. It’s a good step to integrate the two services better. Personally I only skim the top items in Buzz, since I prefer to read the full story in Reader, but some extra features of Buzz are missing; you can’t follow the conversation easily without leaving a comment, you can’t edit your own comment or get the URL of someone else’s. It’s not a perfect solution, but this new option addresses some of these annoyances. It would be nice to see the menu expand with some of the most requested features for Google Reader, like loading the full article from partial feeds or the comments from the original post.

Connect Quora to Google Buzz

If you’ve got caught up in Quora’s perfect storm, the site itself might not be enough. You probably want to spread the word about it on other social networks, to bring more people in. Quora lets you easily share answers on Twitter and Facebook, but unfortunately Google Buzz users are left out. Which naturally led to a question on Quora: Is there a way to link Quora and Google Buzz?

One answer, as already added, is to subscribe to the (not dead yet!) RSS feed from the Quora profile through Google Reader and then share individual posts to send them to Buzz. Not exactly ideal, since it requires a lot of manual intervention and it looses the ‘real-time’ coolness everybody seems to want these days.