These swift and widespread changes to Buzz’s automatic-everything behaviors are certainly commendable, and it’s clear that Google does listen to user feedback in ways that other companies don’t. However, the sheer extent to which the company had to back off from its initial launch functionality goes to show how delusional Google was when it came to its assumptions about user privacy.
Just because I share something somewhere else on the Internet doesn’t mean I want it auto-linked to something else I use, and just because I choose to use Gmail doesn’t mean I even necessarily want to be involved in Buzz at all. Those should be choices that are left up to the user, not Google on behalf of the user. End result: Google is left cleaning up its messes when it could be moving forward.
Even if Flash were the world’s best-engineered animation and interaction technology (which, lol, it’s not) scorn would be heaped on it for what it has allowed people to do to restaurant websites.
That said, I recommend that you write a nice email to your local Flash-webbed business and suggest to them, as nicely as you can, that they offer a one-page summary of what you need to know: hours, location, menu if possible. My favorite restaurant in the world has an eye-gouging website which nevertheless tells you all you need to know in the first three seconds of browsing.
I can’t agree more. So many times I had to pick a random place to eat because the one I wanted to go had, darn, a Flash-only website. Flash is even more entrenched in Taiwan because business owners find it flashy, and flashy things mean they’re getting the money’s worth.
What restaurant owners don’t realize is Flash-only websites actually hurt their business. Responsible designers should remind their clients that. Although I’d say the exact opposite is at work here. It’s the incentive thing.
This is from the leader article, “Who’s Afarid of Google?”, of The Economist, August 30, 2007, my emphasis:
Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. […]
[…] That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy.
[…] The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. […]
One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google’s trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.
I think many of us in the tech industry, who are supposed to know better, are actually confused about the multiple definitions of the term “openness”. Promoting open source technology and openness in tech standards is usually a good thing. Crossing the border to make your life open, without qualification, prior notice or warning, is not. Imagine if your bank did what Google Buzz did to you, making your account history open and trackable by others (say, those you recently wired money to, or received wires from), what your reaction would be? I’d say the bank would be in big trouble.
Google has improved Buzz’s privacy settings for the past few days. Still, there are questions on how the whole thing happened at all. I’m also troubled by the fact that Google’s PR machine doesn’t sound a bit apologetic—so the inconveniences and confusions (to say the least) that many users had endured for the past few days were whitewashed.
Counternotions, a blog that often raises sharp questions on big players’ strategies, comments:
Yes, someone at Google […] thought it was alright AND excellent business practice to graft Buzz over Gmail simply for expediency. Now, we hear they may separate the two. But not only the damage is done, but we also know that there’s not enough deep thinking about and appreciation of the customer experience at all at Google. It’s naive beyond belief, for a $150B company.
If a company starts to think it’s beyond reproach and its customers accept whatever new thing it gives them, it’s a bad sign indeed.
Thank You, Google, for Wasting One Hour of My Precious Working Time Rescuing My Friends’ and My Privacy, for Making Me Unable to Sleep Well from Now On.
As I said in a previous post, I turned off Google Buzz immediately when it was enabled onto my gmail account. I was annoyed by the fact that I was not asked to opt in, shocked by the fact that many of my email contacts were automatically added in, and deeply troubled by the fact that, from a quick glance, I have absolutely no control over the whole thing: access control and privacy level settings.
I turned off Buzz by clicking on the very small text link at the very bottom of my gmail page. Who would have thought that it is put in the very sheepish place where privacy policy and other legal prints are? And that’s not even the end of the story.
A few friends have reported that many of your online traces are still there even if you turned off Buzz. I had a hunch that it was going to be bad. So I re-enabled Buzz and did some experiments with other friends. It was worse.
A quick summary of a few very troubling facts.
People can see who you are inadvertently following. That mostly includes contacts you’ve recently writing to. Good luck if you were writing to an old flame, to a competitor, to a potential client that asks to remain confidential, or to a potential new employer.
You’re inadvertently added to people’s follow list. And you have absolutely no control over who can see you and who can add you.
People can see who you’re inadvertently following and who are inadvertently following you.
Blocking people takes you away from people’s follow list. If I block Alice, I’m now gone from Alice’s follower list. So when Bob looks at Alice’s follower list, he won’t see me. But,
You have to re-enable Buzz to block people. If you don’t block people, they’ll stay on your follower list forever.
Even if you have turned off Buzz, people are still able to find you—and as a result are able to comb through your “social network”—through other people’s follower/following lists. I’ve heard that if you have ever created a Google Profile, or is sharing your Google Reader feeds to Buzz, the situation is worse.
If someone disabled Buzz, you can’t block them. Because there is no longer a profile link for you to click into, and that’s the only place to unfollow people. And they’ll stay in your “following you” list forever.
What deeply troubled me is that I had to learn about how Buzz worked in order to thwart potential invasions to my privacy, over which I used to think I’ve had good control with Google’s trusted mail service. And now I start to worry, even start to fret if I have missed anything to plug the holes.
I had spent an hour unfollowing everyone that I was “following” and blocking everyone that Buzz said was followed me. I assume this is for now the only way to keep my friends and I from the mess.
But now I know I won’t sleep well and have to come back to check (by re-enabling Buzz then turning it off again) to see if I’ve missing anything, or if another place catches on fire, another item of my private information was inadvertently leaked. And the entire world might still think if such information is revealed with my consent and authorization.
I turned off Google Buzz the moment I saw its advertisement blocking my gmail page. And I had to google it to learn how to turn it off. And I thought only Yahoo! and Microsoft did stupid things when it comes to email.
People, your email is not your social network. Just because you own a phone number, that doesn’t mean you have to invite everyone you ever called to call you to say hello, nor does it mean you are interested in hearing other people’s calls. The worst thing is, what Google Buzz is doing is to equivalent to publishing the names of a few dozens of people you’ve recently called to the entire world.
A few weeks ago, I logged into my long deserted Yahoo! email account to see if there was still anyone I knew emailing to that abandoned address. I used to do that every few months. To my horror, I discovered I was enrolled in many social networks I didn’t care about without my prior consent. I could even saw updates (equally inadvertent) from some contacts that I really only contacted once in like… what, 10 years ago? I immediately cancelled my already disused Yahoo! email for good. Microsoft does similiar things if you happen to use both its whatsitsname Messenger and its Live Mail.
Google’s email used to work for me very well because that was the only service that didn’t try to be a sucker. For all its good reputation on thwarting email spam, this is the biggest surprise I’ve had from them yet.
Update: What annoyed me was how Buzz was deployed. It was opt-out by default, not opt-in. I can understand the rationale Google wants to do this. Books like Nudge show opt-in and opt-out can make huge differences. Also, the nature of web app means new features are enabled automatically to everyone. The problem lies in the fact inadvertently joined social network can disrupt your ongoing design to compartmentalize your communication channels.
Many Taiwanese users, and I believe many Hong Kong users too, will wonder how iPad could be a useful device at all. Apple states on its tech specs that the initially supported languages include English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Russian. There is no Traditional Chinese.
Language support is a topic on its own in modern operating system. It is mainly about three things:
Text display and localization (font, layout support, system and application messages)
Natural language processing (text correction, text-to-speech, voice recognition, information discovery, indexing)
When an Apple device supports a language, it’s mostly full support of 1. and 2., and varying degree of 3. On Mac OS X 10.6, for example, Traditional Chinese is supported with fonts, localized menus and messages. OS X also has a few Traditional Chinese input methods. It doesn’t have spelling checker for the language, but it has some natural language processing capability on which the input methods and system-wide indexing (Spotlight) rely.
It’s curious why iPad does not come with Traditional Chinese support in its current version while it does Simplified Chinese. Perhaps it’s not yet fully localized, or perhaps the input methods are not ready yet. Curious, then—since Simplified Chinese is there, and Apple can just use the same code base that is used in iPhone and iPod touch. But on the other hand, iPhone did not come with appropriate Traditional and Simplified Chinese until OS 2.0, and a lot of other languages now available on iPhone (Korean and Hebrew, to name just two) are not supported on iPad yet.
Psychologically, however, this gives iPad a bad impression to Traditional Chinese users. Many American companies made this terrible mistake assuming that Traditional Chinese can make do with Simplified Chinese interface. It’s true that most of us can read the latter without any problem, just like an American English user can read the original British edition of Harry Potter with hardly any difficulty. But being able to read is different from wanting to read. Simplified Chinese has a vastly different vocabulary, especially in computer terms. Font and rendering preferences differ, too.
I sincerely hope Apple does not think that way, although Apple’s track record is not stellar. It messed up its new Traditional Chinese font, Hei TC, that practically renders the font unusable in design and publishing. iPhone is also shipped with that defective font. You can bet that many of us do not feel confident in Apple’s way of doing things, let alone its perceived priority, when it comes to Traditional Chinese.
Even if the next version of iPad’s OS supports Traditional Chinese (and hopefully with the Hei TC problem repaired), a bigger question looms: Which input methods will it include? The Traditional Chinese landscape is not like the Simplified Chinese one, where Pinyin is taught in school and covers 95% of the user base. In Taiwan, pupils are taught the Bopomofo phonetic system, a kana-like set of symbols that represent Mandarin Chinese sounds. About 80% of users in Taiwan use that. There are a number of other input methods. In Hong Kong, where (so I’ve been told) only college students take elective Cantonese romanization classes, component-based input methods like Cangjei is more popular.
The iPhone has three Traditional Chinese input methods: handwriting, Pinyin and Bopomofo. All three are finely implemented but not outstanding to say the least. The problem being this: You don’t write much on the iPhone. You tweet, send SMS, keep some notes, compose one-liner emails, and that’s pretty much all. I can live with slow input methods on the iPhone. But imagine using that with Pages on iPad? It’s going to be like having your fingers chopped.
The biggest problem, though, is that there will be no alternative to iPad’s built-in input methods even if comes with what iPhone has now. If you aren’t satisfied with Mac’s input methods, you can install a third party package. On iPhone OS there is no such thing. Yes, there are jailbreak input methods, and I know many people who jailbreak solely for the damned input method, but jailbreak is never mainstream and not a reliable way to solve a problem that Apple should tackle.
When I say “a problem that Apple should tackle”, I don’t mean that Apple should try to solve everything. It excels in the fields it knows the best, but it has weakness in others. As much as Apple does not make every app on the App Store, it should let other developers solve the problem for the platform.
I can see why Apple might not love to open up input method on iPhone. I’ve actually had discussions with many people in this field since late 2007. Text input component can exercise a lot of control over the system, especially if it lives in your app’s address space. There are inherent security problems too.
But, once again, Mac OS X has shown us that the problem can be overcome, and even iPhone OS has a solution for providing a limited kind of third-party service. Since Mac OS X 10.5, the new input method architecture is based on Objective-C Distributed Objects (DO), which is a high-level mechanism of inter-process communication. Input method modules are no longer attached as a loaded plug-in and can only receive what the OS allows them to know. Suppose there is a kind of “Settings” bundle that functions like that. Mac OS X also employs some watchdog mechanism (which is vastly improved in 10.6) to ensure that those special processes do not block or crash the system, and a similar kind of watchdog can be put into iPhone OS to make sure that input method modules behave.
The question is whether Apple is willing to do it, or does it really think, like many multinationals, that Traditional Chinese users can make do.
I currently run my own company (as a corporation as defined in Taiwan business code) and have experience of having started a partnership (later helped its conversion to corporation). All small businesses (or “micro” businesses if using EU definition).
One thing the experiences have taught me is to understand the significance of operating as a business entity—that you can work with people as an organization to provide your services to the market. There are several importance differences between providing your service as an entity and doing that as an individual, even for many small businesses the content of the work is much the same. That you’re able to handle risk better as a corporation (which is also one of the reasons why corporation is one of the most important, yet often undervalued, organizational innovations in modern history) and that you’re able to provide service to both other entities and other people and issue invoices (compared to individual work-for-hire contracts, one at a time) are just two advantages among many.
Setting up and running your own company, however, always involve more work than just working as an individual. And that’s how I come to appreciate the friendly business environment in Taiwan. It still has lots that need improving, but the quality of a system is always a comparative matter. Red tapes exist everywhere. In that aspect, there is hardly any hidden cost in setting up a company—for example there’s no favor you need to ask for. I’ve learned that it’s not so in many other places in the world.
Many of us live in countries where business freedom is taken as granted, just like other types of freedom we enjoy. In fact it’s not necessarily a given. Interventionist measures, protectionist regulations, restrictive zoning laws, complicated tax codes, obscure accounting rules and filing requirements, lack of flexible payment gateway, insufficient intellectual property protection—they can stifle many aspiring companies. It’s not a cliché to say that we want to cherish what we have and work to make it better. We also need to understand the importance of a good supporting structure and be wary of changes that could discourage entrepreneurism.
In Taiwan’s case, I think the supporting structure had been strong and helpful when ours was more a manufacturing- and export-oriented economy. Doing service on an international scale and providing service beyond Mandarin Chinese-speaking markets are not our strongest thing—yet. I met a Swiss company owner at WWDC ‘09, and he could use a representative office in San Francisco set up by some Swiss government organ that aims to help specifically software startups get literally a foothold in the very competitive Bay Area. As I don’t believe in big government that does everything (mostly badly), a TAITRA equivalent in service sector might help business owners in Taiwan better. And that is one thing that I as a software company owner care about.
I don’t watch TV, and I don’t have access to services like Hulu, but it’s hard not to run into tweets on the latest Leno-Conan spat. With the help of Taiwan’s NMA News (動新聞), anyone can understand what has been going on in well under 2 minutes. (Via @kerim)
Yes, the same animated news that featured Tiger Woods.
Disruptive journalism technology at work. In some unexpected ways…
