I had a slightly weird encounter yesterday with Google Social Search. This is a beta product (which in Google-land doesn’t really mean anything) that shows you results from your search that are found via your “social circle.” I ran a search and noticed this new and unusual thing at the bottom of the first page of results.

At first, I thought it was amusing. Then I thought it was creepy. Then I decided it was just annoying. Let’s examine the meaning of this service by going through each of these points in turn.

Amusing: My search was a catch all for material on an academic subject. It doesn’t matter which one. School’s out but I’ve been gong to school so long, sometimes my brain just gets in that mode. I had already tried searching Google Scholar and found some interesting stuff, and a lot of other stuff that I could not afford to buy. The ridiculous price of so many scholarly and scientific publications is a pet peeve of mine (I don’t mind them making a buck. I just mind that they jack up the prices so high that published research is effectively hidden from most of the world, especially me). So since I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to shell out for a very few articles that might or might not be relevant, I decided to broaden the search and see what regular Google would bring up.

There was a lot of useless cruft, as there generally is. But at the bottom of the page I noticed my boss’s name. That seemed odd to me. His blog (http://ribbonfarm.com) is well read but I didn’t think it was that popular or that relevant to my search that it would be on the front page of the search results! So I looked at the referenced post. It was 2 years old, I had read it when it was new, and it was completely irrelevant.

Then I noticed the header that said something about my social circle. Hmmm. Yes, my boss and I have chatted using Google chat. We don’t very often, partly because our work is covered by a non-disclosure agreement, so over an uncontrolled forum like Google chat (or anybody else’s chat) there’s a limit to what we can say without violating confidentiality. So we do most of our discussions over work-based email. We don’t do them in person because we work in different states and rarely see each other but that’s neither here nor there.

We come here to the question of the definition of “social circle.” My boss is a good guy and I consider him a friend, so I don’t have a problem with him being included in my social circle (This is an important thing. We’re both highly opinionated and a bit hard headed. If we weren’t on pretty friendly terms, we’d probably kill each other). I have had bosses in the past who would make me feel exactly the opposite. I work in the IT field, where 24/7 availability is more or less the norm. That means sometimes you use non-work channels to get in touch with people. This means that Google’s definition of a social circle may contain any number of inappropriate people. What about the times I’ve emailed tech support at some company, or complained about a product? They are decidedly NOT part of my “social circle!”

On Google’s page describing the social search (http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228) which I found after some hunting, there is a description of how to remove irrelevant stuff like that from the circle of friends so it won’t be considered in social search results. It seems to be possible to just tell Google not to use someone when doing this search, though I haven’t tried it. What this means to me is that this feature I didn’t ask for puts the onus on ME to fine tune it to avoid seeing results I don’t want. Picture me banging my head against a wall at this point. I won’t actually do it because I hate pain but come on!

Actually, after looking over the options for how to remove such things from my social circle (and the little disclaimer that says it can take weeks for them to actually disappear from your search results. Way to be responsive Google! Thanks!) I’m thinking the only real option is to not use Google. For anything. Because they cull everything you use for social connections.

This brings us to my next emotion about social search: CREEPY.

The use case they describe in their documentation is getting a movie review. They say that movie reviews from your friends will be more relevant to you than movie reviews from some unknown professional reviewer somewhere. Well, there’s a good point there. I have no respect at all for professional reviewers. The other night a friend and I were watching a movie review TV show and I remarked that when the critics use terms like, “real emotion,” “honest” and “true to life” you couldn’t pay me enough to watch whatever it is they’re reviewing. Those may be fine artistic qualities but do not, in my experience, make the product very entertaining. Unless you’re the kind of person who thinks that emptying a box of Kleenex because you’re crying so hard is a lot of fun. That’s not me.

On the other hand, I have NEVER IN MY LIFE USED GOOGLE TO FIND A MOVIE REVIEW. Are there a lot of people doing that kind of thing? Why? The world is full of movie review sites. I would expect that anyone who is interested in movie reviews is already familiar with rottentomatoes.com or similar sites. There’s no need to search for that. I’d be interested to see what numbers Google has for those types of searches. In other words, does this use case have any relationship to reality or is it just an excuse to jump on the social networking bandwagon?

Facebook, the current leader of social networking technology, has gotten into repeated trouble for taking people’s information about themselves and their friends and using it for more than just to let people share a laugh with their friends. When Google rolled out the execrable Google Buzz, they got in to similar product because users of Gmail (myself included) thought they were getting an email service and did not expect or intend to be advertising their whole lives to the world (see my post about Buzz here).

So now they’re doing it again. You search for stuff and they show you irrelevant results from people you have had some contact with in the past, no matter how slight or even hostile that contact may have been. Does Google understand that what they’re doing this way is actually CHANGING your social circle?

Just as an experiment, I signed up for a service called Gist a while back. It aggregates stuff from the contacts you supply to it and tries to rank them for importance. One of the things I noticed was that the service gauged importance by how often some of these people posted to their blog or to Twitter, not by how often they had contact with me. So people I have only very slight contact with were shown very high in the listings merely by virtue of being busy. People I’ve had contact with but hardly ever think of were ranked as important, while those I truly care about were virtually ignored.

There may be tools to fix these rankings. I don’t know or care. I’m just trying to illustrate a point that Google social search does something similar. People I may have never had much contact with in the past, because they were never more than casual contacts, could still have their stuff show up in my search results, simply because they are active in blogging or Twitter or some other such thing. And, like anything else in search, putting them on the front page gets them more clicks, thereby increasing their importance (at least as far as Google is concerned). There is also likely to be a psychological effect that the people whose stuff you click on increase in importance in your mind (There’s an opportunity for someone to do an interesting thesis here).

Google has turned and information search into a social feedback mechanism. I’m not comfortable with this at all.

True, to some extent, all social networking does this. On Facebook I have connections to people I haven’t seen in years, or have only met a couple times. On LinkedIn I have quite a few connections to people I have never met and only know by reputation. But that’s what LinkedIn is for, so it’s okay. On Facebook, my connections are intended to carry some emotional import and I appreciate the news updates, even from people I don’t know incredibly well. It’s a chance to get to know them better and I like that.

But search? When I run a search for no sql databases, or research on trusted systems, or encryption libraries or any of a billion other topics that might grab my attention for a few minutes (All of the ones I’ve mentioned are related to courses I’ve taken, or to my job, or both), having my relationships vetted and subtly influenced at the same time is NOT what I want.

Here’s another little bit that has problematic implications: “If someone you don’t know shows up in your social search results, it’s likely that they’re connected to someone you do know.” So now Google is recommending friends. It’s annoying enough when Facebook does that. No, I don’t want to connect with the lead singer of a band that my family is all connected to (unless it’s Flogging Molly). You see, most of my family is half my age and has one millionth of my knowledge of and taste in music. Leave me alone!

Which brings us to the annoying part. There are probably many people who think that having this sort of thing integrated into search results is interesting and fun. There are probably even situations where I would find it worthwhile. I can’t think of one but it’s possible. But Google didn’t ask me if that was what I wanted. I don’t see a place where I can choose “add social search to my results.” And it didn’t show up at all in a test search I ran just a minute ago. I have no idea why not. The ways of Google are not our ways. Their thoughts are not our thoughts.

If they’re thinking at all beyond the dreaded programmer’s cry, “Hey! I just thought of a cool new feature!”

The big tech story of the week is the one about Google making people mad with it’s new “Buzz” service. The most interesting aspect of this story is that everyone seems to have gotten it wrong.

Here’s the short version of the story: Google has some new social media application that makes all your email contacts into “friends” in the social networking sense and a lot of people objected to that, claiming that email contacts should be kept private, not advertised to the world as a friends list. This is stupid on so many levels – Google, their users, all the “analysts” – it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start at the beginning as far as I knew it.

The other morning, as I do most mornings, I brought up my gmail account and glanced to see if there was anything new. There was some kind of banner or thing about something called “Buzz.” I immediately thought “Hmm. Could this be a whack at Yahoo’s boring Buzz bookmarking service?” But no. I saw that my boss had already been there and made a comment. I also saw that to reply to his comment I had to create a “profile” that would make all of my email contacts into friends who I could then get Buzzy with, or some such thing.

I decided not to create the profile because I don’t use my gmail account for general email purposes. I have a yahoo account for that. My gmail account is mostly for poetry and other writing. I use it to communicate with the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a lot of editors and a few close friends and family. It’s the kind of account – intentionally – receives the kind of joke emails that people forward all the time. In other words, while it’s a public address, I tend to use it for more private purposes.

Weirdly, Buzz shows that I have 6 followers, including 4 who do not have public profiles – which I also do not have. How do you follow someone who does not have a profile to follow? And if you don’t have a profile, how is it possible to follow someone else without a profile? What the hell is going on here?

Anyway, notice the one interesting bit here: The complaint the privacy advocates have is that this new Buzz thing is advertising information people want kept private and that Google should have given them more warning of that fact. Google did give warning – enough that I decided not to sign up for the thing (but it still tells me there’s new stuff for me to look at there, which I find truly annoying). But, apparently, a lot of people failed to notice the warning and are mad AT GOOGLE FOR THEIR OWN FAILURE TO READ.

Don’t take my word for it. Here are some links to stories about privacy concerns with Gmail Buzz:

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/11/google_buzz_privacy/
• http://www.businessinsider.com/warning-google-buzz-has-a-huge-privacy-flaw-2010-2
• http://abh-news.com/google-buzz-privacy-issues-for-gmail-users-1126.html
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/12/AR2010021201490.html

Believe it or not, this was highly predictable. At a previous job I used to take help desk calls sometimes (It wasn’t exactly my job but it had to be done). One of the things I found amazing was how often someone would call up complaining about an error message when they tried to do something and then not know what the error message was. The conversation went something like this:

Idiot User: “Hi. I’m trying to use [name application here] and it doesn’t work.”
Me: “What do you mean it doesn’t work? Does it give you an error message?”
Idiot User: “Yeah. It does.”
Me: “What does the error message say?”
Idiot User: “I don’t know. I just clicked okay.”

Of course, it’s impossible to diagnosis a problem when the only symptom is that you clicked okay but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that it is perfectly and absolutely normal for people to look for that little “okay” button and click it WITHOUT READING ANYTHING ELSE. For Google’s Gmail Buzz and any other service anyone ever wants to create the implication of this long standing and widely known user behavior is that people will almost alays accept the defaults, even if it is not in their best interests to do so.

As Facebook has shown many times and Google has proved yet again, when people accept the defaults without even looking at them and later find out there was something about those defaults they didn’t like, THEY’LL BLAME YOU, NOT THEMSELVES. Therefore, as Facebook has had shoved in their faces over and over again, forcing users to opt in instead of allowing them to opt out, saves you a lot of bad publicity and hassle down the road.

Yes, the users messed up by not reading. Google’s even bigger mistake was expecting the users to read in the first place (btw: This is an easy mistake to make and despite having articulated the lesson here, I can not claim to be too smart to be immune from this same error. Funny, huh?)

But there’s more that Google did wrong on this one and to understand that, we need to spend a few words discussing social networking theory and practice. Most of the world was introduced to social networking by websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. However, the theory of social networks is not new nor is it restricted to the Internet. The social sciences have long studied the way humans for associational networks and how information and influence travels along those networks.

Also, completely independent of social networking websites, there has long been interest in the way email can be used to learn about a person’s social network. Who do you receive the most emails from? Who do you send the most emails to? A lot can be learned about relationships by studying these things.

I was first exposed to these ideas years ago when I was testing a demo of software being sold to law enforcement as an aid to complex investigations. One of the things the software did was take phone records as input and produce a visual depiction of communication patterns. The idea was that this was how police could find out who was really running the gang they were investigating (though really it would only discover who was running the operations, rather than who was calling the shots but that’s another story). The application to email is obvious.

And this is where Google really tripped up. They have wanted to get involved in the social networking arena for some time (check out orkut.com, for example) but have never found anything that caught fire. Then some genius found out about social science research into using email to examine people’s social networks and thought, “Hey! We’ve already got all their social network info! All we have to do is start using it!”

This completely overlooked an aspect of email that comes up very often when dealing with users (yes, back in my pseudo help desk days): The expectation of privacy. The upshot is that, no matter how many times you tell people that the company reserves the right to monitor their communications, and no matter how often you explain to them that nothing on the internet is truly private, people still think of their email as being private communications. They put their most personal stuff into email, things they wouldn’t want anyone else to know about.

It’s not all just forwarded jokes. It’s stuff that gets dragged into court in cases of sexual harassment, divorce, fraud, product tampering, negligence, even murder (In an unusual twist to that with immense privacy implications, see here). Everything people would ever talk about, and anyone they would ever talk to, can be discovered in their email, including their deepest and most humiliating secrets.

Even people who don’t have humiliating secrets to hide can be very touchy about their email. Even if they only use it for work, that doesn’t mean they want the boss reading it. The flip side to privacy is trust. When someone snoops into someone else’s email, or their contacts, or their desktop files, or whatever, the person whose stuff is being snooped feels distrusted. The response is generally anger.

Contrary to the popular formulation, privacy is important to nearly everyone, not just those who have something to hide. And by exposing people’s email contacts in one huge batch, Google ran head on into this deep need for privacy. They got anger in return. This is the real story. It’s not that Google failed to display their instructions in neon with all kinds of opt in notices to force people to think about what they were doing. It’s that by touching email AT ALL, Google made people worry about who they trusted and who trusted them. Consequently, Google lost trust from some of its users.

In this particular aspect, the users are not at fault. Google made the enormous mistake of thinking of email as a resource to be leveraged. Ironically, they tried to develop a social networking feature without giving enough thought to the social context.

The really funny part about this is that they needn’t have bothered. My second thought when I first saw that there was such a thing as Gmail Buzz, was, “I already have this stuff on Facebook. I don’t need yet another social network.”

UPDATE (same day): I found a link wayyyyy down at the bottom of my gmail page that said “turn off buzz.” So I did. That’s one annoyance out of the way!

UPDATE 2 (also the same day): How did I get all the way through this post without commenting that the backlash on this issue was like Google walked into a buzzsaw?

Two unrelated things clicked in my head today as actually being related on a theoretical level. Thing one I spent some time the other day looking over the websites of some potential vendors. I’ve done this sort of thing lots of times before. As per usual, I was unimpressed by the websites themselves (which may or may not say much about the company itself). Thing two: Someone cracked the algorithm for cell phone signal encryption (really a sort of hiding) to the internet. Both these things show the conflict between the old industrial era way of doing things (let’s call it web 0.5) and the newer Twitter-ified way of doing things (web X.0). It tells us a lot about the changing generations and the growing struggles of the information age.

After that slightly pompous lead in, it’s tempting to just stop but I’ll add some detail, starting with the cell phone encryption code, which is a pretty big deal news-wise. The biggest weakness of cell phone security – and it’s a very big weakness – is that, in order to work, cells broadcast their signal in all directions at once. It’s not like the old fashioned landline phones that send their signal down a wire. In order to intercept the signal of one of those old phones, you have to tap the physical wire. In order to intercept a broadcast signal, on the other hand, you just need to be within range with the right equipment.

For a couple decades now, most cell phones have attempted to evade broadcast interception by (somewhat) randomly changing frequency multiple times during every transmission. That way it’s very hard to intercept more than a single tiny portion of the signal, hopefully too tiny a portion to make sense out of the message. The flaw in this scheme is that for the message to be received, the other end (the cell tower) must be able to follow all the frequency hops and put the complete transmission back together. So both ends need to be synchronized. True randomness is impossible.

News came out the other day that Karsten Nohl, a researcher with the A5/1 security project, has developed a way to crack that frequency hopping protection and released it to the public (See here and here and especially here or just google “GSM crack” for a horde of other sources). The first question that came up was, “Is it ethical to make dangerous information public?” This is an old debate in security circles. On one side are the people who believe that it is always wrong to make life easier for hackers, that keeping systems and methods secret is an essential part of protection. On the other side (and the side I’m on) are those who say that secrecy gives mostly the illusion of protection and that learning from failures is an essential tool to building better systems.

But there’s another, more basic, way of looking at this conflict, which brings me to the other thing I mentioned, looking at the websites of vendors. What the vendors were for is unimportant. What is important is that I found all of the websites to be visually very nice, sometimes using state of the art technology, professionally designed and almost completely devoid of useful information. I’ve done these sorts of surveys numerous times both as part of my job and through the course of formal education and there is nothing unusual about these findings.

Companies tend to design their websites as very fancy advertising brochures. They have a link for investors. They have a link to logos or names of famous clients. They have a link to information about “our team” or some such. They may have a link to their blog, though it’s not much like a real blog because it contains almost exclusively corporate cheerleading and marketing approved advertising copy. They might have a link to a twitter stream but that’s just another promotion channel to them. What they don’t have is the kind of information customers really want and that was once envisioned as being available through means like Amazon customer reviews and ratings. There’s no way to find out anything about the products, services or company that is not directly approved as part of the “corporate message.”

Ten years ago none of this would have been a big issue. Companies were considered to be riding the wave of Internet innovation if they had a website at all. The marketing brochure approach to web communication was considered a professional and effective thing to do. This is no longer true on an Internet where Facebook and Twitter are generating more traffic than every other corporate website combined. But note my criticism above of the way that blogs and twitter feeds are usually implemented. Even when they do them, they don’t do them in a way that seems to me to give people what they want: Actual communication.

If you’re one of those people who says things like, “I don’t get Twitter. Who cares what you’re about to have for lunch?” You may have a future in corporate communications – if there is such a future to be had. Because what ties together the current state of corporate websites AND the hacking of 20 year old cell phone code AND the debate over disclosure vs secrecy is the thing that seems to me to separate a successful Internet presence today  from the methods and even personalities of the last century:

The old way emphasizes control. Control of the message. Control of presentation. Control of the program code and the way people interact with the product and the other people. The new way demands giving up a large measure of control in favor of more fluid and fluidly evolving communication.

I highlighted that point because I believe it is key to success on the Internet as it is developing and is something even very large companies need to understand and cope with over the coming years. Probably because of the presence of the Internet in their lives, younger people seem to be much more likely to take the less control is better side of most issues (we’re talking about technology and interacting with others and with companies, here, not about politics). This has profound implications for the future, both near term and long term.

It means, I believe, that attempts to maintain complete control over the corporate message or even over source code of products are, over time, going to become harder to do (there will be leaks and hacks) and more repugnant to the public. As the older generations (ie: mine) grow old, retire, die, the people who will become the prime consumers and decision makers, will have lived most of their lives under the assumption that the old levels of control are both impossible and undesirable. Sure, as they age, they will want more control. But they will be aiming at a lower bar than previous generations. Someone who grew up with twitter will never have the same view of communications (corporate or otherwise) as people who used to buy newspapers printed on physical paper.

I mentioned newspapers for a reason. I believe the failure to understand the loss of control is one of the central problems the newspaper industry has right now. I don’t know the answer yet but, hopefully, I’ve framed the problem in a way that will help people work on that.

A few years ago when I took a course in web development, I had an assignment to survey a number of different websites all from the same industry. Since I worked for a newspaper at the time, I chose the newspaper industry. After spending many hours on this assignment, my conclusion was that the newspaper industry was completely devoid of creativity or any thought, whatsoever, about the needs of the consumer. I found the web pages for all the different papers to be essentially the same, offering the same news in the same format, with the same crappy navigation system using the same old web 1.0 (or maybe 0.8) technology.

Since then, we have had a few years for web technology to develop and for companies to learn the ropes of the new system. For the most part, though, newspaper web sites haven’t improved beyond adding some video and maybe a search function. Circulations are down, advertising is way down but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of creativity going toward finding solutions.

Or does there?

I’m beginning to think the story might be more complicated than that. There might even be grounds for hope. Maybe. Don’t go buying stock in news media yet, but don’t write them off forever, either. I mentioned in a previous post (April Random Roundup) that my old employer the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle was planning on launching a pay-walled version of the web site. I expressed just a tiny amount of skepticism as to whether it was a good idea. Since then, there’s been a change. The site was late launching and then the D&C’s masters at Gannett pulled the plug on the whole idea. Apparently, there’s some thought of corporate rolling out a pay-site solution company wide. At least, that was the excuse I heard. It’s just dumb enough to be true, too.

I started thinking along more positive lines when I looked at the pay site (shortly before it was taken down). One thing that stood out to me was that the design was far better than standard newspaper web sites. Instead of the usual disorganized jumble of headlines, section links and ads (Oh! They have tabs now! So Gannett properties are up to the 20th century finally!) there was a simple, tasteful layout with a few headlines and a series of very easy to use drop-downs for navigation (It also had the same old boring content but that’s another story).

This reminded me that even a failed experiment is often worth trying, for the lessons learned and skills acquired if for nothing else. Gannett could have allowed the D&C pay site to proceed and tracked it as an important experiment. It could have been used as a way to try out lots of new ideas and to train people in applying technologies that, frankly, newspapers have mostly ignored in the childish hope that they would go away. The difficulty of getting upper management to even consider new things frustrated me numerous times when I worked there. When they finally decided to give something new a decent shot (even if it was the wrong thing to try), corporate stepped on them with all the deep insight and careful timing usually expected from lifelong bureaucrats (In case you’re wondering, that was an example of a literary device known as irony).

For the record, the idea that it would be better to try the whole thing corporate wide is idiotic. That’s not an experiment it’s policy. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong everywhere. And everyone learns the same lessons from it (history shows that lesson to be, “Those people at corporate are morons!”).

The stifling of innovation, not just from the D&C but from every other site like it that was thinking of trying some kind of experiment of its own, is emblematic of what’s wrong with the entire industry. It’s funny, really, that an industry that depends so heavily on writing should be so hostile to creativity.

But I said there was room for hope and I meant it. In recent days there have been numerous stories about efforts by various news agencies and companies to try things they haven’t before. Interestingly, the analysis is almost always similar to my original take on the D&C pay site: misguided and too late anyway. That might even be true of each individual story. But taken together, it shows signs that the newspaper industry has finally started earnestly looking for new ways to tackle the systemic problems that have been dragging them down. Here are a few:

An open letter by Mark Cuban

He has a number of ideas about how papers can improve their revenue. Some of these ideas are familiar to those of us who’ve been screaming (mostly metaphorically) at newspapers for years but they are still not mainstream. He has this wild theory that creative ways of using technology to give customers value might get them to spend money. Interesting stuff.

A New York Times story about electronic readers for newspapers

There’s been a lot of buzz about this one lately. Several companies are apparently going to put out a clipboard-sized flat screen device that people can read their newspapers on. Most analysis I have seen has been highly skeptical (See here and here for example) and with good reason. But the whole idea is a century ahead of the thinking of most newspaper executives (which puts it around the year 1953 but that’s not the point!)

An interesting one about the Chicago Trib actually asking customers for comment on online content

Some journalistic types appear to have considered it a breach of ethics to do this (maybe because it was done before stories were published, though that might just be a cover for indignation at the possibility of being judged. Again, for purposes of this post, the reason doesn’t really matter). The more interesting thing is that newspapers have been very slow to embrace the idea of working with online readers rather than merely shoveling content at them. Despite the reaction to this one, expect to see more of it in the future. This is probably more important than delivering content to fancy new gadgets.

Last on today’s list, Rupert Murdoch wants to charge money for access to the news

This is another one of those doomed-to-fail experiments but maybe it needs to fail spectacularly (as only someone of Murdoch’s caliber can) for people to get the point that locking up content and charging for access only works if people are reasonably sure the content is worth money. If you can just click a couple links to read the same thing on some free site, there’s no chance at all of making money off of it.

Anyway, despite negative reviews for so much of the stuff in the list, taken as a whole what I see is a burst of innovation and experimentation (outside Gannett) that will likely go on for years and produce some real successes in with the failures. Just the act of criticizing someone else’s experiment will help other people at other papers come up with their own ideas. They may be just as hare-brained as the originals but with new twists and new combinations of features, until something clicks. Notice that I’m not saying that newspaper-sized e-readers or pay-walls are the answer. I’m just saying that the atmosphere of experimentation, of competing to produce ideas, is healthy.

This is where the hope for newspapers (and newspaper readers) starts: With humans cooking up crackpot schemes – that sometimes work. Keep your fingers crossed.

Not long ago when there was a rumor that IBM might by Sun Microsystems (see All the Failure Money Can Buy) I gave the opinion that this was a bad thing that IBM should not pursue. IBM didn’t pursue it and life went on.

Now today we have the news that a deal has been reached for Oracle to buy Sun instead (Oracle To Buy Sun For Approximately $7.4 Billion – Hold On To Your Hats). So the question is, is this as bad for Oracle as it would have been for IBM? Short answer: Not as bad, though still not great. Most of my reasons for thinking Sun was a bad buy for IBM apply to anyone who would buy Sun. I just don’t believe Sun has much of a future.

Weirdly, Sun claims that Java is an incredibly important part of the purchase. If I had any stock in Oracle, I’d sell it on the strength of that pronouncement alone (but I’m poor. I don’t own stock in anything, thank God). There is another aspect of the purchase that has to be taken into consideration, however. It’s called Mysql.

Mysql is a (mostly) free database package that comes included with most Linux installs and runs a ridiculously large percentage of Internet websites and applications. Sun bought Mysql a little over a year ago for $1 billion (Sun to Acquire Mysql). That’s right: They paid a billion dollars for a (mostly) free product. Shortly thereafter they started looking for somebody to buy the whole company because they were losing ground fast. Can we say, “Oops?”

IBM sells a database system called DB2. I once briefly played with a developer’s download of DB2 and found it to have a bit of a learning curve but a lot of power. Anyway, DB2 is far from commanding the market and I didn’t think there was much IBM or Sun could do to make DB2 and Mysql relevant to each other. So I didn’t mention DB2 or Mysql when I discussed the possible IBM deal for Sun.

For Oracle, the story is different. Oracle is the world’s leading database company, selling a product called Oracle. I have worked with Oracle considerably more than with DB2 both professionally and in classes where Oracle is assumed to be the platform of choice. Many of us who have worked in the real world would dispute this choice. Oracle is definitely powerful but it also has drawbacks. My personal feeling is that Oracle, while very powerful, is bloated, hard to learn and use, far less secure than its hype and not really worth the astronomical price tag.

Mysql could be seen as a major competitor for Oracle. (Not in the traditional sense since a competitor usually sells products, which Mysql actually does, but it mostly just gives it away. This weird business model came about as a side effect of its roots as a n open source product that then tried to figure out a way to make enough money that the developers wouldn’t need day jobs to support their work on it).

So what does Oracle plan for Mysql? A typical thing for executives who buy up a competing software package is to offer it as a “lite” version of the main product and then let it slowly die as development is strangled for resources and sales efforts are pumped into something they actually think they can make money on. This might not work with Mysql. The name may be trademarked but the original code was open source. A fork that keeps it alive may be possible (I’m just guessing. I don’t know for sure).

At this stage, there is no telling what will happen. When Sun bought Mysql I worried that I might have to start using Postgres (another db that really is open source and free). But then nothing bad happened and I stuck with the package I knew and liked. It is time to revisit that decision, just in case the geniuses at Oracle have big plans for Mysql.

A random roundup is what happens when I’m so busy (or lazy, or disorganized) that I start a number of blog posts over a period of several days, but never seem to finish or post any of them. So instead, I slam them together into one big one and pretend like I’m being conscientious. The latest crop includes some notes about Twitter, Facebook, Roadrunner and my old employer the Democrat & Chronicle.

Twitter is bad for you

In other news – if you can call it that – Twitter makes us less moral. Really. Scientists said so (Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass). Apparently, someone thinks that the stream of consciousness that characterizes much Twitter content is too fast to allow people to reflect on other people’s feelings. Do we need to use more smileys? Can you do smileys on Twitter? Having never used a smiley anywhere, I wouldn’t know. But surely those will make us more moral by putting our feelings out there for others to see, right?

Actually, the research seems to imply that Twitter is not good for teaching morality and that someone brought up on 140 character or less communication may have some deficiencies. So when raising children, remember to talk to them sometimes, not just Tweet at them.

Do I need to go into a rant about the poor quality of most science reporting now or can I get away with something under 140 characters, like “Are they kidding?”

Roadrunner updates

I warned in The Roadrunner Rip-off that Time Warner was running the risk of provoking government regulation by instituting completely unnecessary use caps on consumers. Some evidence begins to emerge to support that: New York Representative Goes After Time Warner’s Metered Broadband (Thanks to the hard Twtter work of Susan Beebe for bringing that to my attention). The rep in question is Eric Massa.

Now we have New York Senator Charles Schumer jumping on the anti-TW bandwagon (see Sen. Schumer to Get Involved in Bandwidth Battle? – again noticed in Susan Beebe’s Twitter stream!). While Senator Schumer does not appear to have promised anything, he is a powerful man and TW would be foolish not to take notice.

At the time, I wrote about TW’s plan, I wasn’t even thinking of individual reps grand standing for attention (or responding to constituent concerns, if you prefer). I was thinking that Internet service has become a utility, like the phone or electricity. New York state regulates utilities heavily. This alone indicates a willingness to put a lid on companies like Time Warner that they should have considered before moving toward instituting caps.

A very smart comment at TechDirt (Law To Ban Broadband Caps Moves Forward) points out that, rather than regulating caps away, it would be better to improve competition so that companies like TW would think twice before handing their competitors issues to use against them. And if politicians were that smart, cable executives might be too!

Update

You gotta love this: Time Warner Cable tells FCC to shut up about net neutrality. Apparently they’re feeling a little heat and rather than respond to customer rage by playing nicer, they’ve brought out the lawyers.  The bad news is, that approach sometimes works, though usually only in the short term.

Bigger update 4/6/2009 2:07 PM

Time Warner appears to have backed down. This was announced by Senator Schumer. I warned them not to get the politicians involved! See Time Warner Cable cancels Internet tier pricing plan. I’d be doing a victory dance except I figure this just means an across the board rate hike will be hitting any minute. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. The good guys won this one. Thanks to Ceejayoz of the fabulous Democrat & Chronicle IT department for getting this up on Twitter so fast.

Facebook Bad, too

Somewhat better reporting here from Jeremy Hsu at LiveScience.com about the correlation between Facebook use, reduced study times and reduced grades among college students. I say this one is better because the article (Facebook Users Get Worse Grades in College) points out that correlation is not causation, meaning in this case that no one is claiming that Facebook use is what causes the students who use it to get lower grades.

What no one covering this study seems to have noticed is that the “lower” grades of Facebook users averaged between 3.0 and 3.5. Those are passing grades. The high end of that range is roughly a B+. That’s not exactly terrible. So maybe Facebook isn’t as evil as Twitter after all. Of course, I use both of them so I guess I’m doomed to both immorality and passing but unspectacular grades.

Here’s Hoping I’m Wrong

News leaked this weak (Rochester: Bauer confirms for-pay website ‘option’) that the newspaper I used to work for, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle is soon to launch a pay web site with premium multimedia content. I still know quite a few very good people at the D&C and, for their sakes, I hope this works out well for the paper.

Realistically, though, I think it’s about 5 years and a lot of layoffs too late. Pay-walls rarely work. In those instances when they do (The Wall Street Journal is the only one I can think of offhand) the product as a whole has a reputation for high quality niche content that attracts a wide audience with a fair amount of disposable income.

That doesn’t describe the D&C. Sorry folks but it really doesn’t. Even if the paper once had a rep for exceptional content (and those of us who remember the afternoon Times Union might dispute even that),what’s the niche? Rochester? Sorry but there are weekly papers in most of the suburbs and several TV stations covering the same area. It’s not “nichy” enough. Besides, the layoffs I mentioned above have likely gutted the ability to not only keep it up but add enough value to a pay site to attract more than a few die-hard D&C fans.

For a hint of the long-term prospects of walled off online newspaper content, see Teens Love Aggregation and ‘Free’, Newspaper Study Finds.

This is one time where I wish I had something more positive to say than, “Good luck with that!”

So there’s a story going around that Time Warner Roadrunner is proposing instituting tiered service in Rochester, NY. The levels would start at $29.95/month for up to 5 GB of data transfer and go up to $54.90/month for 40GB of data. There would also be fees for going over your monthly allotment. More details here and here.

This would directly affect me, so I’m not exactly an unbiased observer. But in an unbiased way, my first thought on seeing this structure was, “Between YouTube, Facebook and online Mah Jong or what have you, who on Earth actually uses a lousy 5 gig?” It may sound like a lot to people who don’t know any better but take it from an old – professional – Computer geek. That one is a red herring. They don’t even mean it seriously.  Ignore it (except possibly to be offended by the mendacity of a company that pretends to be offering a low price option that, in effect, no one can use).

My second thought was that there is no need for tiered service. The infrastructure is there, in place. When a particular user downloads some huge file, there is no one in a control center yelling, “Scotty! We need more power! Hurry or she’s gonna blow!” There is no danger that the pipes are going to burst because there are too many electrons going through them. The system works just as well at a user’s first gigabyte downloaded as their hundredth. Tiered usage is a bookkeeping device, completely unrelated to the stresses and strains on the system.

As I said, this will directly affect me and I’m not happy about it. I work from home more often than not. And I take online classes. I can use a half gig (500 mb, 0.5 gb) in a day without even trying. I can do that without downloading any Linux ISOs or software, or using Internet phone (skype – I’ve thought about it but haven’t tried it yet) or viewing YouTube videos or other streaming media, believe it or not. I know this because I have a bandwidth meter installed on my main computer. I’m just that kind of guy. People who use streaming media are likely to use much more.  And pay more. This is starting to sound like a bad thing, especially in a recession.

Being a writer and blogger, it follows that I believe in making my voice heard about things. So I went to the TW web site and sent them an email expressing my thoughts about this thinly disguised rate hike:

There’s a story in the news that Rochester Time Warner Roadrunner is going to introduce a tiered pricing scheme with charges for use over certain amounts. This is a truly sleazy grab for money without actually doing anything to earn it. Rather than improving infrastructure or making some effort to provide value for customers, TW simply proposes to punish them for using already existing service.

It is especially interesting that such a blatant example of corporate greed would be introduced so soon after congress and the administration created a media firestorm over the greed of bank executives taking huge bonuses. Is TW TRYING to provoke increased regulation? Perhaps I’ll write my representatives, or the NY Attorney General and ask for their opinions.

This action is not only anti-customer, it’s stupid.

Do yourselves a favor. Forget the whole tiered pricing idea.

The regulatory aspect is interesting. President Obama has expressed interest in bringing broadband Internet access to all Americans. Congress has held hearings on the subject. There has been an ongoing debate over Internet regulation for a number of years. Raising rates in such a ham-handed way at such a bad time for the economy and at a time when government seems predisposed toward more regulation seems … what’s the word? Idiotic? Imbecilic? Self-destructive?

Moronic. Also annoying. And potentially really expensive.

It occurs to me that cell phone companies have been fighting this same fight – and losing – for a long time. If they weren’t losing, they wouldn’t have started offering plans with features like free nights and weekends, rollover minutes and free family calling. Is that the direction Time Warner really wants to go, continually introducing new rate plans in order to fend off growing customer rage? That just doesn’t sound like a smart business plan to me.

Here are some links to protest sites:

• stopTWC!
• Time Warner Cable Road Runner Bandwidth Cap
• Kiss my ass, Time Warner
• Facebook boycott TW group
• Road Runner Is For The Birds: Time to Fly Away! (Rochester Edition)

For the record, it’s not the increase in prices I object to, though I’m never happy to pay more. It’s the increase in prices with no commensurate improvement in service (And I haven’t even gone in to any of the horror stories about my experiences with Roadrunner customer service!). It’s the being taken advantage of that I object to.

In general, I’m opposed to government interfering in the private sector. They cause credit crunches and disastrous housing bubbles and recessions and things. But if the government comes down on Time Warner for this blatant abuse of its customers, even while opposing the regulation, I’ll find watching TW squirm hilarious.

I usually stay away from the popular news of the day but this one was so funny I had to say something about it: IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft (Note: This link keeps coming up with an excerpt and a “subscribe” link, but when I opened it from Google search results it gave me the whole article. Interesting, huh?). The short version of this is that the two companies are in talks and there’s a possible price tag of $6.5 billion.  As of this writing, no actual deal has been announced. They’re just talking. Interestingly, according to the WSJ article, Sun has been looking for a buyer for some months. This makes sense to me since I’ve considered Sun to be doomed for several years.

I’ve worked with Sun’s Solaris operating system quite a bit. I like it. It’s terrifically stable. In fact, the times when it seemed to fail there was always an underlying hardware problem. Sun hardware is pretty good, too. Some of their Sparc stations run practically forever. That said, I don’t see Solaris to be all that much better than Linux and it costs MUCH more (On any hardware. Linux has been ported to everything except my mailbox but it’s not much of a mailbox). The extra cost for Sun just isn’t worth it.

When I worked at the newspaper the editorial software we put in during my first year ran on Solaris 8 on a pair of V880s the size of one of those mini office refrigerators. At the time, that editorial system depended on Oracle for the db and was not available on Linux. It was a powerful, very stable and fabulously expensive system. That editorial software is now available on Linux. It’s still fabulously expensive but the cost of the hardware and the operating system are a fraction of what they used to be.

Too bad for Sun. Great for the vendor’s customers (I’m avoiding mentioning the vendor’s name because I prefer to keep the amount of profanity on this blog down, btw. They were not the best vendor I ever saw, though they were a lot better than the worst). Sun itself seems to have recognized this since, starting with Solaris 9, they began incorporating Gnu utilities and features in the base system. In other words, they tried to win back users who were going to, or interested in, Linux, by becoming more Linux-like.

Making one of your major products more like something that’s free in order to compete is a sure sign of a problem. A BIG problem. So this leads us to the question: What on Earth does IBM think they will gain from buying Sun??

Remember that the Wall Street Journal article says that IBM intends to increase its “web heft” whatever the hell that means. It says it right there in the headline. But since the term “web heft” has never been used in conjunction with Sun and never will be (and not just because it’s a newly made up term that doesn’t have any meaning and doesn’t make any sense), the question still remains what does IBM think Sun has that’s worth spending billions of dollars on?

Don’t say Java. When Java was first rolled out, they told us it was going to conquer the web. It didn’t because but it was too heavy both to learn and to run. Java is obsolete. Forget it. I’m aware though that people’s opinions vary and it’s possible that the suits at IBM actually think that Java adds to Sun’s value. If this is true, that would not be a good sign for IBM’s future health, either.

Maybe “web heft” is code for “The economy sucks and we think we can get a fire sale price.” That would make some sense to me. Not much but some. There are those who, unlike me, believe an IBM-Sun merger is a good idea. See Why an IBM purchase of Sun would make sense for example. And for a more balanced consideration, try Is it a bad idea for IBM to buy Sun?

To me it seems that the overwhelming majority of analyses of a possible merger between these two giants are ignoring the glaringly important problem that these kinds of mergers (or buyouts, or whatever you want to call them) have a terrible track record of success. See Why mergers fail for a good take on this. There are lots of others.

The upshot is that no matter how good the products or how successful the corporate cultures or even how dynamic the “synergies,” really big companies don’t merge well. I remember a story about the merger of two department store chains that wound up failing because their computer systems – including things like inventory control, and low level stuff like hardware interfaces – were too dissimilar. They spent a ton of money trying to get them to talk to each other but never succeeded.

The story may be apocryphal but it’s plausible. A huge percentage of big tech projects fail, too.

Does anybody know if scientific journals are making money lately?

I don’t have any idea. A lot of commercial print information sources are having serious troubles. There are reports, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle is in deep trouble [http://sfist.com/2009/02/24/sf_chronicle_for_sale.php] and even venerable (if you can imagine that word in this context) Playboy may be up for sale. [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100906383&ft=1&f=1020] I’ve discussed before some of the troubles in journalism in general. But what I’m asking about today concerns the plethora of scientific and technical journals out there that seem to make up a huge industry.

The question came up because I came across a report that the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation has a paper in an upcoming issue about how social networking could be used to discover prior art related to patent applications and thereby speed up the review process [http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/02/23/social.patents]. It seems there’s an enormous backlog of patent applications and there isn’t much hope of reducing it with current procedures.

I have some interest in this question because, thanks to my job, some of my colleagues and I have our names on some patent paperwork (applications not yet filed, so I can’t describe the work yet – too bad, it’s interesting stuff!) so I have some direct interest in the subject. The idea of using social networking to gather information about patents strikes me as being somewhat naive. There’s money in patents and that means there will be people more interested in gaming the system than in providing reasonable debate. Just look at how many studies a certain evil empire (that will remain nameless) has commissioned to “prove” that Linux (which is free) is more expensive than the evil empire’s very expensive commercial operating system and you get the idea.

But, there might be something more to the idea than described in the brief news article I saw, so I thought, as I often do, that I would see if I could get a look at the actual paper. This began a not unusual odyssey to try to download information from a company that hides information in order to jack up prices. Oooh! Did that sound a tiny bit less than complementary? My mistake. Let me rephrase: Thus began a futile search to find out the facts from a company that thinks that information, even when it appeals to only a very limited market, should be milked for ridiculous amounts of money. There. Does that sound better?

In this case, I found the article after a few clicks (quite a few. Why are these websites always so badly designed?). In order to actually view the content, however, I was offered the option to subscribe to the journal for 400 Euros a year (about $511.80) or to buy just that article for 30 Euros ($38.39 according to the online converter I used). I didn’t spend the money. I work for a living.

This is more or less the norm for peer-reviewed journals. There are a lot of them in the world. A high proportion of them seem to be put out by a small number of publishers. I’m not even making one of those “information wants to be free” arguments you see in some circles (though I have plenty of sympathy for the idea that knowledge should not be made artificially hard to get). I have nothing against paying a few dollars for a service or information I want. It costs money to produce, why shouldn’t the producers get some compensation for their trouble?

But $40 for a single electronic copy of an article? Electronic means the cost for printing is $0.00. That’s ZERO dollars. None.

There’s another force at work here of course. The majority of these kinds of journals are purchased by institutions – colleges and universities and sometimes big libraries. The print copies that are produced sit in boxes and are rarely – if ever – read by an actual human being. That is especially true now as more and more such content is made available on the Internet. Because I take online classes, I have access to a couple of such online repositories. None of them seemed to have this particular journal, though. Why would they? It doesn’t look like something that would have very high demand even among people interested in patents and new technology (like me).

And that’s my point. These journals seem to be a bad deal to me. They charge too much money for small amounts of niche information. Even university libraries have finite budgets. They must do at least some picking and choosing among journals. You would think (but then, maybe I’m too rational) that they would get more bang for the buck by choosing lower priced journals, or even none at all considering how rarely some of them really get used. It’s an economics thing. Scarce resources force us to choose those things that matter most. Even universities are feeling the economic crunch lately, or so I hear.

Let’s put it another way: If they had only wanted $5 for the article, I probably would have bought it. The sale was lost by setting the price far too high. Which brings us back to my original question: Are publishers of peer reviewed journals doing okay in the current economy, even when so much of the rest of the media is hurting?

My first reaction, on seeing the prices they wanted for a single article (let alone the outrageous price for a year’s subscription) was, “I hope not.”

I was going to do an update to the previous post about schizophrenia today. There have been several interesting findings just since I wrote that post (here). But instead, I found an interesting thread about something else schizophrenic: A story at Techcrunch that has the text of emails about why people left Google  (Why Google Employees Quit).

Google carefully cultivates a reputation for being the best and for hiring the best. On the other hand, they just had a layoff (story here) so, best or not, they still have to function in the same economy as the rest of the world. And apparently with the same lame practices. Full disclosure: I’ve been laid off several times and this has probably contributed to my general lack of respect for business “leaders.”
Anyway: back to Google and the “why they left” thread, there were a couple of interesting things that came out of this. One was criticism of the hiring process, which could last months. Months after sending in the resume without hearing a word, interviews with completely clueless Googloids (googlebots?) and months without hearing a response. I’ve been through that sort of thing, too. It was so long after I interviewed for my current job before they finally called me back to make an offer that I had almost completely forgotten what it was all about. I had stopped being mad at my then current employer in the meantime, too, so I was not terribly interested in changing jobs. The money they offered made up for that.

All that so they could bring me in as a contract worker! The people directly over me said there was a lot of bureaucracy involved. A lot of different people had to sign off on it. Since I’ve been there we interviewed someone who we thought would be a great addition to the team and recommended he be hired (not as a contract). Now, several months later, we had thought they were finally going to make him an offer soon but last week they had a round of layoffs, so I guess I won’t hold my breath.

I thought that making the hiring process difficult and bureaucratic was supposed to make sure they only had the staff they needed, so that there wouldn’t be layoffs? I remember hearing somebody give that justification one time, anyway. Maybe they meant it sarcastically.

Anyway, this anecdote makes me wonder if Google is just disorganized or if, even as young as the company is, it hasn’t already come under the sway of an entrenched, self-serving and ultimately stupid bureaucracy. It’s a large enough and famous enough company to attract empire builders and parasites. Here’s an interesting question: Assuming that a large company like Google does attract a certain kind of bureaucratic mind, are they attracting the ones who failed in government, or is the government attracting the ones who failed in business – or do they cycle back and forth?

In any case, discontent with getting in to Google was only one of the reasons mentioned for dissatisfaction with being there. Another was inconsistent and even openly destructive management. This was not cited as the norm but as something that, when it came up, was intolerable. Bad management is obviously not a Google-specific problem. Bad managers are actually very common in the world. There has been some social science research that seems to show that the people most likely to move quickly into management, are also the most likely to be self-serving jerks. It may be that Google is so young and has grown so much that those kinds of people have had more opportunities to move up than they would have had in many other companies. There’s also a strong possibility that a discussion about “why I left” is biased toward talking about bad management. For some strange reason, no one ever says, “I left my job after only 6 months because my boss was too wonderful and I wasn’t worthy.”

One interesting thing that came up in one message after another was that the pay was low. I’ve heard many times that Google is a great company to work for. I’ve heard that they create great technology and that they have a fun and open culture that brings out the best in people. This is the first time I ever heard that they were cheap. On the other hand, I have worked for several companies where the people at the top believed the company was so good, that it’s work was so important, that the employees should be honored just for the chance to be a part of it. Not surprisingly, the employees rarely share this attitude. If things at Google were really like this, though, I think it would be more widely known. Google gets a lot of scrutiny. It is something to keep in mind if I ever actually have a chance to work for Google, though. A wise man once said that promises don’t keep you from having to send the children home to the sea, so get the gold up front.

Or something like that. The biggest take away I see from this thread is that there is no company that will magically make your life wonderful. Not even Google. Keep that in mind when judging the promises made and implied by any prospective employer. Then go home to your family and forget the boss, the hours, the pay and all the other stuff that makes work a pain.