Hate
Even Google doesn’t use “I’m Feeling Lucky”
Feb 8th
Big News Today!
Whether you like it or not, the big news today wasn’t the outcome of “The Big Game,” the 2010 Toyota Prius Recall, or the fact that Verizon is “deliberately” blocking 4Chan for wireless customers (though those last two are admonishable attempts by the respective companies to submarine news).
It was the fact that today, Google advertised its core search product on TV in a $2.6 million Super Bowl ad. Wait, did I just say Super Bowl? I meant “Big Game.”
Hell proverbially froze over, by CEO Eric Schmidt’s own admission.
But if you actually watch the video, and watch closely, you’ll notice that very little of the advertisement focuses on the search experience itself. In fact, it spends so much effort building trite emotional appeal that it completely neglects at least half of the front-facing search experience. In fact, what it disregards is a feature so neglected, even I didn’t realize it was completely passed over until I watched a parody.
First, watch the “Parisian Love” ad itself:
Now watch the brilliant parody “Is Tiger Feeling Lucky Today” by slate:
Disregarding completely the message, the search terms, what the so-called “story” was, did you notice how differently Google advertised their own product compared to how well Slate did? Slate used “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Google? Not once. In fact, doing so could have been absolutely brilliant in the context of the ad’s cheezy romance theme. Imagine “will she marry me” -> I’m feeling lucky.
So what?
So what that communicates is that even Google doesn’t know what the heck “I’m Feeling Lucky” is doing there. Ask yourself, when is the last time you actually used it? Is it easily accessible? Is it part of that seamless, effortless Google experience they talk about? Is it so essential a part of the search experience that if it was missing, some part of your being would be inexorably changed forever?
You get the point. It isn’t.
No love for I'm Feeling Lucky
There’s nothing easy about using “I’m Feeling Lucky;” you can’t get to it with shift-enter or any other keyboard shortcut. It isn’t natural; everyone’s so used to just hitting enter or using the browser search bar. I ask then what purpose it’s serving.
For my answer, I googled. I didn’t use “I’m Feeling Lucky” :
The “I’m Feeling Lucky™” button on the Google search page takes you directly to the first webpage that returns for your query. When you click this button, you won’t see the other search results at all. An “I’m Feeling Lucky” search means you spend less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them. -Link
Oh really? That’s, you know, awesome, but isn’t diving head first into the first result of some search query just as dangerous as using link shorteners? As opening links in email blindly? As bad as everything we’ve always taught people not to do? Moreover, isn’t randomly guessing kind of a bad algorithm for mentally sorting through search results? I mean, if you use “I’m Feeling Lucky,” you’re going to have to come all the way back out to the front to re-submit your query. What’s elegant, beautiful, or simple about that?
Take a step back and think about the name of that button as well. What does “I’m Feeling Lucky” imply? Why the need for obscurity? Why not just call it “First Result” or “Dive In Blindly!™” or something else that’s approachable and friendly?
Years ago, the first time I clicked this, I half expected to be taken to some sort of contest entry form.
Of Simplicity and Sacred Cows
We’ve all read a lot, and I mean a lot about how much time, effort and money Google pours into keeping their famously-lightweight homepage simple. They’ve evolved the design. They’ve removed things. They make it fade in slowly so those of us challenged by reading aren’t scared or overwhelmed. They count and have sleepless nights over the number of words on it!
Oh, I know what you’ll say, it’s part of their “corporate identity,” part of their “product,” part of what makes Google, Google. Nonsense; that’s the kind of talk that turns innovation into stagnation for the sake of consistency. My high school English teacher would be proud, because two of his favorite quotes apply directly to the kind of idiotic allegiance they have to that worthless button:
- A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. -Oscar Wilde
For all of Google’s engineering talent, all that time, all those fancy positions, titles, and critical thought, they don’t realize that their biggest Sacred Cow is staring them in the face. That “Sacred Cow” is ‘I’m Feeling Lucky.”
C’mon Google, even you don’t use it or know why it’s there.
My Wall got Pwned
Jan 28th
Yesterday, just about everyone’s minds were on the iPad. Love it or hate it, what a ride that hype machine was, and what a launch too. But for me, my musings (or rather those of my roommate) were rudely interrupted by the loud boom of a car crashing through the retaining wall surrounding my house.
Apparently, an inebriated woman was proceeding northbound on Euclid in a white Infiniti when she struck a midsize black Mercedes SUV, and flew up, into, and through the cinder block wall surrounding my house. The force must have been pretty awesome, since the size of the hole is sizable. Definitely a lot of momentum (and resulting few meganewtons of force) went into that smash, since there’s shattered cinder block in my yard now.
They managed to destroy a lot of cactus, blocks, and the sign on the corner in the process. I’d like to point out the irony of an infinity with license plate ‘finiti’, crashing through my wall on Euclid (as in, the fabled “father of geometry”). ::shrug::
I know nothing about the occupants’ statuses or health, but hope they’re fairing ok. Lesson learned? Don’t drink and drive, kids.
How Not to do a Live Stream
Jan 7th
Censorship
Like many others yesterday, I eagerly awaited the Microsoft CES keynote and the chance to see Steve Ballmer once again have a Developers Developers Developers moment on stage. Although it was initially marred by a power outage which delayed the conference some 20 minutes and damaged a Media Center TV and an ASUS eeeTV demo, what really made me pull the plug was what Microsoft did to the live stream itself.
Initially it was plagued with audio problems. The stream started too quiet, then suddenly lost the left channel, then the left channel came back but killed the right channel. At one point I’m certain there was some sort of loop in a volume normalization system, as gain increased continually for at least an entire minute. Of course, these issues are technical and completely understandable given the fact that nearly everything needed to be restarted after the power outage.
So imagine my disgust, and the disgust of others, when during the Microsoft Xbox 360 part of the keynote, the following comes up right as they prepare to show the Halo Reach trailer:
Microsoft LiveStreams, now with DRM
Absolutely incredible, censoring a live keynote because of IP concerns from the very company throwing the keynote. Even better, apparently the Xbox team wasn’t made aware that there was any problem at all with what was going to be shown:
Sorry that had to black that out….I did not know
t -Major Nelson
Even more strange, the content that was shown wasn’t new, in spite of the fact that the announcer lead-up to the video made it sound like it was going to be. It was nothing more than the Halo Reach trailer released over a month ago.
It’s a video…not a #haloreach demo. -Major Nelson
Why then did this content merit censoring the live stream for nearly 3 minutes? Is Microsoft not comfortable with using the public spectacle and attention that is CES to promote its own products and games? Is it honestly concerned that showing a trailer for a game in a live video stream constitutes some sort of breach in IP? What?
That, by itself wouldn’t be noteworthy, it was what followed that really iced the proverbial cake for the Keynote.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...
Yes. They did it again. If you’re so inclined, the video is here for everyone to view, now that we’ve been all made feel like children.
There is seriously so much wrong with doing something like this to the thousands of people watching the live stream that aren’t at CES but are still interested, that I don’t even know where to begin. In fact, I don’t even have to, because so much of that is obvious. But not, apparently, to Microsoft. Shortly after was when I stopped watching.
Nice of Microsoft to leave end-user-facing employees that work and try hard like Major Nelson to pick up all the pieces:
Reagarding[sic] the Reach blackout on the stream…..I am going to talk to some folks about that #notcool -Major Nelson
Ok, I need to take a walk and have a little chat with some folks. -Major Nelson
Fast Forward to Today
Imagine how shocked I was today, when during Paul Otellini’s Intel CES keynote the following popped up on the livecast:
/facepalm
I’m still not entirely certain whether, once again, the stream had been interrupted due to intellectual property concerns, DRM, or simply because they didn’t want to show more 3D parallax (despite having done so just minutes before).
Whatever the case, this seriously needs to stop.
Google’s Nexus One – Thoughts
Jan 5th
Today, Google finally announced the much-hyped, finally-official googlephone at their Mountain View office. Admittedly, there wasn’t much about the actual announcement that wasn’t previously known; specs, photos, and even an entire review had already leaked out before the official announcement. But the announcement marks google’s first real step into distributing google-branded hardware directly to consumers, the entry of another google-blessed flagship for the Android platform, and a different, long-needed business model for selling phones and wireless contracts.
It’s been a year, 2 months, and 14 days since the launch of the T-Mobile G1, and Android has matured into a serious contender since its beginnings as an aspiring platform in a market dominated by Windows Mobile, Symbian, and the iPhone OS. While the G1 seemed awkward in a kind of adolescent manner, it’s chin a strange design ‘feature,’ its storage ultimately limited, and design-by-committee UI/navigation (anyone remember “how many clocks does it take for google engineers to tell time?”) the Nexus One is finally enough to make it a real iPhone contender alongside the Droid.
That said, the platform does still suffer from a number of notable shortcomings:
- Application storage limited to 512 MB partition
- (Which google says it will fix by allowing applications to reside on an encrypted partition on removable storage, soon)
- No multitouch within official applications
- (This strange choice likely stems from legal and patent concerns between Google using Apple IP/prior artwork. Google likely doesn’t want the whole board-member-sharing fiasco to undergo any more scrutiny than it already has)
- Slower web browsing
- (Flash? more on that in a second)
- No support for CDMA (Verizon) until spring, AT&T 3G band support unclear
- (Rumors abound that Google is working on an AT&T version, but only a “dozen or so employees have access to this hardware”)
I’m going to expand on numbers 2 and 3, since personally I find these the most interesting immediately.
Mobile Flash
Engadget did a rather thorough of the Nexus One, pre-empting it’s announcement (karma for the same way Google tried to pre-empt CES?), and notably included a quick and dirty comparison of the loading speed of browsers on the iPhone 3GS, Nexus One, and Droid. Qualitatively, the winners and losers are painfully obvious from the video, but I took down some times and came up with the following:
- iPhone 3GS – 17 seconds
- Nexus One – 71 seconds
- Motorola Droid – 82 seconds
What immediately sticks out is that it took both of the Android 2.x platforms roughly 4 times longer to load the same website as it did the 3GS.
Initially, this doesn’t make sense. The 3GS is sporting a relatively recent ARM Cortex A8 underclocked from 800 MHz to 600 MHz, while the Nexus One is running the latest (also much-hyped) Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC running at 1GHz (Qualcomm QSD 8250 according to Google). The Snapdragon SoC is extremely similar architecturally to the Cortex A8, so comparing clock speeds is roughly applicable. Then, why the heck is a newer, faster generation chipset clocked 66% faster 4 times slower? Heck, the Android browser even runs lean and mean WebKit at its core, same as Mobile Safari on the iPhone, and Chrome and Safari on the desktop. Why then is it so much slower?
My theory? Flash.
The same multimedia platform hogging resources on the desktop is now hogging resources and slowing down browsing on mobile devices. Excellent. Sure, there’s a lot of content out there that’s driven by Flash that’s useful: videos, games, navigation, photo websites, fancy UI. But what’s the biggest reason? Advertising. Adobe knows it, I mean, just watch their video on mobile flash and notice what they highlight. Advertising.
Up until now, browsing just about everything on all the modern smartphone browsers I’ve used (mobile safari, opera mobile, opera mini, IE mobile) has been usable without adblock primarily because they didn’t have support for flash. Unless mobile browsers begin allowing plugins such as adblock or similar (similar to how mobile firefox, aka Fennec has begun doing), Flash is something I’d rather see disabled than enabled. How much of a feature is it to waste not just performance, but ever-critical battery on a mobile device primarily to show animated and intrusive advertising?
No AT&T 3G, Just T-Mobile
A lot of what Google was really trying to do with the Open Handset Alliance, launching a phone that customers can buy almost directly from HTC (the Nexus One OEM) and introducing essentially a new mobile business model at the same time was abstracting the carrier away from the device.
That is, handsets are increasingly moving towards being carrier-agnostic. In reality, this is the way it was intended to be (and moreover, should have been, at least in GSM-land). In fact, while this business model is entirely new to the US, the portability of handsets using SIMs is nothing new to customers in Europe, who frequently purchase handsets unlocked and bring plans (and SIMs) with them. (As an aside, much of the reason CDMA became dominant in the US was because this same flexibility wasn’t part of the specification; the unique identifier is built into the phone itself in the form of an ESN/MEID.)
It follows, then, that if Google truly wanted to create a splash in the industry and achieve its goal of creating and directly selling the ultimate flagship device that’s totally carrier agnostic, they would have made absolutely certain that HTC built in either multiple radios for UMTS and CDMA, or some modern, hybrid UMTS/CDMA chipset similar to the Qualcomm MSM6200 (PDF link) rumored to be at the core of the next-gen iPhone.
Whatever the case, the decision to launch hardware that at present restricts it to T-Mobile for 3G, EDGE on AT&T, and no CDMA functionality at all, extremely limits the device and ultimate impact. Moreover, it means that HTC and Google are going to have to support 3 sets of unique hardware for the “Nexus One” name. One with a CDMA-stack version for Verizon/Sprint, the current incarnation for T-Mobile, and a final version supporting AT&T’s 3G frequencies. Perhaps even more if they eventually move to support additional carriers in Europe and Asia.
Personally, I find it heartily ironic that rumors abound Apple is using a hybrid UMTS/CDMA chipset in the next gen iPhone. If so, that would make the same iPhone so many complain about because of its exclusivity with AT&T, the most open.
More open, in fact, than the Nexus One.