DeWitt Clinton wrote a good, brief description of what the Buzz API means. Excerpt:

The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle. The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers.

For those wondering “what’s the difference between this and Facebook?”, this is a big part of the answer, probably the most important part in the long run. Think back to AOL’s heyday- they had a messaging system that allowed you to communicate between AOL users, but eventually opened up email with which anyone from any email provider could communicate. It’s definitely harder to do the latter, but I think it’s always worth trying.

Google Buzz was launched this week. I use twitter more than facebook and friendfeed, so that’s what most of my comments will be based on.

Things I like about Buzz:
- No 140-character limit, but collapsible posts. I’ve never liked twitter’s 140-character constraint.. I think it goes about solving the problem in the wrong way. It also makes people sound like idiots when trying to fit longer statements in.
- No shortened URLs (like tinyurl or bit.ly). These are bad for so many reasons that have been well-documented by others already, so I won’t bother. I’m much less interested in clicking on a link if I don’t know where it goes.
- Open APIs! See http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/. Full PSHB support, enclosures, and social graph API. I’m hoping to play with these soon. (Something I found recently: you can find information about your google social graph here: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social). I’m very excited about the salmon protocol (syncing comments between blog posts and sites like Buzz). More about open APIs here.
- Gmail integration prevents me from having another place to check.

Things I don’t like:
- Delivering replies to your inbox should definitely be a setting, possibly opt-in.
- The “turn this off” link should be easier to find (it’s at the bottom of gmail)
- Contacts and privacy are confusing, and for some people the gmail integration won’t make sense at all.
- Youtube embeds seem to be stripped from imported feeds.
- The mobile stuff seems like it needs another revision.

We used this internally for a long time, and it’s a lot better there. Internally, everyone is on gmail anyway, and you aren’t as concerned with privacy, since communication tends to be very open. I’ve been finding that it’s a very good replacement for the discussion lists that are still used heavily.

I think it’ll be a while before we really know how this all pans out in the wild, though.

Slate has a pretty good writeup about this year’s superbowl ads. I laughed a few times this year, but found very few of the funny commercials to be memorable. The Bud Light commercial with the human bridge could have been funny if they hadn’t completely pulled their punch at the end: the bridge should have failed disastrously. Maybe that would be a bit too dark, but if done right, it could have worked a lot better than what they ended up with.

I’m of course biased, but I really liked the Google ad. It was simple, clever and very human.

It’s also really easy to parody, as Slate has done well:

I meant to post this a while ago…

When I first started at Google, several friends told me things like “My street isn’t on Google Maps” to which I would reply “Move somewhere else!”, but now I can tell them to report the problem themselves.

I’ve reported two problems so far: the marker for my parents’ house was slightly off, so I moved it (and the change was live immediately) and I found one road with the street name misspelled (still waiting to hear back from them on that one).

Keep it in mind!

Steve Sounders documents a trick used by the Gmail Mobile web interface to reduce latency. In order to make things load quickly, complex web apps try to defer loading of some features and load them in the background. The problem with this is that it causes the javascript to be parsed in the background as it is loaded, which can make the UI seem lurchy to the user. In order to get around this, the gmail interface downloads the non-critical code in the background as a big HTML comment, so no javascript parsing is involved, then when it actually needs the feature, it strips off the comment boundaries and parses the now-local javascript.

His writeup is better than mine, just thought I’d pass along a clever trick.

Google Translate has been on a roll this year, integrating with a ton of different properties. I’m not sure why this recent one struck me the most, but I think it’s awesome:
Now on Picasa photos, like this one, it translates comments in other languages into your native language. There’s something about people all over the world looking at the same picture, reacting to it, and talking about it in their native languages that amazes me.

This economist essay on the Google Book Search settlement is a good, concise overview of the issue. Quote:

By helping to resolve the legal status of many texts subject to absurdly long copyright periods and murky ownership, it will make millions of books more accessible than ever before. Researchers from Manhattan to Mumbai will gain instant access to volumes that would otherwise languish in obscurity. Libraries will be able to offer users access to information far beyond their physical book stacks. And authors and publishers will be able to cash in on long-neglected works.

(via Google public policy blog)

Gmail’s web interface was inaccesible for nearly two hours today, causing the internet to explode.

If you set up an email client (e.g. on your phone or mozilla thunderbird) to use gmail, that continued to work during the downtime, though that’s not necessarily always the case during downtime. If you want to be able to keep working with email during downtime (of any sort), I recommend setting up Gmail’s offline features. If you have offline enabled, the gmail interface lives on your computer (still in the browser, like usual) and it keeps a copy of your recent messages. If Gmail goes down, it’ll look just like you went offline, so you’ll be able to continue to compose, read and search emails. You can re-sync when gmail comes back online. Certainly not idea, but it’s better than nothing!

Also, if you’d like to see the status of Gmail and other google apps, check out the Google Apps Status page. That’s where they post information about outages.

The dust seems to have settled, and the Gmail team has posted an interesting postmortem to their blog. Operating a huge service like that without forcing development to grind to a halt is an amazingly difficult task that I’m glad I don’t have to deal with.

Google’s recent announcement of Chrome OS generated a lot of press, not surprisingly. As usual with the tech press, a lot it consisted of mindless hype or knee-jerk contrarianism, but several blog posts I read seemed to have a thoughtful, skeptical (in a good way) outlook.

Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context
Discussing the relative failure of iphone web apps to native apps”:

Mediati was right that not just developers but users wanted native third party apps for the iPhone. The difference from what Google is promising with Chrome, however, is that web apps will be the native apps on the system. Presumably all of the default applications from Google itself will themselves be the Google web apps we already know. It’s an eating-your-own-dog-food issue. What irked about Apple’s endorsement of iPhone-optimized web apps as a “really sweet solution” was that, of course, none of the iPhone’s built-in apps were web apps. They were all written in Objective-C with Cocoa Touch. Apple’s own iPhone apps set a high bar for user experience — a height that could not (and still can’t) be reached with web apps running in MobileSafari.

and countering the “oh, it’s another linux distro” meme:

Whatever Chrome OS turns out to be, it isn’t going to be that kind of “Linux”. They’re using the Linux kernel, yes, but they’re building something new and original on top of that. Linux is to Chrome OS what BSD is to Apple’s iPhone OS — which is to say something that users will never see, smell, or notice.

Google’s Microsoft Moment
On Google’s public perception:

when Google evokes Apple or Microsoft or Oracle in its style of communicating ideas, and when cell phone ads on TV say “Powered by Google”, an average consumer’s conception of Google essentially shifts to seeing this company not as “those guys who do the search engine” but instead as another consumer electronics company, like Samsung or Sony, but a little more hip.
This would be okay, except that I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads — we’re just a bunch of geeks in Mountain View!” And while that might be true for the vast number of engineers who define the company’s internal culture, the external impression of Google being just another tech titan like Microsoft will gain footing, making the audience for Google’s messages less tolerant of ambiguity and less forgiving of mistakes.

On taking criticism:

Worse, because most of the dedicated detractors of Google have been either competing companies or nutjobs, it’s been hard for Googlers to take criticisms seriously. That makes it easy to have defensiveness or dismissal of criticisms become a default response.

Why Googlers should read Anil Dash’s post
Matt discusses Anil’s post (above), and how our internal concept of Google can differ drastically from how people see us from the outside:

Many Googlers, especially old-timers, still think of Google from early days, when we were the underdogs in search. But many people outside the company perceive Google as a huge company with an outsized shadow. We can scare people, even when we’re trying not to.

Lots of good advice there, and some of the comments on that post are worth reading.

Why it doesn’t matter that you can’t run Photoshop on ChromeOS today
Abe counters the surprisingly common argument I saw in some of the crappier articles on the subject:

“I’m not interested in ChromeOS, since it won’t be able to handle heavy-duty programs like Photoshop.”
That might be true today, but it won’t be true forever (or even for long).

I read one article that said that nobody would use ChromeOS because it can’t run Office (can’t find the link right now). Then just last week, Microsoft announces plans to extend Office to the browser. Heh!

A NY Googler goes to Times Square and asks people what a browser is. 8% of them knew:

It’s easy to forget that I live in a bubble.