Google Circles, Another Take

Technically Facebook has the same functionality but it's much harder to find and use the Facebook equivalent. Circles allow you to assign all your contacts in G+ to one or more groups. You can classify people by geography, by hair color, by gender, first initial or anything your heart desires. In short you can create your own etymology and arrange things any way you want. There is one other important bit of information to keep in mind here, circles are one way so only you know who is in a particular circle.

Facebook and their fans claimed early on that Circles discouraged sharing. There were two fallacies at work in that claim. One, that unfiltered sharing is inherently good and two that having the ability to filter wouldn't encourage additional sharing over and above what people typically do on Facebook since with circles you can be selective about who you share with and are thus more likely to post things you wouldn't otherwise. I know that my posts on Facebook tend to be very bland and generic because I have such a diverse group of friends.

There is an aspect of Google's Circles that I haven't seen get a lot of press. Google claims to make their living by organizing the worlds information. It's true enough in a sense but at the end of the day the reality is they make their money by selling lots of highly targeted ads. To date they've left G+ ad free but that doesn't mean they aren't already making money. My thinking is as follows;  the reason Google is so good at providing highly targeted ad placement to their customers is that they can infer a lot about us based on how we interact with their services. Over time they are able to build up a detailed picture of who we are and what our likes and dislikes are. It's kind of creepy in a way but we got ourselves in this mess because we're suckers for the proverbial free lunch. There is no free lunch and this lack of privacy is the way we pay for our place at the table.

With Circles Google has created an incentive for us to classify all our contacts in a way that provides information about ourselves, and others. Google's data gathering has always worked best when we are given an incentive to participate such as search.Only you know who is in a particular circle and what you've named that circle. While Google doesn't make this information public, they are privy to it internally and can infer many things that would be useful in helping them do an even better job of targeting ads. Better targeting means better click through rates and better click through rates mean higher revenues for Google and happier advertisers.

Google needed to make a credible entry into the social networking arena but that was just a means to an end. Search provides them not only with a billboard but also with a way to get to know us better. It's unlikely that the need for search will ever go away but there is a good chance it will be less important in the future and it's also possible that Google will not be able to maintain their current dominance. The G+ service provides them with an additional opportunity to gather information about us and generate ad impressions.

Image by kiwinz via Flickr

The Stinky Stuff Rolls Every Which Way

One of the commonly repeated phrases if you're operating on the front lines in any business is "the **it rolls down hill". It's a comforting thing to say and true enough in many ways. To be blunt, it also represents a  short sighted and overly simplistic world view.

Now that I've said that I better explain myself.

I've spent time both in the trenches and as a manager so I've been on both sides of the fence and based on those experiences I know that the grass isn't greener on either side. Some combination of personal preference, aptitude and random chance are going to decide which role a person ends up in. If' you're an individual contributor by choice or chance know this, the stinky stuff rolls in pretty much every direction.

To get to the individual contributor level it often has to flow past front line management and it probably went through one or more levels of management before it got to them but that's not the only direction it comes from.

When an individual contributor fails to complete a task in a timely manner it rolls every which way since at the very least their coworkers and immediate manager will have to deal with the consequences of that failure. Dysfunction at ANY level leads to some amount of dysfunction at EVERY level.

I could belabor this point for a few hundred more words but suffice it to say that there are people who primarily produce it and people who primarily deal with it. Being located higher in the food chain means a larger multiplier for either case but being on the front lines does not magically exempt one from appearing on either side of this equation.

Image by Darrow Slade Godeski Merton via Flickr

Twitter Follow/Unfollow Game

Awhile back I wrote about how I disliked the fact that some people would follow me on Twitter and then unfollow when I didn't follow back. Sometimes that's because they are looking for people who are willing to interact and not following back makes two way communication more difficult. I can understand that motivation but I think it's only true in a minority of cases.

I've discovered something worse though. Apparently some people have been told that to be true Twitter superstars you have a positive ratio of followers to follows. So what do superficial people who just want to look good without actually earning it do? They follow a bunch of people, wait a couple of days for the inevitable follow backs and then unfollow all of those people. Then they repeat the process.

Yes, this does annoy me. 

Here's a bit of philosophy. When you game a system you destroy that system. I'm not stupid, I know that human beings do this kind of thing and that is  not going to change even if there is a good chance they'll have reason to regret going down this road later.

Lets expand on that last point, social network influence sites are increasingly popular and powerful. I've talked about Klout and PeerIndex before and they'll continue to come up in the future. The value of these sites is in assigning some sort of number to a particular individuals influence. People who try to game the system to inflate their score undermine the credibility of the score. If that happens it undermines the credibility of the companies assigning those scores as well and you can be sure they'll take that personally and come up with ways to detect and account for the shenanigans. It's not even that hard to do in this case. For example, Klout seems to have no problem scanning all of Twitter every day. All they have to do is look at who you're following today, who you've followed in the past and how long you follow others on average. If I ran a company like Klout and I were feeling nice I'd just lower a persons score if I detected this kind of thing. I'd also flag them as somebody worthy of extra scrutiny in the future. If I were feeling less nice I'd make available an additional score that showed the ethics of the person based how they built their network. A scarlet letter so to speak.

It's very easy on Twitter to create a new identity and start over but it isn't nearly as easy to do so on other sites and there is a big push by both Google and Facebook to force people to use real identities.

I don't expect anyone to stop doing this kind of thing because I say so but I do suspect that currently emerging trends and technologies will at the very least blunt the effectiveness of this approach. There is also a very real chance that public exposure and shaming may be in the cards.

For better or worse, anonymity is increasingly scarce both in real life and on the web.  It's very important to keep that in mind when developing an approach for your social networking interactions.

Speaking of social networking interactions, you can find me on Twitter as #emkey1tweets.

Image via Wikipedia

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• Does Klout Have Clout? (compete.com)
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State Of My BLOG

Image via WikipediaOne of the things that makes writing this BLOG tough is balancing a lot of competing needs and interests.

I write here to help me keep my hand and head in the business and technology world and because I like to think try to understand stuff and write about it.

One thing that makes the whole operation tricky is I'd also like to work in that larger world some day and I worry sometimes about offending a company I might want to work for. I don't generally pull my punches, but there are times when I probably spend a bit too much time thinking about how to phrase something in a way that will be descriptive but innocuous. Taking that approach has a tendency to produce prose that is stilted and bland.

On the flip side, I don't want to be snarky. I know that sells but it doesn't feel right to me. A little humor or sarcasm every once in awhile is OK but I don't see any merit in being some sort of Internet bully.

I don't write for money or fame but I'd be lying if I said I didn't write for recognition. That's one of those basic human drives that we're all hard wired for.

Occasionally I've written about some very esoteric topics. I used to do this without a second thought but as my page views have increased over the past few months I'm starting to have second thoughts. Does anyone really want to hear my half baked ruminations on the future of high performance computing?

Now that I'm on a pretty good positive growth curve do I really want to keep stepping out of the box? Knowing who your audience is and catering to their needs, desires and interests isn't optional if you want to see continued growth.

Which leads to my big question right now. Do I want to see continued growth? I've set myself some fairly aggressive goals for this BLOG over the past few months in terms of readership and so far I've been able to meet them. I haven't set a new goal for this month and the main reason is that I want to figure out where I'm going with this thing. Setting a page view goal pretty much answers that question.

Finally there is the thought that some day I might be looking for a job or a potential business partner. Odds are good that this BLOG will be one of the things they'll examine while working their way through to a decision.  What if they read something that they consider to be sub par or disagree with? I should probably pretend that I wouldn't care but the truth is I would. I work with a great bunch of people and have excellent management but I don't want to be doing what I'm doing today for the rest of my professional life. The thought that I might lose an interesting and potentially life changing opportunity because I happen to do a poor job of explaining a point I'm making or express a controversial perspective is a sobering one.

But I believe life should be about taking risks. When you do that you risk failure. That's a little scary but I'm OK with it. The world is a constantly changing place and right now that is more true than it's ever been in my experience.

Change comes whether we like it or not. We're all running with the bulls; we can ignore this and hope we don't get gored or participate and work towards something better.

Dell No More

Image via Wikipedia
I originally wrote this about six months ago and then shelved it. I'm busy studying for a technical exam right now and decided to dust it off. My opinions on dell haven't changed at all in the intervening time. Once I dropped the matter Dell never got back to me. The case was either automatically closed with zero notice or sitting collecting virtual dust. The text below this paragraph is the previously unpublished post.

I''ll keep this short.  Barring a major change in the way they deal with service calls I'll never buy a Dell nor recommend that anyone else do so again. I've been less than impressed at times in the past when I contacted their support but had always managed to get a satisfactory resolution eventually.  This time I've come to the conclusion that I won't.  Both because they appear to be unwilling and I'm just not willing to invest any more of my time.

I've owned, used or bought in excess of two dozen Dell computers over the past fifteen years.  I've recommended that friends and family buy another half dozen or so in that time.  In the grand scheme of things I'm small potatoes to Dell but I've been a loyal customer for a long time and if they are treating me badly they are likely treating most people badly.

The facts, over the last few months my trusty Dell laptop has been showing increasing signs of trouble. It would crash, and when I rebooted I'd get a screen indicating it had over heated.  When I ran the diagnostics it would power itself off after some random amount of time without identifying the problem.

I dutifully opened a case with Dell and after a bit was able to get their support to dispatch parts to hopefully fix the problem.  This is where the problems began.  After a few days I got a call from one of their repair people; though to be clear, this person wasn't really a Dell employee.  He apparently works for a company that provides support for several different vendors including Dell.  I found this out when I called their support number and got asked for which of a handful of vendors my call was in regards to.  I was out of my office at the time of the call.  I received the voice mail within a couple of hours.  I called back at the number requested and ended up leaving a voice mail of my own.  I never received a call back.

To give a bit more background, I've been by turns either very busy at work with a big high pressure/time critical assignment or on vacation.  The first of those two facts has made it difficult for me to get home on short notice, even though I live very close to where I work.  Another fact is that I own another much smaller laptop, an Alienware M11X first generation that I've been using as a substitute.  Yes, the M11X is essentially a Dell product as well.  Which might explain why it powers itself off randomly while running on battery .  I'm going to have to put in a ticket for that soon.

Two weeks or so went by before I had a chance to get in contact with Dell again.  I was informed that they had tried to contact me numerous times (false) and that the parts had been returned and the incident closed.  After a bit of back and forth where they continued to insist that it was all my fault (great customer service that) they agreed to dispatch the parts again.  A few days later I got a call from a contracted Dell repair person.  We setup a time for the next morning for him to come to my home and do the repair.  Actually we setup a window.  I believe it was three hours.  Halfway through that window he called me to say he couldn't make it until late afternoon.  I'd already missed a couple of hours of work, something I couldn't really afford to do and I had commitments all afternoon.  We scheduled a window for the following afternoon.  I mistakenly heard that the window started at 2:30PM.  The tech thought it started at 2:00PM.  I arrived home at 2:20 and found a message on our answering machine.  The tech had arrived at 2:00, hung around for ten minutes and left.  He had also closed the ticket.  Yes, I was pissed but I'm smart enough to know that this sort of behavior is generally policy driven.  I don't know what Dell's contract with the company that provides repair support looks like but I suspect that there are clauses that encourage this kind of behavior. To be clear, it was the ticket closing part that pissed me off.

The tech and I had a brief conversation in which he suggested that I ask Dell's dispatch to just send a replacement laptop.  This sounded like an excellent idea to me, in part because I had suggested it to Dell after the first failed attempt. After a couple of weeks of arguing with Dell I'm convinced this is not going to happen. Their stance seems to be that it is all my fault that things have gone badly to date.

The laptop in question is nearly four years old.  The extended warranty is about to expire.  I can get a better laptop today for under $1000.   I already have a replacement built into my budget in the March 2011 time frame.   At this point I don't know which laptop I'll be buying then, but I know it won't be a Dell.

Apple iPhone/iPad/HDTV?

Image via WikipediaFollowing Apple in the press is always interesting. When you're the number one technology company in the world it's very hard to hide what you are doing but somehow Apple manages. They are scary good at it.

There are some leaks but the tricky and fun bit is figuring out which ones are credible. Right now the iPhone and iPad tend to be the two products that get the most press. Here's what I think is going to happen with these products over the next six months based on the various rumors that have been circulating and my own intuition.

For the iPhone I'm going with a September announcement and an October ship date. I don't think we'll see a 4G phone but we will see dual band CDMA/GSM, a slightly wider screen and a less boxy form factor. The iPhone 4 was just plain ugly to me. Softening the edges would get them back to a more aesthetically pleasing design. I also think the rumors of a narrower bezel and wider usable screen are credible. The Core A5 processor should be a given as well.

There has been some debate as to whether the next iPhone is going to be enough of an upgrade to be labeled the "iPhone 5". That is purely a marketing decision. I think they will call it the iPhone 5. There will be enough upgrades to justify that naming and after waiting a year and a half people are going to expect it to be a big upgrade even if it isn't.

I also think there is a better than decent chance we'll see Apple release a new iPhone in June of 2012 called something like the "iPhone 5G" that will have one or more flavors of LTE baked in and modest upgrades to the CPU and graphics but otherwise be pretty much identical to the previous generation.

On the iPad front there have been rumors of a late 2011 update. I don't think this is going to happen. The iPad 2 was a big upgrade over the original iPad and it hasn't been out that long. The minute Apple releases an iPad 3 the iPad 2 becomes passe. We're all conditioned to waiting a year or more for upgrades to Apples major product lines and expect to be able to enjoy having Apples best product in a particular category for a full twelve months. Relatively minor updates that don't impact the aesthetic aren't as big a deal because they are essentially invisible.

The iPad 3 will probably be announced in March of 2012. I'd expect it to be a bit thinner, have a much higher resolution display and sport an upgraded camera, GPU and quad core processor plus at least one other feature that nobody has thought of but everyone will want. Yeah, I'm not being very precise with that last prediction. With Apple half the fun is the surprise and it wouldn't be a surprise if somebody like me could figure stuff out five or six months in advance.

There have been persistent rumors that Apple is going to start releasing HDTV's. Other than being a consumer electronics item I don't see the appeal of going this route from Apple's perspective. We tend to keep our TV's for five years plus or until they break. Apple has primarily been selling products with a two to five year life cycle up until now. A lot of their business is built on driving people to buy new product every couple of years. They've arguably been able to accelerate that time table a bit but they haven't fundamentally changed the consumer dynamic in the product spaces they work in.

If Apple does get into the HDTV business I'd expect them to have their first failure in recent memory. The Apple TV product has only recently become a modest success after a major revision and big price drop. Maybe they learned something from that experience and have what it takes to make a run at the TV business but I have some serious doubts.

Related Articles:

• Apple will Launch the iPhone 5 in October, Not September (techie-buzz.com)
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New Month/Brazil

Image via WikipediaThe past few months have been good ones for this BLOG. I've had steady growth page view wise and have been on a role posting wise, particularly this past month when I had twenty seven entries. I don't think I'm going to be able to maintain that pace. In fact this past weekend I went two days in a row without a new entry for the first time in awhile. I did have a couple of updates on my Guitar making BLOG though so I wasn't completely idle.

This month I want to make more time for guitar building which is going to impact my ability to post here. I think that's a better balance though and I want to keep exploring/learning about building acoustic guitars. I have a decent shop after several years of tools acquisition and just need to continue to build on my skill set and try new things. Right now I'm in the mode of learning how to create my own spin on the acoustic guitar so I'm experimenting a bit. That should continue to be fun and a bit frustrating as I occasionally stumble.

On a different tack, today is the second anniversary of my trip to Brazil. The trip was part of an elective I took while finishing up my MBA. I have seldom been as busy or sleep deprived as I was during the next seven days. I've also never been happier. It was an amazing trip from a learning perspective and not counting a brief stay in Canada the first time I'd been out of the US since coming here as a baby from the UK.

Brazil is an amazing country with both tremendous upside and big challenges. The beaches of Rio are every bit as beautiful as they look on TV and in the movies. Some day I'd like to go back but it's hard to believe it could ever be as good. The group of students, staff and faculty I went with all helped make the trip very special.

You haven't lived until you've gone to a Brazilian soccer game. American fans of sports can be enthusiastic but nothing you're likely to experience in the US will prepare you for the intensity of Brazilian soccer fans. A word to the wise, don't route for the visiting team. Oakland Raiders fans are easy going in comparison to what you could expect to experience in Brazil.

OK, time to prepare to greet the week.