Found this today

Groupware Bad
from here (Google, Pandas, and Lobsters)

Now the problem here is that the product’s direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

“Groupware” is all about things like “workflow”, which means, “the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I’m done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked’ to `checked’, and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review.”

…
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

….make it trivially easy for someone to….

Good point, too often overlooked.

Ben Adida writes:

Privacy Advocacy Theater

May 27, 2010 @ 1:58 pm

I like this idea.  He then discusses what he calls advocacy theatre:

I want to focus on a related problem that I’ll call privacy advocacy theater. This is a problem that my friends and colleagues are guilty of, and I’m sure I’m guilty of it at times, too. Privacy Advocacy Theater is the act of extreme criticism for an accidental data breach rather than a systemic privacy design flaw. Example: if you’re up in arms over the Google Street View privacy “fiasco” of the last few days, you’re guilty of Privacy Advocacy Theater. (If you’re generally worried about Google Street View, that’s a different problem, there are real concerns there, but I’m only talking about the collection of wifi network payload data Google performed by mistake.)

On a technical level, Ben follows up:

devices, payload data, and why Kim is (in part) right.

June 1, 2010 @ 8:19 pm

A few days ago, I wrote about privacy advocacy theater and lamented how some folks, including EPIC and Kim Cameron, are attacking Google in a needlessly harsh way for what was an accidental collection of data. Kim Cameron responded, and he is right to point out that my argument, in the Google case, missed an important issue.

Kim points out that two issues got confused in the flurry of press activity: the accidental collection of payload data, i.e. the URLs and web content you browsed on unsecured wifi at the moment the Google Street View car was driving by, and the intentional collection of device identifiers, i.e. the network hardware identifiers and network names of public wifi access points. Kim thinks the network identifiers are inherently more problematic than the payload, because they last for quite a bit of time, while payload data, collected for a few randomly chosen milliseconds, are quite ephemeral and unlikely to be problematic.

Kim’s right on both points. Discussion of device identifiers, which I missed in my first post, is necessary, because the data collection, in this case, was intentional, and apparently was not disclosed, as documented inEPIC’s letter to the FCC. If Google is collecting public wifi data, they should at least disclose it. In their blog post on this topic, Google does not clarify that issue.

I enjoyed the way of thinking here in addition to the issues discussed.

I discovered today, much to my delight, that in Google Reader, when I’m reading a news feed of a blog I like, that when I click “Feed settings”, then “More like this” and voila, you get a list of similar news feeds.

It’s a great way to discover new sites! Very cool.

(It’s also interesting to see which feeds are on the recommended list from multiple source feeds).

Do you have a Google account and ever wonder what information Google has on you?  Well, it has a privacy dashboard where you can look it up and modify settings in one central place.

For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, “Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.”

…

And now we have yet another me-too effort. It’s something called Bing, and it’s the latest iteration of Microsoft’s multiyear attempt to imitate Google.

The name, presumably, is supposed to evoke the sound of a winning game-show bell. The cynics online, however, joke that Bing is an acronym for “But It’s Not Google.”

Here’s the shocker, though: in many ways, Bing is better.

That’s quite a statement, of course — almost heresy. But check it out yourself. It’s easy to compare the two, thanks to sites like bing-vs-google.com. Here, you’re shown search results from both Bing and Google, side by side, on a split screen.

…

But search services are constantly in flux. They’re online, so their creators can keep refining them without making you install anything. Bing will keep getting better — but so, inevitably, will Google. If Google doesn’t eventually respond by making its own results more manageable in Bingish ways, I’ll eat my hat.

…

Finally, people won’t start dumping Google en masse; Google is a habit. Everyone already knows how to work it, and it may even be built right into your Web browser. But if you value your time, you should give Bing a fling.

State of the Art – Bing, the Imitator, Often Goes Google One Better – News Analysis – NYTimes.com.

I, personally, have not tried Bing.  Google does what I want, and, as Pogue says, it’s a habit on some level.  When I want information, I know Google will get it. I’m not interested in “testing out” alternative searches. Based on this, perhaps I should give Bing a try. If I can break my habit.

6/23/2009 03:37:00 PM

From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we’ve identified some performance best practices that we’d like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.

We are excited to discuss what we’ve learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential:

• Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone. A great example of the community working together is HTML5. With HTML5 features such as AppCache, developers are now able to write JavaScript-heavy web apps that run instantly and work and feel like desktop applications.

• In the last decade, we have seen close to a 100x improvement in JavaScript speed. Browser developers and the communities around them need to maintain this recent focus on performance improvement in order for the browser to become the platform of choice for more feature-rich and computationally-complex applications.

• Many websites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire web. Tools such as Yahoo!’s YSlow and our own recently launched Page Speed help web developers create faster, more responsive web apps. As a community, we need to invest further in developing a new generation of tools for performance measurement, diagnostics, and optimization that work at the click of a button.

• While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC’s decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry.

via Official Google Blog: Let’s make the web faster.

Sounds good to me. I’m going to look into that google speed page and the YSlow and  Page Speed applications.