Google appears simply to lack the ability to anticipate how its actions will be perceived. Or in the case of the recent Wi-Fi scandal, actually has no knowledge of what it’s actions really are.

“Oops, we didn’t read the code! Copy/paste, copy/paste! Coding is fun!”
- Anonymous Google employee (possibly a robot)

And Facebook has the social monopoly. There’s nowhere else for users to go, so there’s no commercial incentive for change. All its users can do is complain. You’re not seriously suggesting that people could ever leave Facebook, right? Don’t be silly.

However, things could be looking up. Last night, when I logged into Google Reader, it asked me whether I wanted my Shared Items to be public or “protected”. I chose the latter, allowing me to share only with selected groups in my Gmail contacts. This can be configured under “Sharing Settings”.

Logging out of Google and visiting my old shared items URL confirms this indeed works.

Then for some reason, I had the fun time of typing in all my friends email addresses one at a time to follow each of them. Thanks Google UI designers.

Firstly, the Nexus One has no multitouch, which is a deal breaker. Secondly, it’s not yet available in Australia (according to Google). However, I recently discovered that Apple has suckered me into being a permanent iPhone customer without me even realising it.

I’ve bought a few paid Apps for my iPhone. I can’t remember how much I’ve spent but it would be about $45. I was not conscious of it at the time but these apps I’ve paid for won’t work on any other phone. If I switch to an Android phone (or any other phone), I’ll be losing that investment. I guess I could buy an iPod Touch but what’s the point of carrying around two relatively bulky smart devices, and one where my apps only work over WiFi? I guess all I can hope for is that the iPhone hacking community figures out a way to run Android on the iPhone. Now that would be a “superphone”.

On a related note, do the Android apps have to be open source? Regardless, without an iTunes App Store equivalent, and hence the prospect of cashing in big time, devs won’t be as motivated to develop for Google’s platform if they don’t see a clear business model or way they can make money from it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew

FUCK. OFF.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JxcBH_rA2Y

The interface is simple. You can click an “I like this” button for each item. This is the most important UI feature Reader has introduced to date. Using the shortcut keys, I can read articles with acceptable speed and use the L key to quickly flag interesting items. However, what Google does with this “user X likes item Y” training data needs a lot of work.

Here’s some improvements that need to be made, ASAP:

• It shouldn’t show me items from feeds I subscribe to and have already read (syntactic duplication).
• It shouldn’t show me reposts of news stories I have already read (semantic duplication). If a story is deemed relevant, show me the most authoritative reporting of it.
• It shouldn’t show me useless no-content feeds that require you go to the original site to view the story.
• If it’s going to recommend YouTube videos, then it should use the mountain of data it already has on the YouTube network already, not just recommend based on popularity.
• Recommendations need to have much higher precision. Currently, I estimate its less than 0.1  (for every 10 items I read, 1 is relevant).
• It should apply the relevance filtering to posts in my existing subscriptions, most of which have similarly low precision.
• However, there are some feeds such as web comics which should not be filtered. I want to read every single XKCD whether I find it funny or not. If a system could predict which I find funny before I read them I’d be thoroughly impressed!
• Ranking of items (by “magic”? please…) is NOT important. I want to read stories from oldest to newest. I want recall of 1.0 and precision of at least 0.8 or I’m not interested.

To be successful, it needs to merge StumbleUpon’s classification system (which has the logic right) with the Google Reader framework (which has the interface right).

To make a parallel with Gmail and spam classification, the reason Gmail’s anti-spam shits all over other spam classifiers is that Google added a simple “This is Spam” button to the web interface, effectively outsourcing the training of spam messages to its enormous user base. Similar techniques can be applied to Google Reader, but on an individualised basis.

Key to the success of such a classifier is social analysis, which is used by StumbleUpon and Last.fm recommends music I might like, based on what people with similar taste listen to.

OK, so this is pretty old news but I hadn’t really noticed until recently as they don’t show a link for all documents. But why is this so awesome? PDF is a rich format that offers many features not really relevant to web search. Most often searchers are just looking for some information, like MSY’s latest price on that Hot New Intel CPU.

But this only affects search results. But you can install a Greasemonkey script which opens all links to PDF, PPT and DOC files using the Google Docs Viewer. We’ve had online apps for a while, but I consider Google’s  step of opening up the GDocs Viewer to be THE official singularity, or “beginning of the end” for the humble desktop application. After this, there is no turning back. And I for one, want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Or as a friend of mine once said “Firefox + Internet = Operating System”.

That said, one feature that needs improvement is searching within documents. This is only enabled for some documents, presumably the one Google has had time to index the metadata or OCR. And search hits are only highlighted with no feature of iterating through them.

I realised something very interesting about Chrome recently that hadn’t occured to me until I was installing Adblock Plus in Firefox. It’s not a dealbreaker but still: Chrome will never support decent ad blocking software. Think about it, where does Google get a large chunk of their revenue?

That aside, here’s an exhaustive list of why I want to switch to Chrome:

• Speed.

However, its still missing some features preventing my permanent switch to the web browser on all platforms. In decreasing order of importance:

• Lack of bookmark synchronisation, e.g. Xmarks.
• Lack of (non-alpha) Linux support.
• Lack of Mac support.
• Missing “/” find in page shortcut.
• Inadequate replication of the Firefox search bar.
• Cannot set minimum font size in options.
• Cannot customise toolbar layout (I could save 32px of vertical real estate by having my bookmarks and address bar on same line).

I have to ask: will Chrome just be this decade’s Firefox? Firefox (Phoenix) was touted as a slim, lightning fast, no-nonsense browser. But lately, Firefox has been slow to the point of frustration. This is either due to an intrinsic inefficiency, or caused by the Extensions “feature” which, uncontrolled facilitates user-crafted mega-bloat.

Stylish is a Firefox Extension that can apply custom CSS styles to certain webpages, in most cases fixing a user-identified problem with the design. DJBullwinkle has written a custom style called Google Reader Absolutely Compact which does exactly what it says on the box.

Basically, it makes several improvements on the much bloated default interface, allowing you to maximize the efficiency of your screen real estate.

• Article text spans full width of screen
• Compact no-frills borders around items
• Almost all heading stuff removed, save for the search box
• Narrower left-hand column

Visit the link for a preview of the changes, or just try it out! This has been added to my list of essential Firefox tweaks; it’s a godsend.

I should mention, this also removes some navigation buttons, so you’re gonna want to get up to speed on the keyboard shortcuts by pressing “?” in Google Reader.

My only real criticism would be to increase the size of article headings so they stand out a bit more, which you can do by changing the font-size from 100% to 140% as below:

/* shrink titles, but add underlining for visual identification */
.entry .entry-title {
    font-size:140% !important; }

I will conclude by remarking on a trend I’ve noticed in online interfaces since using websites which tailor their design to the iPhone and iPod Touch. These interfaces are some of the most efficient and user-friendly I’ve used to date: Google Reader, Google Talk Gadget, Gmail, FaceBook, Last.fm, ANZ Internet Banking, there are more.  Web designers should be reminded that only when forced to trim a design back to the bare essentials, do you realise what those essentials actually are. You discard all those tacked on superfluous features (Google is notorious for this, just look at Gmail), until only the functional ones remain.

Happy reading!