Google Could Learn from Shakespeare

Last night I attended a performance of Hamlet at Shakespeare in the Park. For all those who don’t know, Shakespeare in the Park is a free performance given throughout the summer in an outdoor theater in Central Park. Tickets are given out to those who wait on line for hours on the morning of the show (for more info, click here). The play was great and the actors were amazing. Like many Shakespeare plays, the producers/directors put their own spin on the classic. Last night’s performance had a very modern take on Hamlet. The soldiers were holding guns. Background sounds of combat filled the air with planes and bombs. The settings may change but the Shakespearian themes stay true.

The interesting thing happened at the end when the story was completely altered from other versions of Hamlet that I’ve seen. I don’t want to give away what happened, for those who might see it, but I found it interesting that the words of Shakespeare stayed the same but this interpretation almost contradicted those words. It was fine. It’s nice to see a different spin on Shakespeare.

This scenario made me think of the current openness trend on the web. Every major company is opening their site up for others to use through APIs. The concepts of data portability and connecting content (Open Social, Facebook going open source, etc..) seem to be building towards an architecture of the web that will allow developers to create applications that are not possible today. These sites, the Googles and Facebooks of the world, think they can write the words to the play and understand how these words will be used in practice. The developers, however, will create the play and will end up interpreting the words as they see fit, even if it’s contradictory to what was originally intended.

Where is the Canola Oil?

I have a few days off before I start my summer internship and today, I was running a few errands. I went to Key Food to pick up some necessary groceries. I haven’t been shopping during the day in a while and was expecting a quick trip…in and out. What I found was a store full of older, probably retired, octogenarians. This is all well and good (even though I had to wait in line while the woman in front of me found the seven coupons she had amongst the thousands she keeps in her wallet). It got me thinking about the core market for that Key Food. Was the older day crowd more profitable than the busy night crowd? Was this the case for all large supermarkets?

Here is why I ask. I recently saw this video:

As we can see, technology advancements are being made in the restaurant industry. Whether they’re better or worse for the customer is a debate for another time. But as I strolled the aisles of Key Food looking for the items on my shopping list, I became extremely frustrated with the poor technology advancements of the supermarket industry. Where can I find the Canola Oil? The sugar and spice section? The baking section? There are certain standard rules that supermarkets have invented and stuck by. Like the fact that bread is usually against one of the walls (usually the left). The milk is going to be somewhere in the back with the cold dairy items. Once these staple items are placed, each supermarket makes up their own categorization for sections which makes it very hard for unfamiliar shoppers.

So we have robots starting to serve us in restaurants but supermarkets are still in such disarray? I’m not proposing that robots should get my groceries, even though that would be nice. Here’s is what I want. I want to be able to go online and put in my shopping list. Then, the website can let me know what aisle every item is in. That’s it! Sounds simple. The supermarkets already have their set sections. Is it so hard to put them online for all to use?

It is simple, but here is why I think supermarkets haven’t implemented this simple convenience. It’s because their core market is the retired crowd who shop in the middle of the day. These people don’t need this convenience. So why put the extra money into a new website feature? I’ll tell you why. The first supermarket to implement this simple feature will get all us, non-retired people who use the web daily,  as repeat customers. We’re not baby-boomers, but we’ve got money (well, I’m a student, so not a lot yet). And we can make a difference in some chain’s bottom line if they give us a reason to.

That A in Penmanship Really Helped

Back in junior high school I had to write all my essays in script. For those who don’t remember (or aren’t old enough to know about this), script was the preferred method of writing for education institutions a while back. I hated script. Mainly because I wrote faster in print. The whole point of script was that you could write quicker. That was the upside, no? But it didn’t work for me. I wrote better in print (did I mention the A in penmanship?). And yet, up to the 7th grade, I was forced to write all my essays in this horrible form of wavy-lined expression. I still have no idea how teachers graded papers. Other people’s script is illegible.

Why do I bring this up? I just finished my first year of getting my MBA. For my finals, I had to write over a dozen essays in a short period of time in these little blue essay books. Besides the fact that my hand felt like it was going to fall off after each round of essays, I noticed that my handwriting is much worse than as it used to be. This is, I think, because I don’t write anymore. Who writes? I type everything. The most I write in a given week is when I’m traveling somewhere new and am copying directions from Google Maps.

So here is my theory. Writing, with a pen and paper will be as unpopular in the future as writing script is today. Currently, the average person only uses script when they’re signing their name (except for those few who use it to write birthday cards…just to let you know, we never understand what you’re writing about). Writing in general will dissappear. All school notes, memoirs, and even birthday cards will be typed and the art of penmanship will die out like HD DVD.

40,000 Songs Per Child

I remember my music collection as a young teenager. It mainly consisted of CDs that I got from signing up to Columbia House or BMG’s CD delivery service. I had more CDs than most of my friends. I’d say my total collection was about 50 CDs. That’s roughly 600 songs. That wouldn’t even fill up a 10GB iPod.

Now you have people of all ages carrying around over 50 GB in their pocket. Apple’s 80 GB iPod stores 40,000 songs! Please remember this when the music industry gives you their sob story about how their losing business because of piracy. They brought it upon themselves for reaping the profits of this mass consumption of their product without listening to their consumers (Apple had to pull teeth to get them to charge $1 a song). They could have avoided their current losses if they actually provided the consumers what they wanted ten years ago when MP3s were becoming popular.

Note to TV and movie studios: Make your content as accessible as possible and sell advertising (like what you’re doing with Hulu). Don’t make the same mistake as the music industry and try to milk the consumer for as long as possible.

I Love Hulu

I truly love Hulu. For those who don’t know, Hulu was a venture by NBC and FOX to bring their television shows onto a streaming site where they control the advertising. The interface was created by Avenue A | Razorfish and it’s clean and easy to use. Every episode from NBC and Fox isn’t on Hulu but they have a nice selection of shows and the content is updated within a couple days of the show’s airing. The service just works REALLY well. I watch the shows that I want, when I want. There are a few ads during the shows at the time when commercial would show up, but they’re short and unobtrusive.

Techcrunch just reported that Hulu has broken into the Top 10 video sites online knocking Google Video off the list.

Hulu users are streaming over 63 million videos and, on average, are watching over two hours of video per month each.

Wow! So I guess I’m not alone in loving Hulu. Why can’t TV studios understand? We’re happy to watch ads if you give us the content we want when we want it. You can’t beat piracy. People will always try to circumvent the established system. But if you can give us what we want, most of us won’t use Bittorrent ever again…maybe.

Communication Proximity

A close friend of mine recently got married and moved to Toronto where his wife’s family lives. When he lived in New York, he and I used to get together when we could but we were both very busy and at times didn’t talk to or see each other for a couple months at a time. This was all fine and good because when we did see each other, we acted as friends who speak to each other all the time. The relationship didn’t change because we didn’t talk or see each other often. We were both busy a lot. That’s life.

Now that he is living in Toronto, he wants to talk on the phone more often because he’s so far away. I don’t see a difference in the situation whether he is 5 miles away or 500 miles away. If I don’t see him, I don’t see him. The rate of phone conversations should stay relatively the same, no? He’s a close friend of mine so I’m happy to speak to him whenever he and I have time. This whole situation, however, makes me wonder about how physical distance affects digital relationships.

Is there a difference whether a friend lives down the block or across the country? Does the potential of seeing them (hopping the car for 10 minutes) change the way or how often you communicate with someone? I’m guessing it does, which is extremely interesting. Everything is moving towards the ability to communicate with people remotely as if we were in the same room with them. For the first time this week, I had a video chat with my in-laws. It was fun and I’m sure we’ll do it again soon. No matter how realistic this communication becomes, I still think the proximity to this person will affect the way you communicate with this person. Maybe the next generation can get over this psychological need to be close to somebody in proximity. We shall see.

The Connected / Disconnected Future

Some of my most memorable moments of my childhood and young adult life happened when I was away from the day-to-day happenings. Specifically, when I was a camper and counselor at camp where I was taken away from the world that I knew and was placed into a temporary ecosystem of bad food, no communication with the outside world (cell phones and the internet weren’t in your pockets back then), and a new social environment with summer-only friends. These absences from real life provided moments of clarity (especially in my young adult life) where I was able to contemplate my life’s goals free of distraction.

Are the youth of the next generation going to have this opportunity? How can they escape from the world and contemplate life with cell phones and web-enabled phones so prevalent? It goes beyond the youth. When was the last time you didn’t use the internet for more than 48 hours? It’s getting harder and harder to isolate yourself. As an adult, I can turn off my phone on vacation to spend quality time with my family. As a youth, however, I never would have shut myself out voluntarily.

This is just one example of how the new digital age is going to change the way we live. Our children will never be away at camp disconnected from the world where they can be a part of simpler, slower lifestyle. I’ll miss getting disconnected from the world. Only when I’m disconnected do I realize how connected I really am.

Let My Data Go

The current disagreement between Facebook and Google brings to light the the bigger issue of data portability which was summed up quite well by Steve GIllmor over at Techcrunch. This is a HUGE issue which needs to start being talked about outside of the tech world. I’ll try to sum up the situation in simple terms for those who don’t know about it (or as my wife would put it, not as nerdy as me).

Your personal information is spread out all over the web. Your email provider has it, as well as other sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, WSJ, NYTimes, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc…). You might not be signed up to many sites where you have a username and password but you definitely have a few. What these sites did with your information could sometimes be ethically questionable. Some sites sold the ability to market to you (you might know it as junk mail or spam). Others were more responsible and kept the data private but might have kept your personal information on low security servers which made your information ripe for the hackers taking.

The problem here is that YOU did not control your data and how it was treated. And because every place that would need our information is now becoming digital, this lack of responsibility of managing our information is quite the cause for concern. Because of these issues, the idea of you having control over who has your personal information and what they do with it has become a popular concept called Data Portability. Here, watch a video.

This Data Portability issue is becoming a hot topic lately because of the Google-Facebook controversy. Google and Facebook both understand that users are going to start demanding their data be portable. So both companies create programs that allow you to take your information outside of their walled gardens. Regardless of whether you think it is within Facebook’s right to bar Google from using Facebook’s API, there is one thing we have to acknowledge. Neither company is providing true data portability. They’re just changing their walled gardens into walled tunnels that allow us to traffic what they feel we can share, not what we think we should share.

For too long, companies have made money off of our personal information. It’s about time companies are forced to provide good quality services to get our eyeballs/business. Feel free to support Google and Facebook’s new approach to letting data outside of their sites. But understand that this has to be just one step towards true data portability. Otherwise, our data is still held hostage by a corporation that is only interested in its own bottom line.

The Web 2.0 Civil War

I’ve been noticing a lot of battles amongst Web 2.0 giants lately. Let’s just take a look at a few of them:

• Microsoft’s battle to buy Yahoo (now it’s more like Yahoo’s battle to be bought by Microsoft)
• eBay’s battle with Craigslist
• Michael Arrington’s battle with Wired
• and more recently, Google’s battle with Facebook

What I find most interesting about these battles is that, only recently, are we seeing the dark side of business with some Web 2.0 darlings. eBay and Craigslist! They’re such good companies that have helped consumers communicate and get better prices for their goods. Why are they fighting? Well, it’s because eBay bought 25% of Craigslist and then launched a competing service. What about Michael Arrington and Wired? Well, Techcrunch is going to be syndicated at the Wall Street Journal website and Wired is pissed about it.

What is comes down to is that none of these companies (even Craigslist) is about anything other than money. Each company has its own agenda and it all comes down to dollars and cents. Find me one successful web 2.0 company that seems to be altruistic in its ways and I’ll show you how all they’re doing is focusing on the $$$. You have to love capitalism.

Google Launches Friends Connect

Yesterday Google announced a new initiative to bring our social connections outside of the stronghold of social networks. A video of how it works is embedded below

While we can see that concept of having one ID across the whole web is in its initial stages, I believe it can have significant impacts on businesses in the near future. I’ll discuss those in future posts.