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So Will Wheaton never posts on G+ any more. Did we stop bribing him or what?

Or is it just because he couldn't transition over to GA+? @115428577457526581719?









 

Closing the viral loop: we're slowly getting there. Here's a personal anecdote.

- heard a neat song on the radio
- used Ears to figure out what it was.
- watched the youtube video via Ears link. Liked the 80s-TRONish vibe enough to +1 it.
- Searched for La Roux on the browser, found friends recommending specific tracks.
- back to Ears, go to Play Music.
- Bought the album after listening to recommended tracks.
- Sharing this here (and will on public G+ in a few) so others can discover.

Loops like this are what power your social network. We can still do a better job, but I'm quite happy with my experience here and I hope others will slowly get there too.

discover, consume, share, repeat FTW


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk8eJh4i8Lo






 

Okay, have a domain name. Now need to come up with free-time to make my web-site-makeover / judging hangout-on-air show a reality.


http://viewsorcerers.com






 

Should we be worried that searching for "google shuttle wifi password" finds a tweet with the correct answer?









 

Resharing internally...

Do you get depressed when you view-source?

Recently I've been doing this a bit for authorship and thought it might be fun to do it in a more general public way. Anyone interested in being a celebrity judge?


https://plus.google.com/117259934788907243749/posts/A6hCjzRdzBD






 

@115428577457526581719 any chance that Wil could use the account migrator tool we promised people back when? Has anyone contacted him?

Also this might be controversial, but we should have a proactive VIP queue for people like Wil. It worked well at LinkedIn (paying customers went to the front of the line). hi5 did it too (we had CS reps that killed off spam on the most popular profiles). And even Six Apart had business class blogs.


https://plus.google.com/108176814619778619437/posts/Mm1ppkUz5zu






 

Russian "classmates" site now has public profiles and schema.org markup, however looks like we're not getting that goodness in the sharebox..


http://www.odnoklassniki.ru/profile/505699888741






 

 

Work to do

We've got work to do.

I just spent a week in the Palm Springs area attending the Indian Wells tennis tourney while using our products. It was good to get outside the bubble for while, but it was frustrating -- especially since I know we can do much better. Issues I encountered:

* Public Google+ shares are rare. This might be expected with the demographics of the area (>50 year old golfers) -- however looking at my G+ nearby view I was the only person to publicly post the winner of the Tennis final (and that stadium holds 16k people...) Nearby stream was depressingly too -- only a handful of posts. Also I think the nearby view should expand distance in "sprawl-like" areas like this. When I was in Palm Springs I didn't see any nearby posts in the nearby towns.

* During the rain delay you had to look at the Facebook Tournament page to find out when play resumed. On-site they had a big 'Check-in with Facebook' ad on the changeable displays. On the 'Follow Us' screen they did at least have Youtube next to FB/twitter.

* Maps is really borked in this area. I commented on this earlier, but there are many businesses that are not there, or are located in the wrong place. MapMaker edits in the area are in queue for weeks it appears too. Navigation worked fairly well, however I encountered areas where nav got really confused -- not sure if the root cause is Mountains blocking GPS, plain crappy samsung GPS or that road info is not accurate.

* There are some weird Business names that must have been collected by Street View. For example _Elmer's Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner_ which is a literal reading of the road sign.

https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5722007384962904001/5722007386027464434

 

Street view is not so useful in the land of recessed strip malls and gated communities..









 

The gods are trying to force me to take a vacation.

Rental cable internet is inoperable. Time Warner are clueless. Don't expect me to respond quickly to anything. ssh over tethering is painful.









 

Heard on morning edition today

_"follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+"_

awesome.







 

Little Monsters

Just invited to littlemonsters.com. Decided I'd sign up via Facebook Connect (since most people will)

Interesting things:
* popup affordances on the home page guide you to features
* Facebook connect used but only to bootstrap your account.
* Sets up an email forwarding address for you that uses your Facebook primary email.
* Has a link to mail.google.com on your profile to read your email (and a gmail logo)
* No public profiles (as of yet..)
* System posts supported (my profile creation has already gotten one "Like")
* Has +1 buttons!
* Very pinterest style for posts -- big page full of posts. None of this single-column vertical scroll.
* has up and down votes.
* "Fan" instead of following.
* Friend finder not there.
* Sorted list of "New" users.
* Chat rooms.
* "t" button for notifications.
* and holy smokes! -- actually they're provisioning a new mailbox for each user on the GA+ domain littlemonsters.com.

plenty more, happy to demo.

 

Yet another benefit of surfing from a Google IP?

I can find out when my friends Wordpress blogs get owned with stealthy pharma spam that only shows up from our crawlers and from Google referers.









 

Take your Security vitamins!

Security reviews may seem unpleasant, but they're really important to defend our users against the bad folks out there and just plain unintentional sloppiness.

I have to commend the team, their diligence revealed some hair raising issues in a SaaS partner that could have had disastrous consequences for us and all of said partner's customers.

[image CC BY-NC-SA from http://www.flickr.com/photos/teeves/]


https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5717225082897424049/5717225079236654674






 

It's always interesting to bootstrap your friends on G+. In this case I'm helping a DJ/Producer get onboard. He wanted to get his Youtube account linked which has all his videos. (which is a separate Gaia)

First had to get him on multilogin (and have him chose different profile photos so he didn't get confused.)

Then guided him over chat on adding links to his G+ profile... which resulted in the following..

Hopefully getting him into a Hangout goes better.

(Oh and if you like synth-pop ala pre-industrial ministry check him out:

https://plus.google.com/117422414454098030528


https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/5716989080486628033/5716989083951888418






 

Can someone point me to the javascript readability rule that requires that periods go on the previous line for chained call?

someLongAssIdentifier.
foo();

vs

someLongAssIdentifier
.foo();

I keep doing the latter and I'm hoping knowing the rational reason _why_ will help me get out of this habit.

(And I'm secretly hoping this is some ancient IE6ism that we can banish...)









 

More follow buttons all over the web...

@101960497985958811288


http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/02/27/linkedin-follow-button-for-companies/






 

+1 auto expand works. Folks I know that don't normally share are sharing. Now I just have to pester them to upload a profile photo :)









 

It makes me sad when journalists basically state that "Google sells your information".

That said -- there was some interesting discussion in this piece, especially the question "when does targeting become discrimination?". I'd like to think that our algorithms are better than that. However advertisers will often choose their audience based on demographic data that may not actually work...


http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147189154/how-companies-are-defining-your-worth-online






 

 

Can't access b/ cs/ s/ etc?

plindner-macbookpro:~ plindner$ curl https://wpad.corp.google.com/wpad.dat
curl: (51) SSL peer certificate or SSH remote key was not OK

Switching to http fixes my proxies.

Also the proxy.pac on proxyconfig looks for a localhost:8888 proxy, weird!









 

Anyone have scripts they use to manage non-filer-based homedirs?

I already put my git clients in /usr/local/google, but having homedir outage on my ubiquity box made things painful.

Also seems like citc clients were offline, probably because of my missing homedir...









 

 

Feature request for @109934384945258289269

Near the end of the meeting start showing a video game style countdown timer and shut down the monitor at the allotted calendar time.

Optional: add a coin slot to allow for paying to extend the meeting.









 

Remember -- _it's not the users problem it's Google's problem_

Posting from google-plus-discuss@googleproductforums.com

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY UGLY PEOPLE ON GOOGLE
ronald leslie Feb 09 10:02AM -0800

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY UGLY PEOPLE ON GOOGLE









 

The CLs on the bus go 'round & 'round...









 

Hey instagrammers -- anyone know what the canonical web presence for Instragram is? I see that they link to web.stragr.am on the offical Instagram blog, however it's not 'official'..

@109016304695129264328 @110242419133439594545 know anything more?

@106853593867879252009 - who's looking into expanding image social search corpus...


http://web.stagram.com/n/jeera






 

To further google memeification I just added imgur.com and 9gag.com igraph rules.

Anyone know the folks that run these fine sites so we can kindly ask them to support authorship markup?









 

Embeds United!

I'm somewhat alarmed that there really isn't a "Life of a Widget/Embed" that has best practices on how to embed Google Content on third party sites.

Has anyone tackled this before? Obviously +1, adsense, youtube, maps, analytics and others all use their own mechanisms.

Is it time to consider deploying common infrastructure for these use cases? Especially for systems that require the ability to identify a Google user?

So here's my proposal.

* Use oauth2 semantics everywhere: tokens and api requests.
* Use a single bootstrap system to identify js domain, collect API keys as needed.
* Generate two new types of OAuth tokens that do not contain user info.
- 'Anonymous-by-domain'
- 'Anonymous-by-domain-by-api-key'
* Allow an account widget that can move you from anonymous -> identified -> authorized. (including multilogin, signin and account registration)

If all the various embeds used this common system we'd have a way to enable personalization on third party sites more easily and provide a clear way to go beyond.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?









 

Anyone else receive an email from Reid Hoffman asking to enter contact info into a Google Docs form?









 

.. random ES thought on content-based circle classifications..

Imagine if we could infer the type of circle based on either the content you post there (via NLP), the linguistic name, or user specification?

We could:
-- boost/dampen the volume of a post based on circle matching:
I have you in my _Photos_ circle, you share to your _heavy_metal_ circle == dampen.
-- You post your high scores to _public_ + _chess_, I follow you in a circle named _games_ == boost.
-- My wife posts to _family_, I have her in _family_ == boost
-- My wife posts to _Tennis_ and public, I don't have her in a sports circle == dampen.


The reason I've been thinking about this is another what-if --
-- what if Apps had a one-to-one relationship with a plus page?
-- When I add an App, it can circle me back.
-- If I perform an action on the third party site the app can plus-mention me, or it can group together users into relavant circles to send updates.

-- I can put noisy apps in a circle and lower the volume.
Note that App could be a Game (like Angry Birds), an App (like Remember the Milk) or even a web site (like 8tracks or Soundcloud..)

Maybe this is stretching the model too much, but it's certainly fun to ponder!









 

Anyone looking into this? On your radar @103217625524699361065 ?

Oh and can someone tell Danny Sullivan that he should properly link his accounts on his profile?


http://searchengineland.com/dont-be-evil-tool-google-108971






 

My openvpn disconnected and wouldn't reconnect.

Switching to the Council Bluffs VPN server (cbf.v.ext.google.com) and now I'm back on..









 

These are not the Guava you're looking for..

[fun stuff from the interests pipeline]

Otherwise pretty accurate, if a bit heavy on my youtube viewing history...


http://www.freebase.com/view/en/guava






 

oooo.. my ubiquity instance was just upgraded. seems snappier already.

3x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5679 @ 3.20GHz

I/O seems a *lot* better. Builds are almost as fast as my desktop.

Congrats team.









 

 

 

After almost a month our Flume MR is finally running again. The mystery of the broken shard has been finally solved!

*shard (n.)*
a piece of broken ceramic, metal, glass or rock typically having sharp edges.

*sharding (v.)*
dunno… but you will likely wound yourself and you get to keep all the pieces.
— Theo Schlossnagle









 

soundcloud.com -- now with rel="me" on profile links. It's a start!


http://soundcloud.com/plindner






 

It's one of those "You have to spit to see the shine days"...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It9a8MuGv1Y






 

Social 2012

Here are my new years thoughts on the social web platforms. I've been pondering what the world can do to get ourselves out of this one man/one graph/one api situation we find ourselves in and what Google can do to help.

Facebook the product and Facebook Connect/APIs have sucked up most of the social web oxygen. Open efforts have largely failed -- the Google-led consortium OpenSocial has been relegated to niche usage like enterprise or contextual gadgets, OpenID use is declining, Webfinger never took off, oEmbed has murky IP, even RSS and Atom are use is declining.

In particular OpenSocial is now paralleling a different OSF -- the _Open Software Foundation_. Remember that? DEC/IBM/etal banded together to fight off a common enemy (Solaris/AT&T or Windows). There was some decent output from it (I loved me some Tru64 OSF/1 Unix) but in the end it was Linux that disrupted and became the server standard while Windows claimed the defacto client standard. Today both OSFs are in decline and don't define the market.
So what to do? Here are a few of my ideas, what about yours?

* Obviously getting market share for Google+ the product and Google+ the platform helps, it provides an alternative. However if we're not careful we end up with a Coke/Pepsi duopoly, since much of our growth will come at the expense of the wider ecosystem before it starts to take from Facebook.

* Try to build on open standards where it sees broad based usage. OAuth 2.0 is something that everyone (including FB) has actually implemented. Activity Streams and schema.org are ascending. Add social to these where it makes sense.

* Try to nurture the next disruptor and be prepared to jump on it when it comes. Any technology that Google promotes as "open" will likely meet the similar fate as OpenSocial. (And I hope schema.org is the exception here...)

* Do something about the Terms of Service encumbered internet that's slowly taking off.

Hopefully sometime in 2012 there can be a way for everyone to work together on social. I hope to live to see the day that Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and a hundeds of smaller players can do something that lifts all our boats and benefits users.

 

Anyone know the folks at Soundcloud? Love to chat with them about XFN and schema.org markup..

Michael Winton -- maybe you know?









 

Offers

I just filed http://b/issue?id=5777937

Google Offers needs it's own Google+ Page, and we should be promoting it in the daily emails we send. This twitter stuff is so last decade...

 

So looks like I'm on call for microsoft APIs as well.. Their SSL support for apis.live.net went _poof_ at 4:30 this morning -- connection refused on 443.

Almost approaching 5h of downtime. They're definitely not getting their third nine this year..









 

It's all fun and games until git autopacks the repository...









 

Just registered for this event with the hope that I'll be able to get OAuth or XFN support in MediaWiki. Sadly EventBrite has every share mechanism except the +1 button..


https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Hackathon_January_2012






 


Once it's prod-ready my chromebook will be one kick-ass oncall device.

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/spdy-proxy/engineering/sshinatab






 

It's gawker, so take it with a hefty grain of salt.


http://gawker.com/5866291