Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 15:33:00 -0800
Subject: Firebase - Looking to hire Engineer #5 for our Core Development team

I just came across your LinkedIn profile and thought I'd reach out to you because of your impressive experience at Google.

---
The things you find when cleaning out your inbox...

#googplus

Looking for anything related to a hotel in Google Search sucks. Too many people chasing referral dollars. Search for 'hotelname city' gives me:

- Google provided 'Related to Hotelname' onebox of 8 hotel images/links
- Google provided onebox of 'Your related activitiy' showing me images of my other hotel searches.
- Big KP on the right rail, with booking and more (dupe) images of the same hotel.
- Favicons.. oof
- Stars, lots of star ratings. 12 to be precise.
- 3 entries with related searches, plus a related searches link at the bottom.
- Love the use strikethrough "Hotelname City 7 (-70-) Hotel deals

I ended up asking friends for advice...

#googplus

This post below is a copy of a Sep 17, 2014 post from the internal Google+ Team community.

I'm reposting it because today I published an Obituary site that includes some of these https://www.julieslife.com/more/email discussed here. What I wrote today is just as import
ant today as it was back then.

Mediating and initiating local and human connections are needed now more than ever.

[I'd also say that we need preservation too, I'm fortunate to be able to relive these memories, compared to MySpace or Snapchat users.]

Anyway, here it is after 5 years....

Subject: Local Grungy People?

...and the importance of serendipity, locals and shared interests.

warning longish philosophical post ahead...

I thought the pre-TGIF Social Presentation was weak, but it did contain one very important quote there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. If I were presenting I'd dump almost all of the mechanics about how we suck at onboarding and just tell a story about that.

Tell a story about how we go from sharing an interest to sharing your entire life together. Tell a story about how we're going to help users with this basic need to connect, and how Google can use technology to mediate this. Tell us how Google can provide just the right amount of serendipity that helps people connect on a personal level. (and then provide the rest of the infrastructure to do the private/personal thing too.)

Because that's my story. It's how a shared interest became love and a wonderful life spent together, due to mailing list: GRUNGE-L

Back then there were no profiles, but there were .signatures. So serendipitously I found myself discussing bands with someone a few miles away. Until one day I made the personal connection and sent the following email.

The rest, as they say, is history

Date: Wed, 8 Jan 92 13:04:43 CST
To: [email protected]
Subject: Local Grungy people

Hey, are there any other people from Minnesota besides you and myself
on the wonderful grunge-l mailing list?

I'm always interested in putting a face onto an e-mail address. I'll
probably be at the Babes in Toyland Show saturday, and the Local Band
showcase on Monday.

Interested?

--
| Paul Lindner | [email protected] | "You have to Spit
| | Computer & Information Services | to See the Shine" --
| Gopher Dude | University of Minnesota | Babes in Toyland
///// / / / /////// / / / / / / / / //// / / / / / / / /

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NESF4NCanpg

#googplus

Looking for a break? Want to improve fairness for Google products? Have a supportive manager? Then check out this short-term opportunity on the John Henry Team:

https://grow.googleplex.com/opportunity/job/2000000070880

So what exactly would you be doing you might ask...

- Work with a system that pulls all the term lists used for blocking through Google and properly categorize them based on identity facets.
- Work with research/product partners to apply this merged, vetted Societal Context dataset. Help remove bias from underlying systems and ML algorithms
- Build tools that will help us develop System Dynamics as a common practice in policy making and the product design process.
- Have fun!

Our environment is Java+Spanner with a goal of migrating to GraphStore in 2020.

Happy to chat about this opportunity or the project as a whole.

#googplus

Foone had a great article about the https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1190784395356950535 device. So I made a joke that today they'd have your allowance on the blockchain, with an Alexa "CleanRoom" Oracle that rewarded you with "ChoreCoin".

Turns out someone beat me to it....

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.sweetcandy.chorecoin&hl=en_US

#googplus

2 months notice for the death of Yahoo Groups. Google Group folks take notice, this is not acceptable for preserving the history of the internet.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN31010.html

#googplus

Unintended consequences of Google Image Search.

THE VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students.

https://www.theage.com.au/education/history-transformed-in-vce-exam-20121114-29ce7.html

You heard about Young Karl Marx, but have you heard of VI Lenin Evangelion ?

#googplus

I joined the http://go/johnhenry team a few weeks ago. Finally getting a chance to post about it after an exciting https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/societalcontextsummit2019.

Excited to be team building again and really excited about the possibility of bringing systems thinking at scale into Google. Looking forward to how our first partner http://go/delavega uses our Societal Topography and Societal Context Repository to bring ML Fairness to display ads.

So much to learn and many challenges ahead.

#googplus

...then Google said "Let there be iGoogle"; and there was iGoogle. And Google saw that the javascript was good and separated the gadgets from the container origins....

Fast forward over 10 years and this serving system is still the underlying force keeping light from darkness. After a good run in Social it was exiled to an uncertain fate with the ever faithful +111756696344385606909 and other true believers keeping it alive.

Exiting the wilderness between PAs it finally found a new home with +109533200203018540387 and +111563624442337972165 into a reliability reset fueled future.

But Gapi needs your help. Please help it find an L5 so it can grow and thrive as it fully migrates to new infrastructure

https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/b9f41ecb-c6c5-4129-af30-2e1181d645c9

#googplus

Someone's going to eventually make a Google Duplex version of this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33CIVjvYyEk

#googplus

Fulton pointed out that generational change, and how it is handled, is often one of the most critical moments in any organization that hopes to last more than a decade or two. In times of generational change, much of the ability for a successful transition comes from the founding DNA and governing systems that were set up at the organization’s inception.

https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/long-lived-institutions-205f28330f79

#googplus

In honor of the recently departed Google+ community/page here's a recent squirrel eating a strawberry from my neighbor in Montclair Oakland.

They expertly trolled the folks there with the subject "Who's stealing my strawberries!"

cc David Bresbis who I remember being a fan...

#googplus

I finally made it to the Allyship Fundamentals course. Recommended.

https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/allyship/home

#googplus

[crosspost from industryinfo..]

One thing we at Google could do is advocate for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit scheme for Games.

- Game publishers would put their games in Escrow when they publish.
- Google could publish a spec on how to interpret the game contents.
- 'Orphan' games would actually be preserved.
- Users that purchased the Game would then be entitled to a copy of the escrowed item, plus the design on how to run them.

This, combined with an export of user-generated data would allow for usability after Stadia or the Game Publisher sunsets the service/game.

And TBH I'd love to see this extended to all Online "Stores" that don't let you export usable contents.

Barring something like that Google could enter a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact with our users if we're serious about the long-haul.. For each purchase a user makes put 10x in a locked escrow fund. When the service cancels that money can be used to migrate the games to a new provider or payout back the user.

- If Stadia gets few users it's not a lot of money to exit and actually would increase satisfaction.
- If Stadia does get popular then there's an explicit feedback loop that reinforces the durability of the system and alignment of interests.

Evernote announced something like this, but never really followed through. A small company called https://www.forever.com/guarantee actually does have a preservation fund that is purpose driven.

#googplus

Happy to see this project. Looking into ways to support it, because they face a steep climb.

Inspired by the folk hero John Henry....Because, despite intelligence, physical strength and an incredible will, (1) he lacked a complete understanding of the system he was challenging, (2) he struggled alone, and (3) he struggled with outdated technology.

https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/project-john-henry/home

#googplus

Today I attended the "Designing for At Risk Users" course. I find it incredibly galling to hear what Youtube did today given the targeted harassment and doxing.

It flies in the face of what was taught and own standards about giving targets the means to "make it stop".

https://standards.google/guidelines/google-material/usability/at-risk-users.html#user-identities

While anyone can experience a privacy or security event, at-risk users face a variety of life circumstances that might put them at unusually greater risk:

.....

Who they are: Anyone could be targeted at some point in their lives simply based on a personal characteristic such as age, gender, ethnicity, reputation, financial stability, sexual orientation, or education.

.....

Active Event

Where possible, users should be able to quickly and easily access practical guidance as they experience a privacy or security event, such as cyberstalking, online impersonation, surveillance, spear-phishing, or account hijacking. Users will likely want to understand what is happening and take steps to respond. They are likely to feel high levels of stress in this state, so easy-to-use designs will be especially helpful.

#googplus

Red Hat turns 20 so they asked former folks for their memories. Here's something I dug up that might be of interest to folks 'round these parts..

... I never got a response on this email; but that might be because Red Hat was always late paying Google Invoices..

Looks like Joan is still here. Ray does not show up in Epitaphs.

#googplus

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/introducing-auto-awesome-photobombs.html

#googplus

Before we bury G+ it might be worthwhile to collect some memorabilia...

Marc Weber from the Computer History Museum asked if we wanted to contribute Google+ artifacts to CHM. They don't care about swag, but I could think of a few things that they might be interested in:

- The Obama + Dalai Lama framed print.
- The Buffalo? (Too big?)
- The Emerald Sea painting (did anyone save it?)

Open to suggestions....

[Too bad the Apiary whiteboard is long gone....]

#googplus

So I thought I'd write an apps-script macro to help find Twitter profiles of my G+ circled people. [I'm assuming these contacts will go away on April 2nd, right Greg Wolfe ?]

Code works, but App Script barfs on the Twitter javascript used to render the follow buttons. So I just grabbed the html output and stuck it on a server and clicked the follow bu
tton...

If someone wants to poke at it and/or publish it (I have no time for either) have at it...

You can access it here:

https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbz8RJl6qIS6x1PTQss_O1Xz69l1_bp1QcyJPoxnW9qITvFYTEI/exec

And the xss-riddled code looks like this:

function doGet() {
var html = '<!DOCTYPE html>';

do {
var pageToken;

var connections = People.People.Connections.list('people/me', {
pageSize: 100,
personFields: 'names,urls',
pageToken: pageToken
});

connections.connections.forEach(function(person) {
// Skip people without URLs in their profile.
if (!person.urls) {
return;
}
person.urls.forEach(function(url) {
if (url.value && url.value.match(/twitter.com/)) {
var name = url.value;
if (person.names && person.names.length > 0) {
name = person.names[0].displayName;
}
html += '\n<br><a class="twitter-follow-button" href="' + url.value + '">';
html += 'Follow ' + name + '</a>\n';
}
});
});
pageToken = connections.nextPageToken;
} while (pageToken);

html += '\n<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>'
var output = HtmlService.createHtmlOutput(html);
output.setTitle('Google+ Follower Finder');
return output;
}

#googplus

Whatever happened to the Orkut Community Archive?

+116817942633187704506 ?

http://web.archive.org/web/20160413222454/http://orkut.google.com/en.html

#googplus

Just a reminder that if you're faced with the task of caring for a loved one at Google I am available to talk.

Also I signed up to donate my excess vacation but I've yet to participate.

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/us-benefits/time-off/vacation/overview--emergency-vacation-don...

#googplus

Looking for a home for the public G+ Postmortems community. Is there a good place to host this? It's not a huge group, only 250 posts, but I would like to see it land in an appropriate place for the participants.

Is there a community of practice around Postmortems that I could reach out to?

https://plus.google.com/communities/115136140203018391796

#googplus

"The first step toward reversing our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport. We cannot be fully human alone. Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our individual or collective will."

In 100 psalms-like entries Rushkoff's manifesto presents a way forward for the situation we find ourselves in.

The two takeaways everyone should understand are
- The inversion of "Figure and Ground"
- Mechanomorphism - treating humans like machines.

It's a breezy, short read and has my highest recommendation. It also gives me hope that we can rediscover

Available at:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Douglas_Rushkoff_Team_Human?id=4Y5gDwAAQBAJ
http:///
https://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294997566

#googplus

2 openings on the Arcs team - one Android-ish, one Cloud-ish. Come work with me and the rest of the Arcs team in SFO...

https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/e8f3fd1f-59d5-4bfe-9a95-0fb706947891
https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/bb80a320-2a69-4236-8618-21f5799a8b15
The http://go/arcs is part of the http://go/cerebra team in Google AI. Arcs is an early stage project creating a new open ecosystem for privacy-preserving, AI-first computing. In this vision the user owns their data, software comes to the device and runs on the data locally, and data egress is carefully managed. The user has a Personal Cloud server that acts as a secure, reliable data repository while also acting as another device with greater resources (power, storage, bandwidth, etc.) than the user’s phone.
We develop software across server (TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Docker, GCP, C++), Android (Java, WebView, TypeScript/JavaScript), and desktop/mobile web (TypeScript/JavaScript, CSS). Much of our work is done in the open on GitHub at https://github.com/PolymerLabs/arcs.

#googplus

Looks like you can get Play Music activity with Location History for free :-/

Visit https://takeout.google.com/
- Select My Activity
- Click on Edit products
- Toggle All
- Select Google Play Music

Downloaded Json has searches, opens and listens going back to ~ June 2017.

Here's an example:

 {
   "header": "Google Play Music",
   "title": "Listened to Wait so Long",
   "description": "Trampled By Turtles",
   "time": "2017-07-13T21:28:54.126Z",
   "products": ["Google Play Music"],
   "locations": [{
     "name": "From your current location",
     "url": "https://google.com/maps?q%5Cu003d37.804363,-122.271111"
   }]
  },

Some days I dream that we renamed Google Assistant to Google Steward,... as in:

3. a person employed to manage another's property, especially a large house or estate.

synonyms:
(estate) manager, agent, overseer, custodian, caretaker;
historical reeve
"the steward of the estate"
a person whose responsibility it is to take care of something.
"farmers pride themselves on being stewards of the countryside"

https://medium.com/s/love-hate/the-death-of-google-is-tearing-its-diehard-communities-apart-ad8332f4...

#googplus

Instead of reflecting on the past year think about what's happened for the last 50 years. I finally got around to listening to a 4 part series about computing in 1968. Highly recommended, very very well done and will blow your mind.

Makes you realize that most of what we've been doing has been riffing on groundbreaking things from that era.

Art? Computer Animation? It all started then with some #cybernetics .. (Ep 1)

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/23/1968-when-the-world-began-part-one-the-pivot/

Google Glass? Augmented Reality? Ivan Sutherland's "Ultimate Display" conceived of it. (Ep 2)

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/30/1968-when-the-world-began-part-two-sword-of-damocles/

Hangouts? Shared Docs? Remote Collaboration? Doug Engelbert's The Mother of all Demos was already there. (Ep 3)

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/07/1968-when-the-world-began-the-mother-of-all-demos/

And the impact felt, with +110664632946820915121 and others:

https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/16/1968-when-the-world-began-return-to-a-square/

Sadly I missed out on the retrospective at the Computer History Museum (was fighting urgent legal/policy fires then)

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

#googplus

Trying to figure out if some Google Feed issues rise to a pageable threshold. go/whodoinotify has escalation paths, but go/news-policy is locked down.

This is regarding:

https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1076666201521180672

and some Moma searching reveals an internal escalation path here:

https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/interest-feed/teams/quality

and another escalation doc "https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxGqThElJyrQ0odnSYpGLx1RhRN5w4xNuzITTnOOhvE/edit?ts=5ae0ab73" I also found an A/C Privileged doc that I won't link here.

Also found a related https://b.corp.google.com/issues/29310297 in 2016, but that was before the Interest Feed reorg...

#googplus

Okay... Who's adding Snark to the training data?

#googplus

See b/121203202 about a horrific experience ordering from Home Hubs from the Google Store. Appears to be stuck over one month in Ingram-Micro Limbo-land.

The sad part is that there's hundreds of these devices in Target Stores nearby. We also happen to run a kick-ass shopping system: "Google Express".

If I felt empowered as an employee I'd buy three hubs from Target, expense them to the Google Store cost center and fix this. I hope someone on the Store team *does* feel empowered to do so; since I know that the playbook reading CSRs won't be able to...

#googplus

Looks like the old go/culture, which was frozen in amber in is here.

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/google-culture/home/google-at-the-edge-of-chaos

Of course that site has links to some old Buzz content that's gone forever:

http://alpha-demo.focus.corp.google.com/buzz/a/google.com/lahosken/SxUWDujDXdN/I-painted-a-bike-shed...

#googplus