Effortless computing

For faster mobile browsing, Google search has a great trick – do a search, click the ‘Options’ link under a search result and click ‘Mobile formatted’.

You’ll go to the site through Google’s servers, which strip the page down to the bare essentials – text and featured photos. This makes it much faster than browsing the normal ‘desktop’ version of the web page – and cheaper if you’re abroad. (If the site actually has a mobile-formatted version, Google may send you there instead.)

Here’s the Economist as it normally shows and via Google – which cuts it down to less than 3% of the original size – 30 times faster and cheaper.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently:

Think of it as an opportunity to instrument the world. These networks are now so pervasive that we can literally know everything if we want to. What people are doing, what people care about, information that’s monitored, we can literally know it if we want to, [pauses, lowers voice] and if people want us to know it.

via Eric Schmidt: we can literally know everything « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting.

The Onion’s take on it

The company has also encouraged feedback, explaining that users can type any concerns they may still have into any open browser window or, if they are members of Google Voice, “simply speak directly into [their] phones right now.”

Either way, the company said, “We’ll know.”

But another comment by Schmidt Google throws it back on us -

Google will know more about the customer because it benefits the customer if we know more about them.

You don’t have to take these services, but many will make the trade-off. Humans are easy.

Apple sells $40bn a year but has so few products you could fit the whole range on a desk.

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could say that is an oil company. That’s not just saying yes to the right products, it’s saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones. I think this is so ingrained in our company that this hubris you talk about that happens to companies that are successful and sole role in life is to get bigger, I can tell you the management team at Apple would never let that happen. That’s not what we’re about. Small list of things to focus on.

- Apple CEO Tim Cook

Murdoch and Cuban, get over it – we’re all getting our news through filters these days. And now Facebook is joining Twitter, Viewsflow, Google, blogs or just friends’ emails as a source of trusted recommendations of what to read. Few people loyally subscribe to a single news source in the way our parents started and finished with the Times, Telegraph or whatever.

Facebook is already the leading source of human-filtered news, but such sources are still tiny (5%) compared to the general search engines and portals (95%). Facebook’s extraordinary reach (400m users) and comprehensiveness (young users live in it) could change that.

Try it in Facebook

• search for a news outlet such as NY Times or Guardian, or bloggers such as Guido Fawkes
• click ‘Become a fan’ for them
• go to your Home page
• under the left-hand news feed links, click ‘More’ then ‘Create new list’
• call it ‘News’ and add the news sources you’re a fan of
• to add more sources later, click the edit pencil by your News feed’s link and repeat

It’s not that fluid a process yet – but Facebook only suggested this use last week.

Don Dodge, ex-Microsoft, writes a homage to the MacBook. Having also moved to the same machine, I can wholeheartedly agree  - the superb design really does make a difference in everyday use.

Will netbooks replace laptops and desktops? The boss of ARM, the UK company that dominates the design of chips for mobile devices, reckons netbooks will shoot from 10% to 90% of the PC market in a few years.

Even if he means 90% of the mobile computer market, I don’t think so… At Conosco we saw laptop sales outstrip desktops in summer 2008 – we now sell 50% more laptops than desktops – but netbook keyboards and screens are too small for serious use.

I’m watching Apple’s bet on the iPad with more interest – Apple thinks there is room for small computers, but ones that live alongside larger ones and don’t try to do everything.

The intermittently* wonderful streaming music service Spotify has added a tab showing artists related to the artist you’re currently viewing. The relationship is based on other users’ tastes – ‘users who listen to x also listen to’ –  which is effective but not always the whole story… For instance, Brian Eno isn’t ‘related’ to his erstwhile band Roxy Music, nor to famous collaborators such as Robert Fripp, David Bowie, Talking Heads, David Byrne or U2.

*Many users have had trouble with streamed music dropping out for a few seconds. The workaround is to pay for the premium service and make your playlists available offline, which downloads them to your computer or iPhone.

All great tech gets misused, the misuse often surpassing the original concept of the tech. So with Google Wave, which is the Schleswig-Holstein question of our day – only three people have ever really understood it, one is in Australia, another has gone mad and the last has forgotten all about it…

Meanwhile some creatives have put Wave to good use -

More at TechCrunch

Chrome OS is a triumph: from the chaos of the open-source bazaar its champion, Google, is building a tightly-controlled cathedral – one that will shield people from computing horrors such as viruses and crashes by allowing in only the filtered sunlight of web applications.

Chrome OS is made out of open-source software – Linux, WebKit, etc. From these publicly-owned pieces Google is building a very privately-owned computing system. Chrome OS will run only on hardware that Google allows. It will run only the Chrome browser that Google controls. You will access Chrome OS using your Google login details. Other companies and their services can offer users only web-based applications and can’t save any data on Chrome OS machines.

In return for this almost complete control of hardware and software, Chrome OS will avoid incompatibilities between them and allow Google to vet all software for malicious intent.

Microsoft has never had this level of control. Nor has Apple, whose OS X is a more closely controlled system than Windows. The iPhone’s App Store constraints have parallels with Chrome OS and have raised howls from frustrated developers.

But from the point of view of Conosco’s IT support services I like Chrome OS: increasingly you can get anything you want from Alice’s Restaurant web services. If the price of reliability is sticking to the web, let’s keep things simple and get more done.

Don Dodge, Microsoft Google evangelist, sums up Google’s pitch to businesses -

Google has a two pronged approach for enterprises moving to the Cloud. Google Apps has packaged applications like Gmail, calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Video, and other commonly used applications. Enterprises can get immediate cost savings by moving these routine every day applications to the cloud, and free up IT resources to focus on more strategic issues.

Google AppEngine provides a custom development environment and scalable deployment infrastructure. Enterprise developers can build custom applications using the same systems that power Google applications, with built-in scalability leveraging things like BigTable and GFS.

At Conosco, we steer our small & mid-sized IT support customers away from any form of custom development – it rarely makes any sense for them. But the Apps suite is increasingly attractive, especially for startups, and it’s easy to move over to it gradually as Don says.