Digitivity » Internet

Facebook Surpasses Google: What Does It Mean?

Digitivity — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:36:06 +0000

A number of sources are reporting Facebook has surpassed Google as the most visited site in the US.

Hitwise blogged that the weekly market share of visits was 7.07% for Facebook and 7.03% for Google in the week ending March 13.

A loss for the open Internet

My opinion is that this represents a loss for the open Internet.

Although there are legitimate concerns about data privacy and some other concerns in regards to Google, in comparison to Facebook, Google looks like an angel.

Origins

Origins are important because the founders set the tone for the entire rest of the company as they hire people and pass on a corporate culture.

Compare the origin stories for the two Web giants: Google was born as a kind of cool and nerdy experiment. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google as part of a Ph.D. research project. For the longest time, there were no ads at all on Google.

Facebook, on the other hand, was conceived in sin. I blogged before on Facebook’s dubious origins. It’s alleged that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook while he was contracted by another group of Harvard students to create a Facebook-like site, all the while stringing the other group along making them believe progress was being made on their site. Money was foremost on Zuckerberg’s mind while he allegedly went to the extent of hacking competitors’ site to enhance his own.

The World Wide Web

Google is all about the World Wide Web, created in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee as a connected group of hyperlinked pages and sites. The main focus of Google has always been to give you a search result for a web page and send you on your way to exploring the Web, hopping from one link to another.

Facebook, though, is a walled garden. Once you get on the site, you’re supposed stay on it. Even to get in, you need a login. Every page you view, every action you take is logged by the same, single site, instead of multiple sites across the Web.

JavaScript and cookies

You can use much of Google without logging in, including the main focus (searching). You can’t do the first thing on Facebook without logging in. Same for JavaScript, cookies, and so on.

Google’s the progenitor of nice, reasonable text-mode ads. Although Google has some other kinds of ads as well now, Facebook ads are the definition of obnoxious, and possibly scammy.

What do you think?

Google Fiber for Communities: 1Gbps Broadband Internet Service Coming

Digitivity — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:43:57 +0000

Google announced that they are going to be building high-speed networks 100x faster what most people have today.

They’re going to price their broadband service competitively to what other companies are charging.

I say it’s about time.

Google is launching the service to jumpstart new, high-speed Internet technologies. They’ll share what they learn in these trials with other companies to help increase Internet speeds generally.

It hasn’t decided where the service will be launched.

The networks will be open access, meaning the network infrastructure will be shared with other access providers.
They’ll provide service to anywhere from 50,000 to a half-million subscribers.
The trials will occur in one or more US municipalities which Google determines would be a good fit.

How fast is 1Gbps?

1 Gigabyte per second is:

134,217,728 bytes per second
131,072 MB per second
7.86 GB per minute

Obviously, this is fast enough to download a high-definition movie in minutes, or a standard-definition movie in seconds. There are a lot of videoconferencing, medical, gaming, educational, and other applications you could imagine being made possible with this speed.

Request for information

Google has a web page that describes what they are doing.

It’s requesting information from cities, counties, military bases, etc., which would be interested in participating in the program.

Even if your city doesn’t send an application in, you can nominate your locality as an individual.

My comments

Although it’s hard to believe that a corporation would be doing something like this out of the goodness of their own hearts, Google actually has an interest in high-speed Internet:

The faster the Internet experience is, the more compelling it is.
The more compelling the Internet is, the more time people spend online.
The more time people spend online, the more time they are likely to be on Google, or on a site that has Google ads.
Hence, the more money Google makes.

Textual vs. audiovisual Internet

A lower speed Internet lends itself to a textual world-wide web. When speeds increased, the use of images on the web increased. When we moved to DSL and broadband, in came videos. Even higher speeds (1 gigabit per second) would mean the possibility of an even more multimedia-based Internet.

But how can this be good for Google, which has traditionally leveraged its parsing of web page text in order to be able to serve ads?

I think the answer is in some key audio-to-text technologies which Google has recently rolled out:

Automatic subtitles for YouTube
Textual voicemail for Google Nexus and Android cell phones

Since Google now has the ability to parse spoken words, it’s not afraid of audiovisual elements in the web for serving relevant advertisements. In fact a really cool thing that they could do is show different ads as a speaker changes subjects.

Network neutrality

There’s also the factor that Google’s been fighting ISPs who are content producers (Time/AOL) or are otherwise jerks (AT&T) which are limiting the already pathetic speeds that they deign to give to American Internet consumers. AT&T’s head actually said he’d like Google to pay for the access that he gives Google to consumers.

This represents a sort of end-run around those ISPs. Google will make its own Internet.

Here’s a case where Google’s interests align with common man’s. Hooray for Google in this instance.

Resources

Google Fiber for Communities

Ars Technica article

Slashdot discussion

Digital Subscriptions Cost $1000 per Month?

Digitivity — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:36:52 +0000

The Gizmodo blog did some arithmetic, and it figures that all the digital subscriptions you need to keep all of the devices some people view as necessary these days can cost near a thousand dollars.

Here’s the list of subscriptions:

Smartphone plan
Netbook plan
Slate plan
Home internet
Cable TV
Landline phone
Mobile Internet
Wi-Fi hotspots
Netflix
TiVo
Xbox Live Gold membership
Hulu
Flickr Pro
Navigation (GPS)

The total dollar cost ranges from $208 to $738.

Granted, some of these may be double counted. And there are ways you could cut costs. For example, you could choose to have either a landline phone, or a mobile phone. Yet, some people don’t have the option to choose, because the phone company wants you to have a landline in order to get DSL. And the cable company wants you to have cable TV to have cable Internet.

But even if you skimp on some subscriptions, others will multiply simply because you have multiple members of the same household, and they need their own separate plans for each of their phones. If you can live with having Internet access on your phone only at home, the office, and major urban centers, you could make do with only Wi-Fi Internet on your cell phone.

Still, no matter what, all these digital subscriptions do add up to a lot, and can be expensive when you add them all up.

Via Hard|OCP

Cory Doctorow for Net Neutrality and an Open Internet

Digitivity — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:20:10 +0000

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian blogger and science fiction writer, has come out against ISPs’ increasing efforts to throttle and control bandwith and Internet accesss.

He argues in the Manchester Guardian that:

ISPs are censoring sites that they don’t agree with for whatever reason, including striking workers’ sites. It’s also outrageous to allow a service provider to block or reduce customer access to its competitors.
ISPs are complaining about high bandwidth users requiring them to implement download and other limits, but the real intent behind such limits is to reduce access to sites such as Hulu and YouTube which are competitors to the cable and media companies that also have ISP divisions.
Download limits will make users hesitant to try new things on the web.
Besides, you don’t know how much bandwidth a given link will use until you click on it.
Telecom firms have been massively subsidized by the public in the form of rights-of-way and monopolies. They owe it as a public trust to provide free and open Internet access.

The story is being discussed on Slashdot here.

Some interesting comments there:

One poster comments that, in the web host he works for, the bandwidth usage varies for specific users, but is very constant for all users combined, as would be predicted from statistics. It’s very easy to plan bandwidth needs from month to month.

Another commenter says that, instead of having private companies own the data lines in the ground, the government should contract with companies to bury the lines, pay them, and then own the lines, just as it does with roads.

Finally, Japan is providing Internet access at an amazing 160 megabits per second for $20 a month. So how come they can do that and Verizon and the like can’t?

I have to say the Doctorow’s arguments are persuasive. Given the rise of sites such as Hulu and Youtube, it’s not just a few users who are downloading illicit movies who are hogging bandwidth. ISPs who slow access to such sites or impose limits are at war with their own customers.

Obama Proposes $44 Billion Universal Broadband Plan

Digitivity — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 13:01:30 +0000

President-elect Obama has called for spending $44 billion on broadband, according to the story being discussed on Slashdot:

Slashdot | Universal Broadband Plan Calls For $44 Billion

I think it’s about time that the U.S. got its broadband act together. Everytime broadband is discussed, someone brings up the excuse that that U.S. can’t have as good Internet service as other countries for the reason that it’s more geographically dispersed. The problem is no one can explain why the most important city on Earth, New York City, doesn’t have broadband at the level of rural Scandinavians.

The second interesting part about this plan is the “universal” aspect. As we become a more and more digitized society, it makes sense that Internet access be provided to everybody the same way that phone service is. Granted, you don’t need a phone to live, but you do need one to live well. So too for Internet service.