Google Plus and Facebook face-to-face

Exactly a month ago, I had wondered if Google Plus could be the new face of social networking, the official demo posted by Google being the only basis of my bemusement. I had been able to procure an invitation the next day and had immediately fallen in love.

Over the last month, I've added 158 people–only 11 of which are (techie) celebs–to my 14 circles, and 128 people have circled me, out of which I have not reciprocated to 20 people. Oh yeah this is complex, I had to use a Venn-diagram to find out I have 118 FB-style friends. Anyway, the point is, only a few of these people have been sharing stuff and following my shares.

Most of the shares are reshares from Google+ celebs, or jokes about the diminution of FB, or tips and tricks or stats about Google+. Or a link shared at both Facebook and Twitter. Most of the content is reproduced from other networking sites. An average Plusser does not share photos here, and does not post that arbitrary status update. Not yet.

For sometime I played an evangelist trying to invite FB friends to Google+, supporting and promoting Plus features, and so did many other Google worshippers. People blogged, facebooked, yammered, and tweeted, why, I have five posts labelled Google+ excluding this. Everyone was curious and every body tried to be a part of it all. HBO made the quick buck showing The Social Network at least once a week. All the popular blogs published a series of posts on Google's latest product and the competitors and the competition. Hundreds of sites mushroomed up in the last month around Google Plus, enhancing the Plussing experience for those who don't mind installing Chrome extensions or revealing credentials to unknown sites. G+ has been evolving fast even at this young age; there were 10 major feature additions, averaging one every three days.

The above facts describe how popular Google+ is. Microsoft had launched Office 365 on the same day as Google Plus, but the latter hogged up all attention on the internet in general and news channels and blogs in particular over the past month. Office 365 might not find so many users in its lifetime that Google Plus has attracted in the first month of its infancy.

A month later, I think I have the answer to my question. Not that I do not love it any more. Not because I still do not have many friends contacts in my circles and therefore not too much of stuff to read/share here. Not because I doubt Google's efforts to streamline all their products and bring over a larger change with the launch of Google Plus.

It is because there is an already existing following of Facebook which will never completely die. Even though this is much different that email, an analogy can be drawn between people still sticking on to Yahoo mail and Hotmail(~300 million users each), even though Gmail(170 million) is more talked about and discussed than its older sisters. The risk to FB comes from the new generation social-networkers, and Google takes care of that with the illusion of elitism it provides by allowing access only through invites. And this pseudo-elitist attitude works with newbies. But it dampens the spirits of a hardened FB user because they might have to move their friends along. Curiosity did help a few registrations, but how long do they stay is yet to be seen. Over a period of time, say a year or so, both of these will have a symbiotic existence.

Google Plus cannot be the new face of social networking. At least not the only face. Social Networking will be divided between Google and Facebook, and unless one buys out the other—of which the plausibility is one-sided, and the probability small—Google and Facebook will have to share that 'facespace'. The two behemoths may decide to join hands and simplify the complete social networking experience for users who do not want to miss out either. Till then, you have to be content with an app that keeps your posts on both the places in sync, or manually post it twice and then discuss the same topic at two different places with different sets of people.

So much for redundancy and repetition.

Sign into Google+ using Facebook?

Google announced simpler sign-ups for Yahoo! users with OpenId last year.

Yahoo opened up to third party authentication with Facebook/Google ids earlier this year.

A lot of other sites across the internet allow sign ups with OpenIds. There are several providers, like AOL, Microsoft, IBM (Surprise, surprise), BBC (More surprise), but Google and Facebook have become the de facto standards. Okay, Facebook's login is not an Open Id per se, it is much more than that, but that is a topic for another discussion, or another blogpost, if you will.

GMail was a competition to Yahoo mail when it was launched, very similar to Google search and Yahoo search. Over time, some Yahoo Mail users have stuck back, though Google has surpassed Yahoo on the search front so much so that Yahoo is not even visible as a mole from the Mountain View based search mountain of Google. The other fields have remained more or less distinct, for example Yahoo content, Google apps, etc. Using each other's ids as open ids then does not harm much, on the contrary, it tries to build a better web by using the best of both worlds.

Facebook, however, had a different vision, not from inception but at least in the past two years (after the launch of the Like button), which is, to rule the web, worded roughly. Google already had that in mind and has been working hard all these years and has been quite successful.

Both of these two warring giants aim at getting the most number of users in their kitty. The larger the number of users, the more they know about individual preferences, and the more they can customize the user experience to match what they expect. There is, however, a huge overlap between the two sets of users. It will be a boon to the mankind if both the sets of users are consolidated. Though Google and Facebook becoming one is almost impossible, I was wondering if there can be a day when we could read news like this:

Facebook joins hands with Google and lets Googlers login to FB using their Open Id.

Or:

Google gives up, believes it is saturated and cannot entice more users to Google+, lets the loyal ones connect to Google using Facebook.

Google Spreadsheet Chokes

Google spreadsheets has a useful view mode called Simple List View. As of today, you can access it using the List item on the View menu. (It was accessible differently earlier).

Only that Google forces you to the list view when you have a large number of viewers. They have worded it differently, saying you will be automatically redirected to list view if there are more than 50 users viewing it.

It shows a link to Go to spreadsheet view, but clicking on that just refreshes the page.

Alright, this makes sense, Google may have issues handling more than 50 concurrent threads trying to modify the same cell, and have pro-actively restricted that, even though the chances of that happening for a 10 cells by 10 cells sheet is one in a Untrigintillion, that is 10 to the power 96!

If that was too large a number, let me present a smaller one: the chances of 5 out of 50(or any number) users accessing the same cell in a 10 by 10 sheet is one in a million. Multiply this with the chances of a Google spreadsheet being shared with more than 5 people, which I assume is one in a thousand, and a simple math shows the chance as one in a billion! The larger the sheet gets, the smaller the probability. For example, for a 20 by 20 sheet, the probability reduces to one a 64 billion.

The bottomline is, I am denied my spreadsheet view, even though I have read-only access, just because Google is paranoid that their system will choke if a large number of users start reading the same cell? This means I am cannot make a copy of the spreadsheet, cannot download it, or print it, all the features Google is so proud of.

Facebook: Account temporarily unavailable

I come back home from work and check out my official and personal emails, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yammer, and Google Reader feeds, not necessarily in that order, and find that my Facebook account is temporarily unavailable. Facebook wants me to "try again in a few minutes".

I keep coming back again during/after I check the other feeds, but cannot access my account yet. There is no way I can even log out other than killing my browser which I don't want to. I login through another browser and Facebook now tells me my account should be available in a few hours!

I must admit that this is the first time in the life of my Facebook account, which is around three years old, that I cannot access it. But this coming at a time when Facebook users are anyway getting tempted towards its Google counterpart?

Post to Google Plus via SMS

Google+ is still evolving. Another feature added to it sometime last week was the ability to post updates via SMS, a la Facebook.

The thing that excited me the most is, that it is available only for US and India as of now.

Does India housing the second most number of Google+ users offer a good enough reason?

Beginning dump of physical memory

"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer".

And what happened to the following running apps on my machine?

• 2 instances of jboss app server
• Eclipse with 38 files open
• 52 Chrome tabs in 4 windows
• 3 Firefox tabs
• EditPlus 4 files
• Notepad++ with 8 files open
• Adobe Acrobat
• Pidgin
• Microsoft Outlook
• 4 Windows Explorer windows
• Picasa Desktop client
• and the various other background processes I could not list

Did Windows save my files? Or at least give a chance to the running apps to do so before mercilessly killing all of them? Yeah, Chrome, Eclipse, and a few others have the auto-save thingy on, but the others? And it would mean restarting the two jboss servers.

Okay, I agree, I was (mis)using by Dell Latitude E5400 running two Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz each, with 3.45GB RAM for 119 processes, but Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3 should have alerted me that it is falling short of resources. An abrupt Blue Screen of Death was the least I expected.

The Microsoft Support page does not list a case that I could assume was the reason in my case, but says, at the end of their 'Symptoms' section, "This problem may also occur at other times, depending on how your system was designed". Duh!

Or was it a case of Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I had started making a list of apps running on my machine (How else did you think I have that list?) because the system dragged down almost to a standstill after I started the second jboss server, which was maybe retro-caused by the crash. I had expected Windows to give up, but, quoting Switch from The Matrix, "Not like this. Not like this.".

IE8 Compatibility, and script and meta tags

When the ticker we had used for our application suddenly stopped scrolling on IE8 for some of the machines of the team-mates, we had a tough time debugging and figuring out. There was no change at all in the ticker code since the previous release, and the bloody thing worked on another installation of IE8 with the same version.

Doing a diff against all files changed between the time the ticker changed from ticking everywhere to ticking on a few installations of IE8 and everywhere else revealed a hack to emulate IE7 using IE8's compatibility mode, and the cause for the problem became apparent.

There was a meta tag that did the compatibility trick, per one of the options at the MSDN blog here :

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

The reason it did work on some installations (on some computers) of IE8 was because the Compatibility View was enabled for those setups. For the ones it did not work, it was because the meta tag came after a script tag, in which case the compatibility mode does not work.

<head>
<script></script>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"></meta>
</head>

The solution was simple, to put the meta tag before any script/css tag in the code; even an empty script tag causes the meta tag to not work.

Blogger's updated interface

Blogger, Google's most neglected child of all acquisitions it has made, is gathering some attention now. In continuation with the metamorphosis in Google's look and feel that started May this year and gained momentum after the launch of Google+ end of June, Blogger has been redesigned to look entirely different from the original Pyra Labs UI and match its other brethren.

The clumsy, cluttered old interface

The smarter, cleaner, new interface

Not only the looks, the functionality has been improved too, with a full-page editor that comes with more formatting tools, and a lightbox to quickly look up definitions or translate text using the other Google tools. I suspect the editor uses the Google Docs code under the covers; there is a striking similarity.

There is, however, a small bug that escaped the developers/testers: the compose area is very small. It uses an iFrame (Where are we? 20th Century?) that is unable to occupy the area occupied by the wrapper. The HTML tab uses the simpler textarea that does the trick

The shy compose area

Like Plus, the new blogger look is still in the field user's trial, though they don't call this so. Not yet. As with everything else, Google lets you send feedback on the new look by means of a menu item on your navigation bar. The new interface is not available by default, nor is there a way to find out the changes, unless you've heard of it elsewhere. You need to go to draft.blogger.com to experience it.

Is this a beginning of an attempt to compete with Wordpress, on the same lines as Google Plus against Facebook?

Preview Gmail's new look?

Very much like how Google offers you to download Google Chrome even when you visit the Chrome homepage, as I ranted about a couple of weeks back, Google asks you to Preview Gmail's new look even if you already have that as your style.

I had went into the Themes and changed it much before Gmail had started prompting me to try their new look. Though I know Google will not keep a flag to maintain if I've tried the new look or not, and accordingly show me the preview link (that anyway takes to me a page titled What's new in Gmail?), I tried from another account I maintain where I had not changed the theme, and I get the preview offering even then.

Changing the theme may be just changing a css file, but that info should exist in some column in their databases against my user id. Can that not me used to not show me an option that I have already availed?

When Google knows who do I talk to, where am I planning to go for a vacation, what do I like to eat on a Sunday afternoon, which IPL team do I support, does it not know what browser do I use to access their products, or what settings I have in their products?

Circle Hack: Use circles in Facebook

As I said in my last post, the biggest advantage of Google Plus over Facebook is the use of Circles. Well, you can do that on Facebook too now, just the addition part. The sleek UX on the Google+ page that lets you add people to circles could be replicated in a 'one-night experiment with Javascript' as per Vladimir Kolesnikov who create circlehack.com, a site that lets you login through your Facebook id and shows your existing lists as circles. You can even add/delete/move people in to/from/around circles.

Here is the source code: https://github.com/voloko/facebook-circles.

Javascript is indeed powerful!