Monthly Archives: November 2010

I need Boxee for Families

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I've been a Boxee fanatic since I first discovered it as a replacement for our old XBoxes+XBMC which can't handle H.264 video. The app gets better and better and I'm thrilled they have launched a standalone box. Quick aside: Any chance they'd sell the Boxee remote for us PC owners? I bloody hate the generic MCE one we have.

Living 2km from an Irish town centre as we do, video streaming is not an option after 7pm. The two tin cans + string that passes for Eircom 7 Mbs broadband can't sustain anything once ADSL contention goes up at night. So for the moment, we use Boxee as the ultimate local media player. It can handle anything we throw at it. As I've said before, its capability and usability make a mockery of the many years that have gone into Windows Media Center.

But, and it's a big but, Boxee (and probably every other Media Center) are clearly developed by single childless people who have 100% control over their TVs. So whilst I love the Twitter and Facebook integration and the bookmarklet to remember stuff to watch, I am constantly aware that a 7 year old child may be checking out what is being posted to our Boxee setup.

Of course there are Boxee user logins. And I bet they get about as much use as multiple Windows logins i.e. none. Who the hell wants to go through a logout/login cycle just to watch TV? "Daddddddddd, what's the password again?". Microsoft even tried to simplify things with the user-switcher in Windows but that takes an eternity too.

So what's the solution? I dunno! The only thing I can think of are those fingerprint readers that some laptops had a few years back. Build that into the remote and automatically show me my Boxee view without any messing with login/logout/password.

Any other ideas for dealing with this in a practical, 5 kids in a house, way?

I had to buy Cracking Contraptions today

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I was in Waterstones in Cork with my 7 y/o daughter today and I spotted Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions Manual. I squealed with glee when I saw it. Done in the style of a Haynes manual with obligatory tea stain and repaired ripped cover, it is a work of utter awesomeness.

As a past owner of 3, yes 3, desperately unreliable Citroens (BX, AX and Xantia), I am intimately familiar with the inside of a Haynes manual. I even had one on carbuerettors due to the BX only doing 20MPG. I never sorted that problem out. Or the electrics on the AX.

The Wallace & Gromit one delves into the details of every contraption, including the house itself and the robo-dog, Preston.

If you are looking for a christmas pressie for any vaguely technical man (go on, call me sexist), you won't find better than this.

Google Account Transition – Argggghhhhhhhh

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I have long complained about the fact that Google Apps Accounts can't do the same things as normal Google Accounts. The problem was exacerbated by Google allowing people to create half-assed Google Accounts with the same email address as their Google Apps account but which were in fact completely different.

Google is rightly now trying to clean this mess up and I don't envy them but gawd it's a complete pain in the arse.

So we transitioned all of the LouderVoice accounts over the other day. Except we actually didn't because my non-Google-Apps but Google-Account loudervoice.com email is hooked to an AdWords and AdSense account and they haven't been transitioned yet. So that's Pain 1.

Pain 2 – Everyone else is completely freaked out by the message they get from Google about killing their non-Google-Apps but Google-Account loudervoice.com emails and replacing them with blah@gmail.com. Not only that but GMail on the iPhone gets completely confused by all of this messing and you end up in a logout-login cycle which eventually sorts itself out. 

Pain 3 – Google Docs is having a really hard time. It's letting me access some files but not others. Even worse, it is transient, so re-trying seems to work. See the attached pic for a doc that I created!

It's going to be a horrible few weeks for Google Apps Account holders but hopefully when the dust settles, all will be well. 

The big problem with Google Places and now Hotpot

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First off, big disclaimer, I have a strong vested interest in this topic, since I run a customer reviews solutions company. But it also means I have some insight and knowledge of this topic.

Google Search has always been about automatically indexing content and trying to make the best content bubble to the top. And that is why it became the most successful search engine, period. Many of us can still remember Yahoo trying to manually manage "the best of the web" or even worse the hellhole that was DMOZ (and I was an editor!).

Why then has Google insisted on taking an old 1990s completely unscalable approach to Places data until very recently? All of the Places reviews are there because Google has done a biz dev deal with someone. That's why you see TripAdvisor, Zagat and others, not because it is the best content, but because they are partners.

Yesterday Google announced Hotpot and ye know what, well done GOOG, not bad at all. The first Google App around location and social that works well. It is, dare I say it, what Buzz V1 should have been.

In Hotpot you search either in the web app, Maps or in Android Maps, find the biz you want, write a review and it then appears on their Places page. You use a Google account to ID yourself and you can give text/stars/favourite on your review. Clean, simple. good. If I was Yelp, Qype, TripAdvisor etc, I'd be worried for the first time.

Quick aside: Why the hell is the check-in project not part of this? Please tell me they're not going to release a completely separate 4SQ-type app? Hopefully they are just iterating and it's coming soon.

I did some quick test reviews this morning and all worked well. So Google's partners can now populate your Places page with reviews; random strangers and your competitors can populate your Places page with reviews; but you, the business still can't populate your own Places page with verified customer reviews (except perhaps nefariously).

This could be solved very easily. Hotpot/Places needs a WRITE API immediately. Anyone who wants to use the API does a quick sign-up promising to obey Ts & Cs around spam, veracity etc and they get access. No more human-managed queues. Multiple reports of abuse can be quickly investigated and those abusers ejected. This means that reviews of your business, no matter where they come from, can appear in Places and benefit you.

The upside for Google? 
  1. No more messing with a massive backlog of applications for Rich Snippets or Places inclusion.
  2. More valuable data! 
  3. A set of search results that are based on the principles upon which Google was founded, not biz dev. 
  4. And most importantly of all, when they properly open up the Check-In WRITE API too, something that competes with and could beat Facebook Places. Tick tock.
Let's hope they do it. I don't think anyone wants to see Google Local turning into an Excite Portal circa 1999.