Patrick Beja

In the American psyche, the French kiss is something of a fantasy. Countless teenagers have had humid daydreams of (almost) prude kisses on the lips, which, fueled by passion and hormones, turn into the torrid abandon to the lust and indecency of… of… (I can’t believe I’m going to be so bold as to right it in plain uncensored text)… of tongue contact!
Well, I understand that there is nothing quite as intimate as sticking out your tongue to reach into someone’s mouth, but I’m not quite sure why my countrymen (and women) got the distinct honor of being forever associated with this deviant practice. Because unfortunately, this is a fallacy… As enjoyable as it is (and it is very enjoyable), we all know there is nothing exclusively French about this specific brand of face sucking. I’m fairly sure most people in the world came up with it on their own, and haven’t needed the help some distinguished world traveler to make the trip to the country of wine and cheese to bring back home the wonders of mouth exploration.

No, ladies and gents, the real French kiss is something quite different, and far more disturbing: it’s the everyday greeting performed by kissing someone on the cheek.

Horrifying, I know. French people kiss each other on the cheek every day. Men casually kissing women, women kissing each other, and sometimes two men are even caught pecking at each other’s face. Hard to fathom, but it happens every day. This practice, which regularly horrifies even the boldest of Japanese tourists, has been a hallmark of our culture for generations, and must constitutes the true pinnacle of French depravity. It is such an integral part of our daily lives that we barely think about it, and launch head first into a lips powered hello that shames most self respecting native of foreign extraction.

It is a mystery indeed. And as all great mysteries, it demands studying and understanding. So I’ve decided to throw my two ethnological cents in, and try to explain the details of this strangest of practices, in three questions. (more…)

The title of this video is “The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See“.
It’s a 80 minute lecture about the importance of understanding exponential growth, as it relates to population growth and resource consumption.

I’m usualy more than a little skeptical about these things. Over emphasized titles trying to alarm you and ridiculous conspiracy theories are not my thing, but I still watched it to make sure. Well, I have to say, the title is probably accurate: getting educated about the arithmetic Dr. Bartlett is detailing here is incredibly important, and I urge you all to watch it, bear with it, and make an effort to understand it.

Here’s the gist:

• The doubling time for a growth rate of 1% per year is 70 years. The world population’s growth rate is ~1.15%. That sounds tiny, but if you’re under 20, you’ll probably live to see it reach *14 billion*. (Damn, we just reached 7 billion a few days ago!)
• Optimistic estimates, which include all the oil *left to discover* (as in: that we have not found yet) put the peak oil production in ~2020. From there, we start having *less* oil every year. It’s a bell shaped curve and it keeps going down.

Put these two together, and you start getting the feeling we’re screwed. The best part: all this is fact, not belief or rhetoric. It is happening, there’s no way around it.

(Here is a link to the full playlist of all eight videos playing in sequence.)

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I love technology. It’s a kind of magic. It makes things possible that had only been dreams. A few decades ago, computers were going to change the world. And now they have, and we feel like we were part of something important. Steve Jobs was a big part of that something. Because of his vision and obsessions, he was perhaps the biggest part of all. If many of us feel that we’ve lost someone “close”, it’s probably because he has contributed so much to that “something important” that connects us all.

But it’s not about technology

My lingering feeling of sadness comes from somewhere else. It’s even more personal than that bond we all share. What I feel is the loss of someone that had the courage to live the way I try to live every day.

When I was 18, I was in a bad accident and had to stay in a hospital for a few months. Thankfully the damage was ultimately minimal, but the experience changed me, as it would anyone I’m sure. My priorities shifted. Suddenly, only a few things mattered: passion, and choices, and life.

Life, because death is coming for all of us, maybe sooner than we expect.
Choices, because making excuses will bind you more surely than chains.
Passion, because it is the only thing that should matter, everything else is secondary.

So I decided that I would live my life following one rule. Every time I’m faced with a really important decision, I ask myself: If I don’t do it, will I regret it when I’m 70?
If the answer is yes, then I have to do it. I just have to, no excuses. There are always reasons not to do something. But if you know in your heart that decades from now you’ll look back and regret not acting, reasons and excuses don’t matter.

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I have always been rather careful with who I friend and what I share,
but I suspect this will be a nice reminder to a few people.

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TL;DR: You didn’t think it was possible, but you’ll soon bring even more of your life on Facebook. And you’ll love it in spite of the privacy concerns, because it’ll give you more and cooler interaction with your friends. If you like sharing bits of text (most people do), you’ll love sharing tastes and activities and you’ll never look back.

Part I: The Gist

I was watching the Facebook keynote yesterday, where Mark Zuckerber was giving the details of what is probably the most ambitious update to his social network yet. Midway through, I stopped everything and went on Google+ to deliver this eloquent quote: “Zuckerberg is seriously blowing my mind right now”.
That was over 24 hours ago. I’ve had time to sober up, compose myself, and think about what was announced and whether or not is is actually groundbreaking. And here’s where I stand today: “Zuckerberg seriously blew my mind last night”.

Here’s why: he found a way to bring even more of our real lives into Facebook.
It might seem trivial to you, but brilliant ideas often seem that way.
Stay with me here: until now, we were mostly sharing status updates and photos. These are actually a very small percentage of what makes up our lives. With these changes, Facebook is bringing another enormous chunk of our lives into the world of social networking. Music, TV shows, movies, sports, games, and much much more… All of this will soon become available for sharing with your friends and family. And we’re not talking about you saying you like The Doors; that was always possible. We’re talking about your friends listening to The Doors with you, right there and then, as you fire up the song from across town or across the continent. We’re saying they can start watching The Shining for the first time, because you felt like watching it again that night. One click, and boom, they’re there. It just works. We’re actually talking about bringing the immense power of sharing that we already know to a whole new section of what we do. Sharing tastes, not just thoughts. Come on, tell me all that doesn’t sound like a huge amount of fun!
Not excited? Ok, different approach. Can we agree that life and communication were different before we had social networks? That brought on a huge change, right? Back then, we went from social networks that covered 0% of our lives (they didn’t exist) to social networks that cover 10% of our lives (text and photos). That was huge. Well, now we’re going from social networks that cover 10% of our lives (text and photos) to social networks that cover 40% of our lives (tastes, culture, activities, etc). After that, the ones where you can only share bits of texts and photos will have to seem incredibly dull… or at least very niche.

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TL;DR: While Google puts all your data in one place, Apple wants to make sure you have of all your files everywhere.

Read on…

The cloud is here to stay, there is little doubt about that. Everyone talks about it, but many misunderstand the reason it’s become such a hot topic. For the most part, the cloud is actually not a feature in itself. At its core it is a means to fix a problem: the multiplication of devices.

Ten years ago, your home or work computer was your only point of access to your data: your documents were stored locally on a hard drive and all was well. The amount of data we managed also wasn’t very large: a few documents and spreadsheets, and that was it. It’s only in the past ten years that we’ve started having digital photos and music, and mp3 players, and phones that can hold our whole lives in their guts. The digitization of everything and the advent of mobile computing are changing he way we relate to our data.

Today, everyone is accessing their “digital life” from many different machines: home and work computers, phones, laptops… All of which need to let us to access our set of personal data (photo, music, documents, and even settings from programs and games). But our systems weren’t built for accessing data across several machines, and this is becoming more and more of an issue.

Enter “the cloud” : a vaguely defined buzz word which essentially means “let’s find a solution online”.

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Another week, another Google+ post. In this one, I’m trying to imagine how a few of the suggestions collected in this earlier post could be implemented. This focuses on the posting portion, with the aim of making it more compact, streamlined and easily manageable.

You can see the main slide here, or head on over to the dedicated Google+ album to check out the detailed presentation. Let me know what you think!

Click to access the detailed presentation (Google+ album)

When a big product is pushed by a big company, it sometimes captures the imagination of tech pundits. And when that happens, we obsess over how to best describe and understand it, mentally playing with new concepts and ideas for days on end, trying to make sense of how they relate to the old ones (until finally the dust settles and we realize we were all wrong).

And with this, I’m posting my third article about Google+ in a week, trying to find an easy way to explain how the service is different from existing social networks.
Here’s what I came up with (in graphical form for your easy consumption):

I think there is some truth to this view. But as always, I could be completely wrong (actually I probably am), and I’d be happy to hear you explain to me why that is in the comments!

[Latest update: July 9th]
After a few days of using Google+, it’s becoming clear that one of its flaws is the clutter that threaded status updates cause. It was the case for Plurk and Buzz, and it’s a really difficult problem to address. Certainly the planned option to display the posts by “relevance” rather than “latest comment update” will be a good thing, but it wouldn’t help me find the updates and comments I want to read more than others…
Here are a few suggestions that I think would help:

[COMMENTS FEATURES]

• Skimming
  And iPhoto albums style “skimming” function. Just display one comment, then let me slide the mouse on the post (or even a “timeline box”) to show the others. Also reorganize the “shared” and “+1′ed” info on the side.
  That way, every post could be the same size, with a more compact and cleaner UI.

• Comments Highlighting
  Highlighting comments from people I’m following. Color tones, size, priority displaying, filtering options… If I follow them, I probably care more about their reactions, so I’d like to know if they commented on something.
  Erwin and Francois also suggested different colors for the original poster’s replies and those from people in different Circles (blue for friends, green for family, etc), which makes complete sense. The latter can also apply to posts in general, not just comments.

• Collapsing (from Ryan / JalenJad)
  I would LOVE to be able to  just collapse all comments on all threads with one click, and just browse updates as a sort of Twitter feed. Collapsing one thread is also a must; not being able to do that almost feels like a bug.
  The “iPhoto album-like skimming” would probably address this, but still.

• Muting without “deleting” (from Mike)
  Currently, when you mute a post, it completely disappears from your feed. It would be nice to be able to just “mute comments” meaning it would never come back to the top of your feed and you wouldn’t get notifications for it either, but it would still be available for you to see if you went to seek it out.

[CIRCLES FEATURES]

• Excluding Circles from the main stream
  The main stream is always the “go to/easy” place, but some “famous/heavy posters” I like are also more active than all my friends combined. I don’t care “as much” about them, so let’s put them in “Semi Circles” (hehe) that are excluded from the main stream. That way, I can check out what they’re doing, but only when I choose to.

• Shared Circles (from Cédric Ingrand)
  [Text pasted from his post] I’d like to be able to actually share a whole circle with someone, (or with a circle of people, or make it public), so people could sync on a workgroup, for example (but there’s like a thousand possible uses for it). Even better, I could make that shared circle read/write or read-only, so that it stays in sync across all users.

[OTHER FEATURES]

• “Share on Google+” button
  On blogs, we only have a “+1″ button, but the “+1″ and “Share on Google+” actions are actually two different things… I like that I can “approve” of something without actually sharing it on my feed (“+1″ button), but I’d also want to get a “G+Share” button with a counter. Maybe we could get a double button, with “+1″ and “+1 and share” functionality?

What do you think? Would these be good additions to Google+? Should we start a campaign to see them added to the “General Feature Request List Of The People”?
I think so; let me know if I’m completely wrong…

[Updates]
July 5th: Three requests added June 5th from reader comments, here and on the Google+ thread. Thanks a bunch!
July 8th: Cédric Ingrand posted a cool feature request I’m adding to this list. Doesn’t quite address clutter, but it does tweek Circles, which we’ve discussed quite a bit. I also cleaned up and restructured the list.
July 9th; Added a couple more features.

TL;DR version:
The killer feature in Google+ is Circles, and it’s pretty damn awesome. It’s a true innovation for social media, just as Twitter’s “following” system was when all we knew was “mutual friending”.

Ok, long version:
(If you don’t know anything about Google+, scroll down for a more in depth description.)

Circles might seem like a simple concept, but they’re actually an incredibly powerful idea. Essentially, they are a mix between Facebook’s and Twitter’s ideas of what a social graph is. They are a very clever blend of the “friending” and “following” systems. With Circles, when you “add” someone to your social graph, you have to decide which Circle(s) you add them to. You can’t just “follow” someone, you follow them by adding them to one of your Circles. From then on, you will only see their updates when you’re looking at that specific circle’s feed (or at your “full” feed, which includes all the people in your various Circles).

Simple, right? “Yeah, that’s just Facebook’s friend grouping” you’ll say. Not really. This is actually much more ingenious. Here’s why:

1. Let’s say I add Tom Merritt only to my “Beards” circle, but Tom hasn’t added me to any of his Circles (he doesn’t “follow” me).
2. Tom sends a public update. I will see it in my “Beards” feed (and my full “everyone I follow” feed).
3. Since Tom hasn’t added me to any of his Circles (he doesn’t follow me), he will never see any of my updates.
4. Now let’s say Tom adds me to his “Frenchies” Circle, but not to his “USAns” Circle.
5. He will see my updates in his Frenchies feed, as well as his full feed. But not if he looks at his USAns feed.
6. Now the key thing is, you can also restrict an update to be sent only to one or more of your Circles.
7. Remember, Tom has added me to his Frenchies Circle but not his USAns Circle.
8. If Tom sends an update to his Frenchies Circle, I will see it.
9. If he sends an update to his USAns Circle, I won’t see it.
10. Also important to know: people don’t see which Circle you’ve put them in. That is for your eyes only.

So you could think of it as Twitter lists on steroids, where lists go both ways. Again, this is really powerful stuff, with deep implications. It means that when you use Google+, you don’t have to choose between a public and a private tool / site / network / social space. With one system, you can direct your updates to the people you want, without forcing anything unto anyone. It basically blends the best parts of Facebook and Twitter together (including status updates, lists, fan pages, etc).

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