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.But first, a bit of vocabulary. That “kiss-on-the-cheek” is called the “bise” in French (pronounced roughly like a shorter / harder sounding version of “bees”).

Ok, now we’re ready.

1) The important question: who to kiss?
Short answer: everyone is a potential bise recipient. Friends, family, people you’re meeting for the first time, men, women… It’s all fair game.
Long answer: it’s horribly complicated. It all depends on the region and the social circle you’re in, and the relationship you have with the person in front of you.
The easiest way to go about it is this: as a rule of thumb, girls kiss guys and girls, and guys kiss girls. Two guys will usually prefer a heterosexually affirming handshake-with-a-smile, but as I said it is not uncommon for them to also “faire la bise”. This will happen mainly if they are close and intimate friends, or they are shallow and annoying fashion people.
Seriously though, it is very difficult to know which guys to kiss when you’re a guy. Even I do it with some of my closest friends, but not with some of my other equally close friends. No real reason, just a force of habit. If you’re unsure, just follow the rule of thumb detailed earlier and you’ll be safe: girls kiss everyone, guys kiss girls.

2) The truly important question: how to perform the kiss?
Now that is an interesting one. I’m sure a few of you at least are imagining some sort of hot and steamy kiss festival taking place every morning in every office building in the country, as coworkers greet each other lustfully when they get in to work. Get your filthy collective mind off the gutter, sirs and madams, we are not that kind of people… that early in the day!
Seriously though, there is nothing sexual about the bise. It is really just a greeting, as hot and steamy as shaking someone’s hand (which can be quite hot and steamy in its own way, although that is unlikely to be sexually arousing). I’m sure some New Yorkers or Italians know what I’m talking about: it’s like saying hello, nothing more. The question is though, how do you do it exactly? Should cheeks touch? Should the lips actually come in contact with the skin? Do you stay three respectful centimeters away and make a deafening “smacking” sound?
Well, the French bise is a healthy mix of all of that: cheeks touch, lips sometimes lightly touch the cheek, and the sound is a respectful natural “kiss in the air”. Do anything else and it’ll seem odd. If you don’t touch cheeks and people might think you’re afraid they are contagious (sometimes, they are). If you kiss the cheeks too openly and it might seem a bit forward and make people uncomfortable (with the notable exception of the “One Kiss” detailed below). And if you suck a gigantic “smack” too close to the ear because you were afraid of a little of physical cheek contact, you’ll render someone partly deaf and they will start disliking you, which isn’t great. As in most other areas, practice makes perfect…

3) The really super important question: how many kisses does the ritual include?
That one is 80% local customs, 20% social circle. Basically, if you’re from the sticks (not Paris), four is standard. Parisian suburbs will go to three, and proper people (Parisians) will stop at two. If you couldn’t tell, I’m a Parisian.
This might seem like a detail, but it is probably the most important aspect of all, as it will determine your social standing in an instant. Kiss someone twice in some remote town in the south, and you will be branded an uptight Parisian ass. Go for a third kiss at a house party in Paris, and forever be known as the uneducated hoodlum who knows nothing of proper society. And of course, if you go for a fourth kiss in a suburban club, they will laugh at the simple boy who just got off the train from cow country.

It is important to note however that there are two outliers in the “number of kisses” category: fashion, and the “One Kiss”.
Fashion is a special kind of Parisians that will do four kisses. As I said, they are shallow and waste valuable time kissing twice as much. We hate them.
One kiss is the opposite: if you have a very very close friend of the opposite sex, you can do the One Kiss. This is a perfect case of “less is more”, and you should be careful in how you wield this powerful weapon (that’s what she said, hehe). Indeed, stopping short of the second “standard practice” kiss will carry heavy meaning.
It says: “I know you so well, we have shared so many intimate moments, I consider you a very special person. We don’t need two kisses, that’s for those losers over there that we don’t really care about as much. We put more in that one kiss than we do in two others, and we know it. Oh, and there, I’ll also throw in a mini hug-like gesture and a sincere smile with that kiss, along with a deep understanding look right into your eyes, because I do genuinely care about you“. Just so you get an idea of what would create the conditions for the One Kiss status, here are a few examples:
- Two hour phone conversations in the middle of the night.
- Having helped them through a tough breakup, but not having taken advantage of it.
- Making out in a club, half drunk, then going for a kebab at 4 in the morning.
- Sex as a one time thing, but it didn’t quite work out. Ok, maybe two times, just to make sure.
You get the idea. Basically, the One Kiss is half way between “friends” and “in a relationship”, but it usually does not go past that point. It’s also different from the “best friend” status, as it usually involves a heterosexual girl and a heterosexual guy; they could be lovers, but they’re not. We’re still very much in friendship territory, just a stronger brand of it. And yes, with a healthy side of innocent flirtation.

Ok, I guess that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this little crash course in “faire la bise”, and please do let me know if you’ve had traumatizing (or enjoyable!) experience with that fascinating French practice. Or how it works in your country, I know we’re not the only ones doing it.

Oh, and I almost forgot: have a lovely Christmas and a fantastic new year everyone, and hugs to all, wherever and whoever you are! (That’s not a French thing, it’s just a Patrick thing.

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.)

The way we are living now will not go on forever. It actually won’t go on for more than a couple of decades. The only solutions are: stop population growth, and find alternative sources of energy. I’m confident we will do at least the second one, but we need to:
1) Understand how important all this is.
2) Hope to God it will be enough for everyone (it won’t).

Please do watch the lecture that goes into much more detail. It’s not some “hippie bullshit about saving mother earth”, as some people might see environmentalist movements. And it’s not some ridiculous conspiracy theory about the banks and secret societies controlling the future of the world either. I hope you know and trust me enough that you understand I wouldn’t serve you such nonsense.

It’s really about what is actually happening in the reality that we live in, and understanding where we are heading. And deciding for yourself whether you/we should do something about it. As the title says, mighty important stuff…

As usual, please let me know if there is something I’m missing here (which is always possible!)

PS: if you know how to embed the video so it plays the playlist, going automatically to the next video, please let me know.

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.

…

When I turned 25, I had to make a decision.

I had studied computer science for a couple of years, and hated it. I completed the two year course, but instead of entering a lucrative computer engineer career, I went on to study Japanese. It had no hope of practical application, but it was such a breath of fresh air. Such an interesting field, with new friends and new things and ideas and views of the world I never knew existed. I loved it, I was alive.
After four years, I realized that to really know Japan, I had to live there. It was crazy:
I was 25, it was time to settle down, get a job, plan for the future… This was the first time I really asked myself the question: “if I don’t do it, will I regret it when I’m 70?”
My answer was: if not now, when? If I do get a job, a family maybe, I’ll never do it. And when I’m 70 and my grandchildren come to visit, I won’t be able to tell them about the cool crazy adventure I lived, and I’ll be sorry I didn’t do it. So I found a way to go.

I spent four years there. They were some of the richest and most transformative years of my life, and I cherish them more than I can say. But by the end, I had had my fill. And surely, now I should settle down… Probably, but I didn’t. In Japan, ripped away from everything I knew, I slowly discovered that I didn’t have to be a “scientific type”.
I discovered that for all the love I bore computers and bits, everyone has a bit of art in their soul. Mine was filled with moving images. I loved cinema so much, I had to be part of it. Again, I asked myself the question. I wasn’t 20 anymore, and starting something different would have been a bit crazy.
But I didn’t think of it that way. I wasn’t “almost 30″, I was just someone who had something important in their heart. You can guess what the answer was.

So I came back to France, and found a way to get into the movie industry. I worked on movies, TV shows, ads… A couple of years into it, I discovered there were production companies dedicated to Japanese clients. They became my safety net in that difficult field. When there was no work elsewhere, I could often count on them.
I didn’t always eat as much as I wanted, but I loved my life. Full of surprises, and travels, and new experiences, and hard work. And funny stories I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren. And it wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t decided to study Japanese all those years ago. Looking back, I could connect the dots.

…

I could go on, but I’ll save it for a boring tale of “my life to this point” when I turn 40.
For now, here’s what I know:

• No one can be happy every day of their life, but you should be happy most days.
• You should be thankful for what you have, not spiteful for what you don’t.
• If the job is tame but you’re alive three nights a week when you’re dancing, then it’s ok.
• If you work hard to provide for the family that is your joy every night, then it’s ok.
• But if you get up in the morning and see no passion in your life for too many days in a row, you should do something about it.

That is the philosophy I constructed for myself over the years. It started with my dad, who showed me you shouldn’t ever settle, and continued with the traumatic event that made me aware of my mortality. I’m trying to explain this clumsily, but someone else has said all of this so much better than I ever could. In 2005, Steve Jobs gave that famous Commencement Address at Standford University. When I first saw it, I almost cried. He was speaking to my soul and my heart, with words that I wished I could have put together. That day, Steve Jobs told the world what I had felt for years.

And it wasn’t about technology. It was about passion, and choices, and life.
If you’ve never seen it, I urge you, I beg of you, please watch it now. And if you find it speaks to you, please act on it. Today. Not tomorrow, not next year. Start hatching a plan to live your life right now. Start searching for a way to live your passions. Not tomorrow, today. Because if you put it off, life will pass you by, one day at a time.

I admired the CEO and the visionary more than I can say. But I think it is that Steve Jobs that I’m grieving for. The guy whose ideas on life resonated so much with mine.

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.

The latest changes to Facebook are groundbreaking (details here), but they also mean that now, more than ever, you should have a handle on who sees your stuff, and what that stuff is. So here are two cardinal rules of Facebook I strongly encourage you to follow:

First, it’s time to purge your friends list (and keep it clean).
You’ve hesitated for years. You’ve wanted to, but just couldn’t bring yourself to do it. I understand. It’s hard. You feel guilty. I understand, but it’s time. Because the new Facebook means two things: you’ll be sharing a whole lot more stuff, and everything you’ve ever shared will be exposed.
So yes, it’s time. You have to get rid of all these “friends” that aren’t really your friends. The drunk dude that you meant at that party once. The girl who’s updates you “like” sometimes, because she’s hot. That guy you knew in high school but haven’t talked to in fifteen years. Yeah, these aren’t your friends. Facebook a tool to communicate with the people in your life you care about, not a contest to get the biggest friend count. So seriously, do it now, or you’ll be sorry later.

Second, you shouldn’t post things that would sink you if they went public.
The question you should ask yourself before posting anything online is: “if this becomes public, am I ok with it?” If the answer is no, don’t post it. Not in your private BFF group, not as a secret picture to your boyfriend, not as a direct message to your mom. Nowhere. On the internet, nothing is ever truly safe. There are hacks, policy statements nobody reads, policy changes nobody understands, disgruntled a-holes out to get you, and much more.
So just do yourself a favor and assume everything you post could end up being public, and that’s it. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t share private stuff: it’s ok to share something private (baby pictures) with the right group of people (your folks). But if it’s something really private or shameful (I’ll let your imagination run wild here), do not post it, period. Ever. E-VER.

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.

Part II: Details

Part I was the general idea and the main part of the article. If you’re not interested in technical details you can stop reading now; the rest of the article is mostly my understanding of how and why all of this is coming together.

The thought process that brought about the new Facebook

First, they understood their main set of problems:
- Facebook has so many users, what they need now is for sharing to expand.
- Apps are a great way to share (many do so on Twitter) but it crowds the feed.
- The Facebook feed is already super messy and crowded, getting worse by the day.
Then, they engineered a set of solutions:
- Moving the feed to the side and renaming it “the ticker”.
- Making a system for apps to share even more (music, food, sports, everything).
- Creating a new feed that magically shows only the cool stuff from the ticker.
And here are the expected results for the new Facebook:
- Users share tons more stuff that they didn’t share before (through apps).
- Facebook has more info for friends to see, and advertisers to pay for.
- Haters hate but Facebook wins at the Internet, for like the 5th time in a row.

Going deeper

So here are the features that Zuckerberg announced at the F8 opening keynote:
- The Timeline, a new kind of profile that organizes everything you’ve ever posted or shared into a beautiful (and scary) scrapbook style life story page.
- The new Open Graph, which allows developers to make you share even more of your life with your Facebook friends (and advertisers).
- The new Feed, launched a few days ago (but is part of that whole affair), which chooses which updates to display more intelligently.
I’ll leave the Timeline behind for now (although it is awesome), and discuss how the new Feed and the new Open Graph are coming together to realize the vision.

1) The New Feed
Until now, the norm on every social network has been the good old linear feed. A giant chronological list of all the relevant updates. That was great when we shared less, but now it’s become a complete mess: dozens, sometimes hundreds of updates, and you have to dig into all of them and hope you’ll find something cool. It’s unwieldy and everyone knows it. Yet everyone uses the same model; Google+, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram…
A few days ago, Facebook retired that feed to a tiny upper right corner, renaming it the “ticker”. You can still look at it, but that’s not “the feed” anymore. It doesn’t drive your experience. They replaced it with a new feed, created by a magical algorithm that tries to guess what’s important to you, depending on how often you come on the site, what your friends are sharing, and a million other things. Essentially, it should surface important stuff that happened since you were last here, not what happened 10 minutes ago.
NB: I realize Facebook already had the “top stories” view, but this is much larger.

2) The New Open Graph
By doing a lot of complicated and scary things (less asking for permission, longer caching times, etc), Facebook is creating a completely new social ecosystem which applications can use it to start broadcasting update to “the ticker”. This is a bit similar to the way that Twitter works when broadcasting what you do on different apps. Facebook wants more of that, because it creates an incredibly deep information pool. But they’ve also been bitten by too much crap in the feed. So the solution is to allow applications to post what you’re doing to your ticker. And they’ll be posting a lot of it. Listen to music on Spotify? Enable the app and it’ll go on the ticker. Watching TV on Hulu? Same thing. Read a book? Ticker. Liked an article? It’s there too.
And here’s the killer feature: click any one of those updates, and you can see/hear/read/play what that thing. It’s a direct line to what your friends are doing. You’re not just reading about it, you’re experiencing it with them, in real time if you wish to.

3) How it comes together
I know what you’re thinking: it’s too much. If Twitter is confusing, something like that will be impossible to follow. Many people even use Flipboard to read Twitter, because it’s just too much crap to sift through.
Well, on Facebook you won’t have to. remember that “new feed”? It does all that for you. It’s almost an integrated Flipboard of sorts. These annoying updates, they go to the ticker. That’s the “Twitterlike backbone of information”. You can look at them if you really want, but you don’t have to. What you’re looking at is the new feed, which selects and organizes all that information. It can recognize patterns, figure out what’s trending, understand what’s important… But you don’t have to know what’s behind it, it “just works”.
Haven’t been on Facebook it three days? You’ll have a summary of the important things that happened. A new TV show five of your friends have been watching, a recipe your parents cooked and your sisters loved, and that playlist your girlfriend created last Tuesday. And if you’re there every hour, you’ll see things happen almost in real time, with a lot more minute details, because the algorithm knows you’re there often.

Conclusion: Neato, right?

Yup. Well, at least in theory. We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see how this whole thing actually performs. But if it works, everybody wins. For Facebook, it’s going to be great. They get more info on everyone, and can sell more ads and make more money. Yay! And for users, it’s going to be great… if you’re ok with the fact that you’ll be sharing a lot more information.

Bonus 1: A few things that need saying.

1. Reading all this, you might think I’m a Facebook fan, but I actually don’t use it all that much, and I like Google+ a lot more. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to its importance, or to its amazing ability to know what works and adapt to what people want.
2. I’m not predicting the future here. All of this might fail; I am just amazed by the reasoning, the concept, and the potential. What happens next, gods only know. I think it’ll work, but it’s just my humble opinion.
3. We’re only talking about social networking here. Some people have been taking the piss out of tech commentator for propping it up as a “major shift” (MG Siegler shares my enthusiasm). But of course we’re not talking about an actual world changing event. If you care about social networking (and, to an extent, the Internet), you should pay attention. If you don’t, you can safely go about your business, there are more important things happening indeed.
4. With all that said, I think Zuckerberg is a genius. Jobs or Gates caliber. He has the rare gift for forming a vision and understanding what the future will be, when other are scrambling with what’s happening now. Also, many people found him awkward, but I thought he did a very solid presentation, leaping from a truly poor speaker a few years back to a very engaging one today. I think he’s been watching a lot of Steve Jobs tapes… and it’s working.

I’ve heard a lot of outrage in the past 24 hours, mostly divided in two camps: those who hate the new Open Graph because it’s too much sharing, and those who hate the new feed because it’s too confusing. And both these groups usually predict this will be the end of Facebook. Right. Ok, lesson time:

• If people wanted to leave Facebook, they’d have left Facebook.
• If people didn’t want to share on Facebook, they wouldn’t share on Facebook.

On sharing: People love to share. They’re shy at first, but eventually they do it. Why? Because it’s cool to be part of your friends and family’s life, even if they’re 1000km away, even if you don’t see them every week. Facebook, and social networks in general, are a wonderful tool, and what you loose in privacy, you gain in enjoyment. This won’t change.
On interface: Sure, there are revolts sometimes, and Zuck is clever enough to adapt and compromise and scale things back a bit. Maybe it’ll happen here and all of this will have to be scaled back. But if History teaches us anything, it’s that this kind of outrage usually isn’t real. If it’s still there two months from now, I’ll worry. I’m betting it won’t be.

But you don’t have to take my word for it; despite the repeated prophecies of their demise, they now have 800 million people using their service… That’s 50 million more than they did in July! Come on, admit they are doing something right, even if you (or I) don’t like it all that much. I’m not saying there can’t be a different opinion, a reason why this is a bad idea or  why it will fail miserably. For all I know it very well might fail, and I could be completely off the mark here. But for the love of God, if those who think so could explain it with other arguments than “it sucks” or “I hate it”…

NB: I also really like the “this is not new” argument. These people take a look at Twitter and say “I can already send text messages to my friend”. And there is another interesting lesson that came out of these discussions: Google Wave has become the Godwin point of technology. Anytime someone announces something original and tech commentators are excited about its potential, someone will say: “you liked Google Wave and it failed!”

[Edit, Sept 25th] Reorganized the structure of the article, which was confusing. Also changed up a few sentences for clarity, and moved the previous conclusion (warning people about sharing too much and “friends”) to a separate upcoming article.

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”.

The Google way: going all in
The first and most obvious way to approach the issue is the one that Google and many others have adopted: they create a giant hard drive somewhere on the internet and store your data there. That way, when a program modifies a piece of data, it does so directly on the file that is up there on the server (“in the cloud”). And any other program or device accessing that data will always see the latest and “correct” version, because there is only one version that actually exists. Problem solved!
Except… you need to be online to access anything. More on that later.
NB: I call this approach “the Google way” because Google seems like its biggest champion, but they certainly aren’t the first or only ones using these methods. Also, Google VS Apple sounds better.

The Apple way: the halfway house
With its upcoming iCloud system, Apple is approaching the issue in a very different way (so different in fact that it’s a bit hard to grasp when you’ve been drunk on the “other” vision of what the cloud “is” for so many years). Essentially, they don’t see the cloud as the final destination for your data. Instead, they use it as the conduit that makes sure your data is actually present and up to date locally on all your devices.
With iCloud, if you create  or modify an item on one device, the action is automatically replicated on all of them. That is made possible by near instantaneous updates, coordinated by the iCloud system, and sent over the Internet to all your registered machines. I’m simplifying, but that’s the idea.
In effect, you theoretically end up with the same data on all of your devices.

A clashing of visions
Of course, both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. But it seems to me that the most important aspect of it all is that Google’s way is a bit ahead of its time. Indeed, the way we’ve imagined the cloud until now requires you to be online to access anything. And we might have truly online homes now, but we are still a long ways off from a truly online world. Mobility, which represents more and more of the way we access our data, is far from being up to the standards that a truly connected system requires.
There are ways to counter that of course, with pining and caching and such, but the issue of connectivity remains, and  it can make for a frustrating user experience. Thinking “always connected world” today would be like imagining Gmail in 1996: a fantastic service by our current standards of ubiquitous ADSL, but barely useable in a time when you had to pay for each hour spent online, blocking your phone line with you noisy 56.6kbps modem.

Apple’s vision seems to bridge the gap from tomorrow’s hopes to today’s reality: online is central, but local is still the heart of the system. If iCloud works the way it’s supposed to, and your local copies are always up to date everywhere, there is no reason it can’t be the best of both worlds: you work on these local files, and the size efficient updates “sent when the network is available” make the best of the spotty coverage issues that would plague the “online or nothing” methods.
Another advantage is that your data is managed by native applications, which are usually more solid and better designed than web apps. HTML5 is getting better and better, but web apps are still behind in many ways. Again, Google’s way seems designed for the future, where Apple’s way tries to solve the issues of today.

Of disclaimers and pitfalls
All that being said, iCloud is not perfect either. What if I work on a document on a laptop that I can’t sync, but then need to access it from another machine? Worse still, what if you work on one document offline, don’t sync, and make another change on that document elsewhere? I can bet that will create more than one headache in the coming months. And I’m not even going to mention the issue of sharing documents, which seems pretty much impossible to do reliably without one unique version accessible online.
Still, there are answers to these concerns:
- If you’re offline, it’s not like the Google way would allow you to edit these documents anyway. There, no online access means no data access, period.
- Apple is the absolute master of “good enough”, with a side of “ultra convenient and easy to use”. This approach has proven successful time and time again.
- Apple doesn’t seem interested in anything beyond helping you manage your personal set of data. They tie everything to your ID, to the point that it is becoming more and more difficult to use someone else’s device. They want you to have the best possible experience handling your photos, your music, your purchases, and all your personal stuff. In that sense, I’m not certain how interested they are in providing solid collaboration tools if it gets in the way of that “personal life management” philosophy.

Conclusion
Strengths and weaknesses of both systems will be debated for weeks and months to come, with powerful arguments on both sides of the trollish war that is certain to ensue.
Still, trying to understand iCloud is making me realize how frustrating it is to live in a world of “always online” promises before they are actually realized. Thanks to Google and their “always connected” philosophy, we already have incredibly powerful tools to work with. Believe it or not, for all the failings I’m describing here, I’ve been living in the Google ecosystem for years (Gmail, Gdocs, Calendar, contacts…), and certainly some of those do work incredibly well. But I’m starting to believe it is possible that Google’s vision is a bit too forward looking still. Once we live in the “always connected & native-like web apps” world, it’ll make a lot more sense.

For now though, I’m thinking iCloud might turn out to be the perfect middle ground…

—

NB: It needs to be said somewhere: Apple’s iCloud is certainly borrowing ideas from others. Dropbox or Microsoft’s photo studio, for example, have been doing things for a while that might have inspired the iCloud vision. But repurposing existing buds of ideas into fully formed innovative concepts that “just work” is also one of the things Apple does best. And baking these notions into their operating systems certainly opens up a whole different kind of potential. Some might react negatively to this, the way Apple sometimes incites among tech enthusiasts: “there’s nothing new here, this has been possible with Dropbox for years”. That would be a grave misunderstanding of the extent of Apple’s project. For all the love I bear Dropbox (and I assure you it is very very great), iCloud is a very different beast, with very different implications.
Oh, and Dropbox will be fine by the way, it’s an awesome product that enables things iCloud never will.

-Bonus-
Partly related: also prepare for a whole lot of fun with Apple’s photo stream feature (which sends all the photos you take on your phone to all your other devices, in real time, home computer included). I can’t wait for the first idiot who will take pictures of his “work dinner” (i.e: strip club night out), only to discover that his wife is seeing them pop up on the computer at home. Seriously, the media is going to go crazy with this.
So remember kids: what happens in Vegas… is sent in real time to your computer if you take a picture of it.

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)

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!

[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.

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).

The downside is that lists are annoying to manage, and ultimately this might be a reason why Google+ stays constrained to a subset of the online population. Indeed, Zuckerberg was right when he stated that people don’t want to manage lists (Twitter lists didn’t really take off in a big way either). Sure, playing with those widgets is fun for us geeks, but I don’t think Aunt Edna will like it all that much (or even understand it).
That being said, Google’s Circles interface seems to make the “list sorting experience” as painless as can be, so who knows, maybe enough people will make the effort. Especially since Circles control everything in the system: Hangouts can be open to a specific one, Huddles work in the same way, and everything you do on the network can be restricted to one or more of them (updates, photos, links, etc). Again, I think we might see Facebook copying this feature very very quickly…

And for those who want to know more about the service as a whole…

Google+ has taken the tech world by storm in the past 36 hours. Some experts are saying this is the most important Google product launch since Android, and anyone who has a brain agrees. Many are skeptical of the search giant’s capacity to compete in that space of course, and given the spectacular failures of Wave and Buzz, who would blame them? But this new thing definitely has a much much greater potential, and it seems that those who have tried it are all reasonably impressed.

Let’s be clear: it won’t overtake Facebook overnight. Actually, it might very well never do that at all. But it doesn’t really need to. Social media is big, and there is definitely room for another player (especially if its name begins with G and ends with oogle). Facebook frustration runs high, and the mere fact that it is a viable alternative could be reason enough to switch for many.
Also, Google+ has a few very interesting features, which make it noticeably different from Zuckerberg’s privacy challenged brainchild. Overall, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google+ become a serious player in the social space, with dozens of millions of accounts by year’s end. Which would already be a resounding success…

Description time! If you want to know what Google+ is in one idea, you can see it as a social network eerily similar to Facebook, but with a few very key differences. Here’s a quick, non exhaustive list:

• Cleaner look. Before you scoff at this, remember that the look was an important factor in what made people switch to Facebook from Myspace (which lovely star ridden design I often called “the bane of the Internets”). I have to say, after using Google+ for just a few hours, Facebook’s design did start looking a bit cluttered and confused to me. I never really realized that… until now.
  Sure enough, some things could be tweaked. Namely, the sections and fonts are a bit large, and it’s easy to miss something into the ether if you’re not paying attention (the feeds are more Twitterish than Facebookish at the moment, if this means anything). But still, Google engineers like minimalistic design, and it shows.
• Hangouts. These are absolutely awesome. It’s video chat done right: you open up a room to one of your Circles, and people go in and out as they please. You see all participants at the bottom (up to ten) and the one speaking appears in a large video on the top. Super simple, but it just works and it’s incredibly fun. You can also “share” a YouTube video to watch together. I can only imagine how it will evolve (watching movies, listening to music, playing games, sharing documents…). This is probably the coolest feature in there, and it’s full of possibilities. Collaboration, education, support and more.
  It’s kind of a more intimate version of Tinychat, for those who’ve used it, and must be making Skype reasonably uncomfortable right now. Also, I wouldn’t be surprise to see something similar appear in Facebook very quickly.
• Sparks. Not really worth talking about too much: gives you “news” based on your interests (and your friends’ votes maybe?) but it seems a bit broken at the moment. Results are poor at best, and a quick Google Search gives better results. Might turn into something later (good discovery potential), but for now it’s kind of a bleh (<- most wordy description I could muster).
• Huddle (Mobile app only): it’s a group chat. I don’t have an Android phone and the iOS app isn’t out yet so I haven’t tried it, but it seems straight forward enough. Also takes advantage of Circles, although that use could be a bit more tricky if  your Circles become too big.
• Instant Photo Uploads. Also for Android phones, there is an “auto upload” feature for photos which is pretty cool. If you activate it, all the pictures you snap from your phone are instantly uploaded to a safe place on your account, and displaying them is just a click away. I doubt that’ll come to iOS though (system restrictions).
• There is more, but this will have to do for now.

All in all, my view of Google+ is that Circles are an immensely clever and powerful way to tackle the control problem in social graphs, and that Hangouts are really really fun.
Now whether or not Google+ will take off as a whole is a different matter of course. There are issues already (and more to come I’m sure) but let’s be fair: it launched yesterday, it’s still in “field testing”, and it’s already in great shape. We also have to recognize that Google learned from its mistakes, and seems to be doing a lot of things right this time: measured launch, strong privacy control, deep but controlled integration with email and other services… Google+ is a very strong service already. And given how crucial social media has become, this is indeed an important vent in the tech world.

So my conclusion is this: Google is off to a very good start and could have a winner on its hands. I won’t get carried away and tell tales of industry changes and such, but what I will say is that I’m convinced enough to keep using it for the time being. And given my experience with Google’s social endeavors, that wasn’t a given.

PS: No one seems to have invites at this point. They were open for a few hours yesterday but seem to be closed, because of “insane demand“. If I do get enough to pass around somewhere down the line (before everyone and their mother has one), I’ll make sure to update this post and offer some to as many people as I can.