William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

2016 is just around the corner . . .

A recent piece in the Bits blog, about Google powering up to lobby in DC, made me visit the FEC website to poke around for what kind of campaign contributions Google's PAC might be making.

Pictured below is a detail from a "SCHEDULE B (FEC Form 3X) ITEMIZED DISBURSEMENTS" filed by Google Inc. NetPAC.

Now what's Rob Portman doing, in 2012, raising money to fight off a primary challenger to his Senate re-election in 2016? Hadn't he better be acting like he'd be running for re-election as Vice President in 2016? Might Google be going out of its way to get Portman's attention now?

Gotta admit that Google appears to be transparent about its politicking. It's sad, though, isn't it - something like a triumph of the intransigent - to think that Google is playing the same game as the telecom companies and the banks.

Drafting

One of the pleasures of redlining is that you can map a tour of changes made in a landscape of text.

I haven't yet had a chance to read Google's overhauled privacy policy. The changes look to be so substantial, it may be difficult for a redline to throw discrete instances of wordsmithing into relief.

That said, here is a small section of the anticipated Google privacy policy, marked against the version to be replaced. This passage, at least, does yield the experience only a redline will afford.

I don't have time this morning to fully narrate a tour. I'll just call out three highlights:

• The implication that Google's security efforts will meet a certain industry or societal standard ("appropriate") is elided if not entirely replaced with the promise that Google will "work hard."
•  Google itself is added as a beneficiary of its security efforts.
• "Google employees, contractors and agents" go from working on Google's "behalf," to working "for" Google. This I think introduces the possibility of agency, or a degree of it, for which Google itself may not be responsible.

G+ Validates Twitter

A byproduct of Google+ that I'm enjoying is that it validates Twitter.

It's cool that Google+ sets out to do so much -- replace Facebook; organize photos; be a newsfeed; somehow be a micro-blogging platform in and to itself; and other and more -- but it's so nuanced that it's demanding.

And so I find myself returning more often to the Twitter stream and with a renewed appreciation for how straightforward and comprehensible it is.

It's easier to consume tweets. And it remains intoxicatingly simple to post them.

This is mostly the mobile me talking. On the web, the G+ promises to integrate with everything else on or through the Chrome browser. Maybe the Twitter is going to be the ubiquitous stream that is platform agnostic. (Maybe some stripped down G+ mobile client will make G+ less exhausting on the phone -- though it's still intoxicating how much you can get around G+ on the android app.)

I still prefer the old Twitter over the new Twitter, but even the new Twitter is much more like Twitter than G+. So I credit G+ for not complaining about the forced transition (old Twitter seems to have been totally phased out now).

In short, Twitter is feeling more like that bare bones, universal public communication utility that, well, we know it really isn't; but relatively speaking, in contrast to the Google, it feels lighter.

One Google After Another

Among the perils of writing fiction set in the near future, novelist Charles Stross said last night in Seattle, are that you can mistakenly refer to technologies that were launching when you were writing, but have cratered by the time the book is out.

Google Wave is one such example, he admitted, in answering a question that questioned his reference to a Wave-like product in "Rule 34," the new novel from which he read at the University of Washington bookstore.

But Wave could come back! He noted that Google had turned it over to Apache, and that a not-too-distant future could be more receptive to what Wave has to offer.

Google+ is not going to crash like Wave, nor implode at launch like Buzz. It already has essential traction in the techie crowd, more so than Quora, probably more so than Facebook (which may be able to defend its franchise among the general population; we'll see). G+ also has a shot to keep morphing and exploring what it might become, maybe for as long a period as Twitter did.

Next up: Google Government, whereby federal power is devolved to regional bodies that will unapologetically raise taxes; build public broadband and public transport; manage free schools and hospitals; and export the crazies to their own Disneyland where goverment keeps its hands off their Medicare drug benefits and armies are equipped and fed with tax cuts.

Meditation on Envy

You were supposed to have your own key.
Apologists extended the trade window and the league was, well,
Funded. At twilight in an obscure Danish kitchen
A rediscovered Indian spice made a difference.

Fresh weather breaks like color in a Brazilian slum
As we plod our redoubt to the secure cantina
Smothered in shade. Google+ attends
The pours of attractive barkeeps shot by shot.

It's hard to look up from your diligence to let go
Of knowing everyone knows no better
Than the last time you logged in, that everywhere’s
A possibility including perhaps the place you’ve plunked yourself down.

Truth is unfashionable, but already paid for.
I lost the reason. I'm genuinely happy you took it. Can I touch it?

©2011 William Carleton

Google+

First I want to thank Josh Maher for sending me an invite and also Ariana O'Dell for offering one while I didn't yet know I had one from Josh.

I also want to say that I really enjoy reading Dave Winer's blog these days. He's not a prose stylist but he's an efficient communicator of interesting thoughts. He sees big context in small things, makes details tell, yet his style is spare and his syntax simple.

So he's been posting recently about Google+, and in one piece dismissively said this:

"Their [Google's] 'social' offerings have been rebuffed repeatedly, and they will continue to be rejected by users, no matter how promising they are, no matter what they are, different from Facebook, a Facebook clone, doesn't matter."

He gives two reasons for this permanent and inevitable state of affairs, the second of which is, "Everyone's watching."

This means that:

" . . . on Day One your service pretty much has to be feature-complete, and ready for hundreds of millions of users. Forget about corner-turns. Forget about dipping your big toe in to get a sense of the temperature. These are the advantages of the upstart, when they're starting."

Well, he may be right, but damn if the darn thing (Google+) doesn't do a lot of shit right out of the gate.

I was so excited at getting Josh's mail that I started playing with Google+ with my iPhone, rather than wait to get back to where I had left my Android phone. Right away it started throwing choices at me, like telling me where I happened to be and asking if it should locate the post I was about to write. Then it threw out dozens of names as suggested connections, and let me select from the list even as it kept refreshing it with new finds.

Google+ appears to be promising that you can gradate access/permissions/exposure by placing your peeps in different "circles." I hesitated at how to categorize some folks, but soon enough I saw I could create and name my own custom "circles" (take that, Facebook).

When I got back to my Android phone, Google+ really knew me and added additional nuance to my control. Once the a couple apps from the Android Market were installed, Google+ was asking about automatically uploading photos as I take them and inviting me to initiate a "huddle" (those features are not on the iPhone).

But I imagine I'd still play the heck out of Google+ even as a web app on the iPhone. The experience on the iPhone is like other Google services on iOS: work fine; feel like the mobile setting of a web page rather than a native app; are missing the touches that supercharge the experience but yet get the job done.

The delight of Google+ will come first on the Android apps. (Apple's answer to be Twitter integration?)

A Bus Too Far

It's inspiring to hear that the creator of One Bus Away will be moving on to new challenges and a bigger canvas.

One Bus Away is a set of smartphone apps and other tools that let people in King County, Washington, know where and when to head for the next bus. I've blogged about it before and the iPhone app has been one of my favorites. I probably would not use the bus at all, were it not for One Bus Away.

If I'm not mistaken, it plots the arrival times of your bus by referencing the odometer reading of the given bus at the start of its route. That is, unlike programs for other municipal bus systems, it does not use GPS to track buses. But it works reliably -- in my experience, buses arrive within plus or minus one minute of the time estimated (and it can be frustrating when the bus arrives and leaves a minute early!).

In any case, the approach works and it improves quality of life in Seattle.

The project's creator, Brian Ferris, wrote this yesterday on the One Bus Away blog, about where he is going next:

"I'm going to work for Google. Specifically, the Google Transit team [in Zurich]. If you've ever used Google Maps to plan a trip using public transit from point A to point B, then you're familiar with their work. Why Google? To put it simply, Google has done more to improve than usability of public transit than any other company I can think of. Their transit trip planner has made trip planning possible for hundreds of agencies where it wasn't before, and dramatically improved the trip planning experience for many agencies with planners of their own. What's more, projects like OneBusAway would not even be possible without the work of Google engineers. Their efforts to establish the GTFS spec for exchanging transit schedule data really launched the open transit data revolution that has lead to apps like OneBusAway and countless others. And perhaps you've heard they're getting into real-time?"

Congrats to Mr. Ferris, congrats to Google for nabbing such a leader, power to the people and may more and more information help break America's dependence on oil.

Photo: Portrait of Chico Alvarez and June Christy, 1947 or 1948, by William P. Gottlieb.