Silicon Shecky

Social Networking is a big thing in the world right now. Can Google+ be the next big thing? Here are my first impressions of it.

Google+, the new attempt by Google to go up against Facebook. I was able to get in it last night, and immediately started poking around, seeing what was what, and how things worked on a basic level.

Basic is the best way to describe the look of Google+. so basic and spartan, which is nice in some respects, but maddening in others. It is easy to see your stream, your circles, etc, in fact the basic layout of where things are located is very similar to Facebook. The learning curve on what is what, is not too bad, although a few hours in I was still trying to find some settings.

The biggest issue I ran into with the main stream page, was the stream itself. It seemed like there were posts put in random order. It made things rather confusing, and I have yet to find a setting to force it to be in an actual timeline that makes sense. This is something I feel needs to be addressed, and pretty quickly, as Facebook’s news feed is well beyond Google’s stream in look, feel and custom-ability.

After looking and tearing my hair out with the stream, I went  into Circles and started setting things up. Circles, to me, is the nicest feature. I proceeded to set up a few special circles for myself and started adding people I knew into different circles. Being able to segregate people into different areas so they only can see what I want them to, allowing for certain things to get out, while other things don’t, is a great idea, and well done by Google.

Posting to one’s stream, you get some nice options, including sending the post to people you know who are not in Google+ yet which would work as an invite to them. Other options such as which circles, or even down to individual people are allowed to see the post, gives a granularity of privacy that Facebook does not have, nor cares about.

Sparks is probably the second most interesting aspect of Google+. The idea of getting what amounts to a RSS feeds based on a keyword for an interest, is amazing. Again, you can get real specific with you information and search. this is definitely right up Google’s main alley, with its search engine.

Some areas where I find it to really feel beta, or need to be improved, besides the stream order, include the Settings. It is not as easy to find some of them, especially the privacy settings, as I would like. Its definitely no more difficult than on Facebook, but I think Google can do better. Also, there is no event calendar system for setting up events. Considering that could be integrated with Google Calendar, I am surprised that they didn’t do that out of the box.

Google did give a tab on Your profile page to keep up with Buzz to some extent, but I haven’t played with it enough to really see how well Buzz got brought into Plus.

Keeping in mind that this is still beta software, and there are bugs, slowness issues, and other things that can and will change or be adjusted, what they do have right now is a good start. Its a solid base upon which to build on. the question really is, will Google advance with this or will it drop the ball like it has in the past.

Firefox 4 is out. For a browser that re-sparked the browser wars, Firefox had been falling behind lately. Can 4 bring back Firefox?

I have a tendency not to download betas of web browsers. I’m not much of a bug hunter, haven’t been able to establish myself in those communities, don’t have a ton of time for actual hard core testing, and I’m not a developer. I just like having things work, especially where web browsing is concerned. So when I heard that Firefox 4′s final release was going to be the exact same as the last Release Candidate, I decided to actually jump the gun and start using it. I figured it couldn’t be any worse than using 3.6.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since version 2, and overall have liked it. There have always been some issues with it, such as the memory hole it has, but they were things I could mostly live with. As  Firefox 3 kept getting updated though, it was all getting worse and worse. To open my iGoogle home page, which is set up with a bunch of news widgets, would take 5 minutes. Not only that, but the whole browser would be slow and unresponsive until it fully opened.

So I finished downloading Firefox 4 and installing it, expecting the same sluggishness. Surprisingly to me, my iGoogle paged opened in under a minute, and I was all set to go to other websites in other tabs, even while the iGoogle page was loading up. This is starting to look promising.

I continued on my browsing way, going to sites I frequent such as Tech Republic, ZDNet, Krebs on Security, and many more. All rendered faster than in Firefox 3.6. I did run into an occasional site which just wouldn’t open in Firefox 4 (Buffalo Wild Wings being one), but considering that there have been a lot of changes in Firefox 4, this doesn’t surprise me.

Everything isn’t all roses though. Java rendering (I enjoy playing Text Twist) and some Flash rendering is slow and painful. The Java being the worst of them all, as it slows to a crawl with a java game on Yahoo’s website. Once loaded, it works ok, but still a bunch of issues. Also, Firefox still uses a lot of memory, and doesn’t have the best memory management in the world. I have also heard reports of people who have had issues with it upon install, although the percentage seems to be small.

Is Firefox 4 an improvement? Definitely. Is it a game changer? No. Can it fend off Google Chrome? Maybe. Personally, I’m not going to Chrome unless I have to (Google has enough info on me from Android, Gmail etc, they don’t get any more if I can help it), and I don’t care of IE, Safari, or Opera. In the end, its really about what you are comfortable with and what works. On that, Firefox 4 is a solid, fast browser.

So here we are, a society that considers itself civilized. A society that has tons of issues. A society that loves clogging up the court system with litigation. You get litigation if you buy coffee at McDonald’s and spill it on yourself, if you are a 4 year old who hit an older lady while riding your bicycle, and especially if you try to make anything in the technology field.

I look at the lawsuits being brought out recently. Apple Sues Motorola, Motorola sues Apple, Microsoft sues Motorola, some company that bought a software patent sues major websites, and so on, and so on. Heck I’m waiting to see who is going to sue whom over what next.

With all the big companies suing each other, its no wonder that you don’t have much technological advancement anymore. You get repackaged versions of older ideas that work better cause of faster processing power. No real innovation, and this is I feel is due to 2 things. Patent trolling, and lack of entrepreneurial spirit.

Seriously, who wants to try to build new things when you can just keep making money off what you already have, and who wants to try to start up a new company, when virtually every method of doing anything is patented, and thereby a potential death by litigation for a small company.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a good reason to have patents, just like copyrights. The issue is the length of time they last for. At some point you need to reduce that amount of time back to something more normal, just so that we can innovate and move forward.  Of course, that is just my opinion.