Faster Forward

Google launched its latest bid for info-ubiquity, a sweeping social-networking service called Google Buzz built on its Gmail service.

Buzz incorporates functions already offered by such popular sites as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and FourSquare -- among many others.

In an hour-long event at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters webcast on YouTube, company product managers explained that Google wants to help people deal with the overload of information streaming out of other social-media services -- yes, by launching yet another social-media service.

As a short introductory video explains, Buzz requires an active Gmail account and Google Contacts list. It uses those ingredients to plot its "social graph" of your friends: Buzz assumes the people you talk to the most in e-mail are the ones you want to hear from the most on this new service. (Since I've used my Gmail account mainly for commercial e-mails from stores, financial institutions, airlines and so on, this part won't work for me.)

Once Buzz is active in your Gmail account -- something that will happen gradually as Google deploys it -- you'll be able to choose between publicly or privately posting comments, links, photos and videos. Public posts, or buzzes, will show up on your Google Profile (remember how Google began building up that feature without an obvious need for it?) and can appear in Google Web searches -- much as Twitter updates do today. Private buzzes will show up only for other Buzz users who are on your Google Contacts list, or a subset that you designate for each buzz -- just as Facebook lets you choose who will see each status update.

Incoming buzzes appear right in your Gmail inbox; Google reps showed off how videos played inline, photo slideshows appeared in a nifty graphical overlay and comments on buzzes showed up automatically and in real time. (They used the new Mac version of Google's Chrome browser for this demo.) You can respond other people's buzzes using a Twitteresque "@ reply" format. Buzz will also recommend buzzes from people you don't follow if it thinks enough of your friends have commented on them and will "collapse" buzzes that draw few comments or provide little information.

Buzz can also pull in content from other sites, such as Twitter, Yahoo's Flickr and Google's own Picasa, YouTube and Blogger -- but you can't post to Twitter from Buzz, something that emerged only in a Q&A session after the presentation. Most important, there is no connection with Facebook, the dominant social network that just claimed its 400 millionth user (in comparison, Gmail is at around 146 million users, although both figures count people who rarely log in).

Buzz appears more ambitious, and a tad creepier, on a mobile device. It ties into the location-aware capabilities Google has built into such sites as Google Maps to determine your location, then goes a step further to try to map those coordinates to real-world places and establishments -- so instead of placing you at 1600 Ampitheatre Pkwy. in Mountain View, it knows you're at the Googleplex.

Using just-updated versions of Google Maps for Android and other platforms (an update for Apple's iPhone will come later), you can then easily announce your presence at a given store, restaurant, bar or airport and post a comment or photo about the place. The former feature threatens FourSquare and its increasingly popular check-in feature; the latter represents a stab at Yelp's business of rating real-world establishments.

You can also see other people's buzzes in Google Maps as little quote-bubble icons. Within a few miles of my home, I can see such recent buzzes as "At the movies finally watching avatar" and "Uh buzz? Great... Another thing to keep updated." You can post a reply to any of these buzzes right from within Google Maps.

During the presentation, Google representatives repeatedly emphasized their plans to make Buzz a "standards-compliant" and "protocol-obeying" system that would let people control their data and take it with them, using Web data-sharing software the company has been working on with other developers.

But Google faces some huge obstacles to building up Buzz as a nexus of everybody's social networks. Its Gmail-first requirement excludes most people online; how many of them will change e-mail services just to use this? Its lack of any integration with Facebook, at least for now, will force Facebook users who also want to Buzz to set up yet another online profile and friends list -- and as analyst Michael Gartenberg notes, they'll lose their favorite Facebook apps in the process. Buzz carries a greater risk of privacy mishaps than even Facebook, thanks to its location-awareness -- one nearby Buzz user, who had earlier taken the trouble to make her Twitter and Facebook accounts private, revealed her apartment's location by mistake. (After I posted a comment asking about that -- which I can only hope did not broadcast my own location -- she seems to have deleted that buzz.)

Most of all, Buzz's mobile features require placing a phenomenal amount of trust in Google: You're not only letting its computers tell you what's worth knowing on the Web, read your e-mail and keep your calendar, now you're going to let them follow you around in the real world.

Forgive me if I'm not too excited to start using this. I like Google and Gmail and my next cellphone will be an Android device, but at some point it's good to log out of the Google ecosystem and give your business to somebody else -- even if that's a little messy and inefficient.

What's your take on Buzz? Do you see this as solving problems with existing social networks? If it does, are you happy to see the solution coming from Google in particular?

Have you finally made your peace with the new home-page design Facebook launched in October? Good -- the social network is now replacing it.

The new design attempts to simplify navigating to and finding a few commonly used features on the ever-expanding site, which recently collected its 400 millionth user:

Does Google need to buy an ad anywhere, much less in the Super Bowl? Apparently, it does -- as you would have learned from watching the game last night.

The search giant's nearly wordless, one-minute ad -- an embed of the video is after the jump, if you somehow haven't seen it yet -- traced the story of a relationship as seen through Google searches. Like many of the company's products, it was notable for its understatement compared with the competition.

(But was I the only person to think "wow, that's a lot of somebody's life stored in Google's search logs"?)

The reportedly $5 million spot also resembled many Google products in its success at blowing past rivals, as The Hill's Kim Hart (a former cubicle dweller here) observed in a post this morning. Over at Search Engine Land, editor Danny Sullivan noted that Google first posted the spot on YouTube three months ago -- Slate uploaded a parody version featuring imagined searches by Tiger Woods in early December -- and has since bought a Google ad to point people to its ad.

As in prior Super Bowls -- see my recaps of tech ads from 2009 and 2008 -- I wasn't too surprised to see that most of the tech industry's contribution to the genre fell short of such classics as Apple's "1984" ad. Oh well: You can't expect all of the ad agencies to stage the equivalent of a 74-yard touchdown on an interception return.

* As a customer of GoDaddy's domain-registration services, I continue to cringe every time this company airs ads that entirely ignore marketable attributes of its services (as in, they're cheap and they work). This year's crop was a little more subtle than prior attempts ... which isn't saying much.

* Motorola's Megan Fox clip played off the same basic theme as the domain registrar's ads but was a little more clever at making fun of it.

* I'm a sucker for anthropomorphized animals and so enjoyed Monster.com's fiddle-playing beaver.

* For similar reasons, I had to smile at Intel's sad, upstaged robot, even if the real-world virtues of products pushed in the ad -- its new i3, i5 and i7 processors -- remained somewhat unclear.

* E*Trade's talking babies are getting predictable, but the "milkaholic" angle brought some new life to the genre.

* I'm trying to wipe the images in CareerBuilder.com's "Casual Friday" ad from my memory (and apologize for linking to it here).

* Qualcomm's Flo TV ad had me wondering how many guys would want to identify with that spot's sad, "spineless" individual, whose deprived life could be redeemed only by buying a portable TV and subscribing to this service (note that a mobile version of free broadcast digital TV is coming this year).

* Vizio's pitch for its Internet-connected TV made me think of ads for Verizon's Droid smartphone at first, with its series of robot arms plucking content off shelves.

What did you think of this year's tech ads? Post your reviews in the comments.

As for all the other Super Bowl commercials, see write-ups by The Post's Tom Shales and Slate's Seth Stevenson, then cast a vote in our poll. Because we all know most of you have nothing better to do on a snow day.

Satellite-TV reception can suffer from what's "rain fade" and "snow fade"--when precipitation in the air degrades the signal. But many satellite subscribers have suffered a different sort of snow fade during this weekend's epic blizzard: snow piling up right on the dish. Which can be a big problem with the Super Bowl kicking off in about six hours--one friend has already cancelled his game-watching party because of this, although the unplowed streets around his Herndon residence also factored into that call.

If your dish is close enough, try using a long pole, stick or broom to brush the snow off the dish and the "LNB" antenna mounted in front of it. If that's not possible, some viewers have reported that throwing enough snowballs at the dish and LNB can shake the snow loose. Or you could try to go out on the roof and take care of things firsthand... but, please, be careful up there. Very careful.

Another option, if you have a digital TV or converter box and an antenna, is to watch the game off the air for free. CBS affiliate WUSA will be broadcasting the game, and it recently increased the power of its transmission. If you can't get your satellite reception in gear--or if your cable's gone out--try tuning into channel 9.1 or having your tuner rescan the airwaves to pick up that channel. You'll need a VHF antenna, such as one with adjustable rabbit ears, to pick up this signal; an indoor antenna can work in many spots within a few miles of WUSA's transmitter in Tenleytown, while farther out you may need an attic or rooftop antenna.

Got other tips for working around snow-driven TV and telecom issues? Share them in the comments....

On learning of the subject of today's column -- Adobe's Flash Web-multimedia software and possible substitutes for it -- one of my editors sent back a quick reply: "I hate Flash! Let it die!"

That's not too different from the reaction I got when I wrote a blog post about Flash's future on Monday.

Apple's public display of disregard for this format at the iPad unveiling last week -- not only does that device not support Flash, chief executive Steve Jobs allowed everybody to see that incompatibility within the first 14 minutes of the event -- seems to have given a lot of people permission to air their Flash grievances since then.

(It's like the first time a browser shipped with built-in blocking for pop-up ads -- and everybody realized how much they hated those things once they no longer had them bubbling up off every other page.)

In the column, I note that I'm not much of a fan of Flash either: Beyond its documented performance and security issues, the whole notion of browser-plug-in maintenance gets tiresome. But while there are good, open replacements for Flash based on the HTML5 standard for Web coding, the Web is too balkanized -- between varying support for modern Web standards in browsers that keeps technically fascinating code from working uniformly and a split between two post-Flash video formats that compounds the work of Web publishers -- to allow us to ditch Adobe's format anytime soon.

For a more technically involved version of that argument, see Gizmodo's post -- and then set aside a few minutes to read Mark Pilgrim's excellent explanation of the video-compatibility issues. Don't forget the problem of old software lingering around, either. As usability consultant Jakob Nielsen wrote in an e-mail, "The guideline has always been to stay two versions behind in terms of what formats can be used on mainstream websites without alienating a substantial proportion of the customers. So assuming that a video format [compatible with HTML5] is introduced in IE 9, it cannot be used until IE 11 is launched."

That doesn't mean that sites shouldn't get rid of non-video Flash components, like stupid site intros that add zero value and interactive menus that could be crafted out of standards-compliant HTML. (I include this site among that contingent, although I have to tell you that Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti said that we don't have plans to cut reduce our use of Flash.)

But for video online, I don't see any rapid movement away from Flash. It's taken long enough just to standardize, more or less, on this one format -- for example, C-SPAN only just announced that it will stop posting clips in RealVideo format at the end of this month. There's also an issue I didn't get into the story, "digital rights management" usage restrictions on video streams: Flash supports them, and a lot of content owners will freak out if they don't have a DRM security blanket to clutch.

But what about mobile devices like the iPad? Nielsen -- who once called Flash "99% Bad" and still opposes decorative uses of it -- suggested that Apple was wrong to block Flash video: "Diversity is the beauty and also the strength of the Web, because small and narrowly targeted sites offer the exact content and services that appeal the strongest to each individual user. Cutting off diversity is a true disservice to the Web, and Apple should stop doing this."

I see his point. But I seriously doubt that Apple will do any such thing ... even if most competing smartphones should soon have access to Flash content through Adobe's upcoming 10.1 release.

Of course, as I type this it's begun to snow, which means that by this time tomorrow the Washington area will be entombed under two feet of fluffy white doom, which means that none of this matters all that much. But in our remaining hours together, why don't we discuss these issues in the comments -- and in my Web chat, starting at noon today.

Want to point a friend to some interesting new software for the iPhone without making him launch iTunes to see the program's listing? Until today, there hasn't been an app for that.

But this morning, Apple added a Web-preview option for iPhone and iPod touch apps. Look up a program in iTunes, right-click its name to select "Copy Link" -- and instead of getting a weird link that will ask readers to fire up iTunes, you'll have a standard Web address.

These listings -- see, for example, the page for the free ShopSavvy program -- include the same basic data that you'd see in iTunes, such as customer reviews, release notes and screen shots. To throw around the relevant buzzwords, Apple's taken an overdue step to make the App Store part of the "link economy."

(Speaking of long-awaited developments in iPhone apps, Post Managing Editor Raju Narisetti wrote that the paper "should be coming out with an iPhone app in this quarter" in a Web chat late last month. More details as I know them.)

The new Web app-preview pages fit in with the Web listings of songs, albums, TV shows, movies and videos that Apple began adding last year -- although the Cupertino, Calif., company has yet to add a public list of best-selling apps to match those it offers in those categories. (As with apps, you can also create Web links to any random item out of iTunes if you want.)

At the start of January, Apple rolled out yet another Web option for music: 30-second previews of any song. That feature, combined with the company's December purchase of the streaming-music service Lala, has some observers wondering if Apple plans to add some sort of Web-radio component to the iTunes Web site.

Would you be interested in such a service? In what other ways would you like to see the content available on the iTunes Store liberated from the iTunes program? The comments are all yours ...

The saga of the misleadingly named "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" has only gotten more ridiculous since I decried it in November.

For those of you whose eyes (understandably) glaze over at any mention of multilateral trade agreements, ACTA is an attempt by the United States and dozens of other countries to write new rules to combat counterfeiting of trademarked goods, as its name suggests, and to stop copyright violations as well, a goal left out of its moniker. (If you've got a spare 90 minutes, you can watch a video of a panel discussion I led about ACTA at Google's Washington offices last month.)

But what might those exact rules be? The people negotiating this deal say they'll tell us when they've finished that work. In the meantime, they will only offer vague declarations about the problems they aim to solve.

Consider, for example, the woefully bland statement put out by the office of the U.S. trade representative after the conclusion of the latest round of ACTA talks last month. Then compare it with the briefer but far more useful summary put together from outside reports by ACTA opponent Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

That level of secrecy has begun to draw criticism from groups that were early proponents of ACTA. For example, in November the Motion Picture Association of America wrote a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk requesting greater transparency and public participation. And at the end of January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce voiced similar thoughts in a press release -- sentiments that went unsaid in a June 2009 endorsement of ACTA.

But the administration itself -- yes, the one that keeps emphasizing the virtues of transparency and open government -- doesn't seem to be getting the memo. In an interview with the trade publication World Trademark Review (note: you may get hit with a site-registration request after reloading that link), USTR adviser Stan McCoy blamed ACTA anxiety over the "misperception that this agreement will focus mostly or exclusively on copyright infringement in the digital environment."

BZZT! You can't whine about a "misperception" about what you're doing when you don't tell people what you're doing.

One concept to come up in too many reports about the substance of ACTA to be chalked up to a "misperception" is a concept called either "graduated response" or "three strikes." This is the idea that this agreement would endorse, encourage or require Internet providers to disconnect the accounts of users found to be sharing copyrighted materials.

How might this sort of privatized law enforcement work? One example emerged this week in a CNet story about a Qwest Internet user who was wrongly threatened with disconnection -- a threat that included the suggestion that she would be blackballed by competing Internet providers -- until Qwest responded to CNet's inquiries by investigating her situation and discovered that her home network had been compromised.

Qwest's conduct, unfortunately, doesn't even seem that bad compared with some of the appallingly dumb things said in favor of three-strikes policies during a panel discussion at last week's State of the Net Conference.

Now remember that the discussion about ACTA is just getting warmed up. I can only imagine what will happen when the more... motivated Tea Party types start paying attention to stories with headline descriptions like "SECRET COPYRIGHT TREATY." Care to take a guess at how the debate will turn at that point?

The most important detail in this morning's press release from Olympus about the imminent availability of two new digital cameras comes 66 lines down:

SD Compatibility

Olympus' new Spring 2010 digital compact cameras offer SD capability for up to 32 gigabytes of capacity.

With the arrival of those models, one of the longest-running, most pointless format wars in electronics will end: Every major digital-camera vendor will sell multiple devices that accept industry-standard SD Cards.

Most of the industry settled on that 10-year-old format early in the last decade--having already moved on from such competing technologies as floppy disks (no, really), recordable CDs, Compact Flash cards and SmartMedia cards. But Sony stuck with its older, proprietary Memory Stick, while Fuji and Olympus had their newer, equally proprietary xD-Picture Card.

Owners of cameras that used those non-standard formats gained no significant performance advantages but had to deal with a variety of real or potential issues. They risked paying more for memory of the same capacity--or not finding their camera's memory sold at all in smaller stores. Cards borrowed from friends were less likely to work in their camera. And if they owned a smaller computer, such as an ultralight or netbook laptop, they would probably find that it only had an SD Card slot.

("SD" stands for "Secure Digital," a reference to "digital rights management" usage-control features that were engineered into the format to win support from the recording industry--and which have since been almost completely ignored in the market.)

For those reasons, I've been recommending SD-compatible cameras since at least 2005. Among the holdout manufacturers, Fuji was the first to cave; in January of 2007, it announced that its upcoming cameras would accept both SD and xD memory. At last month's Consumer Electronics Show, Sony followed suit, not only debuting a series of SD-compatible cameras and camcorders but also launching its own line of SD Cards. Olympus then unveiled its own SD-capable models; one shipped last month and others, as noted above, arrive this month.

So we now have a removable-storage format even more compatible than the floppy disk once was. You can take an SD Card and move it from camera to camcorder to laptop to desktop (longtime holdout Apple finally got around to adding SD Card slots last year) to some TVs and DVD or Blu-ray players. In turn, most non-Apple smartphones use microSD cards--one sits in the foreground of the picture above--that, when snuggled into an adapter sleeve, function in regular-sized SD slots.

It's too bad some of these companies didn't pay attention to tech forecasts sooner. Five years ago, the trends looked obvious, but as far back as xD's 2002 launch, smart observers of the market didn't see a need for yet another incompatible storage medium. That's left us with a large backlog of Memory Sticks, xD-Picture Cards and devices that can only use those formats. If you happen to own one of those things, what's your reaction on having bought into the losing end of a format war?

Since Apple unveiled its iPad tablet last week -- perhaps you've heard of it by now? -- there's been a lot of chatter in techie circles about a feature missing from that touch-screen device: support for Adobe Flash.

This set of formats and the free Flash Player required to view them constitute one of the more polarizing technologies on the Web.

Flash has made some great things possible online: streaming video at sites ranging from Hulu to YouTube, Google Street View interactive panoramas and a variety of rich, interactive interfaces. The nearly ubiquitous deployment of Flash has also largely eliminated the need to install other multimedia browser plug-ins, such as RealNetworks' increasingly marginalized RealPlayer.

But pushy, tasteless Web developers have abused Flash to unleash a plague of distracting animated site introductions and nagging advertisements. Flash can also be a resource hog, especially outside of Windows. Flash also requires frequent security updates to fix flaws attacked by hackers -- and there are so many out-of-date releases of the Flash player in circulation that the latest version of Mozilla Firefox now warns users to update those and other obsolete plug-ins.

When Apple shipped the iPhone in 2007, it left out Flash entirely -- and has yet to include it since, even though Adobe has since signed up other smartphone developers for an upcoming, mobile-optimized version of the Flash player.

The iPad will continue that tradition -- as the audience at the iPad unveiling saw when chief executive Steve Jobs brought up the New York Times' home page on the device, complete with the blue-Lego icon Apple's Safari browser displays when it doesn't have a plug-in required by a page. (There's almost no chance that a company as detail-oriented as Apple put on such a public display of incompatibility by accident.)

But set aside the iPad -- the iPhone, the iPod touch and other Flash-less devices already make up an increasing chunk of the Web audience. At the popular Lifehacker site, for example, the number of visitors without Flash has tripled to just over 6 percent. That's not a large number, but it's big enough for smart Web developers to pay attention -- just as, tech blogger Robert Scoble noted on Saturday, they had to switch to Web standards to accommodate the small but growing number of users using the first versions of Firefox.

Does that make the Flash Player the next RealPlayer? I'm not so sure. Although a new standard for Web coding, HTML5, allows for more interactive content and makes it easier to embed audio and video, Web browsers differ in the sort of HTML5 video they can handle on their own. Firefox can play a royalty-free format called Theora, while Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari support the competing H.264 format. In other words, Flash provides a much more compatible video solution.

In a blog post last week, Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack defended his colleagues' software on those grounds while acknowledging its issues. Comparing Flash's widespread deployment and support with the halting, fragmented nature of other attempts at standardizing Web multimedia, he borrowed Winston Churchill's line about democracy to call Flash "the worst except for all the others ever tried."

That may be the case. But one thing does seem impossible to dispute: The animated Flash site intro needs to die. Can we at least agree on that? We can argue about all of the other Flash content in the comments below.

A TV isn't always necessary to watch TV shows, thanks to the growing number of programs available for free, for rent or for purchase on the Web. But for most people, switching to the Web for TV viewing has required watching shows on a far smaller screen, one with other programs distracting you and an interface full of tiny buttons and menus.

The two programs I assess in today's column -- Boxee, pictured at right, and Hulu Desktop, below -- offer a solution to that. If you can connect a laptop or small-form-factor desktop to an HDTV (which may not be the easiest thing in the world), and if that computer includes a wireless remote control (such as the simple device Apple sells or the more complex remotes included with some Windows computers), these programs will provide a lean-back-on-the-couch viewing experience much closer to that of traditional TV.

As you can see in the column, I like Boxee a lot more. Although the software seems less of a finished product, it's immensely more versatile than Hulu Desktop -- despite Hulu's attempts to stop Boxee users from going to their site in the first place. Hulu Desktop itself works fine as a Hulu-only viewing solution -- and Hulu itself is a terrific site -- but the entertainment companies that own much of the site need to recognize that a viewer is a viewer is a viewer.

(Note that one of Hulu's owners is NBC Universal, which Comcast hopes to buy, which in turn means that Comcast's opinions on this issue deserve close scrutiny by the regulators who must approve its proposed merger.)

And yet while I liked using Boxee to watch Web TV on my HDTV, the idea of dedicating a separate computer for that purpose seems wasteful -- especially if it's going to be an addition to the laptop that usually makes its way to the coffee table. One of the things I gained when I canceled my TV service in favor of over-the-air viewing back in the fall was simplicity. Adding a computer and its regularly scheduled maintenance to the TV configuration undermines that ... although, with the addition of a digital-TV tuner, that Mac or PC could double as a digital video recorder.

A device like the upcoming Boxee Box or Roku's line of Digital Video Players -- they connect to many of the same video sources as Boxee, but not Hulu -- would represent a simpler, cheaper fix.

Yet another option for Web-on-TV viewing that I've tried is software embedded in the set itself: The Sony HDTV I bought last summer happens to include software for this purpose. Thanks to a round of firmware updates, this set now "tunes" into a decent variety of sites -- YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, CBS, Slacker, NPR and more. But even the set's stripped-down interfaces for these sites can take around 10 seconds to materialize on the screen; that's quick compared with the startup time of, say, Microsoft Outlook but seems an awkward lag on a TV. Just getting the set connected to the Internet required adding an Ethernet connection to the living room, which in my case meant some non-trivial (but cost-free) hacking around with a wireless router. And yet ... there's much to be said for a system that doesn't require switching among remote controls, inputs and interfaces.

I'd like to know how you're managing this issue: What's your usual routine for viewing TV shows and movies from the Web on a big screen?