Alexis Madrigal

Look, Google, we've got a plan to help you win on social. There's only one catch: You have to give up on the notion that animates Google Plus.

Out in the Mojave Desert, there's a place called California City that's fascinated me ever since Geoff Manaugh brought its story to the Internet's attention. The city is one of the largest in the state by land area, but its population sits at a mere 14,718. The facts together indicate the grandeur of the planned community's conception and its failure.

As pitched by the town's founder Nat Mendelson, California City would be the home of the American dream, a wonderland for sun and job seekers to go after Los Angeles' population burst across that city's eastern mountains. In 1957, land was purchased; roads were roughly paved; street signs were hammered into place. All Mendelson and his investors needed were the people ...

Who did not arrive as expected.

Those people did stop going to Los Angeles. But they didn't head to the enormous planned community taking shape in the Mojave. Instead, they headed to places like Phoenix. In 1955, the town had 350,000 people. By 1990, it had broken 2 million. California City languished, its grid still cut into the ground and viewable on Google Earth (see below). Instead of a megalopolis, California City became a set of half-built infrastructure. Growth went where people were already gathering naturally. They did not want to move out to the middle of nowhere, no matter how great the golf courses looked in the brochures.

Google/Alexis Madrigal

Last year, Google, which had dabbled in official social-networking applications, released Google Plus. The site has all the things you've come to expect in a social network. There is a rich profile builder, a place for your photos, a nice videochat feature, a conversation feed, and, of course, "Circles," which allow users to sort the people they know into different buckets. Word at the time was that Google's full weight was behind this social push. The journalists who knew the company's insiders best declared that Facebook was CEO Larry Page's obsession.

I was bullish about Google Plus, even if it did feel like a Facebook clone. Google had built out a ton of infrastructure and was pushing Plus out through its major products. This had to be big!

But by most accounts and third-party research, the service is growing its number of users but not their engagement. People are "on" Google Plus, but they are not really ON Google Plus. The infrastructure is there. The street signs are there. People own plots of land. But there's nobody actually visiting town. To make it obvious: Google Plus is the California City to Facebook's Los Angeles.

Google, of course, vehemently disputes that the social network is anemic. They say not to trust the methodology of the people who measure public posts. They tell you that more private sharing occurs than public sharing. They say that the service is growing by every metric that matters to Google.

For example, here's what a Google spokesperson told me about one third-party report:

"By only tracking engagement on public posts, this study is flawed and not an accurate representation of all the sharing and activity taking place on Google+. As we've said before, more sharing occurs privately to circles and individuals than publicly on Google+. The beauty of Google+ is that it allows you to share privately - you don't have to publicly share your thoughts, photos or videos with the world."

But it is simply impossible to ignore that few people actually *use* Google Plus in any way that we've come to define usage of a social network. ComScore says people spent about 3 minutes a month at the site. Google contends that doesn't include mobile traffic or the dropdown menu that appears when you click the red "notification" icon in Gmail and other Google services. But neither of those places seems likely to change the overall pattern here. Deep engagement is not lurking in that dropdown. Let's say actual G+ usage is 10x what the numbers say, so 30 minutes. Facebook's at 405. Pinterest's at 89. Tumblr is at 89, too.

Another small piece of evidence: I added up all the links from plus.url.google.com to The Atlantic. In total, we received 16,000 visitor referrals from the site. That ranks it in the low 30s for us and that sum is orders of magnitudes smaller than we get from some of Google Plus' competitors. BuzzFeed assembled some similar evidence on +1s from around the web along with a devastating excoriation of the site experience.

"Logging into Google+ feels like logging into a seminar, or stumbling into the wrong conference room at an airport Marriott," John Herrman wrote. "It looks like a cubicle farm and smells like a hospital."

Ouch. So what gives? How could Google have invested so much money and credibility in building a service that, by all accounts except Google's own, doesn't work?

One hypothesis, advanced by TechCrunch's Josh Constine, is that we in the media completely misread Google Plus. The service was not an attempt to compete with Facebook. It was not a declaration of social war. No, it was a classic Google approach to social: develop a method to extract and organize information, but this time about the humans. So, they gave us something that looked like Facebook with familiar text boxes to fill in. They tricked us into inputting ourselves into their database with the promise of a great service. On this theory, it doesn't matter to Google if we use G+ because we already gave them our names, locations, interests, and webs of social connections.

And if they get some users clicking on +1 buttons for advertisements, that increases their engagement rate substantially for those users' friends.

"We are seeing 5 to 10 percent click-through-rate uplift on any ad that has a social annotation on our own Web sites," Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering, told the New York Times. "We have been in this business for a long time, and there are very few things that give you a 5 to 10 percent increase on ad engagement."

And so what if the trade we made for our valuable demographic info resulted in us getting 36 minutes a year of entertainment from Google Plus? Jokes on us, I guess.

But I am not (quite) that cynical. Google did not go through all that effort just to build something that people never use. Perhaps they did not dream of the massive destination site. Perhaps we dreamed that up ourselves because we wanted a real competitor for Facebook. But every sign from inside the company is that Google cares deeply about social and they are willing to risk their best product (Search) in order to integrate themselves into your social life. They want to win in social.

And you know, I think they can, but only by ditching the very idea that animates Google Plus.

Reuters

Essentially, Google built a social "spine" for their services without building a service that developed into a compelling social offering. There is no meat on the social bone because Google thought of building a social network not as a means for you to connect with friends but as a means for you to connect with Google.

In an earnings call with investors, CEO Larry Page laid out Google's approach to its social effort. "Google+ is about much more than the individual features themselves. It's also about building a meaningful relationship with users so that we can dramatically improve the services we offer," Page said. "Understanding who people are, what they care about, and the other people that matter to them is crucial if we are to give users what they need, when they need it."

Not that mission statements are the be all and end all, but notice how different Facebook's theory of the case is: "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

Facebook is about you sharing with the world. Google Plus is about Google understanding you. See the difference? This is why people sometimes say that Google doesn't get social. People don't join Facebook so Facebook can understand them better! In fact, the better Facebook understands them, the more wary of the service they get.

Here's the charitable way of looking at things: Google Plus was the first step. Now that they've got the spine in place, they can use their knowledge of the social web to build cool integrations with their existing products. For example, I think the Circles integration with Gmail is awesome. Try it yourself: stick your family members into a Circle. Then, open up Gmail, and click on the Family circle. Voila: every email a family member has sent you is right there. This is awesome. And you can see how Google Plus could form a social dashboard for the email experience. I'd expect to see a lot more of that kind of thing across Google's services. 

But.

That's not the kind of thing that's going to get people to spend more time with Google's social offerings. You create the circle, move the people, and you're gone. It's a nice utility but it's not what has made any social network work so far. Let's assume Google wants people to post to and spend time on G+. How can they go to the next level? How can they make it easier for people to connect to and share with people they care about?

I think Google needs to stop looking across town at Facebook and look within itself. Google is riddled with invisible social networks surrounding a wide range of products. Even better, Google's homegrown social networks tend to be built around Google's core strength: organized (and organizing) information.

Reuters

I've been drawing out a city building metaphor here, so let's keep it going. If Google Plus is California City (or Brasilia), Google needs to find areas where people are already congregating excitedly. They shouldn't build a new city, but revitalize the neighborhoods they already have.

Note that this community building task is different from providing better search service with social knowledge! This is about generating more social connections, not drawing on them to power a separate product. The former is nice, but it's not how you build an engaged community.

So, where are the neighborhoods where humans are already hanging out? Google has a variety of products that while not explicitly "social networks" could easily be thought of as places that help people "share," a la Facebook's mantra. Just think about them all:  Reader. Picasa. Scholar. Earth. Books. Blogger. Hell, even Zagat.

It's these already bustling communities that should form the core of Google's next-level social offering. Take Scholar, which allows users to access research papers. A smallish group numbering in the millions visit the site to find research papers because it works better than academic search engines. It's pretty clear that Google's corporate honchos think the site is kind of a drag and they have no revenue model for it. Little has been done to update the service, even simple things like allowing people to sort by the number of citations.

But think about Scholar as a latent social network. Each paper contains its own social network that Google already crawls. Every bibliography is filled with other social networks. And people searching Google Scholar are likely to be as interested in connecting with the researchers who created those papers as they are with the papers themselves. Why isn't Google making it easy to connect the searchers with the searched? And sure, build a whole other set of social tools on top of that, which make it easy to share with networks of researchers. You want every college kid in America to start engaging deeply with your social network? Make it easy for them to get their papers written.

Or take Google Books, which has been languishing thanks to a similar level of inattention. Every book is also a latent social community. Why can't I lay down markers on my favorite books so that when someone stumbles on some old and forgotten energy book, they see my face there and can connect with me as someone who cares about this obscure thing that they care about? Boom: Instant, fairly strong tie social connection.

I'm just spitballing here. There are so many other things that Google could do with its existing products by working with the communities who already engage around them.

Instead, Google has tended to ignore or piss off its passionate social fans. (That's not to mention the many small, revenueless products -- Wave, Buzz, Knol, etc -- that had their own small but dedicated communities.) So, Google squashed Reader's biggest fans when they decided to integrate that service into Google Plus. The nuts and bolts of the change ruined Reader as a social network for sophisticated sharers of information. Were tons of people using it? No, but they loved it with the kind of passion that few have for Google Plus. Facebook would have tested to see if the changes hurt how often people used the site; I'm not so sure that Google did.

I can see why this is not the most obvious strategy for a company of Google's size: "Build social tools specific to our dozens of products? Bah! Why don't we just come up with a single set and push them out?"

It doesn't seem like Google groks how to create the smaller, self-organized networks of people who become the main driving force behind the larger thing. How many thousands of Twitter users power the whole service? How many thousands of Reddit users drive the whole news system? It I'm sure Google's executives understand the 90-9-1 rule intellectually, which says that 1 percent of users tend to contribute the most to social networks. But they don't get how to identify those key users.

Most companies have to create those kinds of users, but Google just has them sitting around in droves. It's those people rooting around in Scholar and Books and Earth. It's those people uploading ridiculous amounts of photos to Picasa. It's those people who built large networks of Google Reader friends. They are the ones who make a social network awesome and therefore worth visiting.

So, yes, use Google Plus as the social spine. Satisfy the corporate imperative to "understand" me and my web of connections. But now Google should concentrate on fostering the nascent but largely invisible communities it already has. Build them the tools they what they want to help them share. Don't mess up the networks they put in place. Watch what they're doing and double down on helping other people find it.

Does that sound harder than just building one set of social tools that span the Google universe and waiting for the people to show up? Yes, yes it does. But it's an illusion that it's easy to build any social network. Discovering a hive of people spending time together online is an amazing and precious thing. You can't just put a street sign at a road in the middle of nowhere and expect a party to erupt.

So, Google, look inside your already sprawling Google City. Find your explicit and implicit social power users, then empower them to build your social network.

A rousing success for the world's smallest artificial heart.

A Roman doctor holds the pump (Reuters).

Italian doctors successfully implanted the world's smallest artificial heart into a 16-month-old boy, keeping him alive for 13 days with a titanium pump until a heart transplant donor was found.

At 0.4 ounces, the astoundingly small piece of equipment weighed about 80 times less than a standard artificial heart for an adult human, Reuters reported. It can pump a little over 3 pints of blood a minute. 

The little boy had a condition known as dilated myocardiopathy and spent almost his entire first year of life at Rome's Bambino Gesu hospital, where the artificial heart was also implanted. 

The device was invented by Robert Jarvik, esteemed creator of the first permanent total artifical heart, but had only been tested in animals.

It is no accident that we surfed channels before we surfed the web.

Television began as a box. It sat on the floor and it had honest-to-goodness knobs. If you needed to change something on the television, like the frequency to which it was tuned, you had to turn the knobs. You pulled a different one to bring it to life and pushed it back in to silence it. It made a physical noise that did not play from a speaker. The act of watching TV required you to physically touch the box surrounding the tube. Changing the channel while simultaneously watching the television was not physically easy.

The television was that box. But television was also a sociotechnical system of producing, distributing, and consuming a certain kind of media. There were three channels that were scheduled in blocks of time (30 minutes, 60 minutes). There were local affiliates that broadcast national news. The specificities of the system were many. And the actual technological objects -- the boxes -- both influenced the larger system and were influenced by it. (Just like now: what your phone can do changes the network; what the network can do eventually changes your phone.)

Fast forward to today. The distribution of moving pictures to human beings in their homes has changed along almost every vector. People pick and choose. They DVR. They have hundreds of cable channels. They watch video on YouTube and Vimeo. They make their own videos. CNN picks up video from some guy's phone and some other guy's phone plays that video routed through the global brand that is CNN.

The obvious route from that old television set to our current world of video entertainment and news runs through cable. Cable, the story goes, gave consumers more choices. It broke the hegemony of the big three networks with the help of satellite television, VCRs, and Fox. Meanwhile, the Internet was built, creating a vast, peer-to-peer distribution network.

But that narrative --  like this version found at the Museum of Broadcast Communications -- leaves out a lowly but important change agent: the remote control. The remote control diffused more rapidly than television itself and more widely than cable or even the VCR or its descendants. While we say "everyone has an iPhone," the truth was that everyone really did have a remote control. This was an immensely useful technology.

We look back at the remote control's role in changing the nature of television today because a co-creator of the wireless remote, Eugene Polley, died Sunday at the age of 96. His work at Zenith, in part, laid the groundwork for a new kind of television and maybe for new ways of thinking about what home entertainment should be.


The best treatment of the role of the remote control comes to us from two communications professors, James R. Walker of Saint Xavier University and Robert Bellamy of Duquesne in their 2006 book, Television and the Remote Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland. They explicitly connect the development of the remote control with the rise in what we've come to call interactivity.

"The remote control is a subversive technology," they write. "By allowing the user to move rapidly between program offerings and avoid unpleasant or uninteresting material, the [remote control] works in opposition to the historic structure and operational parameters of the U.S. television industry."

That is to say, the remote control wasn't just a means of changing channels on the box, it was a means of changing structures within the industry. The new device meant people could change channels quickly and easily from the comfort of their sectionals, and that affordance meant that television stations could not continue to sell advertising or deliver programming the way that they had before when it was more difficult to change the channel. I do not think it is an accident that we started channel surfing (1986) before we started surfing the web.

Walker and Bellamy continue:

No longer can the viewer be conceptualized solely as passive recipient of the messages of advertisers. Rather, she or he now has the means to construct an individual media mix that may, or increasingly may not, contain advertising. In essence, the [remote control] allows the viewer to control some of the programming functions previously reserved for television and advertising executives.

Any of this sound familiar? The remote control was one of the first devices that users could use to craft their own experience of the medium of television. While we think of channel surfers as mindless at times, they were, at least, making active and frequent choices about what programming to watch. Within the constraints of the available content, they were programming their televisions, not solely being programmed.

Of course, this control only went so far. It is not as if television and advertising executives saw this potentially subversive device and did nothing. Rather, they changed the way they advertised. The industry consolidated with one driver being that the networks, dealing with a newly empowered audience, had to get into cable television. The idea that by changing channels, you could actually change the world sounds ridiculous, but it turns out to have a basis in reality. The only problem is that the entrenched forces in the world have their own levers that they are not shy about pulling.

Thus, Walker and Bellamy conclude, "A large number of distribution systems does not ensure a diversity of content." 

That, if you have watched television recently, still holds true. Certain types of programming continue to dominate. Certain types of advertising -- out of all the things you could possibly imagine -- remain prevalent. But sometimes a small change diffused widely can be as significant as a big change diffused narrowly. At one end of the spectrum, you have tiny numbers of early BBS, USENET, and Internet users, while at the other, you have everyone using a remote.

Even if television *looks* a lot like it once did, the audience has changed. Big chunks of it are gone. These people have moved on to the Internet and even when they watch television programming, they do it on Hulu or Netflix or through a DVR. And what are those services if not the offspring of a nation of channel surfers and a network of nerds?

So, thanks Mr. Polley for, in some way, helping make it easy to watch every episode of Friday Night Lights, years after the show ended and whenever I feel like it. The Zenith Flash-Matic may have been the product you worked on, but your contribution was more important than the device.

The iPhone comes with this great little app called "Find My Phone." Launch it from a computer and the software will use your phone's built-in communication tools to locate the device on a map. This is great if you've simply misplaced your phone. But what if it's actually been stolen?

Our own Jared Keller discovered the perils of tracking down your phone. He knew roughly where it was -- an apartment building in northeast Washington, DC -- but had no idea how to get it back. The Washington police were not interested in going door to door in a big apartment building looking for some kid's phone, and besides nine other cell phones had been stolen on the same night.


The problem isn't specific to Keller, though. It's general. If someone or someones are holding a piece of your stolen property, how are you actually going to retrieve it? The situation holds the potential for confrontation, violent or otherwise, and the resolution of the phone tracking isn't so precise that you can be 100% for sure where the device is.

This is true even if you happen to be the police chief of a mid-size American city like Berkeley, California. The Oakland Tribune reports that Berkeley's police chief sent 10 police officers to track down his son's iPhone, after the kid had it jacked from his gym locker at Berkeley High. Civic discussions aside, the real kicker in the story is that even with all those cops swarming around San Pablo and 55th (a couple miles from where I'm sitting), they were not able to locate the phone! So, they had an active tracking signal and 10 cops and still came up empty handed.

The boy alerted his father and Meehan pulled out his own cell phone and showed a property crimes detective sergeant the real time movement of the stolen phone.

Given the active signal of the stolen phone, the detective sergeant took his team to try to locate it. As the signal was moving into the city of Oakland, the detective sergeant called the drug task force to ask for some additional assistance and members of that team offered to help, said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, department spokeswoman..

The four sergeants followed the signal to the area of 55th and San Pablo avenues in North Oakland, where they contacted residents at several homes looking for the phone. It was never located.

If 10 cops who know a neighborhood can't find an iPhone that's broadcasting its location, that shouldn't give you a lot of confidence in your own vigilante recovery of a stolen iProduct. Just saying. Consider this a PSA: just buy a new phone.

1. Data visualization
2. TED
3. Magazine tablet apps
4. Flickr
5. NATO
6. Judd Apatow comedies
7. Balsamic vinegar
8. Bachelor's degrees
9. Listicles

There are some people who love machines the way some people love food. They fix things. They build things. They repair things. If you want your children to be this type of person, you may want to check out the wonderful new project that Lucas Ainsworth and Alyssa Hamel have up on Kickstarter.

Kinetic Creatures is a set of three cardboard animals that you assemble yourself. They don't just stand there, though: they walk! You can use human power or a little motor to send them on their way. 

They are simple but also complex. They are crafty but also manufactured. They are real, but will only become available if enough people pool their money to bring them into being. These are creatures of our time.

Via Joe Moon

After a weird IPO, no one knows exactly what's going to happen with the social media's shares on its first full day of trading.

Just when you thought absolutely nothing interesting could happen on Friday, when Facebook debuted on NASDAQ, something did: the company's bankers really did set the price of the offering as high as the market would bear. That is to say, when the shares made it out to the open market, they didn't immediately spike as has happened with so many other tech IPOs like LinkedIn's last year. Some have argued that's a good thing, others that it wasn't.

Regardless, as Friday's trading drew to a close, Facebook's underwriters (namely, Morgan Stanley and the consortium of banks the company put together) propped up Facebook's share price at $38. They just would not let the company's share price fall below where they priced it. If you want to see a detailed blow-by-blow of how it worked, check out this rather stunning video recap. Meanwhile, other social media companies' shares tanked for reasons that are not quite clear.

In any case, no one expects those underwriters to keep up that kind of buying. So, Facebook will have to stand on its own. The big surprise, it seems, was that Regular Joe investors seemed unimpressed with the company's offering. Most industry watchers expected the stock to pop because they figured retail investors would herd into the shares. For whatever reason, those regular people didn't on Friday. Now everyone is waiting for the opening bell to find out if they will be more interested now that the hype of the IPO is over. I know better than to offer a prediction.