Category Archives: Google

I still need someone to explain to me what problem Google Plus solves, and why it's not creating other problems that I find way more annoying

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I am now on Google+, because men of my ilk are required to join new services such as this. But it is not solving a problem I have. It’s just creating more problems.

I left Twitter some months ago, because my workflow was like this:

  1. post to Twitter.
  2. have the post automatically mirrored to Facebook.
  3. flip over to Facebook to make sure that the post replicated.
  4. if it took more than a minute to replicate, refresh a few times before giving up with an odd, low-level form of nervousness.

I was connected to all the same people on Twitter that I was connected to on Facebook. Granted, there were others on Twitter who were not on Facebook, like famous people or, to put it another way, people with whom the interaction was expected to be more one-way. I followed Chris Onstad, author of Achewood, for instance. It was fun. His Twitter feed is hilarious. I followed the author of a book I really loved, and to my great surprise and pleasure he connected me with the Boston Globe to write a piece for them. So I can definitely say that Twitter was good for my wallet.

But it was also really distracting, for reasons I laid out in that piece. And I don’t have the self-control to be connected to two social networks and yet only check them occasionally. Nor do I have the self-control to prevent myself from refreshing email dozens of times a day. Email by now is in fact a reflex. But at least email isn’t getting new updates constantly. And the fun of Twitter is following lots of interesting people saying lots of interesting things. It was too fun, honestly. Sad to say. It’s taken me until age 33 to realize that I actually have to talk myself down from unhealthy habits; I literally have to say to myself, “Yes, you want a milkshake from Toscanini’s made with burnt-caramel ice cream and a shot of espresso. But 1) those are empty calories, 2) you can use that $5 for something better, 3) you’re trying to cut down on your caffeine intake, aren’t you?” I probably should have been doing this throughout my life. In any case, I’m starting now, and it seems to be working.

So I ended up thinking that it was better to concentrate on one social network, namely Facebook, and ditch the rest. Really, it’s probably best to go with zero social networks, but Facebook is essentially inevitable now. Many websites require you to use a single-sign-on platform, and OpenID is dead; Facebook is the only one left. Google, as I recall, tried OpenID. OpenID sucked. So a Facebook account is … well, “necessary” isn’t the word, but it would certainly be annoying to go without one.

Also, though, Google+ isn’t solving a problem that I have. Its main innovation, so far as I can tell, is that it makes the concept of a “circle” fundamental: circles for friends, circles for acquaintances, circles for colleagues, etc. Others have the problem that they need their messages to go to specific circles; I do not. The problem is supposed to be that, say, you want to write naughty words, but don’t want your grandmother to read them; or that you want to bust on your coworkers but don’t want your coworkers to read it; or some such. First of all, Facebook offers enough in this direction that Google+ is not really solving a real problem. For instance, I was connected on Facebook to my girlfriend’s son, and I set up permissions such that he couldn’t see a lot of what I posted. Problem solved. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of those blocks, too: coworkers have clearly put me on a “don’t share your Wall with coworkers” rule set. Facebook also offers a nice preview feature, which allows you to see how your profile looks when visited by a specific Friendster of yours.

More fundamentally, having to figure out who should read a given post and who shouldn’t is the kind of psychic weight that I try very hard to cast off. “Should this go to Acquaintances, or only to Friends?” is a question which, when asked often enough, will eventually rub my mind raw.

I’d much prefer to just post whatever comes to my mind to Facebook or Twitter, and let people decide whether they want to read it. On the receiving side, I’m sure Facebook has enough intelligent algorithms to decide whether you find my posts interesting; if it doesn’t think you do, they won’t show up in your feed. If you think I swear too much, you can ignore my posts. If you really hate me, you can defriend me.

Mark Zuckerberg, I’m told, said at one point that people should have just one persona, which is on display at all times. At some level this is wrong: I make dirty jokes with some people but not with my mother; I have one side of my personality that really likes discussing policy and theory, but that side will quickly put itself into hiding if it senses that the people around it just don’t care about those things.

But the costs of having different personalities on the web — one for Acquaintances, one for Friends, one for Policy Wonks — exceed the gains, for me anyway. I’d much prefer to put all those personalities together into one feed. I suspect the audience finds this more interesting, in any case: much better to get the occasional notional pornography title (a category of Facebook post that I very much enjoy writing) amidst links about health insurance, I think, than to get a steady diet of one or the other. I could be wrong about this, in which case my audience would prefer that I put different ideas in different channels. Not my problem. I guess Google+ is designed for people who think that is their problem.

Google+, I gather, came out of watching people’s occasional paroxysms of anger against Facebook’s privacy problems. But people don’t really care about their privacy; if they did, Twitter wouldn’t be popular. In Twitter, everything you write is visible to the world. Had Facebook decreed from early on that everything you post is public, people would have nothing to be angry about. It’s the perception of a bait-and-switch that angers people about Facebook; it is manifestly not that people care about their privacy. So inasmuch as Google+ gives people more privacy than Facebook, it’s not offering the world a solution to any problem that the world actually suffers from.

Neither Google nor Facebook actually cares about privacy. What they want is to sell ads, or to otherwise monetize their social networks. That means, as the saying goes, that “if you’re not paying for a product, you’re the product.” They’re selling you to advertisers. So at a fundamental level — the level of what keeps the lights on in Google’s and Facebook’s datacenters — neither of them is actually interested in your privacy. Neither of them could be interested in your privacy. If Google+ has any actual appeal, it’s the perception that it won’t bait-and-switch you. But that’s just responding to an accident of Facebook’s history. If Facebook were born now, it would be Twitter, and everything would be public. Not baiting-and-switching on privacy is not the basis for a network that people should care about.

What I get with Google+, then, is the solution to a privacy non-problem and the creation of groups of acquaintances that cause me stress without solving any problem I have. Can someone point me to some really killer feature that I should know about?

I am often a curmudgeon about new technology, but it’s not out of reflexive hostility toward new things. It’s that I really need people to prove to me why I need something. I was this way with the iPhone and the Mac, but eventually the tipping point came where it was obvious that the iPhone and the Mac were just better than every one of their competitors, and that there was no legitimate reason to avoid buying one. So I’m more than open to being convinced that I should use Google+. I just need to be convinced that it a) solves a problem I have and b) is better than Facebook. Thus far I’ve not been convinced.

How Google's PageRank algorithm works

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There was recently a little tempest in a teapot on Twitter about some measure of how influential a Twitterer you are, which got me thinking about how silly a lot of these measures are. They remind me a lot of early baseball statistics: read one of the early books in the sabermetrics genre, like The Hidden Game Of Baseball, and you’ll find a lot of dudes with limited statistical training taking a little of x, and a little of y, adding it together, and finding that — hey, this looks like a good measure of something; let’s use it! There are worse ways to develop a measure of something, but there are also better ways. Subsequent sabermetricians developed better ways, using rigorous statistics.

These amateur Twitter ranks made me think of Google’s PageRank algorithm, which was based on years of work trying to measure influence in academic journals. The Google problem and the journal problem are quite similar: if a given journal, or a given journal article, have a lot of inbound “links” (that is, citations from other journals), that’s good — but only if the linking journals are themselves highly linked. A bunch of citations from garbage journals, or a bunch of inbound web links from spam sites, shouldn’t contribute anything to your journal’s or your website’s rank.

The math behind the basic PageRank algorithm is simple. Imagine that you’re an infinitely patient web surfer who jumps randomly from page to page: you start on some page, click on every link on that page, and do the same on every subsequent page. If you click on 10,000 links, and 500 of them go to CNN.com, then you’ve spent 5% of your time on CNN. If 1,000 of those links go to NYTimes.com, you’ve spent 10% of your time on the Times. The PageRank for a given site is the fraction of time that our hypothetical random web surfer spends, in the long term, on that site.

Specifically, imagine a big table listing the probability that one site links to another:

CNN NYTimes HuffingtonPost TalkingPointsMemo
CNN 0.75 0 0 0.25
NYT 0 0.75 0.05 0.20
HuffPo 0.35 0.40 0.20 0.05
TPM 0.20 0.30 0.10 0.40

(In Google’s practice, this would be a square table with as many rows and as many columns as there are pages on the Internet. So imagine a table with billions of rows and as many columns.)

The probability in each cell is the probability that the domain in the same row links to the domain in the same column; so for instance, the probability that CNN links to Talking Points Memo is 0.25; it doesn’t link at all to the Times or to the Huffington Post. (These are purely made-up numbers.)

Imagine, again, that we’re a random web-surfer. We start at the Times‘s website, click somewhere, then click another link at random from where we’ve landed. So now we’re two clicks away from wherever we started. What’s the probability that we’d end up at Huffington Post after two clicks? Turns out that we can answer the question if we turn the table above into a mathematical object called a matrix. The matrix version of the table above looks like

[ [0.75 0 0 0.25] [0 0.75 0.05 0.2] [0.35 0.4 0.2 0.05] [0.2 0.3 0.1 0.4] ]

This is called a “transition-probability matrix.” Since every row sums to one — because every page links to some other page, even if the page it links to is itself — it’s also called a “stochastic matrix.” It turns out — via the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation — that the probability of getting from one of those pages to another within two clicks is the square of the transition-probability matrix. Squaring such an odd-looking beast may seem weird, but it’s a well-defined operation called matrix multiplication. The square of that matrix looks like so:

The square of the matrix shown above

which says that the probability of getting from Talking Points Memo to Huffington Post in two clicks is 0.075. Continue this process through many clicks and you’ll eventually approach what’s called the “stationary distribution” — the long-term probabilities of ending up in any given state, independently of where you started out. In this particular case, the stationary probabilities are

  • CNN: about 0.285
  • The Times: 0.4
  • HuffPo: about 0.057
  • TPM: about 0.257

The Times, then, would have the highest PageRank, followed by CNN, TPM, and HuffPo. Again, the interpretation of the PageRank is very simple: the long-term fraction of time that a random [1] web-surfer would spend on your page.

Of course Google needs to modify this basic approach somewhat. One assumes that there’s a lot of “secret sauce” baked into the actual PageRank algorithm — as opposed to this bare skeleton — that allows Google to respond to spammers more effectively.

Regardless, I suspect a Markov-chain approach like PageRank would apply with few modifications to Twitter. Your Twitter rank would go up the more retweets (someone on Twitter essentially forwarding your tweet on to his or her followers) or mentions (someone including your Twitter handle in his or her tweet) you get, but only if the people retweeting or mentioning you were themselves highly ranked. The essential metric would be the fraction of time that a random Twitter surfer would spend reading your tweets.

One might argue that having a lot of followers should increase your Twitter rank. This is debatable: are your followers actually valuable if they’re not mentioning you or voting for your tweets by retweeting them? I could see basing the Twitter rank on followers rather than tweets, in which case the interpretation would be “the fraction of time a random Twitter surfer, jumping from Twitter handle to Twitter handle, would spend on your account.” But that seems less promising than basing it on tweets.

In any case, the point is that PageRank has a simple interpretation based on probabilities. This is in contrast to all the gimmicky Twitter-ranking sites, whose point is to drive traffic to one site or another. It’s like we’re reinventing Google. Right now we’re at the Alta Vista of Twitter: the current competitors are less focused on searching and ranking, more focused on their “portal,” and ultimately less professional than what Google came up with by using actual math.

For much, much more on the mathematical details of PageRank, see Langville and Meyer’s Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings. It’s a gem.

[1] — Specifically, someone surfing according to a Markov chain. This is a very simple way of modeling a sort of random process that has “no memory”: if you tell me the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth pages you clicked on, and ask me to guess what your sixth page will be, I can throw out all the information you gave me apart from the fifth page. Earlier states, that is, don’t matter in prediction of the future; only the most recent state matters.

The iPhone is not on the side of the angels

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One of the very infuriating things about reading Jon Gruber is his constant “Apple rocks, open-source sucks” mantra. If you didn’t know that constant refrain, it might seem as though he links to “open is for losers” without comment; knowing Gruber, you know that he’s either doing it approvingly, or as a stick in the eye of his non-Apple-fanboy readership. He’s, honestly, a dick like that.

Paul Graham says in the linked piece that “Of course [he would invest in] iPhone. I’m talking about what I hope will set us free, not what will generate opportunities.” This is a perfectly sound point, and doesn’t take away from the fact that the iPhone is an anti-freedom device. I say this as a happy iPhone owner. Or rather, I say it as a conflicted iPhone owner: I realize that by using this device, I am harming the cause of freedom. But it’s also a spectacular piece of consumer technology.

The open-source movement has always treated software as speech: if it’s not free, it doesn’t matter how good it is. If all the books that you could read had to be personally vetted by Barack Obama, you’d never stand for it. Open-source advocates feel the same way about software that needs to pass through a censor first to make sure it doesn’t conflict with what Apple is trying to sell.

That said, I used Linux exclusively for years, and no longer use it as my everyday computing environment; I use a Mac. Macs and iPhones are designed with a level of polish that you don’t appreciate until you suddenly realize that your computing experience has been painless for the first time in decades — that everything works as it should, and that you’re actually giddy at your ability to experiment without fear.

So I’m conflicted. And I’m not going to take the (as it has always seemed to me) lazy way out and say “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” I think one is actually obligated to bring one’s life into harmony with one’s principles, so long as one has principles. I’m the first to admit that I suck at doing this. But it’s a conflict, and it’s an obvious conflict: I believe in free speech, I believe that regulated speech is not speech worth having, and it’s obvious that Apple peddles regulated speech. Yet they make operating systems that are head and shoulders above everyone else’s, despite the fact that they’ve been sitting out there, just begging for someone to make a comparable interface. No one has. Surely Apple deserves to be rewarded for making the best product.

When my iPhone contract expires in September or October, I am seriously considering switching to an Android phone of some sort. Maybe an HTC Incredible, maybe a Nexus One, maybe something else. Before I do that, I will probably pick up an Android device purely for development purposes. It may turn out that I love Android devices, and the contradiction in my life melts away. I hope so, because in the meantime it is uncomfortable.

Google to acquire my former employer for $1 billion?

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If so, then holy fucking shit. Seriously.

A while back, I mentioned that Google was now in the business of giving multimodal travel directions: MBTA, say, to mass-transit system to mass-transit system to Amtrak. I mentioned that it would only be a matter of time before they’d connect up to airlines, etc.

What I didn’t mention there, but have always believed, is that the airline piece is something that only ITA could handle. They’ve been working on the problem of finding the cheapest flight between two cities for their entire history; if Google wanted to add airlines to its route-finding software, it would either have to reinvent what ITA did, or acquire ITA. Given that it took ITA the better part of a decade, and a team of the smartest people you could find, to solve this problem, it’s always been obvious that Google would acquire ITA rather than build this technology itself. If Google is planning to add air travel to its route-finding software, it follows that they’d have to acquire ITA.

ITA is sitting on the best kind of monopoly you can hope for: they’ve solved a problem that no one else can solve. They deserve any success that comes their way. And they can name their price if Google comes knocking. If Google decides not to buy, but they want to add air travel to their software, they’ll have to spend at least five years trying to do it. They’ll probably have to poach large numbers of ITA employees. They’ll need to hire people away from the airlines themselves. I’m no business strategist, but it certainly seems like ITA has them over a barrel here.

I, for one, bow deeply in the direction of ITA’s headquarters on Portland Street in Cambridge. If this works out the way it’s looking, then congratu-fucking-lations to you folks.

I’m still kind of in shock, even though this all makes perfect sense.

Let's not penalize most failure (a riff off Google's Chrome OS)

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My friend Jamie notes that, on the basis of what he saw in a demo of Google’s Chrome OS yesterday, it’s going nowhere. I think this is the wrong way to look at it, for two reasons: first, it’s important to get something out there, and second, more generally: we, as a society, overly penalize failure.

Before I start, I should note that I know essentially nothing about the Chrome OS. I haven’t watched any demos of it. I know that it’s a stripped-down OS for use on netbooks. I’ve read John Gruber’s perfectly sensible point that many of us have one primary computer — a laptop or a desktop — along with a telephone (like the iPhone) that looks like a crippled computer if you squint at it right. As Gruber puts it: maybe you don’t need two cars; maybe you just need a car and a bicycle. People get along very well with a car and a bicycle.

My point here has little to do, though, with the substantive claim against Chrome OS. I don’t actually care a bit about the Chrome OS. Jamie links to some pundit’s piece, wherein the pundit claims that Chrome OS is “doom[ed] … to the dustbin of history.” Pundits need to say things like this; their jobs are to be provocative. I think it’s quite silly to take a position like that, however, when the record of pundit prognostication is so poor. Hell, the first version of Google’s Android phone interested approximately no one. Compared to the iPhone, the G1 was a flop. We’re on to the Droid, now, which people really seem to love. To suggest that the Chrome OS is dead on arrival is to suggest that it won’t improve. Windows 1.0, anyone?

Which gets to my real point, which is that you have to start somewhere. What I’ve learned from working at a startup, and from reading Stealing MySpace, is that it’s far better to get something out there, essentially no matter how broken it is, than to take forever to produce something stellar. A few reasons:

  1. By setting a firm, soon-to-arrive release date for a product, you force yourself to get something done. As they say: If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would happen. Get something out there, then improve it.

  2. By offering a real, tangible product, you give your customers or potential customers a basis for criticism and comment. Now instead of dreaming about an ideal Google OS that they can attach all their hopes and dreams to, people have the real thing in front of them and can ask for specific improvements. (This is a point that lies somewhere within The Mythical Man-Month, which I need to review.)

    There’s a related point in here, by the way, about how to manage software organizations: if you design in a vacuum, with no actual customers to examine your product, you’re going to build something that no one wants. If you design for one customer, you’re going to find that the second customer wants something different from the first and you’ll need to redesign anyway. The Mythical Man-Month argues that you’re going to throw away your first design anyway, so don’t bother over-designing it. All of which suggests that if Chrome OS is undercooked — and again, I don’t know whether it is, and don’t care — that’s exactly as it should be.

  3. I’ll argue this next point by way of an example from my own life. I had been considering upgrading my iPhone to the latest, greatest, highest-capacity version from the 8-gig 3G I have now. Google’s Droid and Palm’s Pre aren’t good enough yet, so far as I can tell, to make me switch away from the iPhone, but they are making me delay my upgrade decision. Maybe there aren’t any phones I want to upgrade to right now, but do I want to lock myself into another two-year AT&T contract when Google or Palm might produce something really stellar before that contract would expire?

    Maybe the Chrome OS isn’t good enough to sway many purchasing decisions right now, but it’s out there now and will probably improve over time. As it does so, it may drive a wedge into the market: people will hold off until they see what Chrome OS 2.0 or 3.0 is all about. This is the strategy that Microsoft — and, I presume, most any smart software company — has been using for years; it’s called “vaporware” when a rival is doing it, “good marketing” when you’re doing it. Chrome OS may be strategic vaporware, and Google would be entirely right to create such a thing.

  4. There’s also the notion of a “disruptive technology.” I’m told that The Innovator's Dilemma has noticed a classic pattern with certain technologies; here I find MySQL a convenient example to keep in mind, though it breaks down when Sun buys MySQL and Oracle buys Sun. The pattern goes like this: there’s some entrenched player (think Oracle) that makes a massive, hardened, massively supported behemoth of a product that people pay premium prices for. Then along comes the little guy, producing a product that is — from the big player’s perspective — crippled and puny and not worth worrying about. Even better from the big player’s perspective, the little guy appeals to the big player’s most troublesome customers — those that don’t generate a lot of revenue and that generate a ton of support calls. So the Oracles of the world gladly dispense with their little customers. (Think of MySQL back when it only had MyISAM tables which didn’t guarantee that your data would be there after a power outage, didn’t support foreign-key constraints, and generally only functioned as a fast indexing engine on top of a bare filesystem.)

    Now the little guy has some customers. They’re little customers, but they’re customers. So now the little guy can build a product based on feedback — which it happily and quickly does, because there isn’t much code to change or much of an organizational battleship to turn. So now the little guy improves his product a bit and shaves off a little more of the big guy’s customers. The big guy still doesn’t notice; the little guy remains beneath his radar. Bit by bit, the little guy cuts into the big guy’s market; by the time the big guy notices, it’s too late.

    We’ve been thinking about Defeating Microsoft Windows for a very long time. It’s pretty clear to me, by now, that that’s just the wrong way to think about it. If I had to wager, I would suspect the Chrome OS is Google’s way of acknowledging that that’s the wrong way to think about it. Google isn’t going to destroy Windows with the Chrome OS, but maybe they’ll take a little bit away from the low end of the market. They probably won’t defeat IE with their Chrome browser, but they’ll insert a little wedge in that market; whatever happens, Google cannot be locked out of the browser market. Microsoft may lose a few customers here and there who decide that they don’t need a desktop computer and can do all they need with a browser, an email client, and a mobile phone. Little by little, companies pick off little corners of the computer market. Maybe Microsoft learns how to respond to these: maybe Windows Mobile goes somewhere; maybe IE becomes a capable browser; or maybe it doesn’t. But the point is that the direct assault on Windows has been tried and has failed. One promising approach to defeating Microsoft is to attack indirectly.

For all these reasons, even if Chrome OS is a failure, it may be valuable. As a society, we take a hard line on failure. We venerate Apple and excoriate Xerox. We praise Facebook and condemn Friendster. In the intellectual realm, I’ve seen praise of Gödel and condemnation of Bertrand Russell. In some senses it’s just that we do so; in many others, it’s not. Each generation of an idea learns from the failures that preceded it. The generation that succeeds generally could not have known where to step had it not watched the missteps of preceding, failing generations. We know that Newton succeeded by standing on the shoulders of giants, but don’t always realize that they were giant failures. And we’re better because they were.

MBTA + Google Maps = even awesomer than advertised

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Bostonians got a nice bit of news last week: the MBTA (Boston’s subway, bus, commuter rail and inner-harbor ferry provider) finally hooked their route information into Google Maps. This was a long time coming. I read a link a while back, which I can’t seem to find now, explaining just how simple the format Google required from public-transit providers was; so I find the delay mysterious, but welcome.

The link above notes that “unlike the T’s website, Google Transit cannot provide real-time updates about service changes and delays.” Interestingly, unlike the T’s website, the T’s website cannot provide real-time updates about service changes and delays.

What makes this much, much cooler than the MBTA website is that Google contains mass-transit maps for lots of other cities. If it’s not possible now, it surely will soon be possible to get from one side of the country to the other on Google Maps using only mass transit.

If Google isn’t already thinking of ways to sell Greyhound or Amtrak tickets through Maps, they’re much more foolish than I expect. First buses and trains, then airlines. I want to get from my house in Cambridge to where I used to live in D.C.: Google tells me that I should walk to the T stop near my apartment, take the red line to South Station, hop on the silver line to Logan, take an AirTran flight to BWI, take a WMATA shuttle to the Greenbelt stop, hop on the green line, take it to the U St stop, and walk 4/10 of a mile to my old apartment.

Only Google Maps is in a position to offer this sort of end-to-end, multimodal mapping. And they’re the only service that has any incentive to, for instance, offer you routes on either Amtrak or Greyhound or any of the airlines; Orbitz and Kayak can’t do that, and certainly no individual transport company has any reason to do it.

Once that’s in place, you can start talking about other clever bits: “Do you anticipate that you’ll be making this trip more than four times per month? Then you might want to buy an Amtrak pass and a CharlieCard; the total cost of doing so would be $N, whereas it would be $M to buy each ticket individually.”

Then hook it up with the various SpeedPass/EZPass-type systems that get you through toll plazas on highways in the northeast. Hook it up with on-time statistics for the various flights, trains, buses, and automobile commutes. The number of directions in which this could be extended is limitless, and Google is sitting right at the nexus, collecting a little fee for the convenience of buying all your passes in one place. Imagine instead a single card, the GooglePass, that replaces your train pass, your commuter-rail punch card, your EZPass, your airline boarding pass … You can sign into your Google account if you lose it, if you want to re-up, etc.

This may all sound pie in the sky, but I would be shocked if Google weren’t already at least thinking this way.

A love song for Google Sync

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If you carry an iPhone, you’ll pretty soon want some way to sync your mobile device with the rest of your computers (laptop, work desktop, etc.). To some extent you can get around this by using purely web-based applications, like Google Calendar and Gmail. But then you won’t be able to use the iPhone’s built-in calendar application, which is really quite nice (somewhat limited — you can’t send invitations — but still nice); instead you’ll have to visit Google Calendar on the web every time you want to add an event. If you happen to be offline when you want to access your calendar, tough luck.

A lot of people will use MobileMe here, MobileMe being Apple’s data-in-the-cloud service. As Apple puts it,

MobileMe is a service that pushes new email, contacts, and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, Mac, and PC stay in perfect sync.

I think most people will find that they don’t need their email synced; if they’re using Gmail, IMAP, or Exchange, all their email is already out on the Internet. If you happen to be offline, the iPhone will have already cached the most recent 50 emails locally; MobileMe won’t add anything to that offline capability.

Which means MobileMe’s main virtue is that it lets you sync contacts and calendar events, all for $100 a year. But why pay $100 when you can get the same thing from Google for free?

iPhone calendar view of today: 'All Calendars' in the heading, my events displayed in red, babe's events in greenHence Google Sync, the new love of my life. It gets better than just syncing my own calendar; using Sync, my girlfriend and I share our calendars, like so:

  1. I sync my cell to my calendar using Sync for the iPhone. I can now access all my iPhone events from my Google account, and vice versa.
  2. She does all her calendaring through Outlook, so she installs Sync for Outlook. She can now access all her Outlook events from her Google account, and vice versa.
  3. She sets the permissions on her Google Calendar, and I set them on mine, so that our Google accounts can talk to one another.
  4. I tell Google Sync on my phone that it should download Stephanie’s events as well as my own.

Voilà: my phone now displays her appointments in a different color. If I change an event on the phone, it gets synced to Google Calendar (you see the “busy sending stuff over the network” icon whir for a moment). The reverse — events changed in Google appear on the phone — happens, too, though you need to tell the phone how often to poll; for that, go into Settings → Fetch New Data, turn Push on, and set the polling interval. Note that this will suck up some battery life; as an iPhone owner, you should already be used to running quickly out of juice. (I keep mine plugged in whenever I’m near a source of power.)

The contact syncing is worth a lot more than you might think. If you already have a Gmail account, a phone, and one or more IMAP accounts, you’re used to duplicating your contacts in multiple places. Google Sync lets you do it in one place and never think about it again. The convenience is nice. It’s especially nice to know that you will never again need to email all your friends, “I lost my phone. Can you send me all your contact info?”

There are only a couple downsides to Google Sync:

  1. Behind the scenes, Sync is just a Google-licensed version of Microsoft ActiveSync. I’m pretty sure Google had to do it this way so that they could get a toe into the iPhone market; the 3G iPhone has built-in support for Microsoft Exchange, so this was the logical way to go. In effect, that is, Google Sync is a Microsoft Exchange account on your iPhone. Since the iPhone only supports one Exchange account at a time (probably for obscure licensing reasons), this means that you’ll need to ditch any existing Exchange accounts on your phone in order to use Sync. I’d imagine it galls Google to dump money into the Microsoft empire; maybe someday they’ll figure out how to squeeze around this roadblock.

  2. I find that sometimes Sync doesn’t let me store more than one email address in a contact. Actually, I can’t say whether this is Sync’s fault or the iPhone’s, but in any case sometimes I can only get one address in there. (And I’m pretty sure it’s Sync’s fault. Pre-Google, I don’t think my iPhone had any trouble storing many email addresses.) It doesn’t always happen, but it often does. This may somehow be related to one of Sync’s known limitations:

    • Limited Contact Information

    The iPhone can synchronize up to 3 email address. Phone number synchronization is limited to 2 Home numbers, 1 Home Fax, 1 Mobile, 1 Pager, 3 Work (one will be labeled ‘Company Main’) and one Work Fax number.

  3. This doesn’t count as a problem in Google Sync, but I should note it anyway: if you receive Lotus Notes invites, Notes inserts its own fields into the iCal email attachment that carries the invite. Where I work, the invite’s location is often a conference room that behaves like a Notes user (so that its time can be scheduled like any other user’s); it might say “9/Knuth” or “7/Perlis,” for instance. This is apparently encoded in such a way that Sync doesn’t understand it as a location, so Sync silently drops it. All of which is to say: certain Notes invites lose their location fields by the time they appear in Google. This may be something that Google can fix in the future. (And one of the virtues of software that sits out on the web is that it can be updated from moment to moment, as opposed to much desktop software.)

Other than those, Sync is a pure win. And it’s free!