Tech Can Help or Hurt – Part 6: Addiction to Apple, Facebook, Google

Posted on July 2, 2018 by technologybloopers

Every major new technology brings with it not only fascinating new capabilities, and in the case of electronic technologies also some potentially-dangerous new challenges. So many auto accidents have been caused because drivers were distracted by their gadgets that it has been proposed that those drivers be punished as if they were driving under the influence of alcohol (or other substances). And it isn’t only driving. Focusing on the small screen while walking not only puts one in harm’s way but in cities like Montclair, CA crossing a street while distracted can result in a sizable fine.

Some help is on its way. At its most recent developers conference Apple introduced a feature called Screen Time (to be available in September) that lets users monitor and limit their app use on their iPhones and iPads.

A couple has dedicated themselves to the cause, creating an app called Moment and living in their RV as they travel the USA.

And at the Hearth in Manhattan, diners are encouraged to put their cellphones in picturesque boxes provided at each table.

But isn’t the real villain the pressure to keep users connected so advertisers can continue to shovel advertisements into the users’ brains?

Google Analytics Seriously Understates Visitor Counts

Posted on March 21, 2018 by technologybloopers

We become disappointed whenever we receive Google’s monthly Snapshots, and suspect that the large majority of website developers feel the same way. In December 2017 our server statistics showed nearly 100 times as many visitors as Google Analytics did, and in January 2018 they showed 60 times as many visitors as Google Analytics did.

There are a lot of reasons why the Google Analytics figures can be inaccurate, including unbiased ones and biased ones.

And, especially for websites with relatively low visitor counts, the Google Analytics counts are seriously inflated by counting visits by Bots.

Beyond disappointing we become angry when Google wants us to buy AdWords, implying that our visitor counts will be boosted.

Increasing Overlap of Tech Giants

Posted on February 7, 2018 by technologybloopers

Question: When you’ve joined the $100+ billion market cap club, what do you do next? Answer: You start invading the other members’ territories (e.g., Amazon is now chasing the digital advertising business that Facebook and Google make billions of dollars from) AND you hire a bunch of pricey lawyers to defend you against antitrust suits.

This club is pretty exclusive today, with American members including mainly Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Netflix. They are so big that to grow significantly they have to look for other big markets (like cloud computing or self-driving cars or Hollywood-type movies) to enter, and most of those big markets are already occupied by other club members or non-member already-large specialists. What are the bloopers here? A classical one would be monopoly/oligopoly pricing and/or restraint of trade. But perhaps more important might be the opportunities lost by a failure to allocate capital to creating useful NEW-AND-DIFFERENT products and services.

Social Media, Especially Facebook, Unfortunately Hijacks Users of the Web … But “Better Web” May Reverse That

Posted on April 27, 2017 by technologybloopers

Facebook and a handful of other social media are so entrenched that few people think about life before them. But the Web was conceived 15 years before Facebooks’s founding in 2004. Facebook put a pretty face on the Web, and billions of people have flocked to it. And Google Search, YouTube, and a handful of other giants –fueled by tons of advertising revenues—exercise a lot of control over what people can see and do, so much so that there is growing sentiment about breaking up these monopolistic organizations. And delivering fake news or vicious propaganda from the likes of ISIS (ironically ISIS can even get PAID by YouTube while it disseminates its messages of hatred) adds further pressure for this breakup.

It will take more time, but help may be on the way from the original creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He is working towards a “Better Web” where users’ control their own (private) data. One group that should benefit from greater control of their data is musicians. The title of Jonathan Taplin’s new book, “Move Fast and Break Things”, may even have caused Facebook to foresightedly replace their eponymous former motto with “Move Fast With Stable Infra(structure)”.

Sports More Important Than Technology Business in Silicon Valley Newspaper

Posted on April 4, 2017 by technologybloopers

The Mercury News’ demoting its business coverage to the back pages of the Sports Section was a populist victory even before Trump’s election. Or does this situation simply derive from the biblical truism “no prophet is accepted in his hometown”? In any case, the rest of the world—including major newspapers—seems more entranced with the goings-on in San Jose and surrounding cities. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have permanent staff in Silicon Valley who seem to turn out significantly more column-inches of reporting and opinion about technological accomplishments in this geography than do the valiant-but-outnumbered technology staffers at the Mercury News.

This demotion came a few months after the April 2016 renaming of the San Jose Mercury News to to reflect its merger with the San Mateo Times. But the spirit of San Jose, which some years ago was dubbed “the USA’s largest truck stop”, lives on in the focus of its printed media. (Apparently a number of other cities in the U.S. claim that theirs is the largest, and a number of locations have subtitled themselves “Silicon XXXX”, like “Silicon Prairie” which can refer to Dallas-Fort Worth or the Chicago area or a multi-state area of the upper Midwest.) We are a bit baffled because the advertisements in the Mercury News don’t seem to be for products and services that the typical sports fan would buy.

Gresham’s Law Trips Up Treasured San Francisco Stores Due to Skyrocketing Land Prices

Posted on October 23, 2016 by technologybloopers

You may believe that worldwide luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Hermes are like the GOOD money that would be driven out by the BAD money according to Gresham’s Law. But in this case these luxury brands are the bad guys. Like their always-empty stores in airports, these future ones in San Francisco’s tony Union Square are just very expensive billboards. And the independent retailers are the good guys (like Arthur Beren Shoes and Britex Fabrics). But even if it weren’t for the purchasing power of the most-valued of these luxury brands, the current craziness of Bay Area land prices would likely have raised the retailers’ rents beyond affordability, so they would have had to relocate or downsize or both. And even the luxury brands have no control over the mess being created by the new subway.

The Witches’ Brew that is YouTube

Posted on June 15, 2016 by technologybloopers

Google presciently bought YouTube from its founders in October 2006, “betting that the popular video-sharing site will provide it an increasingly lucrative marketing hub as more viewers and advertisers migrate from television to the Internet.” Silly us. We thought that YouTube was something that individuals could use to entertain ourselves, and that popular ones would bring their originators (and Google) some (or a lot) of money from ads.

Well, Google sure isn’t making it easy for individuals, thanks to the messy combinations of accounts, email addresses, channels, and browsers that makes it a nightmare to find videos once you have more than one of each of these four entities. And to make matters worse, Google threw its failing Google+ social network into the brew. Using Chrome we find three channels (or are these accounts?)—Wilddancer, Beekeeping (thus far empty as we try to sort out the whole mess), and Bill Coggshall—associated with one email address, and two channels—Car Tunes by Coggshall (which started out as “Car Tunes” that YouTube allowed me to reserve then reneged and forced me to add “by Coggshall”) and bill@technologybloopers.com (strange-looking channel, no?)– associated with a different email address (bill@technologybloopers.com). Using Firefox we find two channels (or accounts?)—Car Tunes by Coggshall and bill@technologybloopers.com—associated with email address bill@technologybloopers.com.

Usability Testing: More Honored in the Breach than the Observance

Posted on June 10, 2016 by technologybloopers

The Internet and the Worldwide Web have arguably changed the path of history. And they have made companies like Google into mega successes. But those companies have also caused much consternation among their millions of users. Why? Apparently they don’t bother to check with many (or any!) of those users to see how logical and self-evident their websites and associated tools are for their target audiences. Examples abound, and we will be posting some of the more egregious. But the Internet giants could have been even more successful, and keep website visitors on their sites longer (where they would be exposed to more advertisements) if their user interfaces were less opaque. The goal is usability, which is not rocket science. Two of most used tools are the Chrome browser and YouTube, which we will discuss in separate posts.

Ads Based on Recent Shopping Miss Their Target

Posted on May 4, 2016 by technologybloopers

I was shopping for MEN’s pickpocket-proof travel pants, and I must have visited travelsmith.com in my search. That was on Monday, May 2. Now, on Wednesday, May 4, EVERY site I visit—on searches totally unrelated to clothing—I am dealt a Travelsmith WOMAN’S Walkabout Knit Short-Sleeved Drape-Neck Top. I hope that Travelsmith is not paying Google (I am using Chrome) or another ad-dealing company very much for these ads. What is their logic? Do they think that I want to buy my wife this top (admittedly, at $27 it IS a lot cheaper than the pants)? Fortunately, after repeating this advertisement ad nauseum, Google graciously offered to let me fine-tune my ad preferences. Hmmm.

But there must be millions of other victims of these faulty algorithms. And some folks, such as the Wall Street Journal’s satirist Joe Queenan, are even more outspoken (e.g., in his ridicule of Amazon, Expedia, and Netflix).

Let Google Eat Their Own Ads

Posted on February 18, 2016 by technologybloopers

Google makes a huge amount of money serving up ads, which funds a lot of interesting, though not always quickly successful, ideas. Most everyone tolerates these ads because their search engine is such a helpful gadget. But we wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective if it would serve up ads that we are more interested in. We suspect that they have already collected plenty of data about our habits that could be parsed to make both Google users and Google advertisers happier. Regarding the off-target ads, we advise: let Google eat their own ads.

Does it really make sense to keep hammering on us month-after-month to buy more of the same item we have bought? (The high-tech rubber duckie Edwin Duck that we bought for a Christmas gift appears daily … sometimes several times.) And although in general a repeat customer is the best customer, there are lots of specialty items that advertisers should know are bought only once by individuals and used for years, so isn’t it better to spend their ad dollars to chase non-owners? Strangely, Google doesn’t seem to have taken a lesson from Amazon, which does a far better job of suggesting stuff that actually COMPLEMENTS what we have recently bought.

We thought that Google had gotten religion recently when we ran across a link leading to an “Opt Out” headline. But the religion they had gotten must have been from insane or malicious gods, because you can only opt out of “interest-based” ads, i.e. ones related to your interests, previous visits to other websites, or demographic details. WHAT??!! It seems to us that those are the ads you might WANT to see. So apparently, after opting out, you will only receive ones that are based on nothing and even more likely to be irrelevant.

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