Gravitas

The idea of an open and communicative government is wonderful. However, all of the childish prattling coming out Washington about who is at fault for creating the nation's debt and who is at fault for prolonging it is absolutely appalling. Op-ed columnists are naturally going to write the kind of pieces that will whip the American people into a furious lather, and that may be a good thing—Americans should pressure the government into making long overdue changes. In fact, it would be nice, if unlikely, to have that pressure result in meaningful, productive dialogue between the people and the government. Alternatively, I think the people should be able to realistically expect meaningful, informative disclosure from our duly elected officials as discussions progress. The dispassionate yammering currently issuing from members of Congress and, indeed, the Office of the President amounts to little more than the finger-pointing and name-calling tactics schoolchildren use to settle a playground dispute. It has become commonplace on the American political landscape, and it needs to stop. The people deserve a little more gravitas from the country's highest levels of leadership.

Intelligent Ratings

Imagine: You're perusing an app store, looking for an app that does a specific task, and after a little searching, you find one that seems promising. A quick examination of the app description gives you further hope until you realize that the app only rates two out of five stars. Further investigation reveals many, many one- and two-star ratings accompanied by individuals' complaints about how the app didn't do what they wanted it to. Many reviewers trashed the app for not doing something that was specifically stated as a technical limitation. In addition there are the usual comments that are confused, unintelligible, or just, plain gibberish.

For me, this is an increasingly common scenario. In a positive review, a single word followed by an exclamation point ("Excellent!") can be sufficient. Potential users may assume that the app works exactly as advertised with few or no bugs. Some people don't seem to understand that negative reviews don't work the same way. "Junk!" is not useful to anyone. Certainly the developer won't know what to fix, and potential users won't know if the app functions poorly, or if it is simply built along the lines of those ubiquitous "fart" apps.

So, I've come to the conclusion that the problem with 5-star rating systems and reviews from strangers is there are too many morons in the world. Mandatory education programs have trained these idiots just enough to (badly) express their simpleton points of view, but not enough to do actual critical thinking before they begin to type. In fact, I rarely read reviews anymore because it is too tedious to separate the really usefully comments from the chaff. I think Google's +1 button offers some hope here, as does the Facebook "like" button, but only if they offer a -1 or "dislike" button as well.

For years Facebooks users have been clamoring for a "dislike" button, and Facebook has steadfastly refused to provide it. Personally, I've always maintained that a "dislike" button is a bad idea, as it would almost certainly foster bad faith among people who are supposed to be a community of friends. in this case, we would all do well to observe the old adage, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I'm not advocating for a "dislike" button on people's wall posts or comments, but when applied outside of the context of Facebook (or Google+) it makes more sense. Obviously, the potential advantage of Google's +1 or Facebook's "like" over something like Digg is the ability to get a quick impression from people whose opinions you actually respect. As a bonus, businesses could get real (if not necessarily statistically meaningful) feedback on things like the impact of changing their corporate logo.

+Me

After playing around with Google+ for a few days, I've decided I really like the service. In particular, I like the one feature that sets it apart from those other major social networking services. Unfortunately there is one thing that I'm still really grappling with: Google Buzz.

Buzz started out as a Twitter-like service from Google which was built into Gmail as a feature. This made it immediately available to millions of users, creating an instant network of acquaintances for each user. There was one overriding flaw here, though, and I don't mean the much-ballyhooed privacy concerns that transfixed the Web. The biggest problem with Buzz was that it was built into an unrelated service. I understand that unveiling Buzz as a standalone service wouldn't have made it as visible as attaching it to Gmail, one of Google's flagship products, but frankly the two are not at all complimentary. Of course, other Google products were adapted to make use of the Buzz API, but Gmail was inexplicably chosen as the "home" of the sharing service.

Enter Google+. Released as a proper social networking service that stands on its own, Google+ is everything Buzz should have been. Unfortunately, instead of properly folding Buzz into the Google+ experience, they chose to stuff the old service under a tab on the "Profile" view of the new service. As a result some Google services (Gmail, Reader) seem to integrate with Buzz, while others integrate with Google+ (Picasa, Youtube), and there is no way to tell with any certainty what will show up where. To make matters worse, if I want to see my own Buzz in Google+, I have to visit the tab under my own profile. It doesn't show up in my "Stream" view. Others' Buzz isn't visible at all in Google+, you still have to use Gmail. Speaking of the "Stream" view, I've also discovered that photos may or may not show up in the "Posts" view on users' profiles. I found that photos shared with the mobile app appeared in my "Posts", but a photo added directly to a public Picasa album (commented on in Google+) was visible in my "Stream", but not in my "Posts". Youtube videos (so far) appear in both views.

Off Limits

Call me a skeptic, but when I hear a government official say, "Nothing is off limits," with regards to budget cuts, I hear, "Only the obvious things are off limits."