This Week in Google 240 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWIG, 'This Week in Google.' Jeff and Gina are here. We are going to talk about the latest from Google. Including an amazing new addition to Google docs that you are just going to love and I make a shocking confession. It's all next on TWIG.

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Leo: This is TWIG, 'This Week in Google'. Episode 240. Recorded March 12, 2014

Let's Troll Prince

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It's time for TWIG, 'This Week in Google’; I had a couple of 'oo's' in there. The show where we cover not just Google but the Cloud, the Twitter, the Facebook all of that stuff. From her mother's basement as all good bloggers do, Gina Trapani. 

Jeff Jarvis: Nice PJ's Gina.

Gina Trapani: Hello. You know I actually do have pajama bottoms on, but this is a legitimate shirt, but I actually do have pajama bottoms on because you know that's what you do when you’re only the top half...I work from home today, I am just embracing the stereotype here. 

Jeff: Okay, are they Mickey Mouse pajama bottoms or...?

Gina: Oh no they are just straight up plaid. 

Leo: They are delicious.

Gina: I can't believe I told you guys this. The whole point was that they were off camera. 

Leo: That you couldn't see them. There's something about people who aren't wearing pants. They feel compelled to tell the world. I don't know what it is.

Gina: We should be clear, I am wearing pants. They are just pajama pants, no confusion here about that.

Leo: Okay. Gina is in charge of ThinkUp, thinkup.com. She is also the author of Todo.txt and a regular host on 'All about Android', every Tuesday right here on this network at 5 P.M PT, 8 P.M. ET. Thank you for being here Gina. 

Gina: Great to be here. 

Leo: Jeff Jarvis, professor of Journalism at City University of New York.

Jeff: I am wearing pants. 

Leo: He is wearing pants, he is also the author of 'What would Google do', and his latest 'Public Parts' and blogs at buzzmachine.com. 25 years old today. Well you know, I think that's miscounting. Because it was the Twinkle and Tim Berners-Lee's 'I' on March 12, 25 years ago. It took them another year before the World Wide Web existed. 

Jeff: And it was not until October 1994 that the commercial browser was released. But still, let's give Sir Tim his birthday greetings. 

Leo: By the way, if you go to google.com, you'll see a little birthday cake with the numbers 25. I thought that was because Josh Windisch was born today. But it's actually 'Happy 25th Birthday World Wide Web.' And it links to a guest post on the Google blog by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He distributed a proposal and this is the original proposal, information management. This, my friends, is a diagram describing the world wide web. Okay, now you know what happened. This lead to a bunch of people in their jammies in their mother's basements' making a living. 

Gina: That you know, when I first saw it I thought, oh it’s how amazing things can happen from a sketch. But that's actually a computer generated flowchart. That actually, he put some work into that at that time. At that time it was pretty avant garde, it was an advanced...

Leo: And it is exactly what the web became. He says, 'This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators." He was at CERN at that time in Geneva which is the nuclear particle accelerator. "And experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system." So the concept of hypertext is not new. In fact, it was first described by ted, what's his name...

Jeff: Oh you know, chat room!

Leo: Nelson, thank you. Ted Nelson. I think he was the first to describe hypertext. And so clearly from this that Tim Berners-Lee put out, that was a turn that made some sense to somebody, 'the idea of a linked information systems.'

Jeff: Did he call it the 'World Wide Web' here?

Leo: Yeah he said he used the word 'web.' "The actual observed working structure of the organization is a multiply connected "web"", he put that in quotes, "whose interconnections evolve with time." But it wasn't the 'world wide web' until later. 

Jeff: We are going to talk about this later, but he in his AMA today, Sir Tim said that, when asked whether there were other names for the web, he listed three: "Mine of Information, The Information Mine and The Mesh." But he decided 'web' was the best.

Leo: I think 'web' was good. And 'web' lead to a lot of analogies like spidering the web as you crawl the web. So I love Reddit's 'Ask me Anything', because they surface the best questions because they get up voted. "What was one of the things you never thought the internet would be used for but actually has become one of the main reasons people use the internet?” Sir Tim Berners-Lee said, "Kittens."

Jeff: Isn't that the best?

Gina: There are a couple possibilities to that response. I like that he chose kittens.

Leo: "Do you think in the not too distant future we'll look back and think ourselves lucky to have witnessed a neutral, free, and uncensored world wide web?" He responds, "I think it is up to us. I'm not guessing, I'm hoping. Yes, I can imagine that all too easily. If ordinary web users are not sufficiently aware of threats and get involved and if necessary take to the streets like for SOPA and PIPA and ACTA. On balance? I am optimistic." But he is right, we have to, it is up to us to preserve the free and open internet. 

Jeff: Amen.

Leo: Tim is an amazing fella. Very unassuming. He got knighted for this but he doesn't act as if, 'oh yeah, I invited it.' "What web browser do you use?" "Don't know", says Java Beans, "but his GitHub account says he commits to some Firefox plugin." That's pretty impressive, he's a Firefox committer. And then Amosral says, "Dude its Tim Berners-Lee. He doesn't need a browser. He doesn't even need a computer. He just puffs the end of an Ethernet cable like a hookah."

Gina: Now that's something that needs to be photo shopped. 

Leo: I can see him sitting on a mushroom. "Edward Snowden- Hero or Villain?", Tim writes, "Because he  had no other alternative engaged as a journalist / with a journalist to be careful of how what was released, and provided an important net overall benefit to the world, I think he should be protected, and we should have ways of protecting people like him. Because we can try to design perfect systems of government, and they will never be perfect, and when they fail, then the whistleblower may be all that saves society." Right on.

Jeff: Excellent answer which Glenn Greenwald immediately re-tweeted. 

Leo: So Tim Berners- Lee I think deserves the honor. Today is the date his eye twinkled but the world wide web was more, actually more than a year later after he first wrote about it and we are all celebrating. 

Jeff: He was asked whether the 404 came from the fact that he was in room 404 when he did this and he said, 'No, that's nonsense.' 

Leo: Where did those error numbers come from?

Jeff: I don't know.

Leo: He probably didn't write those. Probably the folks who did Apache I would guess wrote those error messages, right?

Gina: Well see it's an http spec right, so...

Leo: Oh it was a spec, okay...

Gina: See http protocol spec, all those error numbers, 401, 500, 503 etc., those are all a part of the protocol. I am sure that a lot of people at Apache were probably involved but it was probably a different standards organization...

Leo: Right. He did write the first http server so he had to in order to...on a Next cube, I might add.

Gina: Wow.

Leo: Well, you know Next was kind of designed to make it easy to write scientific software. I am looking at all the other stories, Summer of Code open for application. The 10th Summer of Code. You've been involved in the Summer of Code Gina, tell us about it. 

Gina: I have and I am really excited ThinkUp got accepted as a mentoring organization this year. This is Google's Summer of Code, which is their tenth year. This is a program that Google runs to support open source projects. So, what happens is, open source organizations like ThinkUp or like FireFox or Apache or WordPress, they all apply to be mentoring organizations and then the ones that get accepted then open up an application period for students who want to get in to get experience,  contributing to open source and who also can earn a stipend from Google. So students apply and then they get paired up with mentors and the mentoring organization, so I am going to mentor a student this summer and we've done it two other summers, so I've mentored students in the past. And if the student passes, they propose a project and if they get a passing grade from the mentor, the student earns, I think it's a $5,000 stipend for the summer. This is a summer job basically working remotely on an open source project so you get incredible experience, make some money and the mentor gets a little stipend, I think it's $500 or whatever. And Google organizes this and they fund this and it's an amazing program and Google I think really uses this program to recruit developers as well because at least a couple of students who have been through GSOC even through ThinkUp have gone on to at least interviews at Google, if not jobs. And one of my students actually got a job at Facebook after he graduated. Yeah it's pretty prestigious thing and in fact ThinkUp's developers’ mailing list is just overrun with students right now kind of clamoring to put in their project proposals and asking questions. It's great for the organization, it's great for Google, and it’s great for students. 

Jeff: Do you really get a lot out of it or is it more to the world of the future?

Gina: I love it. I love mentoring new students. One of my things is like I really want to bring young people into contributing to open source. I feel like open source is still really hard to penetrate, I think that there's a certain kind of developer the neck beard that kind of you know can find their way in. But I think there are a lot of young people who are intimidated or really don't know how to get in there, so when you get paired up with a mentor, you have some kind of holding hand, showing you the ropes and working with you one on one. I think that's the thing that gets someone to do this kind of thing. That's how it happened for me. So, I really love it because we ThinkUp gets often long time contributors. Students stick around. We actually wound up hiring a student who we mentored last summer to do contract work for ThinkUp as we prepared to open up sign ups. So it creates jobs, it creates relationships, it makes connections and I really like helping students, particularly students who maybe wouldn't have gotten into open source on their own. Particularly young women, for me just kind of as I like the idea of bringing more women into open source, sorely needed. So, it's great, everybody gets something out of it. It's a lot of work; it's a lot of hours, but it totally worth it. 

Leo: You obviously would need to computer science student or know how to code anyway right?

Gina: You know I think it depends on the project and on the project proposal. At ThinkUp, we try to make it as general as possible. If you have an interest in learning how to code and you have a really great project idea, you are a really great designer, if you are a great copywriter, you could re-write a documentation...

Leo: So it could be that. It could be technical writing. 

Gina: Yeah, it could be technical writing. Whatever the contribution is as long as it moves the project forward and I really, I've talked about this on the show, I've been trying to really get out of that developer only mind set. I think product development and making technical products isn't just about writing code. I think it's also about writing copy, writing documentation and user experience and design and I really want to encourage that as well. And a lot of these projects are extremely technical but ThinkUp is a consumer product, it is very much user experience focused. I mean the code certainly runs it...

Jeff: What are the skills that you need? Are you having problems finding any skills? Just as an educator I am asking, what are we training people to do?

Gina: This program in particular tends to attract students who are extremely technical and who are comp sci majors, that makes a lot of sense. And with ThinkUp particularly and I think this is true of most consumer products, you need somebody who can write and can code and has a very good sense of user experience, right. So that's rare to find that combination. With ThinkUp particularly, ThinkUp is about social insight. So we are looking for people who blog, who tweet, who do Facebook, who use these social tools, who are very experience, who understand the different cultures of these different communities. I mean we had a student build a Youtube plug in for example, for us last summer. I am not that active on Youtube, I don't really know the culture or the comments on it. Or what is liking versus favoriting versus sharing, so we are looking for someone who is really embedded in that community, and who wants those insights and kind of wants to scratch their own itch. 

Jeff: So understanding that community in itself is a skill?

Gina: Yeah, I mean for us definitely. For us because we are about social insights about cultures and communities, we do want people who understand those. But I think every project has different needs. 

Leo: So the Summer of Code, go to google.com/gsoc, I guess. Look if you can't find it, you probably shouldn't apply. 

Gina: Yeah. Student applications are open I think until like March 21st. So if you are looking for a summer job and you are a quantifying student, you should definitely apply.  

Leo: And can you mentor in jammies or is that not...

Gina: All of my mentees have been in different countries. So yes I was often in my pajamas while I was mentoring. 

Leo: But you can get down with technology in your hand, that's what the purple one tells us, Prince, he doesn't like technology. 

Jeff: It's emasculating too, you can't get down and you are emasculated. 

Gina: So, you know my co-founder Neil Dash, he's a huge Prince fan and I shared this link with him earlier and I said, 'cue the Jeff Jarvis rant about how technophobes are destroying culture', and he was just like 'ugh.' He's always been on this thing about, not taking photos at shows, whatever. But I thought it was funny because you know...

Leo: Prince does not like technology. Remember he briefly sued his own fans for posting on Youtube. He tells people at the door, 'no photos. Patriots taking photos are subject to ejection.' And he is saying, 'put your phone down. You can't get down with technology in your hand.' But you know, he's right. I just think he's a little bit of a...

Gina: But this is the guy who put out CD-ROM's 20 years ago. 

Leo: Right. When asked last year whatever he owns an iPhone, he said, 'hell no!'

Gina: Ah, hell no!

Leo: Ah, hell no! But he has people who phone for him. I bet you many in his entourage have an iPhone. He did use a phone apparently to help on Arsenio Hall, help a fan break up. Did you see this? I didn't see this.

Gina: I didn't see it. He used smart phone?

Leo: Well let's see. 

Man in video: Things you might like Prince to solve. And, there's a gentleman who told my producer a story...

Leo: Prince always looks like a Prince impersonator to me. He just doesn't look like he really is there. Anyway this guy asked Prince...he doesn't look like he's looking at you. 

Gina: Well, the big glasses. 

Leo: Alright, we don't have to watch this; he apparently helps Steve break up with his girlfriend. Google discloses a pathetic $9.5 million in bonuses. Okay, now Eric Schmidt got $6 million all by himself. The chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, $3 million in yearly bonus. Chief business officer, Nikesh Arora, $3.5 million bonus. Chief legal officer, David C. Drummond $3 million bonus, that's down a little bit. These will all be paid in a couple of days, so get ready Silicone Valley for a big big party. No cash bonuses for Larry or Sergey. They didn't get the cash bonus last year. But I think when you are the owners, you don't get a bonus. I don't bonus myself at the end of the year. A $100 million in restricted stock though to Eric Schmidt along with his $6 million bonus. See that kind of tells you a little bit more. "In recognition of his contributions to Google's performance in fiscal year 2013." That's just prurient interest; people want to know how much money they make. 

Gina: Yeah, I mean on one hand, '$3 million bonus would change my life', on the other hand, it's not very much for Google. And actually it's down. Those $3 million bonus were down from $3.3 million...

Leo: Some were up, some were down, some people...You know bonuses are rewarded based on merit, on contribution. I think there is some interesting stuff going on with the wearable technology here. Some interesting comments. Google's head of Android, Chrome and apps at SXSW, talked about wearable tech and implied really what Google was going to do with making a SDK or some sort of low level, maybe an operating system for people who make wearable tech. And I wonder...he said, "In two weeks we are launching the first developer SDK for Android wearables. That will lay out the vision for developers in how we see this market working, when we think of wearables, we think of it as a platform. We see a world of sensors. Sensors can be small and powerful and gather a lot of information that can be useful for users. We want to build the right APIs for this world of sensors.” I wonder if Google, isn't thinking of Glass as more of a, and I've said this before, a learning experience than an actual product. And then ultimately they don't want make all, they want others to make the products just as they want others to make Android phones. And if Google's on them, then they will be happy.

Jeff: If Android is the OS of wearables and sensors, then that is an enviable position which also to me informs the interesting decision that Samsung made with their new watches are not Android.

Gina: Right. They are running Tizen. Because they were saying Android is too slow.

Leo: Few companies have the resources of Samsung to develop their own operating system. Most companies would want to use off the shelf and there aren't that many choices. There is QNX I guess, there's a few thing you could use, but I think if Google says, 'look we've got a wearable specific SDK with our Android operating system, it's small enough and powerful enough to do what you want and look people using Google Glass got all this benefit out of it', I think that's pretty compelling. And to me it kind of underscores what I always thought, which is that they didn't really intent to make Glass be a product. 

Gina: Yeah, it was a learning experience. 

Leo: It was a learning experience to stimulate the market. It maybe was like their Nexus phones and tablets, an example of what could be done. But I think that they don't want to be a competitor to the people who might be using them.

Jeff: You know that reason has been questioned. Is that I have always said that Glass is the Newton of whatever follows. But Newton tried to be a product. Are there other examples you can think of before Google, you know before the Chromebook Pixel, before Glass, before these and before the original Chromebook for that matter, that were...what's the phrase you used? For how good a product could be and 'we want to show you the way'...and actually release something to the public but not making it into a product. I mean, Apple has never did that, Microsoft never did that. Are there cases where companies have done that in the past that you can think of?

Leo: Well Microsoft. 

Jeff: What did they release that way?

Leo: Well they didn't make computers until very very recently. They made the operating system...

Jeff: But yeah they didn't make a computer to show other computer makers how to make computers.

Leo: They didn't need...well they do...Intel does that, they do prototypes. Intel has been making concept PC's...

Jeff: But Intel never released them to the public. They were concepts...

Leo: So, I see what you are saying. Do exactly like Glass, which is make something, release it...

Jeff: Learn from it with the public. 

Gina: What about those suitcase sized cell phones?

Jeff: Those were commercial products. 

Gina: They were commercial products but everybody laughed at them, I mean right. 

Jeff: But everybody laughed at Newton too. But they wanted it to be a commercial product.

Gina: I mean the segue-way was a commercial product...

Jeff: Oh, it was supposed to change the world.

Gina: Right, but certainly with the...I mean that they knew that the segue-way would have to change culture in a way and people would have to change their idea of what they thought was dorky and of course it didn't work. 

Leo: Segue-way was always intended to be a product. It wasn't a test for a platform. I mean they never open sourced it or anything. 

Jeff: I think it's interesting they used this power that they have at Google to put out a product that sets the bar...

Leo: Microsoft always did concept PC's. But you are right, they never made a PC. But I don't think they needed to. They were so many people making PC’s that they didn't have to do the research. 

Jeff: Hold on a second...

Leo: Microsoft put the telemetry into...

Jeff: If you see behind me there is an Intel box, I would go get it of a tablet right there, that Intel was going to release. 

Leo: Right. Intel did a lot. 

Jeff: They never released it to the market, but it reached that prototype stage, I worked on that product. So they put a large team on it, put a lot of money into it...

Leo: It's a big R&D expense. As somebody saying, to do as R&D, to release a product publicly, of course they got people to pay $1500 for it, so I don’t think they lost money on it...

Jeff: Schmucks like me. 

Leo: Yeah. But why do you say that? Don’t you love it?

Jeff: No, I am not incredibly mean to it anymore. But, no it's not...

Leo: Okay so look what I got. You didn't even know notice, I've been wearing this all day, I've wearing it for a couple of weeks now. So this is much more offensive. It's the Narrative clip. If you go to getnarrative.com, you can...it was originally a kick starter project under the name of 'Moto.' Remember that? And I bought it as a kick starter project I think or maybe right after it went out of kick starter. So I just got mine, they are going out now. The idea is, it's a clip you wear on your clothing, it records picture. Not a great picture, 5 megapixel picture every...this is not it so let me go ahead, see this...there you go. Every 30 seconds, it had a capacity for 4,000 images. It is USB connection, yeah it's expensive, it has a 2 day battery life. So what you do is every day or so you connect it up to a computer the software downloads the images, puts them on Narrative's servers. As far as I can tell, they don’t have a web based interface. You have to look or view your pictures on your smart phone. So there is a Narrative app for iOS and for Android. And I should put it on here so you can see the...

Gina: Does this make like stop motion videos of your day or what?

Leo: No, it's kind of weird. Here, well I can show you I think. Problem is of course it's everything. So I have to be a little careful about what I show you. It's private; I mean the whole idea is that this is going to be private. Well I got to tell you, I don't recommend it for people with a large belly. Because I got a lot of pictures of the ceiling because it tips...my belly tips the thing up just enough so that I mean really not getting pictures of anything interesting. I am going to try different ways of...it's loading these up now. This is the other weird thing, is that pictures don't live on the phone. There's a nice shot of the ceiling...they also don't live on...here's a walk, here I am walking into work I think. So a lot of and that's just because of how I am wearing it, it seems to take pictures up, so I have to figure out a way to wear this that's not quite so. But every 30 seconds, now this is trimmed so somehow they are looking for good pictures, just like G+ does. Down to 71 photos, if I turn off the trim, it is actually twice as many pictures, but they have taken some out. If you put it face down or you are in a darkened room, it just stops. Yeah it not supposed to be...it's supposed to be everything you did, it's not like you are actively taking pictures. You go back through it, I guess what i should show is something like a...the first day I wore, we had a dinner party. So let me scroll through here, trying to avoid the... 

Gina: So do we get photos of the Japanese toilet in there?

Leo: Yeah, you might if I showed them to you. 

Gina: No I am not asking, I am just asking...

Leo: Well it doesn't...it shoot straight forward, it doesn't shoot down, so you are not going to get anything embarrassing. 

Gina: Okay, Alright. 

Leo: SO these are the first images I took. If you double tap it as I did here, it stars it and says, ‘this is a star image.' So there is a lot of, you can tell I look at the computer screen a lot. Here's our kitchen. It isn't compelling, it's not supposed to be compelling in the sense that, 'oh you want to save these picture.' It's literally a record of what you did, what you looked at all day. I don't know, it's...but you know when I look at for instance, Mike Elgan now used something for Glass, I don't if you guys already know about this, but it takes snap shots, let me see if I can find his post. It takes snap shots with you Glass...

Jeff: Not on order? That actually bothers me. 

Leo: Right.

Jeff: Because I like that on Glass, I can tell people, 'No, I am going...'

Leo: No, this is recording all the time.

Gina: At some point, this was years ago, when Yahoo! started to do some of their geo location stuff with Flickr, they sent me a bike with a phone; it was a Symbian phone at that time. Kind of mounted into the handle bars and there was a GPS so when the bike was in motion, it would do this. It would take a photo every 5 seconds or 10 seconds or whatever. It would automatically upload to Flickr and it would map it right. So you would have this like...

Jeff: That's more interesting. 

Gina: Which was really neat and really, really cool and I enjoyed looking at them and I found that, and I look some nice bike ride down by the ocean in San Diego, but I found that most of the pictures were not that usable right. It was just sky or there wasn't anybody in it or whatever and other than sort of jogging my memory about what a nice day that was down by the ocean and there were low quality or whatever, I didn't see a whole lot of...it felt like a lot of data and a lot of processing power for something that I didn't quite get the use for. Now, for something like mapping, like Google maps, or something like that, that makes a lot of sense. 

Jeff: Did you guys ever see...

Leo: The program Mike used is called 'Moment Camera.' It's for the Google Glass, so I don't know what's happening with this movie, but it made a movie out of his day and took some stuff out and took some stuff...48 minutes, 4 seconds and this is from Glass. The movie is not playing unfortunately, so there is something wrong with that. Its beautiful images, but it's not all that interesting frankly. 

Jeff: No, it's not. One of my students has an effort to do this for people with Alzheimer's, so they can try to recall their day. 

Leo: So that's where this came from. So that was... Gordon Bell wrote a book about this. His wife, Gwen Bell had Alzheimer's and Gordon was the guy who pioneered this. He wore one of these camera's years ago and it was exactly it, so that your life...it's for your personal benefit. 

Jeff: Did you guys ever see the 'Whale Hunt'? Jonathan Harris is the Whale Hunt?

Leo and Gina: No.

Jeff: Go to if you would, thewhalehunt.org and then click on the 'begin Whale Hunt.' Jonathan is a magnificent, amazing artist. Now he took a picture at least once every five minutes, more often if something was happening. Now on the bottom right there Leo, you can see that there is a mosaic and next to that there's a timeline. You click on that, if you go to the right and see where there's a lot of photos? That's where stuff was happening; well guess what they were getting? 

Leo and Jeff at once: They had a whale. 

Jeff: And you can see the time line, the kind of heart beat of this there. Now, he's actually taking a picture, but this goes far beyond in terms of seeing what a day is like. And getting some sense out of it...

Leo: He's using a camera and...

Jeff: He's using a camera, but it shows you what's possible with this idea of collecting a day. And then he sorts by people, by colors, by how many photos there are and it's really absolutely fascinating. So there is something to this, but just putting that clip on you...

Leo: Well, it's not for...you're right, it doesn't have any resonance, if you are not me. On the other hand, if I am there...I think it's early yet and this is very primitive. 

Jeff: Yes, yes I agree.  

Leo: But on the other hand...so couple of things, which would be, making it much more wide angle image so that even though it's pointing the wrong way, it would get the whole thing, I don't care if it's a little fish eye. Because I want to see the faces and I would love to be able to have some sort of interface where I can go in each night and say, 'oh that was Mike that was Joe that was Sally, we were doing this.' And now I would have kind of the record of the day that I can go back and search for and so forth. And that might be of use for somebody with memory disorders or maybe twenty years from now, if I kind of wan to relive my day. I don't know, there is obviously some interest in this notion. The main reason that I bring this up, is because this is so much more offensive than Google Glass. 

Jeff: It is. 

Leo: I was wearing it at the gym the other day and I realized, you know I am taking pictures of all these people at the gym, they don't even know it. 

Gina: Yeah, but then the gym cameras are doing the same right. 

Leo: Right. And this is just for me; I mean I am not sharing it. 

Jeff: See I think is a very simple modification to that device that makes it work. That you have a camera that you are constantly wearing, and you can do a motion to take a picture, when you want to.

Leo: I can, I can double tap this. 

Jeff: And I think that's...if you take off the constantly on, you just have the ability to record something and it's always right there, immediately there, you don't pull out your phone, you don't do anything else, that has utility. And it also has a signal that says, to know that I am doing this. 

Leo: So Dr. Mobius, I love it, says, "This is dumb. There is a reason you don't remember mundane things, you are not supposed to." 

Jeff: Brain noise. 

Leo: And what you really realize how much of your day is unmemorable and doesn't deserve to be remembered.

Gina: Totally unremarkable. And then there are times that I am like, 'oh remember that old apartment we lived in, how did we have that set up? I would love to walk through the apartment I lived in 15 years ago', that kind of thing. 

Leo: I guess we'll have that though, because we take so many damn pictures now with our smart phones. If I go back through my Google+ image library that is actually pretty good record of all the interesting stuff I did anyway. 

Gina: Yeah it's true.  

Leo: Yeah $279, I can't really recommend it because it is pretty pricey. 

Gina: Is this a before you buy?

Leo: No, I bought it, but I’ll review...I bought it when they first announced it, so it was almost a year ago. It just came the other day. I'll definitely review it. I think it's something that has some interest and for some people it might be...but really talk about privacy issues. But I mean, so what is different? I am seeing everything. I record it for my later review, is that somehow...?

Jeff: Well the difference is very simple. On Glass as designed, I have to hit a button or say, 'Google take a picture.' And so it's an explicit act that I am choosing to do and one assumes that I have some measure of permission to do this and that there are some transparency that I am doing it. And that's the difference. And that's why that same device with an obvious movement, I would be absolutely cool with it. Somebody would know you are taking a picture, fine. 

Leo: Bianca Bosker writing about it for the Huffington Post, the title was, "Nice To Meet You. I've Already Taken Your Picture." And by the way this is completely typical of the kind of picture that you get. This is a picture of her, putting on her eye makeup from below. That's the problem, this thing you know...nobody is aiming it. At least with Glass you kind of know what you are going to get right. 

Gina: Right. There is no viewfinder and you are not aiming at, even if you double tap it, you really don't know what you are going to get. 

Leo: If I wear this into a bar in San Francisco, is it completely reasonable that I would get beaten up?

Gina: Well the difference between that and Glass is that it's a much less conspicuous right. 

Leo: It is sneakier. I think it is less offensive because of that to people. Like Glass is like in your face. No, even if they know, I don't think it bothers them.

Jeff: I don't think they were complaining about being recorded. I think they were complaining about Google and capitalism and...

Leo: Yeah, but I don't know, you tell me. Are you really annoyed by the fact that I am taking your picture every twice a minute, while I talk to you.

Jeff: Well the truth is you can do it. You can put a camera in a button, right, no big deal.

Leo: Right. But you kind of know you're doing something bad. Yeah this at least, it kind of looks like a camera. 

Jeff: But it doesn't say what that is. Unless you are really geeky and watch the show, you are not going to know what that is. You'll think it's a pacemaker or something. 

Leo: Well, you can see a lens. 

Gina: Yeah, when I just looked at it, I hadn't heard about it. I thought it was some sort of FitBit or something. 

Leo: Yeah that is what I am going to tell people. That is my heart rate monitor. Pay no attention to that. 

Gina: But smile!

Leo: You are on my camera. Hey Prince can I get down with this on my lapel? I wonder if I would get thrown out of a Prince concert, that's the question. 

Jeff: Now that makes me want to go to a Prince concert with hidden cameras just to have fun. 

Leo: Yeah, just to mess with him.

Gina: Troll Prince. 

Leo: So I think the Android based SDK is very, for wearable is very smart move on Google's part. Nobody else is doing this right? They want to be in there.

Jeff: The Android strategy worked. The strategy was always to have this free operating system out there. The more it's installed, the more developers will write for it, the more customers will have it the more power they have. 

Leo: Hey good news for you guys in Manhattan. You know Microsoft still doesn't have a store in Manhattan, Apple does and next Google. Google is apparently searching for retail space in New York City. 

Jeff: I'll be there.

Gina: I think that, didn't they put some money down on a space not far from the Apple store. 

Leo: According to Crain's they are close to signing a lease for an 8,000 square foot, which is pretty small. 8,000 square foot facility at 131 Greene St. in SoHo district. Just a block from Apple's own SoHo store, which is nice. SoHo is like art galleries and...

Gina: Very fancy expensive shopping. 

Jeff: Actually now it’s become so touristy, it's basically every brand you already know. JCrew and H&M and all that. It's not a few galleries... I am fascinated with what was happening at Best Buy. Best Buy has handed over huge boutique space to Samsung and Microsoft, less so Google. I know that Google, I mean, I sent Best Buy to Google, years ago and they were doing on their own...actually I didn't send them; they were on their own, but anyway. There was talk about Google space in Best Buy stores. I think Google can go beyond just saying, 'here is a Nexus', because you can see it everywhere. I think Google can wow us with the Google lifestyle. 

Leo: That's what it strikes me is that, Google doesn't he store implies that they are there to sell something, there is a counter and money, but I don't think that's really what these things are. I mean they have Chromebook tings in the airport and it's really just more about, yeah look at all the things you can do with Chromebooks and Nexus' and maps. It will be situated in between Tiffany's and Louis Vuitton. That tells you something, don't it.

Gina: And maybe there'll be a line around the corner of people who have been locked out of their Gmail accounts. 

Leo: Is this where I get support for Gmail because I forgot my password. 

Jeff: I think it's a game show. Google genius' versus the Apple genius'. 

Leo: That'll be fun, wouldn't it? 

Gina: I mean that movie 'The Internship' would have you believe that there is a flea of Google customer support folks who want to help you out. 

Leo: Okay Google Now, what's up?

Automated Google machine: Good afternoon Leo. The time is 2:05 P.M. You received a notification form Clash of Clans at 2:00 P.M., 'Chief, our shield is about to run out.'

Leo: Oh no!

Automated Google machine: 262966 sent you a text message at 1:40 P.M, saying amazon.com. You're package has been delivered by the carrier. You received a notification from CNN at 1:43 P.M....

Leo: As I am driving around now I can say, 'okay Google Now, what's up, and it will do all that. It will read me all my notifications, tell me what time it is, what the weather is like. I love this thing. 

Gina: That's just built in?

Leo: Yeah, it's part of the Moto X. You want it don't you. It’s a talking Google now. 

Gina: Dang!

Leo: I am telling you, I love the Moto X. 

Gina: I am getting tech news stories about WhatsApp. 

Leo: Moto X really still...

Jeff: Okay Google, what's up?

Leo: Yeah, won't do it. It's part of their touch less control. It's pretty cool; the touch less stuff on the Moto X is pretty amazing. Apparently, what is that cyanogenmod phone? The one on one or whatever it's called. They are going to, I don't know if we talked about this last time on 'All about Android', but they are going to have some sort of touch less control as well, they say. In fact, they are asking on their website now for people to vote on what the phrase will be, because it has to be something easy to say, easy to remember, but...

Jeff: 'Cyanogenmod' ain't it. 

Leo: 'Okay cyanogenmod.' They have to have something...

Gina: The N1? cyanogenmod edition right. 

Jeff: I think you should ask Tim and contribute to the obvious.

Leo: 'Ask Tim', okay or 'ask Jarvis'. 

Jeff: I'll take it. Or better yet 'Gina'.

Gina: Microsoft has a help thing that is going to be called ' Cortana.'

Leo:  'Cortana', yeah which is a character in Halo, yeah. The 'One Plus', that's it, I was trying to remember the name. The One Plus phone. The OPOS is making some very interesting hardware and I like the idea, I guess it's based on cyanogenmod which is the...

Jeff: The OPOS is?

Leo: Yeah, the new One Plus. I don't know if they are going to have the capability that the Moto X does of having listening without using a lot of power. So the vote currently, 'how would you like to wake up your One Plus one', is 'okay One Plus', is number one. 'Wake up One Plus' is number two. 'Allakhazam' in third place. I like allakhazam, not something you say in regular life. 

Gina: Right, because you don't want it to be like, 'hey'.

Jeff: There was a great Google+ post last week from somebody who listens to us in their car, with their Moto X there. And anytime any one of us says, 'Google'...

Leo: Oh yeah, it's driving them crazy. 

Jeff: Let's all do it. Is it 'okay Google'?

Leo: 'Okay Google' or 'Okay Google Now'.

Jeff: Okay Google.

Leo: Okay Google Now.

Gina: I like it. Okay Google, what's up? 

Leo: Same thing happens with the Xbox. Watch this, anybody watching this from an Xbox, if I say Xbox turn off. This is the problem we are going to have with speech recognition. It's going to hit podcasters especially hard. Alright we are going to take a break, when we come back, the Google Change Log. 

Our show today brought to you by 286,999 designers who want to create design for you at 99designs.com. It is a great place to go, if you have an app, a business, you want some beautiful designs, you are not a designer yourself, which is most of, if you are not trained, whether it is new logo, a website, a stationary t-shirt, there is a designer at 99designs. com. bring your idea to life. Wouldn't it be cool if you could start a design contest today, get dozens of designers submitting ideas to you within the next few days. You can pick and pay as little as $199 with 100% money back guarantee. We love 99 designs. We use it all the time. We just got our new hoodies, let me show you. If you go to tspring.com/twit, you can see the new hoodie. We got this designed by a designer at 99 designs. They really did a lovely job with the logo. But I have to say, we had a contest we got 40 submissions, we liked 5 of the designs so much we bought all them. I think we paid $299 each. Because they are just great. We have a ladies style, Bella hooded sweatshirt too. And don't buy one Jeff or Gina, just want to say do not get one. You will find out why later. 

Jeff: I'll be getting one as a gift for someone else. 

Leo: Oh, that's okay. 99designs.com, that's where we got this. That's where you are going to get great designs. Can you do a little turn on the catwalk? You are too sexy for your hoodie, too sexy for your hoodie, you’re...

Gina: I like the logo on the arm, it's cool.

Leo: Isn't that cool, yeah. If you go to 99design.com/twig, you will get a $99 power pack of services absolutely free. That will give you more designer time and attention, bold your listing highlight and feature it in their marketplace. You will get twice as many designs as a result. Everybody go to 99designs.com/twig. And now break out the trumpets because my friends, it is time for the Google Change Log. 

The Google Change Log. 

Leo: And of course, who better than Gina Trapani to give us the latest from Google.

Gina: The big item this week is Google drive ad-ons. Think about these like Gmail labs features. They are ad-ons, extensions to Google drive. Not to Chrome the browser, but in Google drive. In Google docs, in the new version of Google sheets, there is a new ad-ons menu. This is actually rolling out right now and I am not seeing it in my apps. There is a new ad-ons menu, click on it, you select 'get ad-ons' and that's where you can install ad-ons. These are basically just little new features, some developed by Google, some developed by partners that add functionality to Google drive. They've got ad-ons that translate the selected text, find synonyms, create a table of contents and certain maps. Basically adds a lot of different kinds of functionality. 

Leo: So where do we see this again? How do we know if we have it?

Jeff: On the top of docs. 

Gina: Yes, you have to be in docs or sheets. The new version of sheets, there will be a menu item, ad-ons. Next to tools right Jeff?

Jeff: Yeah, up top.

Leo: So how do I get into docs?

Gina: Create a new doc. 

Leo: I don't have to be specifically in docs?

Jeff: Hold on.

Gina: Yeah, you do have to be in a doc. 

Leo: Okay, I am in a doc, 'new ad-ons', its right there! How exciting.

Jeff: Yeah. And it's the best, the best, the best, the best, the best.

Leo: What are the best?

Jeff: Drive has trace changes. 

Leo: Oh, that's huge.

Jeff: All the irony of having had that waived and finally it's through an ad on.

Leo: Now, these are free? Or some of them aren't?

Gina: I think that some of the services are actually maybe paid for, but I believe these ad-ons are free.

Jeff: I think the fax one for example charges you. 

Leo: This is directly competitive with word. Track Changes is a feature Microsoft Word has had for years but was always missing for docs. This is great.

Gina: You can have a Google sheet for example of names and addresses and select all the addresses and generate a Google map with the ad-on. Lifehacker did a rundown of the best ad-ons that are available right now. 'Hello fax' is one of them that Jeff just mentioned. You can send a fax directly from drive. Mapping sheets, which I was just saying, you can select a bunch of addresses and make a map. 'Easy bib', which creates bibliography, using MLA, APA or Chicago style. You select your sources and citations and it makes it. There is 'Uber Conference', 'Track changes', tons of stuff here. This is a really really big change and I love the way...Google has this history of providing these hosted apps but then creating hooks for developers to create extensions to them, much like labs. But what I like about this is that it is open obviously to external developers. 

Leo: What do you write these in?

Gina: That's the thing right, that's a good question. They haven't exposed, as far as I know, they haven't exposed in API or SDK. I think they reached out to partners and now on this initial release to see what they can get and hopefully they are going to make it. I would love to see a store for this kind of thing, much like the Chrome store or the web store. But for right now it's just selected partners and Google creating these features. That was always my gripe with Google with the Gmail apps is that those lab features only came from inside Google. But it's complicated to make extensions to a hosted app like that. So yeah, really cool stuff. That was the big new thing this week. 

Leo: With this you can sing docs with 'Hello Sign', which gives you legally binding signatures in docs?

Jeff: Well, if they accept it, yeah you can just put a signature on and...I have a fax machine somewhere and I have to plug it in, plug it into the phone line because I only have one phone line now and it's a pain in the butt. So now I don't even have to fax, I don't have to print out and scan the document. All I have to do is just sign the document online with this and it's great. 

Gina: It's so great. And I send a fax maybe once or twice a year and that kind of thing is so...

Leo: Wow charts. I like the pro writing aid. It will detect plagiarism as well as errors, grammatically mistakes in your writings. 'Consistency check', this is really neat. 

Gina: Yeah Avery has a 'Mail merge' feature. 

Leo: So you can not only get to...this is what Microsoft Office should do. You could get to all of the power of Microsoft office but the user controls the complexity by just adding the ad-ons they need, adding into the menu. 

Jeff: Now imagine for example, that screen writers could do an ad-on for formatting scripts. 

Leo: Right. I am sure they will. 

Jeff: All kinds of things.

Leo: This is really neat. 

Jeff: It is very neat. And it is so quiet. right Gina, it came out with a whisper. 

Gina: Yeah it did. It's actually pretty incredible and it was pretty quiet. And this goes far beyond things like templates, like I am thinking...I would love to see something like, something that connected, 'help outs', for example to drive. You have some of those reviews. There is one ad-on that lets you get approval from your team, the check mark. But I am just thinking about like say writing you resume, that kind of thing, you can start off with a template but then to have others review it or translations also, translation review and so many situations you want to collaborate with trusted advisers or friends or maybe even strangers just to get help with something that you are writing. And I feel like this a step towards that. 

Leo: Create a conference call within a document. Alright, so create a doc and you will see a new ad-ons menu. 

Jeff: They have added more since I first saw it. I saw it like yesterday. 

Leo: You can manage your ad-ons here, rate them. This is good.

Jeff: Music notation, that's new. 

Leo: Yeah, love that.

Jeff: Jesus. 'Mail chimp merge'. 

Leo: You can merge your mail with chimps?

Gina: No, mail chimp service.

Jeff: They'll keep writing and writing and writing until you finally churn out Shakespeare. 

Leo: But they didn't publish an API for this. 

Gina: Not as far as I know and this is typical of them right. It seems like that they would... this is the initial launch just to see what people can do. They'll see how popular it is and then...

Leo: Here is blog Labnol, labnol.org, post that says, 'How to Write an Add-on for Google Docs.' You use HTML, CSS and JavaScript, kind of like any traditional web app. "Open a new document inside Google Drive and choose Tools, Script Editor. This is the Apps Script IDE", and then you can paste in this code that's going to give you kind of a generic ad-on. And then you can write the server side script and then...so this actually looks like something you could do pretty easily.

Gina: I stand corrected. 

Leo: This is from Amit Agarwal. 

Gina: Oh yea, Amit's great. And then you can share it with other users. 

Leo: That's pretty neat. 

Gina: So this isn't sort of the...you can't get placed next to the folks like 'hello fax' or 'mail merge', but yeah this is a way to script...

Leo: But you can put yourself, it says you can add yourself to the Chrome extension store. So it sounds like it's like a Chrome extension. 

Gina: Yeah. I forgot that the apps has these script IDE where you can create scripts much like Macros in Microsoft Office, but this is based on HTML. Yeah, this is great. Amit is great, so I stand corrected. There is a way to do this, I love it. 

Leo: "With apps script, you can create ad-ons for Google sheets, docs or forms, automate your work flow, integrate with external API's and more." And Google does document this at developers.google.com. So search for apps script and it totally tells you how to create a docs ad-on, custom menu in Google sheets, that's sweet.

Gina: I am glad I was wrong about that, that's good. 

Leo: Sweet, sweet. Now how do you get in that menu of items I don't know. I guess Google curates that...

Jeff: The other thing is that, the 'track changes' is looking a little bit awkward so I want people to compete and hope the best track wins.

Leo: Yeah, let’s make a better one. I am going to write a word count. It's going to be so good. It's going to do spaces, words, paragraphs; you are going to love it. 

Jeff: I use that more than you would. Germans assign you by characters, the American by words. 

Leo: Huh?

Gina: By characters, wow. 

Jeff: Yeah, I get character assignments from Germany. 

Gina: So you can use fewer but larger words and still make your character count.

Jeff: Well, that's German that defines German.

Leo: I feel like...am I having a stroke? I don't understand what he is talking about. Does it make any sense at all to anybody? Gina you understand this? Okay, I guess I’m just out of it. I stayed up last night playing . . .  That was the day - I think Jeff Jarvis invented the World Wide Web that day.  That’s my memory of it anyway.

Jeff: Sir Jeff to you.

Leo: Sir Jeff

Gina: Sir Jeff

Leo: Anyway - that was just the first of the Google change log

Gina: That was just the first and the biggest.  Got a couple other minor items.  Gmail IOS app got an update. It now fully supports background refresh which means your Gmail messages will be pre-fetched and synced. So they’re right there when you open up the app, no more pauses while you wait for inbox to refresh.  This is dependent on IOS7 and you have to turn on ‘background app refresh’ and’ notifications’ in order for the Gmail app to work like this.  And the Gmail app for IOS also supports sign-in across Google IOS apps, including Maps, Drive, You Tube and Chrome.  So you sign in to one, you sign in to all.  Same thing for sign out.  So, nice update there for Google IOS apps.

Leo: Yay

Gina: Google quietly redesigned their newspaper archive, which I didn’t even know they had. Makes searching through them easier.  So you go to news.google.com/newspaper and you’ll see this archive page that shows hundreds of newspapers, organized by title, and you can search within those papers or look through other news sources.  You can look at issues from specific dates.

Leo: I didn’t know about this either!

Gina: I played around with this a little bit.

Jeff: Go to the Inland Empire, the first edition.

Leo: The Crime Beat? The Inland Empire.

Jeff: The Inland Empire, from 1905

Leo: First edition – Oh, look at that.

Jeff: Just look at the first two columns.  I love this.  I use this as the background for – if you can zoom in on the first column – the second column on the first page.  It just has this great small-newspaper stuff.

Leo: “Trouble in Tokyo. The Japanese resent terms of peace treaty with violence.”

Jeff: “The late Joseph Jefferson advised one of his friends that as soon as he passed 70 to cultivate a garden. ‘The saddest thing of old age,’ he said with a smile as if nothing were wholly sad, ‘is the absence of expectation’”.

Leo: Aww. “Dr. C.H. McCall, a dentist of Missoula, stopped off here Saturday to look over the country and consider the feasibility of locating for the practice of his profession.  He’s pleased with the community, I’m glad to report.”

Jeff: Don’t you love this?

Leo: N.M. Partire makes daily trips between Moore and Rockford, a distance of 6 miles, being in the service of Uncle Sam as mail carrier.

Jeff: “L.L. Bannon, the painter and sign writer, and his assistant, J.F. Richards, are kept on the jump from morning till night, literally painting the town all colors.”

Leo: What!?  What!?  It was a different world.  Hey, here’s a barber who cuts hair with a neatness and dispatch, guaranteed.

Jeff: Here’s my favorite.  “J. David of Utica, a son of Dr. O.F. David, drove in from that place Tuesday of last week, bringing with him Mrs. H.G. Philips and Mrs. J.G. Huntune.  These ladies were returning to Lewistown from a ten-day visit with Utica friends.”

Leo:  Here is a physician and surgeon who does house calls.

Jeff: Oh, a surgeon. Oh.

Leo: With a complete stock of drugs!

Jeff: Empty off the kitchen table, you’re going under tonight.

Leo: I’m going to do a house call. Before you buy, get our prices.  This is really -

Jeff: Isn’t this great?

Leo: Really fun!  That is the Inland Empire, which is guess is a Montana paper from 1905.  Look at all the newspapers!

Gina: Look at – they’re densing the text.  Lots of newspapers.  But the first thing I reached for was the New York Times, like I want to get some classic New York Times going on there, and I couldn’t find them, so - - it’s a limited collection, but as you can see -

Jeff: You can search the New York Times at the New York Times and that’s how I – when I did all my stuff about the fiendish Kodakers lying in wait in the 1890s, about privacy in cameras, that was from the New York Times – and it was just great to read these things in the original piece.

Leo: So Google scanned these? Is that where they came from?

Jeff: Yeah, there’s a limited sample of them. I don’t know how they got them or what the deal is.

Gina: I don’t know. This was totally new to me.  I was like, “Oh they redesigned this thing” and I had no idea -

Leo: Didn’t know there was another one.

Gina: Been covering Google for five years – didn’t know.  One of the surprise Google products.

Leo: So it’s not papers that are trying to sell their archives, like the New York Times. Those have real value and it seems like it’s very old stuff for the most part. Although here’s the Bluffton Chronicle, the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch from 2009, so you can see what’s going on in Blackfoot Valley. 

Gina: “Lincoln rodeo draws a patriotic crowd.”

Jeff: Yeah, yeah

Leo: “Marst service offers thinning demo.” There’s nothing like small-town papers. I bet the crime file’s fabulous here.  “Lordy, lordy, guess who’s forty?  Who could it be? Must be Annie. Congratulations, Annie.”  Oh, Yeah.

Gina: Lordy, Lordy, guess who’s forty?  That’s great, so great.

Jeff: Now you talk about communities – you know, this was communities.

Leo: This was amazing.

Jeff: This is what it was, folks.

Leo: Small town papers

Jeff: We got all haughty and snobby and thought we were changing the world - the way these came back from Utica after a ten-day visit.

Leo: The Petaluma Argis Courier.

Jeff: Oh, I wonder. I bet you can search for it, Leo.

Gina: You can do a find on page, or search

Leo: Oh, I know. No, I’m sure I could, but I’m having too much fun scrolling through – there’s the Parump Valley Gazette.

Jeff: Parump?

Leo: Parump Valley. It’s in Nevada.  Petaluma Daily Argus from holy cow – from 1899!  O M G.

Jeff: What was going on in Petaluma in 1899?

Leo: What was going on is right.

Jeff: Problem with the old microfiche there.

Leo: Yeah, unfortunately, we got a big black section.  This is great!  I’ve got to go through some of this stuff!

Jeff: Oh, give us a sample

Leo: A complaint of exceptional bitterness -

Jeff: See, I was in Petaluma even back then!

Leo:  was filed in the superior court of San Francisco Saturday afternoon.  The suit, brought by Walter Denmore against his father-in-law, his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law and  his wife’s attorney-at-law asking for damages in the sum of $50,000 for malicious and pernicious influence in which the said defendants still continued to exert over Nanny Denmore, the plaintiff’s wife.  He has been wrongfully deprived of the affections, society and services of his said wife and children, and has suffered great distress of mind.

Jeff: What does that say?  Does that say the Druid’s Picnic?

Leo: Oh, well, we still do that.  “The Druid’s Picnic at Starks’ Park Sunday responded to the invitation to  Petaluma and Cypress Groves.  The dance hall was packed from morning until the last strains of music died away.  The processions of the member of the order, headed by the band and Marshall Collins left Gross Hall at 10:30 and marched to the park where they danced naked for hours.  The most exciting – wait a minute! Field sports! – the most exciting of the racing was the Fat Man’s Race, in which Frank Cornwall, E Josie and E.D. Bernardi competed. “The Fat Man’s Race!”  There’s something for all of us.  This is wonderful.

Gina:  Isn’t it incredible?

Leo: Main and Western. Thomas Roach.  I wonder if we could find the  - I bet you there’s an ad in here for the original furniture company that was in our building.

Gina: Only the ads have any sort of graphics or big text.  The news is just a wall of text.

Leo: Right.  Jeff, tell us, Mr. Professor of Journalism, the whole point of newspapers was just they put the content in there as something to separate the ads.

Jeff: Right, originally it was shipping notices and that kind of stuff.

Leo: Right.  “Is the Best Good Enough for You?”  I don’t know.  Wow!  “If so, you cannot do better than to call on us when in need of groceries.”

Jeff: Haha

Gina; AAAW

Leo: Advertising’s come a long way! A long way!  “Eagle Flour, the strongest and best flour made in the state.”

Jeff: Imagine the chat rooms going nuts about now ”this week in 1899!”

Leo: Yeah

Gina: This hearkens back to a time when ink on paper was actually meaningful. This was community.

Leo: “You can patent anything you can invent!” it says, wait a minute now it disappeared. Oh boy. “Also, get caveat, trademark and copywriter’s design protection.”  If I’d been back then, and I’d invented podcasting, I could be rich today. “Fire alarm boxes”. 

Jeff: Oh, this was a great squirrel for us.

Leo: I’m sorry.  We really did get sucked into this. Continue.

Gina: I knew this would be Leo and Jeff - -

Leo: “Do you want to be up to date?  If you do, put in a home telephone. No party lines with eavesdroppers to annoy you, only $1 a month for residences.  Call at our office and give your order for a phone, from the Home Telephone Company.”  Wow!

Gina: Wow!

Leo: Wow!  This is 1899!  They had phones back then.

Jeff: Chicken news?

Leo: Oh, I’m sure, but I’ll save that for another day, because there’s still more in the change log.  This is going to be a long show.  Continue on.

Gina: One more!

Leo: One more.

Gina: One last item.  The Google Wallet Android app is adding a new feature for orders.  This tracks your online purchases using your receipts from Gmail, much the way Google Now does. So I haven’t actually got this yet.  This is rolling out to the Google Wallet app.  There will be an order section of the Google Wallet app and it will send you a push notification when an order has been shipped.  Like if you’re waiting for something from Amazon or Zappos, or whatever.  You do have to update it inside the Wallet app.  I think that you have to turn it on, when you get the update, but handy feature - - a little redundant because I do see that in Google Now, and you will too. But nice!  Nice to see that Google’s trying to make Wallet your place where you buy stuff and place to know whether or not the stuff you bought is on its way.  That’s all I got!

Leo: That’s the Google change log.

Jeff: A lot of changes here in 1899!

Leo: No kidding. “Suits from $7 and up, pants from $2.50, vests $3.”

Jeff: “Serviceable suits”, serviceable.

Leo:  Here’s the guy I want to go see.  “To the unfortunate”, from a Doctor Gibben, “This old reliable and most successful specialist in San Francisco still continues to cure all sexual and seminal diseases.  Gonorrhea, then something I can’t read, stricture syphilis in all its forms.”

Jeff: Is that a bad word?

Leo: “Loss of manhood.” No I just can’t read it.” Gleet” – I don’t even know what that is. “The consequence of self-abuse and excesses producing the following symptoms: sallow countenance, dark spots under the eyes, pain in the head, ringing in the ears, loss of confidence, diffidence in approaching strangers, palpitations of the heart, weakness of the limbs and back, loss of memory, pimples on the face, coughs, consumptions, etc.”

Jeff: Gleet, you’ll be glad to know, is a watery discharge form the urethra caused by gonorrhea.

Leo: Oh, it’s the clap.

Jeff: Yeah!

Leo: I don’t know, would you go to this guy, though?  He looks scary!

Gina: So he basically blamed everything from pimples to headaches on self-abuse. 

Leo: Yeah, the consequences of self-abuse. “Persons cured at home.”

Gina: From that to the internet, folks!

Leo: But thank goodness the internet exists, because we can see this!  This is amazing.  So these are just all really obscure little newspapers that somehow Google - Some of these say library on them – these are scans from – or maybe it is microfiche.  Maybe they bought some database somewhere.  Wow, that’s wild.  All right.

Jeff: Squirrel!

Leo: Squirrel.  Big squirrel on that one.  Thank you, Jeff and Gina.  What should we do here?  Let’s take a break and come back with more news.

Jeff: That was so exhausting; we have to have a break.

Leo: I am drained.  Maybe I should see that Dr. Gibbon.

Jeff:  You really should, Leo.

Leo: “I’m exhausted, Dr. Gibbon, I’ve got circles under my eyes.”

Our show today brought to you by Shutterstock.  You know they could have used some good stock images in those newspapers, don’t you think?  If they’d only had Shutterstock back then they could have brought them vividly to life.  And with over 30 million stock images, vectors and footages, there’s just no lack of great stuff.  Great apps for Android and IOS, Webby Award-winning apps, currently 34,671,266 royalty-free stock images at shutterstock.com and a quarter of a million were added this week!  Which is pretty amazing – they’re all gorgeous, too.  They’re all curated, images for everything you need, including editorial.  You need an Angelina Jolie for your blog post, there you go!  There you go. They’ve got all kinds of images and all you have to do is search.  You can search as with most search engines – by the way, this is the thing that makes Shutterstock unique.  Not only as many images as it has, but the best search engine, so you can very quickly find what you want.  Not only search by nouns, but also adjectives, you can search by subject, color, file type, gender, emotion, it really is the best search tool ever. And then as you’re browsing through images, you’ll also be able to share those images with colleagues and clients by creating a free account.  You don’t have to give them a credit card, it’s absolutely free.  The account gives you a couple of nice benefits.  You get free images. Each week they feature a free photo and free vector image for you, free for the taking, no watermark or anything.  You’ll also be able to use Lightboxes to save the images, to share them with friends or colleagues. Once you’ve got an account, if you see an image you want to buy, I invite you to use our offer code TWIG314, and you’ll get 20% off any package.  Look at all this great stuff!  shutterstock.com

We should search for  - no, maybe we better not.  But maybe if I got a good image of a doctor - Wouldn’t you rather go to that doctor instead of Dr. Gibbon?  That was a scary picture of him. Scary guy.  He looked like Rasputin, the mad monk.  Don’t forget when you go to Shutterstock to click the footage tab because there’s great video too.  I love it.  Shutterstock.com. We thank them for their support and when you decide to buy, save a lot by using offer code twig314. There you go.  Are those from Shutterstock?  Those are video images of the Facebook “like”, thumbs down and something - I don’t know.

Jeff: Handshake

Leo: Hand gesture.  Facebook, by the way, set a new all-time high, this morning. $72 a share! Boy, they ought to spend $16 billion on apps more often.

Jeff: So how much do they gain back?

Leo: I bet you they gain almost all of it back.

Jeff: That’s the thing.

Leo: When you’re paying in funny money, it doesn’t really cost you anything. Wow. You know let’s go look, because I can just do this in Google.  F–b-o-o-k, right? And then Google Finance, is that what it is?  FB and then Google finance will give me the stock summary.

Jeff: Market cap of $180 billion.

Leo: Jiminy miminy criminy biminy! Their low was $17 and now they’re at – well, they’ve gone down from the $72 high this morning and now they’re down to almost $70.88.

Jeff: Couple months ago they were at $67.

Leo: And look how it jumped in February. I think when they announced WhatsApp, it’s been going up ever since.  So the market believes it. I think that February jump is when their quarterly results came out and it showed that they were doing very well indeed in mobile. Because that was the big question mark, wasn’t it?

Jeff: That was a huge thing and it was brilliant! Mobile was nowhere for them and now it’s huge.

Leo: I think you made the most important point, which is that of the $16 billion they paid for WhatsApp, $12 was stock. So as the stock goes up, it - - I don’t think that means they put more money into it. Maybe it does.

Jeff: Well indeed, you wonder.  I don’t know when the deal closes and all that.

Leo: Maybe they just had a certain number of shares and it was valued at $12 billion at the time.

Jeff: But you still end up with more stock.

Leo: We don’t know. Samsung won in court. Apple is asking that 35 Android devices from Samsung be blocked at the border. Judge Lucy Koh said “no”, but the Galaxy S5 could still be in trouble, because there’s a ban right now in South Korea that keeps carriers from adding new customers or allowing their customers to upgrade phones.

 

Jeff: There were reports that they were subsidizing too much.

Leo: 45 day ban.

Jeff: $250.

Leo: How? It wasn’t specifically Samsung but the carriers -

Jeff: Nobody could take a new account.

Leo: The carriers were illegally subsidizing smart phones. The law in South Korea is that only $250 can be subsidized, and they were apparently giving, I mean, gosh when you get an iPhone or a Galaxy S4 in the US, you’re talking $400 or $500 subsidy in some cases. Right?  Because they’ve given you $200.  Twitter is testing – By the way speaking of tests, the Google big giant ad at the top of the search engine? That’s not going to happen.

Gina: No, not happening.

Leo: Didn’t work, I guess. Anyway, they’ve decided not to do that, but Twitter is testing a click-to-call button which allows mobile users to call advertisers directly. So if you’re looking at a tweet that’s an ad, you could press a button… Would you ever do that?

Jeff: We’ve had that on web pages for ages and ages and ages.

Leo: Who’s going to do that?  Remember now this is on your phone right?

Jeff: That’s a good point, that’s a good point

Leo: So you are holding a phone in your hand.

Gina: Yeah but who uses the phone to make calls?

Leo: Good point.

Gina: I mean really? It’s just now – yeah, not the action.

Leo: a New York woman whose child spent $65.95 on Digital Crystals has sued Google, on behalf of all parents everywhere, claiming that Google PlayStore is full of games and apps that lure children into spending money. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco on Friday. Her five-year-old son spent the money while playing Marvel Run Jump Smash on a Galaxy Tablet. It accuses Google of unjust enrichment. Apple lost a case like that, actually had to pay quite a bit to parents. I got a little five dollar gift card for this. But apparently the problem is-

Jeff: They got payments of like $65 million.

Leo: Yeah, it was a big deal. They just paid a $32-and-a-half million fine earlier this year to the FTC. So Apple, the way it works is, once your password is entered, it even says “This is a Warning” on the screen now. They just started doing this. For 15 minutes you don’t have to have your password. Google is a 30-minute window following the initial purchase in which you can offer stuff for sale without asking for a password. So, I guess the tricks kids use (and a five-year-old isn’t too young to do this) - “Mommy Mommy Mommy! Unlock this.” And she unlocks and they buy stuff for a half-hour.

Gina: Yeah, she bought something and then her kid, he did an app purchase. We talked about this quite a bit on All About Android last night. Android offers restricted profiles which can restrict Internet purchases. And I thought there was a choice.  I made an internet purchase just yesterday and I thought there was a choice that said “Don’t ask me for my password ever again”, which was unchecked. So there are ways to change this.  It just seems like if - In court how is Google going to defend itself? I think that Google has a strong case to say, “We provided restricted profiles, we provided parental controls, we have the setting to disable this. So we have made an effort to prevent this from happening.”

Leo: next time you see Kevin, give him a hard time. His kid spent $375 on Digital Fish. Kevin should know better.

Gina: The responsibility as we were talking about last night on the show is spread across parents, the developers, the apps, and Google – the platform - right?

Jeff: There is also something about selling Digital Fish that is ethically challenged.

Leo: Get ready for this, because now we now. If you want to make money in apps, you do in-app purchases.

Jeff: It’s a schmuck test! Just like the lottery, it’s a schmuck test

Leo: There are a lot of them. Under Marissa Meyer, 31 of Yahoo’s 38 acquisitions of startups have been shuttered.

Jeff: While I didn’t see that story, because I didn’t look hard enough. My fault. Are those ones that she bought? Those are ones that were bought – prior mistakes.

Leo: Facebook does the same thing, too, because they’re often acquires. Where they don’t buy the product they’re buying the team.

Gina: Right and this is about talent.

Leo: In the first two months of 2014, Marissa Mayer acquired eight companies including AV8 (Remember that?); Incredible Labs, makers of the digital mobile assistant Donna; Spark – a mobile marketing company; and Tomfoolery - an enterprise application studio. All of which, I guess, have disappeared. I don’t use AV8. Is it still around? 31 of the 38 acquired startups have been shut down. If you use Vizify, here comes sunset. Donna ceased to exist one month after acquired. Some of Spark services are gone. Summly- that was the kid, the teenager - sold his company to Yahoo. That’s now in the Yahoo News app, which is great. Yahoo News Digest. I think this is not unusual frankly. I don’t think it’s fair to call her destroyer of startups.

Jeff: I think it is unfair.

Leo: A monetizer.

Gina: And she always liked the Steve Davies book about her, the article about her in that manager program she was head of. There was a point at which he asked about the rumors that she was training to be in management. So many of them want to go off and be entrepreneurs start their own company. And her answer was “yes those are the people we want. We want people who want to be entrepreneurs and who are going to take charge and lead and innovate and who have that kind of desire.” So it makes a lot of sense that you’d want to acquire startups that not only have innovative technology, but have leaders in them that might help change the culture inside of Yahoo.

Leo: Instagram big update today on android. It launches faster, doubles the speed of profile loading and has a redesigned camera. I thought it looked a little weird.

Gina: I’m watching it right now.

Leo: Yeah. Instagram 5.1.  

Gina: It’s flat.

Leo: It’s the new flat. Instagram. According to this article at The Verge, this is all about global. I don’t know why it would be, but apparently they’re going after Brazil and other countries that are showing some real smartphone growth. Oh, because it looks better on low resolution cheaper android phones

Jeff: Thus the illustration of a cheap android phone.

Leo: I get it. Ahah. That’s an Instagram is a Facebook company. Apparently there is a critical flaw in WhatsApp, another Facebook company, for Android. Facebook campus was locked down last night due to an unsubstantiated threat. Don’t do that kids, that’s not nice!

Gina: Hmm, it was a bomb threat.

Jeff: Yeah, that sucks.

Leo: That’s terrible.

Jeff: I was very impressed with the campus, because when you’re driving around it, it just looks like - as I mentioned when we were there - just some boring office buildings.  But inside, it’s Disneyland.

Leo: Right.

Jeff: But you can’t get in there unless you go through one of the  (unintelligible). As opposed to Google, where you can wander around the campus and gawk at them. At Facebook, you can only enter Disneyland through there -

Leo: That’s good.

Jeff: It is.

Leo: Yeah, that’s a good idea too. The BBC has released its 30^th anniversary edition of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure.

Jeff: How geeky can you get caught?

Leo: It’s the Infocom text adventure being rereleased. That’s cool. Apparently, they commissioned a remake of it 10 years ago and this is a reworking of the original game. Let’s see where we can find this. I want to get it now.

Jeff: Probably have to get it in Britain.

Leo: That would be really terrible. You know you can get these Infocom games. There are a number of players who play the text. Here you go. Here are all the games. These are great games. Very difficult. Look at that. Zork 123, etc. I played almost all of these, don’t laugh.

Jeff: Remind me of wasted time in my youth. And I wish I’d wasted on something better than that.

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: Apparently, somebody just eBay’d the new HTC One.

Leo: Yeah I saw that. $500 on eBay, Verizon packaging. It’s a good deal.

Gina: It is a good deal.

Leo: Oh here it is. Okay so I guess it’s in Flash, and you can play it – there we go, it’s even – “Okay you wake up” – let’s play a little of this we wasted enough time. “You wake up. The room is spinning very gently around your head or at least it would be if you could see, which you can’t. It’s pitch black.” What you want to do Gina?

Gina: Uhhh hmmm

Leo: Turn on light, how about that?

Gina: Yeah turn on light.

Leo: Oh, there you go. “Good start to the day pity it’s good to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on. You’re in the bedroom in the bed. The bedroom is a mess. It is a small bedroom with a faded carpet and old wallpaper. There’s a washbasin, a chair, a tatty dressing gown slung over it.” Let’s put on the gown. Oh. “Take gown.”  I can’t reach it.

Gina: Get out of bed.

Leo: Get out of bed. “Very difficult but you manage it. The room is still spinning. It dips and sways a little bit. Take gown.” Got the gown. ”Luckily it’s large enough for you to hold it. You notice something in the pocket. Examine pocket.” Okay.” Open pocket.” You get the idea here. What like use it’s a little bit more graphic, it’s hard to open or close the pocket. Okay. “Put on gown. Okay you’re now wearing your gown. Open pocket. Opening the pocket reveals the thing you’re aunt gave you, you don’t know what it is. A buffered analgesic, and pocket fluff. Take analgesic.” Ding ding.  “You swallowed the tablet. After a few seconds the group begins to calm down and behave in an orderly manner. Your terrible headache goes. And from there, the end of the world. Continue on.” This is good. This is fun.

Gina: Cool

Jeff: It is fun.

Leo: It all came rushing back to me. 30 years ago. See the Hitchhikers Guide is actually older than the World Wide Web. New York bans Tesla direct sales. You can’t buy a Tesla in Texas either. New Jersey

Jeff: New Jersey. My corrupt ridiculous state. The governor hates drivers. He closes bridges.  “We don’t like car salesman, people.”

Leo: You know what the deal is? It’s the auto dealers associations that raise a lot of money for state legislators.

Jeff: It’s pure corruption.

Leo: So in Arizona and Texas and New Jersey, you cannot go to Tesla.com and buy a Tesla.

Jeff: Short Hills Mall, the ritzy mall in northern New Jersey has a Tesla showroom and two Teslas there and all kinds of stuff. And you can buy Tesla shirts and all that and I can stand there and dream, and they’re closing it. Gone. Ridiculous. The whole system of franchised car dealers is ridiculously inefficient.

Leo: And nobody wants to buy cars that way.

Jeff: No one! We hate it! We hate it!

Leo: On the Tesla blog they write “Unfortunately Monday we received news that Gov. Christie’s administration had gone back on its word.”

Jeff: Corrupt Christie. Another example of corrupt Christie

Leo: Yeah

Jeff: It embarrasses me for my state. Backward, corrupt anti-consumer - the F-U governor.

Leo: Next he’s going to say Teslas can’t go over the George Washington Bridge.

Jeff: And this is the man that wants to be president.

Leo: It’s just not safe. Do you have a link to that eBay sale of the HTC one?

Gina: Yes, at The Verge. It’s right below the Tesla story.

Leo: Okay, because I want to see what that thing looks like. Is that it? Let’s see here. You have an HTC one?

Gina: I do.

Leo: So this is the new One.

Gina: The all new One.

Leo: The all new One or the One 2.  Yeah I see it right there, from Droidlife.  Oh, look there’s a lot of them.

Gina: Well, scroll down you’ll see the original listing. It got purchased.

Jeff: It is the one we have been waiting for?

Leo: It only got five bids. Now, I think it could be very well be bogus. It’s not like eBay is always perfect, is it?

Gina: Right, right. The $499 was the Buy It Now price.

Leo: I would’ve done that.

Gina: Yeah, just to see?

Leo: Yeah. Oh, well, didn’t see it soon enough.

Gina: It looks pretty cool. I love the One. But the new One looks pretty cool. The dual cameras also has my interest at this point.

Leo: Dual cameras on the back?

Gina: Yeah dual cameras on the back.

Leo: Why?

Gina: Like the Lytro camera, so that you can do depth-of-field editing, better editing.

Leo: Ooh, that’s a good deal if it’s real.

Gina: Allegedly.

Leo: Could be just the box. You see the phone anywhere.

Gina: Right

Leo: I’m always nervous about that kind of stuff.

Gina: The dual cameras, though, there was this  -  pretty for sure.

Leo: Yeah yeah but again in that listing they only showed a box.

Gina: Right

Leo: You might it just bought a box.

Jeff: Or a picture of a box.

Leo: It’s like those people who thought they bought iPads. Instead they got boxes with apples inside. Actual apples. These things happen.

Gina: The seller has pretty good feedback.

Leo: Is that how you do it on eBay? You check the seller?

Gina: Yeah

Leo: Let’s see the feedback. Is it 100%?

Gina: 100% positive.

Leo: Well that’s pretty good. How many?

Jeff: Yeah, how many?

Gina: 55

Leo: That’s enough. That’s enough, 55, 100% positive. I think you can assume this person knows what they’re doing.

Gina: It makes you wonder.

Leo: Where they get it?

Gina: Where’d they get it and that they’re willing to sell it -

Leo: So 500 bucks for 32 GB brand-new One from Verizon Wireless. But you’d probably able to get it for 200 or 250 subsidized. I don’t know, that’s interesting – I don’t know how he got that. “A brand-new unused unopened item in its original packaging.”

We’re going to take break and come back with our tool, our tip, and our number of the week.  But first a word from Personal Capital.  I’ve got a tip for you. If you are not yet planning for your old age, you better get going. I don’t care if you’re 21 years old. It’s really important to start taking a look at what you’ve got, conserving capital, building your investments. Problem is, it’s tough.  It’s tough. You got lots of stuff to keep track of. Your stocks, maybe you have a 401(k) at work, your bank account, your credit cards, your loans, your mortgage. And they’re all in different sites, different usernames, different passwords. And then of course, and this is unfortunate, but a lot of times you’re paying too much to get investment advice. So this is the next generation - the modern financial advice. It’s called Personal Capital. Within minutes, you’ll have all your accounts in one place. In a beautiful dashboard, real-time, so you can see exactly where you are and how you stand. You can see if you’re overpaying in fees and how to reduce those fees. They also give you advice that’s tailored to your situation. So that you can optimize your investments, so that you can retire. Lots of people won’t ever be able to retire. Don’t expect the Social Security system to survive until you’re 50 years 60 years old. Set it up right now. personal capital.com/twig  It just takes a minute to sign up and it’s absolutely free. Absolutely free. Personal Capital- the smart way to grow your money. personal capital.com/twig If you don’t see the “greetings twig listeners”, you’ve gone to the wrong place. personalcapital.com/twig.

I guess, according to Android Police, we’re seeing Google Maps Versions 7.7 for Android. I have to check and see if it’s come out.  Adds public upcoming events to Place Cards.

Gina: Oh in Maps, interesting.

Leo: So that you have a place card and you’ll have upcoming events.  So if you look at a venue, I guess it will show you what’s going on.

Gina: Yeah you could add the TWiT schedule the to TWiT’s page in Maps.

Leo: That’s awesome!

Gina: Right, couldn’t you?

Leo: I guess. If we were smart enough to put it there. We’ll have to work on that. Gina, what is your tip of the week?

Gina: Tip of the week is for Android users who have KitKat, who may be experiencing some battery drain lately. Losing battery. There is apparently a bug that Google is aware of where some apps that get a hold of your camera - apps like Skype  - will run this thing in the background and it will kill your battery. There’s a long bug report on it and the Android open-source project. One android open-source contributor said Skype triggers this bug. So if you seeing bad battery drain on your KitKat Android phone, uninstall Skype until the fix is on its way out. The fix is on its way out, Google’s aware of it and they’re working on it now. I actually haven’t seen this, but Jason last night on Jason Howell on All About Androids, said that he was having that problem.  So, something to keep in mind. Kind of funny to see someone with Android saying “hey uninstall Skype”.  It’s not just Skype, it’s any app that accesses your camera in a certain way that runs the camera process in the background even when you’re not running the app, which Skype apparently does.

Leo: It makes me feel like it’s a Google bug.

Gina: It does feel like an Android bug, right? It does seem like Android shouldn’t let this happen. And it is, it’s like Google said, they’re aware of this and they’re issuing a fix. So it’s a process called  mm-qcamera daemon and that’s what it is.  So you can restart, you can kill that process, or you can try uninstalling Skype if that’s an option for you.

Leo: Okay. Good deal. Jeff Jarvis your number of the week?

Jeff: My number is three.

Leo: Three?

Jeff: That’s how many seasons Big Bang Theory just got renewed for.

Leo: What? You can’t renew a show for three seasons!

Jeff: They just did. I’m hoping there’s no shark on the horizon.

Leo: I don’t watch that show. I find it insulting.

Jeff: I love that show!

Gina: I do too! I felt guilty about it!

Leo: You should feel guilty.

Jeff: No!

Gina: I feel better about it now that there are actually smart women on it. When it was the beginning and it was just Penny being an airhead, that used to bug me. But now that there’s Amy and Bernadette, I feel good about it.

Jeff: It’s great!

Leo: I know I’m going to lose my geek card, but I just feel like it’s insulting to geeks.

Gina: I think a lot of geeks feel the same way. I’ve gotten some very derisive stares when I mention I like Big Bang.

Leo: You want to get some sense of how bad the show is.

Jeff: Uh-oh!  We’re going to have a Jeff/ Leo fight here.

Leo: You love this show, Jeff.  I can’t believe they’ve been renewed for three whole seasons?

Gina: It’s blockbuster, it’s been so successful.

Leo: There are YouTube videos of Big Bang Theory without the laugh track. The laugh track makes you think this is funny. But when you watch it without a laugh track you realize there are no actual jokes in the show.

Gina: It is in front of his live audience though. They do film in front of a live audience.

Leo: Okay well let’s just see what it sounds like when there are no laughs.

(Watching Big Bang theory on YouTube without laugh track “Ahh, nothing makes beer taste better than cool clear Rocky Mountain Spring Water. Where are the Rocky Mountains, anyway?  Philadelphia.  Really, I thought they were”)

Leo: There are no jokes!

(“Think about it, Raj, where did the movie Rocky take place?”)

Jeff: There are beloved lovable characters.  Geeks are lovable.

(“Okay, now I get it.”  “ I’m just going to hide out in here to avoid the shaming” “ I am very comfortable here.” “Penny dear, why don’t you shoot another silver bullet my way.”  “Get one yourself.” “Ooh, someone’s been taking bitchy pills.”)

Leo: Okay I’ve had enough. Have you? Terrible show. They should not renew it for even one more season

Jeff: Oh geez.

Leo: Try playing Game of Thrones without the laugh track then see how you feel.  All right. I don’t know why that show just does not grab me. And I do feel like it’s a little insulting to women. Maybe it’s better now.

Gina: It is better now.  It’s a sitcom.

Leo: Well I hate all sitcoms right?

Gina: That’s fair. I’ll accept that

Leo: Although, there are a few good ones like Episodes on Showtime - very funny, very good, very talented. People hate me now!

Jeff: ha ha ha ha

Leo: You are full of it, Leo!  You are so wrong!

Gina: ha ha. 30 Rock was great.  There are some great  -

(mad mob sound)

Leo: They’re at the door with their pitchforks and their torches!

Jeff: An army of nerds.

Leo: To me, if you’re a geek, you shouldn’t like it because it’s so insulting to geeks.

Jeff: That’s so precious.  That’s just so so precious.

Leo: I do want to watch, there’s going to be on HBO a new show by Mike Judge, who did Beavis & Butthead and Office Space, about Silicon Valley. And what I’ve seen so far looks pretty good.

Jeff: The Amazon show went nowhere, right?

Leo: What was it called?  I can’t remember the name of that.  That was supposed to be good. I also – okay, so now you can get it all out of your system - I really hated the new Cosmos.

Gina: I didn’t see it. Shouldn’t see it?

Leo: That was just the intro. I should wait and see another one.

Jeff: Well now that I know Leo’s taste I should run to watch it.

Leo: It was all special effects. It felt like the Disney ride version of the universe.

Jeff: Like it was any different from -

Leo: I wasn’t of the right age to be influenced by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, but I was underwhelmed by it. I’ll watch the next episode of it. Maybe it was because this was just the intro. And I was very insulted that… Oh, I don’t want to go on, I’m sorry.

Jeff: TV insults you all the time. You must be sitting there home watching your TV just saying, “How dare you?”

Leo: I do like talk to the TV a lot. I talk back to the TV a lot. I’m really angry about True Detective which started out really great and let us all down, I thought, significantly. But enough TV reviews.  Do you have any numbers to take the bad taste out of our mouth?

Jeff: Okay okay. I’ll think of another number. It’s the first time in all the entire show my number was rejected.

Leo: I didn’t reject it.

Gina: Yeah I was going to say…

Leo: No, it was a good number! Have you ever heard of the TV show been renewed for three seasons? It’s unheard of!

Jeff: I will give you this instead. Tony Hale who is the brilliant CEO of ChartBeat. ChartBeat tracks pages…

Leo: I love this thing. Yeah.

Jeff: Tony says, quote, “I’ve been worried that native advertising.” Native advertising is the stuff that tries to pull you into thinking that it’s really content, but it’s just a long texty boring advertising. I’ve been worried that people are fooled by this, but I should have more faith in humanity. Chart Pages found that when people go to a page with normal content, 71% scroll, okay? That is, they’re committed, they look for more. People who go to native advertising content, only 24% scroll.

Leo: That means they don’t continue to read because they know it’s bogus.

Jeff: They know it’s crap. And I think that’s important. And then he had another number in here… A stunning 55% of people spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page. They looked at 2 billion visits. So more than half the time we glance off the page like an asteroid off Mars, in 15 seconds, swoop gone! Which is to say most of the time we go to something that’s irrelevant to us and  - crap! How did we get that crap? Often we get to it from links. And the other thing that ChartBeat has said is that most people - we talked about this on the show before - most people share or like before they read.

Leo: This was really an interesting graph. Do we read the articles we share?  So there are four quadrants. The bottom half is low social activity in other words, no sharing. The top is lots of sharing. The left half is low read time. High read time is the right half. So if you look at the high read time/high sharing there’s nothing! ha ha ha ha. If you spend time reading something, you just don’t share it and where’s there the most sharing?

Jeff: The things we don’t read.

Leo: The least read time. And we talked about this on iPad Today on Monday. It either indicates that people share to show how smart they are or, I think that people just share headlines. They’re not sharing the article.

Jeff: That’s exactly it. The motive to share is social capital. Look how smart I am. I’m the first one to share this. And we just bug people with it. So I wrote a blog post about what the proper metrics are, then. So Tony tears down some metrics, but I think we have to look at other metrics. And it varies right? At Circa, the main method they use is “follow”. If you follow a story, it says please bug me when something happens here? That’s a good metric. At Media, they track what they call TTR, total time reading. They’re even going to start – they’re looking - one of the executives there just yesterday told me - they’re looking around text to basically charge on time, like broadcast. Which is what Tony Hale also backed up in some other research. So the idea that you could spend on time. Now “attention” is a good metric for things that are like that, but I also think it’s bad for things like “just tell me the facts and get me out of there.”

Leo: When Jerry Yang many many many years ago in a conference room meeting, he, “Our job at Yahoo is to get you in and out of here as quickly as possible.” Well that didn’t last long, did it? Because they went with the old media model of trying to shove as many oddballs in front of your ads as they could. It would drag you down by friction and hold you there. But that’s not the best metric if you just want to get a fact and just get in and out. So efficiency is an important metric. So anyway, I wanted to point you to Tony Hale’s very good piece, and this has evidently now erased the memory of three more years of Big Bang theory.

Gina: So you brought that up again.

Leo: The most clicked-on but least-deeply-engaged-with articles had generic topics. In August, the worst performers included “top, best, biggest, fictional.” In January the worst performers, “hairstyles, positions, nude” and for some reason the word “Virginia.” Lots of clicks, not so much engagement. You know I think that’s true. I think we know that here.  For a long time I felt bad that we were getting as many “shares” as I thought we should in social media. Partly that’s because we’re long form video. The show’s not easy to share. But I think that people get engaged with our content, so I’m not going to worry so much about whether we’re getting shared or not. Although I think there’s a few people tweeting that I’m an idiot for not liking Big Bang Theory right now. All right, you will like this, though. Two Android apps.  This is a Chrome Cast app.  Did you ever play Cards Against Humanity? Somebody in the chat room told me about this, I just installed it. Casts Against Civility.  It’s a Chrome Cast app that lets you and one or two or three other people play this amazingly horrid, but fun, card game. It’s not the same company or the same people that do Cards Against Humanity.  It’s a party game for horrible people. The object of the game is to respond to a question or statement that has a certain word or phrase censored. Like playing one of the 10 cards in your hands.  It’s going to get a lot of groans and titters  from your playmates in this, but you play it on a big-screen and I think this is a great way to do a party game. It’s free. Casts Against Humanity. The other one is… You’re never get to stop playing this!  So I got to warn you. Came out first for iOS, but Quiz Up is now available on Android. Have ever played this game? This is a trivia quiz game. It has an infinite huge number of topics.  I’ll go to the topics page and you’ll see. So there’s something you can be an expert in an almost any category. Not just geography, scroll down: Africa, African countries, Asia, Asian countries, Australia, the cities of the world, European countries, landmarks, name the flag, name the country, name the landmark.  And that’s just geography. There are just tons of topics. You want to play one?  Let’s see, I probably have some challenges.

People are challenging me a lot on this one. Which one do you want to play? Dog Breeds? Dr. Mom wants to play Dog Breeds. Let’s see how good you are at dog breeds. So it’ll play in real time. It’ll automatically pick an opponent somewhere in the world, there’s always somebody to play against, or you can asynchronously play against your friend. So Dr. Mom’s already played this and gotten her score. Now I’m going to  play at the same time. It’s got very dramatic music. What is the breed which is among the most common of pet breeds known as - - - . Well that’s a Doberman isn’t it? Yes all right.  So see you can test your knowledge of dog breeds. Certainly a lot of fun to play. You also get dinged for taking too long.  The breed for search and rescue - this is too easy, this is not a good test of this game.  They can get pretty tough. If I play the – and by the way, here’s a new Quiz Up challenge.  You guys aren’t saying anything!

Jeff: I’m not a game player.

Leo: I like trivia.  Don’t you like trivia?

Jeff: No

Gina: I’ve started a Big Bang Theory quiz.

Leo: laugh laugh laugh

Gina: laugh laugh laugh

Leo: You want to pay play the Big Bang Theory quiz? You want to play it? All right.  I want to see if you guys really watch that show.  Okay. Go to topics, television. You claim you watch that show. TV  . . .all the TV shows  . . .no, I didn’t want to do that, oh crud.  Okay,  Big Bang Theory. Now we’re just going to play somebody randomly, all right? I could challenge people I know but I’m just going to play somebody randomly. I’m playing Roberto. He is playing from the US. He’s pretty good at this he’s won 21 times.  I don’t think I have a shot at this. Big Bang Theory, round one. Get ready. What did Penny try to pay her electric bill with?

Gina: Starbucks gift card?

Leo: That’s what I would’ve guessed. Good. Was that a guess or did you know? Roberto got it right away.

Gina: She’s pretty predictable.

Leo: What is Sheldon’s IQ?

Gina: 194

Leo: Nope, 187

Gina: Oh!

Leo: Sheldon tries to train Penny by using what kind of food? Cake, chocolate, fruit or crisps?

Gina: Chocolate

Leo: Very good. Thank you. Thank you very much. Round 4. There are only seven questions. Which episode does Stephanie Barnett make her debut appearance? Is it The Dumpling Paradox, The Lizard Spock Expansion, The Euclidean Alternative, or The Friendship Algorithm? No, it’s The Lizard Spock Expansion. Roberto has gotten every single one right so far! Why did Amy Farrah Fowler leave the scouts? She didn’t like the uniform? No. They discovered she was a girl.

Gina: These are hard.

Leo: In which episode did Leonard propose to Penny? The Cushion Saturation, The Launch Acceleration, The Gothowitz Deviation? I don’t even like the names of the show. Double bonus! What is the name of agent sent to interview Leonard Sheldon and Raj as part of a background check on Howard. I think it was Patty Pearson, but it’s actually Angela Page.  Ladies and gentlemen, congratulations to Roberto. So I lose.

Gina: I failed you, Leo. That was terrible. I did terrible.

Leo: You don’t even watch that show, do you?

Gina: I do, I do! It’s a fun game. I curse you for making me install it!

Leo: If you like Trivia, it’s really great.  You talked about it last night?

Gina: We talked about it last night and I installed it last night while we were talking about it on All About Android and I hadn’t actually launched until now. But now I can see I have lost my night!

Leo: It’s really fun and then people start to beat you by one point and you get upset it’s really great. But I want to play this Cast Against Civility. I think that’s going to be a lot of fun. I wonder if they will use the same questions as cards against humanity?

Gina: Kind of a neat use for Cast.

Leo: Quiz Up! Casts Against Civility.  Couple of picks there. Thank you very much, Jeff Jarvis. Did you see the last episode of True Detective yet?

Jeff: Yeah

Leo: What you think? I’m a little disappointed

Jeff: I’m not a fan of  -  

Leo: Oh I am. I don’t like him as a human.

Gina: Yeah, no, not as a human.

Leo: He’s the most awesomest actor ever. And Woody Harrelson is great. What’s the show you’re most excited about these days?

Jeff: Big Bang Theory, of course.

Leo: Shut up. You know you’re lying. I know you’re lying

Gina: Nothing matters until the new season of Orange is the New Black.

Leo: I love that show. That’s a good one. As long as I’m giving you games that are going to kill the rest of your life, Threes! is also now available on the Android app store.  Have you ever played that?

Gina: No, Threes?

Jeff: I don’t like games.

Leo: Ah, you will like this one.  One of the best games ever, but you have to get the right one. Because Threes! is so popular on IOS, I see a lot of fake Threes. That’s not it, it’s got an 8 for the icon, but somebody said the real one was available, so I have to look and see if I can find it.  Huh, boy, look at all the fake ones!  It’s like the Flappy Bird clones.  Thank you, everybody, for joining us. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.  I’m heartily sorry.  Gina Trapani is at smarterware.org. She probably doesn’t get much time to blog these things.

Gina: No, not blogging too much. But just about to launch sign-ups to our waiting list members on ThinkUp.  So, www.thinkup.com.  So pop your email in there and you’ll be the one of the first to know.  And we will be live to the public very soon, probably next week.

Jeff: For all the popular kids.

Leo: I am going to show you real quickly, because you really can’t get a sense of what it can do until you see somebody’s Think Up.  So it shows you popular re-tweets.  Oh, people liked the petition to end Daylight Savings Time. 

Gina: Man, nice job on that.

Leo: Highly retweeted.  187 re-tweets, 34 applies, these are the people that followed me, the lists I’m on, key stats for my tweets. My favorite is how many times I said I, me.

Gina: hahaha

Leo: What do you call that one?  Talk About Yourself Much? Or something

Gina: Yeah, Enough About Me.

Leo: Enough About Me.  I get that one a lot.

Gina: We’ve got quite a few new insights rolling out in a couple weeks.  You’ve got a very engaged audience, Leo. 

Leo: It makes Twitter better.

Gina: Well thank you.

Jeff: I love best when it says how many people I added to somebody else’s tweet.

Leo: Oh, yeah, because you re-tweeted it, half a million more people saw it.  And that’s such a nice feeling.  “ I really did something good for somebody today.”  That’s Jeff Jarvis.  He is the Professor of Journalism of the CUNY.  Just a jolly fellow. He also blogs at buzzmachine.com and his latest book is “Public Parts”, available everywhere. Are you mad at me?

Jeff: I LIKE the Big Bang Theory.

Leo: Are you angry?  Did I hurt your feeling?  I haven’t watched a sitcom.  The truth is, I can’t watch network television.

Jeff: You waste your life with games; I waste my life with sitcoms. 

Leo: Oh no, I watch a lot of TV.  In fact, Lisa observed that last night.  “You watch way too much TV.”  I like TV, but I tend to watch the cable dramas. I like cable dramas.  Thank you, lady.  Thank you, gentleman.  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for watching.  We do This Week in Google every Wednesday at 1 pm pacific, 4 pm Eastern time. Note, we are now on summertime in the United States, so 1 pm our time.

Jeff: Really pissing off Leo.

Leo: Shouldn’t we kill Daylight Savings Time?  Just kill it?

Jeff: I think we stay at it.  Just not ever change again. Just stay right here where we are.

Gina: It would make life with a baby a lot easier, that’s for sure.

Leo: You know there are 17% more fatalities the Monday after Daylight Saving Time begins?

Gina: Because everyone’s exhausted.

Leo: Yeah, because you’re one hour off and you’re groggy.  These are fatal traffic accidents in the US. 17% more on that Monday.

Jeff: I was talking to a doctor the other day who got more people coming in feeling bad and getting depressed because  -

Leo: Why do we do this to ourselves? What is the advantage?

Jeff: But all they have to do on Daylight Saving Day is just watch a rerun of Big Bang Theory.

Leo: I’m sure you’re right.  Who is your favorite character?  Sheldon?  Everybody loves Sheldon.

Gina: Amy Farrah Fowler!

Jeff: And she did a great interview, long great interview on Howard Stern.  She was just wonderful.

Leo: Really.

Gina: Oh, really.

Jeff: Blossom

Gina: Blossom

Leo: She was Blossom?  I didn’t like that show, either. Hahahaha

Jeff: She’s an honest-to-God PhD.

Leo: What? What’s her doctorate in?

Jeff: Biology, or something like that.

Leo: How does she justify playing such a nitwit on the show?

Gina: No, she doesn’t.

Leo: Oh, Penny’s not the neighbor.

Jeff: Penny was not Blossom, believe me, Leo.  You are clearly a Communist. The show, The Americans, it’s about Leo.

Leo: Actually, I like The Americans okay.  For network television it’s not bad.

Jeff: How about Orphan Black? Did we talk about that?

Leo: Yeah I like that a lot.

Jeff: Like that a lot, it’s coming back.

Leo: Oh, good.

Jeff: April

Gina: She’s an actual neuroscientist.

Leo: See I thought she was the neighbor, but she’s not the neighbor?

Gina: No, the neighbor is, as far as I know, just an actress.

Leo: She definitely doesn’t have a PhD.  She probably doesn’t have a bachelor’s. Are we out of here yet?  I haven’t said goodbye.  I have not finished the show; I am still digging a deeper hole for myself.

Gina: You are, Leo.  You are getting dangerously close to equating beauty with dumbness here.

Leo: No, I’m not at all.  I don’t know what Penny looks like.  But it’s very sexist; they play her as some bimbo.

Gina: Particularly in the beginning.  As the show went on, it got better.

Leo: Well, Okay. This show is on 2000 UTC, forever.  The thing is – never mind.  Thank you for joining us.  We will see you next time on TWiG!