The story of Google that matters for most people is how it affects their daily lives (searching, web browsing, mobile phones, mapping/navigation, email, calendaring, YouTube, news, etc.) but I appreciate that Levy’s book focuses on the personalities and processes driving the evolution of what is arguably one of the most transformative corporate and technological entities of our time.

It can be easy to forget that behind some of the game-changing products and services produced by the company, there were real people thinking through issues of privacy, dealing with cross-cultural considerations and navigating interpersonal dynamics all while trying to make a living and find a sustainable business model.  They had/have desks, meetings, slide shows to give, families to care for, water-cooler conversations to have, and Levy does a great job capturing and re-telling those stories from the days of “two guys in a garage” all the way through the present days of life as an international corporation.  This is not always done with the most critical eye – those with concerns about Google’s operations or policies may be put off by the extent to which this book is an homage – but on the whole I think Levy is fair in calling out the moments when individual Google employees or the company as a whole screws up, and placing those in the context of Google’s good intentions.

A few themes in what Levy’s book revealed about “the Google way”:

1. “Ready, fire, aim” – Google does the bold, innovative or creative thing first, then (for better or worse) readjusts, re-calibrates, rethinks it later
2. When it comes to figuring out “what works,” studying data and using a scientific approach is more important than intuition or speculation.  Despite their many successes with this strategy, Google experienced failures when a data set wasn’t complete, e.g. when it doesn’t include the preferences, fears, doubts and hopes that are trapped in people’s heads or hearts.
3. Especially in its startup years, Google tried to only hire “A” people; engineers, researchers and thinkers who were either the best in a field of study (or headed that direction), who were driven by the excitement of discovery instead of money, and who could internalize the big picture goals of a project and then go make it a reality.  In their hiring they screened for intelligence, applicable knowledge, experience and adaptability, and as a result, they operate more like a research university than a traditional corporation.  Bureaucracy, office politics and administrative overhead seemingly emerged only with reluctant concessions to what was absolutely necessary to function at a larger scale.
4. If you want innovation in your organization, it’s important to create an environment where challenging accepted ways of doing things is not only permissible, but normal at all levels of authority and leadership.
5. It’s good to introduce questions of morality into the day-to-day operations of your organization.  At the same time, the more people you have, the harder it is to maintain integrity around living out a given set of moral values.

Google’s history is particularly of interest to me in that the company was started within a year or so of the company I co-founded, Summersault.  We were in a dorm room instead of a garage, and our goal was making great websites, not letting others search them more effectively.  There are not just a few differences between Summersault and Google today – billions and billions of dollars more in annual revenue, tens of thousands more employees, a private jet here, a self-driving car there, etc. – but I don’t think its too conceited to say that we started our company in the same spirit Google did, trying to help people make the most of the web…they just did it on a much bigger scale.

I was recruited by Google several years ago, to be a part of the team that keeps the company’s software application infrastructure up and running.  I really enjoyed my conversations with their staff about what it would mean to work there, and it was exciting to think about being a part of something so technically interesting and so global in scope.  In the end I knew that my passion and focus remained with what I’d started here in Richmond and so I declined to continue in the interview process, but In The Plex only reinforces what a great adventure that alternate path through life could have been.

It seems safe to say that most people underestimate the significance of what Google is and does.  Steven Levy’s book is a great read, and a great insight into how this one company has transformed the Internet age.

First of all, kudos to Google for “going for it” in the Facebook era.  They’re one of few players who actually has the resources and skill to make a serious go at a viable alternative to Facebook, and you’ve got to admire the effort.  If the success of the movie The Social Network tells us anything, it’s that Facebook has become mainstream and popular, and as generations of younger people look for ways to establish their identity in the digital age, they’ll be looking for alternatives to the place where their parents and now grandparents also hang out online.  By the same token, people of all ages and professions are trying to figure out just how to effectively and safely use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media tools in a world where we’re being encouraged to blend our personal and professional lives together more publicly.

Is Google+ just the right thing at just the right time?

People are already writing about the high bar that Google+ will have to jump in order to see any significant migration of Facebook users, not the least of which is all the time people have invested in curating their lists of “friends” there.  Facebook is going to make it as difficult as possible for its users to do any kind of exporting of account information from their system, and I don’t think Google is devious enough to launch an unauthorized workaround.  So people will be left to recreate their online identity on Google+, where the number of people you are connected to still largely drives your user experience.

On the other hand, despite Facebook’s 750 million users, I suspect Google actually knows about at least as many people, if not more.  Between its large and growing population of GMail users, the information they have about web users through tracking searches and Google Analytics data, and their ability to gather and index huge amounts of data from other sources, Google is perhaps positioned better than any other digital media organization to say “hey, we already know so much about you, why don’t you make yourself at home here!?“

One of the main selling points of Google+ is the ability to organize your list of contacts into Circles, containers (or, for those who want a more widely used descriptor, “tags”) that help you figure out who to share what with and how you want to slice and dice the information being shared with you.  I’ve heard a number of people clamoring for this kind of thing on Twitter for a while now, and though Facebook lets you do a version of it, it’s clumsy to use.

But as Joel Spolsky suggests, this might be asking a lot of us to exert the mental energy to determine which circle(s) each person belongs in, and to keep up with that over time.  Life is messier than “Friends”, “Family” and “Co-workers” (especially if you live in a smaller city like I do), and many people have adapted to the “Friend label fits all” approach on Facebook, limiting as it might be.  We may not know for sure anyway until a lot more people are using the system.

From an interface design perspective, Google+ has all the hallmarks of a well thought out, well-engineered web application by a company that’s been doing this for a while now.   I think Google+ has a ways to go to reach the level of simplicity that Facebook has enjoyed when it comes to its primary transaction, the display of a status update from a connection and subsequent comments/likes/etc.   On a single post by a connection on Google+, I counted no less than 9 different actions I could take in response (compared to 7 for a comparable post on Facebook, presented with fewer links/clickable widgets).

From a nit picky technical perspective, let me just say that the use of a “+” character as a prominent part of an online service’s name is pretty cringe-worthy.  The character isn’t allowed in a domain name, so they had to use “plus.google.com” for the actual web address. “+” is often used as a joining character in URL query strings or a special modifier in web searches, making its use here conflict a bit now that they’re using it in a site name. Google’s own search engine is confused by it – try searching for “Google” and “+” as search terms and their new offering doesn’t even come up on page one of the results (at least for me).  I even feel slightly uncomfortable using the “+” in the title of this blog post.

Until Google makes available an API that will allow other applications to integrate with Google+, there will be a lot of finger drumming going on in the world of web app developers.  Basic things like “let me post to Google+ from an app on my desktop or from Twitter” aren’t possible yet, and won’t be until that kind of access is allowed.  Google says it’s coming soon.

That’s my initial take on Google+.  Surely they’ll making a number of refinements to the system in the coming weeks and months, and it will be a different ballgame when it’s open for anyone to sign up.  Until then, I don’t think I’ll be spending much time there as a user, but it will be very interesting to watch the evolution of what could be a significant milestone in the very short history of social media.

What do you think about Google+?

• Hospitality for the Coming Age: Sharing in the midst of scarcity: Anna Lisa’s new blog chronicling her ministry formation work around sharing resources – food, listening, time, hope – when such things are scarce. Brand new, ready for your comments!
• indexed: astute and sometimes funny observations about the state of the world, presented as simple diagrams on index cards.
• Project 10 to the 100th: Google is giving away $10 million for good ideas – anyone want to partner on a submission?
• FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments: in the tradition of lolcats, some really funny and scary stuff here, like this abomination of truth in marketing.
• Found Magazine: random bits of other people’s lives found, scanned, and posted to the web. Wow.

Unzip the archive, then process the resulting files to obtain a numeric result. You’ll be taking the sum of lines from files matching a certain description, and multiplying those sums together to obtain a final result. Note that files have many different extensions, like ‘.pdf’ and ‘.js’, but all are plain text files containing a small number of lines of text.

Sum of line 4 for all files with path or name containing bar and ending in .xml
Sum of line 2 for all files with path or name containing bar and ending in .txt
Hint: If the requested line does not exist, do not increment the sum.

Multiply all the above sums together and enter the product below.
(Note: Answer must be an exact, decimal representation of the number.)

And my solution, starting from a Unix prompt in the directory where the files were unpacked to:

# find . -ipath "*bar*.xml" -print | xargs grep -h -n '.*' | egrep '^4:'| cut -d':' -f2
# find . -ipath "*bar*.txt" -print | xargs grep -h -n '.*' | egrep '^2:'| cut -d':' -f2

I then took the two lists of numbers, pasted them into a spreadsheet, and multiplied the two sums into the final answer. I started to look at Unix tools to sum a list of numbers passed as arguments, but unsure if Google was timing me, I opted for the spreadsheet instead to keep it fast.

I could have also used “cat -n” to generate the line-number-prefixed output, but for some reason grep was on the brain.

How would you do it?

I like this puzzle as a potential test for a network/Unix sysadmin, and plan to use it at some point (especially since we’re trying to hire a system administrator at Summersault). Maybe Google will release their puzzle generation code?

• I had a little fun with the users of the Palladium-Item forums who like to post anonymous rants. It resulted in at least one phone call threatening legal action against me and started at least one conversation about the nature of privacy on the Internet, so I consider that a mild success.
• Jim Hair, photographer and community activist extraordinaire, announced he and his wife Vicki are moving back to California after he accepted a position there. Funny on a number of levels, but mostly so because of what they’ve invested in Richmond.
• Jean Harper is at least fantasizing about a good joke, though I’m concerned about her allegations that members of the Earlham College swim team are promiscuous. Wait, does Earlham have a swim team? Ahem.
• Google’s got it going on with a new kind of wakeup alarm, plans for colonizing Mars, and a way to never send an e-mail that’s late.
• Lawmakers in Congress are “criticizing” oil industry executives for not investing in renewable resources – jolly good show!

What else ya got?