Google+

Google+ is a social networking service by Google that has been in development for a few years and was launched about a week ago. While still in invite-only testing phase, the interest in joining the site has been massive and the service quickly gathered over a million users. Feedback from early adopters has been very positive, despite Google+ not really inventing a wheel here. Best achievement of Google+ is that it takes what is already there and improves on it while also closing one of the most relevant gaps between the four more notable social networking services of the last five years: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn. This post will point out the features that are relevant to Google+.

More personal Twitter

While the entire internet buzzed about Google+ taking on Facebook’s huge 750+ million userbase, reality is that the main feature of Google+ is really challenging Twitter, while dressed in Facebook-like user interface. Twitter is mainly used as releasing public information about your daily activities in a micro-blogging form while allowing for discussions on various relevant matters and allowing anyone follow whatever you post in public. And personally I have always been bothered by both the limited ‘text-message’ length notices and very awkward public commenting on those posts.

Google+ takes the similar concept of anyone being allowed to follow anyone else without requiring confirmation of friends. As such, if the person you follow does not add you to their circles in return, they will not see your posts in their stream while you will see their public posts. This is very similar to how Twitter works.

At the same time Google+ remedies one of the biggest flaws of Twitter, which is public discussion that can be followed in Twitter through ‘hash tags’ and retweets and so on. It is very awkward (and has been, in my opinion, ever since it was released). Google+ simply applies public commenting to public feed posts, so celebrities, companies, brands and whatnot can have all their discussion happen right under their own public posts. Already many little-known people use this for great effect, such as Apple-fanboy MG Siegler of Techcrunch and Felicia Day, the lovely actress of Dr. Horrible fame. This opens up such public discussions with a more personal touch than would ever be possible with Twitter.

And Google+ allows sharing information with only specific people (listed as Limited in feeds) in your specific circles, which is more similar to how Facebook works. This ability to balance information read and shared is what makes Google+ ultimately a better Twitter killer than it is Facebook killer, especially once mobile integration on Google+ becomes as common as it is on Twitter. As a sidenote, Google’s +1 buttons (which are essentially Facebook ‘Like’ buttons, but across all Google services, including search) are already more common than Twitter share buttons.

Google+ also implements a location-specific sharing for photos as well as posts. Location specific data has become important on social landscape ever since Foursquare capitalized on it. This is especially handy when using a mobile phone and checking out updates from near where you are. This is similar to Twitter’s location specific tweets, however I personally prefer Google+ implementation of this, which can easily be set per photo and post, instead of an account wide setting it is in Twitter.

More public Facebook

Everybody was talking about Google’s ‘social layer’ attempting to challenge Facebook. And the first impression people got was that Google+ was indeed very similar to Facebook, but it is not – at least in the shape and form it is right now – a network where your parents might end up joining, just like they are unlikely to join Twitter. While Google+ includes all the usual features of a social network, from profiles to networking to photo sharing and discussions, it is not as personal as Facebook. While it includes relationship statuses, they are not linked to specific other user. It also has no families, no anniversaries and events (the latter two would likely be implemented through Google Calendar instead). Google+ is a network that suits better for professional networking, than personal networking, without neglecting the latter completely. And in a way, it does it better than LinkedIn which has always felt like a niche networking tool I rarely found any actual use for, despite being a user for more than three years.

The concept of circles is similar to Facebook friends lists, which majority of Facebook users do not use. Difference is that Google+ allows you to also filter out information based on this circle, not just share to specific circle, which makes this type of information networking more intuitive to me as a user. At work I am not much interested in what most friends post and share, but I would be interested in what people of my industry share and Google+ allows me to do it much better than both Facebook and Twitter.

One of the features Google+ could benefit from is the Groups aspect, where those shared circles can be created. It is possible with Google+, but would require everyone to create a same circle and follow everyone in that circle, which is a hassle. For social collaboration it would be better if such groups could be created, since I personally use them in Facebook rather frequently.

Google+ also intends to add business pages and apps into its midst in the future, challenging Facebook in those aspects as well, but as of right now it is only guesswork what might happen and thus I shall leave it at that for now.

Google+ is everywhere

Something that Facebook has tried for years has already been succeeded at by Google from day one. By having already millions of users of various Google services, from Google search to Gmail and Docs features, Google+ is integrated across all of those services seamlessly through the top black Google bar that includes links to all Google services as well as Google+ notifications. Seeing notifications pop up through various Google services will instantly make using Google+ more streamlined and natural since you do not need to visit Google+ main website to be notified of various activities.

Google also launched the service near-perfectly by making sure that it contained everything that people would expect such a service to have. This includes mobile interface – both web based and mobile applications – as well as introducing new design across these services prior to launch. This made for a very notable launch that felt less like an arrival of a new product and more like a corporate wide move by Google to take its services to next generation, double-dipped in social media.

Google finally decided to hire designers

While a minor point in comparison to previous three, Google decided to redesign all of it’s main services both on desktop and mobile while developing Google+ and launching them just prior to Google+. While Google has experimented with minimalistic designs for years, it is only now that the new interface seems to have hit the right mark. New design is very sleek and minimalistic, with desaturated colors of red, black and gray being dominant, accompanied by blue and with minimalistic use of gradient transitions. Google+, as well as new design of Gmail, balances white space better than previous Google designs have ever done. All in all, this makes Google+ and their applications pretty to use, which is important, since how things look is so very important to shallow users that we are.

Chinks in the armor

Not all has been great, of course. Google did not anticipate Google+ to become as great a success from day one and the mass interest in the service caused problems even in its invite-only model of growing userbase. Patience is not something that is to be expected from people who live in this fast-paced industry and everybody wanted to be early adopters mainly due to this great word of mouth that Google+ has received. What happened was that very soon there were more people wanting an invite to Google+ than there were people who actually knew what Google+ is about and had read through Google’s blog post and watched the demonstration.

Google+ has also been underwhelming for early adopters due to once arriving there, not many people you know had joined yet, so once you managed to get in, the place looked sleek, but empty. Even if that was to be expected of a new service that demands large amount of users, it felt disappointing. Some of Google+ features have also been a little broken since launch, but that too is to be expected from this public invite-only testing phase that Google+ is going through (despite there not being a Beta sign anywhere to be seen). Google+ also needs to work on how public commenting can be read, since comments cannot be collapsed again once opened and it can be a problem with hundreds of comments on public threads, but that will surely be remedied soon.

Google+ also has similar issues related to account authenticity that Twitter and Facebook has faced. For example there are six different Mark Zuckerberg Google accounts. At least it is confirmed that one of them is authentic. At the time being however, Google+ has no methods for verifying if the account belongs to the right person or not.

Google+ feature ‘Sparks’, which is a list of interests of sorts, also remains a bit strange to me and I have not been able to find a usable purpose for its existence, but since it is still in testing phase, I am sure it will expand and become more useful in time.

Conclusions

In this article I have mostly focused on the sharing and circle aspects of Google+. I did not touch chat and video calling functions since I have not tried them often enough.

Taking all of this into account it is perhaps surprising to realize that Google+ is perhaps the very best way Google could have entered the social networking arena. By combining the best of features of Facebook and Twitter and implementing a very clean layer of location based information sharing, Google+ is a serious entry on social market that will definitely make an impact in scale that cannot be predicted today. While it does not challenge Facebook as much as it challenges Twitter, all signs point that it is here to stay without having to battle over social market share the way people were expecting.

Electronic Payments

E-payment systems and bank services are everyday and common in Estonia, but both developers and companies, who implement e-payments to websites, tend to ask large sums of money for solutions that should be relatively simple. Having developed e-payment systems for years, I had not put together a single solution for this very common problem until now, when Estonia has adopted Euro as its main currency. This solution is released open source, under LGPL license.

Please note that while this e-payment system is now considered stable and has not run into major problems ever since it was released, some of the connections have been tested more often than others and it is still recommended to test the implementation and make sure it works accordingly before going live.

E-payment systems and Bank e-services that are supported with this solution:

Swedbank (Estonia)
SEB (Estonia)
Sampo (Estonia & Finland)
Nordea (Estonia & Finland)
Estcard (Estonian credit card web service, Mastercard, Visa, etc)

Requirements:

Solution is built with PHP and requires PHP support. The website or service that implements this solution should be modern and utilize UTF-8 for data encoding. This e-payment system assumes that it gets its data as UTF-8 and acts accordingly. This system may not work properly if website is not encoded in UTF-8. OpenSSL support is also required from the web server for some epayment profiles. Multibyte String extension support is required for certain UTF-8 calculations.

Files descriptions:

config.epay.php – Configuration file for each profile. This also includes testing environment access informatin, if that profile has it (read the comments). Whenever setting up a e-payment link, this file should be configured accordingly.

class.epay.php – Main class, this file also calls the configuration file and expects the file to be in the same directory as the class.epayments.php file. This file should not be edited, unless necessary for some reason.

gate.epay.php – This is gateway file that is used to submit data to the bank service or parse the result from the service.

example-submit.php – This is example file, which generates the form that submits order data to gateway and gateway then submits it to the bank.

example-return.php – This is example return page, which receives returned information from bank.

Example:

This package has a working example that is easy and quick to set-up. Package includes SEB bank e-service testing environment. The only thing you have to do, to get the example up and running, is download the package below and upload it to your website under root or subfolder. For example, if you upload the files to:

http://www.example.com/epayment/

Then you have to change only two configuration settings in example-submit.php file, related to order information and return URL. Using the previous example, the lines should be changed accordingly:

line 22. $config['gateway-url']=’http://www.example.com/epayment/gate.epay.php’;
line 23. $config['return-url']=’http://www.example.com/epayment/example-return.php’;

Don’t forget to change the example.com website address to your own website address. Nothing else needs to be changed to test if the class works.

From example to Live implementation:

The example runs on ‘seb-est’ (SEB Estonia) profile. To use another bank, such as Swedbank, you need to assign correct payment-type before generating the form (like in example-submit.php file). Then you also need to assign proper values to config.epay.php to the profile. The settings in configuration file are commented and self-explanatory. It is important to note though that some e-payment services offer no testing environments and other epayment services cannot even be tested without the testing environment being set up by the other side first (such as the case with Estcard solutions).

Download:

waher.net e-payments solution 1.4 stable

Other notes:

As BETA, this solution does not check for errors in every location and there may be quirks as a result. These will be ironed out in future versions. Please report any bugs or problems you find either here in comments or personally to my e-mail kristo@waher.net

Version history:

1.4 stable
20.04.2011
Minor change for Nordea, switching the language keyword (estonian and english were switched)

1.3 beta
04.03.2011
VK_AUTO requests did not work with some banks, gateway now attempts a cURL request to remedy that, if cURL is enabled.

1.2 beta
31.01.2011
VK_AUTO assigned for ipizza profiles (Sampo, SEB and Swedbank) for automatic pings on success URL

1.1 beta
13.01.2011
Sampo profile now works properly, taking into account UTF-8 characters

1.0 beta
11.01.2011
First release

The Social Network

Please note that this is not review of the movie, but an opinion piece about its topics. For a review, I recommend a review from one of my most trusted reviewers, Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times.

David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’ really is more of a movie about making enemies, than making those 500 million friends. But what the trailer depicts is not what the movie is really about. After seeing the trailer, I expected something entirely different. I expected what I guess Mark Zuckerberg  – one of the creators of The Facebook – expected, a movie that paints him as a monster. Instead it was a movie about our dreams, hopes and aspirations and how, at times, we exploit, manipulate and so completely cause self-conflict because of those things we like and want to achieve. The older generation will never understand and we can only hope that our experiences will be able to serve our children better. No one was holding our hand when the internet took over the world.

The movie focuses primarily on relationships and on the business side of things, it is intertwined with internet and development of applications for the internet. I loved the subtle nuances about the role that software developers play in this world and how it so strongly conflicts with the way your traditional business used to work. By creating these castles in the air, from air, a developer is in a unique position that no other job has shared in the history of the world. There are no rules to follow, you simply need a good idea and an even better execution. A symbiosis of art and science. What the movie displays very well is that web business does not even require huge investments and resources to become a success: merely couple of thousand of dollars and a passionate codewriter were needed to push things off to a running start. Even some of the smarter business strategies were covered, which explain why Facebook did not run into problems that Friendster did (which was the first very popular Facebook-style social network).

These years media still wonders if Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook or not. David Fincher, being a smart director that he is, never lets that take over the role of characters in the movie. In fact, it does not even answer the question for the viewer. But in all honesty, this was not what the movie was about, it simply tied everything and everyone neatly together.

It helps that the movie takes the perspective of the most known flawed hero of this generation to carry what otherwise might end up being a cluttered movie. Zuckerberg found his creative stride during the years this so-called Web 2.0 (or simply Social Web) was catching on. Smart – but not popular. Ambitious – but not charming. He was not driven by clichèd motivations of common biographical movies, such as father issues or chase for perfection or becoming better than your competition. He wanted to become accepted and he wanted to prove to people that hurt him – and tragically himself – that making something great and popular can become something he can excuse his shortcomings with. Instead of fixing his problems, he was looking for ways to mask and excuse them.

‘I wish I was special,’ say the lyrics of the song in the trailer. So did Mark Zuckerberg and so do all of us.