Cossolus

It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch.

But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.

I think that in the video you should get rid of the elevator music and have someone narrating the most important points about the service, such as how it differentiates itself, what are the limits (storage capacity, etc).

Microsoft used to be able to "embrace and extend" in order to extinguish the competitor. With Bing it seems they can only "embrace", by which I mean copying and trying to decrease differentiation. But look at the trend. In the future, when/if Google search incorporates social feedback effects (ala +1), Bing won't even have the user-base to be able to copy the competitor, let alone extend and extinguish.

One look at my website statistics tells me Bing is already as good as dead.

The same thing occured to me. The same thing probably occured to everyone that read the article, because that's exactly what the article says:

"The findings in the current study are limited in their application as this study models hair loss related to stress and thus may not be relevant to hair loss brought on by factors other than stress."

Your problem is that you believe that since you personally don't want to do crack, that the overall usage of crack in the general population wouldn't increase if it was available at the corner store. That's called "projection".

Toluene is obviously not as pleasant and/or addictive as crack, or else you'd see as many people strung out on Toluene on East Hastings as you do crackheads. Oh - let me guess, we don't see that because of all the anti-toluene education and toluene recovery programs that are available.

Try this thought experiment on for size: do you think that in Saudi Arabia, if alcohol was made legal and available, that alcohol use would increase among the general population? Do you think that if cigarettes were sold cheaply at school cafeterias, that cigarette use would increase? If your answer is "no", then you're either deluded or a troll.

Here's how I see it. You have all these knobs you can twiddle with and see the results. Here's what happens when you turn the knobs:

make crack legal -----> crack-use increases a LOT

make crack cheaper -----> crack-use increases

increase mental health services -----> small/no effect

increase education ----> crack-use decreases moderately

So what have you gained by legalizing crack? In my opinion, you've shifted the beneficiary (the people at the top of the financial food chain) from being the dealers and their lawyers to being the government and their cronies.

The only half-decent proposal I've heard so far is to have the govt. purchase Colombia's supply of cocaine paste every year and destroy it. That would hugely drive up the street price and result in a net decrease in usage.

Let me get this straight... you think you're going to regulate the behavior of a crackhead by changing his tax rate?

I think the reality of how +1 will be used will be more like this: you see your list of search results. The first three are so-so and the fourth one is great. You think to yourself "why the hell was the great result not at the top?" and then click the +1 button to promote it. Google uses this info as a signal, both globally and for your circle of friends.

I think it could work, as long as it's not gamed into uselessness.

The parent is actually correct. From the original paper:

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

/end quote

There's a name for "good reasons" that don't result in proven product. They're called "bad reasons".

This product reminds me of cue-cat, in the sense that it fails to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Yes, these secondary affects are interesting to think about. Also, if people don't have to drive 95% of the time, people will forget how to drive, and will probably be unable to instantly switch into 'operator' mode when/if the car decides to transfer back into manual mode. For this reason, I don't see the technology being successful until it can drive reliably enough that it never has to switch back into manual mode.

Can you imagine reading a book, watching a movie, eating (or whatever) in your car and suddenly the situation gets so hairy that the car switches back into manual? I don't think that would work out, especially if the last time you had taken the wheel was 5 years ago.

Sure, and snorting vitamins could replace eating meals. Sleep has been implicated in a lot of secondary roles, including memory consolidation, the body's ability to repair itself, etc. It's unlikely such a fundamental process can be easily replaced.

I think that's the most important feature, and would give your site an advantage to using a wiki. Providing/exposing 'semantic structure' in documents and separating style from structure is cool, but I don't think that's a problem that people are clamoring to have solved, anymore than it's already solved by various markup technologies.

A wiki that can exports its content as professional grade PDF files suitable for publishing would be awesome, but that's a major feature, and my humble advice would be to see if that's doable WELL before you do anything else.

I would actually be interested to know if anything already does that...

Sell when you can, not when you have to.