By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

MobileMe’s launch has been anything but smooth. It was so bad that Apple has even offered a 30-day extension to those whose accounts were active as of July 9, 2008. Personally, they should just do the right thing and give everyone an extension, up until they finally bless the service as “fixed.”

However, Steve Jobs sets high standards, not just for his employees, but for himself and the company as a whole, and in an internal email that Ars Technica said they had viewed, he fessed up: My Bad. Well, Our Bad, but with caveats.

For one, Jobs admitted that rather than launching the whole service at once, they could have launched it in pieces (no!), such as launching the over-the-air iPhone syncing first, and then each web app (Mail, Calendar, etc) separately. He added:

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

Well, yeah! The iPhone 3G launch itself was a fiasco, right? Why add still more complexity?

It’s been so bad Apple’s even put up a status page, although it hasn’t been updated since July 29th.

Note: the first MobileMe bug I found was so embarassingly easy, I thought, “how did this make it out the door?” I couldn’t login unless my ID was entered in all lower-case, despite signing up with an upper-case first letter. Sigh.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

“Of sorts” is probably a bit confusing, as it is a YouTube channel, but as the International Olympic Committee announced on Monday, it will be geo-limited to 77 territories “across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including India, Republic of Korea, Nigeria and Indonesia” where video-on-demand (VOD) rights to the broadcast have not already been sold.

The coverage will also be limited to highlights and clips; no live coverage. The channel, assuming you meet the location requirements, can be found at http://www.youtube.com/beijing2008.

In the press release, IOC Director of Television and Marketing Services Timo Lumme said:

“The IOC’s priority is to ensure that as many people as possible get to experience the magic of the Olympic Games and the inspirational sporting achievements of the Olympic athletes. For the first time in Olympic history we will have complete global online coverage, and the IOC will have its own broadcast Channel and content production facilities. The IOC’s Channel will make fantastic Olympic footage available where young generations of sports fans are already going for online entertainment, and will complement the footage offered in these territories by our broadcast partners across all media platforms.”

By offering an abundance of freely available content across media platforms around the world, including over the internet, the IOC believes it is limiting the risk of piracy infringements.

Right, but honestly, if YouTube isn’t jam-packed full of Olympic clips (which will constantly, I assume, be taken down by Google employees), I’d be very surprised.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

It’s been discussed before: in this information-filled age with all our personal data in databases that are vulnerable to leaks, as well as much of our behavioral data being gathered by corporations, is there really any privacy? On Wednesday, in response to a lawsuit, Google said no.

In April, Pittsburgh couple Aaron and Christine Boring (yes, that’s really their name) filed suit against Google in Allegheny County court. Why? They felt that Google’s “reckless conduct” in publishing Street View photos (above) of their property (which was “protected” by a private road sign) caused “mental suffering” and hurt the value of their home.

There’s a fairly easy way to get pictures removed from Street View (more on that later), and Google brought that up, implying that someone decided it was a good way to get some cash out of a large corporation. On the other hand, if that was the case, they strangely only asked for $25,000.

As Google said in their motion to dismiss the complaint:

“When plaintiffs discovered these images, rather than using the simple removal option Google affords, they sued Google for invasion of privacy, trespass, negligence, and conversion. Plaintiffs seek damages form ‘mental suffering’ and diminished property value supposedly caused by the public accessibility of the photos. They claim these injuries even though similar photos of their home were already publicly available on the Internet, and even though they drew exponentially greater attention to the images in question by filing and publicizing the lawsuit while choosing not to remove the images of their property from the Street View service.”

The photos already available on the Internet that Google mentions above are on a county website.

While that’s true, here’s the scary, big-brotherish (though unnervingly true) part:

“Today’s satellite-image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist. In any event, plaintiffs live far from the desert and are far from hermits.

As far as Google’s contention that the Borings could remove the offending image: it’s true. All they (or anyone) has to do was bring up Street View Help, click a link, and select “This image infringes on my privacy.”

But their lawyer, Dennis Moskal, had this response:

“If you take Google’s response to the furthest conclusion, you could never have any reasonable expectation of privacy unless you fortified your house and barricaded yourself in.”

and

“Is something ever really removed from the Internet once it’s sent out to a billion people? It’s a face-off between big business saying that they can set forth what the law is - that they’re above the law.”

He has a point about things never disappearing from the Web. After all, things like old MySpace photos have brought down politicians … and more. And where did I get the picture of their property above? Right.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Cuil is pronounced “cool” and what makes it potentially cool is the participation of former Google search architect Anna Patterson and her husband, Stanford professor Tom Costello, as well as other prominent search tech folk. (Where have we seen that minimalist home page before, eh?)

Cuil purports to have a larger search index than Google’s, and to be faster, and to be better than everything than Google. Of course, if it wasn’t, why would I use it instead of Google, right?

Search results (example above, for the “iPhone 3G”) are decidedly non-minimalist (click to enlarge). Speed reader that I am, I prefer more results per page with little if any “fluff.” Still, that’s me, and perhaps not you. It would be nice to see some preferences to allow this to be changed.

There’s no specific news search, though news shows up in the results, as with Google. Speed-wise, I can watch Cuil render the page of results, so it’s not faster, but it’s certainly fast enough.

Results-wise, while top results on both Google and Cuil for “iPhone 3G” turn up, who else, Apple, results after that for Cuil are pretty old news stories on the iPhone 3G. Meanwhile, Google has more recent results.

There is something Cuil seems to be better at than Google: privacy. Here’s their privacy policy:

when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours. More precisely:

Logs

We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.

Cuil is relatively new, and thus will have some growing pains. Will it replace the word “Google” as a verb on TV shows and the like? Probably not. Will it gain market share? Time will tell.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge, according to the site.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

On Wednesday Google announced changes to the way contacts are handled in Gmail. Previously, rather than just allowing you to fully control who does and does not get added to your contacts, they automatically added people you email to your contact list.

The change made today adds another type of contact: Suggested Contacts. When you email someone, that person is moved into a “Suggested Contacts” group. From there, if you want, you can move them into your “My Contacts” group. There’s also a “Most Contacted” group.

You can also create your own contact groups, which you can then add contacts to. Much like adding Labels to emails, you can have a contact in more than one group.

Of course, they still kept a rather arcane setting:

“Automatically move suggested contacts into My Contacts if I frequently email them.”

And of course, they don’t tell us what “frequently” is. Of course, while that’s the default setting, you can uncheck it and take total control of your contacts. And that’s what I would recommend for those of you, like me, who’ve been annoyed by the auto-add feature of Gmail from the beginning.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

When I login to Gmail, I always leave the “Remember me on this computer” checkbox unchecked. Why? I don’t want to get into the habit of checking that checkbox, as what would happen if I would make that selection and leave a public computer with myself still logged in. That would be a problem. Until now, anyway.

Gmail is rolling out a new feature. Typical of such roll-outs, it will be gradual and may not be available yet on your account.

If it’s available, you should see something similar to the above at the very bottom of your inbox. You’ll see information about the last activity on your account and whether it’s still open in another location.

Obviously, this is a great way to find out if someone has hacked into your account (as has happened to me previously, though not with Gmail), but it doesn’t give you all that much info. However, click the Details link, all you’ll see a lot more (below). More

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Last night the federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to hand over (.PDF) user data for all videos watched on YouTube to Viacom, stating:

Plaintiffs seek all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website.

Red flag, right? This means your privacy, assuming you’ve ever watched anything on YouTube, has gone out the window. As users should have assumed, and as confirmed by the ruling (.PDF),

Defendants’ “Logging” database contains, for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID” of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (“IP address”), and the identifier for the video.

Viacom said it wants the data so it can prove that copyrighted material is far more popular than user-created videos. Think about it though. Why do they need user data … shouldn’t they just need data about the number of times copyrighted material was uploaded and watched, not who watched it?

I don’t know about you, but generally I don’t login to YouTube, so they won’t be getting my user ID - but they will be getting my IP address. Oh, but let’s not forget that Google themselves said that IP addresses are not personal information. More

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Until now Flash (.SWF) media files have been pretty, well, opaque: search engines couldn’t index them. For webmasters, this meant extra work, as the old adage was “a search engine likes text.” No longer.

In a press release on Tuesday Adobe announced that it was working with both Yahoo! and Google to enable indexing of Flash files. The project will enable searches on Flash content to return text and links, which can then be indexed. Better still, current Flash content will be immediately searchable by search engines, without alteration.

David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe said:

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs (rich Internet applications) and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player. We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Of course, all this assumes that the search engine has the Flash tech working: Google is rolling out Flash search today, but Yahoo! said it was going to enable the feature in a later release of its search engine and that it was “working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.” And no, Microsoft wasn’t mentioned at all.

However, Adobe’s statement does indicate Adobe will work with other search engines as well. With Microsoft having its Flash competitor, Silverlight, however, I’m wondering if that will slow things down between the two companies.