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.
I'm not completely convinced that Bing lacks the user base to compete with Google. There are diminishing returns in user base volume after some point, and Bing has around 100mm US users[1]. I think any of us would be pleased as punch with that volume and it's not clear it's not enough to do something-social-with-search.
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."
No. I'm saying that you put a hefty tax on the drug so that when the crackhead buys it most of the money paid for the drug goes toward:
1) Funding programs to educate people with factual information about the dangers of substance abuse to persuade as many people as possible that using drugs is probably not in their best interest and, in particular, to persuade some of the individuals who are most at risk of going down that path that maybe spending some time on the psychotherapist's couch dealing with the root causes of their problems would be a good idea
2) Funding programs for at risk people without health insurance to provide affordable access to mental health services so they can resolve their problems before they resort to the dysfunctional strategy of using mood-altering substances to cope
3) Funding treatment for the addicts who want to get off drugs to successfully do so
Right now, 0% of the money that an addict spends on purchasing drugs goes towards anything positive. 100% goes straight into the pockets of the drug cartels and their middlemen with no social benefit whatsoever. What I'm saying is that you could lower the price of the drug just enough to make the profit-to-risk ratio unattractive to the cartels (and reduce the likelihood that a crackhead is going to have to burglarize your house in order to fund his drug habit) and simultaneously bring in enough tax revenue to fund programs aimed both at reducing the demand for drugs and reducing the societal impact of the problem by improving public mental health and providing treatment for addicts.
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.
>>make crack legal -----> crack-use increases a LOT
Seriously? You really believe that? Would you, personally, be down at the government crack store buying some rock to smoke today if it were legal (I'm assuming that you currently abstain from doing such things)? I know that on my own list of reasons why I'm not a crack user, the #1 reason is that I have enough self-respect to not want to piss my life away on such things. The illegality of it is entirely irrelevant to my decision. I suspect the real effect of legalization on the prevalence of crack-use in the population would be almost nil.
>>make crack cheaper -----> crack-use increases
Again, I think the vast majority of people who are not currently crack-users would remain that way. Paint thinner is super cheap and easily obtained at the local Home Depot, but we don't see a huge epidemic of ordinary folks deciding to huff toluene on the weekends to get high.
>>increase mental health services -----> small/no effect
I agree that focusing solely on the availability of mental health services would have little effect, but that's not what I'm proposing. You have to also actively promote utilization of those services and work on changing public attitudes about them (get rid of the stigmatization problem) through health education in the schools, advertising, etc.
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.
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?"
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.
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.