After a lot of teasing, and a lot of leaking, the Galaxy S IV is finally here. Last year’s version, the S III, remains the world’s most popular Android phone, having sold over 40 million units. Can the S IV live up to that kind of hype? Can Samsung make us feel like we’re living in the future? More »

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The Samsung Galaxy S IV will be announced at an event tonight in New York. It’s so close we can almost feel it in our hands. And thanks to the leaky ship that is the internet, we’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect once it’s real. More »

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Matthew Keys, one of Reuters News’ top social media managers, is facing potentially serious prison time after federal accusations that he’s a member of Anonymous. According to the DOJ, Keys tried to help hackers deface Tribune Company news sites. More »

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New gadgets. We love them. They bring excitement donin the days leading up to their launch and they give us reasons to walk up to strangers and ask them questions in hopes that they’ll let us give them a try. The same will hold true for Google Glass when it’s released. People will love on it. Eventually, it will fail.

The idea is a strong one. Wearable tech is all the rage right now and this is the closest one can get to having bionic, Terminator-style eyes. It will be reviewed and many bloggers will call it a life-changing, pseudo-religious experience, something that any geek with true nerd cred needs to have on their face at nearly all times. Over time, it will turn out to be a fad. Here’s why:

They aren’t very useful after the first week

Most of the things that will be done by users will be done in the first week after purchase. They’ll need to try this, try that, and try everything else that you can do with Glass, but then it simply becomes a novelty. You can’t play Angry Birds on it. You won’t be able to text, at least not in the traditional way. Streaming videos to an inch in front of your face or getting augmented reality versions of what’s in front of you will be first-week lookatme moments, then they will rarely be used.

The camera may be useful indefinitely. That all depends on the quality, ease of storage, shakiness, and other factors. Otherwise, the rest is all for show.

They’re a little too obnoxious

After several years of being in circulation, people still look like morons when they wear their bluetooth headset while not on a call. Some say they look like morons when they are on a call.

This won’t be any different. It may end up being worse. Google Glass will score big points at parties but will stand out like a sore thumb everywhere else just as bluetooth headsets once did. Once people become used to the headsets, they still won’t be very accepted. If anything, they’ll be shunned even more than bluetooth.

People wearing them will not be trusted by their peers

Everyone knows a prankster who post unflattering pictures and videos of their friends taken with a smartphone. That’s annoying, but at least you know what to watch for when they’re around. They can’t just walk around nonchalantly with nothing in their hand capturing embarrassing moments at the bar the way they’ll be able to do with Google Glass.

Even at the office, while people are talking badly about their jobs or bosses, nobody will be able to trust Mr Google Glass Wearing Guy. You never know when he’s recording you, after all.

They’re most useful where there’s limited internet

It’s great to be able to stream videos to your eyeballs, but the points when they could be most useful for this and other purposes are times when there’s no WiFi. Mobile data plans are getting more strict and it’s hard to imagine streaming video or recording videos from a cellular connection without having s0me challenges with usage.

Glass may be able to store data on mobile devices through bluetooth for upload when WiFi is available, but that sort of takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?

They can’t replace anything

They aren’t a phone. In fact, they need a phone to work best. They aren’t going to replace iPods or iPads. They may replace a digital camera, but technically the phone already did that.

In essence, they’re an add-on product. They’re going to be just another gadget to buy, keep safe, and maintain. Other devices like smartphones and tablets helped to replace something else, but Google Glass does not.

Something better will come along

Whatever “it” is, it’s going to be epic. Technology is moving too quickly to believe that Google Glass is going to be cutting edge technology for longer than a year or two.

They simply don’t have anywhere to go with them. They will need to be replaced rather than improved and because they are a luxury item, there won’t be a ton of people who will be willing to upgrade to the next variation of Glass, whatever it may be. No, they’ll look at the next shiny object that comes along that’s completely different from Glass, at which time I’ll probably write an article similar to this one about that piece of technology.

The first tragic use of Glass will make them uncool

Perhaps it’s not a good thing that I can think of a dozen ways this can be used negatively. They’re ideal for documenting horrific crimes. They can be useful in committing others. I simply don’t want to go into the graphic details because I don’t want to give any sickos or criminals ideas, but if you think hard enough about it you can probably come up with something nefarious that could be perpetrated using Google Glass.

It could be something unintentional like a fatal accident indirectly caused by someone using the hands free components of Google Glass. Distracted driving can happen even when both hands are on the wheel. If there’s something on your face taking your attention away from the road, bad things can happen. Unfortunately, it’s not like cell phone use that can be witnessed while passing law enforcement. You don’t have to have your hand up to your face to operate Google Glass, so trying to discourage its use by writing tickets isn’t feasible. Some would say that they could be disconnected when traveling at a speed that indicated car travel, but then passengers would be hampered.

* * *

Google Glass will likely be successful at first. It may continue. It’s likely going to fail. Then, we’ll get to wait for the iWatch.

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Google has pulled the popular Adblock Plus and other ad-blocking apps from the Google Play store.

To be clear, that means Adblock Plus and its ilk are no longer available for Android users. So far nothing has changed in the Chrome Web Store, which still hosts plenty of ad-blocking add-ons for Google’s web browser.

The move shouldn’t be surprising given that ad-blocking software cuts into Google’s bottom line, though that’s not exactly why Google says the apps were removed. The company says that such apps violate the Play Store’s terms of service, specifically that they cause “interference with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.”

Naturally if you’ve already installed AdBlock Plus — or any other affected ad-blocking app — it will continue to work, though there will be no more updates. For that reason, Wladimir Palant, creator of AdBlock Plus, suggests users “install our next release from our website once it is out.”

Palant calls the move “surprising” and wonders if it suggests “a course change at Google.” It doesn’t seem particularly surprising to me, but Palant’s thoughts on all the “for rooted phones only” apps currently available in Play seem well-founded:

Until recently the main distinction between Android and iPhone was that Android allowed you to install any app as long as it wasn’t malicious (meaning that it’s obvious what the app does). Google Play still allows apps stating “for rooted phones only” but I wonder whether these are next on the list to be removed — each of them performs “unauthorized actions”.

What’s really surprising is that Google ever allowed these apps in the first place.

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The Internet serves as a hub of the world, providing entertainment, connection, and goods and services. By 2015, online retail is expected to be worth $279 billion. In United States, while Internet is an important resource, it’s not readily accessible to everyone.

Ten percent of Americans don’t have access to basic broadband because of where they live and six-tenths of poor people don’t have wired Internet. Much of this has to do with lack of competition between companies that not only allows them to ignore portions of the population, but to also drive up prices without consequence.

In this infographic, InternetProviders.com explores Internet around the world and ways in which the U.S. can step it up to mend a broken communication system.

Why American Internet is Lagging

American Internet is Lagging – An infographic by the team at InternetProviders.com

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One of the most important lessons you can learn in Facebook marketing for your business is that you can have a much greater impact on your performance online through Facebook by focusing on what’s happening in the real world. Facebook is virtual, but that doesn’t mean it has to focus on the virtual world. Make it real.

If your business is out there doing things in the real world, you have plenty of potential Facebook content to post on your page (as well as you other social media pages and profiles). Do you participate in charities and local events? Do you sponsor a little league team? Do you have a monthly meeting at a local restaurant?

What about your employees? Do they go on trips or do amazing things like skydiving? Does your team have a bowling league? Does your service manager sing in a country western band on Saturdays?

There are plenty of things that we do in the world that aren’t necessarily associated with business. Finding the business posts is an easy task if you’re keeping your eyes, ears, imagination, and smartphone open. When you really get into it, humanizing the business by sharing things that are happening in and out of the store through your activities and employee activities is crucial. You’re business is made of people. On social media, people love other people. That’s what we really want to see on social. Take advantage of this by getting your content through your people.

This is where the people themselves can get involved. They don’t just have to be the content creators with their actions. They can be the content finders. They can brainstorm, make lists, and come up with things that they’re doing in the real world that make sense to get on social media. The content is out there. You just have to focus on people.

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WebP versus JPEG. Click the image to see the full size examples on Google’s WebP comparison page. Image: Google

Webpages are constantly getting bigger.

Massive JavaScript libraries and endless sharing buttons aren’t helping, but the main culprit behind most of the bloat is the good old image. According to the HTTPArchive, images account for roughly 60 percent of total page size. That means the single biggest thing most sites can do to slim down is to shrink their images.

One way to do that is with alternate image formats like Google’s WebP, which can yield images between 25 and 34 percent smaller than more popular image formats. Despite the astounding space-saving potential of WebP it, like JPEG 2000 and other efforts before it, has not completely caught on with browsers.

So far only Google Chrome and Opera support WebP (both also automatically convert all images to WebP for their respective proxy browsing mobile services). Mozilla objected to WebP when it was first launched, but all of the issues raised in that post have been addressed as WebP has evolved. Firefox still does not support WebP. Nor does Internet Explorer.

However, as Opera’s Bruce Lawson recently pointed out, using some cutting-edge CSS wizardry you can serve WebP images to Chrome and Opera, while still offering JPGs to the rest. Here’s what the code would look like:

.mybackgroundimage {
    background-image: url("image.jpg");
    background-image: image("image.webp" format('webp'), "image.jpg");
}

This code uses the new Image Fallbacks syntax, which is part of the CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 4. The format qualifier is borrowed from @font-face and ensures that browsers won’t download the WebP image if they don’t support it.

Of course this only helps with CSS background images, which probably aren’t the majority of the images most sites serve up. For content images there’s currently no easy way to do the same thing, though there might be in the future if browsers begin to support the proposed <picture> element. Because <picture>‘s syntax is roughly analogous, you would be able to do something like this:

<picture>
    <source src=image.webp type=image/webp >
    <source src=image.png type=image/png >
    <img src=image.png alt="alt text "> <!-- fallback content -->
</picture>

That would cover almost all the bases: browsers that support WebP and <picture>, browsers that support <picture> but not WebP and browsers that support neither. Unfortunately it’s going to be a while before this pseudocode becomes real.

WebP has other problems worth considering before you dive in. For example, when users save an image they may have trouble getting a WebP image to open in their favorite desktop app.

Still, while WebP may have a little ways to go, the potential to significantly reduce page size appears to be winning converts. If you’d like to learn more about WebP and how you can use it, check out the video below from Google’s Making the Web Fast series.

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Chrome’s malware warning page. Image: Google.

Nothing drives away your visitors quite like a message from Google that “this site may harm your computer” or “this site may have been compromised.”

Hopefully you’ll never need it, but if your site does get hacked Google has set up a new site dedicated to helping websites that have been hacked.

The “Help for Hacked Sites” section of Google’s Webmaster Tools offers up articles and videos to help you not only recover from compromising hacks, but take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Part of what makes hacked sites difficult to deal with is that oftentimes developers don’t even notice that they’ve been compromised. “Hacks are often invisible to users,” says Google in its new help section. “For example, unbeknownst to the site owner, the hacker may have infected their site with harmful code which in turn can record keystrokes on visitors’ computers, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions”

Google has an 8-step program for unhacking your site, which include basics like identifying the vulnerability that was used to compromise your site, as well as how to request a review so Google will remove the dreaded “this site has been compromised” message from its search results.

For more info and all the details on what to do if you’ve been hacked, check out the new Help for Hacked Sites section of Google’s Webmaster Tools.

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