I’ve been dreaming of drive-by skyscrapers, made of hundreds of thousands of those little copters, in formation.

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) February 1, 2012

Learn & Act: EFF, Google

My parents received a Google TV (the Sony version) for Christmas.  Being the visiting technophile, I was tasked with setting up the device and teaching my parents how to work it.  I had previously set up the exact same device for my roommates over the summer in San Francisco, so I was familiar with the set-up and the device itself.  This post is a brief review of the set-up process, followed by my thoughts on the concept of Google TV and similar systems.

Review: Google TV

Installation is fairly straightforward.  Google TV sits between your cable or satellite box and your television (or if you have one, your A/V system).  Essentially, Google TV becomes a layer on top of your TV signal.  The unit comes with infrared “blasters” that allow your Google TV remote to control your cable/satellite box (and A/V system), and the remote itself can power on the TV and control the volume.

After you have the unit connected, you are taken through a fairly easy software set-up process.  Syncing the remote, connecting to your wireless network, logging into your Google Account, and letting the device update are fairly painless.  Identifying and customizing your cable/satellite provider and premium channel options takes a little time, but after that, you’re basically set.

The latest iteration of Google TV appears to be a version of the Android Honeycomb system, which is sort of the transition version of Android between the old-looking Gingerbread OS and the futuristic polish of Ice Cream Sandwich.  There is a version of Android Market with a handful of Google TV-ready apps like Pandora, Twitter, etc.  I won’t spend too much time talking about how Google TV works, but it basically gives you a unified way to search web video and TV listings, as well as the wider Internet.  There is a version of Chrome in there, and a custom YouTube player.  You can find more details using your favorite search engine.  It’s not a bad experience for what it is.

The Missing Link in Internet+TV

What I really want to talk about is why attempts such as these to meld TV and Internet fall short.  The key software features are in place, though there’s certainly plenty of room for growth and innovation there.  The real problem is the one that has plagued efforts in this space since WebTV came out in the mid-’90s: the keyboard.

Well, it’s not really the keyboard itself that’s the problem.  Sony, Logitech, and others have done as well as they could here.  The problem is the experience of using a keyboard to control a device and screen that is 10 feet away from you.  It’s essentially the opposite of the experience that a tablet gives you, where you are almost literally touching the objects you are manipulating on the screen.  With Internet+TV, you really do feel the distance between yourself and what you’re manipulating, even though you have the same controls available to you as you would if you were operating your laptop computer: a keyboard and a pointing device.  It’s the feeling of being forced to play one of those arcade crane games to pick up a stuffed animal: this should be so easy, but it is, in fact, extraordinarily foreign and frustrating.

Here’s what needs to happen in this space.  The experience shouldn’t revolve around the TV.  It should revolve around a tablet.  The Internet doesn’t need to be integrated into the TV; the TV needs to be integrated into the Internet.  The TV device itself should just become a big screen that you throw content to.  When you’re searching for a TV show, tweeting, creating a Pandora station… it doesn’t make sense to be doing any of those things by using a keyboard in your lap to operate a device that’s 10 feet away.  You should be doing all of that in your lap, and then once you’ve selected something the result shows up on the screen, whether it’s a video or picture or even text.

The connection between the user and the web is too intimate to be stretched across the living room.  The experience of Internet+TV should not be centered on the TV, it should be centered on the user.  A tablet is the perfect bridge between the two.  I have my suspicions that this is part of what Steve Jobs meant when he revealed towards the end of his life last year that he’s “cracked” the TV problem.  I think it’s a safe bet that the iPad will play a central role in whatever Apple’s got coming next for TV.

Google TV is a not-bad experience, but that’s not saying much.  Adding the Internet to your TV is looking at the problem backwards.  The TV should just become your entertainment monitor, with the rest of the experience centered on a tablet.

Image: cc-by dailylifeofmojo (Flickr)

Google Reader used to be pretty good on its own, but it’s a bit spartan — especially after its recent visual… er… refresh.  Most clients took the Google Reader organizational model and just prettified it.  With the advent of iPad apps like Flipboard, however, the trend has been to try to merge the utilitarian advantages of the Google Reader organizational model with the magazine-style prettiness and delight of Flipboard.

I have tried many different Google Reader clients over the years, but I’ve recently settled on one that really shines: Feedly.  In a clean-but-not-too-clean interface, Feedly strikes the right balance between a beautiful experience and serious information consumption tool.  ”My Feedly” is your front page that pulls the most interesting or popular articles to your attention right when you log in.  Once you’ve read or scanned those, you can click the check mark on the right side of the screen to mark that page as read, and then either refresh or move to a new section.  The sections correspond to your Google Reader subscription categories.

Feedly also provides a series of widgets across the site that are actually useful.  For example, on the home page are a list of “Featured Sources” from your subscriptions (which you can customize) if you want to jump to a specific feed.  An “Essentials” widget provides a list of curated sections that you can subscribe to, like Gardening, Android, and Cinema.  Feedly also hooks into your Twitter and Facebook feeds to scoop out most-liked or -tweeted articles.  In fact, there is a very basic interface to post Tweets directly from Feedly if you want.  Stock quotes are also pulled in.

Although the default view for any given section is the magazine layout (see first screenshot), there are five other views to choose from: timeline, titles only, mosaic, cards, and full articles.  Feedly retains Google Reader’s ability to mark as read only those articles older than a day or a week.  And there is a really excellent subscription management system that lets you easily subscribe, categorize, and drag-drop feeds between categories.

When you click an article to read it, it opens in-line.  You can use j/k to navigate between articles.  The usual social feedback and sharing tools are there — Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — and you can also shoot an article over to your Instapaper if that’s your thing.  Other great features include a quick “Preview” tool to pop up a view of the original webpage, a built-in bookmarking system to save articles for later consumption, and a new tagging system that let’s you organize posts into custom collections.

The only thing that could make Feedly better is a mobile app, and sure enough there are versions for Android and iOS, built on top of HTML.  I’ve found these to be really great, with really intuitive swipe gestures to mark views or sections as read or unread.

Whether you’re a casual feed reader, an info junkie, or have never even heard of RSS, I recommend you give Feedly a try.

And say, who’s that gentleman holding the hammer?  He looks like a pro.