Google selected me as one of (the many) Google “Glass Explorers”, thanks to a tweet I sent saying how I would use Google Glass, namely:

#ifihadglass I’d find myself in the shoes of Vannevar Bush’s walnut-wearing (social) scientist, & I’d remember the names of my students :).

— halavais (@halavais) February 21, 2013

What this means is that I will, presumably over the next few months, be offered the opportunity to buy Google Glass before most other people get to. Yay! But it is not all good news. I get to do this only if I shell out $1,500 and head out to L.A. to pick them up.

Fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money. I’d be willing to spend a sizable amount of money for what I think Glass is. Indeed, although $1,500 is on the outside of that range, if it did all I wanted it too, I might still be tempted. But it is an awful lot of money. And that’s before the trip to L.A.

To be clear, the decision is mostly “sooner or later.” I’ve wanted something very like Glass for a very long time. At least since I first read Neuromancer, and probably well before that. So the real question is whether it’s worth the premium and risk to be a “Glass Explorer.”

As with all such decisions, I tend to make two lists: for and against.

For:

• I get to play with a new toy first, and show it off. Have to admit, I’m not a big “gadget for the sake of gadgets” guy. I don’t really care what conclusions others draw relating to my personal technology: either whether I am a cool early adopter or a “glasshole.” I use tech that works for me. So, this kind of “check me out I got it first” doesn’t really appeal to me. I guess the caveat there is that I would like the opportunity to provide the first reviews of the thing.
• I get to do simple apps: This is actually a big one. I’m not a big programmer, and I don’t have a lot of slack time this year for extra projects, but I would love to create tools for lecturing, for control, for class management, and the like. And given one of the languages they support for app programming is Python–the one I’m most comfortable in–I can see creating some cool apps for this thing. But… well, see the con column.
• I could begin integrating it now, and have a better feel for whether I think it will be mass adopted, and what social impacts it might have. I am, at heart, a futurist. I think some people who do social science hope to explain. I am interested in this, but my primary focus is being able to anticipate (“predict” is too strong) social changes and find ways to help shape them. Glass may be this, or it may not, but having hands on early on will help me to figure that out.

Against:

• Early adopter tax. There is a lot of speculation as to what these things will cost when they are available widely, and when that will be. The only official indication so far is “something less than $1,500.” I suspect they will need to be much less than that if they are to be successful, and while there are those throwing around numbers in the hundreds, I suspect that price point will be right around $1,000, perhaps a bit higher. That means you are paying a $500 premium to be a beta tester, and shouldering a bit of risk in doing so.
• Still don’t know its weak points. Now that they are actually getting shipped to developers and “thought leaders,” we might start to hear about where they don’t quite measure up. Right now, all we get is the PR machine. That’s great, but I don’t like putting my own money toward something that Google says is great. I actually like most of what Google produces, but “trust but verify” would make me much more comfortable. In particular, I already suspect it has two big downvotes for me. First, I sincerely hope it can support a bluetooth keyboard. I don’t want to talk to my glasses. Ideally, I want an awesome belt- or forearm-mounted keyboard–maybe even a gesture aware keyboard (a la Swype) or a chording keyboard. Or maybe a hand-mounted pointer. If it can’t support these kinds of things, it’s too expensive. (There is talk of a forearm-mounted pad, but not a lot of details.)
• Strangleware. My Android isn’t rooted, but one of the reasons I like it is that it *could* be. Right now, it looks like Glass can only run apps in the cloud, and in this case, it sounds like it is limited to the Google cloud. This has two effects. First, it means it is harder for the street to find new uses for Glass–the uses will be fairly prescribed by Google. That’s a model that is not particularly appealing to me. Second, developers cannot charge for Glass apps. I can’t imagine this is an effective strategy for Google, but I know from a more immediate perspective that while I am excited to experiment with apps (see above) for research and learning, I also know I won’t be able to recoup my $1,500 by selling whatever I develop. Now, if you can get direct access to Glass from your phone (and this would also address the keyboard issue), that may be another matter.
• No resale. I guess I could hedge this a bit if I knew I could eBay the device if I found it wasn’t for me. But if the developer models are any indication, you aren’t permitted to resell. You are out the $1,500 with no chance of recovering this.

I will keep an open mind, and check out reviews as they start to trickle in from developers, as well as reading the terms & conditions, but right now, I am leaning to giving up my invite and waiting with the other plebes for broad availability. And maybe spending less on a video enabled quadracopter or a nice Mindstorms set instead.

Or, someone at Google will read this, and send me a dozen of the things as part of a grant to share with grad students so we can do some awesome research in the fall. But, you know, I’m not holding my breath. (I do hope they are doing this for someone though, if not me. If Google is interested in education, they should be making these connections.)

“The trade” is simply that you are permitted to use a system like Facebook for free, and in return you give them permission to sell information about what you say and do on the service. This trade has been criticized on a number of grounds. The user often does not understand what she is giving up, either because it isn’t clear what damage that loss of privacy might bring in the future, or that the deal is cleverly concealed in 30 pages of legalese that constitutes the End-User License Agreement. Others suggest that privacy itself is a human right and not any more subject to barter than is your liver.

But Doctorow doubles down on the myth of the trade, suggesting merely that it is a bad deal, a deal with the devil. You are trading your immortal privacy for present-day reward. I don’t disagree with the details of his argument, but in this case I don’t know that the devil really is in the details. Maybe it’s not a deal with the devil, but a deal with a Tengu.

A tengu, for those who are not familiar, is a long nosed beastie from Japanese mythology, often tied to esoteric Buddhism and specifically the yamabushi. (Those of you who have visited me in the office have probably seen one or two tengu masks, left over from when I lived near the Daiyuzan Saijyouji temple.) The deal with the Tengu is sometimes told a bit differently, with, in one case, the human claiming that he is afraid of gold or mochi (and the Tengu producing these in abundance to scare him off), or a tengu getting nailed with a splinter while a woodcutter is doing his work, and complaining about the human tendency to not think about the consequences of their actions. In other words, there is a deal, but maybe the end user is making out like a bandit.

Right now, it’s not clear what value Facebook, to take our earlier example, is extracting from this personal data. Clearly it is part of some grail of behavioral marketing. Yes, they present ads based on browsing behavior now, and yes, I suspect those targeted ads are more effective (they’ve worked on me at least once), but I’m not sure that the marginal price Facebook can command for this data adds up to all that much, except in the aggregate. Indeed, for many users of the service, the bet against future value of privacy is a perfectly reasonable one to make.

I’ll put off for now an argument that comes dangerously close to “Zuck is right,” and suggests that our idea of “privacy” is pretty unstable, and that we are seeing a technologically mediated change in what “privacy” means not unlike the change we saw at the beginning of the last century. In other words “it’s complicated.”

Doctorow seems to suggest that all we are getting from this deal is a trickle of random emotional rewards in the form of responses from our social network. Is this the same guy who invented Whuffie‽ Those connections are not mere cheap treats, but incredibly valuable connections. The are not provided by Facebook (or Twitter or Google, etc.) but they are brokered by them. Facebook is the eBay of social interaction, and so they take a small slice out of each deal. Can Facebook be disintermediated? Of course! But for now they are the disintermediator, making automatic the kinds of introductions and social maintenance that in earlier times was handled by a person.

In other words, if there is an exchange–and again, I’m not sure this idea of a trade adequately represents the complexity of the relationship–it isn’t at all clear that it is zero-sum, or that the user loses as much as she gains.

This does not at all obviate some of the solutions Doctorow suggests. Strategically lying to systems is, I think, and excellent way of mediating the ability of systems to tie together personal data in ways you would prefer do not happen. But I suspect that people will continue to cede personal data not just because the EULA is obscure, or because they poorly estimate future cost of sharing, but because they find it to be a good deal. Providing them the tools to be able to make these decisions well is good practice because arming citizens with both information and easy ways of making choices is essentially a Good Thing™. But I would be surprised if it led to less sharing. I expect just the opposite.

Over the last few days, I’ve been exploring Google Plus a bit, in my spare time, along with a quarter million of my closest friends around the globe. There are already a lot of reviews… that’s not what this is. I find it to be an interesting entry point, and I’m curious to see what happens with it. As I said on Twitter, I’m cautiously optimistic about its future.

That said, I’m curious what that future will be. A lot of people worry, rightly so, about the privacy implications of Google properties all combining their connections to users and assimilating us all into a massive, Google-controlled borg. But if anything, the opposite is also a concern.

I work a lot with Google documents with teams, and I find it to be a really useful tool. What works for ad hoc collaboration, however, doesn’t work as well for continuing collaboration or managing groups. If I have a group or organization, keeping track of project teams and the like who want to use Google Docs is a nightmare. Not only does it tend to be fussy with non-Google emails, it’s a pain to create groups in Google and then invite them to a document.

The biggest missing feature in the Googleverse is effective management of groups. Google Groups certainly isn’t it. And I was hopeful that Circles might be.

And it could be if you could share circles. Right now, I can create circles to indicate who is who and who sees what in my update streams. Cool. But no one can see what my circles are. As I noted in an early post on G+, that’s a good thing. I wanted to know this before I created, say, a circle called “people who annoy me.” All of us have people like this in our lives, and for one reason or another are forced to interact with them, and we probably could group them this way in our head. Nonetheless, we wouldn’t want this–or many other groupings–to be public.

I am thinking back to other social networks that attempted to create classes of connections that require a whole range of negotiations. It’s hard enough for me to divide people between “friends” and “associates”–if on top of this I had to then justify that decision to people who are in those two groups, I assume I would have very few of either.

So, as a default, I’m fine with the title and grouping of circles remaining private by default. (Although it’s not as clear that this is true of the latter case, since you can find out the list of people who have access to a particular post, and perhaps surmise some group boundaries that way.) But I want the ability to make my circles public, and perhaps to have people in the circle be able to add new people to the circle.

What sort of a circle would that be? I now have a circle called “QUICM students” that includes past and present students in the grad program where I teach. I took a first stab at dropping people into that group, but I know that there are others I’ve missed. I need something that is much more akin to traditional group management. Others in the group need to be able to add members from the outside, and perhaps with some groups, they need to be able to add themselves.

I don’t see that this is a big push away from Circles, and I really hope that G+ develops in that direction. Without some way of creating and managing groups, it will lose out on a function that is missing not just from their social networking effort, but from a lot of Google applications. One group I am working with has decided to use ManyMoon as a way of managing this function, and others turn to other approaches. But a robust group management feature would be a great addition to G+.

If that group/circle identity management solution could also be cleanly integrated with Docs, with Reader, even with Groups (which might become superfluous in this case), I think we would have a platform for distributed collaboration that would be helpful to businesses, to educators, and to anyone else who wants to get things done in a group.

Why?

Because it was hacked. This happened back in April, and happened to a lot of other WordPress installs. The only reason I knew about the potential de-listing is that I got a note on my Google Webmaster account. I fixed the problem and asked for a review. I figured, 30 days delisting is fair enough. But now, months later, I appear to just be out of luck.

Google’s a private company, and can choose to exclude whomever they like. That doesn’t make it any less suckful, though. And especially since I’ve written a book that could be considered critical of Google (but barely so–I’ve been a pretty consistent booster), there is always the worry that this snub is intentional. I don’t think this is the case. I think Google is just inept and inefficient, not actively censoring a critic. But I also think that if they are trying to avoid being evil, they need to try harder, and relist my blog.

Until then, I’m going to promote Bing at every turn.