I’ll spare you the summary post for Google+; you can get that on TechCrunch, Mashable, the New York Times and in about a thousand other places. It’s a social sharing component that’s directly integrated into Google, enhancing everything they do. It puts privacy front and center using a long-rumored feature called Circles, which in my opinion mostly serves to make the user feel safe (after all, the data is still all stored on Google’s servers, so any appearance of deep privacy is an illusion). It learns from your social activity in order to recommend new content, thereby facilitating a kind of serendipity in content discovery that’s long been missing.

Although I haven’t used it first-hand yet, and Google often lets its ideas down with poor user experience, I think the concepts are brilliant: much-needed enhancements to the social networking paradigm that take it beyond the 2004-era profiles-friends-posts model. I can’t wait to try it out.

They’re not pushing this aspect too hard, but I think Google+ is going to be strongest in the area where Facebook is weakest: small to medium businesses. You’d have to be an idiot to try and use Facebook as an internal communication tool in any company, but by adding Circles, Google+ enables just that: you can share real-time content between just a small number of people. More than that, though, up to ten people can videoconference live, optionally while consuming that same content.

If Google have pulled this off, and if Google+ is properly integrated with Google Apps, they’ve instantly created the best business collaboration tool on the market – as well as a great tool for people who want to share in a much deeper, less trivial way than Facebook currently allows. If they then add an API layer, as they have with many of their other offerings, they’ve created a social layer for the web, just as Google Maps is for many people a location layer. It’s a really big deal.

Of course, it’s centralized on Google’s servers, and educational institutions, government organizations and anyone with a legal or ethical obligation to treat users’ data as being private should stay away. The decentralized web community is busy creating better tools for those use cases, and for anyone who cares deeply about privacy, as well as entirely new interface models. Circles itself is not a million miles away from Diaspora’s Facets, for example, and there’s still everything to play for. Nonetheless, Google have iterated social networking as a concept, and I’m fascinated to see how the web community in general responds.

Update: Google also announced Google Takeout today: a tool that allows you to export your Google data and take it with you. Google+ is very much in the mix here. Could this be the first mainstream social network to achieve real data portability? Given the number of decentralized social web advocates on the team, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Update 2: I took an export of my Google account via Takeout (you can do the same here) and although it’s impressive, I was left with questions. Why does Google Buzz export as a huge number of HTML files rather than an Activity Stream, for example? Where are my Google Docs files? It looks like the bundle wasn’t designed to import into other software, which I would have thought is kind of the point?

latakoo is looking for a Java developer. Interested? Get in touch.

It’s been a slow progression. First, I moved from Eclipse, for years my Integrated Development Environment of choice, to NetBeans, which I’ve been using for the last year or so. It’s faster, leaner, and less prone to bringing down my computer for no readily apparent reason. But now, slowly, I’m making my way to Coda. And it’s like a breath of fresh air. It just works.

It surely helps that Coda is a native code web development IDE, while the other two are optimized for (and built on) Java. For large applications, Java is a dog. But there’s something more to it: while NetBeans and Eclipse feel engineered, Coda feels designed. As well as checking that everything works, someone went through the trouble of checking how it feels to use. The emotional experience was an important part of the design.

Beyond programming languages and development methodologies, the most important skill a developer can have is empathy. To be useful, software needs to be built with a deep understanding of my needs as a user, which may be different to another user’s needs. I write both software and short stories, and I use the same approach for both: I’m writing for an audience. Open source often feels like it’s scratching an itch; rather than users, the software is often written for the developer. We know that over 80% of Linux kernel contributions are made by corporations, so it’s reasonable to infer that most open source software is built to feel an internal corporate need.

Consequently, interaction design is underrepresented in open source. Versions 0.1 through 0.9 of Elgg featured interfaces built by Dave Tosh and myself, reacting to reports of what users found difficult or confusing. They were usable, but although I’m proud of them, they were undeniably clunky. From version 1.0, we had Pete Harris on board, an actual UX designer, who made a world of difference to the project. I don’t think Elgg would be as popular as it is without him. (Now that he’s moved on – alongside the rest of the 1.0 core team – I’m interested to see how the interface develops.)

Open source is an important, valid methodology with many applications. I still completely stand behind it, but I’m not willing to use inferior software for ideology’s sake. So how can we improve the design ethic in open source?

Part of the problem is market. To be blunt, commercial software needs to sell, and usable interfaces are an integral part of that; open source projects don’t, and often sell support as a funding strategy. Making the software easier isn’t, therefore, always part of the dynamic. (You’ll notice that the best-designed open source projects - WordPress, StatusNet et al – all have a commercial version.) It’s also not necessarily part of the engineer’s agenda: I’ve too often heard software developers discuss design as a kind of fluffy afterthought that they don’t view as being as important. I try not to hire developers with this mindset; anyone who thinks they’re more important than anyone else in the development process is destructive.

Another problem, though, is designer attitude. Who wants to give away their hard work for free, after all? Designers already complain about their work being undervalued on marketplaces like 99designs. (Oddly, very few developers complain about their profession being undervalued on sites like oDesk, although I think it is.) While developers see having a Github repository as a kind of portfolio, and participation in an open source project as career-building, designers don’t have the same incentives. Although there are individual examples – Chris Messina’s involvement in Firefox undoubtedly boosted his career, for example – a designer’s participation in an open source community is not generally seen as being awesome. Yet.

Open source companies have an incentive here, and a responsibility to the community to promote this ethos. They should understand the importance of hiring designers, and they should give preference to designers who have contributed to open source projects. Most importantly, developers should understand that designers are engineers too: they just work with a different set of tools.

Illustration: Design Is Not My Job 1, by Andy Mangold, released under a Creative Commons license.

My talented friend Michael Goldrei designed the icon set for Agit, a Git client for Android by Roberto Tyley. Git has become the creative geek’s source control system of choice, and having a native Android client is a great thing. (Source control allows the source code for an application to be managed in a way that prevents developers from overwriting each other’s changes, or from making irreversible, catastrophic mistakes that destroy everything. It’s pretty much crucial in modern software development.)

If you’ve got an Android device, you can grab Agit from the Android Market over here.

Roberto actually fixed Android’s zlib implementation in the process; the patch he submitted is now running on some of the newer Honeycomb tablets. He’s also designed the app to share SSH connection information in a pool with other compatible apps – something that would be completely impossible on iOS. I’m looking forward to seeing more developer tools in this vein.

The other day, Steve Jobs stood up and announced iCloud, which replaces the PC as the hub in the iOS device ecosystem, demoting it to just another device. You no longer need to have a PC to activate or synchronize an iPhone or an iPad. This is right, and proper, and in some ways long overdue.

Meanwhile, Nintendo announced Wii U, which connects to your TV like virtually every home game console before it, but also has touchscreens embedded in the controllers. You can move a game from the TV to a controller in mid-flow, for example if someone wants to watch TV. It’s not a stretch to think that someone might be able to watch a streamed TV show on a controller while someone plays a game on the television.

A few days earlier, Microsoft previewed Windows 8′s new interface:

“It’s going to run on laptops, it’s going to run on desktops, it’s going to run on PCs with mouse and keyboard,” says Microsoft’s Jensen Harris after demonstrating the Windows 8 interface in the company video below. ”It’s going to run on everything.”

We’re moving towards a very different paradigm for personal computing. In this connected future, more than ever before, the device is a conduit. You can consume the content or applications that you want, when you want, where you want, on the device you want; content, data and applications are all untethered to any particular object.

This doesn’t have to be any less secure, any less powerful or any less customizable than what you’re already doing. Most consumers will get their computing through Apple and Microsoft, as they already do (Google have ChromeOS, but unless there are major, secret features primed for release, it suddenly looks small-scale compared to the alternatives). Linux users will continue to run Linux – on their PC, on their phone and on their personal open source clouds.

Importantly, virtually all of the cloud platforms on the market have some kind of web technology component (you’re going to be able to build Windows 8 apps in HTML and JavaScript, for example); it’s pretty clear where all of this is going.

I’m writing and posting this blog post on a six hour flight. The Internet is increasingly everywhere; by moving to the cloud, we’re allowing for lower up-front device costs backed up by ongoing subscriptions. The platform providers are going to do very well out of this. Whereas in the current paradigm they capture value by locking users into application compatibility bubbles (Windows apps won’t run on Mac OS X, etc), in the cloud-based future, the lock-in comes from who runs the cloud servers. When Bill Gates started out, his vision was of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software; if he was starting out today, his vision might be a connected device in every pocket running on the Microsoft cloud.

Although this is a step forward in my opinion, there are dangers. Think about how “cloud services” as we’ve known them to date (web tools like Facebook) have monetized; they mine user data. As we put more and more sensitive information into the cloud, the challenge will be to maintain ownership over our information, maintain privacy over our activity, and to ensure that no one company gets to control this brave new world.

Recently, there’s been a lot of buzz in tech circles about college being a waste of time. It started with investor Peter Thiel’s creation of the Thiel Fellowship, which awards potential students technology & entrepreneurship mentorship and $100,000 of incubation money to work on their own projects. In an interview with the National Review, he remarked:

You know, we’ve looked at the math on this, and I estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the colleges in the U.S. are not generating a positive return on investment.

Over on TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy mused:

[...] For Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe.

The touchpaper was lit, and the meme began to spread. The Washington Post discussed the relative merits of different degree majors:

Over a lifetime, the earnings of workers who have majored in engineering, computer science or business are as much as 50 percent higher than the earnings of those who major in the humanities, the arts, education and psychology, according to an analysis by researchers at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

[...] “Education is so off-the-charts expensive now,” said poet and Florida International University professor Campbell McGrath. who noted that his son is considering an anthropology degree. “You are making a really weird decision if you decide to send your kids off to study philosophy. It would be a better world if we all studied the humanities. But it’s not a good dollars-and-cents decision.”

A couple of days ago, Mahalo’s outspoken CEO Jason Calacanis chipped in:

The education bubble feels a lot like the housing bubble: it’s based on credit, it keeps growing and a lot of the folks participating don’t have the ability to pay back the money they are borrowing.

Anyway, back to the point. Preschool and primary education in this bubble is three to four times what I paid for college ($9K for Fordham University at Lincoln Center in the late 1980s-early 1990s). A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year.

People are spending $500K on their kid’s education — before college! Insane!

This is why we have something called “public education”, which is a hugely important resource that none of us should take for granted. I was publicly educated, and my children, when I eventually have some, will be too. But I digress. He continued:

What would a parent pay to have their 19-year-old sit next to one of the brilliant Twitter triumvirate: Evan Williams, Biz Stone or Jack Dorsey?

What if you could pay $25K a year for three years and have them spend one year shadowing each of these individuals? Would you pay $50K a year?

[...] After three years of sitting next to folks at $35K a year for $100K, you give your child $50K to start a company and you’re in for $150K. That’s probably $100K less than you would spend on a private school all in.

[...] It would be better than spending money on college, right?

Cue Dale Stephens, one of the recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, who made his feelings known over on CNN:

College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. In the book “Academically Adrift,” sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college. Student loan debt in the United States, unforgivable in the case of bankruptcy, outpaced credit card debt in 2010 and will top $1 trillion in 2011.

Fortunately there are productive alternatives to college. Becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or mastering the phrase “Would you like fries with that?” are not the only options.

Enough was enough. The New Yorker attempted to justify a college education, but came across just a little bit elitist:

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.

College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential.

Nonetheless, they nailed how education is used in today’s employment marketplace. Assuming that all we care about is a graduate’s work prospects, let’s return to that Washington Post article:

In general, the study found that a college degree is a good investment. It showed that a worker with a bachelor’s degree can expect to make 84 percent more in a lifetime than a colleague who has only a high school diploma.

Combined with Peter Thiel’s napkin figure that 70% of college programs are not providing a return on investment, and the Washington Post’s report that engineering, computer science and business students end up making 50% more, the numbers seem to suggest that the people Thiel is paying to not attend college are some of the people who would get the most out of college.

The New Yorker article is elitist, but that’s one of the true purposes of universities: to create an elite. They’re gatekeepers: a way for people to hold up a piece of paper and prove – at least in the minds of the general population – what they’re capable of. Standardized qualifications make hiring more efficient (or at least, that’s the assumption), and ensure that an individual’s claimed skills and achievements have some oversight.

This is the essence of a gatekeeper. I’ve written and spoken extensively about gatekeepers, and there’s a real chance that just as other gatekeepers have fallen or been dramatically reconfigured in the wake of Internet models, the fabric of how we think about qualifications will be radically changed. In fact, I hope it will be. A college degree isn’t just an intelligence test; it’s a test of one’s ability to follow instructions within a set framework, and a test of one’s access to resources.

This leads to a simple but important question: if we are to lose faith in college degrees, how can we best represent what an individual is capable of? Could LinkedIn-style social portfolios, with testimonials ranked according to built-in trust metrics, fill the gap? Or will we be left having to take peoples’ word for their own achievements?

I’m inclined to think that we’ll figure out a strong, decentralized, less-elitist way of going about this. But there’s a bigger question in all of this, too. If you take salaries away and look only at the overall education of a person, and the overall knowledge of our global society at large, don’t universities have some inherent value?

I would argue that they do. I also think that looking at direct salaries as the sole measure of ROI in an institution is a short-term, short-sighted way to look at the world. Sure, some degrees yield less well-paying jobs than others. However, the contribution to our overall well-being, and to our economy, shouldn’t be overlooked. The world is a complex system, and just because a degree has a lower financial benefit in the first instance to its graduates, doesn’t mean it has no benefit, either to them or the people connected to them. Think about teachers, or nurses: both are poorly rewarded, but we need them for our society to work. Historians, literary theorists and philosophers are all important, and make our lives better. This is where – or at least, one of the places where – I strongly depart from libertarians like Thiel. Simply put, I think their “enlightened self interest” is near-sighted; perhaps fatally so.

I agree with Dana Levine:

I agree that we should encourage students to delay entering college, but I think that we need to focus on fixing our educational system rather than abandoning it. [...] For some reason, most of the people I knew who delayed college by one year seemed better adjusted than the people who went straight to college.

[...] I think that we should encourage kids to delay college by one year. During that year, they should be able to pursue something they are passionate about, or if they aren’t self-motivated enough to come up with something, they should be provided with service opportunities that allow them to have a more structured experience. After one year, a lot of them will run (not walk) to college. Some will realize that they can make do on their own, but I honestly think that will be fewer people than you would expect. Hopefully the kids who do go to college at 19 or 20 will be far better customers of higher education than the naive ones who now come in at 17 or 18.

Rather than abandoning a system that doesn’t completely work, let’s understand the value of what we have, and try to make it better.

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