Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote ‘The Search,’ that hero was Google – the book wasn’t about Google alone, but Google’s narrative worked to drive the entire story. – John Battelle
Google Now is one of those products that to many users doesn’t seem like a product at all. It is instead the experience one has when you use the Google Search application on your Android or iPhone device (it’s consistently a top free app on the iTunes charts). You probably know it as Google search, but it’s far, far more than that. – John Battelle
Brand marketers don’t believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone. – John Battelle
As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you’ve allotted for vacation. – John Battelle
If we as a society do not understand ‘the cloud,’ in all its aspects – what data it holds, how it works, what the bargains are we make as we engage with it, we’ll all be the poorer for it, I believe. – John Battelle
When you use Facebook, you’re always logged in, and your identity and relationships – to others, to content, to apps and services – are assets Facebook can use to customize your experience (oh, and your ads). – John Battelle
The beauty of the innovation that flows from the open web is that no one has to ask for permission, get a credential, or win a Disrupt or Launch award to go prove their idea is worthy. They just… put up a page on the web, iterate, iterate, iterate… and eventually, a Facebook emerges. – John Battelle
The smart phone isn’t a perfect device, as we all know. It forces the world into a tiny screen. It runs out of battery, bandwidth, and power. It distracts us from the world around us. – John Battelle
Facebook’s data trove is enviable, and its moves into nearly every aspect of our lives – from payment to media, will create even more of it. The company also has created a huge base of developers for its platform, but the ecosystem is incomplete compared to vertically integrated OSes like iOS, Mac or Windows. – John Battelle
The largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young, when the universe was ‘complete’ – the entire web was searchable! Now our digital lives are utterly fractured – in apps, in walled gardens like Facebook, across clunky interfaces like those in automobiles or Comcast cable boxes. – John Battelle
Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality. – John Battelle
It seems everyone is converging on a simple set of facts: Our lives are digital, and we wish to share our lives. Pinterest came at it through images, artfully curated. Facebook came at it through friends, cunningly organized. Dropbox came to it via files, cleverly clouded. – John Battelle
Way back in 2008, when the iPhone was new and Instagram was a gleam in Kevin Systrom’s eye, I was involved in creating a service called CrowdFire. It was a way for fans at a festival (the first was Outside Lands) to share photos, tweets, and texts in a location and event specific way. – John Battelle
In short, Now is Google’s attempt at becoming the real time interface to our lives – moving well beyond the siloed confines of ‘search’ and into the far more ambitious world of ‘experience.’ As in – every experience one has could well be lit by data delivered through Google Now. – John Battelle
If you’re going to build something, don’t build on land someone else already owns. You want your own land, your own domain, your own sovereignty. Trouble is, so much of the choice land – the land where all the people are – is already owned by someone else: By Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Apple (in apps, anyway). – John Battelle
The truth is, truly passionate media creators don’t get into the media business to make huge gains from spectacular unicorn exits. When it happens, we certainly all cheer (and perhaps secretly hope it happens to us). But the fact is, we make media because we don’t know what else to do with ourselves. It’s how we’re wired, so to speak. – John Battelle
Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I’d like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 A.M. at a corner market in New York City. – John Battelle
Google+ was, to my mind, all about creating a first-party data connection between Google most important services – search, mail, YouTube, Android/Play, and apps. – John Battelle
There are essentially two main reasons to hold a phone up at a show. First, to capture a memory for yourself, a reminder of the moment you’re enjoying. And second, to share that moment with someone – to express your emotions socially. Both seem perfectly legitimate to me. – John Battelle
I’ll admit it: I’m one of those people who has a Google News alert set for my own name. – John Battelle
Search is now more than a web destination and a few words plugged into a box. Search is a mode, a method of interaction with the physical and virtual worlds. What is Siri but search? What are apps like Yelp or Foursquare, but structured search machines? Search has become embedded into everything and has reached well beyond its web-based roots. – John Battelle
Drones ply the liminal space between the physical and the digital – pilots fly them, but aren’t in them. They are versatile and fascinating objects – the things they can do range from the mundane (aerial photography) to the spectacular – killing people, for example. – John Battelle
In a world lit by data, street corners are painted with contextual information, automobiles can navigate autonomously, thermostats respond to patterns of activity, and retail outlets change as rapidly (and individually) as search results from Google. – John Battelle
Google Now supplants the need to open an app by surfacing cards – cards that magically turn into just the information you need, when you need it – without having to go to an app to get it. – John Battelle
We speak of ‘software eating the world,’ ‘the Internet of Things,’ and we massify ‘data’ by declaring it ‘Big.’ But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It’s hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the ‘real world’ of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home. – John Battelle
Anytime Facebook wants to change how it might use all that data about you, in any way, across any service it has within the Facebook ecosystem, all it has to do is change one privacy policy, tell you about it, and that’s that. – John Battelle
The Web 2.0 world is defined by new ways of understanding ourselves, of creating value in our culture, of running companies, and of working together. – John Battelle
I’ve always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That’s how Facebook started, after all. – John Battelle
In the past, Google has used teams of humans to ‘read’ its street address images – in essence, to render images into actionable data. But using neural network technology, the company has trained computers to extract that data automatically – and with a level of accuracy that meets or beats human operators. – John Battelle
Boxes and rectangles on the side or top of a website simply do not deliver against brand advertising goals. Like it or not, boxes and rectangles have for the most part become the province of direct response advertising, or brand advertising that pays, on average, as if it’s driven by direct response metrics. – John Battelle
