A Week In: Froyo 2.2 Solves HTC Sense Sensitivity

When the much-awaited upgrade to Android's core operating system finally made its way to the HTC Evo last week, I mentioned I was concerned it wouldn't knock out a peculiar bug I had seen with my phone, which at times locked it up, or made it take actions I hadn't initiated myself. In the interest of fairness, it is worth noting the bug is gone.

Whether it was solved between Eclair (2.1) and Froyo (2.2) or whether HTC's code was cleaner this time around, I am not sure, but the end result is the same, and I am much more confident using the phone than I was before the upgrade.

Mentioning the issue obviously opened up the potential for criticism from folks who see Google's ecosystem as introducing fragility, but as mentioned when I discussed my intent to be pragmatic, even if I have made a personal choice, I want to be fair, pointing out both what has been great, and what has been less than fantastic. The intermittent locking bug, which emerged just after an over the air (OTA) update from HTC in June, at times threatened to upend my preferences and pull the rug out from my switching away from iPhone. But it's gone, and it's full speed ahead in using the platform which now seems more natural to me than when I bump into iOS on the iPad.

Also gone with the 2.2 update? Many of the application failures that at times popped up from background applications, as mentioned when I first discussed my experience with Evo. While 2.2 wasn't a game changer, in my opinion, adding a few nice features and some speed, the real benefit to me has been making the entire experience more smooth and eliminating issues I had - not a moment too soon.

To Protect Me, Amazon Has Decided to Kill Me

For the amount of transparency I put online, combined with my preference to purchase things online wherever possible, I have to count myself lucky that nothing nefarious has ever happened to my data. I have never seen false orders on my behalf, been a victim of identity theft, had to cancel accounts and change passwords everywhere, cut up credit cards, or reverse charges due to anything related to my Web use, so far as I can recall. It's possible that winning streak came to an end this last week, thanks to a flag from Amazon, saying that my account had been suspended immediately, due to suspected fraudulent activity. Rather than take their good advice, I am instead hoping I can prove all is well, and the mistake lies with them. Foolhardy, I know, but worth a shot.

I have e-mail receipts of activity from shopping with Amazon.com spanning for more than a decade. Even though I don't use the site as much as I used to, no longer buying books (as I once did regularly) or CDs (long since replaced by iTunes, Spotify and others), the idea of the account getting zapped, and needing to start over with all-new personalization and buying history, seems odd. I am something of an Internet account packrat, and I like the consistency. And even if it seems naive, I still doubt somebody got enough data to make an order on my behalf - as no other account, anywhere, shows one micron of suspicion.

The odd behavior with Amazon started at the end of last month, I bet. When I moved across town, I changed the address associated with my VISA card. Later, I went to Amazon and changed it there as well, including on my Amazon Wish List, which I typically look at a mere once a year, just before Holidays.

A week later, on August 5th, I got an odd e-mail, which was so text-heavy and non-interesting I almost dismissed it as a phishing scam. Entitled "Account Closure: Please Read", the e-mail explained:

"After careful review of your account, we believe it may have been accessed and used by a third-party to place order(s) without your permission. It seems that someone obtained your personal account and/or financial information elsewhere, and used it on Amazon.com to access your account.

We have closed your Amazon.com account effective immediately because of this possible unauthorized account activity. If this recent account activity (HP Pavilion dv6-3010us 15.6-Inch Laptop) was authorized by you, please reply to this message as soon as possible and we will reactivate your account."

Anybody who knows me knows there is no way I would by an HP laptop. Not for me, not for a friend, not for anyone I actually cared about. So it's obvious something is amiss. After checking the message's details and ascertaining it really had come from Amazon.com, I tried to login to my account, and couldn't get through. It really had been closed after all!

Morbidly curious, I checked activity on the credit card associated with the account, and found nothing weird. Similarly, no other account had a hair of concern associated. Every notification from Blippy could be traced to myself or my wife, and Chase, ETrade and Wells Fargo all came back clean. This only reinforced my thought Amazon goofed somewhere. So I reached out this week to follow up, and there's still a ways to go to finding out the truth.

Amazon makes it hard to reach anybody by phone on their site. Clearly with their scale, they want to avoid inbound calls, if possible. To get there, you have to hit Help, find the Contact Us button, and "Sign In to Contact Us". Of course, I couldn't sign in. Duh. So I clicked to skip sign in and found another set of questions to fill out to describe my story. Again, thwarted by tech, I could only put about 100 characters of description to explain. Try that. It's harder than it sounds.

Needless to say, I made it through and the young woman on the line couldn't solve my issue. There's simply no account assigned the e-mail address any more. After a decade's time purchasing on Amazon with the same ID and having them know me as well as they do, I'm locked out.

I completely understand their wanting to protect me as a customer, and stop problems before they start, but something is amiss. If my credit card data were truly compromised, would I not see spending somewhere else? What do you think? Should I convince Amazon they screwed up and get my account on, or should I start canceling and changing passwords everywhere? Either way, whether it is their fault or not, I don't think I will be shopping at Amazon very often going forward. It's a result of unintended consequences.

Twitter Says Shoutouts are Internal Only to "Give Props"

My late-night speculation on Twitter readying a new feature uncovered not a new way for users to send notices to others on the site, but instead, one of the multiple internal-only accounts used to raise company morale and togetherness.

Sean Garrett (@sg), in the company's communications group, sent an e-mail this morning saying the intriguing account was "not a product", after the discussion of the potential feature had reached ReadWriteWeb and TheNextWeb, among other places.

The entertaining denial and explanation is below:

There have been reports of a Twitter Shout Out™ product being launched on the market soon. We can neither confirm or deny a product at this time. Not even if you ask us really nicely*. However, what we can say is that we are always optimizing for user value and relevance. For example, just the other day Ev was saying that we should totally find ways to "give props" to users adding value on the system in a way that is organic to how people are already using Twitter. Someone told Ev that "give props" wasn't something that people said anymore. Biz -- or was it Jason? -- then said that "shout out" was now a more common vernacular for a "kind mention of a homie" (Urban Dictionary). Anywho, where were we? Oh yeah, Twitter Shout Out™ and that freakin' leak. Or was it a leak? Or was it after-midnight sleuthing? You tell me. Or, maybe the this is all some sort of some special tease to later to be revealed during Dancing with the Stars or, better yet, at halftime of an exhibition football game. Speaking of which, whatever happened with the folks in Up With People? Do you think they are really are still that happy?

*However, what we can say is that it's not a product. It's an internal account where Twitter employees "give props" to each other.

So there you go. It's another episode of my being wrong after midnight. See also: Independence Day Speculation on Brizzly and Foursquare. All part of the fun when you mix real-time discovery and real-time services that operate in public.

Don't Look for Hints of Buzz Demise After Wave's Closure

During last fall's debut of Google Wave, which seemed to be a launch of a complicated solution in search of a problem, I was immediately struck by the overwhelming nature of the platform, which inundated me with update after update and parallel conversations all vying for my attention. Not unsurprisingly, I stepped back from the product, as many people did - hoping it would improve in simplicity and utility over time, eventually becoming a product I could use for collaboration and real-time messaging. But that day never came. Like many products, much of Wave ended up being all about itself - as people first were attracted to its novelty, and later, many threads were all about how to best utilize it, with tips and tricks. It was there because it could be, not because it should be.

Wednesday's announcement that Google Wave has been discontinued as a stand-alone product is not dramatic for almost all people, as it wasn't being used all that much, beyond tire kicking, as people seeking social outlets went one way, and those seeking collaboration stuck to more traditional tools. Wave didn't kill e-mail or any social tool, and pieces of it will live on in other Google products as the company says they have learned from the episode.

With rumors of Google Me flying about, and Google Buzz still not having entirely recovered from some early misguided press and unclear utility in a social world dominated by Facebook and Twitter, it is logical to wonder, for some, if the Mountain View owned aggregation and sharing site will follow Wave to an early end. I would not be so fast to reach this conclusion, even if Google hasn't done as solid a job in marking product milestones the way they have finally determined how to make big splash launch announcements. The product, as best as I can tell, sees regular updates, with more features in the queue, and has a good, if not overwhelming, level of use from casual to devoted participants. And it seems very logical that even if Google doubles down with a new product like "Me", as rumored, that Buzz would play a major part in its development - as would the company's expanded Google Profiles.

At its end, Google Wave, for Google, was as much an application environment as it was a destination. Thus, its closure should not have elicited any more of a response than if we learned Google had abandoned the Go programming language, or Closure tools. But Wave wasn't hyped as a development platform or a bucket of features. It was thought of as potentially disrupting e-mail, and as recently as the South By Southwest conference (SXSW), the company's GMail team was being asked questions about competing with Wave for attention and resources at Google, and the panel called it "a leapfrog project" for the future Web, not today's Web.

Google Buzz is not a leapfrog project. It's hard for Google to force a leapfrog when it is they who are playing catchup in the social space. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has repeatedly stated the world does not need a Facebook clone, but it does seriously need a real alternative. Today, Buzz is not that alternative, and the team's developers never positioned it as a Facebook killer, Twitter killer or anything of that nature - instead focusing on building the product on open standards for sharing of content, and we have seen the Buzz buttons populate the Web in a way that less-successful products, FriendFeed included, never did.

Multiple sites, including TechCrunch and GigaOM, have reported Google has a new head of social in the company's VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra. Vic was present at blogger pre-briefings of Google Buzz back in February, and participated in the official launch on stage at their Mountain View campus, so he is very close to the team. Additionally, as I've previously mentioned, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is particularly keen on Buzz's success, and the company most certainly does not want to lose even more page views and advertising opportunities to social competitors.

That said, Google Buzz hasn't immediately captured the imagination of users and seen dramatic growth some have expected for it, although statistics for its use are practically impossible to find. Even as Google said it was not intended to be a head-on competitor to Facebook, it has instead been regarded internally as an extension of Gmail, and that likely isn't the best place to have an active social network, even as Schmidt says the team "is doing very well".

Following Buzz's debut and initial privacy bumps, the team discussed introducing new features as regularly as once a week - and visible introductions, ranging from the official Buzz buttons to integrated comment and like histories by account, have popped up, but the fanfare from Google has been minimal - as the company continues to do a less than stellar job of continuing to get press from iterative updates.

In a discussion I had with Google employees recently about why they choose to stay at the company instead of going to an IPO-bound alternative, most notably Facebook and Twitter, one responded that working at Google was like working with future technology that was anywhere from 12 to 18 months away, and that, like light reaching the Earth from stars extremely far away, we are working on technology that is itself somewhat dated.

With one foot deep in speculation and the other on more firm ground, I can't help but believe some of the relative quiet around Buzz from the Google team is related to their being focused on something else that leverages their work in a big way - the next social volley, whatever it turns out to be. But Buzz isn't going to get eighty-sixed only six months after launch. I think what we are seeing instead is the emergence out of the "Trough of Disillusionment" so popularized by Gartner's Hype cycle, and a slope toward productivity. When it climbs that slope, it might still be called Buzz, or it may have a new name, but it isn't going away soon.

You can, of course, find me on Buzz here: http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray.