Part of me wants to laugh, part of me wants to cry, and part of me wants to say "Good for them."
What's next? Photoshop? Flash? It's weird to see a large company embrace this type of business model, which (at least in my mind) is normally reserved for the smaller guys.
I bet they're just testing the waters. I suppose Acrobat is a good product to do it with.
What did Google expect of this? Did they think they would fight this guy, and suddenly he would give up writing about this case?
I feel like they got a pyrrhic victory here.If your customer is getting his answers in the form of evidence at a hearing, you're doing something wrong, regardless of whether or not he was actually in violation of the terms of use.
Anyway, thanks for adding this. It's good to read how it all ended up.
Not to me, Google comes across as muscling out a small business for their own interest. Isn't this the definition of using a monopoly position for anti-competitive practice? Their position is completely undermined as soon as they introduce a product for squatting exactly like what he had made on his own.
Note that at the time of the original termination of his account, the terms of use did not forbid use with parked domains and the service itself did not provide any distinction between parked domains and regular domains.
What the aces? Google is defending the terms of service explicitly agreed upon by this person. He completely and flagrantly went against those terms. The only intriguing part of this whole story is how seriously Google takes their terms of service.
Google defended the terms from someone who very clearly broke them.
That guy who was shut out of Google Checkout for absolutely no reason? Legit. This guy? Nope. He clearly broke the rules and paid for it justly.
We all agree Google should cut the spammers off, but they need to have a rational policy for how they communicate with their partners, customers, etc.
I expect better from Google regarding the customer service. It shouldn't be a mystery to anyone what happened to their account/balances at Google and he shouldn't have to go to court to figure this out. It's frightening to me that we all depend so much on Google and yet you can chock up the bad service to "defending the terms of service".
Sure he has no recourse in the law for this, he did badly, justice was served-- but that doesn't mean it's right for Google to behave the way it does with its users. Google should be open, frank, and clear in their dealings.
Someone tried unsuccessfully to login to my account a few times. They messed up... and yes, it was a pain to get any response from them for a few days, but I love them again ;)
The exact thought I had. Having just released a widget this weekend I had thought about how to give it a thorough test. I'll just try it out on some different blog platforms was my sad idea. Then, this today. Thank you very much Gabriel!
I wonder if there's a potential web app here. Something like Crossfire was for TV, just less "fueling the argument" and more "getting both sides of the story."
Microsoft Research has developed an interesting experiment along those lines, which unfortunately remains offline, although someone has registered the domain: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/blews/
There's a site, which I found via HN, I think, that allows readers to vote on the bias of articles posted. Articles are then categorized as left, right or balanced. I'd post the link, but I can't find it anywhere.
Patenting qualms aside, I think this is a brilliant idea.
I wonder why this hasn't been implemented. I could definitely see using this format for detection, but then visually using square buttons. Best of both worlds?
> I could definitely see using this format for detection
Why have any gaps between the keys at all?
On a physical keyboard, you want gaps for at least a couple of reasons: so that your fingers can feel the edges, and so that you don't accidently click on two keys at once. Triangular keys might make some sense on a physical keyboard then, since presumably you would be able to press inside the combined area of the key's triangle and the two adjacent triangular gaps, so less chance of pressing two keys at once.
On a soft keyboard, you can't feel the edges of the keys, so the first point doesn't apply anymore. The second worry, pressing two keys at once, also doesn't apply, since the software calculates the centre point of the finger press, and activates the key which that point falls over, rather than all the keys under your finger.
With a soft key pad then, the only real way to make keys easier to press is to make them bigger. The iPhone for example, will increase the effective size of the keys that you are likely to press next, predicted based on language settings.
So, it probably hasn't been implemented for a soft key pad because it would make it harder to press the keys. You would press roughly in the right place, and get no response.
As for physical key pads, I notice that the Blackberry has keys with raised diagonals. That probably gets you most of the advantages of triangular keys (easier to feel them apart) without the need to actually make them triangular.
I'm imagining that the real HCI difference here is that which key your finger is determined to be centered on changes. Whereas before, touching the "gap" between a key above and below your finger would have an unpredictable 50/50 chance of activating either key, now the "gradient of precedence" of the keys fade out as they near the triangle point, so, assuming the triangles were pointed downward, you would always activate the key below. Making things predictable makes users happy. You could do this without the triangular display, of course; it's simply an interesting affordance to hint to users that they can use the keys this way.
Agreed. This is why I found it bizarre that the BlackBerry Storm's on-screen keboard mimics the 2-letters-per-button design of some of its hardware keyboards.
The buttons are all virtual, and the only thing that matters is the (x,y) coordinate of the screen press. so why encourage users to press the screen somewhere other than the center of the desired letter?
For me, it's all planning. I consider myself a terrible coder, so I have to lay out everything first. Working from that plan, I get things done fast.
Think of it like giving a speech. Write the speech, revise it, and then go over it in your head (The "practicing in front of a mirror" part doesn't really apply here.) Then, finally, give the speech. You might stumble over a few words, or have to consult your cue cards occasionally, but there's nothing wrong with that. You'll do it less as you give more speeches.
As much as I hate it when video game folks claim their industry is recession-proof, I have to agree that it's probably mostly other factors at work here.
What's next? Photoshop? Flash? It's weird to see a large company embrace this type of business model, which (at least in my mind) is normally reserved for the smaller guys.
I bet they're just testing the waters. I suppose Acrobat is a good product to do it with.