OK having fulfilled my tourist guide duties with my UK colleagues, I got time to write up a quick report about Google IO. So here goes:

Disclaimer: These are my personal views, I was fortunate enough to be invited for the event on an “influencer” ticket.

For the TL;DR folk:

Google did a tremendous job with the conference, the organisation was impressive, their messaging concerning the web less “use Chrome” and more “here is cool web tech Chrome supports” and they released all the things I hoped and feared about: Chrome for Android and IOs. There was a massive amount of great tech talks and most are available online. Big web announcements were Chrome for Android and IOs and lots of updates to Android, Google+ and search on Android.

Now, more detailed info for those not conditioned by 5 second cuts in music videos:

Event organisation

Overall I was very impressed with the conference organisation. But of course there are some snags. Here are what worked and what annoyed:

Worked well:

• Value for money – on a very literal level – is ridiculously good. Just the hardware giveaways (more later) are giving your money back three-fold.
• Before the keynotes they showed demos submitted to chromedemos on stage – this must have made quite some people proud
• Lots of great content, a lot of it live streamed and already available on YouTube – I guess it helps owning that)
• Amazing AV equipment in the rooms and especially in the big keynote hall (the three screens made me drool and want to talk there, but it also would mean I have to make prettier slides)
• Food was adequate and ample, and drinks and coffee were available throughout the event
• The staffing of the “business hours” tables was very good and it was no problem whatsoever to get your questions answered (this might be as I knew a lot of them though). The Chrome booth was stacked with all the people in the devrel team and Chrome engineers, no boothbabes in sight. Actually, none at all. This was a Google event with Google experts – an impressive feat to pull off.
• Lots of places to charge your hardware – a lot of the rooms have rows and rows of outlets and there were massive Android figures standing around with all kind of cables to charge a plethora of devices.
• Every talk had a cardboard box with “+1” cards to throw in at the exit of the talks to vote for it. I loved that idea as it was physical, showed the 1 character of Google and gave them a mechanism to measure the success of the talk (that a few speakers I talked to never saw people changing the boxes is a bit worrying though). There was no scanning of your badge on the way in to the room as it was last year – I guess they gave up on that.
• Every talk was transcribed live on big screens for the hard of hearing – this is not cheap and hard to pull off, but a wonderful little touch.

Worked less well:

• The insane amount of attendees (around 5500) lead to a lot of queuing up for the keynotes and swag pickup (which needed both the conference badge and a photo ID which lead to even more delays). The first day we did a loop-the-loop around the keynote room to get in and the second day we had a long and random queue in the foyer. Maybe letting people in earlier would have fixed some of the issues.
• The repeat of the “amazing suprise” of the first keynote (people sky-diving onto the building wearing Google Glass) which was sold as a behind the scenes turned out to be probably the most boring Mythbusters episode ever. The reason for the repeat jump was that Google paid for two days of rights to fly over the Moscone centre to make sure the weather was good and as this is not a cheap feat they wanted to make the most out of it. They should have let me jump with the people on the second day – maybe in the Firefox costume (or as an Android, or just me).
• The Google+ presentations were weird. Whilst presenting the new Events feature (which is much better than what Facebook offers) and trying it out at the afterparty went down well, the obviously non-impressive numbers of Google+’s growth compared to competitors seemed not needed to me. I guess the focus is on fact soundbites for the press, but when they are easy to be slashed, why bother? Maybe I am just sick of the numbers game
• The official app for the event was laggy and didn’t get updated in time. I missed a few talks because of that. It also had the wrong hashtag when you tweeted from it (which I edited before sending off but I doubt a lot of people did which must have skewed the twitter numbers).
• Schedule display was patchy at times and I found far too much going on in parallel. Maybe shorter sessions would have allowed a better experience.
• The last day was very much empty and felt like an extra day for networking with not much organised content. Good idea but seeing that lots of people didn’t bother going defeated the networking purpose a bit.

Overall impressions

• The technical messaging was fair and interesting. Whilst last year a lot smacked of “look at those numbers aren’t we awesome and you should use us” this year was much more about “look what is possible and how we support it”
• Google released a lot of products and services in direct competition with smaller players (Tripit, Shazam, Turntable.fm) and released a few products blatantly aimed at Amazon (Kindle competition, offering Infrastructure as a service), Apple (Siri competition) and Microsoft Office (Docs upgrade to allow for collaborative writing and offline use – which only will work in Chrome).
• There was quite some snark aimed at Microsoft in the keynotes (“try doing that with Sharepoint and spreadsheets”) and of course there were “and another thing” and “xyz isn’t cool abc is cool” sightings.
• In comparison to last year the keynotes were more polished and seemed less “please use this”. There was more self-assurance on stage. However, quite some of it seemed too scripted for my taste and had a lot of “this is my favourite thing ever” which gets unbelievable after a while. I liked that the man showing Google Now and the lady presenting the design ideas behind Glass were scared as heck on stage and thus showed real emotions and were much more believable. The keynotes are online: Day1 Day 2
• The after party was much simpler than last year – Train was a very fitting band for San Francisco and Paul Oakenfold can’t have been cheap (but I had to spend a lot of time explaining US folk who he is). The alcohol ran out rather quickly, but that might actually be a good thing. There were a lot of entertainment things but less of a “maker faire” flair than last year.
• Google IO allowed for a lot of people to be in town, which meant that outside events cropped up, like a beer.js in the thirsty bear and some other quick meetings about Web Components with people from a lot of browsers and large companies.

Great releases

• Google Hangouts are very much focused on using WebRTC now and seem to be quite a competitor to proprietary and installable solutions. The message that “WebRTC is available in IE via Chromeframe” made me spit coffee and laugh though – sadly it is not that easy.
• Google Chrome for Android and IOs is great, shame that the former is as an opt-in for phone service providers and will not be backfilled to Android older than ICS. The slickness of the presentation of Chrome was impressive though – history syncing over devices is incredibly useful. Now I want that with my apps state on Android (a boy can dream)
• Speaking about Android, the atomic app update in Jelly Bean is what was a benefit of web apps vs. native apps that is going away now – instead of needing to download the full APK you now download the changed parts. Time to change my presentations :/
• Google Drive got some impressive new features including automatic OCR and face/sights detection in photos.
• Google’s collaboration with Subatomic and Cirque de Soleil
  Movi.Kanti.Revo – (keynote section) is probably one of the coolest tech demos I have seen in the last year. It uses the camera and movement detection to navigate an interactive dance and performance experience.
• Google compute engine could be a real threat to Amazon’s EC2. You can fire up lots of virtual machines for computation in a very simple manner

Talks I’ve seen and can recommend

• The web can do that? is Eric Bidelman’s overview of cool new web technologies delivered in a very matter-of-fact way. Great talk!
  
• GRITS: PvP Gaming with HTML5 was a very well delivered talk on HTML5 gaming and the GRITS blueprint game you can download and learn from.
  
• The Web Platform’s Cutting Edge is a wonderful introduction to web components and the need for them (also mentions X-Tag, so, like, win!)
  
• Turning the web up to 11 covers all the details of the Web Audio API - this has great demos and tools but can be a bit daunting
  
• The Mobile Chrome summit was a great meeting with all the big names in mobile web development asking the Chrome team questions. Notes will be out soon, and I wish they’d implement my suggestion of building Chrome Frame for Android :)

Talks I will watch and sadly enough missed

• Better Web App Development Through Tooling
• Chrome developer tools evolution
• How to Build Apps that Love Each Other with Web Intents

Free stuff

• Google once again showered the conference attendees with free hardware: a new Galaxy Nexus phone running Android Jelly Bean, a Nexus Seven (geek credit++ from me on that name) tablet, a Nexus Q (which I left as a present here as it is the approximate weight, shape and usefulness of a cannon ball in my hand luggage as most of the Google Play streaming content is not available in the UK), and a Chromebox. Google painted themselves in a corner a bit with that – there is no way IO can be a non-giveaway conference ever again.
• Other swag was a lovely Google IO shirt, stitched HTML5 badges, Sticker sheets with the HTML5 logo and related technology icons and Android figures filled with Jelly Beans.

Was it worth it?

Expletive yeah! I will be back next year.

As part of the Mozilla Evangelism Reps program, I am right now preparing a training on how to learn from other talks. As a demo I went through a few talks showing what makes them interesting and pointing out good tricks the speaker (in most cases subconsciously) used and how you could use that for your own talks.

One of the first talks is Pablo Defendini with “Adaptive Web Design” explaining how he created a responsive online comic and why.

You can find the minute-by-minute analysis of the talk on the Mozilla Wiki.

I really enjoyed this talk as it shows that enthusiasm about a subject matter and just “having a go” can work out really well. It also shows that everything can go wrong when you present and that it isn’t the end of the world – you just need to move on swiftly.

Right now I am in San Francisco working on training materials for the Mozilla Evangelism Reps program. As a part of this I am analysing great talks and point out the tricks the speakers used and what new speakers can learn from that.

I love giving talks and I love watching good talks. I used to watch Southpark and American Dad episodes on the cross-trainer in the gym but lately I replaced them with TED talks and presentations from YouTube (why isn’t there an option to download them without an add-on) and Vimeo.

Both when watching and when giving talks I realised a thing lately: shorter talks tend to be better. Yes, a well crafted long talk can be very exciting, too, but I find myself drifting off quite quickly. A well written and executed 15-20 minute talk can bring across the same messages as a one hour talk that is padded with a lot of demos or stories.

Running the danger of many a “how dare you suggest how to run an event, what have you done to earn a right to say something about that” comment and tweet I wondered if we shouldn’t think about aiming for shorter talks at events and if they aren’t more effective. Here are some reasons for shorter talks:

• The audience’s attention span is not stretched to its limits
• You can have more talks, thus offering more choice and also a chance for unknown speakers to have a slot
• Speakers are forced to plan their talks better. You concentrate on one thing that makes a difference instead of once again telling “the history of HTML5” or “how medieval sock-knitting relates to responsive design”
• Talks become more of a “check this out and look it up later” giving the audience resources to look up in their own time and on their own terms
• After the event re-use is easier. A 15 minute talk is easier to edit and release on the web and will get much more viewers than an hour or longer talk – simple file size and dedication from the viewer’s side are the reasons here
• Content becomes more reusable. If your talk is shorter you are likely to show things that people can try out for themselves later. In a longer talk you can show all kind of cool stuff that only works in your setup and a special version of the browser and so on. In a short talk you don’t have time to explain how people should set up their environments
• We have more time for Q&A

Of course this doesn’t apply to all talks. A good inspirational session or something discussing an idea in depth will take more time and a good speaker will make it worth your while. I have, however, seen shorter talks work very well in unconferences and lately more and more conferences seem to favour them, too. I for one am happy to deliver more short, focused items (maybe several in different tracks) as it keeps things fresh.

Of course some talks are performances and the time is planned well and it makes sense to allow the speaker to deliver a short play around a topic. This is very much not me though and for quick educational items maybe less is really more.

Comment on Google Plus if you are so inclined.

A few weeks ago Michael Chaize came to the London Mozilla office to shoot interviews with me for the Appliness magazine by Adobe. This edition is now out and can be downloaded from the iTunes store or the Google Play store. There is also a non-interactive PDF version out there.

He did a great job filming the office and my teaser video explaining what the Mozilla London office is about and what is happening in Mozilla.

If you don’t have an iPad (like me) you can see the 3D view of the office at the end of the article also in this video.

Great job, Michael, I am chuffed to bits how that worked out – even when I was attacked by a vicious red dinosaur.

At the fluent conference last week Nicole Sullivan gave an interesting keynote called Don’t feed the trolls:

I liked this very much. We need to fight the current culture of animosity, one-upping and “winning” on the web and turn it towards a culture of nurturing each other and that values communication and agreement instead. The main techniques to do that were outlined by Nicole:

• Understand your own prejudices and communication failures
• Respond to what makes sense and is the human part in troll mails and posts
• Don’t feed trolls – don’t fall for baits

Nicole works through a few kinds of trolls, jealous trolls, the grammar nazi, the biased troll (and the trolls who look for bias where there is none) and the scary troll. She alludes to another, which I will cover here:

The accidental troll

In her talk, Nicole defines a troll:

Def. Troll – people who seek conflict

Now, I have been called a troll a few times, and it hurts me every single time. I am not a person to seek conflict – at all. I am very uncompetitive and the best way to bore me is to tell me that $x does things better than me. Good for $x. I am not $x – I can look at what $x is doing and see what I like for myself but I shouldn’t copy it as it is not me. I want to be better myself tomorrow than I am today as I am the person that is with me all the time. If you don’t compare yourself to yourself and get better you play catchup and become the “good” that is somebody else. You have your own, unique way of learning and communicating and you should hone and celebrate that. If you get home and the door closes and you are someone else then there is a problem. This is for actors and rockstars who tend to die in drug overdoses.

So how come people saw me as a troll or gave me the “Don’t be hatin” message that pretty much insults the grammar fan in me? Because I posted in anger. I was pissed off – somebody was wrong on the internet and people even applauded and quoted it. This will not do.

Cultural differences

Part of this is cultural. Europeans, especially Germans, are a direct bunch. We say it like it is. If we want something, we request it. If we don’t like something, we make it obvious without a doubt that this is the case. America, on the other hand is not like that. Everything is about not offending people – not because this is bad, but mostly because you can get sued if you do. How this works in a society that is highly competitive at the same time continuously baffles me. There can’t be any losers in any competition, just third, fourth and forty-eighth winners. This dilutes the idea of competition to the degree that people don’t take them serious any more. In Europe, not so much. A competition is something serious and to win, someone has to lose. The same applies to conversations. Meetings in the US are considered a success if everything was mentioned and nobody was affronted or feels bad coming out of them.

In Europe, the result of a meeting is what has been done and what needs to be done next by who and by which date. If that means someone got blamed for doing things wrong, that is just how it is.

Pointing out an error is not attacking the person who made that error. What it is is pointing out an opportunity to fix something. This is the end goal. A lot of people have problems admitting to failure. To me, a failure is a great opportunity to analyse what happened and making sure you don’t do it again. If that hurts, even better, as it is easier to remember for you not to do it.

With this background it is easy to affront people on mailing lists and other communication devices that lack human communication (body language, voice and so on). The problem is exacerbated when the thing that – in your book – is obviously wrong gets sold as a “best practice” and gets a jazzy marketing-ish abbreviation and people quote it all over the place. Something you consider a mistake becomes something other people strive for rather than being something to learn from by avoiding it.

Countermeasures

So here is what I do now. I channel the Fennec:

You notice that this animal is much more ear than mouth and this is what we should be doing. Instead of firing up a massive post ranting about what is wrong in a certain publication or person we should start asking questions and most of all listening. The same applies to humans: we have two ears but one mouth – let this be our ratio for learning.

So if you disagree with something and it really rails you, give it some time before you answer. Do other things, have fun with people. Then go back and write your post if you still want to. Even better, ask the right questions.

By asking for refinement and pointing out shortcomings of a solution in the form of a question you do not only bring it upon you to do better than the original solution. You also turn your anger into a chance to get the original maker to take on your refinements and make the product that angered you work better. If the original author can not answer your questions you managed to show that they made mistakes and called something a best practice prematurely. And other people listen, too. Which means that they’ll request more details and changes.

Another way of listening is to read all the other posts and comments following the thing that annoyed you. You’ll find that in a lot of cases other people will point out the flaws you see, too and you can join a conversation and maybe even soften the tone of other comments to turn them from flame to request.

All in all a lot of accidental trolling happens because we get the wrong urge to answer as fast as possible and be the first to point out a flaw and thus winning 245 internets. Letting things sink in first and listen for a while helps you write better responses, realise that some sins are not really that much of an issue and make you understand the context of what something was published in, which can be a large part of the content decisions.