Yesterday Google announced Google TV on their yearly Google I/O event.  Google TV will try to achieve what many companies have tried before: Combine the Web with the TV. The utopian vision is neatly explained in this two minute youtube video. My guess is that this concept will fail. No matter how much I love Google and how often I use their products, I bet this will be a venture they will soon try to forget. Let me explain why:

• TV is a passive medium. The great thing about TV is that you can sit down and zap. No interaction needed! Trying to make it an active medium with tons of things to do will confuse the user.
• Google TV offers you freedom of choice. You can now choose between millions of clips, video’s, shows, movies, etc. But this freedom of choice will only cripple the user. It is very hard to choose because it might just be possible you make the wrong decision. You only have a limited time each day to watch TV so what should you watch? Old passive TV is very simple. Don’t like what you see? ZAP! Also, you can easily get an overview of all the content showing that evening so you can make a decision on what to watch and what to miss.
• Sometimes I already try to browse on my TV. But it’s just a painful experience. The resolution is too low so it’s hard to read anything. Also to have a good browsing experience you need a keyboard and a mouse. So if Google TV hasn’t got a good solution for this problem the whole browsing ability of Google TV will be pretty useless.
• Beneath my TV are three boxes (Set-top, receiver, DVD player) already. I don’t want to add another box! And I certainly don’t want to buy a new TV with integrated Google TV. I just bought a new one two years ago. The fact that you have to use extra hardware for Google TV will be another obstacle a lot of users just don’t want to take.

Of course, it’s easy to just be critical and shoot. So I want to share an idea on how Google TV might become a success:

• You have to be able to socialize with your friends via Google TV. As I said the freedom of choice will be a problem, so there needs to be a good recommendation system. ‘If you liked this than you will probably also like this…’. Knowing Google this will probably be available in Google TV. But they need to take it further. It would be great if you have the ability to recommend content to your friends and visa versa. Or to watch a show simultaneously with ‘virtual’ friends and communicate about the show. This way watching TV will become a whole new experience and we might accept that TV is becoming less passive and more active.

What do you think, am I wrong or right? Let me know in the comments!

Once there was a war between the search engines. We all know who the won that war: Google. We can hardly remember what we used before Google (Altavista? Yahoo?). A new war is raging. Facebook is stepping up and is putting the pressure on Google. But it’s Google throwing the first punch.

Last week a lot of Google  Software Engineers deactivated their Facebook accounts. This exodus started because of to the announcement on Facebook’s F8 conference concerning the change in privacy settings. Facebook is opening up to third party sites (such as Yelp) to make your surfing a more personal experience. This move by Google’s employees is interesting because the whole things looks orchestrated. Is this a spontaneous reaction or were these Google workers encouraged?

The decision by Facebook to open up is making the social website a serious competitor for Google. The way Google indexes the web is very theoritical, very ‘mechanical’. The 100+ factors in the algorhythm decide the ranking of websites depending on the search query. The machine is the boss. Facebook is going to do the opposite. It is now possible for website owners to place a Facebook ‘I like it’ button on their website. This way the website which is ‘liked’ the best will get higher in the rankings. An added layer is that you see how your (Facebook) friends have interacted with the website you’re looking at. So instead of asking help of a machine (Google) with a search query you now turn to your friends (Facebook). What do they reccomend? Which websites do they like? This technique is not new (delicious is already doing this) but the big difference is the huge user base. Some sources even claim that Facebook’s traffic is surpassing Google’s. This in combination with the opening up to third parties is creating a very powerfull new way to surf the web. If we now look at the Google developers shutting down their accounts in perspective it looks like a pre-emptive strike. To openly question Facebook’s privacy settings and make a public stance means the war has started. Or maybe it already started when Facebook denied Google from crawling their website? Anyway the next couple of years we are going to see some fireworks with Google and Facebook going head to head.

In the end we, the users, are always the winners because this means both parties have to be creative and innovative to obtain a loyal userbase. So I encourage this battle: Go war!