I know, I promised a bigger take on Google’s increasingly controversial Search plus Your World. I’m still assimilating it and gathering information, but it’ll come.

While I’m dragging my feet on that, a word about Google’s lavishly produced Think Quarterly magazine. The theme this quarter is speed. Readers of In the Plex know how important this is to Google, especially to Larry Page. I tell a story in the book where Page mentally measures a product’s speed in milliseconds.

One of the people I spoke to about Google and speed was early Googler Urs Hoelzle. In this issue of Think, Hoelzle outlines what he calls “The Google Gospel of Speed.” He outlines the company’s goals thus:

At Google, we don’t plan on stopping until the web is instant, so that when you click on a link the site loads immediately, and when you play a video it starts without delay.

I bet Google won’t stop even then.

In the Plex also talks at length about how Google tries to maintain startup nimbleness while growing and growing. There’s an interesting essay by Kristen Gil, Google’s VP of Business Operations, in Think Quarterly that describes this, with several bullet points that include Google’s recent shift to more of a command structure. (Something I first noted in my dispatch about Google+ and its origins in Wired.)

Gil also mentions Google’s internal management system called OKR’s but to get the full story on how Google has adopted Andy Grove’s system of Objectives and Key Results (brought to Google by John Doerr), you need to go to (you guessed it)…In the Plex.

Just sayin’.

Today Google launched Search plus Your World, a significant change to the flagship product that just about everybody uses every day. It’s a big deal, and Mike Issac has the deets and some analysis. I’ll post something myself on the broader issues later on.

For now, let me note one feature that may be lost in the larger news. Because some people may not want shared items from people on their social graph to intrude with their searches, Google offers a quick opt-out: a button that removes all social results from a search.

But it does more than that. Choosing that option blocks Google from using the history of your previous searches when it provides results. (Google still uses some personalization in choosing results, namely language and location. Otherwise, says Google’s search quality guru Amit Singhal, the results would probably be unsatisfying if not confusing. If you’re really motivated, though, you can plow through some menus and change those settings, too.)

According to the Google blog:

We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results..

This seems to address the complaint known as The Filter Bubble, as popularized by Eli Pariser’s cogently-argued book of that name. Pariser contends that when Internet providers personalize their services, people wind up seeing only what those providers think they want to see—stuff in their comfort zone. Pariser engages in world-class hand-wringing at the prospect of people exposed only to things they already agree with or are familiar with. Google personalization is his bête noire.

I reached Pariser this morning. He had not heard the news, but I briefed him and he checked it out on Google’s blog. His first reaction (pending a more thorough dive into the feature) was positive. “It’s definitely a big step in terms of transparency and control. It’s kind of awesome to see them do this,” he told me. There are still issues he’s like to look into — does the opt-out also block information like what browser people use?– but at first blush, he says it seemed to really address the concerns he raised in his book.

In one fell swoop, Google might have popped the Filter Bubble.

It’s no longer news when the company that once famously refused to run commercials does so – another sign of conventionality in the company that promised not to be conventional – but it is still rare enough to be worthy of analysis.

Here is the Google holiday commercial, where the Muppets do a Google+ Hangout.

You get a sense of Google’s strategic priorities by seeing that it’s spending millions to promote Google+. The war for personal information is crucial to Google, and it’s the impetus behind Google+, as I’ve written here. Further information comes in a follow-up interview with Bradley Horowitz, a co-leader of the project.

You get a sense of what works well in Google+ by noting that the focus of the ad is Hangouts, a relatively late addition to Google + that has helped hone its purpose. It’s a cool feature, but also makes a statement: this product is about what’s happening now. Google is well-placed to be a leader in real-time presence, and merging group chat into a social experience has been a win.

But there’s another message, too. You get a sense of Google’s culture—and who the people of Google are—by the choice of the Muppets as the stars of the commercial. Muppets are central to the lives of Googlers. The vast majority of Googlers are people in their twenties and thirties who have completed the perilous obstacle course of the meritocracy, probably starting when their ambitious parents plucked them in front of the telly to absorb the lessons of Big Bird and Count Von Count. (My bet is that many of those parents were otherwise parsimonious with tube time.) Along with the lessons, they bonded with the puppets, much as toddlers get fixated on blankies and stuffed animals.

As a result, even the most math-geeky Googlers kind of melt at the sight of Miss Piggy. It’s not even too much of a stretch to claim that the do-goody ethic of Sesame Street was the forerunner of Don’t Be Evil.

The Muppets keep popping up at the Googleplex.  Google’s very first paid employee, Craig Silverstein, was the founder of the Internet group  rec.arts.henson+muppets

One of the languages included in Google’s translation program is the weird (“bork, bork, pork!”) pidgin of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets Show. .

According to Doug Edwards (in his memoir I’m Feeling Lucky) in Google’s early days, the most important chart on the internal web site was the measure of search quality of various engines. Each line on the chart (representing the effectiveness of a given company in delivering results) was labeled by a Muppet character. Google’s label for itself was “The Great Gonzo.”

Naturally, Google expresses its Muppet-philia in its famous doodles. The Muppets are to the Google home page as guest host Alec Baldwin is to Saturday Night Live. In late 2009, Google decided to run an entire week of doodles to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Muppets.

This year, the Muppets had a movie to promote and the Google connection was never stronger. To introduce its revamped Hangouts (and in a harbinger of the television commercial to come), Google did an introductory Hangout with the Muppets and the human actors in the movie. Google also did a Muppet themed A Google A Day puzzle, with a week of Muppet-related queries, with questions from Kermit, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Sam Eagle and Miss Piggy.

This past September, Jim Henson would have been celebrating his 75th birthday if he lived. So of course Google did another Muppet doodle, this time in collaboration with the Hensen company itself. Jim’s son Brian, took over Google’s Official Blog to write a tribute to his dad. This is part of what he wrote:

Jim was clearly a great visionary. But he also wanted everyone around him fully committed creatively., . . . Every day for him was joyously filled with the surprises of other people’s ideas. I often think that if we all lived like that, not only would life be more interesting, we’d all be a lot happier.

The ethic of Jim Henson as expressed above is totally in synch with Google’s self image.  Google people see themselves as creative folk who make people happy the way Henson made them happy when their parents planted them in front of the television as part of the long march towards high SAT scores. No wonder there’s a gaping disconnect between the way Googlers think about their company and the way critics paint it–not as a high-tech art colony but an overly powerful, privacy-gobbling market dominator.

Considering the deep imprinting of Muppetry on the Google mindset, the tv commercial won’t be the last of the partnership of the Henson’s puppets and the Internet giant. Google will be hanging out with the Muppets for a very long time.

Today’s news is that David Eun has left AOL to join Samsung.

Eun came to AOL from Google, where he was head of content. His job dealt largely with forging partnerships with big providers (publishing companies, studios, etc.) in that grey area where Google sort of was and sort of wasn’t — providing content. Now everyone knows that Google is firmly in that business, but in a way that augments its core strengths. It would still be a huge surprise if Google bought a newspaper company or a movie studio. Something like Zagat’s is more of a fit. (Reviews are integral to building a product that directs people to local businesses.)

Eun was one of several top execs that Google’s former ad head Tim Armstrong took with him after Armstrong became the CEO of AOL in 2009. Eun’s role was similar for AOL, and it was more central, since portals are all about the kinds of deals Eun makes.

Samsung is something else. Why does it need a content exec? Is Apple envy behind this? Hardware companies not in Cupertino have rarely made a splash in such partnerships. (Sony, of course, took a more balls-out approach some decades ago and bought a music company and a studio. But thinking like a content owner led Sony to shackle its hardware offerings, and thus the company of the Walkman was too timid to go balls-out in its digital products.)

Another Googler who followed Armstrong to AOL was Jeff Levick, who formerly headed Google’s North American sales. Levick is a fun guy who gave me some great stories for In the Plex, which–did I mention this?–is Amazon’s best business book of the year. (So did Armstrong. In fact, Armstrong promised to take me on a sales call to General Motors or a similar big client. But before we did that, he moved to AOL.)

Levick now works for Spotify,

Together these two departures make a couple of points. First, the AOL remake isn’t thriving. (But you knew that.) Second, no matter what tech business you’re in, you’re probably competing with everybody else. Samsung can butt heads with Google, Apple and Facebook in wrangling content. And everyone–TV, magazines, ebooks, search engines, and music services–is in the ad business.

Including AOL, where its CEO has two fewer trusted lieutenants.

It’s the end of the year, so people are compiling “best-of” lists.

Not that I’m paying attention.

I hardly noticed that Amazon selected In the Plex as the best business book of the year.

Or that Audible chose the audio version (wonderfully voiced by L. J. Ganser) as the best audio business book of the year.

Or that the Library Journal listed it among its best business books of 2011.

And Kirkus review included it in its list of best non-fiction books of any stripe. (The package links to a smart interview that Kirkus did with me about the book.)

Or that Strategy + Business a worldly publication that every year picks the class of the lot included Plex as one of the top tech-biz books of the year, with the super-smart (and sometime finicky) Michael Schrage calling the book a “superb, surprisingly comprehensive Baedeker of what makes Google Google.”

Not that I’m keeping track. Still, thought you folks should know. Just in case you were shopping for friends and relatives for the holidays

Nice reporting in New York Times about the secretive Google X division.

Secretive, but not exactly top secret. While Google is very much keeping things under wraps in its long-term research division, there has been wiggle room on its title. I have three business cards from researchers in the division, and all boast the Google X connection. In fact, the “X” in the business card is dropped out, and you can see through the card. One of the cards, belonging to Sebastian Thrun (he of the self-driving car) is made of thin metal.

It’s kind of a joke. When these guys give you a card, you say, “I thought that this doesn’t offiically exist.” And they laugh, or roll their eyes. In any case, considering this, I find it strange that the Times claims that many Googlers are totally in the dark about Google X.

Speaking of the car, it’s breathtaking to consider the Times’ revelation that Google is considering actually manufacturing them. This seems like a stretch even for Google. (But as I write consistently in In the Plex, Larry Page likes to think really big, so who knows? By the way did I mention that Amazon just named In the Plex as the best business book of 2011? Just sayin’)

The article reports what has been clear for a while: Sergey Brin is focusing on his X files. When Larry became the CEO designate last January, the two co-founders did kind of a switch. Larry had been most interested in the long-term stuff, but moved away from that. Literally, as he transplanted his office to the area where Emerald Sea (now known as Google+) was being developed. Sergey, who had an office in the Emerald Sea building, moved out. In his public appearances this year, he’s been talking glowingly of the X stuff, and has promised we would see something big from that in the coming months.

Literally, this is the X factor in Google. What comes out of this division may be a brand new multi-billion dollar business. Or not. That’s what rolling big dice is all about.

Over the past few days I’ve been asked a lot about why Google addressed a patent problem with what seemed like overkill—a $12.5 billion acquisition of a handset company that almost doubles the size of the company and puts Google deep in the seemingly unattractive business of being a hardware manufacturer. I tell people the following story, as accounted in my book In the Plex.

Google was in the early stages of setting up engineering centers overseas. It wasn’t quite clear how extensive the effort would be. In an executive meeting with company’s key leaders, Larry was asked how many engineers Google should eventually employ.

“How many does Microsoft have?” he asked. He was told that Microsoft employed about 25,000 engineers.

“Then we should have a million,” said Page.

Google didn’t embark on a million-engineer march after that, but the reply is utterly typical of a Larry Page response. Time after time, Googlers describe Page’s critiques, with one common element: Page’s unhappiness that the plans were insufficiently ambitious. You suggest a toothpick to Larry, and he immediately thinks forest. That’s the way he is, and because he is that way, it is no accident that Google is so prominent as a business and in our lives. And you better believe that Larry Page wants Google to be a much bigger business that’s even more prominent in our lives.

That’s why it made utter sense to me that Google would try to dig itself out of its patent hole with a plan that wound up to encompass much more than the problem itself. After being rebuffed in its efforts to nab an expensive patent portfolio to defend Android against “bogus” (in David Drummond’s phrase) claims, it decided not only to get a better portfolio but an entire company and new business model as well.

During the conference call explaining this purchase, Google send some mixed signals as to what it would do with Mobility. Page vowed that it would be a “separate business.” But he also said that he was excited about the possibilities that it opened for Google, to innovate in hardware. This is somewhat of a contradiction. Every year, Google chooses one model from one handset manufacturer as its “lead device,” the chosen (temporary) flagship phone. That company moves its people in with Googlers to create a device that integrates the latest in hardware with the latest in Android OS. Android Czar Andy Rubin said that Google’s new division would compete for this plum on an equal footing with the Samsungs and HTC’s of the world.

How is Google going to handle this? Does he think that if, in a given year, Google-ola wins the contest, the other partners won’t suspect a fix? Conversely, if Google does keep its new division at arms-length from the Android folks, wouldn’t that be hampering its new investment?

People have also been asking me whether, if the acquisition goes through, the Motorola division will become “Googly.” It’s a good question. Currently that division has 19,000 employees. That’s nearly doubling the size of a company that’s obsessed with not falling prey to the stodginess of being a big company. My view is that Google won’t cope with this problem by regarding its new prize as something outside the Google-sphere. Google has specific ideas of how a company should run, what its culture should be, what kind of employees it wants. Why would it disregard those when it comes to Motorola? Google is a disruptive company—so we should expect it to be disruptive when it comes to future products from Google-ola. Business models too. Maybe Google will figure out a way to give away moto-phones, calculating it will wind up profitable on the back end. (Maybe that’s what Page meant when he cited “an opportunity to accelerate innovation in the home business by working together with the cable and telco industry as we go through a transition to Internet protocol.”) Hard to predict what Page and Google will do, but it would be uncharacteristic not to be startling and disruptive.

One thing does bother me here, and that is a parallel to Larry Page’s response to the challenges of Book Search, when he busted open an impasse between Google and the authors and publishers by embracing a larger solution—the class action settlement. The impetus behind both actions was a problem not rooted in technology or a user need, but an externality that stifled innovation and the user’s benefit. In the book case it was an arcane copyright system that prevented Google and anyone else from pursuing a course that would have brought fantastic benefit to civilization. In the mobile area it was an arcane patent system that assured that only established players with mighty portfolios would have the sufficient legal protection to produce a smart phone.

In other words, both bold solutions came from a poison seed. The Book Search Settlement wound up getting bounced in court for its overreach. Google undoubtedly hopes that its Mobility purchase has a better fate.

No, not here.

It’s here.

Close readers of IN THE PLEX could intuit that I had access to the team behind Emerald Sea, the codename for Google’s social product. It wasn’t done when the book was, so I couldn’t share the details. The essential components are out today, so I was finally able to tell the story behind what is now called Google+.

In one sense, following up on this to deliver the long story I dropped today was a great way to gently decompress after my immersion into Google for the book. I still had a reason to go on campus and talk to a team of Googlers and see what they were up to.

So will it succeed? Depends on a lot. But from the start I was surprised at the degree of urgency in this project. There was a lot of twists and turns before today and undoubtedly there will be more. And I’ll keep watching.

I’ll weigh in later on with some views on the FTC’s now-confirmed probe of Google. For now, let me flick at just one data point. The author of Google’s blog item that acknowledged that it had received government subpoenas–and launched a general defense of Google practices–was not a lawyer. It was an engineer. Specifically, Amit Singhal, a world-class computer scientist who has been sort of the search quality guru at the company for a number of years. He is also utterly captivating when he describes the intricacies of Google’s algorithmic quest for relevant results. This may indicate the tenor of its eventual defense– Google is putting forward its face as data-driven, scientific, and non-judgmental in its treatment of search results.

Much more to come….

Now that the Anthony Weiner Twitter Meltdown has pretty much played out, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been much discussion of the butterfly wingflap that brought him down: Twitter’s rules of engagement when it comes to “following.”

The success of a social network is largely determined by its settings. In 2006, an engineer named Jack Dorsey had an idea for a way for people to share short updates on their lives with friends and family. Working with a small team, Dorsey and his colleagues began developing and testing the product. This included determining the built-in boundaries of the service, a process which would determine the breadth and purpose of the entire project. Twitter was a simple idea but settings had to be just right, like the proper temperature for a soufflé. Should the rules be very restrictive, to preserve privacy and intimacy? (Too restrictive would make the service less useful.) Or should they be expansive, and invite a wide circle to share one’s status reports? (Too broad a channel would mean a depersonalized cohort.)

The breakthrough that enabled Twitter to become the wildly successful service it is now, came from a twist that was much more significant than even its founders knew: they made it possible to “follow” someone’s messages without requiring permission. Essentially you would take out a subscription to someone’s Twitter stream. You would follow your best friend or your brother in the same way you would follow Barack Obama, DeSean Jackson, or the New York Times. This was a break from the traditional two-way agreement that ruled communications in previous social systems. This changed Twitter from an asynchronous instant messaging system into a hybrid of a social network and broadcast medium.

“The relationship model was something that we debated a lot,” says Evan Williams, who headed the company (Odeo) that created Twitter. “In the first version, by default you were private.” (This quote is from a conversation I had with Williams in 2009, when I was working on a story for Wired.) But then Dorsey’s team came up with the idea that you could follow someone without them following you. “That was really important,” says Williams. “From my perspective, I wanted something like a blog relationship model. What I thought was beautiful about blogs as opposed to email or anything else is it’s completely up to the recipient of the information whether or not they consume it.”

But Twitter was much more intimate than blogs. Following someone on Twitter was not exactly like setting up a blog feed or subscribing to a magazine. You became part of a visible community. In order to make this happen, Twitter made public the list of people you followed, as well as the list of people who followed you. You would notice when your friends followed the same people you did. You could make connections with other people who followed the same Tweeters you followed.

To further encourage the community aspect of Twitter, the founders determined that by default, all messages would be public. Weirdly, one of the questions that came up during this discussion was the question whether people would be creeped out when it came to flirting and other personal issues. “This openness was the result of a lot of thought around the way we had started recognizing that people were communicating online,” says Noah Glass, who was part of the original team. (I interviewed Glass for the aforementioned story.) “We were on MySpace, and I got into a lot of trouble from various girls posting things on that thing out in the open, and I started thinking about openness–we all started thinking about openness. We come from a world where privacy is important. But we realized that not everyone shared this feeling about privacy in that same kind of way. People were having really intimate discussions out for everyone else to read. I realized that that the level of privacy we thought was important, was not necessarily important to a certain group of people for a certain type of communication. And so making any conversation open and followable was something based on those systems that were becoming popular.”

This thinking influenced the settings when Twitter, because of user demand, implemented a “reply” feature. The replies, just like any other tweets, were public.

But what if you wanted to have a truly private conversation, as with SMS or email, with someone on Twitter? This presented a problem to those with a huge following. One way to do this would be to allow users to send a private message to any other user, just as they can with email. But celebrities and others with large followings didn’t want to open a private channel to just anyone. So Twitter decided that for “direct” messages there should be some limits. Direct, private messages could only be sent to someone who followed you. The fact that you followed someone meant that you’d probably be happy to hear from him or her. To have a back-and-forth conversation, then, both parties would have to be following each other.

Otherwise, once you hit a few keystrokes to specify that something is a direct message, sending a private tweet is not all that different from sending a public tweet. The service has never really figured a way to foolproof the process. It is a rare Twitter user—even an experienced one—who has not mistakenly sent something intended as a direct message out into the public Twittersphere. Happens all the time.

These settings helped make Twitter catnip for loquacious politicians like Anthony Weiner, who used it to establish his feisty personality with a nationwide community. But it also proved his undoing when he misused Twitter for sordid sexual contact with women.

Twitter’s regimen of rules tanked Anthony Weiner in several ways. First of all, it provided a public record of the initial contacts that Weiner made with the women. Here was the apparent pattern of Weiner’s inappropriate communications: a woman would tweet an encouraging public messages to the legislator—which would be public, the only way she could communicate to him. (By and large, since the women were political supporters and not thinking of themselves as material for his sexual fantasies, this wasn’t a problem for them.) Then Weiner would respond to them—but his responses were constrained by the knowledge that his replies were public.

Weiner needed a more private channel of communication for flirtations up to and including pictures of his package. Since the women followed him already, he could send them direct messages. But to receive their replies, he had to follow them in return. Only then could he engage in flirting or sexual repartee.

Weiner seemed not to realize the extent to which Twitter’s rules still made him vulnerable. The women were publicly listed among those accounts he followed. Since he only followed around 200 people, these new followers seemed out of place among the politicians, journalists, and celebrities on his list. It was all too easy for a political foe to notice that Weiner was adding young women (and in at least one case, a porn star) to his followers soon after a public exchange.

And that is exactly what happened. A right-wing activist noticed Weiner’s pattern and then harassed the young women the Congressman followed. But even then, Weiner did not curtail his behavior. He simply unfollowed those women and found new ones to flirt with. His Twitter use was a train wreck waiting to happen.

The train wreck occurred when Weiner confronted the confusing rail yard that Twitter’s founders never truly fixed: the inadequately drawn distinction between a public message and a direct one. When Weiner decided to send a young woman a picture of his crotch—wearing grey boxers that barely contained his tumescence—he had already taken the step of following her. But he made a common mistake between a direct private message and a public reply, and sent the picture out to the thousands of people who followed him.

That was so crazily egregious that Weiner’s initial lies that his account had been hacked seemed plausible. But the evidence of his deeper misbehavior was already out in the open: the thumbnails of the young women he followed, publicly available on his Twitter account. Journalists, political rivals, and right-wing muckrakers had no problem finding multiple women who had flirted and even received more graphic photos via “private” Twitter messages. When asked about what happened, the women talked, and Weiner’s original “I was hacked” story fell apart.

Weiner was caught in the social net, undone by a bunch of conversations several years earlier between some San Francisco geeks trying to figure out the settings of a cool new product. The details of Web product design had led to the pants being pulled down on a promising political career.