8:26 AM
Md.Zahid Hasan
by Scott Ard
Thirty years ago, Andy Hertzfeld was a young computer engineer working at Apple Computer on the first Macintosh under the leadership of Steve Jobs. As Jobs had repeatedly promised the small team, their creation would change the world, and he was right.
Today, Hertzfeld's passion for technology and his experiences at Apple have been baked into a new product that Google unveiled to the public this week. Called Google+, it's a suite of features for helping people communicate across the Web with friends, family, and co-workers. If that sounds like Facebook, it should. Google+ is openly described as Google's latest attempt to break in to the social space in a big way, potentially chipping away at--if not dismantling--Facebook's dominance.
Hertzfeld's role on Google+ was primarily building Circles. Simply put, Circles grabs all the contacts in your Google profile and allows you to drag and drop them into circles labeled friends, family, sports, and so on, similar to taking a batch of songs in iTunes and dragging them into playlists. You can then send updates and photos to one or more circles of contacts.
CNET interviewed Hertzfeld by phone to ask more about the ambitions of Google+, the thinking that went into Cirlces, his next projects at Google, and some broader industry trends.
Q: For those not familiar with your role in the early days of the personal computer, can you summarize your work on the Mac?
Hertzfeld: I was one of the first people on the original Macintosh team that started working on the Mac in February 1981. I first started doing low-level stuff like the BIOS system and all the device drivers, and later developed the user interface toolbox, which was the code for the windows menus, scrollbars, and all that, and left Apple a couple months after the Mac [was released in 1984], so I developed the original thing. After that, I continued to do stuff for the Mac, like Switcher and everything, but that was a very positive formative experience for me.
Hertzfeld: I was one of the first people on the original Macintosh team that started working on the Mac in February 1981. I first started doing low-level stuff like the BIOS system and all the device drivers, and later developed the user interface toolbox, which was the code for the windows menus, scrollbars, and all that, and left Apple a couple months after the Mac [was released in 1984], so I developed the original thing. After that, I continued to do stuff for the Mac, like Switcher and everything, but that was a very positive formative experience for me.
And you've collected those stories into a book and a Web site. You want to give a plug for those?
Hertzfeld: I'll plug my book, which is called "Revolution in the Valley." Actually, I don't need to plug it anymore because it just recently went out of print, but there's a Web site, folklore.org, where you can read all the stories in the book and even more for free.
Hertzfeld: I'll plug my book, which is called "Revolution in the Valley." Actually, I don't need to plug it anymore because it just recently went out of print, but there's a Web site, folklore.org, where you can read all the stories in the book and even more for free.
After Apple, you went to a few companies: Radius, General Magic, Eazel.
Hertzfeld: I actually helped start three different companies: Radius, which addressed the limitations of the Macintosh in 1986, and then General Magic, where I worked from 1990 to 1996, where you could say we developed the iPhone of the '90s, kind of. We were developing what we called Personal Intelligent Communicators...We correctly identified mobile as the next big thing after PCs; we were just about 10 or 15 years too soon. And then I got very enthusiastic about open source in early 1998, which led me to found a company called Eazel in 1999, to try to help make open-source software easier to use, and so I worked there for a couple years. Unfortunately...Eazel was a creature of the bubble. We just didn't know it. And when the bubble burst in 2001, we couldn't raise our second round of funding, so we had to scuttle the company.
Hertzfeld: I actually helped start three different companies: Radius, which addressed the limitations of the Macintosh in 1986, and then General Magic, where I worked from 1990 to 1996, where you could say we developed the iPhone of the '90s, kind of. We were developing what we called Personal Intelligent Communicators...We correctly identified mobile as the next big thing after PCs; we were just about 10 or 15 years too soon. And then I got very enthusiastic about open source in early 1998, which led me to found a company called Eazel in 1999, to try to help make open-source software easier to use, and so I worked there for a couple years. Unfortunately...Eazel was a creature of the bubble. We just didn't know it. And when the bubble burst in 2001, we couldn't raise our second round of funding, so we had to scuttle the company.
You went to Google in '05. What were some of the projects you worked on at Google prior to Google+?
Hertzfeld: I worked on a smattering of different things, including the Photo Picker...it was in Gmail for many years, but I think it finally got switched out by something newer. But probably the single thing that (was) sort of my project was Google News Timeline, which launched around April 2009, and it's still available. (It) is sort of a zoomable timeline that you can project all kinds of information on.
Hertzfeld: I worked on a smattering of different things, including the Photo Picker...it was in Gmail for many years, but I think it finally got switched out by something newer. But probably the single thing that (was) sort of my project was Google News Timeline, which launched around April 2009, and it's still available. (It) is sort of a zoomable timeline that you can project all kinds of information on.
Which brings us to Google. What exactly is your role?
Hertzfeld: My role's been evolving, but really, the Circle Editor was my baby. I wrote a prototype for it singlehandedly and then sort of led its development through to the present time. I was not just the interface designer but the main implementer as well, writing code.
Hertzfeld: My role's been evolving, but really, the Circle Editor was my baby. I wrote a prototype for it singlehandedly and then sort of led its development through to the present time. I was not just the interface designer but the main implementer as well, writing code.
Circle Editor is the page where you drag the little tiles that represent people into circles. And, of course, I had a lot of help, both with the interface design and the implementation.
More recently, I started three or four months ago helping out with other areas of Emerald Sea (the internal Google code name for Google+), and more recently, in the last month or so, I've taken a broader role, trying to make all of it be as great as I can make it.
One thing I just want to make clear is, I feel a little bad that I've actually gotten too much credit as the designer of Google+...I feel more comfortable saying I'm the designer of the Circle Editor, which...even though I had help from other people, I really was the driving force behind that. I was not, really, for the entire Google+, and I'd just like to make sure that the superb UI team that we have here does get credit for their work.
So you focused on Circles, but now you're going to branch out into what, Sparks and Hangout?
Hertzfeld: Yes. All of it, really. Just helping to refine the UI, improve it, adding important features that people want, etc.
Hertzfeld: Yes. All of it, really. Just helping to refine the UI, improve it, adding important features that people want, etc.
I'll come back to Circles in a second, but can you just give me kind of a high-level view of what G+ is? What was the intent for Google+, and what are you hoping to do with it?
Hertzfeld: Sure. Everything on the Web can be improved by knowledge of your social connections, so Google+ is an effort to...add a social layer to Google, to YouTube, to Google Search, to every Google property. And so the core of Google+ are some APIs and applications that let you organize [and] maintain your identity through a profile and organize the people you know. Really, one of the main contributions we're making compared to the status quo is giving you much finer grain control over your sharing. You know, instead of just having an undifferentiated mass of people, we make it really easy and at the forefront of the UI to send some things to some people, other things to others.
Hertzfeld: Sure. Everything on the Web can be improved by knowledge of your social connections, so Google+ is an effort to...add a social layer to Google, to YouTube, to Google Search, to every Google property. And so the core of Google+ are some APIs and applications that let you organize [and] maintain your identity through a profile and organize the people you know. Really, one of the main contributions we're making compared to the status quo is giving you much finer grain control over your sharing. You know, instead of just having an undifferentiated mass of people, we make it really easy and at the forefront of the UI to send some things to some people, other things to others.
Related links
• Video: Google's Facebook killer, Google+
• A hands-on look at Google+, using Google+
• Developer API for Google+: It's coming
• How to invite your pals to Google+
Let's talk about Circles. It works really well, and I think the early returns have been very positive. I think somebody called them "delicious," which is pretty rare for a Google product, especially when talking about an interface rather than some algorithm behind it. Tell me about how Circles came about and how your past experiences at Apple, at Eazel, at General Magic may have played into it.
Hertzfeld: Well, really, at Apple, I learned that the best thing I can do is put a smile on the user's face, and actually, I want to make their jaw drop when they use what I do. I want to astonish and delight people, and I've tried to do that throughout my career with everything I work on--just make the user happy. And even more than happy, get them excited and pleased with what they're doing. And so with Circles, one of the things I was trying to do is take advantage of the new capabilities of the Web browser. I had a feeling of a lot of fertile territory, because the Web browsers pretty recently, in the last year or so, got a whole range of new dynamic capabilities that people weren't exploiting yet. So, as you probably know, the Circle Editor is heavy on animation, with rotations and scales and fades that really were very difficult to do in Web browsers up until 2010 or so, so part of it was just my technical hunger to try out new things. But really, that's driven by the main desire just to put a smile on the user's face and make a vivid, exciting experience for them.
Hertzfeld: Well, really, at Apple, I learned that the best thing I can do is put a smile on the user's face, and actually, I want to make their jaw drop when they use what I do. I want to astonish and delight people, and I've tried to do that throughout my career with everything I work on--just make the user happy. And even more than happy, get them excited and pleased with what they're doing. And so with Circles, one of the things I was trying to do is take advantage of the new capabilities of the Web browser. I had a feeling of a lot of fertile territory, because the Web browsers pretty recently, in the last year or so, got a whole range of new dynamic capabilities that people weren't exploiting yet. So, as you probably know, the Circle Editor is heavy on animation, with rotations and scales and fades that really were very difficult to do in Web browsers up until 2010 or so, so part of it was just my technical hunger to try out new things. But really, that's driven by the main desire just to put a smile on the user's face and make a vivid, exciting experience for them.
I started [Circle Editor] work in February of 2010, and then by May, they'd conceived of this broader Emerald Sea project that my prototype became one of the central pillars of, and so since May, I wrote the prototype, which was quite different than the Circle Editor that actually shipped. For one thing, at the very beginning, we weren't even calling them circles, which of course influenced the graphic design.
Once we decided to call these groups of people "circles," I tried to make things very circular, but anyway, starting in May or June, I got a bunch of people to help me, and by September, we had something resembling pretty much the Circle Editor you see today. But I spent another six months refining it, adding more animation, trying to make it as delightful as my imagination would allow me to make it.
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