As a child, my parents’ friends asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “Race car driver.” As I grew older, my parents would ask the same question, with a little more concern. “Race car driver.” Through my teens, the answer remained the same. “But it’s dangerous”, they would reply. As parents, time was running out. I was about to go off to college. My Dad came up with the best lines. “When I was your age, I really wanted to be an electrical engineer. My Dad wanted me to be a doctor, but I didn’t want to be one. Now I wonder if I should have listened to him. I really think you should consider being an electrical engineer.”

February, 2001. I watched my childhood hero slam in to a wall in Daytona, Florida. His name was Dale Earnhardt and he was a race car driver. Going three wide in to the final laps of the Daytona 500, the black #3 inexplicably veered off the embankment and then shot back up in to the retaining wall at 160mph. “Race car driver.” That Fall I embarked in pursuit of my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

As an adult, I am known somewhat by my Apple fanaticism. My first computer was a Mac. It was an Apple IIe passed on by a family friend on which I played Chess and occasionally used the word processor. After years of tinkering with custom built PCs, I returned to the fold with a black MacBook. I got sick of the finance world I ended up in, so I took a job as a professional web developer. iMac. And I love my job so much I do it in what most would consider their “spare time”. MacBook Air.

Today, I watched my Facebook feed fill with mourning, respect, and snide remarks for a man I deeply respected. Today, the world lost one of it’s most brilliant visionaries, innovators, personalities, and… salesmen. A one in a billion type of person that died of a one in a million type of disease.

In their lifetimes, my personal heroes both held a few things in common. They both wore black. All the time. Both of their spheres of influence loved to hate them, but still respected and revered who they were. They both earned notoriety for their fearless passion (or perhaps their passionate fearlessness). And ultimately, they both died… doing what they loved.

May we all be so lucky.

Thank you, Steve. Thank you for teaching us, in your death, what it means to live. And for reminding us, in the oft quoted words of Stewart Brand, to “stay hungry” and “stay foolish”.

At the turn of the century (man, that sounds historical) hundreds of college students were returning or had returned to the San Francisco Bay Area from their respective universities all over the country. Many of these people were searching for a community similar to those they had in college. Going to class together, eating together, hanging out together, and worshipping together all the time. Living life together all the time. In most cases, the churches these young professionals had grown up in did not meet these needs. So they left looking for something more.

In 2001 members of Newsong Irvine planted a church in Sunnyvale called Great Exchange Covenant. It flourished. People found a contemporary worship style more in line with what they had experience in college. Strong communities were formed. Lives were changed… people were transformed. And this didn’t just happen in the Bay Area. It was happening everywhere.

I attend an offspring church of this movement in San Francisco. We are a family of people who predominantly have an Asian heritage. Read: we have lots of Asian-Americans.

We are not an Asian American church.

Part of the original draw of attending GrX for some was that, well, it wasn’t their home church. Asian-American family churches around the Bay Area panicked as they were slowly losing their young adults to churches similar to GrX. They strategized how to keep their young adults happy. They vilified those that left for what they perceived as the new hip thing. “Oh, you go to GrX” translated to “Oh, you’re one of those abandoners.”

But the draw of the “new hip thing” wasn’t just that they could miss service on Sunday morning without their parents finding out. It was structured differently. The “english ministry” wasn’t just a secondary service. You didn’t call the “english pastor” the “EM Pastor” because he was, well, “the pastor”. Fabulous. No Asian-American church hierarchy. No Asian-American church patriarchy. No Asian-American church politics.

Natural leaders emerged. They heeded the call to service, acting as what the traditional church might have called deacons at the ripe old age of 25. They ministered to each other. They ministered to others. They flourished.

Church politics are not something unique to Asian-American churches. It’s universal. As far as I see it there are two ways of completely avoiding church politics. 1) attend a church so new as to have not had to run into these political conflicts (yet). 2) attend church, but remove yourself from these politics by either not getting involved and/or by attending a church so big as to have too many layers between you and the top for you to even remotely come in to contact with church politics.

The politics came to the “new hip thing”, almost as a sign of maturity, and the dream-like bubble of the faultless church popped. It popped big.

The draw of the “new hip thing” for those that had previously attended Asian-American churches also partially involved the absence of the traditional Asian-American church hierarchy. The English Ministry Pastor was usually under the Senior Pastor. The deacons were predominantly not a part of the English Ministry. Everything was run by those that you did not necessarily commune with or even know for that matter. Things got done (building decisions, hiring, finances) all without your opinion or input. You had no say, and thus you didn’t care.

I don’t go to an Asian-American church, but I see people acting like they do. Week-in. Week-out. I am guilty of this too. In my time I have left 3 churches that I didn’t feel met my needs. I also did nothing to help myself.

In the “new hip thing” you hung out with your Pastor. You attended the same small group as one of the “deacons”. You threw back beers with the music ministry director. Everything got done (building decisions, hiring, finances) all without your opinion or input. You had a say this time, but it turns out you didn’t really care.

Many of these people were searching for a community similar to those they had in college. Now they were going to work together, eating together, hanging out together, and worshipping together all the time. Living life together all the time. In some cases, the churches these young professionals had started to grow in to did not meet all their needs.  So they left looking for something more… or they grew up and, like the deacons at pastors at the churches they grew up in, they did something to fulfill their needs for themselves and others.

It would be hard to argue that Google isn’t successful. Starting as a Stanford research project and ballooning to a $163B market cap that is taking on every imaginable competitor that it can, you might think that there’s no space that Google can’t compete reasonably well in.

But the internet giant seems to lack success in a key area of the internet: social media. First there was Google Wave. TechCrunch called it “part email, part Twitter, and part instant messaging.” Users called it completely confusing, as it seemed like no one really knew what the hell you were supposed to do with it.

Then there was/is Google Buzz. Buzz was supposed to a brilliant way with sharing things with people you actually wanted to share them with. But it’s launch was marred by privacy concerns, lawsuits, and an eventual drop off in “buzz” as people slowly disabled the feature as it added too much noise to their Inboxes.

Google+

So with Wave and Buzz lessons in hand, Google has rolled out +Pistevo to my Google menu bar. Think of it as Facebook, but done the Google way. It’s Buzz, except it has some added features like “Hangout” where you can awkwardly group video chat. Group management is handled by what Google+ calls “Circles”. It is pretty well thought-out, though Google had the advantage here of rolling this feature out at launch, unlike Facebook. So rest assured, you can happily block Aunt Sally from your drunken rampage last Saturday night. But unfortunately you have to add Aunt Sally individually and all your other 1000 Facebook friends because it currently doesn’t integrate other services. Overall Google+ looks a lot like Facebook, feels a lot like Facebook, and acts a lot like Facebook.

Google’s “Anti-Social” UI

So everyone wants to know… is it as good as Facebook? Kind of. Google+ is a clone of Facebook, except branded with Google’s “New” UI. Google has been letting their designers do a lot of the legwork the past few months. They added a new menu bar up top, gave Maps a makeover (NICE WORK EVELYN!!!!), reskinned Gmail, and made a bunch of other tidy visual touches to its flagship search.

Google has made a lot of money on one thing: search advertising. They are quite good at it. And I am quite certain they are good at designing for it. Get users to search quickly and get them off the page quickly to drive pageviews and click traffic. That is Google’s bread and butter, and if Google+ runs on the same Google mentality it is destined to fail.

Social networks have the inherent need to be social. You hang out on Facebook because your friends/ex-lovers/creepy co-workers are all on Facebook and you spend an inordinate amount of time stalking people, you creeper. You get in, and stay in. The problem with Google+ IS that it is Googley. It fits in completely with Google’s new branding. Developed by brilliant engineers and a brilliant designer who made it perfectly Google.  The more I use Google+ the more I find that I want to leave it. Get in, get out with a revenue-generating click. That’s the essence of Google. And that’s why Google just doesn’t get social.