Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Man, I love Maker Faire. It’s almost as if Burning Man mated with Slashdot. Here are afew of the fun things I saw today.

In the Craft area someone showed the credit cards that they accepted, but the credit card sign was hand-made:

Also in the Craft zone was a “postcard machine.” It was a person sitting inside a booth pretending to be a machine. You could select the postcard you wanted and push two dollars through the slot. The person in the booth would make beeping and booping noises and then slip a custom postcard into your hand:

Outside, several people were driving around in mobile muffins:

Not to be outdone, someone had decorated their art car entirely with pens and markers:

I forget where I saw this, but someone had made a Q*bert quilt:

Finally, I enjoyed this art installation about the “newspaper of the future.” It was a standard newspaper machine but had an LCD monitor that showed optimistic headlines:

Good stuff. I bought a pair of Monkeylectric LED Bike light sets, so that should be fun.

I communicate with people in lots of ways: face-to-face, email, via my blog, leaving comments in the blogosphere, conferences, etc. At SMX West a couple people asked “I sent you a friend invite on service X but you haven’t responded. Do you not like me?” Please don’t feel bad, because it’s not that. I’m letting a lot of requests drop on the floor — even requests from other Googlers to chat on Google Talk. I did a quick check of various social services and here’s what I found:

LinkedIn: 176 invitations to connect
Twitter: 671 requests 1060 requests
Google Talk: 27 chat requests
Facebook: 190 friend requests
MySpace: 35 friends, and it’s a fake account that someone else set up in my name (I’m not 42 years old, thank you very much ).

At this point, managing friend invitations feels more like work than fun. Many of these services have really poor interfaces for mass approving, and a while ago I discovered that if I stopped responding to friend requests, very few people got angry with me. So if I haven’t responded to a friend request from you, please don’t take it personally — I’m just a little socially exhausted.

By the way, I have a precise measurement of being Calicanissed. He told his twitter following to add me, and I got almost exactly 400 additional twitter requests. Jason didn’t know it, but I had my twitter set to the private mode that requires each twitterer to be approved. Thanks, Jason.

The title pretty much says it all. A while ago, someone saw my call for good summer vacation reading and the resulting pile of Amazon books that I bought, and they sent me a couple free books, maybe to get a review or a mention. I appreciate the creativity, but please don’t send me any books or other free stuff. If you’ve got a new book coming out, I’m happy to hear about it, but if I decide to read or review it I’ll buy my own copy.

A while ago, someone sent a big cookie with a “No spam” message like this:

I appreciate the thought, but please don’t send me any free stuff. Google has a gift policy to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Even if Google didn’t have such a policy, I wouldn’t want to accept any gifts of value, because it’s important to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Usually I just give away any unsolicited stuff that gets sent my way. Thanks.

Honest. I wanted to write a big, in-depth blog post about X (pick whatever X you want), but then Emmy came and sat down beside the keyboard with a forlorn face. This is what she looked like:

Emmy was just waiting patiently for me to get off the computer so that we could play or hang out. How am I supposed to blog under those kinds of conditions?

Update: This was an April Fool’s day joke.

I recently discovered something really wild: the iPhone has a secret SATA interface. Using the SATA interface, the iPhone is much easier to hack because it looks just like a hard drive to a computer, so you can replace individual executables and symlinks with no effort. Readers know that I’m a bit of a storage freak. A month or so ago, I was reading on Lifehacker about this cool SATA USB docking station where you can just slide a hard drive into the dock:

So I ordered one and set it up. The accident that unlocked all this is that I was getting up out of my desk chair while reading on my iPhone. The chair bumped me and I dropped the iPhone from a couple feet up. By some weird chance, it landed in the docking station. Not only did it fit perfectly, but a hard drive picture appeared on the iPhone’s screen. Just a few seconds later, my Windows XP computer recognized the iPhone as an external hard drive! I pulled the iPhone out and was able to reproduce it by pushing the iPhone down hard into the docking station. Dropping it from couple feet the first time forced it into the connector, and it does take a little more muscle to make the connectors mesh than I’m used to with peripherals.

Anyway, this is what the iPhone looks like when it’s docked as an external hard drive:

The iPhone is formatted with HFS+. I happened to have drivers for HFS installed on XP; the default installation of Windows doesn’t have these drivers, but you can download hfsutils here. If you have hfsutils installed, the iPhone looks like a regular hard drive. I’ve been able to backup my iPhone and restore the image to my wife’s iPhone with no problems (she still keeps her phone number of course). I’m not an expert iPhone hacker, even though I know a few things, so it’s been slow-going. But I’m making solid progress and wanted to alert other people that the iPhone works in this way. I’ve tried a few other external SATA enclosures, but I’ve had best results with the Thermaltake so far.

Update: Some people are claiming that these images are photoshopped, but they’re actual images. What’s even more fascinating is that I discovered that the iPhone works as an external hard drive with my laptop as well:

Is anyone else seeing this behavior with their iPhone?

Update 2: Okay, this is getting a little scary. I started thinking about how the iPhone connected with both my laptop and my external hard drive dock. And I asked myself: “Where else can I stick my iPhone?” So I tried putting my iPhone into a CD player that was nearby:

To my surprise, a CD-ROM image appeared on the iPhone. Sure enough, the CD player started playing my iPhone! Of course, it was a data CD, so instead of music I got an awful racket as the CD player tried to play the data CD on the iPhone.

My mind reeled as I considered the possibilities. If the iPhone worked with electronics, maybe it would work with other appliances as well? I took a lamp, unscrewed the light bulb, and sure enough it worked:

The iPhone light turns on, and it’s surprisingly bright. From there, my brain really started to work. What if the iPhone could connect to anything mechanical? I walked over to a neighbor’s house and held my iPhone up to the lock on their door. Sure enough, a key appeared on the iPhone screen:

A few seconds later, the lock clicked and the door swung open. So far, every lock that I’ve tried with my iPhone has opened, even the industrial-strength ones.

I did have one bad experience though. I started to run all over the house plugging my iPhone into things. In the kitchen I dropped my iPhone into our toaster:

It worked really well, but in my enthusiasm I somehow buttered my iPhone and ate it in just a few bites. On one hand, the iPhone makes for a really expensive piece of toast. On the other hand, it was delicious. So that’s it — my iPhone is gone now. So I’m going to ask: has anyone else done similar experiments with their iPhone? Where you can stick your iPhone and what happened?