211–220 of 251 posts
Google Buzz and now Google+. Google stop trying to be Facebook! You need to change course and focus on the consumer(customer service) & their privacy. Otherwise others will and are starting to eat your lunch!
Your next quest is to formulate a complaint about Google Reader shutting down.
I think many of the policies that have been changed towards the usage of a real name are intrusive to privacy, but I have no pity on people who require privacy and lose it after willingly continuing to use a service that is known to conduct such practices.
If you like e.g. "single sign-on", it should be your choice to set it up and participate. Not coercion. Not coercion holding your existing investment in various products (of which Google was and is acquiring ever more) hostage.
If what you are offering is of benefit to your users (should I use the word "customers"? -- a whole other discussion), you should be able to sell it to them -- on an "opt-in", "I'd like to use this feature" basis.
As Google+ rolled out, it became evident that it was anything but this.
True names. Then the stories -- accurate or not -- of account deletions.
I was damned if I was going to risk my longstanding Gmail account for the sake of trying out Plus. Fortunately, the integration was not so quick and thorough that I was at that time compelled to participate in Plus in order to keep that account. (Sign up for Gmail now, and you get a Plus profile, like it or not.)
Plus has some nice technical features, and some of the conversation I intersect (under a separate Google identity that I can afford to lose) during my limited interaction with it, consist of more thoughtful and interesting content.
But I'll never trust it -- Plus, that is.
Google showed us all, with Plus, the limits of their advocacy for us, the users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, perhaps more dangerous in theory. In practice, the biggest role the federal government has played in US history is that of liberating people from the tyranny of private businesses: first with slavery, then Teddy Roosevelt vs. the robber barons, the Civil Rights Acts (that prohibited private businesses from discriminating based on race), and most recently the (unfortunately not-so-successful) fight against priva…
> that's pretty much the only thing the US government does Besides waging bloody, unnecessary war (War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish American War, Vietnam War, Iraq War); instituting explicitly racist immigrating policies; waging a disastrous War on Drugs at home and abroad; instituting protectionist trade policies on behalf of rent-seeking corporations and unions; busting unions; interning thousands of innocent Japa…
I was involved in planning for a 200-year commemoration of the War of 1812. We invited the U.K. and Canada, amongst other nations, and they were glad to send representatives to the commemoration, despite the fact that the U.S. was at war with those 2 nations in 1812.
The attitude of "Google knows best what's good for you, and doesn't have to justify itself or even acknowledge your objections" also doesn't mesh with what a social network should be, in the minds of many.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't underhanded. It was overhanded. It was forced on their users to the detriment of pretty much everything associated. Tyranny supplants trust. If "Igor Partola" is your real name, I think statistically there's a good chance that you understand this innately. Now, you can argue that the trust was misplaced, or that the author's use of the word "trust" to describe the basis of their users's relationship with an…
Where on earth did the Gilles Deleuze quote come from?
> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous. It's one of those many weird cases where you…
I think there was a more thought-provoking part than the "broke everything it touched" line: Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio digital editor Andy Carvin in 2011 that if people don't want to use their real names, then they shouldn't use Google+. He explained that Google should be considered "an identity service" with Google+ as the foundation across all its products. Google, particul…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside. People working at Google are smart (and majority that I know are smarter than me). Smart people are going to point that something is wrong. But they will not bitch too much because that will be "career-limiting move".
Well, yes, people working at Google are smart but also very arrogant, I rarely see them listening to the users, you know, cause there is no way the "product" know better than them.
> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous. It's one of those many weird cases where you…
Except in this case, the ultimate party responsible holds half of the majority voting rights and continues to blissfully push socially inept product ideas. Not in the case. Vic Gundotra was responsible that did not hold majority voting rights, who managed to convince the Google founders that did have it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well sure, as long as the real name policy is actively enforcable by G (which I doubt, but someone else apparently had to go through their enforcment practice), there's a risk. Then maybe it means that G isn't the right medium to express oneself anonymously and have an official virtual life. As I said, the only real problem is that policy. > It's much less offensive than the G+ real name policy, so that's a weird foc…
> I don't think we have the same definition of offensive (please correct me if my second language english is wrong). That policy was harmful, but I wouldn't qualify it as offensive. I think the article provides good examples where it was harmful. I'm also not a native english speaker so I might well be misusing the term. To me, it's not so much that it's harmful, but that the people it's harming, who are likely alrea…
I understand your point.
> Why would an insult convey more offense than all the criticism in the article already does?
That really depends on the aim of the article. If it is to express a feeling, fine, she did express her feeling. If it is to make a point, she shouldn't, or one might simply say she cannot have a rational discussion, because it simply doesn't prove anything. Google didn't use insult, it undisclosed private information. While it is senseless, it's not an offense, in the sense that there's no proof that it was intended to hurt. I don't believe that S. Brin woke up one day with the idea of harming people, or do you think that is what happened? If it were the case: if I had been the victim of a deliberate attempt at hurting me by disclosing things about me that I consider private, I would be seriously pissed. The question is: was it deliberate, or was it simply an error, or a misunderstanding? People make mistakes, that's unfortunate, but it's understandable. She, otoh, cursed voluntarily.
> It's also a particularly harmless insult that as far as I can tell
That's anyone's appreciation. In a different culture, it might well be the worse thing you could say to someone. The fact that it carry already a insulting connotation is enough: there's no way someone could take it as a compliment, thus whether it is harmless or the worse one could say is besides the point, the message is clear.
> That's a lot of words about this sidetrack
For a minor issue, that happened in _the title_, but I surely don't care that much.