81–90 of 444 posts
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Have you tried commenting on Google Play? You need Google+. I have an Android phone but I shouldn't need a Google+ account when I have my regular Google account which actually works on Google Play. And it wasn't like this when I bought my phone. I can't "opt out" of my phone. I already bought it before they required Google+ for Play's comments. Have you tried using YouTube? They keep nagging you to open a profile. et…
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The biggest problem with Google has been that they've been a "benevolent monarch", more or less. Meaning, much of the reason why google has been good for the web has been due to specific choices that google leadership has made and the ways that google has chosen to wield its power. This contrasts to strict limits on power and strong external forces from competition, etc. As long as the monarch is benevolent this is g…
> One could make a very well-founded argument, for example, that Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and even EA or Comcast are not, strictly speaking, "evil" companies. I'll venture to say this is the case. Most tech firms are small-fries when it comes to evil. Cargill, Monsanto, and pretty much any oil company - now that's serious evil. And that's just in recent history. We're not even talking the East India Trading company.…
There is a huge war between Facebook and Google for global control of the most popular social graph and as much as I like Zuckerberg as a person, I was rooting for G+ for its streamlined interface and perceived lesser level of evil. Now I'm not so sure.
I think there should be a third option in the form of a decentralized social protocol.
I think there is market for a "social rss" where you could choose amongst a number for providers, "Google Readers" for social if you will, that could connect to each other. That way people could choose their frontend and the way they consume their friends social feeds. This would open competition and give people choices of different user interfaces, layouts and themes.
For public posts the implementation could be fairly straightforward. I assume other providers would periodically fetch friends posts, upvotes, downvotes and other social interactions from other networks.
When it comes to private content, the providers would probably have to send things only to other trusted providers that promise to show it only to the correct "circles". However, I don't see it as a big deal since privacy in G+ and Facebook is already somewhat of an illusion because it only takes one amongst hundreds of friends to share your stuff outside the network. Maybe your friends would need to authenticate into your network and do email verification at least once. Maybe they could use a Mozilla Persona authentication?
There are companies that could do this without too much effort. Tumblr already publishes rss of their user's feed, they would only need to add the ability to consume rss and push for an upgrade of the rss protocol to support social features.
Digg has shown interest in doing an rss reader, why shouldn't they work on upgrading the protocol to include more social features?
Other web based rss reader companies could do it.
A new team from this community.
Or even better, cooperation of all of the above!
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> Google and YouTube are full of smart people. Some kind of "poor comment quality" filter should be easy to implement. This touches on something I actually feel deserves a second look, if only from an academic or sociological perspective. I have never quite understood why Youtube appears to be the single largest (or, at least most prominent) internet cesspool. Comments there are routinely among the most vile I've see…
Mean correlates with stupid. More stupid people watch TV than read. YouTube is TV.
The difference is that because Youtube has no moderation in its comments, smart people look at the comments and immediately decide that it's not worth their time. So, the only people who comment are the idiots who just like to see their words on the Internet.
I used to be a Google fan as well. Not a BIG fan but a fan. In late 2010 I decided it was time to move on from Google. It took a while but I already went back to Firefox (nightly), started moving my emails to fasmail.fm (with my own domain so I'm not tied to anyone), I'm trying to use only DuckDuckGo (it's difficult... I have to admit that Google is unbeatable yet), stopped using google+ and Google Reader (since 2011…
Is this the tech version of Poe's Law? Or is it the new version of tin-foil-hatism? You guys have a very, very strange definition of "evil". Google may not be perfect, and sure they deserve some harsh criticism and mocking from time to time for their choice of unofficial motto, but come on people, get a grip.
I have always been somewhat of a Google fanboy except for a few misgivings about their worrisome breadth of infiltration into people's live and things like the iGoogle shutdown but the Reader situation has been a huge slap in the face that made me lose a lot of faith in them. There is a huge war between Facebook and Google for global control of the most popular social graph and as much as I like Zuckerberg as a perso…
You mean something like diaspora? https://joindiaspora.com/
lets all stop with all the fear mongering. Do you guys really believe that every time a site loads a facebook or twitter widget they aren't tracking you either. I can name 1000 other trackers that sites actually do install and that do genuinely sell your information. There are a handful of widgets that do the same thing for twitter and facebook so lets just stop the bs.
The problem is that I currently use Google for real identity stuff. This seems to imply I'll need to do something like all my web browsing in Firefox, and use Google services in Chrome.