Larry Page Issues Public Update On Google Changes 159
itwbennett writes "Larry Page just wants to be loved. Well, he wants 'Google to be a company that is deserving of great love,' Page wrote in a public letter. But he also wants to offer the kind of personalized service that the requires trampling on your privacy. 'The recent changes we made to our privacy policies generated a lot of interest. But they will enable us to create a much better, more intuitive experience across Google — our key focus for the year,' Page wrote."
From the letter: "Think about basic actions like sharing or recommendations. When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends. Google+ makes sharing super easy by creating a social layer across all our products so users connect with the people who matter to them." With all the claims of altruistic intent in the open letter, one might wonder why Google has to push their own social network instead of working on open protocols for sharing.
Um, Google DID try open source first: OpenSocial (Score:4, Informative)
Long before there was Google+, Google tried to standardize the web with an open social platform that anyone could use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
In the end, though, people didn't want to adopt it. The problem is that, like proprietary format wars, there's a lot to be gained by being the dominant player with a closed ecosystem. Facebook does not want to share its data or platform with other people.
Re:here's an idea (Score:5, Informative)
If you haven't already set that slider, click the "What's Hot" link on the left panel of G+ below the "Stream" section. It will show a volume slider in the center area near the top. Slide that all the way to the left, then click back to your stream. Problem solved!
Re:No company is deserving of "great love" (Score:4, Informative)
It's a mistake to think of your relationship with a company as anything other than economic. For instance:
Employee: You do work, they give you money. Either you or the employer can end the relationship at any time (well, in the US at least, the employer can at any time, whereas you are generally expected to work another 2 weeks), and the employer will probably not hesitate to do so if it's in their economic interest to do so.
Shareholder: You invest in the company and possibly vote on who you want on the board of directors, the company gives you money periodically as dividends or reinvests the profits so you can sell your stake for a higher price. Again, there's no emotional relationship in the least, and it's not totally uncommon for a CEO to rip off the company screwing the shareholders.
Customer: You give them money, they give you a product or service. Again, that's a 1-time economic deal, and they don't give a damn about you after you've given them money unless you're going to try to get the money back (demanding a refund, threatening a lawsuit, etc).
Supplier: They give you money, you give them a product or service. The only reason they might want to maintain a good relationship is if they want to have another round of trading.
Basically, once your particular economic transaction is over, the corporation doesn't give a rats behind about you. Which makes it absolutely stupid to love a corporation. That doesn't mean the people at that corporation are evil, just that they will do what's in their economic self-interest.
Re:I stopped reading pretty quickly (Score:3, Informative)
See, I think Larry Page has a fundamentally flawed belief:
When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends.
I don't want that at all. Maybe I want to share my great find with a small circle of friends. People whom I'd like to reinforce my connection with by limited sharing of relevant, high quality stuff. I expect it to be quid-pro-quo, and if you can't give me good stuff, the I expect to be able to withhold my favor from you.
What I don't want is for any random person who wanders through to leech off of my effort. Or for people to think that because we both like funny pictures of cats that we share some deep, personal connection. A social network is useful because the people in it are screened for quality in some way. The (olde tyme) method of screening was that it required effort to maintain each and every contact, so less useful contacts naturally fall by the way.
I don't want, every time I browse a bookshelf at the local bookstore, each of my friends to come up and tell me what they thought of the book. I want to discover for myself. And frankly, some of my friends' threshold for "awesome" is shockingly low.
Re:I stopped reading pretty quickly (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More iffy Slashdot editorial (Score:3, Informative)
Oh hai thar, the next iteration of DCTech/SharkLaser/WhatWasYourNameYesterday [slashdot.org]. You're way too obvious, as I noticed you when you posted a karma-whoring semi-offtopic comment about virtues of MS and Bill Gates up this thread in response to a comment about browsers.
Could you please stop with your anti-Google FUD, plzkthx?
Android is not GPL'd software - only kernel is GPL, and they are not required to publish anything else. All the other parts of Android are written by Google and published at their own will under Apache license.
Your "abuse" accusations are as unbased as almost everything you say. They use open source in accordance to licenses (if you've got a proof to the contrary - we're willing to listen. Right now you're just flinging words around) and they contribute to open source a lot.
Re:More iffy Slashdot editorial (Score:2, Informative)
http://code.google.com/opensource/projects.html
"Google has released over 20 million lines of code and over 900 projects. Many engineers work on open source projects full time, and even more use their 20% time to create new projects or contribute to their favorite existing projects. See our full list of released projects on Google Project Hosting (http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google)."
For perspective, the linux kernel is about 15 million lines of code. Some personal highlights of released code include:
* protobufs (why everyone doesn't use protobufs all the time I don't understand)
* Closure
* guice
* gflags
* perftools
* gwt
* webm
And of course there are contributions to linux, gcc, web standards etc... and the direct influence Bigtable, GFS and Chubby have had on software development (think NoSQL for a start).
Its unclear what you are trying achieve by suggesting Google should open source their core products? Publishing the key search or advertising algorithms would just encourage abuse and reduce their effectiveness. In fact, I don't think you really understand what goes into making and running a large service- YouTube isn't a single piece of software, or even a small set of software. Its a huge stack of hardware, software and people. At best Google can usefully release small bits of software because no one else runs an environment like theirs and almost no one (barring direct competitors) have the sorts of requirements the software was written to address. You are not going to run YouTube on your home desktop machine, you are not going to run an advertising platform or a search engine out of your living room. Exactly what benefit are you trying to bring to the world?
For me the whole point of FOSS is that "It is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, copy, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code." That includes using it to business ends, like Google, or (for example) any user of the Linux platform. Its entirely unclear to me how Google could be abusing FOSS? Surely the whole point of releasing FOSS is that it gets used? And despite your suggestions otherwise Google contributes a lot of patches and code back into FOSS projects. (As an example according to the latest Linux Foundation annual report Google sponsors about 1.0% of the code changes to the Google kernel and about 3.5% of the code reviews. http://go.linuxfoundation.org/who-writes-linux-2012)
I would suggest, sir, that you are talking out of your hat.