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.
Re:here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
hell even G+ is forcing crap at us all the time. Larry, remember why Google became great in the first place - it had an unobtrusive search page that was not filled to bursting with flashing banners and adverts.
So why does Google+ homepage insist on sticking a "what's hot" crap across the stream of stuff I've decided I want to see? Why is there a 'best of' G+ banner that you can't turn off?
Tell you what Larry, turn on location services on your phone so we can all see exactly where you are all the time, and open your email so we can see everything you're doing. Even just show us the feed of 'personalisations' that Google is accumulating based on your browsing, email and G+ activities.
Then we can talk privacy.
Open protocols won't help... (Score:5, Interesting)
Open protocols don't help when everyone stops making webpages and moves to Facebook, which isn't publicly crawlable. Remember when everyone wanted their OWN website, and websites linked meaningfully to other websites, and there was a whole ecosystem of small, independent webpages with information on a crazy number of niche topics, and everyone's webpage had links to other webpages that they thought were cool? That doesn't really exist anymore. THAT web is dead. If Wikipedia and Craigslist, and a dozen other silo-type sites are all that's left to crawl (if they decide to let Google do it), how important is Google, really? The web has changed, and Google had to change or die with it. Google+ is just Google's attempt at taking what's left of the public, open web and internalize it (and make it all 'social' content mostly not publicly crawlable, ironically). So yeah, the (open) web really is dead, or will be soon.
No company is deserving of "great love" (Score:4, Interesting)
I love people, I love freedom and some other abstract concepts, but there's absolutely no way no how that I will give love to a corporation.
A corporation is a social and legal arrangement that exists to make money for its shareholders. It does this by producing 1 or more products, selling them to customers, and paying a portion of their sales to their employees as wages, another portion to the suppliers, and giving the remainder to their shareholders. That's it. It's a purely economic affair, and thus any dealings I have with a corporation are a purely economic relationship.
Re:More iffy Slashdot editorial (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No company is deserving of "great love" (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh? While I agree that the "great love" stuff is nauseating hyperbole, characterising companies as "purely economic affair[s]" is just silly. Companies are made up of people, selected by the people already in the company (while hiring), and people who want to work there (by applying). So you end up with a bunch of people who are selected for a particular mindset. The result of this is that companies have all sorts of differing priorities, motives, directions and products. This is particularly noticeable in tech, where there are ideological divisions between competing companies.
Money, is of course one of the big concerns, but I would argue that it's not necessarily the biggest. Apple seems to be largely motivated to make products that are insanely focussed on a certain type of user experience. Google by large-scale information sorting and similar technological problems. This is what make people want to work at these places.
Respect for a company is no stranger that respect for any other group of people.
This whole business of personal search... (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, I totally get why they want to do personal search like this, but I think that they're missing the bigger picture. On all but a very small subset of topics, I don't need or want something that's customized to me individually. The fact that it's there at all means that something I'm directing a client to look for is going to be harder for them to find, if we both have highly customized search enabled (?) when we visit the web search page.
I've also found that Google news has noticed that I don't like to read right wing political content. So they've been giving me less of it. That's another problem, as I never asked them to do it. Maybe the solution here is letting users sculpt their own experiences, based on what they actually tell Google they want? Automating this has the potential for being absolutely disastrous if they don't get it right.
Re:I stopped reading pretty quickly (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:More iffy Slashdot editorial (Score:2, Interesting)
Google realised this with Google Talk, which is a federated XMPP deployment. On its launch day, Google Talk users could talk with millions of existing XMPP users. The XMPP installed base was probably smaller than AIM or MSNM, but it was already fairly large.
Google didn't really "realize" anything. They used XMPP so they could quickly throw together something they needed. Facebook also uses XMPP, do you think they also realized the potential of having open IM networks, or do you think they used that to minimize costs, effort and work needed to create their own protocol and all associated things?
Google has a long history of leveraging (i.e, abusing) open source code for their own benefit. With things like Android they are required to publish their code because they used GPL'd software, which of course benefits others too. However, it is fairly stupid to think they did this to help the world or shit like that, they did it because they have to. Google also abuses lots of open source software which they have built their custom software upon, but because they only host it on their servers they don't have license problems with GPL. May I ask, have you ever seen Google open sourcing their core products - which are built on GPL and FOSS software - like their search engine and advertising platform, YouTube, or anything like that? Of course not, because they don't have to. I am a big supporter of FOSS and open source software and movement, but in my eyes Google's abuse is much larger problem than lets say Microsoft, who at least spends their own resources, money and work to create their software from the beginning, and not abusing those who have contributed their code from their good heart.