Blunderstorms

There’s a lot to be lost, […] For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.

Poor Sergey Brin. In an interview with The Guardian, he laments that he can’t trawl through my electronic diary for information to use to target me with ads, which is a Serious Problem for us all, because my thoughts on what I had for dinner yesterday are somehow paramount for the continued existence of the free web.

My previous post notwithstanding, I don’t mean to shit on Google. I use many of their services and their way of delivering ads is far preferable to that of pretty much all their competitors. I also realize servers and programmers and developing eyeware for Spider Jerusalem costs money, and that nothing is free (linux-flavored homebrewed beer regardless).

That doesn’t change the fact that statements like these really creep me out. I realize Brin has to say this stuff in order to keep up appearances, but I wonder how much is a soundbite for the benefit of us, the lowly peasants in the field, and how much is his actual conviction. I find both troublesome, but the latter downright terrifying.

A commenter (can’t remember which tech website, and I can’t be bothered to trawl through all the threads again) pointed out that “the definitions of privacy are evolving,” implying we should get with the program. Here’s the thing, though: It’s not evolving, it’s being eradicated. Fucking PRIVACY is privacy - change its definition and it isn’t privacy anymore. This is newspeak, and how. As the saying goes:

Anyone who says that assaulting people with hammers is wrong is just failing to accept the new hammer-assault reality of the digital age.

I use Gmail, Search, Reader, Calendar and YouTube regularly, and YouTube and Google Translate sporadically. For those services, I pay by way of exchange, allowing Google bots trawl my info and deliver targeted ads. That’s fine, and I accept those terms, but who decides what Google gets to go through beyond that should be me, not them or anyone else.

Added bonus, the simile of the decade:

If Canada wanted to send tanks into the US there is nothing stopping them and it’s the same on the internet. It’s hopeless to try to control the internet.

They should send the Mounties instead. Nobody fucks with the Mounties.

I admit it: I’m kind of burned out on Social networks. I am, or have been, a member of: Friendster, Pownce, Orkut (possibly Jaiku, who gives a shit can keep track?), Twitter (2 accounts + around 6 joke accounts), Facebook, Tumblr (3 blogs), LinkedIn, Coroflot (when it was called something else), Identi.Ca, kvitre.no, Wordpress.com, Fluther (more of a community), MySpace, bebo, delicious, Diaspora (the hub at poddery.com), Flickr, Foursquare (more here), Gowalla, Posterous (more here), GoodReads, Path, Last.fm, LiveJournal, My Opera, Pinterest, Virb, Instagram, PicPlz, soup.io and WAYN. And that’s just the stuff I remember off top of my head.

Lastly, of course, there’s Google+, the mighty G’s attempt at coralling you into an even smaller corner of the Internet. I have no doubt that Sergey and Larry’s pet eventually will take off in a big way, much like Android has. “If you build it, they will come,” as the movie said, and ultimately, the people will haz their hamburgerz, and the hardcore G+ users will complain about getting what they wanted in the first place: the patronage of the common rabble. So it goes.

At the moment, however, it’s something of a ghost town over there. I assume my user pattern is pretty standard: drop by every now and then, look around, then leave. The new redesign is very nice; clean, simple and appealing. You can do pretty much anything, and I’m told that if you know where to look (and can be bothered to do so) there’s lots of interesting content to be found. On the whole, though, I just can’t be bothered. I much prefer blogging on my own site, then sharing those posts elsewhere, like here on Tumblr. 

More than the post-apocalyptic experience, though, I think what gets me most about Google+ is its evangelists: huffy folks, most of whom deliver a similar cri de coeur with equal fervour: “G+ is where I go for interesting people with whom I have interesting conversations about interesting things, without all the idiot updates from my stupid friends.”

I don’t know about you, but that line of arguing doesn’t really make me feel terribly wanted. Paradoxically, in attempting to make you switch to The Next Big Thing, the early adopters and hardliners have made Google+ pretty unappealing: beyond Page and Brin’s vaguely desperate pleas to come play with them (a tactic we all know won’t get you laid), it sounds like a social network for people who are (or at least consider themselves) better than you*, a social network without all that pesky, you know, social stuff. 

Like I said, I have no doubt Google+ will eventually be huge. The user base has already grown a lot, in no little part thanks to, ahem, creative registration (yeah, sure, ogling watching that Secret video counts as using G+). It’s not that far a stretch to imagine that you’ll eventually need to sign up for an account just to use Google Search. Hyperbolic? Perhaps. Assuming activated Android phones will automatically count as well: probably less so.

I understand Google has every right to do this; the company can do whatever they want. They’ve built a billion-dollar empire, a colossus straddling the whole globe, pushing the future before them, while I’m just an asshole with a blog, so what do I know? Regardless, It still seems vaguely off to me, a retroactive move to catch up from a company that’s usually in the lead

I’ll readily admit there’s a lot that annoys me about Facebook, but my friends are there, and unlike the most vociferous Google+ users, I actually like my friends, warts and all.