Slashdot Mirror
Larry Page Issues Public Update On Google Changes
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.
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.
The "What's Hot" was initially annoying but once they added the "volume sliders" to it so that you could just drop the volume to 0 (which says "Show nothing from What's hot in your stream") the problem went away. They do still have a fairly rapid rate of change on G+.
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!
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.
I am officially gone from
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.
Oh hai thar, the next iteration of DCTech/SharkLaser/WhatWasYourNameYesterday. 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.