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How Steve Jobs Changed Google Plus
Anthony_Cargile writes "Everyone thinks of Google Plus as a social networking website competing with Facebook, but that is no longer the case — even Google recognizes its failure in that regard. But in a meeting with Sergey Brin and Larry Page shortly before his death, Steve Jobs gave key advice as to what direction to take their company with regards to Google Plus, as is evidenced by their controversial new 'umbrella' privacy policy that went in effect this year. Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated."
Seriously, he died months ago, we can stop jerking off all over his legacy now...
Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated.
Good thing we have alternatives, right?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Nothing but gossip, and scaremongering.
This is the same man who came up with "MobileMe" and Ping. Remember those massive failures? No? That's because the media ignores them in portraying Apple as a company that never makes a mistake.
Steve Jobs, evil until the end.
What Would Satan^WSteve Do?
Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated.
Wouldn't that require people to actually use Google Plus, in order for it to be a problem?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Slow news day much? This article is devoid of news, consists solely of "Duh!" opinions rendered in awkward sophomoric prose, and is all too typical of the low standards of fourth-tier tech sites. "The leader in technology news and commentary"? Maybe at your particular high school.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
I think you mean Privacy Nuts.
If you think that information wasn't already communicated between groups in the company, you are hugely mistaken,
The new privacy policy just made this far more clear.
All the separate agreements equally allowed this.
If there is anything worse than people still bringing up how OH SO WONDERFUL STEVE JOBS is, it is the privacy nut articles.
Give me another Raspberry Pi Beowulf Cluster of viral infections or whatever the hell else.
Oh GOD, I just realized this is both! That's it, time for sleep. I'm done. Gone, out of here.
I like how the article pointlessly mentions that Jobs used LSD, I didn't like the guy but there's no reason to toss comments like that out in an article where they make no difference
Also, this sounds like "embrace, extend, extinguish" to anyone else?
Only link in the summary is returning a 503
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Didn't Google call Google+ an identity service? You can't expect privacy from an Identity Service. That would be like expecting Facebook to stop violating your privacy; they can't stop, violating your privacy IS their business model.
Apple's online services have never integrated terribly well, and they have a bad habit of renaming things and moving features from one service to another.
Which seems to mimic a certain Redmond based software company's online ventures...
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
There's nothing in the article (yes, I read it). It's just what everyone already knew - Google+ is one more Google service and will continue to exist and act as a data source to better target their advertisements. Big deal. The actual content of the unified privacy policy remains less threatening than most, even if people continue to cower at its mere existence. The contribution that it mentions from Steve Jobs is essentially non-existent, and I've already written more than this thing deserves.
They were so non-traditionally successful that they were too good for ordinary people. Think different.
BAHAHAHAHAHA
Ever heard of the Slashdot Effect?
Still don't get the general obsession with privacy - i do get the need just not the "obsession" for most people.
For 99% of people, nobody really gives a damn about your online life ... no they aren't tracking your every move ... you are just boring and not worth the effort, just like the rest of us.
The other 1% - well that's a different case .... perhaps using google plus or facebook at all ain't so smart for them !
He is the troll god, for whenever he is mentioned, the trolls come out to troll, yourself included. Stop worshiping him, troll.
I stick to the shadows, and only go out at night, wearing a mask.
You seriously need to wear more than a mask on not to be recognized, Stubby.
Google accepted advice from a man who declared Thermonuclear War against them. Seriously?
So I read the linked blog post, and I'm trying to figure out what the guy's real point is. The one thing that IS clear is the author's an unabashed Google fanboy and can't grasp the concept that his favorite company might be able to fail at something.
Anyway, I'm stuck deciding between two possibilities:
a) He knows in his heart of hearts that Google+ is a failure, and is trying to pin that on a non-Google person because - hey, you can't libel the dead.
b) He really does believe Google can do no wrong, and is trying to somehow convince non-believers by invoking the perceived infallibility of Jobs.
In any case, it's hard to believe anyone could believe that Brin and Page heard Jobs say "you need to unify your products into a seamless whole" and twisted that into "your problem is you don't have a unified privacy policy".
#DeleteChrome
It seems that the top, techie-led Silicon Valley firms are sort of an exclusive boy's club: Apple, Google, Oracle.
Quite suggestive that Page and Brin are into something, too;). However, it could also be an in-joke about enlightenment. After all, in the sixties, LSD was the shorter path to achieving oneness with the universe (the long way was to go on a pilgrimage to India). Now iimagine Jobs advising his young apprentices (disciples?) to unite their different services into the One web portal.
Righto. Facebook is a threat to Google only so far as it reduces Google's ad revenue. Facebook could well be a news or pr0n site.
Launch your own company, state the (apparent) obvious and get rich, bitch.
Or shut the fuck up.
On word for you : hindsight.
Media, maybe, but Apple themselves readily admit their own mistakes. They don't flog a horse long after it's dead, unlike some.
Page and Brin, struck with this epiphany, thought to themselves: "My God, how come we and our 30,000 highly-qualified employees never thought of this before!? This man is truly a genius!"
This is the same man who came up with "MobileMe" and Ping. Remember those massive failures? No? That's because the media ignores them in portraying Apple as a company that never makes a mistake.
Where do you get off calling MobileMe a massive failure? There's a bunch of different services that existed before MobileMe, and exist under iCloud now. Some services have changed quite a bit, like Gallery to Photo Stream, iDisk is going away, and new services like Match are available for a price, while the synchronization stuff is now free.
Who says Apple doesn't make mistakes and what makes you think the media doesn't give them coverage??
You don't even know what MobileMe is, and I'm starting to think you don't know the difference between a mistake and a failure.
+5 Said something bad about Apple, LOL.
Was Jobs’s conversation with Brin/Page meant to stir the data giant into even more of an unstoppable data bank, or was it merely an innocent remark meant to give the users a more pleasant experience? Probably both.
Or... False dichotomy. Jobs seemed to be committed to destroy android even if it cost apple the last dollar in it's bank. Why would Jobs give "good" advice to Google to help it's bank account? Perhaps I suggest a third option. Maybe Jobs was hoping to tease google into chasing a ghost... I have no evidence, but then again, neither do the authors of this article, and at least a passive disinformation strategy makes more sense than Jobs wanting to help Google+...
A little touchy, are we?
As I recall, Jobs didn't "launch" his own company -- there were three founders.
I agree that people get rich off of the obvious all of the time. Apple is probably the number one example of that scenario.
BTW, "hindsight" is not involved when something is obvious.
Feel better soon!
...I don't have to be Steve Jobs to say that to Google.. came on..
Oh look, it's the old trolling-by-calling-someone-a-troll technique. You must think you've oh so very clever.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Where do you get off calling MobileMe a massive failure?
Well, Steve Jobs called MobileMe and the MobileMe team a massive failure himself.
"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, "So why the f*** doesn't it do that?"
Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company's on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of "tarnishing Apple's reputation." He told the members of the team they "should hate each other for having let each other down", and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team.
Source
FTFS "Everyone thinks of Google Plus as a social networking" ... - I rarely think about Google Plus and I suspect 98% of the planet don't give a damn.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
MobileMe was a piece of crap and the only good thing about it that Apple (and Jobs as its CEO was ultimately responsible for the whole fiasco) did was kill it. As usual, simply pointing out this failure brings out the Apple zealot apologists like ToasterMonkey who see any criticism, no matter how valid, as a personal affront.
Wrong. Apple is still flogging the dead horse known as "Ping". Yes, there is a rumour that they will be killing it on the next release of iTunes but the services are still up and running right now, suckering in tens of users every month with promises it could never, and will never, deliver on. Face it kiddos, the only company that is actually worse at being social online than Google is Apple.
"You're holding it wrong." "Just avoid holding it that way." "Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong."
They just built (bought, LOL) all these "services" over the years, and did Android, but it took Steve Fucking Jobs (RIP) to TELL them they had something that could be unified? Seriously?
Love the way Jobs was quoted: "He told them something to the effect of...'[purported quote]' ".
Sure, I imagine G's goal all along was an ID service: GOOG doesn't like the anonymity of information/posts on the internet because their main brand (Search) is serving up these pages and they want the pages to be more reliable; they want accountability on the web. (I completely disagree with the concept, but that's not the point). Apple wants a good web experience, too, but only on their hardware. No way (imo) Jobs would have said shit to Page about a homegrown social network without mentioning hardware, and he surely wouldn't have lauded Androids as the hardware (not closed enough). The companys' mindsets are way too different for these types of collaborations. (Actually, they hate each other.)
...readily admit their own mistakes.
Here's another glass of Kool-Aid, kid. You're doing great.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Those quotes are in response to the disastrous INITIAL RELEASE of MobileMe, you disingenuous cunt.
Not sure why anyone would think I'm trolling, or even sticking up for Apple. I'm merely making an observation. The list of stuff they've readily abandoned (sometimes much to developers' annoyance) is pretty long.
.Mac, MobileMe, Ping, Rosetta, Classic Environment, SCSI, Floppy Disk Drive, Mac Clones, FireWire, Gil Amelio.
These are dead horses they not only didn't flog, they carted them off to the knacker's yard without ceremony:
68000 processors, Hypercard, Claris , A/UX, Dylan, OpenDoc, eWorld, AppleLink, MPW, MacApp, Mac OS versions 1 through 9, MacTV, Pippin, The Resource Fork, File & Creator Types, PowerPC processors, Cube Mac,
Once a federation of fairly independent product units (i.e., gmail, maps, blogger, docs etc.), Google+ now threatens to subsume each into a monolithic service. While this offers some synergies, it stratifies the organization and reduces the independence of once autonomous leaders. Google will survive the internal blowback but may never again operate as flexibly or rapidly. Ironically, most of the technical changes relate to unified authentication using OAuth. The one who controls permissions is the one who controls society.
TFA talked about Google Plus
" ... wrap everything else around Facebook and the users will cope"
Umm ...
Excuse me for being dense, I do not understand what exactly does that mean
Anyone care to explain ?
Thanks !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Where do you get off calling MobileMe a massive failure?
...is this some sort of secret? Apple has been known to have serious issues when it comes to rolling out user services and getting any real traction with them, even when they tried to bundle them with a basic backup service.
Each time, they'd take some aspect of the last series of network service failure that they thought was important, jettison the cruft, add some new stuff, and rebadge it. Apples inability to run these services well (jesus, idisk? .mac?) has been the a major talking point in the industry for years and years, as it stands in stark contrast to their ability to roll out hardware.
So, I can't help but notice that nowhere in your post do you really say why it is a success... just scattered questions irrelevant to the matter at hand. What's the word for that again?
This article is without merit and doesn't say much at all, though my favorite part is description of the "quote" he attributes to Jobs:
He [Jobs] told them something to the effect of
... and then just makes up the rest.
And not to rag on the author too much, but this "About Chris" profile simply makes me cringe.
Chris started at The Coffee Desk during its hey-day as an infrequent guest author who slowly grew to becoming a mainline contributor. He is a business grad student at USC who is very fluent with technology and the ever-evolving web, and has priceless contributions to Silicon News as a result. He is known for looking at the "big picture" of things, namely new technological trends, and analyzing them from a business perspective that so many IT professionals tend to glaze[sic] over in their focus on the technology's specifics.
From a guy with such tech "fluency," I expect a bit more.
---Alex
Is this the same steve jobs who vowed to kill android?
Perhaps Google shouldn't be asking advice from someone who wants to kill one of their most popular products, after all disrupting google would damage android.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
nuff said
Think different. Split infinitives.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
That's because the media ignores them in portraying Apple as a company that never makes a mistake.
The media haven't ignored it at all, just recently Mossberg brought Ping up at All Things D
Not sure why anyone would think I'm trolling, or even sticking up for Apple. I'm merely making an observation. The list of stuff they've readily abandoned (sometimes much to developers' annoyance) is pretty long.
These are dead horses they not only didn't flog, they carted them off to the knacker's yard without ceremony:
68000 processors, Hypercard, Claris , A/UX, Dylan, OpenDoc, eWorld, AppleLink, MPW, MacApp, Mac OS versions 1 through 9, MacTV, Pippin, The Resource Fork, File & Creator Types, PowerPC processors, Cube Mac, .Mac, MobileMe, Ping, Rosetta, Classic Environment, SCSI, Floppy Disk Drive, Mac Clones, FireWire, Gil Amelio.
I think the issue is that you claimed that Apple themselves readily admit their own mistakes, when they are famously known for going to great lenghts never admitting anything. Any time any issues arise, Apple is mum hoping it will blow over, until the issue gather so much steam that they just have to respond in some way (like giving out free iPhone cases in stead of just saying you are holding it wrong). The examples you are listing are somewhat different, I don't think anyone disagree that Apple is quick to abandon technologies. And I think you would be hard pressed to come up with an Apple exec introducing them saying 'We admit it, we failed with this".
I refused to use Google+ from the very beginning, due to its glaring lack of privacy protection. Sure, I have an account. I like to keep my options open. But there's next to nothing there.
And when their "umbrella" policy came into effect, my decision to ignore them was 100% vindicated.
So, on the contrary: people who were paying attention did indeed anticipate it.
Well, Steve Jobs called MobileMe and the MobileMe team a massive failure himself.
Well he certainly tore them a new one, which led to iCloud, which is the sum of all the lessons learned from that debacle - so in that regard iCloud it's the new and improved version of MobileMe. It's not as if Apple got out of the business of providing mobile syncing and software services.
I don't like the kind of crap where I login to gmail and then have google's search show "btw, we know who you are" so as a small mutiny I've switched to using chrome for gmail and for everything else it's opera or firefox.
I almost certainly read the article, and I almost certainly agree with the summary. You almost certainly read the article too, in which case you almost certainly agree that this almost certainly occurred. This is almost certainly the most accurate story ever posted on /. And almost certainly, this comment will be rated +5 informative.
It is either certain, or it isn't. If it is certain, then there is no doubt evidence to back up that claim. In which case you would simply say "it is certain that... because of..." Unless you are writing an article on probability theory, then we should expect facts. Not rumor dressed up as fact.
You know what we call things reported on web blogs that are almost certain?
Bullshit.
Here are some red-flag phrases the writer of the summary almost certainly read, and almost certainly ignored:
"Nobody would expect..."
"I'm going to reveal..."
"It all started when..."
"...something to the effect of..."
"...easily verified via his Wikipedia page..."
"I'm told by people familiar with the situation..."
"I project that..."
Well, before I totally dismiss the article let us learn about the author. Perhaps he is a well connected business savvy insider who has connections right at the top. Let's see what the bio says:
Chris "...is a business grad student at USC who is very fluent with technology..."
Okay, I can't go on any more. I'm going to be sick. Whatever journalistic integrity I had is being sucked dry by this one. Since when did USC grad students start getting taken so seriously?
Coincidentally I was reading The Big Short the other day and it was about a very similar theme - how human beings seem to want collectively to believe in something no matter that it is obviously bullshit, and that the people who try to point out that the emperor is naked get no thanks - they even seem to get blamed when the system collapses due to its unsustainability. There is not a lot of difference in principle between believing in the medieval idea of Heaven and believing that junk mortgages could be made AAA by clever repackaging, and that nothing bad would happen.
Marx wanted to find out the truth underlying human society. Jobs wanted to find out what would best satisfy the desires for gadgetry of middle and upper middle class Americans. They were both pretty good at what they did (Marx's analysis of capitalism has turned out about 100% correct), but in the case of Marx his followers screwed up. I strongly expect Jobs's successors to do exactly the same.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Fact of the matter is, he must have greenlighted it at one point. Don't most i Fans and history say he was a massive control freak?
C= made a PC too in the 70s
C= made a cheaper home fun computer than Apple
C= made a better color computer than Mac System 6
The C= Amgia could emulate the Macs+OS via ROM module or (copy rom as most did via BBSs). The Rom in ram ran faster. The Emulator patched some OS calls to be asyncronous and ran faster and better that a real mac did. And also ran Amiga apps at the same time as Mac Apps.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
none of this pc/cpu tech would be possible if it wasnt for the massive effort of the moon landings, which triggered development rappid in cpu/computers etc...
So this is why we also need moon mission #2 and mars missions.
Other wise IBM would have you using version 1.001 for 1000 years.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"even Google recognizes its failure" Really? I find it amazing that such crap-articles are posted and allowed to be posted in today's environment. If Google truely recognizes such, maybe a citation would be posted but it has not. Hence, the only thing that one can believe is that this is some failed attempt at sucking up to a company that one is a fan-boy of. Sure the Facebook (AOL of this generation) has millions of daily users that play games and post random "thoughts" and Google+ has conversations that for many of us are quite important.
How is something a failure that grows every month?
Thanks for wasting my time (again) with such drivel.
.... `ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste'
The distortions were already creeping in during his lifetime. But, to be fair, his writing had certain ambiguities and tensions that lends itself to being misunderstood.
Jesus is an entirely different story. Briefly put, there just isn't enough evidence to make any sort of objective judgment. To say that Jesus would have rejected (or accepted) modern Christianity is to make a judgment founded upon ideological principles.
The case of Aristotle is pretty interesting. In some ways, Aristotle was very empirically minded. In other ways, not so much. But what happened in the medieval era was the flip side of Feyerabend's observation that any science without a metaphysics becomes a rigid metaphysics on its own. Aristotlean metaphysics ceased to be metaphysics and was adopted as a science.
In any case, Jobs is nowhere close to the league in which you'll find Aristotle, Marx, and Jesus. Fifty years from now might get a couple of paragraphs in some text books. But in the end, his innovation wasn't anywhere near as world changing as any of the others under discussion.
What's wrong with having released services that did not succeed? The stereotype of the Apple Fanboy loves EVERYTHING that Apple puts out, simply because it's made by Apple. Those two services just show that the stereotype is not true.
But why cite Wikipedia when there is so much better information on early history of science? The article you cite describes Alhazen as an "early Islamic scientist" whereas he was pre-scientific, as was Francis Bacon (to whom I am very distantly related, so I have some interest in the subject). Descartes described the experimental method but was a long way from following it. You can argue that Aristotle, by proposing the validity of sensory experience as a clue to understanding the world, was the father of experimental method (experience and experiment have a common root) or you can argue that Galileo was (he actually did experiments to test his ideas), but to try and claim that the moment of truth lies somewhere in between ca. 350 BCE and ca 1600 CE is to try and measure accurately using a jelly stick.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No, it isn't. It is based on a comparison of what is said in the New Testament versus what is propagated by several mainstream churches. Anybody who has had a theological education (guilty) and has then not had to earn a living by espousing one version or another of Christianity is free to see this and say it. To claim that this is an "ideological" issue involves a great deal of tortuous argument that apparently straightforward statements in the NT actually mean something quite different, plus a willingness to give the writings of Saul of Tarsus primacy over the Gospels.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
iCloud still sucks, you cannot even iMessage any one or check iMessage histories.
its pretty, but not pretty enough.
Wheres the 3d contacts editor using webGL?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
What a-- bad-- article. Blogger blogs about his own opinion, cites other bloggers as "proof". Also, Blogger doesn't know how the Internet works. FTFA:
Let's put aside that you're using Wikipedia as a primary source. The bigger wtf is-- do you even know what a hyperlink is? Apparently not. You should educate yourself. The information is easily findable if you Google for "list of html tags", click on the w3schools blue thing, then scroll down to the section called "a".
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Boldly split infinitives that no man has split before.
Google has maybe struck gold three times, ditto MicroSoft. But Apple tops them with double that. For every killer product there may several duds. And look at all the brilliant companies like Dell, EBay, RIM, Facebook that never really found their 2nd hit yet.
Trolling the world, even from the grave.
The Google Plus profile being linked to GMail and Picasa is why I deleted my Google Plus account and profile some months ago. It took a while for me to realise this, but once it did, my real name disappeared from Google Plus and not long after that, Google said fix your name or it'll be disabled, so I deleted it.
As a G+ user, I can categorically state that it is not a competitor to FB because it's not a social network. Instead, it's a competitor to LiveJournal and Blogger and I'm expecting to see Blogger actually get consumed by G+ as it makes sense to consolidate the two products.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
http://gplusideas.wordpress.com
And MobileMe was called a failure after that first release. I was only showing that it is not false to say it was a failure. They clearly learned from it, reworked it, rereleased it under another name (iCloud), and were more successful. That doesn't falsify a supportable statement that MobileMe was a failure.
Not sure why anyone would think I'm trolling, or even sticking up for Apple. I'm merely making an observation. The list of stuff they've readily abandoned (sometimes much to developers' annoyance) is pretty long.
These are dead horses they not only didn't flog, they carted them off to the knacker's yard without ceremony:
68000 processors, Hypercard, Claris , Steve Jobs, A/UX, Dylan, OpenDoc, eWorld, AppleLink, MPW, MacApp, Mac OS versions 1 through 9, MacTV, Pippin, The Resource Fork, File & Creator Types, PowerPC processors, Cube Mac, .Mac, MobileMe, Ping, Rosetta, Classic Environment, SCSI, Floppy Disk Drive, Mac Clones, FireWire, Gil Amelio.
FIFY.
That sounds just like something Hitler would say...
Just look at how many apologists like you and ToasterMonkey are desperately trying to downplay Apple's failures. My original statement that Steve Jobs is not god, and so doesn't automatically imbue success on everything he touched. Yes, nothing wrong with having services that do not succeed, will you fucktard apple zealots give that same consideration to Google, Canonical and Microsoft? My guess is NO you won't.
Call me an "Apply zealot" if you really want to, but the media didn't make a big deal about the failure of those products because they never made a big deal about those products to begin with. What are they going to say. "This product never interested us enough to cover it when it came out! But let's laugh at Jobs because of its failure..."
Well, Steve Jobs called MobileMe and the MobileMe team a massive failure himself.
"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, "So why the f*** doesn't it do that?"
Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company's on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of "tarnishing Apple's reputation." He told the members of the team they "should hate each other for having let each other down", and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team.
Look guys and gals, I know this is going against the grain here on Slashdot, but maybe, just maybe, hang on here until I'm finished..
Maybe Steve Jobs wasn't always right? Or at least he came across as a little too anal retentive sometimes?
It could just be me.
He didn't say it was a massive failure for one thing. I mean shit, are you telling me that was his body double at the iCloud launch or something? You could play the exact same scenario out with it, s/MobileMe/iCloud/g.
By the same supposed Steve Jobs reasoning you can conclude that iCloud was a massive failure right out the gate. /stopsdrinkingcoffee
I mean FFS, it has CLOUD in the name! THE most nebulous word in all of IT! Now are you SURE you didn't take him a little out of context?
You are speaking of the iPone 4? The device which was the #1 selling smartphone for 15 months with the highest customer satisfaction rating of any mobile on the market? Believe everything you read much?
How is that relevant? They made a mistake -- a very obvious mistake, if not necessarily important -- and tried to hide it until it became a PR nightmare. The fact that they overcame it and the did most everything else right doesn't change what happened.
It's obivous in hindsight, you tool. That's the whole point. I didn't see buttloads of commenters claiming that Google should centralize their services before they were centralized, so forgive me for not believing it was obvious to you all.
``It is based on a comparison of what is said in the New Testament versus what is propagated by several mainstream churches.''
It is based on an ideological interpretation of what is said in the New Testament which, itself, is a collection of sources put together by ideologues. To presume that the Gospels record what Jesus said and did accurately is a ideological judgment. It's one that I agree with. But it isn't objective in the same way that sources from more recent figures are objective. We do not have any correspondance between Jesus and his contemporaries. We do not have authentic works that claim to be written by the hand of Jesus. We have the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul, John, and James, and a whole slew of works that never made the canon. At the very best, from a historiographical perspective of what Jesus said, these are all secondary or tertiary sources rather than a primary source. Moreover, all are from admittedly biased sources. This does not mean that they aren't accurate. They may very well be. (And I believe that they are.) But their accuracy is not ascertainable in an objective fashion given the ideological nature of their source.
Most scholars think that the last of Gospels was complete within a hundred years of Jesus having died and it's quite likely that the earliest Gospels were complete within 50 years of his death.
Yeah that was in something like 2006. Upon initial release. Before it was fixed.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.