Tag: google

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Weekly Wrap 65: Better late than never, perhaps

A supposedly-weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers Monday 29 August to Sunday 4 September 2011, a week during which I was so mentally exhausted I needed to take a bit of a break — hence the relatively low level of media output.

I also did about a day’s worth of geek-for-hire stuff for some long-standing clients. That was primarily web development, not the sort of thing I detail here unless there’s something interesting to show you.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 103, “Google’s real names a real disaster”. A conversation with Kirrily “Skud” Robert, about which I have already written stuff.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

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Crikey: Google+ is a goddam Trojan horse

So, there’s a reason Google is being so stubborn over this “real names” policy. Google+ isn’t a social network at all, despite the fact that it looks like one. It’s actually the core of an identity service.

I wrote about this for Crikey today, a piece that includes Google chair Eric Schmidt’s confirmation of that plan and some observations that suggest Google+ is failing to reach critical mass.

The continuing bad press over what’s been dubbed #nymwars won’t help. Yet I suspect that Google’s need and desire to prevent Facebook Connect becoming the planet’s default identity service will override most concerns.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Schmidt has always been the go-for-profits guy. Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page is reportedly aware of the problem, although an informative post by Stephen R van den Berg says it’s unclear whether he’s being properly informed about the criticism. That post was written a week ago, however, so I daresay Page has seen at least some of the news reports since. And the other co-founder, Sergey Brin, has been notably silent.

It feels like things have come a long way since my original expletive-filled rant.

Oh, and thank you to everyone who said they liked the Patch Monday podcast on this topic. That’s especially pleasant given my fears over the rushed recording.

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Patch Monday: Google’s real names a real disaster

Google’s disaster of a “real names” policy was the subject of today’s Patch Monday podcast. How could it not be, after my own experiences and the attention that scored globally?

Australian developer Kirrily “Skud” Robert, a former Google employee currently resident in San Francisco, has been compiling Google’s name failures, so she was a natural guest for the podcast.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

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Stilgherrian versus Google, Round 2

There’s been a few developments this week in my battle with Google over my name. More communication. And more media coverage.

On 18 August I responded to Google’s boilerplate email thusly:

Hi folks,

My full, legal name is a mononym, “Stilgherrian”. It has been so for 30 years. This name has been used consistently throughout that time on every official document, in every credit line in print, on radio and on television, in everyday use… everywhere.

Dare I say it, a Google Search will soon reveal that.

My only photo ID is my passport, and I am unwilling to send a copy because I have security concerns.

I can’t edit my name in Google Profiles to match my “real” name, because it won’t let me leave the surname field blank.

How do we fix this?

Cheers,

Stilgherrian

Google’s reply arrived on 20 August.

Continue reading “Stilgherrian versus Google, Round 2”

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Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids

[This is a slightly edited version of the article written for “Stories: from The Local Government Web Network”, issue 3, August 2011, which was distributed at the LGWN’s conference in Sydney on 18 August. Some material in this article also appears in Tweeting your way out of Paranoia, the closing keynote presentation I delivered.]

If you’re not yet at least experimenting with Twitter, the real-time social messaging service, you should be.

Suppress the corporate paranoia. It’s a lot easier than you might think. And while Twitter does get far more attention than its relatively small size might suggest — truly active Twitter users number perhaps 20 million globally compared with Facebook’s 750 million active users and counting — it punches well above its weight in terms of connecting with influential community members.

Twitter may not ever become the core real-time service used by the masses. Or if it does, it may only be for a few years. You only have to look at the last decade to see the then-leading MySpace surpassed by Facebook in 2008, just four years after Facebook was founded. Google’s launch of Google+ in June this year has generated plenty of speculation that the search and advertising giant’s foray into social networking will in turn wipe Facebook off the planet. Who knows?

There will always be some real-time social messaging service, however. Whether that’s Twitter as a stand-alone service, or whether we all end up using a real-time component of Facebook or Google+ or something that has yet to be deployed — none of that matters. The principles and practices of real-time messaging will doubtless end up being much the same.

Anything you might do with Twitter will be easy to migrate to any other real-time messaging system. The lessons you learn will carry across too.

Continue reading “Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids”

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My Google names-policy rant goes global

My expletive-ridden blog post about Google’s fucked-up “real names” policy and their brain-dead implementation has gone global.

While my editor at Crikey commissioned an article, To Google, we are data fodder, and I am an unperson, the story was picked up by an American political blog and linked to by The Wall Street Journal.

The post has been viewed at least 6000 times, probably many more. So far.

I’ve just written a lengthy response to the 127 comments so far. I do think that people who say “It’s only a beta” and “It’s just a bug” and “Well it is a free service” and “What do you expect with a weird name?” have entirely missed the point.

That, too, will probably offend people.

And now my work here is done.

Please add your comments on the original post.

[Photo: Logo from Google Developer Day 2007 by meneame comunicacions, sl, used under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.]