Day: January 13, 2014

→ Google will make it easy for strangers to email you

→ Google will make it easy for strangers to email you:

I don’t know why anyone’s surprised. To be clear, for anyone who thinks Google is some benevolent, selfless entity handing out free services to everyone out of the goodness of its heart:

Google’s leadership, threatened by the attention and advertising relevance of Facebook, is betting the company on Google+ at all costs.

Google+ adoption and usage is not meeting their expectations. Facebook continues to dominate. It’s not working. They’re desperate.

Google will continue to sell out and potentially ruin its other properties to juice Google+ usage. These efforts haven’t worked very well: they juice the numbers just enough that Google will keep doing this, yet will keep needing to do more.

Making Google+ succeed at all costs means exactly that. All previous rules are out the window. Google will eventually violate every formerly held principle if it might help Google+.

You, the users, are just along for the ride. You’re just eyeballs. Body parts and ad-targeting data. Google doesn’t care about you at all. You’ve tolerated enough already that it’s pretty clear you’re not really going anywhere.

[And this is news how? even if the target of their promotion has changed. And BTW, while all us tech geeks take Google to task for this, believing, for some period of time anyway that Google was “different” from other corporate entities, I don’t see that they’re “worse” than other corporations form this perspective. Just not any better either. ]

Source: Marco

Internet of Things: The “Basket of Remotes” Problem

Internet of Things: The “Basket of Remotes” Problem:

For consumers, technology should get out of the way — it’s a means, not an end. Consumers don’t have the mindset or training of IT techies, they don’t have the time or focus to build a mental representation of a network of devices, their interactions and failure modes.

[Well that might be a bit extreme, but *I* am certainly not interested in setting up all that infrastructure. And I do want my devices to work, and slowly ever so slowly, things are creeping in that direction.]