louisgray.com - Latest Comments in louisgray.com: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

Re: louisgray.com: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

kara — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 03:13:00 -0000

"Prokofy, I don't mind being wrong, but in this case, you had users taking news published publicly elsewhere, stored in a public feed, and at a public URL. That they expected this combination to in fact, be private, was broken."

The public URLs have zero discoverability until you pass them to another user and this was always made clear. This same sort of simple obfuscation is used effectively for most private or narrowly shared material on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and elsewhere. Are you suggesting that obfuscation as practice for managing content distribution is "broken"? That argument seems overblown.

Google's real mistake here was conjuring "friends" out of a separate application and providing no direct means to control who you broadcast to. Why should I be appearing on the sidebar of my ex? Why am I sharing posts with the guy in HR?

The people I want to share my reading interests with are most definitely a subset of those I communicate with using gmail.

Re: louisgray.com: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

Dave — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 01:39:00 -0000

In the old school, thanking for feedback was indeed disingenuous. But in the new world of social media, companies rely on it. Business models are built around it. And Google has become much more engaged with their various constituencies in the last year, and seems to put a priority on responding to feedback.

Re: louisgray.com: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

louisgray — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:46:00 -0000

Prokofy, I don't mind being wrong, but in this case, you had users taking news published publicly elsewhere, stored in a public feed, and at a public URL. That they expected this combination to in fact, be private, was broken.

There will be violations of privacy in the future, for sure. But I don't think this was a big one. It's more an instance of Google botching the message, when the medium itself was safe.

Re: louisgray.com: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

dyerbrookME — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:43:00 -0000

No, no, no. You need to wake up to the reality of people's anger about the loss of privacy, and more to the point, the sheer aggressive arrogant intrusiveness of geeks making widgets and platforms for social media.

You don't keep hectoring people about "the openness of the web" and how "information wants to be free" because they cut your service in a heartbeat when you violate their sense of space. Instead, you need to respect this more.

People's reactions aren't overblown; the egos of the social media makers are. They need to listen to customers, because they bite back hard.

Prokofy Neva

Re: louisgray.com: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

Ben — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:03:00 -0000

Know the fable about frogs in the swamp watching bulls fight? Matters to them naught who wins ... the battle itself threatens them.

Which isn't my comment: my comment is that google is as refractory to real innovation as is, say, NSA. Which is a stretch, because I really don't grok google's mandate.

http://bentrem.sycks.net/gn... ... "computing is for insight.