DISQUS

Stephen Larson · 2 years ago

Nice job Google. Google is getting way beyond creepy.

rkorba · 2 years ago

Eric: Totally agree, and thanks for preaching same... even in my 5th decade, i'm not so old fashioned; however, your friends should be just that -- yours.

Luke Razzell · 2 years ago

Great analysis, Eric. I would add (in counterpoint) that relationships are very often not symmetrical (e.g. I am a fan of your blog, but you may not read mine), yet the "friend" metaphor that many social networks deploy straightjackets relationships into symmetricality.

At Blog Friends (where I found and now favourited this post), we keep your point about asking for explicit preferences in mind always; as well as avoiding assumptions about "friendship" (we talk about Fans and Favourites).

David Scott Lewis · 2 years ago

Google is still missing the point. It's not about a new way to manage existing contacts (and it does indeed seem pretty creepy; I hope it defaults to no sharing), it's about finding new contacts and developing new relationships. If I just want to share stuff or find what other people are reading, I can use Digg, Furl, whatever. Google has a different on this, but it's just another way at approaching the same problem.

For finding NEW contacts, developing NEW relationships, sharing with existing contacts at a "higher level" (so to speak), Twine and the other Semantic Web-based solutions are better than what Google is now offering.

David Gong · 2 years ago

Once "finding a new contacts and developing new relationships", it's about how to better maintain and manage those existing contacts. If Friends were not all equally important, then information shared should also be discriminative. And users have full control of that. www.reachcircle.com is offering such a solution for professionals.

Peter Bell · 2 years ago

Eric:

You've definitely "hit a nerve" on this one.

A good example from the past of precisely the same sort of social phenomena is the rise of the credit bureaus.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but at one time people didn't even know what their credit scores were (assuming such scores existed at all) because the credit scoring business was in its infancy and it didn't really matter. People got credit, were able to qualify for mortgages, get jobs and insurance, regardless of, or even in the absence of, a good credit score. And, given what's happened in the U.S. in the last forty years, personally, I'd say that most of us were a lot better off and the quality of life here in the U.S. was a lot higher, all other things being equal.

While the saying is as old as the hills, it's still powerfully true: "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

As Google continues to grow with its "cool" new features, unless people are diligent in protecting against the abuse that such power represents, Google itself will become a force in further delimiting and impoverishing us as a society. Remember, Google is a business, not a social charity. And, it's allegiance, ultimately, is to its shareholders and the other companies with which it transacts business.

Good for you in calling our collective attention to a very disturbing and, potentially, malevolent development.

Thanks.

Peter Bell

Luc On The Move · 2 years ago

No evil my ass.

Metin Bey · 1 year ago

There is a new example of geoweb applications.
OMOM - Online Members On Map.
Online Members from
Ning.com, Hi5.com, Facebook.com, Bebo.com, Orkut.com and MySpace.com
are on google map.
34 Supported Languages :
English, Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Deutsch, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian ve Vietnamese ..

Site Link = www.AskOkulu.com

No registration or sign up.
About a month passed 25.000+ members with no advertisement.
Members see the applicaiton in the gallery and click then invite their friends.
İn this rate,( about 500+ new members in a day ) in 1 or 2 month, 50.000 members and then the target will be 100.000 + members.
And go on...