That time of the year, geeky presents and how google (apparently) ruined it all (Just Bru)

That time of the year, geeky presents and how google (apparently) ruined it all0

Posted by Bru December 26, 2007 11:54 AM

I kind of saw it coming, when google integrated gtalk with reader without letting user opt out, a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, apparently there's a wave of angst rising now at the claim that, by doing so, google ruined Christmas. Meh. Personally I agree with Michael and his "Give me a break", but yes, giving users the option to choose would have been wiser. Now don't get me wrong, I'm totally for syntactic (or interface, in this case) vinegar to "facilitate" the correct use of a tool, but there's a (not so subtle) difference between not giving me a keyboard shortcut for "trash" items in gmail and exposing all the stuff that I decided to share counting on the fact that:

page is accessible to anyone who knows its address, so all that's left to do is to let your friends know about it.

Security through obscurity is by far not the best practice, but certainly you can't blame the users for adopting it, nor you can pretend that what was shared before under that context is still perceived as "sharable" with the new push behaviour. This is also one of the issues I was pointing out and trying to solve through the Social News Reading concept: enabling people to choose who to trust and to empower with their own share of attention. Among other things that I appreciated under the xmas tree, the long awaited open source version of MT (that actually came in a few weeks ago, but I had no time to play with it so far) and, right on the xmas day, Ruby 1.9, that promises, among other things, to considerably speed up things. Now I should put those to good use to bring this website back to the techie edge it belongs... ideas are never a problem, time often is, but I still have some holidays and only a bunch of social events... ...like the SnowBall, that started as a dinner between old friends, and turned overnight in quite a massive event, considered the time (28th of december) and the place (somewhere in northwest Italy). We plan to eat well, drink better, have some inspiring conversations and, if anybody cares, maybe play a round of werewolf or the like; so if you don't have better plans stick yourself on the wiki by tomorrow morning and we'll try to add a sear for you. Oh, mind you, the snowball fight will probably have to be rescheduled, due to lack of snow itself... Update: Google promptly replied to the feedback mentioned above and adjusted reader's behavior according to that. Cute.