Microsoft gloated on its official blog today about the oodles of coverage of Google's new privacy policy. The post uses the word "discussion," but it only linked to the vigorous freak-outs in which many sites engaged. It mentions "concerns and worries" and "lack of choice," but it never explains what Microsoft is talking about. The central thesis is that "Google... made it harder, not easier, for people to stay in control of their own information."
The post then goes straight to the list of Microsoft products to which Google users can switch: Hotmail, Bing, Office 365 and Internet Explorer. How are these products better for users' "own information" than Google? Well, they don't read it to target ads. What else do they do with users' information? No explanation here. "We've left the light on for you. :)", VP Frank X. Shaw writes. You have to hand it to Microsoft for being so forward, but by rushing to the sales pitch, this post misses a huge opportunity to be informative. Is that because the information might be more complex than Microsoft (and the press) would care to admit?
Google's Blogger has found a way to handle local government takedown requests similar to the way Twitter now does. It will now start redirecting readers to country-specific top-level domains (TLD) instead of the usual blogspot.com domain. It does so based on the location of the user's IP address, just as many other Google services do. This gives Google the "flexibility" to comply with removal requests according to local laws.
But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.
The President of the United States held a Google+ Hangout today. He fielded questions selected from over 130,000 submissions as well as from five lucky Americans selected to hang out with him live. For the rest of us, it was a streaming video experience. It began with a swooping, dramatic intro, and then Google MC Steve Grove took control of the proceedings.
This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy. But despite the great camera angles and the believable-but-composed real-world folks, it stretched the definition of "social media" pretty thin. User-submitted content is good, and the hand-picked live participants get to be involved, but for most of us, it's no different from television.
Google has reportedly fired its Kenya country manager, Olga Arara-Kimani, over a fraudulent use of Mocality's data.
Nairobitech reported:
"The Google Mocality saga has drawn its first casualties. Kenya country lead for Google, Olga Arara-Kimani formerly of Safaricom has been let go by the company. Also axed is a technical guy in Zurich... It is not clear how Olga was picked for the fall but as one observer noted, sometimes a sacrificial lamb has to be found for the brand name to weather the storm."
Update after the jump.
The second-most important thing about social media is talking to people. The most important thing is to know whom you're talking to. We can't have a conversation about "authenticity" or "realness" or any other airy social media concept until we understand that there are people listening on the other side of that megaphone, and that's very nice of them to do. In order to get something out of social media, our listeners have to get something out of listening to us.
To give them what they want, it helps to know who they are. With the integration of Google+ into search, Google's social network will become an increasingly important part of the Web. By Google's count, it has 90 million users already. If you want to have a presence in Google search, active participation on Google+ is a good idea. I tested a tool for understanding the Google+ audience today and found some interesting insights.
Google updated its privacy policy on Tuesday. It replaced more than 60 separate policies with a single one that treats Google users and their data as the same across all Google services. Reactions were shrill. "The End of 'Don't Be Evil'" was trotted out for the umpteenth time. The Washington Post quoted privacy experts saying, "There is no way anyone expected this." My, that sounds terrible!
But it's not true. Everyone watching should have seen this change coming. Google executives have maintained for so long that their new direction is one unified Google product. The new policy doesn't track any new data. It doesn't change the user's settings. Users can still export all their data and leave Google forever. All this does is change perception.
Today Google+ announced that it is now open to users ages 13+ (in all countries except for Spain, South Korea and the Netherlands). Until today, Google+ had been 18+. When Facebook began in 2004, it was open to college students only, most of whom are 18+ years old. In September 2006, Facebook became available to everyone, including users ages 13+.
A study published last year by researchers at the University of Guelph in Canada looked at how parents acted on Facebook. Their study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. They discovered that parents revert to adolescent behavior, which suggests that there's something inherently adolescent about social media.
Google Earth released version 6.2 today. It patches up some of the choppy textures it used to have, so it now looks like a smooth, realistic surface - no more "quilt effect." The texture improvements are now in all versions of Google Earth, including the mobile versions. This update also adds Google+ integration. Screenshots from Google Earth can be shared with Google+ circles with a new "share" button.
In a telling display of Google's new unified product approach, the Google Earth annoucement encourages users to "upgrade to Google+." Google wants to be considered all one service, and a Google+ "upgrade" spans across all its sites and applications.
Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz announced today that Google+ will now be available to teens. Previously, the social network was exclusively for adults over 18, but now anyone with a Google Account can use it (13+ in most countries).
This policy change comes with new safety features for teen users. They will get a warning pop-up before posting publicly. Only people in teens' circles can contact them by default. If a stranger joins a Hangout in which a teen is participating, the young person is temporarily removed and asked if they want to rejoin.
Take two open source projects, do a little creative hacking and ingenuity and what do you get? The Android-Kinect project. An engineer that goes by the name DDRBoxman hacked a Galaxy Nexus smartphone with his a projector, a PC and Microsoft's Kinect API and was able to use "touch" based gestures to control the user interface by interacting with the projection. Everybody has been waiting for The user experience brought to us by the film Minority Report. Well, this engineer might have brought us closer than any other hack before.
