WTF happened to Google?

[MonCapitan2002]

I just want to mention a complaint about Google since they own Youtube. What the fuck is it with having a 500 character limit for commenting on videos? That is way too fucking stingy. While I wouldn't necessary raise the limit large enough to post essays, I do think it should be higher.

Maybe a character limit in the range of 2,000 to 2,500 characters? It's difficult to post well thought out comments when the limit is so fucking restrictive. Bastards!

[Janet]

I have never heard anyone describe Youtube as a place "to post well thought out comments". I think you may be doing it wrong.

[beyelzu]

As to what the fuck happened to google, I think we can probably safely conclude that its downfall was brought about by a certain recent addition via internment.

[Ymir's blood]

I thought that she was working to destroy it from within.

[Ensign Steve]

You're thinking of civilization.

[Ymir's blood]

It's horrible, but my first thought upon reading that was Sid Meier's game series. That didn't seem quite to fit however...

[Dingfod]

If it takes you more than 140 characters to say what you want to say commenting on a video, you probably have too much time on your hands.

[Stormlight]

Rich sack of shit wants to see your medical record.

Originally Posted by Larry Page

"I just disclosed yesterday my voice issues, I got so many thoughtful emails from people and advice," he said answering an audience question at the Google I/O developer event in San Francisco. Page said he had originally thought his own medical information should be very private, but the response he got from his blog post caused a rethink.

"At least in my case I feel I should have done it sooner and I'm not sure that answer isn't true for most people, so I ask why are people so focused on keeping your medical history private?"

Yeah, fuck off Larry Page. Can you actually be more disconnected from reality?

[Angakuk]

Not to worry. Ensign Steve is on the job there now. She'll surely fix everything that is wrong with Google.

[Ensign Steve]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So ... how is everybody feeling today?

[Adam]

So, speaking of Google, I've been pretty uninterested in their Google Glass thing, other than getting some mild amusement out of the back and forth over privacy concerns, but today I realized something important.

They have a spot to mount sunglass lenses.

All it would take would be some creativity with custom lenses of the right sizes and shapes...

I WOULD BE WEARING TOTALLY FOR REAL SPIDER JERUSALEM GLASSES!!!!!!

[MonCapitan2002]

O_o Is that supposed to be a good thing?

[specious_reasons]

On the Google Reader front, I've more or less settled on Feedly. I did just see this article about Bloglovin'.

[lisarea]

I'm still using Feedly, too, but it looks like they don't have an export option. Someone please tell me I'm wrong. I have made a bunch of modifications to my feed since I moved from Reader, so I'm stuck if I can't export and try different ones.

It honestly never even occurred to me to check before I moved everything over. I just assumed every reader would do that.

[BrotherMan]

But lisa. Why would you want to leave? It's nice here in Feedlyville.

I'm still using the Brief Firefox Extension. It's not as portable as any of the other options that cropped up, but it's working for me.

[lisarea]

I forget why. Either something made me mad, or I just wanted to try some new thing.

I'm always trying to think of new ways to complicate my life.

[Kyuss Apollo]

Anyone signing up for the new Google maps?

The lowdown from the good, the soft, and ugly.

[Janet]

Google maps have decided my address exists again. Wish I could feel confident it would stay that way. I'm tired of having pizza delivery guys call me from the wrong porch.

[Demimonde]

I am excited about the new google maps and how they are integrating them. Of course, I am a total map nerd and think of it as one more step towards my dream of having a time based global map, which I have wanted to see since I was a kid.

Some of the filter bubble type concerns are legitimate, but I really don't think that it will really change for the worse the way people behave in any substantial way. If anything, online directions have actually guided people into "bad" areas that they typically wouldn't visit far more than they have stopped them from going there and I don't see that trend changing.

I look at my hood, which prior to the mid 90's was a NO GO zone for white, affluent, suburbanites. I laugh now to recall a story a friend of mine told about driving down one of our main streets in 1996 and locking her doors in fear that she would be "car jacked." I laugh at myself for the time years ago as a 'burbanite. I had googled directions to a famous local restaurant, "Joe T. Garcia's," and ended up in a North Side neighborhood in front of some guy's house. My first time in the bario but not the last.

The cheap rent allowed independent businesses to open here, and the internet brought customers to their door who ordinarily would have stayed in their own neat little closet communities. Now thousands of people drive into the area to visit who would have not dared to do so a decade before. It has been a huge factor in what has revitalized the area, IMO. I seriously doubt that any google algorithms could be worse than the typical human heuristics of "bad areas" or "white flight" which we have had historically keeping people on the road most traveled.

I also disagree that it will result in a diminishing of public spaces. I understand their argument that strict adherence to directions can result in a fly over effect, but I think that google has a direct investment in the opposite of what the author fears. Through Niantic labs, their app Ingress has been a huge undertaking in understanding and mapping urban public spaces, especially for pedestrian traffic. Just about every portal is an urban art or historical marker in a very public space which they are encouraging their users to inhabit while interacting with other users. Google is funding projects to counteract the exact issue that the author fears, IMO. I also imagine the crowd sourced information will be very valuable to them, but the user is having fun and using the public spaces that are frequently overlooked and under-used. I have seen it in action. Just tonight I captured a portal near Heritage Park, a fantastic public space with small private niches overlooking the river and the original Fort that gives the city its name. It was abandoned by people because of drug use and crime and became a rather "scary" place. It has been gated off by chain link fencing for years. Recently they have begun looking into reopening and revitalizing it. An ingress portal and new visitors can only help that effort IMO.

Niantic also did the Field Trip app which is a glorious mash up of old and new. While I trek around my city it pings me with local news, businesses, and events as well as historical information, with articles and pictures, pertinent to the buildings and places I am near. It is probably my favorite app, because it will give me a zagat review of a local restaurant I haven't been to yet, let me know that my favorite band is playing at a club that just opened I didn't know about, and let me know that that cool stone building on the corner was built in the 1920's for the black community as one of the first local charters of the Independent Order of Oddfellows with photos from the period. So. Frickin'. Cool.

[beyelzu]

As a tourist who google mapped around a city some recently (when ES wasn't my sherpa), I really like my smartphone. I am not particularly scared of "bad areas" thanks to my privilege, but I don't like being lost. Armed only with my smart phone, some credit cards and an id, I can safely navigate around. I feel I am more likely to do things because of google maps.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by Demimonde

Some of the filter bubble type concerns are legitimate, but I really don't think that it will really change for the worse the way people behave in any substantial way. If anything, online directions have actually guided people into "bad" areas that they typically wouldn't visit far more than they have stopped them from going there and I don't see that trend changing.

I look at my hood, which prior to the mid 90's was a NO GO zone for white, affluent, suburbanites. I laugh now to recall a story a friend of mine told about driving down one of our main streets in 1996 and locking her doors in fear that she would be "car jacked." I laugh at myself for the time years ago as a 'burbanite. I had googled directions to a famous local restaurant, "Joe T. Garcia's," and ended up in a North Side neighborhood in front of some guy's house. My first time in the bario but not the last.

My current favorite place for tacos here (run by hipsters though) is in a somewhat depressed looking area just outside of Pittsburgh (I didn't realize it wasn't in the city initially).

I took my friend who was visiting relatives there, and he enjoyed the food. Later he informed me that his suburbanite relatives had told him that I had taken him to a "very bad area."

And it is a somewhat depressed area (it lost 80+% of its population because of the loss of the steel mill) but I just looked online, saw the great reviews and the type of place it was and assumed it must not be in that bad of an area.

[specious_reasons]

The latest version of Chrome for Android automatically hides the navigation bar (tabs and URL). I don't like this feature, but I can understand that others would. Was this feature so widely loved that they couldn't give me the option to keep the behavior I preferred?

[LadyShea]

I Google maps for trip planning and trip taking. I check out various routes and put hotels on it and share it with my fellow travelers and it's always awesome. Like bey I use my iPhone + Google Maps for navigating, and have only come across one mistaken address (which I reported and it got fixed). I was not aware of anything new, so will be looking now.

[ceptimus]

Most people who moved from Google Reader to The Old Reader will now have to look for an alternative elsewhere.

[Kyuss Apollo]

What's happening to iGoogle?

iGoogle will be retired on November 1, 2013.

Just exported my feeds to igHome, with an hour and 47 minutes to spare. Been in denial this day was coming, but had to face facts.