Thursday Morning – Where is Everybody?
Like many people, I signed up for the Google+ (Google Plus) early on in hopes that a competitive alternative to Facebook would arise. Not only is the Facebook outfit devoid of ethical responsibility to their users (referring to their personal information intrusions and peddling that info.), but their computer programmers are just short of the skills needed to keep the system running smoothly. A day doesn't go by that I don't log on at least once and I am unable to view images or successfully click to a page. They just never get it sorted out and sometimes it's infuriating.
Google's ethical record isn't a whole lot better than Facebook's, but they stay within the law (I think) and are not so careless with their "customers'" personal records. And when it comes to computer programming skills, nobody but nobody can match them for quality and reliability. Their programs and servers are solid and stable. So it was (is) a hope of mine that the Google+ will eventually draw Facebook's population over to their cloud. But it has been awfully quiet so far. That's partly my fault, though. I have not participated in getting it off the ground, but kind of sat by watching and hoping that everybody else would start the building out. But it's been quiet.
Google claims that they signed up 40 million users for Plus worldwide, but is anything happening? Even Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt didn't post his first Plus message until three months after they went live. A columnist for Slate e-zine, Farhad Manjoo has come out an pronounced Plus as "dead" already. In his column headlined Google+ Is Dead he writes:
The real test of Google’s social network is what people do after they join. As far as anyone can tell, they aren’t doing a whole lot. Traffic-analysis firms have reported that Google+’s traffic has fallen precipitously from its early peak.* Even Google’s own executives seem to have gotten bored by the site. After several public posts in the summer, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped off the site in the fall; they only started posting once more when bloggers began pointing out their absence. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman and former CEO, posted his first public message when Steve Jobs died. That was three months after the social network went live.
I was an early Google+ skeptic. Shortly after it launched, I likened its main feature—the ability to divide your friends into discrete groups, called Circles—to the process of creating a seating chart for your wedding. In theory, it was appealing to send "private" messages to certain groups, but in practice I thought most people would find it tedious to categorize their friendships. And apart from the Circles feature—which Facebook quickly co-opted—I didn’t think Google+ distinguished itself from its rivals in any compelling way. I still don’t.
And yet, I’ve been surprised by just how dreary the site has become. Although Google seems determined to keep adding new features, I suspect there’s little it can do to prevent Google+ from becoming a ghost town. Google might not know it yet, but from the outside, it’s clear that G+ has started to die—it will hang on for a year, maybe two, but at some point Google will have to put it out of its misery.
I'm not quite that pessimistic about its chances. Google has a record of patience and deliberate growth without worrying too much about early financial losses. They have the capital to support this thing while they work to get it right. When they want to be, they can be that huge elephant in the corner that commands attention and I don't think they will go away. Here's hoping, anyway.
Now let's start making some + marks on our checksheets and get the equipment checked out. I'm going to get the coffee started before we meet back in the day room.
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The best way to stay out of that food fight is to just not post your personal stats in the first place. This is true for every similar network, not just Facebook. Don’t put down the name of the place where you work, just list the general category such as, “emergency ambulance medic” and maybe the state or province you’re in. But nothing specific. This type of intrusion has been going on since the advent of the world wide web. Facebook is currently the biggest target for the spammers for two primary reasons. First, Facebook is too eager to find ways to capitalize financially on their success and cash in on their popularity. Coupled with an obvious deficiency of corporate integrity, they will continue to seek ways to exploit their users. Which leads to the second reason they are courted by the spammers…..the users. World-wide there are more than 400 million active users. And 50% of them log on at least once a day.
With the inter-connected network system that is evolving now, you don’t need to log into several websites to check the latest offerings, just one or two of your favorites that you can remain logged on in the background while you use your computer to do/watch other things. And that brings us around (again) to commenting on those little tabs that you are seeing on many websites, not just blogs - including this one – where you can choose to share information that you would like your friends and correspondents to see. By simply clicking once on the tab, you can forward the page that you are reading to your page on either of the two networks. Currently, this is how news is flashing around the globe as it happens. It’s an innovative way to “spread the word.”
“More Than We Need To Know” Department
Comments Off(Former) CraigsList Sex Worker Resigns
Remember Melissa Petro from last fall who felt compelled to write on Huffington Post that she supplemented her income by selling sex on CL while she was an elementary school teacher in NY? (Clarification: She apparently didn’t have (paid) sex while a teacher but rather wrote about it.) According to the New York Times she agreed to resign this week rather than face a hearing that could potentially result in her dismissal. That’s probably as wise a move as yammering about it in the first place was stupid.
Melissa Petro (New York Daily News photo)
Her initial writing was apparently in response to the CL decision to shut down the part of the site where one could obtain “massages” or “escorts.” She was writing as a “free thinking, entrepreneurial human being” to express her outrage at the decision. No happy ending, here.
The fact that people have sex and that they also sometimes pay for it is well understood to the point of being boring. A chief objection to sex for money is that the purveyors are victims, though it’s hard to see Ms. Petro in that light as she describes the experience: “a graduate student, bored and curious, sexually uninhibited, looking to make a little money while having a little fun.” What’s not to like?
Ms. Petro fell afoul of the ubiquity of the web, our current love affair with social media and the need to share with the world every morsel about ourselves, even those tidbits that should be held back for a bit. (We do want to hear about it, but perhaps not right now.) Some great writing is explicitly sexual but the “rub” occurs when the writer is your seven-year-old daughter’s teacher at P.S.70, or wherever. By all accounts, Ms. Petro is a gifted writer who can clearly “string two sentences together” though her zest for sharing may have out-paced her judgment in this case.
While we sign onto our favorite social media site and “comment”, “share”, “like”, “tell”, and “show”, or “blog away the hours” we would all be well advised to remember that “timing is everything.”
Note to self.
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