Archive for the ‘Evil’ tag
Kill Evil Gets Rid of Annoying JavaScript Tweaks All Over the Web [Annoyances]
Chrome: Kill Evil is a simple extension that disables annoying scripts all across the web, like sites that won’t let you right-click, sites that won’t let you copy images, or sites that paste in citation links whenever you copy their text. More »
Google’s Moves Raise Questions About ‘Don’t be Evil’ Motto
Notifications Are Evil [Information Overload]
What’s your maximum NPH? How many notifications are you exposed to every hour? Let’s take a second to think critically about these constant requests for your attention: What do they mean? Who is making them? Why are they there? Before I wrote the Information Diet, I audited myself and found I was receiving upwards of 10 notifications per hour: one every six minutes. More »
The Evil Android Home Screen [Featured Home Screen]
Reader Ammar Githam took our evil weeks to heart and made this great looking, informative home screen. More »
Twitter Censorship: Necessary Evil or War on Freedom of Speech
In a blog post late last week, Twitter announced plans to begin censoring users’ tweets within certain countries. The censorship policy, which the company has stated is reactive only, will not filter tweets before they appear on Twitter. Instead, after Twitter receives what they view as a valid and applicable legal request concerning a specific [...]
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Gillmor Gang 01.28.12 (TCTV)
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — debut the latest Google catchphrase to replace Do No Evil: We Really Don’t Care!
@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
Focus On The User: Facebook Don’t Be Evil Google Tool
The big news from yesterday was from Facebook who built a bookmarklet tool that aims at changing how Google shows Google+ results in the new Google Plus Your World launch…
The Don’t Be Evil Bookmarklet Makes Google’s Social Results Useful Rather Than Simply Promotional [Video]
A group of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace released a “Don’t Be Evil” bookmarklet that tweaks the Google+ integration in Google search results to display the most relevant social network for an individual rather than simply promoting their (often less relevant) Google+ page. More »
Make Your Evil Plans in This Week’s Open Thread [Open Thread]
On the future of search, dumb people, and marketers squished into goo
I got to participate in the ‘Future of Search’ panel today at the Seattle Interactive Conference. Two subjects came up that I must expand on a bit:
My car
This is my car. It is a Buick Regal Turbo. It is awesome:
My car – is it not nifty?
OK, now that that’s done with.
What scares me about the future of search
I got to talk, briefly, about what it is in search’s future that scares me. There are three things, and they only scare me when taken together:
- Big, monstrous entities controlling the lion’s share of most traffic online, because the control search. Don’t tell me about social media. Search still drives transactions. Social will get there, but it ain’t there yet.
- Dumb people forcing those big monstrous entities to make bad decisions.
- Marketers get squished into goo.
Case in point: Google’s decision to limit access to search query data. Right now, it affects, what, 10% of search queries? 5%? So what’s the big deal?
Mobile. Mobile is the big deal. Android is now 50% of the market. Most Android users are signed into Google, all the time. So we’ll be cut off from enormous amounts of data. Data that we can use to make marketing more efficient. Data publishers can use to sell and target their own advertising.
This is just an example. But it’s really telling.
There’s no Big Evil (or Big Good)
Google doesn’t have to be Evil to end up really screwing things up. I suspect the whole search query privacy debacle started with Google trying to head off ridiculous regulation by the EU and other clueless folk.
And, for all their genius, Google doesn’t seem to make the most brilliant non-technical strategic decisions.
This also has the convenient side effect of providing Google a monopoly over data they collect from millions of searchers.
Weeeeee.
So, to review: Big companies control internet commerce. Dumb legislators make dumb laws. Big companies respond to dumb laws in dumb ways. Marketers get smushed into goo.
So yeah. I’m a little scared.
It’s not all bad
Search is fantastic. Search lets us do incredible stuff. I love it. But it’s like lots of other great inventions: It’s part blessing, part curse. Step carefully.