I love all of Google’s programs. Gmail is fantastic, I like my igoogle page, I love my Google feed reader, and I love Google Docs (although I think Blogger totally blows). I realize that Google now has complete and total access to pretty much my entire brain, and I have no privacy whatsoever, and all of my writings and emails and searches, and everything I’ve ever bought, and all the books I’ve looked into, and everything I’ve read and thought to save or extract is all retained by Google in an easy-to-retrieve file that can be exposed at any time to anyone, and that I have basically asked for it, having thoughtlessly given Google all of this information because it’s just too easy to do so and rather difficult not to.
I’m ok with all of this.
But what I am not ok with is that Google – as well as it knows me – is absolutely certain that I would like to turn all of my applications into social networking sites. First, Gmail was retooled in such a way that the horrid gchat was featured prominently in a sidebar – even in my igoogle page! – impossible to get rid of. For the longest time (though I will admit this has since been fixed) gchat kept signing me in over and over again, even though I had my settings indicating I never wanted to be signed in.
And can I just take a second here to explain why I despise gchat, AIM and the like? Despite having come of age in the glory days of AIM, I have never used chat, because I think it’s really fucking obnoxious. If I’m browsing online, it’s because that’s what I want to be doing right then. I’m not waiting for someone to pop up in the middle of whatever I’m looking at, and deliver me from my contemplation with small talk. Chatting is what I do when I have the pleasure of someone’s actual company – and preferably, there will also be drinks, or summer sun or some other added sweetener. I put up with occasionally tiresome chatting because it’s nice to be with people. So, why on Earth would I want the chatting without the people? That’s like wanting commercials without programming!
So, anyway, imagine my spitting fury when I signed into my google reader the other day to find that google has added some sort of ‘share network’ bullshit in the sidebar that you can sign out of (or just refuse to participate in), but cannot get rid of altogether. Why the hell would anybody want to turn their feed reader into a social sharing site? There are all kinds of places where people can post a running tally of what articles they are reading if they so desire – Twitter, Facebook, their blogs, posting a ‘my feeds’ widget in the sidebar of their blog. Apparently, that’s not enough – some people want other people actually reading over their shoulder at all times! Well, I don’t want people in my feed reader, or in my email inbox, or in my Netflix cue or in my Amazon checkout cart. I don’t care if other people do (although I don’t understand it), but there should at least be some way to completely opt out of all this stuff, and not have it continually coming up.
And now at the top of all my items in my feed reader, there’s a stupid little cartoon face with ‘X-number of people liked this!’ next to it, and if you click on that, it gives you the user names of all x-number of gazillion people who clicked that they liked that particular item. Come on, Google! Do I really fucking care that iceprincess3 liked something Ezra Klein posted? No! No one does! Let me read my feeds in peace.
And let me hasten to add that I love spending quality time with people in the flesh. I love having actual, live conversations with people. I love getting emails from people. I love reading other people’s substantive blog posts, that they’ve put time and effort into, and I love love love it when people get into a dialogue here on my blog, where I post things I actually want to communicate to people, and while my posts may not always be brilliant (or even slightly interesting), no one ever has to come here and read my blog – I don’t pop my posts up in the faces of all of my friends while they’re trying to read the NY Times Op-Ed page or whatever.
As I said at the beginning of this post, I love Google. I use nearly all their tools and have given my reputation entirely into their keeping. I just don’t love these sharing, chat and otherwise pointless features in areas that have absolutely no need to be networking platforms. There are plenty of places to go out and mingle online; I don’t see why some things can’t remain (cosmetically) private.
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