To me, it’s symptomatic of a company seeing only
from a revenues-potential perspective.
I can’t imagine one person there thought like a normal user,
and didn’t have it strike them ahead of time.

I’ve liked a lot of your opinions and work over time, Chris,
most recently your quick mind on http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2010/01/18/designing-hashtags-for-emergency-response/

But I implore you; use any influence to humanize Google,
especially “Social Google”.
I may never be as tech smart as their least employee,
but the public-facing evidence of a lack humans in Mountain View is stunning.
And please, please don’t try to be Twitter.
We have and love Twitter. Add an entire different,
wonderful advancement to the human-based web.

Thank you.

I do hope that Google can recognize that they introduced this the wrong way – you don’t force folks into it and start creating connections without anyone’s consent – and remove it, or at least make it fully opt-in.

Mr. Messina, I have to say, I’m really a bit surprised. From reading your blog, I considered you one fighting the good fight for strong authentication and similar standards, which to me relate to privacy concerns. Thus, quite honestly, the above post comes across sounding like a PR piece.

If it doesn’t build up a critical mass among early adopters, the steam will run out, and the product will collapse like a bad souffle.

While true standards are nice-to-have, de facto standards and platforms have already dominated the social networking field, and trying to change all that, would take considerable effort on all parties, plus FB makes some serious missteps a la Friendster.

Not impossible, but unlikely.

Interoperability and transportability of all collaborative web data is the key to user freedom and healthy competition on merit.

I’d like to see these same trends extend not just over and through the web, but throughout all devices, information systems, and services. I’d like the world to be read/write.