A lot people is complaining about the missing cities, mistakes, low quality in the new iOS 6 Maps application. In fact, it’s a new app, it’s still a work in progress. I prefer to think about it as a Beta version, just to avoid my disappointment to grow.
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It’s pretty well know that Google+ doesn’t allow people to use nicknames in their profiles. They claim that this will protect users from the “bad intentions” of evil hackers or spammers. This is just nonsense. This basically shows a lack of understanding of what a nick name means and how the use of a nickname can harm users.
If someone want to be anonymous with the intention to do something bad and get undiscovered, the worst thing to do is using a nickname. That romantic idea of a dangerous hacker with a cool nickname, chased by authorities, working in the night in humid and dirty abandoned apartments is unreal… This is not Hollywood! Matrix was just a movie… Hello! Google, knock knock please wake up…
In real life, far before Internet, people used and still use what is called a “fake identity” to make the task of authorities harder. I suggest to see this movie to understand what being an anonymous outlaw means. This means using a fake name, a name that looks real but it’s not a real one.
So is Google really checking if the name in the profile of some user is the real one? How are they going to check that? Are they asking the scanned copy of users passports? Are they asking to introduce your credit card number? Or, maybe, they will send someone to your home to confirm… your identity? Come on, please let’s be serious. If Google really wants to enforce and assure that users use their real names, so go ahead and implement real security measures to be 100% sure that the user is not using a fake identity. (Of course they will loose almost all their users if they do that, though) But if Google is not going to really check G+ profile identities, please stop wasting your time closing accounts and focus on many of the issues that people, for free, is asking you to improve.
Then look at this, in their privacy terms:
Google Profile.
In order to use Google+, you need to have a public Google Profile visible to the world, which at a minimum includes the name you chose for the profile. That name will be used across Google services and in some cases it may replace another name you’ve used when sharing content under your Google Account. We may display your Google Profile identity to people who have your email address or other identifying information.
Posts and other content shared by or with you – such as photos of you – may be visible on your profile to those with whom that content has been shared. You can use the profile editor to see how your profile appears to particular individuals.
“…which at a minimum includes the name you chose for the profile…”
Did you read that? The name you chose for the profile. I don’t see any indication to use my real name or “…by using a nick name your account will be suspended…”
This policy does not affect me personally, I used to write my real name everywhere, but I understand that many people have good reasons not to do so.
I just would like to see a little bit of common sense. For web illiterate people, this policy, shared among other social media platforms like Facebook, has a direct impact creating a wrong vision of how “identity” works on the web. People may do the wrong assumption like: people with nicknames = bad, people with “real” names = good. This policy is sending a wrong message, making people believe that by writing a “real name” you can trust that profile.
If somebody want to abuse the system, I can assure you, he/she doesn’t need a nick name to do so.
Already everybody knows that Google is one of the biggest and more used search engines in the net. It’s not only a search engine, it provide countless services, many of then are really unique with almost no competitors.
I had a happy life with Google and it’s services. I used Gmail, Google Documents, Google Labs, Froogle, Google Chat and many others. Specially I was an user of Google Ads.
I didn’t earn so much by using it, but some few bucks a months was not bad at all. All of these services were centralized with only one company: Google.
I didn’t realize how much of my Internet life becomes little by little more and more Google dependent and I didn’t realize how much effort I should need in the future in case I decided to broke this dependence. Google is a company and after all it only thinks about its own profit, it’s quite normal, that’s the way companies work and all the social aspects are not really social, it’s just marketing to increase the profit.
Well, after some years using Google I decided to change this dependency and come back to a Googleless era. I decided to move my dependency back to me and to other companies and services on the net. I can not have all those benefits from my own, there are no all-in-one-package applications that I could install in my server that provide me with all the services I need. So I prefer to depend on many companies instead to depend on only one. Why? Simple. Google just theft my money in Google adsense a couple of months ago and I couldn’t do anything. No responses, no tech support, nothing.
I had an account with an email that was not a Google gmail account. Lately they decided to merge all those accounts and force users to use a Google account for the adsense services and many other Google services. In that process I lost the money that I had in the adsense account. Just reset to zero and I also lost all my ads as well.
I cannot complain to them, because I just say yes to the agreement they offered me to accept in the moment I created the Google adsense account. They reserve the right to quit any account and the user cannot complain at all. This is not fare because even if the service is free, the simple fact of using it, makes my using of Google services a contribution to Google business and they repaid me quitting my account with absolutely no possibility form from my side to claim or even an explanation. Well my fault, I didn’t read that “agreement”. It happened me once, and I swear, it won’t happen me twice.
So let’s see how can we live without Google and how we can just use it as one more of many of the great search engines that exist out there in the net an not as the ONLY one. Remember, Google is not Internet. It’s just a company, that’s all.
There are several. They are good and many of them better than Google.
http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://www.powerset.com/
http://search.wikia.com/
http://www.ask.com/
http://www.goodsearch.com/
Interesting search engine. Its results are powered by yahoo and the 50% of its revenue are donated to charity causes.
http://www.leapfish.com/
This search engine provides results from the mayor search engines, Google, Yahoo and Msn.
I’m moving back to the email related with my domain name. In my case I make a huge use of email communication. I have a personal page and I need to have a domain name to create a presence of myself in the net. There are many services, for free and not free that offer the possibility to have some kind of “presence” on the net. But I think that a domain is one of the most powerful solutions. Think about it. A domain is a real presence, independent of companies or services. You just need to pay for it every year, domains are really cheap and you need a hosting service. The good thing is that the hosting service is something that I can change at any time in case I’m not satisfied with the service. I understand that in case you don’t have a blog or don’t make a strong use of Internet maybe buying a domain name is not worth it. But for me it is, and depending on a third party services is not a solution. So instead of having a “free” email I prefer to have an email associated with my domain. It gives me the freedom to choose the email that I need. The use of this email is a way to promote my web page too.
I pay every year for a hosting service that provides me with the infrastructure to build, not only this site, but many others, and it also provides me with many other services. I’m using BlueHost. They have a really good service and good cost-service relation.
One more convenient thing in having a domain name is that you can use an email of your own domain even without a hosting service. A .com/.org/.net domain is really cheap, just $10 per month and you can redirect all the emails coming to your domain to a specific free email. In this way you just can change the free email service whenever you want but your original email won’t change anymore in the future.
If you care about your presence in the net, you don’t want to find that someday your blog just disappears because the small letters in the contract of the free service said that X Corp. reserves the right to cancel the service at any time. That’s what happened to me with adsense and this is the reason I’m eliminating, as much as I can, all the dependence with those kind of services.
I have a share disk on my hosting provider that lets me move easily files from my computer to the shared directory so other people can access them. Google provides an online Word processor, spreadsheet and so forth. Well, I use OpenOffice on all my computers so I just create the file and move it to the share folder. It’s easy and no Google dependent. I can even make a public accessible folder in case I want to share it to everybody as easy as to pass just a link to it.
Blogger is a really powerful tool but it’s not the only one. WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging CMS out there, it’s open source and you can easily install it on your own server. It’s not the only one, here you can find a full list of opensource CMS. Since the beginning I decided to blog independently of any free service just to have control and to be free to implement all the changes I need.
Google adsense is one of the most popular ones but not the only one. Here you have some alternatives:
http://chitika.com/publishers.php
http://publisher.yahoo.com/
http://www.adbrite.com/
http://www.openx.org
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
Remember that almost all of them have similar “contracts”. So be careful and don’t rely so much on these services. A better way to make money is just increasing the traffic to your site. After sometime some companies can be interested to put advertise on them. This is a more stable and profitable than all those “free” services.
So after this review, I’m not using Google as the only search engine, only blogging platform, only email service, only ads platform and so forth. I do not depend on it. I’m getting better results using different services and companies. Not just only one.
Always try to avoid dependency. I know it’s hard sometimes, but it is worth it.