Fucking technology. I just spammed myself. Look down.
See that post called 19 January, 2011 22:58? I didn’t write that. My email did. My blog host, WordPress, offers posting-by-email. And YahooMail has shitty security. Put those together and you get me spamming my own blog.
I broke the link so you won’t click on it and virusize yourself, but I couldn’t resist keeping the post up. Moral of the story: Fucking technology.
Posted in Gadgeteering, Information Stupor Highway
Pretty much as soon as Google launched Buzz in Gmail, the stings started a-coming. (I knew they would, I just knew it.) Alley Insider did a great “Code Red” timeline of the scramble to un-fuck-up:
February 9 — Google Buzz launches.
February 10 — In a post titled “WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Major Privacy Flaw,” We complain that before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see the people you email and chat with most. Our complaint is that Google forces users to opt-out, rather than opt-in, to exposing this private information publicly.
February 11 — Google updates Buzz to make it easier to opt-out of publicly displaying lists of followers.February 12 — We suggest this change doesn’t go far enough.
February 12 — A woman complains that Google automatically set her up to be followed by her abusive ex-husband.
February 13 — Google goes all the way, replacing an opt-out feature, auto-following, with an opt-in feature, auto-suggesting.
February 16 — Google promises more changes, including a more prominent “mute” option. Says a Google spokesperson, “Some people feel like there is too much noise in the inbox and this is something we are working on better controls for.”
A former Google employee even started a virtual Buzz complaint box.
But what really cracks me up about this whole thing — all the excitement and creeping-out, hemming and (ye)hawing — is that Yahoo started rolling out an automated social wire and status updates on the What’s New page of its mail client months ago (like, August of 09), and no one even noticed. They even posted the latest on the Mail blog on February 5, four days before Buzz exploded:
It’s less invasive than Google’s, as far as I’m concerned (I have email addresses with both), but still pretty, well, fucking stupid. Good thing for Yahoo nobody cares enough to give them a hard time.
[Thanks, Ahs.]
Gmail was, once upon a time, an invite-only cool kids’ club of early adopters. Today, it is unquestionably the standard for today’s 20- and 30-somethings: personal email for the professionals, and professional email for the pseudo-professionals/freelancers/artists/perennially-unemployed/web-trepreneurs. “Very late-twenties,” as my friend recently put it.
But not so long ago there was no Gmail. There was Hotmail. And YahooMail. And before that AOL. Tracing the evolution is like looking at the rings of a tree, or geological strata. The earliest ancestors have died off: you shan’t be receiving anything from the fossils of Prodigy or Eudora. Still, the old guard is adapting, trying to keep up with the cutting edge in electronic letter-writing. Where you stand in the fray may represent as much about you as the clothes you wear, or whether you order hoagies, heroes or subs.
Posted in Information Stupor Highway
No Happy Medium 