The Pebble and the Avalanche

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Current Revolutions in Business and Technology

by Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky,

author of The Pebble and The Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions

 

Tue, 2008-Jan-01, 07:07

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Another Google Gaffe?

Hot the heels of a rather serious Google gaffe, there's speculation from informed sources that Google is about to integrate a social-networking service into their Gmail account. If someone — a business associate, a friend, or just some oddball who sent you email and was therefore automatically added to your contact list — updates one of their Google-related services, this information will show up on a continuously scrolling list ("feed") on your Google page.

This is speculative, in the meantime; no official Google announcement. There's no indication of what information is automatically shared by Google. That is, if you upload your family vacation photos to your online account, do all of your business associates receive notification automatically? Yes, that sounds silly, but as I noted in the link above, Google already did something just like that.

Google might want to organize my life, but they need to realize that my life has nuances. I wonder if the social atmosphere of Silicon Valley, where work integrates heavily with non-work activities, is affecting Google's judgment about what services people want and don't want. Google blew up out of nowhere to own the Internet search-engine mindshare; but if they can't learn how to disaggregate friends, acquaintances, cliques, colleagues, collaborators, and the like from each other, they're going to blow back to nowhere.

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