yanw

He was referring to the platform not the product. Everyday it seems I find yet another reason to hate the tech "press".

The government doesn't need a search warrant to rummage through cloud data, that's the point.

They usually change policy, or enforce existing ones before an algo update that doesn't prove any connection in you case and it's not like they are dependent on your ad expenditure.

A side point: is it a gmail "nightmare" or a cloud nightmare? the case in question doesn't describe a gmail specific vulnerability yet the alarmist headline hints otherwise. Backing up cloud data might a good hygiene but I call foul on the link-bail headline.

The slow and often fruitfulness process of changing the law.

How is it a gmail only problem? The government got a court order to force them, Google didn't hand it over willingly. It's the government who is at fault here and the shitty laws that enable it.

Where is the raw data? how large is the sampling? how do they measure traffic?

The data in question is suspect as no hard data is shown nor are they saying on how many users the report is based on or how they were able to measure traffic at all. Chitikta is a Google competitor of sorts their business is ads and they do have a strong partnerships with Facebook.

In this Google v. Facebook thing people seem to forget that G+ isn't Google's core business but Facebook is Facebook's so the bigger investment in social is going to come from them.

Well it was launched only yesterday ...

I agree it's easy to be engaged in a good discussion in G+.

No, that meme is wrong, it's not similar. You bought Windows and Microsoft bundled IE with it, you didn't by Google you use it, Google is Google's. And no one says that search must be just the 10 links and nothing more.

He asked both question, that was a separate one in general meaning. As for Google showing snippets of Yelp or anyone else that is still lawful, the whole search business is built of snippets and fair use.

Eric did well. What bothers me is that no reps of small businesses were in this hearing, it just seems like one big corporation is shilling a fight against another.

It's all political, all grandstandings, and an overall a welfare operation for antitrust lawyers. There is not issue here to start with.

Anti trust exists to protect costumers and when the product is free and the alternatives are free, where is the harm?

Google is free for users and free to anyone wanting to get in their index, so they do not owe any self proclaimed competitor anything and that is the crux of it, the law is on their side, you cannot monopolize "free" and all this politicians' propaganda is waste of time and tax payer dollars..

For fuck's sake senator Blumenthal just asked if Google "Has ever scraped content?" !!

These senators seemed ignorant about pretty much everything involved.

And as for Mr. Schmidt he should have started by saying that Google is free, it's free for users and for those wanting to be indexed by them so they don't owe any self proclaim competitors anything.

You assume that tools aren't part of human evolution but they certainly are and modem tools are no exception. I assume the cognitive powers used for memorizing trivia will be reallocated to something else, they won't go away.

The circles are asynchronous, and you don't see which circles you're in nor do those you "circle" see where you put them either.

You seem to have a problem with social networks in general ...

As for I gotta say, I'm a little offended by your audacity, because you're essentially asking me to categorize every single person I've ever had an email conversation with as a friend or a non-friend

No one is forcing you to categorize anyone, these are suggestions from your contacts you can not circle them at all if you don't want to, as for the categories they range much wider than "friend" "non friend".

There is a pattern with these posts, as it's interesting that just before Google announces a major release someone publishes this sort of piece, either criticizing Google on privacy issues or competitive issues or describing a product as struggling.

It's PR, someone paid for this and more often than not it takes place right before Google releases something.

It is a stupid panicy law to begin with, the politicians who came up with it didn't think of the consequences, they just went on with their grandstandings.

As for it's exceptions they are too vague and troublesome to scale for millions of users.

It's not their children policy it's the government's: Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA): http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.shtm

Bradley Horowitz talks about Apps users in depth here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5sRC67s9fg#t=23m20s

Basically they want to make sure they get it right before deploying to paying users.

As I've commented before: G+ is to be judged differently.

Public post counts are not reliable measures, besides it's way too early to tell, ask again when it's visible to all users and integrated into all of Google's products and have the basic features of search and even "vanity" urls, not to mention removing the invite bottleneck.

It's Google's social play, something it must have, a list of people you know and interact with over Google products. It's a work in progress and will still unfold for some time.

And for the record if any other startup got the numbers they have it would be dubbed a huge success, it's just that people like to speculate about and judge everything Google as it gets them clicks.

Having different business strategies for different markets is worthy of criticism?!

The choice is there, you can change the settings, the ballot just doesn't popup.

You think this "evil"? In other markets Chrome doesn't have a default search engine, in this one it does. If trying to protect your investment while keeping choice and providing an opensource browser is "evil" then your standards are too fucking high.

So? that doesn't stop the other browsers (and it shouldn't).

Google isn't the dominant player there and they can do whatever they want to grab market share, there is nothing wrong with that.

If they are the upstarts in these countries they can do whatever they want. It's just the ballot, you can change the search engine from the settings just fine. No other browser offers a ballot anyway.