Fucking whitespace.
I know, I know Google, you are King Leonidas and there’s nothing you love more than being all Spartan and stuff, but seriously now: cut it out.
In your attempt to merge your product designs with Google+, you’ve broken two of your most beloved offerings: Gmail and Google Reader. With whitespace.
Back when we were still living in caves, I had a Yahoo Mail account. That’s because the only other alternative was Hotmail which offered 2MB of free space (remember those days?).
TechCrunch is growing up. Or growing old.
An year after being acquired by AOL, two of its most prominent voices, founder Michael Arrington and MG Siegler are heading to Crunchfund, the new VC firm floated by Arrington, while another, Paul Carr, is working on his own startup. The internal strife and drama has been well documented (perhaps too well documented) to recount here. And while the site continues to be a page-view munching monster, long time readers know that something’s amiss. Sure, there’s the breaking news, the regular columns, Alexia Tsotsis’ quirkiness and Erick Schonfeld’s insightful analysis, but something just doesn’t feel right.
Alpha-geek, minimalist design enthusiast, autocratic perfectionist, yogi chasing hippy, LSD experimentalist, hungry fool, culturalist, returner of coke bottles, the crazy one, lover of beards, wooden floors and New Balance 992s, glass aficionado, hero-shithead roller-coaster, Bill Gates’ nemesis, owner of many black turtlenecks, wearer of rimless Harry Potter glasses, walker of long walks, one time Joan Bez lover, Bob Dylan fan, Jon Ive spotter and Woz collaborator, aesthetician, college dropout, typography nut, bad parker, lover of Gandhi and other assorted misfits, employee tormenter, storyteller, counter culturalist, persuasive salesman, smooth presenter, interviewee intimidator, movie producer, onehelluva marketer, creator of at least one gadget in your house, brother of award winning novelist,, Buddhist, Jerry Lee Lewis admirer, drinker of tea, reader of many books, toymaker, perennially curious wonderer, half-Syrian, abandoner of historic houses, changer of worlds, deliverer of inspiring commencement addresses, vegetarian, rebel, visionary, crazy genius inventor, changer of worlds, purveyor of tastes, shifter of epochs, iconoclast, innovator, hero, role model, billionaire, taskmaster, doer of things that need to get done, micro manager, spotter of off-color hues of yellow, , breaker of rules, egos, and emotions, pixel gazer, inspirer of devotion, awe, fear and worship, forceful perseverant intimidator, enlightenment seeker, charmer, denter of Universes, i, zen Buddha, distorter of realities, holder of doors, magicworking charisma fountain motivator, prescient future predictor, husband, father, brother, man, entrepreneur.
Try as hard as I might, I can’t seem to bring myself to love Google. Few people who have some SEO experience can. They’ve seen the gross inconsistencies of its search results, the often unfair ranking upheavals where for every five spamming bad guys, at least one good guy also takes a fall, and the complete obliqueness of its customer service process. Forums upon forums are filled with complaints from angry AdWords advertisers who’ve been banned without explanation, it’s silence and heavy-handedness perhaps matched only by the AdSense team.
Sure, I love Gmail and YouTube (which Google didn’t build, by the way), and even Google Docs is somewhat okay, but I simply can’t embrace the company’s main product: Google.com, wholeheartedly.
As a medium, the internet represents the lowest strata of content, a veritable cesspool littered with spammy, misspelled, grammatically incorrect writing. If it is not being hammered into the nightmares of English majors worldwide (that would, by the way, include yours truly) by internet ‘marketers’, spun into often hilarious psychobabble, or plagiarized by unscrupulous publications, it is being organized into inane lists or splattered across dubious websites with formulaic, page-view enhancing websites (“100 Coolest People in Tech! Yay!”).
So when one of the strongest voices in tech journalism – former TechCruncher Paul Carr – announces a new startup, The New Gambit, that promises to be a funnier version of The Economist, I can’t help but cheer on from the sidelines.
Arab Spring, Anna Hazare, and now Occupy Wall Street.
Even as we gloat over the new iPhone 4S, it can be easy to forget that right now, as you read this, there are hundreds of protesters marching on Wall Street. In the post-Age of Excess, their targets are big banks that flourished through Government bailouts even as the rest of America struggled with unemployment.
The Occupy Wall Street, or the 99% movement as many have called it, follows the largely successful Anna Hazare movement in India. While the targets were different – the government rather than big banks – the issues raised by Team Anna were remarkably pertinent to those of the 99 percenters. Both were protesting against corruption and government excesses. Team Anna was galvanized into action after a series of multi-billion dollar scams and scandals erupted in the past six months that cost the country more than $50 billion over the the last few years. Public outrage, already at a boiling point, found in Anna Hazare a channel that could articulate and amplify it. Team Anna’s demands were simple: a regulatory body to check corruption with the powers to indict ministers and members of parliament. Continue Reading →
In what might very well be Google’s very own Kanye West moment, a Google engineer, Steve Yegge, has trashed Google+, calling it a “knee-jerk reaction” to Facebook.
Google: give this guy a promotion, pronto!
After months of saying that Google+ was a bad idea, here’s finally someone echoing my sentiments. That the voice is from within Google itself makes it delightfully refreshing. How often do you see a big company’s employees trash its own products in public? Continue Reading →
Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive updates.
