With recent announcements about Google migrating their privacy policy into one large policy, that lets them share your information across any and all of the Google tools, some folks are starting to get up in arms about Google moving away from their unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil”.

Some are even comparing Google’s moves to AOL.

There’s some truth to this. Unlike Facebook, which started out as a social network only, and has tried to bring more things into the walled garden, Google has a number of various things out there, that people have been using for years, and now they’re simply forcing all of it into the walled garden, and into Google+ specifically. Facebook, rightly, got their hands slapped when they tried to bring in “partners” and made folks opt-out of those additional postings to their profile. They’ve recently added partners, but have made the process more of an opt-in, where you can choose whether a partner has rights to interact with your profile information the first time you use it.

Google, on the other hand, has no opt-out. The various Google properties will, as a matter of business, share your information. Does that mean Google will start posting your activities to G+ publicly? Of course not. (Thought there’s nothing, technically, stopping them from, is there?) It does, however, mean that Google is using information from your email, maps,  your calendar, from G+, and from your search history to target ads to you. What kinds of ads you get from Google will wind up saying a lot about the information that you are looking at and not sharing.Hope your boss or spouse doesn’t see that, eh?

For me, the unintended consequence of Google’s recent maneuvers to the end of anonymity on Google. Since we now know that they are striving, with G+, to be a one-stop identity source, and since signup for any Google product requires a Google account, which in turn creates a G+ profile, which of course, requires your real name, how could you use Blogger, Analytics, Gmail, etc. anonymously?

Let’s use this scenario. I’m a current Google account holder, and I want to create a second Gmail account, for use with an anonymous blog dealing with a highly sensitive subject. My attempt to create a second Google account is met with the creation of my G+ profile, which I can’t actually create without using my name, as I understand the TOS. Since there’s already a G+ profile out there for me, it’s not clear that I could create a second account.  So, I’m left with walking away from Google, and using other web services to do what I want to do.

Ultimately, when your business model is encouraging users to use your competitor’s products, maybe you are FUBAR?

What do you think, will Google’s policy changes make you think twice about using Google products? Or are you so far into the Borg that there’s no turning back?

Just the other day the wife and I were discussing the problem with using Flickr to host your online photos. For both of us, we paid for a pro Flickr account, and enjoy the fact that Flickr allows our photos to be discoverable by anyone, any time. I also like the ease of linking to the photos from there on the blog. Facebook really requires someone to “friend” you in order to even discover your photos.

On the other hand, most of our online interaction with family and friends takes place on Facebook now. We’d like for folks to be able to interact with our photos whether they have a Flickr account or not.

Well, in an amazing coincidence, our friend Kevin shared an app on Facebook called Goyaka Export, that allows you to simply grab a photo set from Flickr, complete with titles and descriptions, and import it as a new photo set on Facebook. Now, I can share photos in both places without going through the extra steps of typing titles and descriptions on both sites.

Even nicer is that when you import a new set, it will automatically be set to being only viewable by you. So you can import a bunch of sets, but only make them visible when you’re ready to share them, instead of overloading your friends newsfeeds.

I’ve started selecting some photo sets from Flickr to my Facebook profile. Looking forward to sharing the memories of vacations on my Timeline!

I’ve talked before about the things that show up on procedural TV shows (I’m looking at you CSI) that simply aren’t possible in the real world. Think about the number of times you’ve seen a crime drama take a crappy cell phone picture, for example, and using “technology” get a crystal clear image of a license plate 200 feet behind the subject of the photo, for example? It drives me up the wall when attorneys expect those of us who work with electronic evidence to just magically be able to do something similar.

I’ve always wondered how much of what we see on television in areas that I’m not as familiar with, is completely wrong as well.

Worse yet, as someone who’s worked in technology for awhile, it’s somewhat shocking how many incorrect “facts” show up in actual news articles about technology. Articles that complain about missing features, that aren’t missing, or reviews that seem very biased written by people with a clear agenda, etc.

The other day I was listening to a hockey game and one of the announcers started talking about the schedule having “back to back visits by teams from British Columbia”, which seemed odd to me, as Vancouver is the only BC team in the NHL that I know of. Of course, I checked the team’s schedule and saw the next two games were against those great BC outposts of Edmonton and Calgary.

The point is not to poke fun at hockey announcers and technology writers, however. As I thought more about this mistake, I started to think about how many American’s probably do think those cities are in BC, or just don’t have any idea. I’ve been a hockey fan since childhood, and following the game means I probably know more about Canada than most Americans. Given that, I knew the statement being made was incorrect. But, how many areas of knowledge can I be expert enough in to make sure I’m getting “facts” from journalists? For most of us, when we hear economic, health, geopolitical, or scientific “news” reports, we don’t have the expertise to know an inaccuracy when we hear it, or the resources to fact-check the reports. The best we can hope is that someone who does know differently will point out the inaccuracies, or the misleading uses of statistics, etc.

But what if they can’t reach most of us? Are you looking for the corrections, or just taking what your favorite news sources tells you at face value?

I hope everyone out there has a wonderful holiday weekend!

Added as an update to this post:

As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

I’ve written many times that I’m very appreciative of tools that allow me to post to various networks, with one-step. RSS feeds, for example, are great to feed from WordPress to Twitter or Facebook to allow a new blog post to show up in multiple places without any extra effort from me.

In that same vein, one tool that isn’t really new, but that I’ve only recently started playing with is Instagram. On it’s face, it’s a neat little add-on for the iPhone camera, that allows you to take photos, apply some neat filter effects, and share those photos. It’s behind the scenes that I really see the value though. After taking a photo, and applying a creative effect, I am then presented some options to Geotag, and share across other networks.

In my own workflow, I can take a cool little photo of a place we are visiting, like walking around the campus at Furman.

Now I can push the photo out to Twitter and Facebook, letting folks know where I am, what kind of cool things I’m seeing right at that moment, and I can also store a copy of the photo along with my other online photos at Flickr.  And, I can do all this in one iPhone app, not by making visits to a bunch of different networks.

To me, having the ability to share information to the people who are interested in seeing it, wherever they happen to be, without me having to take extra time, is a huge benefit. Instagram gets that.

I’ve decided to go ahead and turn off the automatic posting of new blog posts to my personal Facebook profile. If you’re using Facebook to follow the blog, you can still do so from the blog’s page. If you’ve only been “friends” with me on Facebook to keep up with the blog, I won’t be offended if you unfriend me and only “Like” the page instead.

BTW, my Child Abuse Survivor site also has a Facebook page, and the same rules apply.

I will share posts on my personal profile from time to time, I just don’t want to share all of them when they are already on Facebook elsewhere.

Of course, this is subject to change.

You’ve probably noticed the weekly “links” post that gets dropped into the feed and picked up in other places like Facebook and Twitter on Sundays. If you’re interested in seeing those same links, only in real time when I add them individually instead of in the weekly wrap up, you have myriad choices to do that as well. They start out on my Diigo account, then through the magic of If This Then That, they go out on both my Twitter, and the Facebook page for this site.

If you’re following either of those, you’ll see the links as they get added, give or take 10-15 minutes. You’ll also see various other things I share as I come across them in those channels, that aren’t necessarily showing up here on the blog.

Speaking of the Facebook page, for what seems like years now, I’ve been feeding the blog posts to both the Facebook page, and my own Facebook profile. I’m toying with the idea of stopping that, and only linking to select posts on my own profile, letting the page be the place to follow the blog in it’s entirety on Facebook. This way my friends and family don’t have to see every new post. Any thoughts on that type of change? Would you “like” the page to see the blog posts on Facebook, or are you already getting them elsewhere and don’t care where I post them on Facebook?

I’m also toying with a few other ideas, but not ready to commit to them just yet, and trying to figure out how a Google+ page fits in here as well. I’m trying to use it more, both my own profile and the pages, but that lack of automated import is hard to get over!

I’ll be sure to keep ya’ll posted!

Before I made any comments about Google Plus’ new Pages feature, I wanted to take a look for myself. So I created a page for my website.Feel free to add it to your circles if you’re interested.

The first obvious lacking feature, much like the most obvious lacking feature of Plus in general, is the complete lack of any tool to bring in updated content from my website, into the Google Plus platform. As this has gone on, I am coming to the conclusion that this is not an oversight, or a technical glitch that Google hasn’t quite worked out yet. This is a company willingly ignoring the requests for that feature, because they do not want you posting content from outside the Google walled garden. So, instead of posting content here, and allowing the wonders of RSS to share that content on any social network you want to follow me on, be it Twitter, Facebook, or just in an RSS Reader, I will have to actually go over to Google Plus, and share this post manually.

What a waste when Google could save all of us that effort very easily, if they wanted to. Obviously, they don’t.

This has been a big week at Google, what with big changes to Gmail and Google Reader. Some folks are not thrilled with the new more Plus-friendly Google Reader.  I can sort of see their point. I didn’t use Google Reader’s “Shared Items” feature, mostly because they never integrated it with Feedburner’s Link Splicer in the same way Delicious was integrated there. (Even after Google bought it, they never integrated the two, in fact, they’ve never done much of anything with Feedburner to be honest, leading to the current state of Delicious not working any more.)

However, I know lots of folks did use Google Reader’s shared items, both as a bit of a mini user community, and as a way to grab that feed and show it on their blogs, feed the RSS to Twitter, etc. Now those options are pretty much gone from Google Reader, but they did make it easy to share items in Google Plus, which has been sorely lacking up until now. It’s unfortunate that they decided to make Plus the replacement for the much more open format of Shared Items, but that’s their prerogative.

In fact, as we see from the horse’s mouth itself, forcing all your Google product usage to be tied into Google Plus is pretty much exactly the idea. Frankly, this interview is a little scary. My hope that Google Plus will eventually have an open API that allows me to post something on Twitter and have it picked up by Google Plus, the way I currently can with Facebook and LinkedIn, seems to be in direct opposition to where Google is actually going with Plus.

Too many pundits and tech bloggers have made the mistake of thinking of Google+ as a Facebook competitor, but it’s absolutely not — at least not as far as Google is concerned.

Of course, Google is still in the business of competing with Facebook for ad dollars. That boils down to compiling the best, most actionable data about consumers to sell to advertisers.

And if Plus catches on, Google stands a much better chance of accomplishing that goal, not by orchestrating a Great Migration of users from one social network to another, but by subtly linking all your Google-powered online activity and profiles so advertisers can see a more complete picture of you than Facebook could ever offer.

If Google’s goal, with Plus, is to truly tie you as an individual, across all of Google’s properties, I don’t see any reason for Google Plus to have an open API that shares data from outside of Plus. It’s as much, if not more, of a walled garden that Facebook or Twitter will ever be.

Of course, since they rolled out Plus as a “social network” and really allowed it to be portrayed as a direct competition to Facebook, it’s also possible that this is all revisionist history. It’s possible they thought they could kill Facebook and Twitter, and now that they realize that they can’t, and haven’t delivered anything close to the promise of Plus that was all the talk of the pundit world just a few month ago, they are moving the goal posts. Frankly, if they wanted a single sign-on account across all their properties, they could easily have created that, without all the fan fare of Google Plus. I don’t think that was it at all. Plus is more than single sign-on across Google properties, it’s Google’s way to not only track how you use their services, but also track the things you share with your friends, the things you say to your friends, who you email with, who you have in your circles, how you describe those circles, etc. Basically, an advertisers wet dream.

Also known as everything we always feared Facebook was trying to do, but with the same people who decried Facebook’s privacy applauding them, a pretty impressive feat.

For myself, after reading the interview, I’m even less likely to spend any time messing with Google Plus. If it is to be limited to bringing in information from Google’s other properties, I’m not interested. I’m not interested in moving years worth of work in Flickr to Picasa just to make it easier to share in Plus. I’m not interested in moving my websites back to Blogger just to make it easier to share in Plus. I can share those things just fine on Twitter and Facebook, and more importantly, my social networks are already there too.