I think it’s on with Google+

I read this snippet in Business Insider regarding Facebook’s troops defending their turf against the limited introduction of Google+. Zuckerberg's Google+ profile

Everybody’s on Facebook already. Philip Su, the engineer who worked on Facebook video chat, said it’s a one button click to any friend “on the social network that already HAS all your friends.” That’s definitely not the case with Google+ yet.

I commented:  Yes, “everybody’s” on Facebook already .. but so many of my cohorts don’t really want to be there. I don’t need Facebook for work but I couldn’t do business without Google, GMail, Google Apps, Reader, and such. If Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter can provide all required social interactions, I heartily welcome having one less presence to maintain. Had Google acquired LinkedIn, it might have been game-over.

If you’ve got a Google+ account, what do you think?   Does this resonate with you?

Dear Metacafe ..

Hello Site Architect, Security Officers, CTO, and other potentially suspicious characters at Metacafe –

I landed at your site today as result of searching for a video showing the best music making applications for tablet computers.   I was shocked and dismayed when I noticed that underneath the first video I clicked on was a comment box awaiting my input displaying my Facebook profile picture.   You might wonder why I thought this was a serious problem.  Well, for starters, I’ve not enabled Facebook Connect with your site.  Actually, I’ve never even registered at Metacafe.  Geez, I wasn’t even logged into Facebook on any computer and hadn’t been for days.


So my question is this: why is my %)*&^ Facebook identity showing up on your site?   I know this probably isn’t all your doing and I ought to be pestering the alpha geeks over at Facebook as well, but, honestly, I am just a little bit sick of Facebook detritus following me everywhere, and the less time I spend there, the better I feel.  Besides, I’ve no patience for another  “oh my gosh .. we’d never do anything like that” response.

I understand that Facebook is not going away any time soon.  And there’s little chance of me erasing my Facebook account as my elders unfortunately have irrevocably and mistakenly substituted it for the telephone. But I really think there is room in the universe for healthy population of Things Not Connected To Facebook. So is there any chance you could not line up like the millions of other lemmings and just say no to auto-magic, opt-in by default, creepy stalking technology?

So, in closing: I now hate your web property.  How do I delete any and all association with my information from your site?

Thank you.

My heart still belongs to Lala

My Lala profile

I’ve just taken a test drive of Apple’s Ping and I am totally underwhelmed.   As a user of Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.FM, MOG, and most significantly, Lala, I am completely befuddled.  Why in the world would only iTunes purchase history be considered in user profile creation and not the wealth of data contained in the user’s iTunes library?  There are play counts, ratings, playlists, genre tags, BPM annotations and so forth.  No, really, can someone explain this to me? As it stands, Ping is utterly worthless to the musically driven social net citizen and is not likely to perform a meaningful social networking function in Apple’s marquee media store.  Surely Apple must realize how scale-free social networks are formed.  Without well-connected nodes capable of generating quality content, and without those nodes’ mass of preference data there is nothing going on here.   Had my library and playlists been pulled in I just might have cared enough to write some reviews, invite my tribe and hang around long enough for a little more Lala DNA to show up.  Not a chance now.

In summary, dear Apple, compare and contrast how hard Last.FM works to import and export user music preferences.