I’ve been reading Mike Elgan since his article on the New Bedouins in 2007. He still writes about technology but is increasingly focusing on traveling to exotic places and sampling their food and wine. One of his latest posts on technology bemoans the shuttering of Google+.
Google has become, he says, the new Yahoo. By that he means that, like Yahoo, Google introduces new products with great fanfare and once its users become dependent on them, abandons the products. Google+ is just the latest example. Ironically, Elgan makes a compelling case for not trusting Google or depending on their apps but then reveals that he’s still depending on Google Photos and—worse yet—Google drive.
I don’t get it. You spend a whole article articulating why you shouldn’t use Google apps yet you continue to commit some of your most precious content to it. Several of the commenters are in the same boat.
These folks are going to get burned. That is what happens when you depend on Google for anything. Sooner or later they’re going to pull the rug out from under you. It’s impossible, as a practical matter, to get away from all their apps. If you want to watch a video, for example, the chances are overwhelming that it will be on YouTube. But there’s a difference between consuming someone else’s content on a Google app and committing your own data to it.
Of course, none of this addresses the—even worse in my opinion—Google practice of reading your documents and locking your account if they find something they don’t like. The engineers writing the AI to do this aren’t nearly as clever as they think they are so they get false positives. That means a completely innocent research paper on Google Docs, say, could get flagged as Bad Think™ and just like that you lose your work. Why would anyone subject themselves to this?
Elgan wonders where people should go in a post-Google+ world to express their views and share their content. It’s not that expensive to get a domain and rent a virtual server. Irreal costs less than $10 per month. Then you can have a blog and build a community around it. It’s completely portable and if the provider goes out of business (or doesn’t like you) you simply move to another provider and update your DNS. Users wouldn’t even have to be aware of the change.