Pretty ironic that Google--a company that gained notoriety for its minimalist search engine--has a "company blog" full of ridiculous eye candy. On my laptop screen, the top bar (which stays as you scroll down) takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Then I accidentally moused over the bottom part of the page as I was reading the end of the article, triggering yet another bar popping up from the bottom and telling me about other Google sites.
The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse.
It's 1997 all over again, folks. Only I would have never expected Google, of all companies, to fall into the eye candy trap.
"The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse."
You can say a lot of things about Google but they've got balls. :-)
The irony is even stronger than you realize, Google has been on a kick 'make the web fast' for a while, when they first kicked it off in 2010 I pointed out that most of my pageloads were hung waiting for doubleclick to load (which got fixed by the way, they are a lot faster now). So the notion of pushing a bunch of non-useful eye candy is kinda antithetical to that theme, but they do it anyway.
Perhaps their release process is broken, I have wondered what would change if they could make it a corporate priority that no Google generated page should take longer than 500mS to load on a 1Mbit connection. They could at least lead by showing best practices for fast loading web pages. Perhaps a current employee reading this will pass it along.
Most Google pages do load in much less than 500ms - of course, the trick here is what you have in mind by "load". The actual slow renders are all on browser (read, javascript) side: mobile clients, etc.
As far as best practices, I agree we need to do a better job of advertising this material. It is available:
Google's brand is about fun, not minimalism. You can look at the page and see a pretty standard corporate blog post. But, if you choose to, you can play with the header. It's fun. Try it.
(Actually, the design is pretty minimal. Big block of text that fits on the page without scrolling, and a few pieces of miscellaneous info on the right hand side. There, but not distracting. I can't really complain about the aesthetics of this design.
If you asked a million people what Google was about, if as many as a hundred of them put "fun" ahead of speed and usefulness, I would be very surprised.
This isn't Google Search, it's the Google corporate blog. It's an ad, essentially. Google wants people to associate the brand with fun.
Balls that bounce around is not exactly the end of the world. Yes, you don't like it. Some other people apparently do. You read the article and discussed it anyway :)
Yeah, I don't understand why Blogger now requires javascript to read any blog. The content is just static HTML most of the time! Why are they pushing so hard to hide the content if you have javascript disabled?
They are making their properties require scripting, they threatened that javascript "would be replaced" with something that can support massive codebases (dart), and they have new protocols that use a persistent connection that can't really have a proxy between you and Google (Spdy).
I'm sure some of these came about organically, but they all contribute to moving from a publishing model (web 'pages') to an application model. Basically Google is making the web into an application, but like modern DRM in games, you have to be 'online' signed into google all the time to use it.
Make it personal 1:1 with google by killing proxies (require TLS like in Spdy), kill pages by requiring scripting. Result is a Ubisoft for the web. This is I think pretty clearly the destination that Google is pushing towards.
JavaScript is part of the web now. It's because people like interactive content, not because of some conspiracy to DRM their corporate advertising blog.
"JavaScript is part of the web now." It wasn't before? It's acceptable to have completely blank pages with no content, JavaScript 'or else'?
"It's because people like interactive content". And Google put '+' into everything because 'people like social', not some plan to compete with Facebook.
"some conspiracy to DRM their corporate advertising blog." Because clearly I was talking about a single blog.
"proxying works fine for SPDY" A SPDY -> HTTP proxy. When there's a SPDY-to-SPDY caching proxy and no man-in-the-middle you might say it works fine.
...that's a lot of spin from a Google employee. Maybe I hit pretty close to the mark.
You're right that it's odd that the page is blank when viewed in w3m. I'm guessing this is an oversight rather than something intentional. I will investigate.
(As for SPDY proxies, I use one every day at work. I'm not sure why you are so concerned about the ability to proxy, but I assure you it works fine.)
Since Marissa left UX, G's frontend becomes worse every day. I especially hate these "fixed bars" that pollute my small netbook screen and that unfortunately are so hip nowadays, like flash intros were ten years ago, or the rainbow <hr> some 15 years ago. Hope they don't exist for long, its terrible UX.
As for a blog software where you need JS to read a simple text, well... facepalm.
My internet connection is pretty bad. The thing is, whole country is in the same shit. Guess what, google plus doesn't even load in here. I mean, facebook(even through proxy since its blocked by govt) and others are loading perfectly, maybe with some delay, but g+ is not functioning at all. All google services are suffocating with js/ajax/whothehellknowwhat stuff, that making it almost impossible to use them if you are not at some lightning speed connection. Uhh, so pissed off!
This doesn't even scratch the surface of what Google could show you. If they showed us the extent of what they can actually infer from our activity, some people would probably shoot their computer, burn their router and modem, and never look at a screen again.
It can probably build a very extensive list of skills (what languages you know, spoken or programming), preferences (habits, sexual, etc), hobbies, a full social network map (from emails and social networks), character (from analyzing emails, searches, etc), amongst other things.
I'm not necessarily saying that this data is already compiled somewhere - but Google being a data-oriented company, they could most likely do all this if they really wanted to.
Why would they let you see all their data unless there is a legal obligation to do so? It would just freak people out and they'll start looking for ways to anonymize or find and use another search engine/email/etc.
In other words given all their options and incentive they don't seem to get any benefits from really exposing all the data they have about you. One can argue that is really they most precious resource.
They have some incentive to expose some to make you feel like you are somewhat in control and they are somewhat open and transparent.
That is far less than what Google's recommender system actually knows. But it is open question to an outsider whether Google interprets what it knows, or of the knowledge is all a pike of correlation matrices that are opaque until the ads pop out.
One thing that Google knows: other accounts you have with non-Google services. For example, when you setup your G+ profile, they offer to link a Twitter account that they suspect is yours.
Twitter used to offer an api to lookup a user by email. So this does not have to be something they figured out by parsing your Inbox for Twitter signups.
I love the unintentional creepiness of this quote:
"Data deletion at the data source, e.g. in your Web History will have no impact on issued reports, however reports can be deleted at any time"
As in - if you didn't know already, GOOG's Web History is a superficial front-facing report, all your personal data is happily sitting in GOOG's databases, is tracked, related, and available to whomever has the appropriate power to access it.
I don't think the quoted sentence says that. It rather says that Web History is the source of the data, and even if you delete it there, it will not affect reports that have already been issued in the past.
The question is what they mean with "issued reports". Are these reports that are being issued or reports that have been issued? It's a bit ambiguous, I think. But then again, English isn't my native language, so maybe I am just confusing some Grammar rules.
I think you misunderstood the phrase (which has been removed since?).
I signed up (my web history has been disabled for months) and I only have data about my OSes/emails/locations, nothing about search "Web History No activity found."
It can be easily extended to allow storing ~everything~ ('The idea is that we can rollback any damage done to your account' or 'We can help you identify everything potentially malicious a 3rd party did by storing every detail').
How do you differentiate between legit (my account, my data) deletion requests and the bad ones? Right. Not at all.
I'm assuming that this we're talking about an aggregate built for the account statement. (I don't know if the account statement is a batch job or something built incrementally as you browse. But the original statement leads me to believe it's the second one.) If you want to actually delete the data, don't delete entries from your browsing history or search history; officially request deletion of all your data from the privacy page. Deleting everything Google knows about you is different from pruning one embarrassing search result by deleting it from Web History. The first is an action you take because you don't want Google to have your information. The second is an action you take because you want to be able to show people you search history without showing them a particular search you did.
(Remember: most people are worried about protecting their information from their friends and family, not from some future Orwellian society. Google gives you tools to do both.)
The first sentence is either incomplete or my non-native english parser stumbles and falls. Help me out, please.
Regarding the following statement: Your take seems a lot more sensible now. Still, I still don't feel that the matter's settled. If you claim that most people are worried about their petty problems of hiding their embarrassing search items from friends and family then I'd like to counter with the argument that the same 'most people' don't understand that removing one (the history listing) wouldn't remove the other (the data Google has).
Claiming that this wasn't the _intention_ is kind of hard. I'd say any layperson can expect that 'forget about X' or 'delete X' really purges the relevant data. That's what you're trained to believe. Even if the intention wasn't explicitly "I'm afraid of Google and want them to forget about my history":
Separating the data management like this is really just borderline abusive for casual users. Ask mom and dad if they expect that something is still stored and connected to their account if they remove it from the (browsing/web) history.
> For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately
When I was att CCC this winter I noticed that a russian ip had logged into my gmail. Turns out it was CCC who had rented a russian ip. Scared me quite a bit for a few hours and resulted in me changing my password.
My report says my 3 of my 'most contacted' emails are gmail accounts I've never heard of. Googling these email addresses returns lists of known spammers. However clicking on the emails in the report itself shows no known results in my gmail. Has anyone else seen this? Should I be concerned? What should I check for?
I already re-checked that I have no forwarding addresses set; the addresses do not show up as autocomplete if I begin to type a message to one.
Could it just be a bug? The numbers are "14 emails sent", so not a huge amount, but I'm slightly disturbed by this and can't find any other clues yet.
Already received my first report. It took at most 20 minutes or so to receive the e-mail for it.
One month, 1338 searches. That I was not expecting. I didn't realize I searched 50 times a day on average. I suppose it's not that high when I think about it but it caught me by surprise.
It's interesting that they map all of my IP addresses that I logged in from to the companies that own the IP blocks and show that to me when I mouse over the countries in the list.
I don't live in America and haven't been for years. Noticed I have logins with "tch network services" and have no idea why that would be the case. I don't use any VPN services (esp. not to login into my accounts). Anyone have any ideas?
Today we’re introducing Account Activity, a new feature in your Google Account. If you sign up, each month we’ll send you a link to a password-protected report with insights into your signed-in use of Google services.
The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse.
It's 1997 all over again, folks. Only I would have never expected Google, of all companies, to fall into the eye candy trap.