Google-

google albums

I occasionally blog about google because this blog is hosted on google's blogger.com service. This blog is devoted to my obsession with science fiction and I have fun illustrating stories (see the images to the right on this page).

I've previously blogged about the saga of how google bought Picasa and the blogspot blogging service. Google's blogger.com service made use of Picasa to archive images used by bloggers. Then the Picasa web albums became integrated into google's social media platform, Google+. Why? Asking such questions is like asking what goes into sausage.

its an ads ads ads ads ads world

Killer App
To this day I don't understand Google+. Back before the age of the internet, computers had "killer applications". When the internet arrived, there was a great web page editing tool called Netscape Composer which allowed for easy creation of web pages and I used it for making web pages before there were dedicating blogging applications. For a time, back in the 1990s, Netscape Communicator was the "killer app" for nerds like me who wanted to put their ideas on the internet. Sadly, during the first Browser War, Microsoft's hideous browser was bundled with computers and Bill Gates declared Internet Explorer a "killer app".

Think of the people who created software such as Composer and how they were swamped by the Microsoft behemoth. There is a strange process by which people who know and love computers get replaced by marketing specialists. Think of tech nerds like Steve Wozniac being replaced by people like the sugar-water salesman John Sculley. After the dramatic rise of Facebook (the "killer app" for social media), the folks at google could not stand the idea of so much internet advertising revenue being channeled through social media unless they could get into that business, too.

settings for this blog

Google tried to follow the same kind of strategy that made so many people Internet Explorer users: they forced Google+ accounts on users of other google products. To this day ( Oct 13, 2018), there is a Google+ link at the top of this blog, stuck there by google.

plus.google.com

I doubt if there was a single person at google who ever cared about Google+ for any reason other than trying to compete with Facebook for advertising revenue. And that is not saying anything special about Google+. I get exactly the same feeling for how google has "developed" their blogging platform and what they did to destroy Picasa after they bought it. In an era when insanely great computers and software have been made by dedicated and enthusiastic people, almost as many great products have been systematically destroyed by megalithic companies like Microsoft and Google.

If you build it, they will come
Of course, some people actually did start using Google+. It was sad to see their dismay at the Google+ community pages this week after they got the word that Google+ is being discontinued.

That announcement of a Google+ phase-out came along with a report that there was some sloppiness in the handling of some Google+ user data (WSJ). Since there are "only" a few million Google+ users, I'm sure it is not worth google's time and effort to keep Google+ running.

Google+ link at the top of this blog

My only concern about the demise of Google+ is related to the fact that I currently have hundreds of links from this blog to web pages like this one. Will those links continue to be supported by google?

It is now 5 days after google said it is going to close Google+ and if someone follows the Google+ link at the top of this blog (and if they have so far never been forced to have a Google+ account) then they will be invited to create a new Google+ user account!

Any screen

WYSIWYG
One of the worst experiences of my life was typing my senior thesis on a manual typewriter. Lucky for me, by the time I had to put together my Ph.D. dissertation I had a Macintosh computer and WYSIWYG word processing software and access to a laser printer. In the early days of the internet, web page creators would tell the world which screen width and display resolution their web pages had been designed and optimized for. I still wish that blogging platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress shared a standardized system for web pages on which text and images would scale equally when readers use their page zoom controls. I'd like every viewer of my blog to see things exactly as I designed them to be positioned on the web page. Mega corporations such as google don't care about things like this, but bloggers do.

WYSINWYG
The screen shot image below shows what the first draft of this blog post looked like on my computer when not using google's Chrome web browser:

Here it is again with a different browser, google's Chrome:

Feb 3 update
It looks like google is going to take this opportunity to destroy all of the webpages that originated as Picasa pages, completing the heavy-handed take-over and destruction of Picasa by google.

Instructions for downloading your Google+ data.
April 2019: The End/

Learn more

click image to enlarge

Update: destruction complete. It is yet another Google masterpiece. Force bloggers to use "Google Album Archives" that were part of Google+. Then destroy Google+. Then inactivate all the links that bloggers had created from blog posts to their Album Archives. Congratulations, Google, keep up the good work.

2020 update: "On June 10, 2020, the Honorable Edward J. Davila of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, granted preliminary approval of this class action Settlement and directed the litigants to provide this notice about the Settlement. You have received this notice because Google’s records indicate that you may be a Settlement Class Member, and you may be eligible to receive a payment from the Settlement. Please visit www.GooglePlusDataLitigation.com for more information."

Related Reading: Google Album Archives