The Lair

Sometimes it seems like the many headed serpentine creature of lore is a frequently recurring theme. This isn’t solely because my hayfever allergy has kicked in and my eyes are swimming; mind you. Bear with me while I speculate, whine, rant and generally display a par-for-the-course amount of skeptism and negativity about everybody’s favourite, Google and their multifarious ventures.

Take for instance the interesting recent feature, a flag button introduced by blogger. I like it. Spam blogs don’t really impact my online behaviour all that much for any number of reasons; but I’m sure this isn’t the general case. The problems with a generic “flag” toggle button though, are many. For example, exactly which blogs are Blogger trying to target for a takedown ? No wait, they don’t promise a takedown, all they promise is a delisting from their public directory of blogs. Some (I hesitate to use the word most, but it seems more likely than not) spam blogs are aimed at pumping up PR (page rank) for a particular set of keyword searches. Yes, they’d lose one link from the public listings but that’s it. It ain’t a delete. Page rank isn’t going to be affected much, surely ? They’d lose random amounts of traffic from people who click “Next Blog” and stumble on the page, though.

And a specific use for the flag button is to indicate objectionable content. Yes, the poetic quotations about one person’s vulgarity being someone else’s potery (sic) are wonderful, but are they workable ? From a few years experience as a moderator at the zoo known as Slashdot, it’s generally observed that people tend to flag anything they don’t agree with in a negative way. A simple flag? Hah. Slashdot has anything upto eight different moderation “types” and people still disagree about what each of them mean. “That’s not flamebait, dammit, that’s insightful!”. A simple boolean toggle ? Yep, that’s real expressive. It gets better. I can flag a single blog multiple times. *grin*. Yes, I just tested it out. From the same machine, I used Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera (yes, I have all three browsers installed on a single machine, stop staring at me) to flag a certain blog thrice. Ooh, oooh, flagging doesn’t require that one is logged into the Blogger service, you see. And even if it did, creating a few dozen Blogger accounts to flag someone down doesn’t sound all that hard. This is a whole new way to stuff flags in someone’s piehole to make them STFU, so to speak.

It’s at times like this that I really do curse my misguided sense of ethics. There aren’t many people whom I’d arbitrarily like to shut down or flag as asshat or eejit. In fact, I can only think of one person. So why aren’t I planting multiple mighty flags of “-1 inflammatory idiot” on this person and his spiel on blogspot ? I’ll never know. If Charles Clarke can figure out a few rules, why can’t I ? Double dang my ethics.

Ok, but onto the next venture, the most recently launched Google Talk. You know, the first I heard of this, my reaction was “Oh, that’s just fuckin’ great. Now, some people I know will move to this and that means yet another IM service I need to track. Like I don’t have enough already”. Yeah. I have Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and AIM. Oh, and Jabber. I have contacts on all of those silly services. A few unique contacts. Who, for various reasons, don’t appear on other services. Fortunately, the number of multi protocol chat clients increases daily and I use Trillian. So all is good, right? Yes, for me it is.

The nice things about Google Talk first. They use XMPP, for which I am profoundly grateful. Jabber has long been one of my poster children for a perfectly decent standard lacking a good backer to become ubiquitious - and with Google throwing its’ weight behind the protocol, things might finally look up. Unlike some other services, Google appear to have no problems with third party clients being used. People are already talking about the expected arrival of transports to talk.google.com; ie: the capability to interoperate with other chat services. Yes, Jabber can do this. I’ve used this feature and it’s great. You can essentially connect to a Jabber server (which supports transports) and talk to any of your Yahoo or MSN or AIM or ICQ contacts. Ain’t that great ? Yes, for me it is.

But this is me, remember ? I’ve used a multiprotocol chat client for years now. I’ve gotten used to the limitations of such a service. Most of these limitations apply to using transports with a Jabber server (which I did for a few months, once). The first is fancy emoticons. Google Talk doesn’t have any at the moment. If you automatically insert a grin (:D) after each sentence typed, as I do, then things can be a bit disconcerting. It’s worse for transports; since they need to catch up to all the fancy emoticons that each service supports. Trillian and Miranda do this quite well now. So does Gaim, Kopete and any number of other clients. Google Talk doesn’t. yet. The biggest barriers to widespread adoption for an IM service are, essentially, making sure your existing contacts move over seamlessly (very difficult) and having lots of cutesy bells and whistles. These could include things like near pornographic animated avatars and animated emoticons and distracting backgrounds to your IM windows and loud bell tones which can be spammed and audibles and … and … *calms down visibly*. See ? Everyone should switch to a minimalist client like Google Talk. Really. And don’t forget to buy a headset. Incidentally, I wonder how well Google Talk functions behind a firewall. Skype, possibly their closest rival in terms of voice chat, famously claims full functionality from behind a NATted firewall.

And in a piece of paranoia worthy of Google Watch, has anyone noticed that Google, the search engine, is now rewriting your search result URLs ? And they’re doing it in a slightly sneaky way. Mouse over the list of search results and you get the proper link. But copy-paste the link. Aha. Explained here. OMGodzors! Google is teh evil!!!1111SHIFT111!!.

If they ever turn evil, a lot of people will be unhappy, to say the least. Moi, a happy content Microsoft Windows user for more than a decade, will shrug my shoulders and resume my apathetic Googling.