Evil Genius
Google’s foray in the social networking space, Buzz, has got a bit of kicking in the last couple of days, because of the assumptions it made about how people use email. It’s a bit weird, really, that some wunderkind at Google didn’t spot the potential for trouble before Buzz was rolled out, no consultation period required, or so they thought, at the beginning of last week.
The basic line of thinking seems to have been:
“We need some way to hit the social network ground running. People aren’t going to fancy importing or adding friends to a whole new social web app. Luckily people already have lots of friends in their email address books so let’s save everyone a load of time and just make an instant list of followers and followees from everyone’s contact lists. And make all these lists visible to everyone by default, because these networks are all about showing off anyway. And then throw in their photos and RSS feed subscriptions as well for a dollop of extra stuff. Instant Facebook-levels of content and social networking will ensue and our appreciative users won’t have had to lift a finger. Victory will be ours.”
The car-crash then ensued when this insanely naive view of what email is for (Social networking, but in an old-fashioned, clunky way. Errr… that’s it, isn’t it?) ran full-pelt into the real world, where email is a medium not a genre and used for a million more important, secret, dangerous and intimate things than Facebook or Twitter could dream of.
How do you not spot the problem here? What kind of self-obsessed corporate culture produces the kind of clearly very talented engineers who have no understanding of the real-world uses of a technology they control so much of?
Is it now just about beating the other guys? Are we back to there again? That seems to have been the driving factor here. There wasn’t the customary Google opt-in beta period. It was just there, all of a sudden. Because it was good for you. Because Google is cleverer than you are and they know what is good for you. Even if your life crashs as a result. And, actually, don’t worry if that happens. Google has backups.
It turns out you don’t need to be a genius to be evil. You just need to be really, really stupid.