6 ms·

That was an impressively quick response for a large company.

• dbz 17y ago
  It's really not surprising though, imho, because no one likes having decisions made for them. One of my teachers once told me what I thought and why I did things. I've always hated my teacher since that time- not because he was completely wrong, but because the principle of the action was disgusting. Google just decided we (gmail users) wanted this.
  • thecombjelly 17y ago
    It's one thing to decide that your users want something, but that doesn't mean it happens. You have to decide how you are going to fix it and then write a fix and then test the fix. Usually big companies require a group of people to agree on what the fix will be and how to do the fix. It often involves paper work and approval on different levels. It isn't usually just something that one of the programmers goes in and fixes (although that model seems to work often for startups).
  • zitterbewegung 17y ago
    I liked those features. I liked not having to click to follow people and be automatically signed in with everything already configured. But I don't think everyone else did. I think we have different viewpoints and enough people got pissed off for them to change their policies.
    • pmjordan 17y ago
      People use services in very different ways, and have very different views on what is acceptable privacy-wise. Personally, I struggle with the "all-in" nature of Facebook (and Buzz, but there's no social pressure to use it yet) - I have various social circles offline and online that simply don't overlap (e.g. family, friends from school, friends from university, friends in the various towns/countries I've lived, customers/business partners, etc.), and the tone, topic and nature of communication with each group is different. I'm not talking about "secrets", I just don't think it's appropriate for them to be forcibly stirred into a pot, and people don't need to know about everything without even trying to dig it up. I even resent the public friends list on Facebook, but at least I get to decide who lands there (unlike the initial Buzz rollout). As a result, I don't use Facebook actively and just add people as friends because it's perceived to be rude if I don't. I've noticed I'm not the only one - there seems to be a pattern: someone discovers Facebook (note that it's only recently become popular in Austria; it was practically unknown outside the web scene in 2008), get excited and add all their friends, post pictures, etc. and after a while remove a lot of personal details, delete photos and only participate actively by replying to others. Maybe this has already played out a few years earlier in the US. Oddly enough, I really enjoy Twitter. I guess it's because it's very up-front about everything being public, so the temptation to post something you might regret later is reduced.
• cookiecaper 17y ago
  Not for the level of freak-out that people had about it. You can light a fire under a company's butt if they think that the perception of their new product threatens their business, as a reputation for recklessness with user's data and privacy threatens Google.