4 ms·

Never forget that you are not the customer, you are the product.

simias 13y ago
That's just silly, Google can't afford to alienate its users, whether you consider them customers or products. This phrase is becoming a meme.
- weland 13y ago
  Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search, turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fuck is almost outrageous. We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell, and with the decreasing amount of Internet education most users get before starting to surf the web, the distance from that point is increasing. They thrive on the eternal September.
  - username223 13y ago
    It has been so long; I almost forgot the phrase "Eternal September." Keeping an eye on your internet privacy is a pain in the ass: I use DDG when I can, block most scripts and trackers, and keep an eye on my cookies, but it breaks some websites in non-obvious ways, and I'll have to do something else to deal with browser fingerprinting. As long as most people are easily productized, it just doesn't matter.
    - weland 13y ago
      My browsing habits are pretty much along the same lines, but I expect it will become much harder to do so in the following years. Between the feature creep and the monetization of idiocy, I expect we will lose even more diversity than we already have; on the software side, privacy-enabling features will just slowly disappear, as a smaller and smaller proportion of people will have the technical prowess to even care about them, let alone use them. As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
      - username223 13y ago
        In the middle term, it will probably come down to stone tools: blocking via /etc/hosts, filtering headers through proxies, etc. I'll re-learn it. As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
        weland 13y ago
        I'm gonna make an Internet of my own. With hookers and blackjack and threaded newsreaders :-).
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived. The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, which means a disruptive newcomer can grow very fast if the whole viral networking effect kicks in, but usually when that happens one or more established players must fall to create the space.
    - teisman 13y ago
      True. And the people objecting against the whole G+ / YouTube integration are probably the early adopters that could lead the herd.
    - weland 13y ago
      > I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived. On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  Google can definitely afford to alienate the small percentage of its users who actually care about privacy. They alienated me to the point where I no longer use any Google products, and I hear the company is still pretty successful.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  This is precisely about alienating them. They know they're alienating people and they've done the numbers and don't give a shit.
- aragot 13y ago
  Don't forget that Internet is the new television. We've built empires of television channels (including all the commercial football clubs) for the only sake of planting advertising inside each other's homes. With Internet, we've had our innocence time, with few advertising, relatively clever users and smart, responsible usages. But Internet will become the new plaza for the populace, filled with orange blinking advertisers, awful designs that only lowerclass people can accept (think saving a file in Windows 8 or just... facebook), like supermarkets who swap alleys around just to make you walk in front of new products, like neon lights which look awful as they try to catch your attention. And websites will get bugs as they grow old, because margins will be shallow again. The story of any long cycle in economy - 2012 was the top of the curve. And Google will fill perfectly in the middle.
Flimm 13y ago
That's completely irrelevant. Google need you as a product to sell to their customers.
- a3n 13y ago
  And there's no indication that they're in danger of not having you, or a large number of close approximations of you. Social networking is today's TV, that you must participate both as a way to spend your life and to not be alienated from all the other people in your lives that use and talk about social, or TV, or whatever the next thing will be.
Silhouette 13y ago
We would be the customer, if they hadn't messed up their advertising management systems so much that we've given up trying to make them work. I don't do our on-line marketing, but I think we're up to something like 4x actual spend that they're offering in credit as they beg us to start advertising with them now. Even Facebook's ad buy system is better than Google's current one, and being worse than Facebook's ad buy system is an achievement that I always assumed would require years of practice and a lot of natural talent.
msabalau 13y ago
There is nothing magical about being the customer. Paying money doesn't stop anyone from creating a multi sided market that makes you the product. As anyone who subscribed to a magazine, purchased season tickets to a cultural organization, or seen an ad on an Xbox can attest. Also, you created an account an hour after this article was posted just to type a banal cliche that we've all had to endure endlessly?
- chronic25 13y ago
  Yes, why not? It's not hard to make a new account.
- waps 13y ago
  Also : I'm a customer of my isp. Not too happy about them at all. In fact, I'm a lot happier being Google's product (and I would argue that at least in a few instances this is not true).
mistercow 13y ago
People say that, but these are just labels, and ultimately it doesn't make a difference. The thing that matters is who has power in the relationship. Look at heroin; users are customers, but those supplying the product hold the power. Or look at the music industry: musicians are the product, fans are the customers, and neither of them have much power.
BrandonMarc 13y ago
Precisely. It's as though Google is the new network television. Advertisers pay to be delivered bits of your attention, and the network focuses on trying to keep your attention, and with a little data mining & demographics match you with the "best" advertisements.

That's just silly, Google can't afford to alienate its users, whether you consider them customers or products. This phrase is becoming a meme.

weland 13y ago
Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search, turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fuck is almost outrageous. We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell, and with the decreasing amount of Internet education most users get before starting to surf the web, the distance from that point is increasing. They thrive on the eternal September.
- username223 13y ago
  It has been so long; I almost forgot the phrase "Eternal September." Keeping an eye on your internet privacy is a pain in the ass: I use DDG when I can, block most scripts and trackers, and keep an eye on my cookies, but it breaks some websites in non-obvious ways, and I'll have to do something else to deal with browser fingerprinting. As long as most people are easily productized, it just doesn't matter.
  - weland 13y ago
    My browsing habits are pretty much along the same lines, but I expect it will become much harder to do so in the following years. Between the feature creep and the monetization of idiocy, I expect we will lose even more diversity than we already have; on the software side, privacy-enabling features will just slowly disappear, as a smaller and smaller proportion of people will have the technical prowess to even care about them, let alone use them. As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
    - username223 13y ago
      In the middle term, it will probably come down to stone tools: blocking via /etc/hosts, filtering headers through proxies, etc. I'll re-learn it. As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
      - weland 13y ago
        I'm gonna make an Internet of my own. With hookers and blackjack and threaded newsreaders :-).
- Silhouette 13y ago
  We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived. The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, which means a disruptive newcomer can grow very fast if the whole viral networking effect kicks in, but usually when that happens one or more established players must fall to create the space.
  - teisman 13y ago
    True. And the people objecting against the whole G+ / YouTube integration are probably the early adopters that could lead the herd.
  - weland 13y ago
    > I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived. On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.
greenyoda 13y ago
Google can definitely afford to alienate the small percentage of its users who actually care about privacy. They alienated me to the point where I no longer use any Google products, and I hear the company is still pretty successful.
davidgerard 13y ago
This is precisely about alienating them. They know they're alienating people and they've done the numbers and don't give a shit.
aragot 13y ago
Don't forget that Internet is the new television. We've built empires of television channels (including all the commercial football clubs) for the only sake of planting advertising inside each other's homes. With Internet, we've had our innocence time, with few advertising, relatively clever users and smart, responsible usages. But Internet will become the new plaza for the populace, filled with orange blinking advertisers, awful designs that only lowerclass people can accept (think saving a file in Windows 8 or just... facebook), like supermarkets who swap alleys around just to make you walk in front of new products, like neon lights which look awful as they try to catch your attention. And websites will get bugs as they grow old, because margins will be shallow again. The story of any long cycle in economy - 2012 was the top of the curve. And Google will fill perfectly in the middle.

Flimm 13y ago

That's completely irrelevant. Google need you as a product to sell to their customers.

a3n 13y ago
And there's no indication that they're in danger of not having you, or a large number of close approximations of you. Social networking is today's TV, that you must participate both as a way to spend your life and to not be alienated from all the other people in your lives that use and talk about social, or TV, or whatever the next thing will be.

Silhouette 13y ago

We would be the customer, if they hadn't messed up their advertising management systems so much that we've given up trying to make them work. I don't do our on-line marketing, but I think we're up to something like 4x actual spend that they're offering in credit as they beg us to start advertising with them now. Even Facebook's ad buy system is better than Google's current one, and being worse than Facebook's ad buy system is an achievement that I always assumed would require years of practice and a lot of natural talent.

msabalau 13y ago

There is nothing magical about being the customer. Paying money doesn't stop anyone from creating a multi sided market that makes you the product. As anyone who subscribed to a magazine, purchased season tickets to a cultural organization, or seen an ad on an Xbox can attest. Also, you created an account an hour after this article was posted just to type a banal cliche that we've all had to endure endlessly?

chronic25 13y ago
Yes, why not? It's not hard to make a new account.
waps 13y ago
Also : I'm a customer of my isp. Not too happy about them at all. In fact, I'm a lot happier being Google's product (and I would argue that at least in a few instances this is not true).

mistercow 13y ago

People say that, but these are just labels, and ultimately it doesn't make a difference. The thing that matters is who has power in the relationship. Look at heroin; users are customers, but those supplying the product hold the power. Or look at the music industry: musicians are the product, fans are the customers, and neither of them have much power.

BrandonMarc 13y ago

Precisely. It's as though Google is the new network television. Advertisers pay to be delivered bits of your attention, and the network focuses on trying to keep your attention, and with a little data mining & demographics match you with the "best" advertisements.