Google Account Goo

I love Google. I hate Google.

Not long ago Google changed Google Apps, the wonderful suite of cloud services that makes it possible for a small organization to have robust group services, like email and contacts, for free. The change was to include all of Google's other nifty services, like Analytics and YouTube, to the list of things you could do with your Google Apps domain. Fantastic!

Not so fast. Quite a while ago we realized that you couldn't transfer an Analytics account (or profile, or anything) from one person to another. So, if as a web designer you created an Analytics profile for a client's web site, you couldn't then transfer the profile over to a client-controlled account later. That sucked. So, the answer was to create a Google Account for the company and start the Analytics profile there from the get-go. If you had a designer flake out on you and delete your profile from their account, along with all your data, well that sucked for you.

Now we have essentially the same problem with the Google accounts created for companies so that they could use Google Analytics, and other services like YouTube. You would think that once Google Apps moved those other fine services they'd figure out some way to allow an organization to merge their old Google personal account with their Google Apps domain, wouldn't you? I mean, who wants to loose all their data when bringing everything under one roof?

Not only that, but --and this was a painful discovery-- if you delete your organization's old account thinking you can free up the user name for your Google Apps account, you're going to be disappointed. Google retires usernames from deleted accounts so they can never be used again. That's a special bummer for organizations that got usernames that match their domain names or brand names.

Google, with all their genius, can't seem to figure out how to get user accounts to do kung fu, or even a half-hearted high kick. Google accounts are a data prison from which you can never escape.

Unweblike Behavior

 

For the second time in a single day I have come across content on the web that is "not available in your area". This is bullshit. It's the world wide web. It defies geographical location by definition. The whole point of the WWW is that if you put something on it, that thing can be seen by anyone on a computer anywhere on the planet.

I say that if a page has any content on it that can't be seen by anyone anywhere, then it is not on the web and should be removed from the web. Taking something off the web can be achieved in two ways. First, and easiest, it can be removed by the search engine companies from being included in results. If Google and Bing removed the above offending web site from their search results, the above offending web site would stop putting geographically limited content on their web site and thus gain re-admission to the web. I'm simply confident this is true. To effectively remove offending pages from the web, it might be necessary to remove entire domains from the search results. BBC doesn't want to have the entire bbc.co.uk domain taken off Google.

The second step would be to make a browser plug-in which referred to a black list of sites and removed links from the markup of any page linking to one of the offending pages or sites. The black list could be crowdsourced, so URL's could be added by users as they came across offending content. If this becomes an issue that people care about and start using this plugin widely, browsers might incorporate the behavior into the core of their programs.

Search engine companies like Google and Bing, and all browser companies all have an inherent interest in maintaining a global definition of the web. No government regulation is necessary to impose such a definition -- and I'm a guy who's usually in favor of regulation as a solution to big problems. But in this case there is a better way. Also, I'm not suggesting that all content be free and open to everyone no matter what. Pay walls and the like might or might not be a good idea, but they are not as a model contrary to a functioning world wide web. Certainly you do want to have restricted areas of web sites.

My thesis is simply that geolocation is an invalid filter for access to media on the web. It's perfectly fine to give me a default view that depends on my geolocation, but not to keep me locked out of certain content entirely. I think it will lead to a balkanization of the web.

Lastly, this does not mean that such geo-localized content would be banished from the world, just the web. Essentially, if you want to provide geo-localized content exclusively to people in a certain geographic area, then there's an app for that. Or, you make an app for that. The WWW is distinct and different than the Internet. I don't condone filtering the Internet.