Nowhere can I find any method of opting out of your secret contact siphoning ‘feature’. Does this mean that because you’ve already done it, it’s too late and you think perhaps I should get over it? No, I don’t think so.

Yeah – I missed it! Thanks to @benwest0411 for picking me up on it. In my defence, it never actually says exactly how the opt-in would work.

Your post says ‘If I accept, and later decide … to revoke…’, I should email you, but just because I never accepted sure as hell doesn’t mean I don’t now want to revoke. So, Please remove my stolen contact data from your servers. Yeah, you already did

…and… just while I’m full of righteous indignation,

• put a button on your settings page so that I can have the satisfaction of doing it again all by myself, any time I want to
• and another button that says ‘Delete Account’ – one that really deletes my stuff, whenever I want to!

I think that still holds

Really pissed off with this. I feel like I’m a pretty savvy user, and I like your app, but you really blew it with this episode. You need to do some serious rebuilding of trust.
and probably that too!

Someone at Google appears to be deliberately and systematically polluting and plundering the crowdsourced data of competitors. Two instances seem to have been all but proven so far (check this post about OpenStreetMap and Mocality), it seems unlikely that it stops there.

If ever an action was hypocritical and seemingly calculated to destroy trust, it is this. In fact, it’s an action which could be terribly damaging to Google, which relies so much on trust every time someone uses Gmail, sends a Google+ message, hosts a document, amends a map. Crowdsourcing is trust in action.

For these reasons, I can’t imagine the actions have any basis in official policy at Google, but are likely the actions of an over-zealous group or individual. Whatever, the case, Google need to come clean about this REAL FAST! full disclosure, and nothing less will do. We’re waiting!

Update: 18 months now, still prodding google, but no answers yet

Google Street View is brilliant – in fact, the whole digital map revolution is largely driven by expectations set by Google. Their tech is amazing. Unfortunately, as an organisation, they often fail to come up to scratch. A shame… here’s an example:

Every now and then Google have a flurry of promotion about their street view partners program, most recently in March this year the blogs seemed to be getting the message out. It’s certainly a cool idea, and there are some stunning examples out there. Our University applied for this years ago, and after a few slips and trips, were delighted when the trike finally visited the campus (on May 9, 2010). Then we settled down to wait for the images to come online. The site said it could take up to 90 days.

Today is the anniversary. Yup, 365 days later, and still no Street View on campus. Now, I’m sure they have their reasons – obviously, being very busy would be one of them. They have since released some excellent street view partner sites. I know we’re not being singled out or ignored, because I understand that the day before they came to us, they did the MCG… and it’s not online yet either! I guess what I find infuriating is [a.] that they are still soliciting for partners, when they’ve obviously got a massive backlog of images already, and [b.] that they never tell you anything – no communication, no progress updates, nothing. It’s always “don’t call us, we’ll call you”.

So, Google is as Google does. It’s free, so one certainly can’t complain, but like a lot of people, I do wonder about the direction Google are taking. That they were so long congratulated as innovators, but now that innovation is contributing to a lack of focus for a business that was built on focus. I wonder how long before they do start to officially start to trim their programs, rather than just let them die of neglect.

And now they’re even going indoors! Don’t know if we’ll ever see our images online at this rate.

Yet more trumpeting about excellent new StreetView locations, but no response to any of my enquiries.

They’ve added some new imagery captured by the trike, Google Earth Blog has a good write up of the additions.

While I was there, I was alerted by user “Munden” that the blue dots of user generated photos had disappeared from the Google Maps when you dragged Pegman. Indeed! That does make it a lot easier to drop pegman on a ‘real’ bit of streetview. You can still access the photos by turning on the photo layer first, then dragging pegman onto a photo. Works OK, but I found it didn’t work in the little inset map that displays in the lower right corner. Maybe that’s on their list!

Speaking of “on their list”, at the start of May last year, the Google Street View trike visited my uni’s campus, but still no sign of the images online. The LatLong blog seemed to be using the recent additions to trumpet their partner program, but I have to say, if our experience is any guide people will have a looong wait for any results!

I am not normally given to conspiracy theories, and apparently this is a hangover from when the wikileaks server was down and google dropped results from its index, but that was ages ago – why hasn’t it been fixed?

I’m not going to add much to the comment that hasn’t already been said better already by others [1, 2, 3]. However, I will try to add a little insight from my own perspective.

About 18 years ago, I worked for a company that prepared film separations for print (crumbs! only 18 years ago – do film houses still exist?). It was highly skilled and exacting work, and the company, Show-Ads, was the acknowledged leader of the industry in Australia. Some of the work we produced was simply superb.

Anyway, we could see the internet was going to have a huge impact. We also had really close ties with the major ad agencies and direct links to the several major retailers (Target, Myer, Coles, Kmart). We produced all the artwork for the catalogues these retailers stuffed in your mailbox, and we held digital image files of all their product (we photographed much of it ourselves). In short, we were really well placed to give these retailers a huge head start into online sales.

So, in 1995, the company spawned a new division called Marketspace. It was going to be soooo cool – it was a virtual shopping mall where a visitor could enter, choose a retailer, browse products, and … well, they could browse products. To be fair, looking back now, it sounds like crap, and it kinda was (frames, animated gifs etc.), but 15 years ago, believe me, it was the shizzle!

Funny thing though, the retailers were dead scared of it. They didn’t want to get involved, they didn’t want the risk, the didn’t think it would work, they didn’t want it to work because that would mean people wouldn’t visit their stores. It was an attitude that, even then, marked them as dinosaurs, trudging reluctantly down the long road to the tarpits of extinction. And here we are today, more then 15 years later, and we’re still hearing the same arguments!

So, Gerry (and your ilk). It’s too late. Not just a few weeks too late, not just a few years, but 15 bloody years too late!

Amusingly, one of the brands I remember from the Marketspace days was Myer’s failed venture into electronics: MegaMart (remember those?), and 15 of those stores were sold off to Harvey Norman! So, Gerry, you really did have your chance 15 years ago! Hilarious that now you can go to harveynorman.com.au and search/browse product, but not buy! Sure, there’s no animated gifs, but it’s still that 1995 mindset.

One of the generous sponsors of MoMoMelb is Blackberry, all these events have their sponsors – it just wouldn’t work without them. And the sponsors have to feel like they’re getting value for their dollars. All I can say is that they might need to adjust their message a little…

We were to be treated to a ‘sneak peek’ of the new Blackberry tablet, the Playbook. Since Apple’s release of the iPad, there’s been a steady stream of press predicting a range of usurpers… so far the predictions have failed to come to much. Anyway, Blackberry is a pretty solid player – a much more worthy adversary in this space than a bunch of OEM hardware makers cranking out cheap tablets and slapping Android onto them, and given the audience, we’ve all heard the reports and speculation, so there’s a fair bit of anticipation in the room.

So, with this captive, tech-savvy audience, what do they do? They play the promo video that accompanied the launch more than two months ago and talk through some specifications which were also released at the same time… that’s it! That’s the Sneak Peek! What a missed opportunity! To be fair the hapless company rep probably had no more information than that – the device isn’t scheduled to ship here for at least another 5 months – if they meet their targets!

Anyway – I had a little laugh to myself about the optimistic predictions they have for battery life, on a device that runs flash, probably in the background! Ha ha! seems I wasn’t the only one who didn’t swallow everything at face value.

Anyway, I don’t know about tablet computing – it’s one of those things that you’ll either find a space for in your life or you won’t. I’ve used an iPad a fair bit, and I love it for a few things; news browsing in particular, over breakfast! But you’re not going to carry one in your pocket. I certainly won’t be buying one. iPads are the darlings of the senior staff around our place, so I suppose there’s going to be a healthy take up of PlayBooks amongst people who don’t pay for their own hardware.

Actually, on that subject there was another hilarious moment when someone asked who had a Windows 7 phone – a surprising number of hands went up. The question was followed with “who bought it themselves”, ummm no-one! After all, IE7, what were they thinking?

I just saw this one from downloadsquad.com in my feed reader and it’s true!!

Visit http://www.capitalone.com/autoloans/ using Google Chrome and you get one rate (that’s it on the left), but use Firefox (on the right) and you get a much more attractive rate!

I have no idea why – maybe they just hate google!

The latest culprit I’ve noticed is typekit.

I wondered why the site I was loading was so unresponsive, page load was 30-40 seconds. A quick look in the status bar told me…

Frustrating!