{"id":80,"date":"2005-03-17T16:49:44","date_gmt":"2005-03-17T20:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/03\/17\/reflexive-g-juice\/"},"modified":"2005-03-17T16:49:44","modified_gmt":"2005-03-17T20:49:44","slug":"reflexive-g-juice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/03\/17\/reflexive-g-juice\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflexive G-juice"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Sean Bonner’s latest post about public perception of Google<\/a> out in California, jibed exactly with a certain vibe I’ve been getting. I don’t understand it, but there it is. <\/p>\n

Not long ago, Google was the haven which I expected to someday harbor people who were deeply obsessed about information coordination in all of the right ways; people with a sense of the vast span of current ideas, what ‘information technology’ could more appropriately mean, and how different that is from what has been realized in recent decades. Privately I hoped that they had already found a few such people. I have finally given up on that last and vainest hope; and have a hard time sustaining the earlier one.<\/p>\n

This has nothing to do with them being evil<\/b> — as far as I’m concerned, they’re not good, they’re grrrreat<\/i>! The company is made up of a remarkable collection of well-meaning idealists, including many friends of mine. But something is definitely wrong; and I wish I knew exactly what. <\/p>\n

For instance: I use gmail for some high-traffic mailing lists I am on. I have been sending them feedback from time to time, with no response from their team. Fine; they are busy. Yesterday I went to send them feedback and a suggestion, and noticed that there was no longer a feedback link where there had been. I had to dig to find one beneath their series of help menus. Fine; it made me read through the help docs to see if my suggestion had already been made. The idea of getting feedback-submitters to fill out a multiple-choice form first of ideas they are in favor of was charming.<\/p>\n

But<\/b>. After sending them mail, I realized I had mistyped something, and sent a follow-up. Then, half an hour later, I had another suggestion to make, about a different aspect of the product. As before, it was one that didn’t appear on their shortlist of features they were considering. And… I found that I could no longer access the feedback page at all; instead I was redirected to the generic help-homepage. I had been cut off. It was an awful feeling — there I was, wasting three minutes trying to find a way to send helpful feedback, and I was just being quietly pushed away. I’ll try to duplicate the effect on a different machine today, but really… what kind of way is that to interact with your users? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sean Bonner’s latest post about public perception of Google out in California, jibed exactly with a certain vibe I’ve been getting. I don’t understand it, but there it is. Not long ago, Google was the haven which I expected to someday harbor people who were deeply obsessed about information coordination in all of the right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indescribable"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}