Google has been in the news quite a lot recently, so I thought that rather than spin it out with several posts, I'd just wrap them all into one.
YouTube is going from strength to strength. It's been reported that 400 hours worth of content is uploaded every minute. That means that if you wanted to watch an entire days worth of video it would take your entire working life; 65.7 years, or if you prefer, 1,000 days per hour. That's an insane figure, especially since in December it was 300 hours, and not too long ago I was quite interested that it had reached 100 hours.
Google finally appears to have decided that Google+ has had its day. Their official blog, written by Bradley Horowitz, VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing says "While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink " What they got right was very little unfortunately. As usual with Google, they don't listen to their users, and just went with what their engineers were thinking. As a result they built a social network that wasn't really very social. They launched it too early and had little interesting 'wow' factor stuff. As a result the initial enthusiasm disappeared very quickly, and it became the butt of a good few jokes. By the time they had released really interesting functionality such as Google hangouts it was too little too late.
Now they're hiving off as much as they can - Google Photos has become its own product, and I actually quite like it; it's very easy to embed photographs into social media accounts for example. Google hangouts doesn't require G+ any longer, and Google is also creating G+ 'communities'. You can create your own private communities, or focus discussions around a single subject area. Unfortunately, there's nothing new in any of this. The bottom line is now, as it always was, 'Google doesn't understand social' and that's its real downfall.
Finally, Google is saying 'non' to the French privacy regulator which was demanding that the right to be forgotten should be rolled out across all of the Google search domains, so that no-one could find material that one of the domains had un-indexed. I think that Google was quite right to refuse to accede to the request, and they have chosen to fight it in the courts which may well take years. We simply cannot have a situation where one country's laws are able to affect the rest of the world. What would happen when one set of laws contradicted another - would Google be expected to act as Judge and jury? It's a nonsensical concept.
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