The indefatigable Cory Doctorow has a piece posted by the Guardian using rather quite colorful language to describe the conundrums posed by positioning Google Plus as an “identity service”. Doctorow does note that the real names policy being enforced by Google Plus would create quite a change compared to the traditional notion of people potentially having multiple yet separate identities. Lewis Carroll wrote fiction yet Charles Dodgson wrote mathematics textbooks…even though both happened to be the same physical person.
(h/t Richard M. Stallman & Bradley Kuhn)
Meh
As much as I like Doctorow sometimes, this is a pretty weak essay (not that I can do any better!), but I do like his close: “There could be no stupider moment for Google to subscribe to the gospel of Zuckerberg, and there is no better time for Google to show us an alternative.”
I wish I could come up with a reason that’ll force me to pick sides here, I’m still on the fence of this debate.
I took a side
I wound up deleting my Google Plus account because it was a pain to keep up with let alone post to. The gopherspace hosted by Super Dimensional Fortress is far more flexible let alone Identica.
Whenever I can figure out how to keep StatusNet up without making a whole shared server fall over I probably will go back to that.
Superman vs. Google Plus
http://allthingsd.com/20110831/superman-vs-google-comic/
In my case
the very fact that I couldn’t join up when it started has massively put me off wanting to join and now reading and hearing about all these elements has made me really not care.
I would have joined up, so they’ve lost one person here. I wonder how many people think the same?