firecat | At last, with Google+, everyone on the Internet will know you're a dog again.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-yo-momma-wont-use-google-and-why-that-thrills-me-to-no-end-2011-7

This guy thinks I won't use Google+ because I'm old enough to be someone's mom, and therefore I'm an "average user" who is "locked into Facebook," as opposed to a member of the club of "geeks, insiders, social media stars, journalists, and other people" or "people who have strong social graphs". He's glad about this because "we geeks and early adopters and social media gurus need a place to talk free of folks who think Justin Bieber is the second coming of Christ." (Huh...I haven't seen a single conversation about Justin Bieber among my friends.)

He thinks that having to use *asterisks* to tag text as bold is "mighty geeky" and so it will keep "normal people" out, the people who "want the system just to bring them fun stuff without doing any work." Because "Normal/average users? They just want to watch TV and drink beer." Which means "Google+ is for the passionate users of tech" and "if you want to really be able to choose who you listen to, then Google+ is much better" than Facebook.

He's also excited about the “'Hangout' videochat feature" because "You can have 10 people call into a room and it lets you all talk to each other." Oooh! People have never been able to do that before! And now we can do it with video. That makes it easy to weed out of our social circles the ugly and different people and the stray "woman old enough to be a mom" who managed to sneak her way in.

Personally, I'm not rushing to join it primarily because Google already has a ton of demographic data on me and I'd rather not give it even more.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/720859.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

branewurms

WOW. What a jackass! HERE LET ME PAT MYSELF ON THE BACK FOR BEING GEEKY ENOUGH TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PUT ASTERISKS AROUND A WORD. I MUST BE SO SMRT. I AM SUCH A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE AND ALL YOU PPL ARE BEER-GUZZLING CAVEMEN.

From:

sonia

Huh? I thought that using *asterisks* to bold stuff is what marked me as old enough to be a college grad's mom! Oh wait, he probably thinks women haven't been on the 'net that long.

I emphatically agree with your reason not to join. For myself, I think of that as a geek's reason - I understand the underlying system well enough to want to opt out.

From:

meloukhia

Whenever I encounter people nattering ignorantly about TEH OLD PEOPLEZ and the INTERTUBEZ I think of my grandmother (old enough to be my grandmother, har har har), programmer, cryptographer, and badass extraordinaire. I'm pretty sure she'd run circles around Google+ if she was still alive, seeing as how she was one of the people who built the underpinnings of the fucking Internet.

From:

delight

My mom, who is 61, is super excited about Google+. She hates Facebook with a passion.

From:

busaikko

That article made me so angry I had to comment (mom here... and my husband can't use a computer, so guess who does all his business stuff? And in Japanese, too). He seems like a horrible unthinking person... and doesn't know his history if he thinks that the *asterisk trick* is something shiny that google made up by itself. I'm amazed Google hasn't responded to shoot this article down -- because the last thing they need is to lose potential female uses.

From:

betonica

I'm checking it out, and will tentatively be there. I perfectly understand not wanting to give google more demographic info, but I haven't given them a lot to date (most of what I've made available was on usenet - heh) and I figure they've got the potential to be better than facebook. Who knows, though - time will tell. (And that jackass who wrote that article? is an idiot.)

Actually, though, what I'm waiting for is for someone to come up with "mark as read" in one of these social media or another. You wouldn't think that would be so hard.

From:

flarenut

I would be there if I already had a working google account for anything, but I don't really. It seems perfectly plausible to me, and probably less sucky than facebook, but all my friends who aren't somewhere else are on facebook.

Mostly it seems to have a better interface for groups of friends (not designed to maximize sharing for the benefit of advertisers) and better facilities for actually seeing the stuff you want to see and making conversations from it (am I the only person who conducts fb business almost entirely by email?).

But I still get such a strong sense that people are trying to reinvent usenet and threaded newsreaders with a tiny side of IM.

From:

flippac

I'll be happy when there's finally a good enough reinvention? Completed with documented protocols and nukeproofness and...

From:

flarenut

documented protocols? That's so 20th century.

I think what we need (yeah, right) is to create a bunch of virtual uber-personas that can have the friends, interests and other stuff that all the reinventions seem to require. Everything nowadays (for partly-technical, mostly business-model reasons) centers on people and the threads etc that they create -- at least as far as I can see -- and that doesn't really work for oldsters like me.

From:

ursula

My experience has been that when I give Google information, it tries to sell me stuff I don't care about, whereas when I give Facebook information, it tries to sell me stuff I find actively obnoxious in big flashing letters & then gives my information to scammers. So I'm kind of hoping my friends will migrate . . .

From:

submarine_bells

Wow, talk about misogynist assumptions. Especially given that, judging by his photo on the article, he's clearly old enough to be someone's dad. *snort*

I get the impression, judging by the stuff he's enthusing about there, that he hasn't really been on the internet for very long. He's so pleased with his own cleverness regarding trivialities such as asterisks-mean-bold, after all. Not exactly the mark of someone who's been around the tracks for a while, methinks.

From:

emceeaich

Yes, he has two kids.

And many of us have tried to explain to him that not everyone is a white, cis-gendered, hetero guy in the tech industry and maybe can't afford not to be pseudonymous on the internet.

From:

trouble

But... gChat has been using *this* to mark bold for a very long time. It's irritated me because I've been of the generation of net users who uses *this* to mean *action*, like *hug*.

From:

apis_mellifera

That drives me bonkers in gchat, too. Asterisks are action, not formatting, dammit!

From:

laughingrat

He thinks that having to use *asterisks* to tag text as bold is "mighty geeky"

LOL. I guess he'd plotz if he did any research on great big social networking sites for five minutes and found out that this huge website, Ravelry, which is for knitters, many of which are middle-aged-and-older females, uses asterisks to bold text.

Oh wait, no, the asterisks are for italics. Yeah, that's so last year. *snort*

From:

evilawyer

Yet more Internet ageism. And all kinds of other ---isms.

From:

snippy

My comment there:

I'm sorry you don't like your mother. Maybe if you showed her how to use the Internet like a geek, you'd enjoy having her share your hobby.

I don't like your eagerness to other people, it's so privileged (cis-gendered while male? check). We were using asterisks to mark text bold back in the early 1990s on Usenet (and probably before that--it's just that I've only been using Usenet since then). And I'm a grandmother.

If you don't have the discipline to set boundaries around your use of social media (say, by rejecting friend requests, or remembering who might see that info you just posted), then stay off of them. Take responsibility for your choices, don't expect a business offering you a product to police your social group.

I doubt Google really wants to discriminate against older people. That's actually against federal law, they constitute a protected class.

And really, dude, way to show off your immaturity. If you want to say "no non-geeky people" age isn't how you do it. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. To my kids *you* are old. To my grandkids you are ancient. Even if to me you sound like a whiny teenager.

From:

firecat

GREAT comment!

From:

spark

Best riposte from a G+ comment: "I guess Scoble's momma decided not to add him to any of her circles"

From:

firecat

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

From:

klwalton.livejournal.com

He's also excited about the “'Hangout' videochat feature" because "You can have 10 people call into a room and it lets you all talk to each other." Oooh! People have never been able to do that before!

Because I didn't ever sign on to group chat on PCLink back in 1988.

Heh.

From:

firecat

But you had to TYPE. That's too much WOOOORK.

From:

klwalton.livejournal.com

Oh, of course!

And I signed on with the last wood-burning modem!

From:

e4q.livejournal.com

::snork::

From:

mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com

Oh hell, that boy thinks he's all up and hip about computers because he's young.

My father, who was born in 1945, would rather beg to differ, as he was one of the technological developers that made that young snot's tools possible.

From:

firecat

Yay for your father!

According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1965, so he isn't young. He has NO excuse to be that way.

From:

mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com

Yeah, 1965 is solidly middle aged. For that matter, so is 1968...

From:

jenk

Indeed.

Heck,

skydancer was born in 1960. Obviously he's only ever worked on staid business systems.

From:

ckd

I will just say that I often disagree with Scoble. (And would in this case even if the topic didn't involve my employer.)

From:

asim.livejournal.com

I was thinking much the same thing -- indeed, there was a reason I ended up disconnecting from him, online, some remarkably insipid act/statement he made a couple of years ago.

Scoble used to have some interesting things to say about tech. Now he seems just as reactionary as the folks he's supposing won't use Google+.

From:

firecat

I hadn't encountered him before. But he seems like someone I would tend to disagree with.

From:

chaos-by-design.livejournal.com

I remember reading this article about "digital natives" vs. "digital immigrants" and it was a pretty good description of how people who've grown up with computers differ in their mental schemas in terms of using them than people who didn't. But the one big problem I had with it is that it based whether you were a digital immigrant or native based on age. According to that article (which I don't have a link to, alas), I'd be a "digital immigrant." Just because of my age; whoever wrote the article didn't do the obvious thing, which is to base it on actual experience.

The idea of me being a "digital immigrant" is absurd. I'm a web programmer by profession! I help make the internet!

From:

firecat

I guess some people assimilate better than others. :P

From:

e4q.livejournal.com

that man is an arse.

fact.

From:

slfisher.livejournal.com

There's a bunch of men who seem to have taken it as their personal mission to slag G+ for women. I don't get it.

From:

ckd

Once a social network gets girl cooties, it'll be nothing but FarmVille and knitting and cats. Clearly.

From:

eeyore-grrl.livejournal.com

my mom who is NOT TECHY at all has figured out the basics. and my friend from college who likes shiny, but also not techy, she's having fun with it...

ugh.

also saw an article how it was less than 10% women and that was horrible. which, well, i looked at my circles... i think there are more women than men.

google is my bread and butter and healthcare (my partner works there) so i am a bit biased and it's the only reason i'm such and early adopter, but it's not as "geeky" or offputting to the average user as this man suggests.