If everyone evaluated the actions of every company the way Dave evaluates Google’s, we’d have some of the most boring and bland applications.
I stopped believing in Google fairplay when they added a Blog-This feature to their toolbar, and didn’t use open APIs so users could post with any blogging tool, not just Google’s.
A quick investigation of google’s Blog-This feature shows that it works like this:
- Clicking the link executes a javascript function
- The function grabs the selection from the blog entry
- It then passes you along to the blogger “post a new entry” page with the selection in the querystring.
That’s it. It expects you to be logged in. It doesn’t pop up some swanky box in order to post to you blog via AJAX. It doesn’t do ANYTHING except provide a modest shortcut between a blogger blog and a blogger administration tool. This is useful for communities of Blogger users. It’s not useful for anyone else.
In Dave’s world, though, Google wouldn’t have implmented this feature at all. They wouldn’t be allowed to unless they made it work with any blog on the planet. The fact is that Google didn’t see a feature and think this was the best way to do it… someone thought “Hey… with a few quick lines of code we can add a small feature to blogger!” and so they did it. It probably took 20 minutes.
Creating a bridge from a blogger blog to any other blogging system is a feature that’d take days of development, testing, and error handling. They wouldn’t have gone to that much trouble.
There might be 100 people who use BlogThis right now… and in Dave’s world, those people get shorted a feature because Google doesn’t want people like Dave to think that they’re evil.
Once again we see Dave ascribing malicious motives to an entity that he dislikes without any sort of evidence for it. Pray tell, Dave, if this is such a desirable feature — one that requires us to think Google is evil — why can’t I click a “blog this” link on Scripting News and post direct to EyeOnWiner?
Heh, nice punchline.