Eye on Winer

So Dave has, once again, taken the attitude that someone else’s new creation is No Big Deal because he has done something like that before. This most recent act of self-aggrandizing hubris is in regards to the new Google Gears launch. Dave writes:

I read that Google is going to announce a toolkit today that lets you run web apps on a disconnected machine. Something we had working in Radio in 2001. The key is something called a desktop web server. Nothing revolutionary about it.

Ignoring the fact that Dave goes thermonuclear if anyone insinuates that RSS was no big deal because people had done it before, he’s just wrong. Gears, while having some of the same effects, is not just a replica of Radio. There are some big differences.

The most important of which is that Gears is a browser extension, not a full webserver install. It doesn’t lock you in to a platform or require you to learn to code through Dave’s virtual chicken scratch. Radio didn’t allow for “offline” websites, it simply kept a replica of a server so that you never were offline. Similar net result, but not the same thing.

Of course, this kind of response is no surprise. Google is evil, remember? So the most insulting thing Dave can think of to do is to take credit for getting there first. Google won’t need to reply… in a month Gears will have wider distribution than Radio ever did.

When Dave reads a blog that has a feature that annoys him — SnapPreviews, for example — he wants (as a user) a way to modify the content offered by the blog author to suit his tastes.

When someone else is bothered by a feature on his blog — that addresses he lists aren’t linked, for example — he gripes about any tool that lets users modify the content he authors to suit their tastes.

Hypocritical position #871: Dave wants more control over the content he reads than he thinks his readers should be allowed to have.

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:

1. Clicking the link executes a javascript function
2. The function grabs the selection from the blog entry
3. 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?

Wired News has an article today suggesting that Yahoo is the most strict censor in China — even more strict than the government itself. Now… what do you want to bet that this flies completely under Dave’s radar?

I mean… wouldn’t that make Google look a little better? Odds are good that if he does mention it, it will be in order to take a shot ag Google.

How long before dave links to this article, entitled “Google is Killing the Internet” with either a snarky comment, an “I told you so”, or nothing but the title and one of his little winky faces?

C’mon Dave… the fact that you haven’t posted it yet suggests you’re falling off your google-bashing game.

Dave: “I’ve been on Google’s shit list for years“.

Gosh, really? I can’t imagine why.

He gives Google’s page creator a C… why?

This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It’s a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn’t it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.

Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities. Give me a ring when there’s at least some rudimentary content management in there.

Score: C.

Look, Dave, if you’re making a webpage, it doesn’t need a feed just because it’s on the internet. Feeds are not fundamental parts of everything on the web, they’re tools that can be used in very particular situations to enhance data flow. But more obnoxious than that…

He’s really just pissed that Google has done something. Anything. It doesn’t matter what it is. If Google does it, Dave hates it. Did he point to a better AJAX page editor? No, he complained about how it’s not a part of blogger. As though it would be that easy for Google to just snap their fingers and add a huge feature to blogger. This is a product developed to stand alone. Could it be modified to work on Blogger templates? Yes. Is that why it was developed? Maybe. Is that the point of it at the moment? No.

What if the had made it part of Blogger, would Dave be a fan, then?

He’s probably just irked that some 12 year old can now log into Google’s page-creator and create something in 2 minutes that looks an order of magnitude better than anything Dave’s software products can produce out of the box.

Here we go again.

Dave whining about the google toolbar.

Firefox started misbehaving, so I thought — let’s go download a fresh install. Guess what’s waiting for me: no choice but to install the Google Toolbar. Remember what they said about their hack, if you don’t like it, don’t install it. Well, there it is. Where’s the choice now. Back then I couldn’t get anyone to listen. Letting Google modify our content to add links to their sites was a very bad idea then, now maybe others get that too? Now that they’re doing it for the Chinese censors. Why do you guys trust Google so much. They’re a corporation; they’ll do whatever they have to do to make money, do you think the integrity of your writing is even the smallest little issue for them? I don’t. Now here I am and so are you. Someday you’ll have to run the Google Toolbar. Today I don’t have to, I can accept a misbehaving browser, or I can learn how to uninstall it after the fact (good luck, I still have some Google crap from the Desktop Search product that I can’t uninstall), or switch to another browser, or back to Windows. At least Microsoft isn’t fucking with my integrity (and yours) the way Google is.

Let’s make this point again because Dave seems to miss it: the Google Toolbar does not modify your content unless you ask it to. It only links your material if you take a specific action every single time you want autolink to run.

“Someday you’ll have to run the Google Toolbar” — by what authority? Because it’s lumped in with the best browser on the market and you want to use that browser? That doesn’t sound like “have to” to me, it sounds like “want to.”

I’d also be interested to know in what way Google is “fucking with [my] integrity.” I was under the impression that the only person who could do that was me.

Oh the things we learn from reading Dave’s paranoid ramblings.