It does seem that Google is making the fundamental error that "contact" === "identity" === "person", that is, that your contact info IS you which IS the self you want to be everywhere; that is, that there ought to be a central DB which stores all of this as if it were truth.
But it ain't; these are statements about truths, and those statements have context, and without context become less useful. I don't want to connect my Contacts to G+; they're fundamentally different. (Just like I didn't want to connect my YouTube viewing to my email. It's wildly inappropriate.) I might want to call someone Snagglepuss in email, and only in email; I might want to 'know' someone only on YouTube, or only on Flickr, or whatever, without other parts of their life necessarily getting dragged in. Shades of Nymwars again.
It makes it harder for Google's nascent AI, because entity resolution is more complex, and I have zero sympathy; they're robbing themselves of rich data by flattening contexts.
(FWIW, complaining about stuff on G+ seems to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, the way to get developer attention. At this point I think I have two key G+ devs checking in on my complaints; not to mention the helpful alley-oop from Googlers in our social circles...)
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Date: 2015-04-01 09:26 pm (UTC)It does seem that Google is making the fundamental error that "contact" === "identity" === "person", that is, that your contact info IS you which IS the self you want to be everywhere; that is, that there ought to be a central DB which stores all of this as if it were truth.
But it ain't; these are statements about truths, and those statements have context, and without context become less useful. I don't want to connect my Contacts to G+; they're fundamentally different. (Just like I didn't want to connect my YouTube viewing to my email. It's wildly inappropriate.) I might want to call someone Snagglepuss in email, and only in email; I might want to 'know' someone only on YouTube, or only on Flickr, or whatever, without other parts of their life necessarily getting dragged in. Shades of Nymwars again.
It makes it harder for Google's nascent AI, because entity resolution is more complex, and I have zero sympathy; they're robbing themselves of rich data by flattening contexts.
(FWIW, complaining about stuff on G+ seems to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, the way to get developer attention. At this point I think I have two key G+ devs checking in on my complaints; not to mention the helpful alley-oop from Googlers in our social circles...)