Luis Suarez has been Living in A World Without Email #lawwe since February 2008 and blogging about his experiences and insights at Elsua.net. His latest entry Living “A World Without Email” … in Google Plus is a great review of Google Plus from the #noemail / #lawwe perspective. Luis also provides an important link to and brief review of Matt Hames’ post Google+ is not taking on Facebook; it is taking on email. Luis isn’t limited to the email challenge by Google+; he’s also interested in how G+ works for building social capital and business.
Plus One
I won’t repeat my entire previous post on Google+ issues here, but see my comment to the previous #noemail post on the 2008 IBM Report, or see a discussion of Google+ on Slashdot yesterday where I quoted that and got an interesting comment in reply. A central point I made from there:
“Google+ and #noemail (Score:2)”
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2362556&cid=36977142
“Google+ is now just another stream of stuff that I have no local copy of. Anything I put on those servers is lost to me if they go down or I leave the service (unless I go to extra trouble to make a copy). I can’t integrate it in with my existing email archive. There is already a lot of stuff in the stream from the people I’ve added to circles, but I have no easy way to navigate it other that a rather cumbersome and relatively slow web interface. Google now knows anything I search for in that stream. … Am I better off with Google+ over everyone using email and the phone and personal blogs and web pages, considering the pros and cons? Overall, I don’t think so, sorry. I’ve lost privacy, Google as a company is now more powerful, I’ve lost archiving. There is increased confusion about how to communicate with me (hint, anything on Google+ will probably be missed unless I get an email about it). And so on. … Well, who the heck elected Google, and Facebook, and Twitter, and so on, and gave them control of a national treasure, our communications system?”
One thing I did not mention there in detail, in Google’s favor, to be fair, is that Google does have a team working on helping people export their stuff from Google services. I don’t know how far it goes for Google+ yet (like does it do years worth of streams of comments by people you have been tracking?). But exporting is not the same as an RSS feed and having an updated current local copy. Google could also change their policies or the availability of the service at any time (like they did with Google Wave and other services like Google Notebook).
Wow. I’m a little late getting here, but this is a good link and a VERY relevant comment by Paul Fernhout (also his post on slashdot–so many people named Paul with good ideas too!). I’ve been thinking for a little while now about writing a post about the archive aspect of the #noemail lifestyle on my blog. If I do so, I will definitely reference these discussions.