All your data are belong to us

I sometimes joke about how Google is going to one day own all information, everywhere (they already own my email, planet, and blog, as well as the search results that bring people to 34), but their slogan is "Don't be evil." after all. I am a little disturbed by this, though: I posted a comment on FFH about how much I like Flickr for sharing my photos. Google owns a competing photo sharing suite, Picasa/Hello. (Yahoo! owns Flickr.) After being up for a few hours, long enough for Rich to refer to in his comment, the comment was taking down by the Blogger administrators. Maybe they thought I was a particularly sophisticated spambot shilling for Flickr, but you have to wonder whether a similar comment encouraging people to use Picasa would have been taken down.

Here's the text of my original comment:
Get a (free) Flickr account for sharing your photos. You can do cool things like posting the most recent photos in a little sidebar on your blog like I do, if you want, but it's really just the best of the general-purpose photo sharing sites out there.

I harrangue about technology a bunch, but hopefully I earned enough techno-cred by recommending Firefox that you'll believe me on this one.

Comments

  1. AnnaJuly 06, 2005

    I agree that it's really weird, but I don't think they're purposely weeding out the competition. After all, they recommend Flickr on their own help pages. I will be attempting some HTML here, but it probably won't work.

    Good Luck

    ReplyDelete
  2. FormJuly 06, 2005

    I bet it was the "Get a (free)" phrase that set off the spam bot defense forces.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jeff'yJuly 06, 2005

    Get a (free) Picasa account. It kicks ass (not really, though).

    Let's see if that triggers the same sort of response.

    ReplyDelete
  4. RichJuly 06, 2005

    Picasa is okay. Not as good as Flickr though!

    ReplyDelete

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