Monday, August 10, 2009

Future Policy Question: No cell phone = must leave blogger? / Posted to Blogger Feedback




Note: This is a question about a possible change in policy that, should it really be coming, one would do well to act on well in advance of its adoption. If you are not a Google employee, please do not try to answer it. Your guesses might be interesting, but nobody can really speak for Google but Google.

Here we go: First of all, a policy change that went in toward the end of last month - to get a new gmail account, one must have a cell phone that allows one to receive text messages. See:

http://freewareelite.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/gmail-now-requiring-cell-phone-number/

If one does not have a cell phone, Google suggests that one find a friend who has a cell phone, who, one must assume, doesn't want a gmail account of his own and is willing to let one use his cellphone for these purposes. Good luck finding one of those, especially given the circumstances which I'll mention in a few paragraphs.

Quoting the post:



"Until recently, GMail has been IMHO the best web-based free email on the planet, because of it’s quickness and ease-of-use. However, starting yesterday, new GMail users from the USA have been required to supply their cell phone numbers in order to create an account.

This means that your mobile phone is going to be spammed?! Why does Google want to do this? They say that this requirement will spread to new users outside the US soon, and later to all GMail users."



which would imply that those of us who have gmail accounts, but not cell phones that they own or can borrow, will lose access to their gmail accounts at that point. Pretty bad already if one was relying on that gmail account and gets surprised, but it gets worse.

Last night, a friend of mine tried to create a new Google account for a non-Google address, and ran head on into a notice that he had to provide that mobile phone number, with text messaging capability, because Gmail required it - even though he was not, at that point, trying to set up a Gmail account! Just a standard Google account, one of those things that lets one post to Googlegroups under one's non-Google email address and, most significantly here, lets one log into and post to Blogger.

Which leaves us with the question - when we lose access to our Gmail Accounts, at some time in the unspecified but apparently not very distant future, will we also lose access to all other Google services that we have to log into to use, including Blogger? I ask, because my main personal blog is currently located on Blogger, and if I'm going to have to move it elsewhere, I'd like to begin that process as soon as possible, for reasons all too familiar to anybody who was around for the Yahoo 360 fiasco. Also, I had been thinking of making fairly extensive use of a few more of Google's services, especially the Knol feature, which I was going to use to start posting some mathematics related material - I find the offerings of material above the sophomore year undergraduate level to be surprisingly limited online - but obviously, if I'm about to get locked out of this account, devoting much time to building up a presence here won't make much sense. That would be like laying bricks as the wrecking ball came into sight - severely bad craziness.

I mentioned a reluctance that friends might feel over lending one their cell phones for this purpose. Let's take a look at this post to see one reason of why that might be:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/gmail_advertising/3319645.htm

"Gmail trying to access my cell phone logs

Here is a strange occurrence... I installed Gmail and maps onto my Blackberry phone which I have high security settings on. 15 min later I get a pop up stating that Gmail was trying to access my phone logs. Does anyone know what Google would want with our cell phone history logs?"

Not exactly a moment that builds a large amount of trust in the company. Cell phone numbers are generally considered to be private information. To help me in this way, my friends, if they had cell phones - and few of them do - would have to breach their own privacy, leaving them open to telemarketing calls and the possibility that a company that they don't really know might try to put that information to inappropriate use. That would be a lot for me to ask of them, and I wouldn't blame them one bit for saying "no", because I would seem to be asking it of them very lightly, if I were to ask them to help me through this new procedure.

As for getting a cell phone of one's own, if one is doing that just to hold onto one's Gmail address, that will have become one very expensive "free" email account, even when the Blogger membership is thrown in as a fringe benefit. At that rate, one could get one's own domain name, run Wordpress on it, get a paid email account, and skip the cell phone - getting more functionality, more customer support and more security, at a much lower cost. Why would the user choose to pay more to get less, as he would be doing here if a cell phone was something that he just wasn't that interested in having, which, at over $50 / month, is far, far more expensive than some of our Internet connections? Especially since, under the cell phone powered option, he has apparently opted in to telemarketing calls (see comments following post behind the first link).

So, is it time for me to start packing and looking for a new online home?




Thursday, August 6, 2009

Please get rid of nofollow / posted to Diigo community forum





I just edited an old post on a group, and noticed that Diigo has jumped onto the bandwagon and started adding rel=nofollow to all outbound links in its groups. Guys, please stop doing that.

The standard argument for using nofollow is that its use deters spammers, even if the rate of spammage would seem to have increased since the introduction of nofollow. This belief can easily be seen to be nonsense by anybody who has ever waited for one of his sites to appear in the search engines listings. Why? Because that process can take months, sometimes even years, and spam sites don’t tend to live that long. Within weeks of a site being so promoted, sometimes even within days, complaints about the spam will have gone in to the service hosting the site and to the site’s registrar by the truckload, and the site will be gone. Only to be replaced by a brand new site at a brand new location, selling the same old stuff, as anybody who, out of perverse curiosity, has ever clicked on a link on a semi-old spam message (and then checked his newer e-mail) almost certainly has seen for himself.

Spammers work by getting large numbers of visitors to go to throwaway sites that won’t live long enough to rise in the search engine ratings, so pagerank won’t matter to them. Logically, it shouldn’t, and if we take a look at spammer behavior following the introduction of nofollow, we find no evidence whatsoever that it does. It can, however, matter immensely to those who are trying to establish a web presence for themselves honestly, by doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, that which the search engines are supposed to be encouraging them to do – by creating and posting content that people want to read and link to. Let’s say that one of us posts content to a “black hole”, a site that (like Diigo) has rel-nofollowed all outbound links, including the homepage links on our profiles. (Check it out – Diigo has done this). Let us say that somebody looks at the content, likes the content, and links to it. Diigo gets a search engine boost, but the person who took the time and did the work to create that content doesn’t. Meaning that his other sites would have done better in the search engines if he had posted that content elsewhere, where nofollow wasn’t being used.

In effect, he is being penalised for having chosen Diigo (or some other black hole) as the place where he would post his content. Nofollow hurts the legitimate poster, while having absolutely no direct impact on the spammer. But it can have an indirect impact, as one can see by looking at services like Simpy, where the spam has taken over.

Think of the difference between being the one guy who’s speeding while everybody else is staying below the limit, and being that same guy when everybody else is doing 85, too. You’re still breaking the rules, and you still know that (theoretically) you can be slapped down for that, but there’s a great feeling of safety in numbers. As the ratio of spam to legitimate content goes up, the spammers get bolder and more aggressive, as anybody who has ever been away from a forum he moderated for a little too long knows – spam tends to snowball, and probably for the same reason that the number of speeders will start to soar after a point; because one’s chances of being one of the people grabbed and sanctioned are dropping. The life expectancy of one’s spam is rising, and the profitability of it is doing likewise in the process, a thought that will lure more spammers in to take advantage of this opportunity.

There’s the indirect impact on the spammers – by undercutting the incentive given to one’s legitimate contributors, one helps create a friendlier environment for those spammers, which perhaps is why the rate of spammage has gone up since the introduction of nofollow. The law of unintended consequences has kicked in with a vengeance, and why wouldn’t it? If somebody, in “real life” (offline) decides to treat all of his visitors as if they were scofflaws, hardly anybody is surprised when he eventually finds himself surrounded by nothing but scofflaws; honest men expect to be treated with respect. Why should life work any differently online? Because treating us all like we’re spammers, even after we’ve proved that we’re not through months or years of honest posting, isn’t even remotely respectful. Even if it is fashionable.

Yes, I know that dealing with spammers can be exhausting, and I’m sure that one will be greatly tempted to believe that a shortcut can be found to doing that tedious, emotionally unrewarding task, much the same way as some of us would like to believe that we can find a fun way of getting around the need to do cleanup in the lab, or that’s there’s some diet that allows one to lose weight and reduce one’s cholesterol while eating all of the steak, bacon and chocolate one wants, maybe by nibbling a few acai berries or something like that. But reality is what it is, and it either gets dealt with on its own terms, or it gets worse. Sometimes, a lot worse.

One doesn’t win popularity points by reminding people of this, but it is the truth.