Google Service Unification

Starting this fall, UMass has chosen to go with Google to provide most basic IT services to undergraduates: email, calendaring, apps, etc. For that reason, I've been holding my nose and going back to look at all this stuff since it probably will be the only sensible way to try to interact with undergrads. But what a nightmare. It just gets worse and worse and worse. I really dread when I have another google account I have to work with: how are they going to interact with one another.

I've been increasingly coming to hate Google anyway. I was sad when they killed off Google Reader. I don't like Google Plus any more than Facebook. (OK -- maybe a little more, but it suffers from the same problems: too many graphics mixed with sloppily edited text). But for years I've been using gtalk and have been very happy with it. Unfortunately, Google is trying to wreck it now too.

I started using Gtalk when it was a simple XMPP service. Or, at least, that's the only way I've ever wanted to use it. It works well -- I use it with Adium and/or Pidgin, so I can use Off-The-Record Messaging, which means that the messages are encrypted end-to-end (with some other cool stuff related to accountability with plausible deniability). Gtalk was great. But then Google didn't want to just provide a chat service. They decided to add voice and then video chats. Then they decided to add the "hangout" feature.

So I don't know the exact timeline here, but I think things really started to suck with the introduction of Google Plus. Google decided to add their social media framework and then twist everything around into arcane shapes to fit that somehow.

Why does this matter? If I try to open certain types of Google pages, it tries to include a Gtalk client on the page and these confuse Adium. And they appear at least on Google Plus pages and Gmail pages -- maybe more. But the pages/clients are different and have different controls scattered in several different places, with privacy controls off someplace else entirely -- its hard to tell what does what. Somehow, when I inadvertently signed out of Gtalk in Gmail, I then became invisible in Adium -- people couldn't see my status anymore. I began looking for settings and changed this thing and that thing and the other thing to no avail. Eventually, I tried signing in with Gmail to see what the settings looked like there, and it started working again. So I closed the Gmail window leaving the chat client signed in. But now, I seem to have added everyone who's in my "circles" so they show up as "buddies" in Adium. So, now I get notified every time Lawrence Lessig checks his gmail when his status becomes active for a few minutes. And then again when he leaves. Lucky me.

Companies act like people want integrated services that can do everything. In point of fact, I think people are much happier with clearly defined services that each only do a particular thing well -- and they want to have different services to do different things. So it must be that companies are doing this in spite of what people want because they think they can make more money this way. Capitalism sucks. Sigh…