How Google+ Punk'd The Oatmeal 218
ryzvonusef tips this quote from TechCrunch about a tit-for-tat exchange between Google+ and the creator of The Oatmeal webcomic:
"This summer, the artist (Matthew Inman) wrote that Google+ comment threads sound like *crickets*, poking fun at the social network's lack of engagement. He also criticized not being able to 'set up a fancy profile URL so I don't have to link people to http://plus.google.com/blergasdf1234thimbleturdorgasm99meatpoopypoopxv9donkeypie ' — a made-up, ridiculously long string of random characters. ... In retaliation, the Google+ team didn't cite its user growth stats or give an excuse for why there are no custom profile URLs. ... Instead, they just redirected the vanity URL back to The Oatmeal author Matthew Inman's Google+ profile. Congrats, Matt, you've now got 'donkey pie' at the end of your own special Google+ vanity URL."
The reality... (Score:4, Insightful)
G+, a vastly superior platform.... ....except that there's nobody on it, which is what makes a social platform superior.
Unless your preferred social experience is finding new social groups, you're pretty much boned.
I participate in the Dragon Age Legends community when it was live, but when that closed, I wandered away...
Wow! That's almost hilarious! (Score:1, Insightful)
So now a joke about how awful the URLs are links to the oatmeal's page...
That's... funny? I guess? This doesn't seem like he's really being "punk'd" so much as an engineer going "tee-hee look I can make a joke!"
XKCD? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the kind of childish joke I'd expect from an xkcd fan.
XKCD is about the least childish comic you can find, web or otherwise. Not sure where that came from..
It's been a while since Google hired on merit rather than "fit".
Did they stop the quest for people with PHD's or abnormally high grades? I hadn't heard that.
Way to go Google+ team! (Score:5, Insightful)
You've pretty much proved the guy's point! All right!
On the plus side, by astroturfing this on Slashdot you'll almost certainly show a huge blip in traffic to that link - which you can turn around and use in your end-of-month report to show even more phenomenal Google+ growth!
Wait, that was probably your whole idea from the get-go, wasn't it?
Re:ummm....Punk Oatmeal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, a webcomic called The Oatmeal made fun of G+, claiming that it was impossible to make short URLs on G+, and they cited the aforementioned http://plus.google.com/blergasdf1234thimbleturdorgasm99meatpoopypoopxv9donkeypie [google.com] as a fictional example of this problem. Google, feeling particularly clever, decided to redirect the up-until-then fictional URL to point directly to The Oatmeal's G+ page.
This is allegedly humorous enough that it warranted being posted here. I beg to differ.
Sour grapes much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Occasionally, Google does something cool (like the speech-synthesis YouTube comment feature they added after and xkcd comic) but this just reeks of sour grapes from the Google plus team. It comes off as immature and petty.
Re:Sour grapes much? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your sense-of-humor module seems to be broken, Aspiebot!
Re:The reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
The signal (# of users) on G+ is moderate. The noise (# of junk posts forced upon you) on G+ is extremely low.
Thus, the S/N ratio on G+ is very good.
All of this is by comparison to FB.
(The best thing about G+ is that it is not FB...)
News for nerds, stuff that matters (Score:2, Insightful)
For very large values of "matters".
So what this has proved is that Google *can* set up human-readable Google+ addresses, it just won't. Unless it's some socially-inept programmer on the G+ team who has taken offense at something you've done and wants to make a point.
GOOGLE, WE GET SOCIAL!
(For very large values of "get")
Re:The reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying that each person that leaves Facebook and goes to Google+ reduces the mean IQ of both?
Re:I still don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
TFS actually highlights what I consider to be Google's biggest problem: they don't listen.
They don't listen when we tell them about faults with search.
They don't listen when we tell them about faults with gmail.
They don't listen when we tell them about faults with google shopping.
They don't listen when we tell them about faults with Google+.
They don't listen when we tell them we've come to depend on service X, and please don't discontinue it.
And so, eventually, we wander away, and this is when the crickets come into play.
Re:The reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
And my brand new social network Rossy, not yet released, containing at present exactly one post which is not junk, has a S/N ratio of infinity.
So much for S/N as a metric.
Re:I still don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you need to look up the difference between "I" and "we"
Re:I still don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't seem to understand that in most fields, crowdsourcing from the general public works really badly. Just look at the results of any given election. Consider GeoCities and MySpace were the result of letting everyone have input.
On the other hand, crowdsourcing can be really effective when the source group are experts and learned enthusiasts.
So, no, unless you have years of experience doing graduate level research in search, e-mail, or social networking, you should probably stop speaking with entitlement that Google should listen to you. If you have such experience, go get a job with them or build something better.