Feh. After reading Venture Beat I signed onto Google Reader just to see who the new Google Profile feature automatically considered my ‘friends’. Wow. The list does include some friends, but it also includes people I’ve written to a lot for business reasons but wouldn’t necessarily call ‘friends’, and a person I’ve had a lot of correspondence with in the past, but aren’t even on speaking terms with any more. (It certainly was a shock to see them on that list.) I can remove them as friends by deleting them from my GMail contacts, which is fine for the person I’ll never write again, but kind of irritating for the ones I’m not actually friends with, but still email frequently.
Google, where do you get off calling these people my ‘friends’ without asking? Do you want me to use your services or not?
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The “hide” option under Settings–>Friends seems to work, no?
It shuts off the sharing, Anne, which is no big deal because I didn’t share anything anyway. But it doesn’t remove them as my friends, which is the little bit of irritating that tells me Google doesn’t quite ‘get it’.
Ahhhh… so it’s more the assumption and applied nomenclature that irks you. I get it. And besides, it’s not like they’d automatically share your google calendar with your “friends” shouldn’t the same privacy be applied to your greader?
I never understood why you weren’t speaking to me anymore. But, atleast it’s nice to know now. I’ll be removing you from all my friends lists, then you won’t have to worry about it. How’s that, jerk?
Heh – Pete, wrong gender.
Thanks goodness I’m not that person. What a relief!
Have a good Holidays Greg!
We should catch up in the New Year. I tried calling you on my ride home last night. I have 3 numbers in my phone. None of them work for you anymore. That’s a solid sign that it’s been too long since we caught up.
Tootles.
And I understand what you’re saying with the google thing.
What I do like about it, though, is that it is an implicit social network – which I think is the ultimate future. I don’t collect people like equally valuable baseball cards. Email USUALLY reflects who I really interact with. I think google just needs to identify frequency and maybe provide some “opt this person off of my friend list” abilities. Otherwise, I think they are right on track.
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