Kevin's Weblog

How lame.

After claiming both that size doesn’t matter and that our search team was “exaggerating”, Google now brags that theirs is bigger.

Note that they say they can prove it, but decline to actually do it, inviting people to “prove it themselves”. Also, while they say that it’s unique pages that really matter, they tell people to include omitted results in their test. Well, okay, I’ll play along with their pepsi challenge. Let’s search on my name on both, and scan down as far as we can.

• Google, duplicates omitted — 125 results
• Yahoo, duplicates omitted — 202 results
• Google, duplicates included — 986 results
• Yahoo, duplicates included — over 1000 results

Of course, for those who care about relevance, Google doesn’t turn up my home page until result 4, and that’s the only result from my site on the front page. Yahoo puts my blog in result 1 and also includes my resume and home page on the top ten.

I’m sick and tired of social networking sites. Does the world really need any more?

I signed up with Friendster a while back. By the time that what’s-her-name got fired and everyone was canceling their accounts in protest, I couldn’t even remember out what my login and password were.

I got into Orkut when it was the new, cool thing, then immediately wondered why when I discovered how lame it was.

I reluctantly accepted an invite to LinkedIn, then didn’t do anything with it for a while. Recently, since we’re hiring, I figured it might be a good place to try to find candidates and I got most of the way through posting something to their job board before they told me that it would cost $100. Of course, before I went through that exercise, I spent a fair bit of time and energy hunting people down and sending out a ton of connection requests.

After that fiasco, I wondered if the new O’Reilly Connection thing would be useful for recruiting. But, it’s still in beta, and the splash page doesn’t actually tell me any thing about what the site can do, so I don’t feel inclined to bother.

I went looking for an old friend recently and found he has a site on Multiply. But, I’m just tired of this whole thing and I’m not going to sign up for another site just so I can comment on his posts. I’d love to follow what he writes via the RSS feed, but they turn out to be lame feeds that just link back to the site rather than including the content, so I won’t bother to subscribe.

A lot of the reason that I started hosting my own blog, rather than using something like LJ, Blogger, or Blogspot, was that I wanted control of my data. I didn’t trust those sites not to disappear some day, and they made it so hard for me to keep my own copy of what I posted in case I wanted to move elsewhere. I have the same problem with the social networking space. I see the value in the idea, but I want to manage my network myself. I can’t stand having to tell each site who all my friends / connections are. And, some of them are going to disappear eventually. And some of them are going to exploit that information for financial gain. I want some sort of social networking where I manage the information myself and I control how it gets used. Until someone figures out how to do that, I’m done with social networking.