On sports I know nothing about, and employee morale

I'm the first to admit I know nothing about any sport that is not cricket - and there too, interest has dwindled over time. If it wasn't for Google Now's helpful alerts that we're losing another match to Australia or Sri Lanka, I wouldn't even know we're playing any more.


So usually, when I see any headlines or tweets that appear to be related to sports, I ignore them, apart from the occasional wondering which sport they're talking about. But there's one type of sports-related headline/tweet that tends to make me think a little more.


I saw a tweet just now that some team is open to trading one or more of its players - and I think the players were named, but I'm not sure. I also think the sport in question was basketball, but again, I'm not sure. Let's just say there a lot of words that I did not recognize in that tweet.


AnyWAY. The thing I always wonder is, what do announcements like this do for player morale? To have the world know the team you play for is willing to let you go so that it can find someone who might do better than you? I mean, I'm sure very often the players are willing to be traded as well, and I'm sure there's plenty of money involved to make them happy-ish about the trade, but... still. Doesn't it create some kind of awkwardness and/or tension among players?


Can you imagine this happening in any other type of job? To come into work and see a company-wide or department-wide email from your manager saying they're perfectly happy to be rid of you if another manager offers them someone better from their team in exchange? (This may or may not be something I have occasional nightmares about.) As someone who worked in HR in a previous lifetime, I'm not sure I would recommend this.


It just... makes me wonder. Y'know?

Where I whine about Google being... well, Google

WTF Google?

I've always liked you. Your search was cool, your products were cool, your company seemed fun. You kept coming out with new sites that seemed more exciting than they probably were because you made them so exclusive. Wave, Buzz, even Google Plus. I actually have long Gtalk chats archived somewhere with friends about how we could get invites to these sites. I ignored, and continue to ignore, all the rumblings about privacy issues and data concerns and whatnot, and just liked the stuff you had.

Case in point: despite knowing Wordpress is probably way better than Blogger, I've stuck to you all these years, haven't I?

But then you became this know-it-all that started taking away the sites and features I actually liked and kept pushing other, annoying features and sites at me.

You took away the likes and the sharing features on Google Reader, you shut down Wave (which, to be fair, I can't blame you for; not enough people saw what fun it could be), you even took away Buzz, which let me share articles with people without having to go anywhere. You started pushing Google Plus everywhere you could, linking it to Youtube (although thankfully, at least there you let me choose and switch between my blogging name and real name. DON'T CHANGE THAT.), trying to get people to share articles there rather than on GReader (fat chance, I say), and even trying to trick me into linking it to my Blogger account. You wanted me to log into Chrome - I still have no idea what that really means - but were okay with me ignoring you over this.

The biggest blow to my heart was when you shut down GReader. I've moved on, I've found another home to keep my gazillion feeds in, even though its not as perfect as GReader was. But there's a part of me that will never forgive you for breaking my heart the way you did over this.

And now, you've messed up Gtalk. Gtalk has been my window to the world for so long. I love how it archived everything within Gmail; for someone who loves to search for and read specific old email conversations, it made finding chats to reminisce over so convenient. If I occasionally had wistful thoughts about the more fun emoticons that MSN Messenger had, I ignored them to focus on how easily accessible Gtalk was and how I could stay invisible and still talk to everyone I wanted to talk to.

But then you brought in Hangouts. For a long time, I managed to ignore the existence of said hangouts. I still used Gtalk from within Gmail, and if the way archived chats looked changed a bit, I wasn't overly bothered. I bought an Android phone, and it let me download Gtalk, so I was happy. It kept asking me to update Gtalk to Hangouts, and for more than a year, I managed to ignore it. Then last week, ignoring the voice in my head advising me against it, I went ahead and did a software update on my phone. Which led to various issues on my phone, chief of which was the appearance of auto correct and the disappearance of my dictionary (both of which I managed to fix eventually, thankfully), and the switch from Gtalk to Hangout.

And today I discover that if I have Hangout on my phone, I can't go into invisible mode - not just on the phone, but even in Gmail on a browser, because I get a nonsensical message saying I'm logged in on a device that doesn't allow invisibility.

So I ask, Google, WTF?

Here's what makes me really curious about you, Google. How exactly do you come up with such bullshitty decisions? Do you do focus groups, or tests, or whatever, and pilot these ideas? Or is it just random dudes sitting in what I hear are really cool cafeterias thinking, how can we totally change things that are working just fine, and make everyone who uses this miserable.

Because most of the people I talk to or follow on social media do have similar opinions - good or bad - to the ones I've expressed here. But then most of the people I talk to or follow on social media also weren't very keen on the BJP winning the elections in India, so what do I know. I clearly don't follow very representative people.

Here's the thing. I know you won't give me back the things you've taken away from me; I once spent an entire networking event with your company complaining to a recruiter about you guys had ruined GReader, and he kept nodding and admitting he thought you guys had messed up there, but that didn't help me, did it?

But seriously, can you just stop? Stop screwing with the products I love so much, and just let me use them.

Just. Stop. Change for the sake of change is just stupid, okay?

The world of G+

I'm feeling left out of the entire Google Plus conversation, so here's my two paisa worth on the new social networking must-have.

• The way I see it, G+ seems to be the opposite of Twitter. You follow people who want to hear from on twitter; on G+, you add people you want to share with to your circles. Isn't that sorta in-your-face?
• Facebook is where I keep in touch with people I know IRL, and those online folks who I've connected with beyond twitter and blogs. G+ hasn't caught on with a wider audience yet, so at the moment, most of the people suggested to me are online folks. Doesn't help, because I haven't connected with those many! So my circles are fairly empty at the moment.
• A lot of it so far seems to be sharing of articles and posts that people are finding interesting. Why do I need another site to do that? I have twitter, GReader, and occasionally, even Facebook. Anything I want to share with the world is adequately shared through these three sites. I don't need another.
• And my biggest pet peeve: the big USP of G+ was supposed to be the idea of sharing specific things to specific circles. I just shared my first article on G+, and it asked me which circles I wanted to share it with. Here's why that doesn't make sense to me. I may have a circle called College friends, but from the 30-odd people I went to college with, today I'm close to less than people. So I may not want to share with all the 30, no? On Facebook, I have lists similar to circles anyway - School, College, Work, and now B-school. I also have three lists called Severely Restricted, Limited Profile, and Kinda Limited. One gets to see my wall, but nothing of what I post. One gets to see some links that I post, but rarely my status updates, and none of my photos. And the third gets to see most of my status updates and links, but very few of my photos. (I'm a little paranoid, yes.) It doesn't matter where I know you from, it's how well I know that defines what I share with you. So yes, while I could make a Circle saying "People I like and want to share my whole life with" on G+, it's easier to keep people out than bring them in.

Does that make sense?

I do realise that for people who are very active in the whole Social Media, Social Collaboration, and that kind of stuff, will get excited by G+. Google Wave was also made for such people, and was actually a very cool thing - just way ahead of its time, which failed, in my opinion, because the wider audience had no use for it.

I'm part of the wider audience, I think, because any talk of optimizing social media just bores me to death. I'm on the sites I am for interesting stuff to read, and some nice conversations. And I'm very happy with my twitter conversations, thank you. The anonymity I pretend to cling to there comforts me. I don't need a second site for these conversations, especially one where I have to tell the whole world who I am.