The Google situation is expertly summed up in this long, all-encompassing and very brave post by Aaron Wall highlighting Google’s hypocrisy when it comes to privacy (and others intellectual property for that matter). This is immensely brave because he’s an SEO expert, he has to ‘work’ with Google all the time. As Google’s ranking parameters get broader, Aaron exposes himself to censure by the big G.

Dan York examines the Facebook privacy changes over on his Disruptive Conversations blog.

Read both of these for background, they’re the two best blog posts I’ve read all week (and I read a lot, so you don’t have to).

My take on the Google situation is that their latest moves are just some of the more obvious steps they’re taking on the road to monetizing everything that you do.

8 out of 10 cats
Personalised search, so that if you ‘express a preference’ for results from a couple of websites when you search, those sites float to the top, isn’t intended to make your life easier. There may be more relevant results that don’t get shown because you’ve previously been to other sites that were amongst the found set for that query. You miss out on a new, maybe more appropriate result. How does a new player in a market break into your preference for shopping for music at HMV, Play or Amazon? They advertise of course. Google are moving away from ‘create great content’ to get to the top of the organic results to entrenching the position of incumbents. The strange thing is they could have presented the ‘results from sites you go to a lot’ as another section of the page or a ‘mode’ but that would have tipped too many people off to the fact that Google was watching them, whether they’d logged in or not.

The jealous older brother
Facebook’s move to hoodwink nudge people into opening up their status updates to the whole world has nothing to do with simplifying privacy and everything to do with their envy of Twitter. With Twitter’s recent deals to give Google and Bing access to the ‘firehose’ and the attendant press coverage, Facebook is like the jealous older brother sulking in his room when it’s his sibling’s birthday and all the relatives are round, showering little Timmy with gifts and attention.

Here’s the thing – Twitter was never meant to be private – sure you can set your account up so that nobody can follow you until you approve them. Almost nobody is using it that way, that’s just not the point of Twitter. This is why Twitter has become so important amongst brands – monitor for mentions, participate in conversations.

Brands have better and deeper engagement tools on Facebook, but that’s not enough; Facebook want their 350m users to be available to marketers in the same way that Twitter users are. Facebook users didn’t sign up for that though. They don’t want or expect to be ‘listened to’. Facebook is a walled garden, with adverts confined to subtle, easily ignored elements in the sidebar. Facebook need to get over their Twitter envy and work out better ways to monetise than attempting to gull their users into opening up more than they ought.

It all comes down to money

In both cases these aren’t moves to make the user’s life better or easier, they are ways for companies to monetise their visitors. Don’t hold it against them – Google is a company, not your friend. They have shareholders, those shareholders expect growth every quarter. You don’t grow like Google has without upsetting some people. First it was other search engines, then advertisers, then publishers, finally the next pips to be squeezed are the users. As a user all you can do is take it under advisement that Google don’t have your best interests at heart.

Facebook wants attention, it is privately held but doing everything possible to increase the valuation for when they do go public. Attention is how you do that. Twitter has attention, Facebook want some, so Facebook think copying Twitter is how you get it. Childish really but there you go.

Image credit: brunkfordbraun via Creative Commons on Flickr.