The Risks Of Using Google (Or Any Single Service Provider) For Everything (GOOG)

New York artist Dylan Marcheschi uses Google services for just about everything -- e-mail, blogging, photos, calendar entries, and even reading news stories.

So when Google mysteriously terminated his account on July 15, he was put in a tough spot.

As Infoworld reports, it turns out that a robot detected an image that it thought was child pornography on his Picasa Web account, so it terminated his account.

But Marcheschi wasn't able to reach a real human until he wrote a long nastygram on TwitLonger and promoted it through his Twitter account, @ThomasHollywood. 

Once he actually talked to a real Google employee, the company turned his account back on -- minus the supposedly offensive image.

All's well that ends well, right?

Except the story shows how risky it is trusting your online life with one provider.

It's one thing if Facebook suspends your account -- at least you'll still be able to send email and use your mobile phone.

But Google is almost unique because it offers so many services under the umbrella of a single account. If you use Android and your account is suspended, you can lose all the contacts and stored data on your phone as well.

With the addition of Google+, rules for profiles have gotten more confusing -- the company has suspended some celebrity profiles that it thought were fake, and has also cut some business profiles from the service.

The one bright spot in all this is that Google has a service called Takeout that makes it easy for you to take your data out of its services and create a backup -- or switch to another provider completely. That's more than Microsoft, Yahoo, and other big providers offer.

The lesson: use it before you need it. Or better yet, spread your online life among multiple providers.

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See Also:

• Here's A Leaked Internal Microsoft Video Making Fun Of Gmail For Reading All Your Emails
• Feds Are Taking A Long Look At Google's AdMeld Buy
• THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Could The Google+ Honeymoon Be Already Over?

The Risks Of Using Google (Or Any Single Service Provider) For Everything (GOOG)

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Here's what the new Gawker design looks like. Single story, with column of headlines running off to the right.

Here's what the new Gawker design looks like.  Single story, with column of headlines running off to the right.

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Here's what the new Gawker design looks like.  Single story, with column of headlines running off to the right.

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Google Lat Long Blog: Even smarter Street View navigation: single click to go (anywhere!)

Monday, November 22, 2010 at 5:35 PM

Last year we introduced Smart Navigation to Street View, which allowed you to jump to a new panorama just by double-clicking on a place or object. Now you can quickly navigate to those images with just a single click.

For those of you who haven’t used this click-to-go feature before, notice that as you move your mouse around in a street view panorama, a disk or rectangle follows the cursor (what we call the “pancake”). This pancake not only makes the panorama feel three-dimensional, but shows you where you can jump to a new panorama to get a different view. For instance, let’s say you’re checking out the town of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico because you read about the large community of artists and writers living there. You can get a closer look at the Parish of San Miguel by clicking on the pancake and navigating around the church.



A few more clicks will take you through the colorful neighboring streets. Through your virtual exploration, you can see a restaurant in the distance behind the below rectangular pancake:


With a single click on the pancake, you’re transported right in front of that location and the pancake reappears - this time with a magnifying glass. This means you can zoom in to get an even closer view:


To read the menu at “El Infierno” and see what kind of food they may have, the single click to zoom also applies here. We’ve also made it easier to zoom out. Once you’ve zoomed in all the way, the magnifying glass changes from a plus sign to a minus sign, signifying that the next click will zoom all the way out.


QUE VIVA single click navigation!

Posted by Daniel Filip, Senior Staff Engineer

Google Lat Long Blog: Even smarter Street View navigation: single click to go (anywhere!)

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