Come on bloggers…
So this is ridiculous. I’ve been reading a lot about Google’s new toolbar (featuring AutoLink) and the new changes in doing look ups. It pisses me off that hundreds of bloggers (The End of Google?) regurgitate what they’ve read without any investigation. I love how some even say “I haven’t used it because I use Firefox, but it’s so evil” - how can you criticize something you haven’t even looked at!?!
Google does not autochange your content. It is an opt-in feature. A user must actually click a button to “auto-link” recognized content (addresses, ISBNs, etc.). It then notifies the user of the changes by highlighting the newly created links on the page. Next, a user can click on the button again to re-highlight or select to remove AutoLinks.
There is no behind-the-scenes auto-changing of web content. It is basically what any other plugin for a browser does! It’s the same crap people were giving Google for the G-Mail links claiming that they were reading everyone’s email to generate their ads. So please people, stop bitching about new technologies just because you think it makes you look cool and geeked out for doing so.
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As the author of the above referenced post, I figured I would pop on by and explain to you what I was getting at. First let me say that I don’t care what Google does with their Gmail, and never have. It is Google’s system, and if you want “free” email from them, you have to put up with whatever they tell you that you need to. As a website owner and publisher, I have control over the content that I create and publish on my websites. I don’t host my site on one of Google’s servers, I pay for them. I don’t create websites and content, so that Google can place links, that look exactly like any other hypertext link on the page (and there is no waving flag that says, “hey, I just added these links to the page after you clicked the button”). It is not up to Google to decide what links appear to be on my site and that can take the user away from my site without my permission. I am sure this seems a little stingy to you, but maybe we are just different. I can see there being some good applications to this technology, but there are also bad.
So, I am sorry if you thought I was “bandwagoning.” I actually think Donna is pretty on top of her game and I have respected what she has written for almost 2 years now. I have installed and used the Beta toolbar in IE on about 10 sites now. Overture has a similar technology they use to serve ads for some of their clients. This is technology that will create links (like Google is doing) that appear to be native to the page, but are ads similar to Google’s Adwords/Adsense ads. The difference is, the website publisher determines that the links will be placed on their site. Google is not serving ads here, but clicking on an ISBN number took me to Amazon’s site. Not exactly what many website owners would like to see. As someone who publishes on the web and is running adsense on their site, I am a little surprised you appear to be such an advocate of this technology.
Now, I have to go back to planning my car PC…and I am not saying that to sound, “geeked out.”
Cheers,
Jason