Boydo's Tech Talk

In what looks like a potential emulation of the concept of “liking” something on Facebook, Google quietly rolled the ability to “+1″ (or “plus one”) a piece of content you might come across on the internet in the last few months. Furthermore, it also allows your searches to be enriched (or potentially polluted depending how you look at it) by the recommendations of your social circle. You can even expose the list of your +1 sites on your Google profile as well if you prefer.

Anyway, I have added Google +1 to the blog so if you fancy a particular article then please feel free to click the +1 button. It’s great for me to know the sort of things you are interested in. Also, it saves you having to post if you don’t have anything you didn’t want to share but thought it was worth noting for later reference. The downside of Facebook is that you can’t search the list of things you have liked whilst with Google +1 you can at least find a list of your +1s in your Google profile. You can find the list at profiles.google.com and then click “+1′s”.

It’s worth noting that people in your Google Talk, your My Contacts group in Google Contacts and people you following Google Reader and Google Buzz will be able to see your recommendations so be careful what you “+1″.

To view Google’s presentation on the +1 button click here.

A couple of articles  have surfaced over the last few days concerning Google and its collection of WiFi network information when conducting its Street View activities. One such article detailing Google’s response and admission of its actions has me scratching my head.

Alan Eustace, a senior vice president at Google, was quoted as having said:

“We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.”

Are they serious? If I had a file on my computer and wanted to delete a bunch of stuff, I’d select it all and press the delete key. If I were concerned about the data, I’d overwrite the data many times with garbage. Of course, you can go to the extreme by using things like a degaussing device, smashing the media into a million pieces and then throwing it into some concrete mix.

What happened to Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra? There’s been some notable carelessness lately, particularly with the Google Buzz service. Sure, this may have been unintentional but this is a significant oversight in my books.

How would you feel about a third party harvesting your WiFi information?