No, thank you, Google Plus, for suggesting I add myself to a Circle. Previously.

But all of these proprietary networks that want to own and hold in your content are reversing much of the web’s progress in some other areas, such as the durability and quality of online identity.

If you care about your online presence, you must own it.

[...]

Sadly, most people don’t care about giving control of their online identity to current or future advertising companies.

But there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours.

Marco Arment — Own your identity. Amen.

Previously, you could associate multiple email addresses, including Google Apps email addresses, with a single Google Profile. This has been extremely useful, especially for using a product like Google Groups.

Their recent infrastructure change reversed all of this. Specifically, I use danielbachhuber@gmail.com to log into my Google services, but use d@danielbachhuber.com and other email addresses with my Google Groups. Because the Google Apps email addresses can no longer be associated with my primary Gmail account, I can no longer participant in the myriad of Google Groups I’m a part of. Furthermore, I have no idea where else this problem is going to manifest itself.

Google won’t ever get social because they’ve just fundamentally broken the concept of one login for multiple identities and contexts. As strongly as I am against it, this is what Twitter and Facebook are doing right.

The project is being guided by the artificial-intelligence researcher Sebastian Thrun, who as a Stanford professor in 2005 led a team of students and engineers that designed the first winning entry in an autonomous vehicle contest organized by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Since then, Dr. Thrun has focused more of his activities at Google, giving up tenure at Stanford and hiring a growing array of experts to help with the development project.

In frequent public statements, he has said robotic vehicles would increase energy efficiency while reducing road injuries and deaths. And he has called for sophisticated systems for car sharing that, he says, could cut the number of cars in the United States in half.

“What if I could take out my phone and say, ‘Zipcar, come here,’ ” he asked an industry conference last year, “and a moment later the Zipcar came around the corner?”

Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars. The robots are coming.

Both Google and Facebook are run like absolute monarchies in which hundreds of millions of users (digital serfs, some might say) have created identities. Rather like mercantilist countries in the offline realm, both companies operate policies to protect this asset.

Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures, Jun. 10, 2010:

Facebook is a government. Facebook’s users are citizens, and Facebook’s applications developers are the private companies that drive much of the economy. Apple. Twitter, Myspace, Craigslist, Foursquare, Tumblr and every other large network of engaged users (including some services of Google) plays a similar role. We have always tacitly acknowledged this. We talk about these networks as communities, communities have governments.

David Carr, Dec. 19, 2006:

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

We need a people’s revolution.