In 2003, google says: “Seth Godin Says Google Has Officially Jumped the Shark”
I think that’s kind of a personal decision.
I think google only recently jumped the shark for me.
Google, having amassed vast amounts of information about every or at least lots of individuals can be said to jump the shark for different people at different times depending on the amount and type of data they have for a particular person and how they use it and the results that gathering that information for a particular person has had.
For me, google just jumped the shark.
A few weeks ago, probably months ago now, I forget when it was, google stopped updating the news headlines on their “google news and weather” app.
This is kinda funny because I remember them doing that once before as well, forcing me to abandon my favorite news app for something ‘better’.
Well this is the second time they’ve done that, maybe third time’s the charm.
But it wasn’t, it was the time they jumped the shark.
I replaced the “google news and weather” app with the “google news” app like a good little sheep, just like they told me to. Funny how removing weather from the app somehow was supposed to make it better.
Anyway.
A friend of mine just asked me about something related to politics and I pointed out how I don’t read too much about politics, but it made me realize that this new app shows me lots more in the way of news articles and most of them are political.
There’s the “just for you” page, and the “latest” page which are nearly identical and filled with lots of the latest political hoo-ha. I will admit to reading some of it, but not very much.
But I realize I don’t read many non-political articles, because it just doesn’t show me very many.
I have to look a number of pages in to get an article that is just a current news story about something that isn’t politics.
Then I realized, that this app never shows me sports news. That’s fine, I never follow sports, and I never click on articles, so google got that one right.
But then I thought about it some more and realized, that I do read a relatively large percentage of ‘technology’ articles, relative to all the news I read. And I realized that lately, most of what I’ve seen show up in the technology section of the news app is about games.
I’m not a gamer, I really don’t care about fortnight or why I should click A-B-B-A or this or that game. I have clicked through many more technology articles than political articles, and none of them were about games, yet that’s all google shows me now.
And I realized… google has jumped the shark. They have so fined-tuned their understanding of my interests in news articles that they can no longer show me news articles I’m actually interested in.
Congratulations google, you’ve peaked, you’ve surpassed maximum, you’re on the downside of the hill.
I can’t wait to see who’s going to replace them with a small shell script.