Image via CrunchBase
I recently read an article in the Washington Times questioning the ethics of Google. A young Facebook friend was wondering if he should stay away from Google services after reading the article. I responded that I have too much invested in the Google powerhouse by way of their services to do that. As I type this I am using Google Chrome as my internet browser for instance. Google has many good services despite the ethical concerns.
Something very strange happened to me yesterday as I was using one of their services however. I have another blog on Google’s Blogger platform. My daughter wanted to open a blog of her own and decided she would use Blogger. We share a computer but I was logged out of Google services and she was logged in.
She began creating her blog; she uploaded an image of herself, chose a template and began customizing it to her specifications, and she filled out her Google profile listing her favorite TV shows, books, music, etc. She posted her first entry and called me over to read it and also follow her blog. She wanted me to show her how she could follow my Blogger blog as well.
She went to her dashboard. I was sitting beside her and I noticed that her dashboard said she had 118 followers, the same amount that I had. She had just opened her blog and there was no way she could have caught up to me that quickly. We looked at her followers and they were the same as mine!
We logged her out of her account and I logged into mine. Blogger had taken parts of her profile and merged them with mine. My “about me” section, my favorite books, TV shows, music, etc. sections had been replaced with hers. My profile picture had been replaced with hers. I was very surreal and disconcerting. After I deleted her picture and profile information from my profile, I logged out and she logged back into her profile. Everything was normal on her profile and she was back down to her two followers and my 118 followers were no longer displayed on her profile. Thankfully they were still on mine and hadn’t been deleted with my profile information.
Stranger still, my daughter had titled her blog “Swinging Into Another Dimension”. We both found it mighty strange that we seemed to experience a dimensional shift as we opened her Blogger account and our two profiles became intertwined.
Note: Blogger went down yesterday and as of today it is still not back up. I wonder if what happened with my profile and my daughter’s profile was part of an overall glitch in their servers.
