Jay Gabler

"Fighting with Google is kind of like fighting with your mom. You could win the battle—but it means you’re getting something gross for dinner."

A board member at the nonprofit news organization where I work, in an e-mail thread about whether or not we should argue with Google about the fact that they just disabled one of our most successful Google ads (5% clickthrough!) because—being an advertisement for a review of a touring show—the ad made mention of the show’s copyrighted name. I think we’re the innocent victims of a scalper dragnet, so I might take this one up with Mom. It is scary, though…what if she doesn’t sign the permission slip for our next field trip?

Jason kincaid, JAy smooth, JAY patel, JAY Goodrich, JAY GAnaden, JAY GABler

The all-wise Google Plus’s guesses, in sequence, as to who I’m referring to when I log in as a page for which I’m the sole administrator and start typing my own name after a + sign.

I’m now back to visiting Google Plus multiple times each day, because the Daily Planet’s social media marketing gurus assure us that Google is planning to give a million SEO handjobs to each of the handful of remaining media companies who continue to pretend that Google Plus is a vibrant social network.

I hope this is true, because every time I go on Google Plus, I feel like a sucker. There’s exactly one person I know who ever posts anything there—and she’s a great person, but hello, one person—and the site takes forever to load because Google is like, um, hang on just a few more minutes while we load the entire Internet into your browser. Every time I get this dialog—which is frequently—I hope and pray that someone on the Chrome team is pelting someone on the Plus team with a dodgeball.