Limitations of Google Plus Pages

I’d love to like Google Plus Pages, but it is, at the time of writing, still poorly developed and inflexible.

I’m first of all happy that Google Plus finally became available for our Google Apps for Education domain. That’s quite recent. Previously Google made it available only to Apps for Education college and university domains. Finally they understood that this was illogical and unworkable because Google Plus is becoming so deeply ingrained in their products, and anyway it is possible for Apps administrators to limit usage in accordance with Google Plus age restrictions (14+).

But the change to Google Plus has been a step backwards for organizations, particularly with regard to photo albums. Picasaweb galleries could formerly be given an organizational name. Now under Google Plus, the gallery is titled after the user. That’s awkward for a company or an organization, and one would like to move the gallery to a Google Plus page. But that too is impractical. The major and insurmountable difficulty, is that it would be impossible or impractical to move all previous albums to a Google Plus page, since every album in the gallery would receive the current date. And the current date is unalterable. Only the photos in an album can be reordered. The albums themselves cannot be reordered. Google Plus photo albums are linked to posts, which might be fine. But dates for posts are also uneditable. That if one uploads photos for today’s important event, but then wants to go back and upload photos for an event that occurred a week ago or last month? Last month’s photos will be at the top.

There are further limitations. Google Plus Page photo albums are not based on Picasaweb. Picasaweb enabled fine tuning of the albums, and allowed also for an album description. These features are not there under Google Plus. Finally, the only way to upload photos to a Google Plus page is via the web interface. It cannot be handled by Google’s successful desktop application Picasa, for example. Google does not provide, as in Picasaweb, cut-and-paste code snippets for linking to the album, or embedding photos or slideshows – though all of this may still be possible with a little hacking.

For all of these reasons, I’m wondering whether to abandon Google entirely for my organization’s web archive, and move all the photos back to our web site. Formerly Google’s service provided a nice repository. I would store all the photos on Picasaweb, and embed a slideshow when posting a new article on our site. Now that’s less convenient.

From K-Pop to kudiyattam

Twitter brings me news of many things. This evening I finally explored what was all this about “Gangnam Style”, words that I’d seen repeated numerous times, and discovered the phenomenon of K-pop. If I were the right age and had an ear to other kinds of media, or had teenage kids in the house, I certainly wouldn’t need Twitter to find out about that, but it’s good that I haven’t insulated myself completely. I watched a couple of catchy youtube clips and satisfied my curiosity. It isn’t something I’d go in for, but it’s refreshing to re-discover that Europeans and Americans no longer dominate world popular culture as strongly as they once did.

Then there was David Shulman’s amazing article in the New York Review of Books about kudiyattam, an epic Kerala drama form, which is about as far as you can get from K-pop. It’s a disappearing genre in which plays can last 150 hours and go on for weeks. This summer, thanks to help from the Hebrew University and the Rothschild Foundation – but probably thanks mostly to Shulman – that’s exactly what happened. A 29-day play that hadn’t been staged for two generations was revived and staged for a group of Sanskrit and Malayalam students.

Says Shulman: “Sitting through a play that lasts 130 hours might sound a bit exhausting, and at times, of course, one’s attention wanders. There were moments when I, like others, would fall asleep to the hypnotic beat of the mizhavu drums and wake minutes later to a world of bewildering, even outlandish, color and movement. Still, this performance changed my life and, given a few hours, I could even tell you how. I doubt that I’ll ever again have the opportunity to give myself entirely to a month-long performance that inexorably builds up to a climax of truly unimaginable power.”

Three summers ago, I met him at the airport on a similar trip out to Kerala. We were going to Chennai and he, with a group of students to Kochi. And at the end of the journey we happened to meet again at Amman airport. I’m sorry in a way that I didn’t keep up my Sanskrit studies and take part in such adventures. But I’m happy that David Shulman is there, helping to keep alive the culture of Andhra and Kerala, when he’s not braving the tear gas of the army and violence of settlers, on expeditions to West Bank villages.

Benvenisti & Gaza

This evening attended a talk in the village by Meron Benvenisti on his new book, which, in the current reality seemed like a form of escapism. (I wonder how many people died in Gaza while he was speaking?) Benvenisti told how his experiences and perception of regional realities had led him to believe that there is no chance for Israelis and Palestinians to live separately, and that therefore they will need to learn to live together. He says that he doesn’t make prescriptions about how that may happen: the job of a writer, according to him, is mainly to ask questions and pose dilemmas for the reader to try to deal with.

In Gaza, Israel continues to pound the residents. Today it moved away from its so-called precision strikes, with a result that around 26 people were killed, including many children. It proceeds with this barbarism thanks to a warm mantle of world support – particularly from the White House. At the same time, it apparently knows that it won’t get the leeway to continue like this for very long before the tide of world opinion turns against it. Still, with all those troops on the border – more than in the Cast Lead campaign four years ago – it wouldn’t take very much to spur them into a ground invasion. Perhaps a direct hit that scrores a few casualties would be enough. Beyond human intelligence, or lack of it, much about warfare is chance; like the trajectories of Hamas’s wayward rockets. Some of these, according to the army, are actually duds: they’ve been stripped of their payloads in order to give them a longer range. “They’re basically pipes,” said one official. So Israeli and American taxpayers are spending $50,000 a shot to knock hollow pipes out of the sky.

No Israeli really believes that this military campaign will produce anything substantial. So whereas the human toll and the risks are great, the possible tangible benefits are few. Israel is spending millions and risking a great deal in order to win a bit of quiet. And it could have obtained that quiet more successfully by other and cheaper means.