Beating on the dead horse a little more... (stock phrase :)
The thing that bugs me about "doesn't mean what you think" phrase (in general... forget its use in this thread) is that in my opinion no one can know what someone else is thinking. It's presumptuous to imply that one knows what someone else is thinking. At least, it comes across that way to me. The issue seems to be that things can have multiple definitions. And two people may be operating with different definitions. But unless someone clearly states x means y, then I find it presumptuous for anyone to say to that someone, "I know what your definition is". What they are really doing is taking a guess. In my opinion.
The examples of stock phrases you gave are qualitatively different from something like "doesn't mean what you think it means". I'm not sure how to describe the difference. Maybe they are metaphors? I don't know. But they are different. For one, they don't on their own presume anything about anyone else.
Repetition is fine up to a point. Maybe it's like a song. Even if it's a good song, if you listen to it too many times in a short period of time, it loses something. You may not even want to hear it anymore. Too much of a good thing. Stock phrase #2.
I rarely use Javascript (certainly not for email) so I wouldn't know about all the latest Gmail "features". :)
What I was hinting at was a sort of evolutionary pressure on Google... to start using personally identifiable information. That pressure being Facebook as a perceived competitor.
That's why I said it was not personal. I just randomly chose this one random post in one random thread. There are hundreds to choose from.
Anyway, I'm over it. Maybe using these oft repeated phrases serves some purpose.
Your last sentence made me laugh again. Was that intentional? Are you poking fun at me?
If I took these phrases about what other's are thinking seriously, then everyone in web forums apparently knows what everyone else is thinking. Like they're clairvoyant or something.
I never presume to know what anyone else is thinking. If I want to know, then I ask them.
The difference between Gmail and Facebook is that Gmail did not aim to track who you correspond with. Facebook is focussed on personally identifiable information. They have made it their business from Day 1 to know who your correspondents (friends) are _and_ to exploit that for profit.
To my mind, this is not something Google set out to do. Although to compete with Facebook, I imagine they may have changed direction. We have Facebook to thank for that.
Let's imagine for a second that the future brings us the proverbial "video telephone" that even the most non-technical person expects to one day be standard issue. Crystal clear, real-time communication with both audio and video as available to every person as owning a cell phone is today. Now, hold that thought.
Should companies be invited into every conversation we have on this device? Should they be permitted to show ads to us as we converse?
We never had companies keeping a record of everyone who we telephone and listening in to our telephone conversation to try to figure out what junk postal mail to send us. Would this be different? How?
Ok, now we can return to present day reality. The question is: Where do we draw the line? Should companies be a party to every conversation? What will happen if we leave this question to the unscrupulous kids working and compromised adults working at Facebook? I doubt they would see anything wrong with what I described in the previous paragraph.
Oh man, I lol'd when you wrote "don't think it means what you think it means". Whether it was intended or not, you have cured my annoyance. I guess a laugh was all that was needed. Thank you! Carry on with the mindless memes.
(I did initially get an upvote for stating the annoyance, so anyone else who is annoyed by this meme, good luck. I feel your pain.)
When I said creative, I meant creative use of language. Yes, memes are extraordinarily popular in forums like Slashdot, Reddit and HN. But I only attribute creativity to the person who created the meme, not the ones who use it incessantly... unless they use it in some creative way, as you did (if indeed you were making a joke).
Idioms. Yes. I take your point. I never looked at memes that way, although I have certainly relied on idioms for learning computer languages.
How did you get your numbers for your conclusion about "most perspectives"? That is not just an opinion, correct? Otherwise you might have used words like "I think" or "in my opinion".
Another related conclusion I'm curious about is "their data" (i.e. the data users uploaded is now CL's data). That is not just an opinion, correct? When I search for a clear answer on that issue, I can't find one. I'd love to see some clear guidance on this question.
Platform providers do sometimes use their advantages unfairly. But platforms cannot succeed without some level of symbiosis between those who provide them and those who use them. This is only my opinion. However I have seen others say much the same thing.
I think this is the reason VC need kids to build hyped contraptions of unneeded but usefully obfuscating complexity that can be pitched to investors as "the next big thing". Adults would just skip the hype, the faux productivity, and do things efficiently in the simplest way possible. Case in point: the author's small image composition program built using C and Erlang.
"Private messages" and "Facebook" are mutually exclusive.
Facebook is the antithesis of privacy.
Dreamers think FB has value.
Does the average person, of any age, think privacy has value?
What's more valuable?
Can all value be measured in monetary terms?
Web traffic has value (e.g. we can sell display ads). FB has web traffic. But so did milliondollarwebsite.com.
Privacy OTOH seems a long-lived concept, dating from at least the dawn of civilisation. I'd argue we have a lot more privacy than our ancestors. A trend that has continued unabated for hundreds of years. FB is but a {milli,micro,nano,pico}second in the evolutionary timeline of privacy.
Can we find some other way to convey this message without using that same tired old phrase over and over and over again? As soon as I see this phrase by brain automatically shuts down because it tells me the author lacks creativity.
Are people who post to nerd forums really that deficient in English language skills? Or are they just hoplessly compelled to mimic the language used by others?
"means what you think it means" is like some kind of lingusitic meme.
Future posters: Let's be creative and devise another way to state this.
This comment is not personal. It is just a randomexample of a phenomena. Many, many, many nerds use this phrase. I'm just tired of reading it. I can't be the only one. Next time you are tempted to type "doesn't mean what you think it means", please stop yourself. Write it some other way.
I've seen this done with specific bands, but this is a great idea for a website. Regardless of how well they execute, it's just a great idea. Lyric sites are huge, but many of them are rather crappy (I guess because they try too hard to monetize). Annotations of lyrics are scattered across many sites. It would be great to have them all in one place.
But let's hope it doesn't become like a CDDB fiasco.
It's not the data, it's the delivery. If everyone could have a spot in all the major ISP's and datacenters and set up their own little racks, mirroring some interesting content for high speeed access around the world, then there's no need for many of the big companies that are currently raking in the dough (e.g. Akamai, Google, Netflix notice none of them own the data!).
When anyone can deliver the data by setting up a server proximate to the user, then it just becomes a question of what you have to offer. And then we see that none of the big players actually own any of the content they're serving. Suddenly they are not so valuable. If my neighbor and I run a crossover cable between our homes, that's about as "high speed" as we're going to get. If my neighbor has the same content as BigWebCompanyServingContentTheyDoNotOwn, then I'm going to choose to get it from my neighbor. It's faster.
In sum, it's the ownership of the delivery mechanism, the distribution channel, not the data. (That's why the media and entertainment industry are toast: as the internets gets bigger they cannot control distribution as easily. Eventually once everyone is online, they will have almost no control.) But what's funnier is BigWebCompany does not even own the distribution channel either! They just are the only ones serving up the content for you, from an ISP or datacenter at close proximity.
Instead they "control" things like email, web browsers, and server know-how.
The thing that bugs me about "doesn't mean what you think" phrase (in general... forget its use in this thread) is that in my opinion no one can know what someone else is thinking. It's presumptuous to imply that one knows what someone else is thinking. At least, it comes across that way to me. The issue seems to be that things can have multiple definitions. And two people may be operating with different definitions. But unless someone clearly states x means y, then I find it presumptuous for anyone to say to that someone, "I know what your definition is". What they are really doing is taking a guess. In my opinion.
The examples of stock phrases you gave are qualitatively different from something like "doesn't mean what you think it means". I'm not sure how to describe the difference. Maybe they are metaphors? I don't know. But they are different. For one, they don't on their own presume anything about anyone else.
Repetition is fine up to a point. Maybe it's like a song. Even if it's a good song, if you listen to it too many times in a short period of time, it loses something. You may not even want to hear it anymore. Too much of a good thing. Stock phrase #2.