Google can be astonishingly stupid and comatose about what users want. Witness the new “feature” in Google Calendar which adds events it thinks you want. I clicked Upgrade and it added, without asking, 6,832 birthdays from my Google+ followers to my personal calendar, making the calendar unusable. Just which socially clueless engineers at Google thought this would be a good idea? Why would anyone except a software engineer who thinks Data is Supreme assume I (or anyone) wanted 6,832 birthdays added to a calendar by default? To make things even worse, Google, quite possibly deliberately, makes removing these spam birthdays difficult. It’s not at all obvious how to do it on a desktop (although easier on a mobile device.)
Awesomely Techie details how to kill this noxious birthday spam. Facebook doesn’t make blunders like this. Facebook gets social. Google does not and never has.