Google+ Stories, yet another “leave it to us” offering.

I noticed yet another autoawesome style offering from from google called Stories, which seemed perfect to add into my week of autoawesomeness. It is basically a on-line slide show that has been automatically prepared by yet another google algorithm to automatically select your best shots and is being prompted as a tool to  “brings out the richness of the memories behind the photos” and present them as “beautiful, interactive stories so you can relive your adventures”. Ok thats the hype, what actually happens? Well it does choose your adventures for you. At the moment you can not create your own from scratch! For me this is a very puzzling omission. You can however “tweak” the slideshow by adding or removing photos or videos and can change the cover photo. Thats about it!

 

The stories are supposedly about your “memorable” travelogues and it would appear these stories are triggered by either locations (geotags) information embedded in your photos or by landmark detection tools shifting through your images (and possibly including having your home address already known, eg. typed into google maps). Perhaps I am not the only one just a little concerned about who or what knows I’m not at home and when. 

This is an interesting in the context of a recent program titled “Digital photography: message and memory” on the ABC Radio National’s Series Future Trends. Which presents a different view, the rush to photograph every moment may be leading to us remember less and less. 

So should we leave our memories to google+ to manage?

Not sure I want that, and I worry many will not even realise their real memories have gone and been replaced by something else.

I guess the one redeeming feature is google+ stories (and movies) are private until you share them.