Decatur Wants You To Send In Pics Going Crazy for Google Fiber
Decatur Metro | March 19, 2014
Decatur’s Catherine Lee writes on The Decatur Minute…
Thank you to everyone who has tweeted about wanting Google Fiber in Decatur. We love how excited everyone is!
While we’ll be working closely with Google over the next few months to see if Decatur/metro Atlanta is a good fit for their fiber product, we want to continue to show them how much we want Google Fiber in our community. We’ve created a Google+ City of Decatur page, so make sure to +1 us if you’re on Google+. Also, we want to hear from you. Send us photos, videos, drawings, etc. telling us how much you want Google Fiber in Decatur and we’ll share it on the City of Decatur Google+ page. We roped in some fellow City employees to take a photo (above) as inspiration – although we know you can be more creative than us. Here are a few more for inspiration.
You can either submit your photos/video/drawings via:
- Email:
- Dropbox (use the same email above)
- Post it on your Google+ page and link to @City of Decatur
- Post it on Facebook and mention @downtownDecatur
- Post it on Twitter and include @downtownDecatur in the body of your tweet
We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Photo courtesy of The Decatur Minute
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For some reason I find the idea of begging for the opportunity to pay someone to know everything about me, somewhat uncomfortable. I assume this response will be deleted for non-compliance. Boys! Avenge me!
+1
i’m not a huge fan of google for various reasons, but i’m even less of a fan of comcast and their high speed internet near-monopoly. a little competition would do us all some good.
Exactly. The Evil-Google-or-not proposition is a false choice because it suggests that Comcast and AT&T are somehow *not* evil. Of course, we all know better. They’re all monolithic scumbags, so the decision should simply come down to speed. Go fiber!
A second Red Dawn reference on the board in the last 2 weeks! Greatest anti-communist movie ever.
Your mistake is assuming they don’t already know everything about you, which is why they’re standing behind you right now.
I’ve posted some Google fiber photos on my MySpace page.
[Sincere Response] I’m puzzled by the negative vibe. Maybe I don’t understand the issue. Would you rather be in a town with or without high speed internet? Would you like more or fewer choices for internet providers? Do you think fiber would eventually make Decatur more or less interesting to businesses looking for a home? What about for businesses operating from the home? Do you think it would be a plus or a minus for students? Would Skype work better?
Bo sees this campaign as begging, I see it as expressing enthusiasm for the availability of new services I’d enjoy. Besides, I had fun taking the picture my GFs and I sent in. I’d like to see more Decaturites get behind it.
My perspective is no longer Decatur-centric, but as a resident (and taxpayer) in the city of Atlanta, I still have a horse in this race.
The market for high-speed Internet really sucks here, so any new player jumping into the mix is a welcome development. But Google seems to be getting more and more Microsoft-y and Facebook-y, in terms of trying to force you to use ALL of its features and functionality, affording less and less ability to pick and choose. For instance, I find myself reluctantly taking an active role on my HOA board this year. (Deferred maintenance issues in the building, Little Red Hen syndrome, yada yada.) The established channels for communicating within this condo community are a Google Group, a Gmail account for the HOA board, and Google Drive. I have been shifting to Gmail as my primary personal email (too painful to verbally give someone a Mindspring address), so it should all be copacetic, right? Except it’s not. Google makes it fairly cumbersome to use these features if you don’t want to mingle your various accounts, which I don’t for obvious reasons.
What I resent is not having choice — about who to pay for the services I need and use, about who tracks me when and where and for what purpose. I am not averse to paying for key capabilities, but the “free” platforms are so ubiquitous that it’s difficult to find pay options that integrate reasonably well with the rest of the world.
Naturally, I think my perspective–kind of “meh” about Google, among other giants– is shared by many others and is being reflected in some of the comments here.
Totally fair point of view. And I love the idea of better internet speed in general. My issue is this:
We, the citizens of Decatur, have spent (tens of? hundreds of?) millions of dollars creating the kind of community in which Google would be privileged to do business. They will make money here because we have invested money to make it thus. If they want in, they will be welcomed and they will be successful. We’re past the point of having to make the case for “Why Decatur?”. The word is out. We did it. We won.
So I don’t want to make them a video. However, I also realize that it’s a cute marketing gimmick and ultimately no harm, so it’s not that big of a deal to me. It just reminds me a bit of the Lego Movie. If you’ve seen it, you’ll get what I mean.
My perspective: I am totally overwhelmed by technology/phone/internet/TV/radio/ereader/gaming/i-device choices. I cannot keep up. Whoever simplifies all this for me at a reasonable cost for reasonable quality will get my business by default. It doesn’t have to the cheapest, just reasonable, and not the best, just good enough. On the other hand, we have a lot less technology addiction in our household compared to what I hear from others. (I would have been the person in 1930 who would have said “I can’t keep up with all this communication stuff–telegram, regular mail, flyers, calling cards, telephone, radio, ham radio, newspaper, magazines. Why can’t we just stick to one or two of these?”)