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So Google Analytics might be the biggest violator of HTTP. Those bastards.

This.

"GET requests should have no side-effects" was never supposed to mean "you can't log GET requests". This timeline thing just seems to be logging parts of your web activity: a privacy can of worms to be sure, but not a HTTP violation.

Agreed, but tracking is different than sharing. Nobody's going to complain that your web server logs GET requests (well, not from an HTTP standpoint, at least), but posting that information to your social networking profile is a little different.

That said, there are certainly very similar cases out there already. For example, when you read a thread in many forums (vBulletin, at least), it updates your public (or semi-public) profile to say you were last seen reading that thread. I've never particularly cared for that either.

Please read the spec. The authors clearly said that the side-effects cannot be ones that the user is responsible for, not that there should not be side-effects at all. GA's logging is not something that should concern the end user.

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