Mark Zuckerberg's profile on Google+ | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg's profile on Google+

plus.google.com

14 pointsnextparadigms24 comments

At this point, who can blame him.

There's a pretty big difference between "joined" and "switched". This title is ridiculous.

By the way, what's with the fugly Google+ URL's? Don't you agree they should make the URL's a lot nicer? There is no vanity URL either, which I'm sure quite a lot of people would like. Google has never seemed to get this. You should look at Google Sites url's. It's like 5 words in there before you even see your site's name. I wish they made them a bit more elegant and streamlined.

Google+ is likely built with GWT, which requires more effort than say Rails to get nice URLs. My guess is that nice URLs are in the pipeline, but they weren't an initial priority.

Interestingly, the old Google Profiles did do this, my URL was https://profiles.google.com/corin.c.cole

I would imagine it will come to plus some time in the near future.

They probably turned it off for privacy. If you found an old Google profile URL, then you also knew the email address at Gmail, which would render Gmail useless for people who value their privacy.

Ideally, they need to offer the option to have a URL that is different from the Gmail address.

But in terms of code it's very easy to change the system so that it lets users pick their URL - the question is more whether Google will decide to do it, and the fact that they used vanity URLs in the old profiles suggests they may well.

I hope they do something on the namespacing.

Linkedin appear to be including a country name in the URL now which increases namespacing, but that isn't enough.

This is one of the biggest challenges I see online and in gaming at the moment:

How do you namespace identity in a way that gives everyone an appropriate vanity URL and scales indefinitely?

Currently every system seems to end up like XBL with '{{!! MyNAMEz !!}}'.

If XBL is like this now - what will it be like in 10 years.

I think I saw some planned Google Apps profile URLs somewhere that used the format /yourdomain/name - that could be a start.

Perhaps people could specify their own custom namespace.

agreed, totally and utterly. human readable urls are such a "tend" accepted wisdom, that i find it hard to believe it wouldn't be implemented

I've started questioning their importance. For some apps it's really difficult to get them done and the impact is not that great because people are mostly traversing link trees nowadays and most times simply use google to get somewhere... Twitter shortens even nice urls, so why bother?

At first, I was skeptical. But if you look at the people that he has in his circles, it starts to look more and more legit (Blake Ross from Mozilla, Pedram Keyani from Facebook, Sam Lessin from Drop.io, now owned by FB, etc.)

In this case, I'm gonna go with "yes, this is actually him".

Why would it be surprising to see him on there? Dogfooding is a good idea, but in this case, there's nothing stopping someone from using both Facebook and Google+. He'd be foolish to not be on Google+, how else is he supposed to know where he's winning and where he might lose users.

It would hardly be surprising if he had joined to see if there was anything to worry about, would it?

He looks worried on his profile picture.

One way or another he's on Google+ scoping it out and sizing up the competition; hypothesizing the social war that is about to come.

Wouldn't you do the same thing?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted - you have a valid point. If a competitor came out with a product, I would absolutely investigate it and see how it compares. Not to mention, if I were a well-known person, reserving my name before any scammer could.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I don't think its really him, but a nice bit of PR either way - subtle.

No, stating the obvious would be: Of course he wants to see what his competition looks like first hand, and you can't test a social network without networking with people who know who you actually are.

Is he supposed to slink around like a frightened thief? No, he'd join, steal the good ideas, and say "so long and thanks for all the fish"... like a Boss.

Even if he joined, he would likely use a different name.

Why?

What would be the benefit? It would be just something else to deal with and cause attention in the press.

Well, for one, how do we know that he doesn't have an anonymous account? And for two, if he only had an anonymous account, it could reflect badly on him as well - recall the Scott Adams sock puppet fiasco from awhile back.

He probably wants to explore the competition...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com