Hacker News Reader

Comment by quizbiz | Hacker News Reader

I found it very odd that Google+ profiles don't have a clean URL. Something like g.co/+nirlevy would be perfect.

I thought no vanity URL's had something to do with their privacy policy:

> If you choose not to have search engines index your profile, your profile itself won't appear in Google search results. However: * Your profile will still remain visible to anyone with your profile URL.

From: http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#...

If we all had vanity URL's that spelled out our name, our private profiles could be accessed by just guessing the URL.

Now your private profile is only visible to those that know your specific URL and Googleplus ID.

I also think vanity URL's, name changes, name squatting and celebrity verification is too much manual work for Google's liking.

They used to have vanity URLs as a drop-down option in the Profile (I got it when I created my profile to try out Buzz last year). Even though I deleted the profile, I still had the option to choose it when I re-created the profile. It seems to have been removed in the last week or 2.

It also took Facebook quite a while to get vanity URLs out of the door. If the Google+ team decided that they did not want to release it to the public until it had feature parity with Facebook, then we never would have seen G+.

We should all give them time to tweak the site and figure out what features people actually want and which ones are actually important.

With Facebook, you can use a pseudonym for your vanity URL and hide all content to be non-visible to all except those you grant access to. This works well, I feel, and hope g+ does the same.

It's so spammers don't use it to get a bunch of @gmail addresses to spam (with personal info to boot!).

And how would they discover the gplus vanity urls? From the email addresses?

Browsing/crawling around G+? There's not @facebook email, so it doesn't matter if everyone can find your vanity URL.

It would be quite easy to get started, http://findpeopleonplus.com/ already has a million places to begin.

> There's not @facebook email

Yes there is.

why the second slash?

http://g.co/+nirlevy

one unnecessary character saved

EDIT: the second slash g.co/+/nirlevy version was in the orignal comment (which was obviously updated without notice)

Bah meant to update you and thank you but I was distracted and went back to work. I am sorry.

It's not quite the same, but there is http://gplus.to/ - though you have to add yourself to it.

if you knew the URL... you wouldn't need search ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com