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Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

I really like G+, but I'm a bit dismayed that they seem to be addressing the concerns of brands over those of users.

The nymwars was a prominent example, of course, and even the resulting promise of pseudonymity features have yet to surface, while Pages for brands are now live.

The lack of an outward facing platform of APIs is also concerning. I continue to hope that the Plus project is the beginning of a way to implement social features into the web itself. I hope that Google doesn't forget that as the web gets better, Google gets better, and as people use the web more, people use Google more.

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Give it some time. Likely Pages is dead simple to implement compared to pseudonymity. Possibly it was made by "secondary" team while the main tackles the pseudonymity.

G+ has not been live that long. Let it grow and evolve.

They could implement pseudonyms RIGHT NOW. All they have to do is stop paying people to harass their users. They can pay a lawyer to change the policy document later.

The reason for the delay is not because it's difficult to implement "not caring what people call themselves", but because it's difficult to implement some craptastic "you can call yourself what you like as long as we know who you are" bullshit.

Feh!

Maybe you're right. But it's not just Pages. It's also stuff like Ripples, +1 integration with web sites, badgets, etc. These rollouts all seem to point to a prioritization of brands over users.

I'm still hopeful, though.

I'm just a regular user, not a business per se.

But I like what they are doing with the +1 button, or with the customized search results. I think it's pretty cool experimenting with my own blog / trying to stand out in the search results and it's also pretty cool seeing your face in that list :) -- not that I want to earn any money from it or whatever.

Google's direction is pretty clear to me. They are giving people the tools to promote themselves online. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although the nymwars left a bad taste in my mouth that I hope they'll rectify.

I think that makes you not really a regular user. Don't get me wrong, I think it's fine that Google is providing tools for self-promotion and features for brands. But it seems to me that the best feature for brands is a lot of engaged users.

The reason Google search ads have a stranglehold on the market is because they have so much search marketshare. Similarly, it seems to me that the best thing to do would be to aggressively provide users with the best experience possible. The brands will follow, regardless of how good their tools are.

Not really surprising when you consider that the businesses are Google's customers.

Pages are pseudonyms!

This is true, actually. Pages seem to act exactly like regular user profiles other than the intention to have an associated brand instead of an associated person, and Google+ engineers have been posting that anyone can create a page (it just might not get the "confirmed name" checkbox by its name). So you could effectively set up a page with whatever name you want and use that as your pseudonymous profile on G+.

That won't work, because Pages can't add people to their circles until they've added the page. It'd be pretty hard to maintain a social network that way.

Ah, ok, I was wrong about pages working exactly the same way as user pages then, whoops.

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