Google+ opens to teens, launches youth safety features | Hacker News Reader

Google+ opens to teens, launches youth safety features

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69 pointsturing30 comments

Finally. Google+ without teenagers made it very weak against other social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Teenagers love social networks, they are their most avid users, Google+ should have accepted teenagers much sooner.

So now instead of college kids complaining about an influx of teenagers (Facebook), we can have technology enthusiasts complaining about an influx of teenagers! The "what's hot" section has less of a tech bias than it used to already, but I wonder what it will look like in a month.

The what's hot section is just as lazy and useless as Twitter trending topics. I almost never find globally hot topics hot. Twitter occasionally has some semi-relevant content there, but Google+ hot topics are dominated by funny pictures and gifs. I can only see this problem growing further as a result of these changes.

This seems like a problem that is just asking to be solved. I've thought of this before: Just like you can use Location to affect what topics are hot for you, if they could determine a way to select area of interest to filter them it might prove useful once again.

I'm sure it isn't a trivial thing to solve; but not impossible.

Google may already have determined your interests via their Ad profiling. They got me pretty spot-on, you can see what they've pinned you down as liking at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

However, lots of teenagers will be glad to be on google+, I've felt extremely frustrated at not being on it not because it's a "hip" social site, but because of google's constant integration of google+ into everything. It was like going to disney-land without seeing Mickey Mouse, so I hardly think the complaints would be justified.

Also, not to forget lots of teenagers are tech-oriented, let's not forget how apple and Microsoft started!

Yeah, because teens would never lie about their age to get around stupid restrictions.

It's a legal wording of an implicit social contract. When Google says, "you can't use our service if you are under 18", they mean, "you can't blame us for showing your kid porn".

It's the same reason illegal drugs are illegal. When you overdose, the government doesn't have to spend any money investigating why you got contaminated drugs.

Actually, that's not the case at all.

Illegal drugs are huge money makers for lots of people, countries and organizations (both selling them AND fighting against them).

Although, the initial historical reason they got illegal in the first places is because of some moral-style campaigns and a lot of ill-informed medical opinions (along with a few correct ones).

Please ignore drug related thread de-railings. Thank you.

If Google wants Google+ to actually become a serious contender, they need to make it friendly for mobile.

1. Make it compatible with iPad. I generally don't even try to follow links to Google+ when I'm on my iPad, as if the page has anything more than a handful of comments, it will almost surely run the browser out of memory and cause it to exit.

2. Make their mobile app understand Google+ URLs. I wanted to read a Google+ link that was submitted to HN yesterday, so I actually clicked it in the hope it hadn't gotten too big. It had. After pointlessly trying four times, I copied the link, and then I went and downloaded their Google+ app, opened it...and discovered it had no way that I could find to give it a link to a Google+ page and have it display it!

Re: point #2, IIRC on iOS devices this isn't possible. I believe that Apple allows third parties to register pseudo-protocols ("myapp://<content-id>"), but doesn't allow apps to receive links for certain patterns of HTTP URLs.

No reason not to have a javascript redirect on the G+ page before rendering to ask if you want to go to the app, and then redirect to googleplus://

Nice workaround, but what to do about the browser's rendering? When the user goes back to the browser, what would he see?

I was a bit unclear. I wasn't complaining that the Google+ app could not somehow intercept my attempt to open a Google+ URL.

My complaint is that I had copied the URL, and wanted to paste it into the Google+ app, and have it display the content. That is something under the control of the app.

Sorry, but any requirement of the form "copy X and paste it into Y" cannot reasonably be considered as a "required to be a serious contender" feature for a mobile OS. Only the most serious of users have any clue how to do editing at the level of clipboard functionality.

And regardless: can you do that with Facebook app? I don't see how with the Android app in front of me.

The Google+ app isn't a browser. There's no reason you should expect to be able to cut and paste an arbitrary URL into it (except for posting, of course). What should the app do if you decided to paste: "http://www.cnn.com/ or whatever?

To me, Android's Intent setup is beautiful because the apps themselves decide whether they can or can't handle particular URLs (so Google+ can catch Google+ URLs, Twitter clients can catch Twitter URLs, Google Maps can (and other mapping providers could, for that matter) catch map/location URLs, etc.).

Without the right kind of extensible framework, I just don't see how you could do anything similar and usable in iOS.

It's worth noting that this Just Works in Android due to intents.

More importantly, this finally means that Google+'s Big Push into Japan - their collaboration with J-pop megagroup AKB48 - can be completed, as before most of the members were too young for their own accounts (man, giving over 100 girls Nexus Ss can't be that cheap...)

https://plus.google.com/117147321771860727748

I wonder what this could mean for using Google+ in the classroom – perhaps teachers could post links in a circle exclusively for the students in their class, and allow students to comment and discuss those links. Also, on a hangout, students could more easily collaborate on group projects, especially if they use Google Docs.

Most teens don't care about privacy, what they want is to be wherever all of their friends are (i.e. Facebook.) G+ probably isn't that place yet, but maybe one day...

They are so totally afraid of Facebook-World taking over the Internet. It is as if nothing else exist on the Internet besides Google and Facebook. What a terrible days these are to be on the net.

"What a terrible days these are to be on the net." Seriously? I can think of just a few bigger problems that might be making the net terrible.

But you do understand that this fear is legitimate? Facebook is the only company that currently can challenge Google in ad serving and knows EVERYTHING about it's users ? There is nothing weird in fact that google wants to fight back.

Well, they have all the rights to fight-back, but is that good for the users?

Between Google, Facebook and Apple, our lives on the Internet is pretty much owned by these corporations, and then you have government getting uncomfortable.

I believe it is - Seeing that I completly ditched facebook for g+, it was with benefit for me. I don't know anything about you, but I have all my android phone contacts backed up in separate file, I use gmail, but I'm not really mail dependant - I would run my own mailbox if the need would arise. Except search I don't really think I would notice if Google or Facebook or any other Internet giant disappear tommorow(ok, i know long term effects - but short term my life would go on)- social sites are just a nice addition, but I would do perfectly fine without them - just as I did before they appeared ;-) But if you are concerned about your life being owned by corporation think about improving your ways so you don't have to worry about issues like this. I would hate to live in a world and use internet where one company has monopoly to everything, best way to archive that is just not getting yourself too dependant on it.

The September that never ended.

Google now encouraging teens to share personal information online - trajectory officially becomes asymptotic to the creepy line.

Teens are humans. Iff encouraging humans to share personal information online was creepy before, it's creepy now. All this changes is that they're not unfairly discriminating.

Well, they're still unfairly discriminating against those under 13, but congress is forcing their hand on that one.

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