Disclaimer: I work for the big G

Exactly. Google needs a way to identify and canonicalize people and organizations. I think they've tried various automated and smart techniques to limited success, and it's much easier to say that if you create a profile so that you tell us what your identity is and what your websites are, then we can attribute your work in searches much better. You don't ever have to use G+ the web site after that.

I think that there's a basic misunderstanding of what G+ is, even inside Google, and it's our fault for not making it more clear. Maybe things needed different names.

Google+ is really three main things:

At it's core G+ is an identity service. It knows who you are because you have a profile. Authorship requires this I guess.

Then it's a sharing service. Google needed a way to enable sharing in all it's products.

Finally, it's a web site with a social stream.

It's possible they should have stuck with "Google Profile" for the first part, and then the author might not be so upset that Google needs some information to attribute correctly.

Also, it'd be ideal if there were standards for these things. Google definitely used to go more that route, like Open Social, but those attempts failed against proprietary systems like Facebook. I think things are just moving to fast right now for the slow process of standardization to be competitive. I hope that when certain _features_ of identity, sharing, messaging, etc. standardize again, then new protocols can be standardized around those features. New XMPP extensions, or an entirely new protocol, to support the features of Hangouts would be great for example. A system for securely asserting identity and profile information (not log-ins) in the way that people use Twitter, Facebook and G+ would be wonderful too.

I clicked a hackernews link yesterday and forgot about the tab for an hour. When I finally got to it I was somewhat shocked to see it was a google+ page that automatically signed me into hangouts, where several tried to chat with me. About half my google plus home screen area is devoted to chat or attempts at convincing me to upload a profile picture or attempts at convincing me to find more friends.

I'm sure if I was a regular user of google+ I'd turn off many of its social features, but by default it's at least as social as facebook. I agree ultimately its "lowest common denominator" purpose is a unifying platform for google, but as a heavy google user who isn't looking for another social network (which describes a lot of people out there) google+ is way too social. It's simply something I want to avoid, yet I feel like I'm forced to interact with it too much.

Who wants this? Are Google so hopeless in strategy that they have to borrow from Facebook?