Google+ Is Walking Dead
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Er, Google announced that when they announced Google+, that it wasn't primarily a separate product but a social layer that would weave together all of Google's services. The Facebook-esque site has always been the tip of the G+ iceberg. (The Forbes article on the departure, interestingly, notes that the platform position has always been Google's position, but that the tech media never believed it [1].)
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-...
Nobody it seems ever picked up on that and were focussed intently on spending all of their energy not leaving Facebook for some reason. The hate-on for Google+ was above tepid. People would take seemingly any opportunity to call it down even though the service worked incredibly well on mobile and the company wasn't swamped with privacy allegations.
It was just a small thing Google+, a free social platform attached to ones' Google identity. That so much controversy ended up surrounding something that I feel was really rather clever and innocuous will continue to surprise me for some time.
If they had just said that 'Okay, your Google profile is now called Google+, and your YouTube account attached to your Google Profile is now your Google+ profile, and you can go to your settings to complete the migration', it wouldn't have been so bad. What they didn't do is offer anyone any reason to change.
All the benefits they hawked for YouTube's Google+ comment integration were actually such huge drawbacks that many top YouTubers turned off comments entirely. Unsurprisingly, YouTube comments had gone from the mindless, racist, misspelled prattling of the internet's ignorant masses to giant spam-filled, link-filled dumping grounds of (varyingly) penis enlargement spam and giant ASCII dicks, and YouTube comments went from bad to worse, a feat no one thought possible.
It really feels like the decision was made for the YouTube team by someone else (Page? Gundotra?), and the YouTube team just had to roll with it, with their input being ignored and the Google+ team saying 'No it'll be great, don't worry, you'll see, everything is better with Google+!'
To this day, people invite me by gmail address to threads, which I cannot leave unless I tie my Google account to a Google+ account so I can join the thread so I can leave the thread.
The entire thing was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and everything that they wanted out of it could have been accomplished by providing value, rather than extrinsic rationalization.
It nicely solved the annoying google+ problem, with the added benefit that I haven't seen a youtube ad since.
Apparently if you block youtube cookies, the ad server mostly just gives up.
I don't get why you guys fight it so hard. It asked me to enter a name one time. It was clear that it was asking me because it was part of my profile and I had never entered my name on a Google product before. So I entered my name and you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing forever.
Apparently everyone else has been "hassled" endlessly for years to give their name to Google. They already know who you are. You should be appreciative of the transparency. Type in the name. It immediately sorts everything out for you. Google needs to keep moving forward as a company and with their products. They cannot support legacy use cases forever. You need a Google account to use their services. The Google account requires your name, well ok so big deal that isn't a big ask most companies ask for that.
It also publicises your name, which may be a big risk for some people.
Isn't that a bit of a problem whether you are using a alias or not, since a co worker or anyone will eventually come across your alias while doing whatever it is on Docs or Hangouts or similar. Then look you up using that? I use Google apps constantly it seems that would happen quickly.
Is it possible to use Android without a Google+ account?
There is also the issue of (for example) the person with the surname "Yellow Horse" having her account closed down by the policy, as Google didn't believe it was a real name.
So here is the elephant in the room "privacy allegation": if I mess up and make a drunk post on Facebook, I can purge the entire profile and move on. Gmail, however, and a host of associated tools have been critical for my jobs and business for many years. If i make a stupid drunk post on Google+, I don't even want to think how and what parts of my job and business it might affect, so in the foreseeable future I'm staying miles away from anything "social Google".
You'll be losing saved games in Farmville for instance (maybe no big deal to you but still friction for some).
I would lose my Endomono fitness tracking account, that would make me pause.
I'm sure there are many others, just like for Google+.
Really? I don't think so. At the very beginning there were two distinctly separate groups: The geeks, a minority which were eager to jump on the G+ boat -- And the non geeks, which were helplessly oblivious of it, or the advantages were not worth the hassle to them.
It just didn't gain enough momentum, and it was not because of any hate.
Years later though, they began cramming it down people's throats, for example with the annoying pop-ups in Youtube, riddled with dark patterns. Really, don't-be-evil Google? Really?
That's when people started (rightfully) getting pissed off.
You write as if Google+ is past tense. I think you've drunk the Kool-aid that TechCrunch is serving. Disclosure: I'm very, very active on Google+, and so are a lot of my friends. I've been circled by about 10,000 users and have almost 1,500,000 views. Google+ is quite popular with a certain demographic: very technical people, engineers, developers, and programmers. Also Android fans, photographers and artsy people.
I'm sorry you don't like Google+, and it's fine with me that you express a negative opinion about it. But let's stop the silly "Google+ is a ghost town" false rhetoric. It's manifestly, demonstrably untrue, and it doesn't do you any favours when you try to make a case like that. Let it go. Let the people who appreciate Google+ enjoy it. Google+ is still growing by leaps and bounds, and I expect it will continue to do so whether you like it or not.
Saying, "it's not a ghost town [for me]" is no more or less valuable than the opposite experience. I'm glad you're enjoying g+, but that fact doesn't say much about the service.
If we wanted to have a substantive discussion about how well G+ is doing, we'd need to know a lot of specifics about G+ (as well as define what 'well' means in this context). Can 540 million active accounts be a ghost town? Depends on what 'active' and 'ghost town' mean. If we're just going to throw around labels without definitions or data, people just end up supporting the idea that feels right in their gut.
Those are hardly enough to make it viable.
1.500.000 views? There are cat videos that have as many...
What really bothers me is Google trying to force it on people through other Google products.
I read Linus and other personalities on G+, I'm also not implying it's a ghost town.
It just didn't gather enough momentum to attract the mass of "regular" casual users.
It's not that people hate it for the real name thing or whatever. More likely, they hate it because many other's do so why not.
It is true that there was a substantial delay before G+ was made a public external platform (there were initially some external, selected partner, integrations), but G+ has been a public external platform for some time.
> Google has offered no useful APIs for it
"Useful" is subjective, of course, but they offer a fairly extensive set of G+ platform APIs. [1] It's true there isn't a write API for the Facebook-style news feed, but that feed isn't central to G+-the-platform, only to G+-the-product.
Where's my access to pushing content from another network or platform onto G+?
Other than Data Liberation, were's my ability to extract content from G+?
It's a fucking silo. Always has been.
There's a read API for activities, but its not RSS/Atom.
> Where's my access to pushing content from another network or platform onto G+?
Push it from the integration app as App Activities using the Moments API.
> Other than Data Liberation, were's my ability to extract content from G+?
There's read APIs for the various kinds of Google+ content.
> It's a fucking silo.
Well, except for all the ways to get content in and out of it, sure.
I've looked for push tools and haven't found them.
Links on this stuff you're referring to?
It's still a fucking silo.
The news that Google+ integration is no longer required for other Google products means the platform is deprioritized.
Given how many employees are on the mountain view campus, the attempt to portray office space reorgs in a place known to have serious office space constraints, as related to leadership changes, is silly.
1. There is always a new or being renovated building on campus It's just the way it is.
2. I would actually assume this is entirely not related to his departure. Teams at Google outgrow their space all the time, and people get moved around to accomodate expected growth plus real estate renovations of buildings, etc.
Seems clear enough.
Nobody needs this explained to them.
Similarly, I doubt anyone needs
"walking dead" =|= "dead-dead"
explained to them as a logical inequality.
But if you do...here's an example for reference.
Unless a firm has publicly announced that it is winding down, it is better to avoid labeling a fund as “walking dead.” Tagging a fund in this way has consequences. As in the case above, it can impact deal flow as companies seeking funding may think twice about approaching a firm believed to be in that category. It can hurt a firm’s prospects of being invited into syndicates and even potentially damage a firm’s existing syndicates. It can jeopardize relationships with current and prospective LPs if a forthcoming fund is even a notion among the firm’s GPs. Finally, and perhaps most troubling of all, it can even damage the prospects of portfolio companies backed by these supposed walking dead VCs.
https://jonathantower.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/time-to-rethi...
Google clearly has skin in the game here if this narrative means that they will lose engineering talent from G+. Techcrunch clearly has skin in the game here as a scoop is equal to eyeballs.
Luckily, google has PRs that make 10x what tech-crunch writers make. So surely any needed corrections will make there way through the noize.
That being said, it would be great to keep the comments clean of superflous tit-for-tat inuendo accusations when the undelying conflicts of interest are pretty apparent and not overly subtle.
Countering inuendo with facts seems plenty enough to counter-spin any un-substantiated points.
And the original point here stands well enough alone. Don;t disrefard the TC qualification about the office relocation. That is a fair point and stands by itself--no drama needed.
Scenario: a company with a quasi monopoly - and more money than it knows what to do with accordingly - responds to a fast growing potential competitor by getting into a market it doesn't understand well, is miles behind (arguably so far behind the market has already decided the winner) and isn't well suited to compete in.
See: IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook
Primarily I'm curious to see what Facebook's Bing is going to be. With a now very profitable, soft monopoly in social (and the willingness to spend to keep it), it seems inevitable Facebook will follow a rhyming history.
The Facebook phones we've seen are the same thing on a smaller scale.
Of course I don't use it much because so few of my friends do, and that's the rub. But if I could magically move all my facebook friends to G+, I would.
If I could magically get my friends to show up in those places, I would.
Translation: LinkedIn is not Facebook is not Google+ is not any-other-media.
LinkedIn, I use for people I know professionally.
Facebook, I use for people I know... but probably not the ones I currently know professionally.
Google+, I use very much like I used to use Google Reader and Blogger. I subscribe to interesting people, Communities, and Pages. The experience is MUCH nicer than following the same things on Facebook, in my opinion.
I do actually think Reddit has a slight edge in presentation for subreddits, compared to Google+ Communities. But on the plus side (ha), Google+ communities tend to not have as many trolls in them, perhaps because they're not anonymous. Perhaps because the trolls just haven't arrived yet.
I happen to also use Google+ as a massive backup of all of my photos.
its not clear, from the sound of it.
right now seprate ecosystems support diversity (UI) and diversification (PI) and functional efficiency (sandboxing, signal/noize).
I wanted to like G+. I tried really hard. And I used to like and trust Google. The G+ experience ruined both.
In terms of negative brand equity, this has been a disaster for the company.
so for Google, they would need to find out what could be a defining feature that would move people off FB. whatsapp's killer was signing up via telephone number, from a smartphone.
for business people there's LinkedIn, for coders GitHub, for teens there are SnapChat/etc. - Google would need to find an underserved target demographic and build something, anything unique.
so far they have failed.
Well, that's the thing: you don't have to be anonymous to Google. Just let people create a few separate 'profiles' that they can post with (like Reddit's throwaway accounts, but integrated).
In the end, this would be even better for Google; Facebook can build a profile of who you portray yourself as, but they can't get any behavioural data from other aspects of yourself that you might want to keep off Facebook to avoid attaching them to your real name. If you want an example, check out FetLife; a giant fetish/kink version of Facebook. People post updates, photos, events, etc. there that you almost definitely wouldn't post to Facebook, because you don't want your real name attached to that (because sometimes people are careless and might give away aspects of your life that you don't want revealed).
Imagine if Google could make use of that information, those friends lists, those interactions, those posts and comments and connections. They would have a huge data harvesting advantage over Facebook, because they could see aspects of your life that no one else could see, as well as aspects of your life that you're open and public with.
The same goes for celebrities. They could have their 'celebrity' account (i.e. their 'real' account), but also create separate personas that they could use to read, post, comment, etc. As it is, if +Vin Diesel used Google+ like a regular person, he'd get flooded with comments; as another example, Jewel Staite, who is not even super-famous, posts pretty much any tweet and gets hundreds of retweets and favourites, and dozens of worthless replies.
People like that can't use social media the way everyone else does; a secondary profile feature tied to your primary account only via Google's anonymized data collection processes, would let people like that use social media normally, be marketed to, interact, and get value that they just can't get right now.
There's probably lots of other examples, but those are the two extremes that came to mind.
Um... that's the part I don't want, the part that makes Google even creepier than Facebook. I want to maintain separate online identities for separate activities, not let one big company follow me everywhere, but pretend to give me separate identities that only it can correlate. I prefer my current solution, where one barely-trusted corp gets me email, another my "social", others my chit-chat in various communities.
But it doesn't have to.
There are numerous ways in which Google could tackle that problem. It appears to be pursuing some of them.
One is to become a vastly better recommendations engine by becoming interactive. A constant frustration I've had when looking for products or product information online is in refining my search. There's not a "no, I don't want that, I don't want anything remotely like that, take it away, don't ever show it to me again" button. A "dismiss with extreme prejudice" button. A "get it the fuck away and kill it with fire" button.
But that's exactly the role a very good in-person salesclerk will perform. They'll ask what you're looking for, ask for some particulars, then suggest. And if you don't like something, it's gone. No pushing (the ones who push aren't very good, and they don't get my business).
Part of the problem is also that online product descriptions are abysmal. I was shopping for monitors -- a technical product -- a ways back, and not a single vendor gave me the ability to search by pixel pitch, aspect ratio, and dimension. I could specify screen size, but there was no way to distinguish a 1080p 36" display from one with a suitably high pitch, a more rectangular aspect, and the size I was interested in. Scrolling through pages of stuff I wasn't interested in.
Furniture that fails to show close-up views or 360° rotations on $1000+ items. Really, you expect me to buy, sight-unseen, and wait 6+ weeks for delivery, based on a single poorly-sized image?
Another approach would be to cut out the middleman (advertisers) and sell directly. Which is what is happening now with Google Express, a WebVan like retail service tied with not a single merchant or large national vendors, but even local services. That's actually a pretty smart concept in my book.
There's a large and growing backlash to pervasive surveillance, whether by governments or companies, and I think Google's getting swept up in it.
Microsoft had a business model that worked for it until it didn't. Google faces the same risk.
This is how it works actually.
Even I can have one or more extra handles, not traceable back to my main account.
Reddit says "just sign up with an account, we don't care".
Or as I said way back when about the nymwars:
"FPN: Google finds technical solution to psuedonymity
Citing unreliable sources, Forbidden Planet News reports that Google have found a technical solution to the pseudonymous user puzzle that's stumped its boffins for months:
Users: This is the name I wish to be known by.
Google: We're down with that.
I suppose the question is that they'd win, and whether or not it's worth as much to them to allow for privacy and handles.
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You always knows who you share with, and they don't mess with permissions after the fact.
Also there are clear notifications if something will be shared because of actions you take. E.g: you tag someone in a picture and it makes sure you are aware that this will share the photo or album with the person in question.
Fantastic! The people who actually use Google+ don't use it like Facebook and it is misguided to try to think one will fight the other. (Nor do people use Facebook like Twitter. Nor do people use Facebook like they do LinkedIn or OKCupid)
The Circles feature of Google+ makes it really easy to target only small groups. I most often now see Google+ used for posts that are set to private within a family. Thanksgiving plans shared just among a family. Your friends on Facebook don't care about that, but your siblings do, and Google+ makes it much easier than Facebook to maintain a circle for that sort of thing. You just create a Circle called Family, and after you use it a couple of times, Google defaults your posts to that circle. To the world it looks like you've never posted on Google+, but meanwhile you've been sharing pictures and funny jokes with your brothers and sisters every day
And if you don't use Google+ this way, but most of your family has a Google+ account (is it possible to not have one anymore?) I'd highly recommend it for this sorta thing.
And yes, everyone might "have" a Google+ account, but if no one you care about ever checks it, then does it really matter?
Exactly : not everyone is comfortable sharing everything with everyone on Twitter. Some are not even allowed to share publicly.
Personally I hope it does push Google to rethink G+. It doesn't take too much: step back a little, stop pushing it aggressively where it doesn't fit. Actively support pseudonimity - let people have their privacy AND their G+ cake and participate in multiple circles under different identities. Add APIs to let a 3rd party ecosystem develop. Encourage it. Yes Twitter wound it back but only after they were the undisputed leader. Fingers crossed.
They should develop Google+ for the way that people would like to use it instead of developing it for the way that they would like people to use it.
That goes for everything, Google or not.
I just got annoyed by G+. The realname thing, then being badgered about it. Every one of those annoying "invitations" turn me further away from it. Maybe I am just different or too contrarian, but that kind of sealed G+ in my head as "stay the fuck away from this annoying thing".
Google may have softened their line on enforcement, but unless you're willing to risk having your whole account randomly suspended (along with who-knows-how-many other Google services will go with it), that doesn't really do you much good unless you are treating it as a throwaway account in the first place.
[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html [2] https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271
Never make a law you cannot enforce.
Bad policy-making by Google? Certainly. But nobody is getting suspended for using a nom de plume on Google+ now.
Because they haven't done this? https://developers.google.com/+/
And you're pretty wrong. You do that by posting App Activities via the Moments API (which the user controls the visibility of using Circles, just like any other posts.)
https://developers.google.com/+/api/moment-types/ These come in a number of different types with different semantic properties, with a generic fallback type, and a publicly posted process to request new types.
Eventually though, it would be nice if someone at Google figured out how to make multiple-account usage not suck rocks. Why can I not sign out of a single account? Why does the order in which I sign into my accounts matter for so many things?
I also use LastPass across profiles and 2-way auth for both LastPass and Google accounts.
If you want separate accounts just make one for YouTube (or whatever) then a separate one for Gmail.
[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en
[2] http://scotch.io/bar-talk/leveraging-multiple-chrome-users-f...
Google is a great company but community building isn't a core strength they have.
Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+?
Yes. I don't believe it. Here's some random numbers (head counts in teams)
- Core 50
- Ops 20
- Web 50
- Android 50
- Other mobile platforms 50
- Integrations to other products 150
- Technical writers, support etc 30
- Smiley faces: 642 employees
- Frowney faces: 557 employees
- Miley Cyrus collages : 1 employee
I wonder why your random numbers and mine differ so much?
EDIT:
I'm not surprised there are 1,000 people on Google+, and I would wager you that that's not counting ANY Core, Ops, or Web ("Web" in the traditional sense).
You're also forgetting to count Auto-Awesome Photos, Auto-Awesome Videos, the ability to search UNTAGGED images that have been uploaded to Google+ Photos... Those are fairly ambitious on their own.
Yes. Even more so in the context of the supposed freedom Google employees have to work on the team/product of their choosing. Though I only know that anecdotally and it may have been one of those benefits that got phased out as it conflicted with business reality.
Maybe Google x somehow does keep the magic spirit they used to have but there's a definite anti-user marketing droid led trend with everything from Hangouts to Maps that should be far more concerning than the G+ fallout.
EDIT: To add, what always killed me about G+ was it wasn't the Googly answer to the problem. What they should have done to counter FB was to get behind something like Diaspora (i.e. an open source federated social platform, where they happen to offer hosting for free if that's what you want), and encouraged something like Persona as the ID system. Basically take the oxygen away from FB, and provide a boost to the "open web" which they can index in the normal manner.
* There would've been a heck of a lot more startup mapping the world if many people had such foresight were things were going.
For that matter, it still is doing that in a different way with support for Schema.org markup across many Google products, which provides, in principle, a different way to do some of the event-sharing and other things people do through Facebook.
The Googly answer to most things isn't doing one thing, its doing multiple things with different payoff timelines in parallel.
Google has done a pretty good job on the no-doubt extremely thorny problem of unifying accounts and multi-account login. I'm reasonably happy with that. I love Gmail, and Hangouts, and Android in general, but Google+ makes me want to blow my brains out every time they try to ram it down my throat. For the hundredth time, I don't want to "find friends" before I join an urgent Hangout I've just been invited to.
The worst part is that they sacrifice their core strength to chase an unproven Facebook purely out of fear. Even if Facebook miraculously manages to crack social advertising in a way that eats Google's lunch (and given the questions around the value of Facebook advertising, that is a huge if), there's no hope for Google in trying to beat Facebook on their own terms. Frankly it's been an embarrassment for Google, and I hope they really have killed it as the central focus.
Google+ is actually designed far, far better than Facebook. And the implementation of communities and circles really gets social interaction right in ways that Facebook has not. Sure, Facebook has a much bigger user base. But I don't think Google+ sees itself as a direct competitor to FB. It's more of a tangential thing. I also think TechCrunch is hilariously off-base for writing that Google is dialing down Google+. I think all that stuff is pretty much clickbait.
Google probably won't do it, though it would be a great time to reconsider their global strategy and think about what can actually be brought to the people to make the information space better for everyone. I mean, actually.
Google will always need massive amounts of user data, that is a given because of how they make money. I want something for giving up some privacy, and a very effective customized Google Now assistant would work for me. The current Google Now is a decent first baby step.
That just shows me how awful the UX is. When I want to change my real name I do the same, then come to the conclusion that I have to click on "edit profile", click on the damn avatar in order to edit the real name, INSTEAD of changing it from some "general settings" page.
I really like to mention Twitter's new UI is way better. I have a good UX with the new Twitter. This is something Google just don't seem to understand.
If Page really wants people to allow Google to feature creep their entire lives, G will have to wage a PR war to convince people that not only can G be trusted to manage identity, but that "Don't Be Evil" is a primary ideological directive.
Passport started out well, then tanked, and the Microsoft account today just works across all Microsoft sites - from outlook.com to Windows Phone, Visual Studio, Skype and Windows 8 to Bing. Once the Passport mess settled nothing was really heard about identity at Microsoft again, and yet the little releases keep coming(ADFS 3, e.g.).
To me, if Eric Schmidt, Vic, Google+ et al had a failing, it was that of not learning from others' mistakes (and consequent successes). Frankly, given that Kim Cameron works for Microsoft I'm amazed that anyone could use the word identity and not start by looking at how Microsoft does it.
Ironically enough, I think G+ faced its own identity problem for too long and failed to get critical mass because of it. To me, the increasing convergence of chrome and android is a bigger deal than anything happening with +
Google+ still has potential to be great (mainly because of their huge user database and Google name behind it) if they can successfully pivot and create something that is valuable, a Facebook clone forced onto people wasn't the greatest idea that Google has ever come up with.
LinkedIn is AWFUL. It's a giant spam factory with shit features, but I actually like a lot of their employees other projects....
Anyway, Google should have users upload their resume to Google +, and then have it be indexable and searchable through the Google front-end search. It's a natural extension of the "share with Circles" concept.
A Google Professional/LinkedIn competitor would have been perfect for Google+. I would also be more willing to share with my friends and family on a site like that, so it would be a perfect LinkedIn/Facebook killer at the same time. Google+ just focused too much on sharing with friends/the world type site at a time when people are getting more cautious about sharing online and things being public.
I do want a service very similar to LinkedIn but more trusted and less weird stats/data-mining, Google would be a good company to make that happen, but Google+ would need a major overhaul.
(I know Google tracks everything too, but the whole "pay X dollars to see who viewed your profile" is when I made my decision to not support LinkedIn.
Maybe if G+ used color shaded divs, something, anything to make it instantly clear what is what on the page. Another thing, every time I go there it asks hey do you know so and so, no or yes, doesn't matter just take me to the main page dang it.
The Android app trails the Web site in functionality. You would think, for example, that the implementation of circle management on a touch device would be more drag-drop than the Web interface. Noooo, it's a series of lists views.
Where IS the FREAKING picture I just took? Since I got Glass, there's a third place. Plus the ones I have not yet found.
Blogger integration was a terrible lost opportunity. In part because Blogger sucks, too. The world needs to move fluidly between Tweet-ish things and blog posts. G+ did not deliver on the fluidity. Sites could have used some social pixie dust, too. But no. When Google+ stuff shows up in my GMail, it just adds noise.
Then, riding the wave of the Blogger success, they tried to drain the troll swamp at YouTube. Masterful allocation of resources and wise strategic move.
Because both my current books are about Android, their primary social presence is on Google+. For one it seemed to work well. For the later one, not so much.
Now is a good time to reassess and find a mixed solution that's first-tier in every category.
Has there ever been a case of something called "widgets" succeeding by any real measure? Even in fiction or idiom?
It's kind of like an addon or sometimes a labs feature. Not required by all users but available if needed.
Hopefully they'll just end the push to make people unify account names across platforms.
The efforts to make me unify my Youtube and my (inactive) Gmail accounts have been fricken annoying.
I've been online long enough to have had several identities which have served me well in certain circles, at certain times of my life. Being able to selectively dump these when necessary has been a way of online life for me.
When I decided the everything-tracking creep factor of Facebook was too much, I just deleted the account completely (well, as much as one can do). I wasn't concerned that it might take down my email, or my mobile app purchase history, or any other manner of service. It was quite painless.
Google+ and the drive to integrate everything is leading to the erosion of identity compartmentalisation.
I know I can create multiple Google accounts, one for each service and each identity. However managing all of these at once (with Google's multi account login features) has always been very cumbersome. More so than an account with each service provider. And I never trust that my activity isn't being correlated across my individual accounts.
If you don't want a real name attached, create a Google+ Page with your current nickname and use that. Then nothing changes for you, or anyone following you.
If I were Google, I'd like to move all my products under one account too.
I've never been to "my" G+ page and don't intend to go now. Google has annoyed me and it's their to solve that annoyance.
I am the consumer, get used to it.
To everyone else: When did all these tech guys turn into grandparents, "All these new fangled social networks, we didn't need that when I was a kid, a rock and a stick, that was enough, now get off my lawn."
It is one thing that I can configure whatever through patience and knowledge.
It is another being willing to configure stuff whenever some fool decides that they want to change a service around. I can dance but that doesn't mean I dance to someone else' tune.
Hehe
To be fair though it took some time before it became apparent how simple to page thingy was. I delayed the YouTube switch for months myself.
The response should have been to simply allow pseudonyms (i.e., Google knows who you are logging in as, and can infer your identity very easily anyway) and to do as twitter and prevent mis-use of real names where appropriate.
It feels like the motivation behind it wasn't to build an insanely great social network but to maximise user value by tying web searches, emails, interests, social circles, documents, location and more to actual identifiable people.
I can see how that information can be extremely useful to advertisers and therefore valuable to Google, but I do not see anything there that is worth spending time on when there are many better, less invasive alternatives.
Google+'s initial focus of sharing data with smaller groups of people was nice as well.
But Facebook and Twitter have a majority of the users already and G+ isn't better enough for people to move to it.
The page is a giant TC logo with an ad next to it, oversized menu navigation, a headline, and then A GIANT PICTURE that literally takes up my entire 13" laptop screen.
All of this before I get to the actual article with actual content.
Word of caution - not everyone browses the internet on dual 27" cinema displays or Retina MacBook Pros. Even still, oversized images do more to stroke the designer's ego than to truly enhance the communication of the content.
For ad much as designers hate "Make the logo bigger", they have totally got onboard with oversized photos on blog post headers/featured images.
and I'm using it exactly like what techcrunch describes: as a platform, not a product.
I use Picassa to sort my photos and post to google+ web albums for family to use. I use Google+ Hangouts for IM, and I am using Google+ itself for credentials (OAuth).
The actual Google+ product, never use it. It's actually a good thing that they figure out usage patterns and adapt their strategy to reflect it.
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Interesting how I couldn't get the people in my business or my family to even look at G+ when it first came out but, this past week, my employees made a circles just for them and that's how I found out my wife and kids had all joined G+.
I'm starting to see this everywhere, at least in the circles I run in, so it looks to me like things are looking up.
Before Android, I really thought that Google's shit didn't stink. I would have voted for Google for president. Afterwards it wasn't the same, and just went downhill from there.
In retrospect, the only reason I thought gmail was so awesome was because they gave you POP3 access. I mean, the UI was clean and simple, but it wasn't much easier to use than any of the other webmail clients. I'm not saying that in order to criticize gmail: that's the best they could have done, because none of the other clients were that difficult to use.
What I liked was the simple generosity that they showed by allowing me to download and send my mail without using their UI. I was entirely willing to let them read it all and target ads towards me during my searches in exchange. [Edit: to be truly honest, I was excited that their math might really offer me the products that I'd be interested in:) Seems so quaint now.]
Then, Android. The choice of laying a Java VM over the underlying filesystem and kernel, and the choice to lock parts of the filesystem down and to fill the OS with opaque binaries and phones with closed drivers represented the opposite of the image of trust that had attracted me to them in the first place.[Edit: Ugh! I forgot about the proprietary headphone jacks.]
I felt that before Android, Google trusted me to use their products, and I trusted them not to be evil. After Android, it occurred to me that Google did not trust me to use the phone I bought from them.
Google Docs is pretty successful. Not super successful, but successful enough to put pressure on Microsoft, which is always good. Google revolutionized search in the style of Altavista, and beat them on the math. Then they went into email in the style of Yahoo and Microsoft, and offered a cleaner UI and a softer sell than either. Then they went after Doubleclick and kicked its ass with text ads then bought it as the coup de grace, went after Office, bought YouTube after they failed to beat it, and went after Facebook (who had gone after myspace and friendster), and went after Amazon in B2B, while repeatedly failing to beat it or Ebay in retail or payments.
What I'm trying to say here is that Google hasn't given me anything that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere ever. The distinction that Google had was 1) being focused on the math (and therefore quality), 2) offering clean user interfaces and APIs, and 3) having a conscience. Two and three have gone to shit, and everybody has caught up on 1) - there's good math everywhere these days.