Using Google without a Google+ profile
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
>>"Google has been doing some rethinking" thanks I already read that
>>"#googleplusupdate #youtube " thank you that was valuable
>>[another summary of the article I just read]
This is also one of my major complaints with youtube. I find it hard enough just to follow a single youtube comment thread because:
1. Everyone appears to be speaking a dialect of english that is understandable seemingly to everyone but myself - some sort of strange mixture of 90's IRC speak with some klingon thrown in.
2. People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username.
John Smith: That was a great video
> Jane Smith: +Bubba I agree
me: "who the heck is Jane talking to?"
3. Then finally there're all of those G+ reshares:
John Smith: Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/asdf83289
> John Smith's friend: I enjoyed that video
</rant>
To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.
Why are you even allowed to have 2 names anyway? The real one(the one in your url,.e.g. twitter.com/<realacctname>) and that $WHATEVER_STRING_YOU_WANT username?
Idea, someone make an extension/greasemonkey that replaces all the free-form usernames with the actual account name so I can follow conversations without having to deal with all the mental bookkeeping of 2 names per user in conversational thread.
1) It's fully public, and everything you're a fan of uses it.
This makes it fantastic for building a feed of stuff you follow in tiny, tidy, bite-sized messages where one overactive wall-of-text can't slow you down as you drink from the firehose of info.
2) It came out of SMS. That means it keeps the limits of SMS, like short messages and usernames and whatnot. Imho they should break out of this box a bit - move tags and people out of the message body and swap names into the UI.
Re-shares are not good reading. They are written by users for their followers, not for the people on the actual video page. As you said, they have zero value.
When I first noticed this way back when Google started publishing re-share comments under the videos, I would reply to those comments with remarks such as "I already knew that; yes I know what the video is; why are you repeating the video name"... and some people responded with "what are you talking about" because they didn't even know their re-share comments were being published on the video page. That's how broken the comments are.
YT comments should have been hauled out and shot. Not jackboot-forced onto other platforms as well.
Looks like the latest comments are from Feb 2015, sad that it's not still live.
Not a terrible quality snapshot though.
Sometimes I think that's a good thing.
Facebook has the same problem. Any reasonably popular feed, such as I f'ing love science has completely worthless comments, because 99% are them just people tagging their friends.
There also tend to be fewer comments (it's easy to see who is replying to who) so threading is typically not necessary on FB.
My thought is that HTML needs a comments primitive with date, author, subject, and references, with the resulting view (threaded, flat, collapsed, etc.) a client detail.
Or, you know, Usenet, tin.
1. Usenet was small. Somewhere between 50k and 500k users, based on my own and Gene Spafford's guestimates. More solid numbers appreciated (~1988-1992 or so).
2. It was selective. You had to be a student at a research university, or work for a tech company, or have government access, or be able to gain access to systems provided by same. Which meant you were at the tail end of a highly selective filter.
3. It crumbled under the face of multiple attacks: spam, abuse, trolls, etc. There were some defenses, but ultimately insufficient.
4. It was a pain to administrer, and for little or no gain. Which meant that few providers would, those who did charged, and they recouped minimum benefit for the effort. Ultimately it fell prey to the problem of shrinking usage and ready substitutes largely via mailing lists (relatively comparable) and Web-based forums.
5. Limited rich-format support, limited permanent content support, limited collaborative effort support. A Usenet-type functionality with _some_ support for post formatting, for images, video, and audio (but not to the point of being readily abusable), and for permanent content (FAQs, Wikis, etc.) to be usefully co-related to the primary discussion, would be useful.
I don't know that we'll ever have "one" conversation platform again. And no, Facebook doesn't count.
"Classical Usenet" was what came before, for the most part.
4chan (well, imagboards in general) have a nice system where you can reply to multiple people at once by referring to the post id. Top-level comments are usually represented by referring to no comment, or by referring to the OP's post id. I find this much, much easier to follow.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...
I agree that having some sort of easy way to quick-view the parent of a post would also be useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki
Disaggregate content from commentary. That's the internet I want.
You see Google+ interaction where you expect simple comments. I often see Youtube comments in Google+ threads because the thread happened to start with a video, and therefore automatically becomes a Youtube comment for barely literate Youtubers to spit their bile at. Or I see a G+er accidentally post a Youtube comment as a nonsensical G+ post.
Google tries to treat everything the same, but they need to recognize that different things are different things. I don't want my G+ stuff on Youtube, and I don't want Youtube stuff on G+. You don't want G+ reshares in the article's comment section.
I'm glad they finally seem to be coming to their senses. Would have been nice if that'd happened a few years earlier.
Tumblr has very much the same program regarding reshares. Although I'm not sure if Tumblr even wants to foster discussion on their site--people do it any way, of course, quoting each other, but most Tumblr themes make these kind of discussions look awkward and hard to follow. Nested quotes get thinner and thinner, until you have just one word per line, sticking halfway out the container.
Kudos to them, but a lot of pain could have been avoided if they did all this listening back then, instead of waiting until their thing was clearly dead.
Not as fancy as some of the commercial offerings, but I never need to worry about it getting killed off.
I couldn't stand feedlys interface, and theoldreader is good enough.
https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...
Among my thoughts: the group of people really discussing things online just isn't that big.
Reader was far more significant than Google realised.
https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...
Both Enge and I address both the definition of "active" and of "invisible" non-public activity.
1. We're limited to directly observable public actvity. Given the sitemaps providing a population of profiles to sample, that means looking at actual public posts. Anything else would be Making Shit Up, which I prefer not to do.
2. It's possible get some sense of non-public activity by looking at followers and views for profiles with and without public activity. Evidence is that profiles without public posts have about 4.3% of the activity of those with. That gives roughly 4% of the total G+ userbase, or about 95 million users.
Again: showing activity at any time. That about doubles the active users count in total. (112 million + 95 million). It doesn't speak to recent activity, though.
My initial G+ "public activity" analysis: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ
Follow-up "active" public sharing accounts vs. "inactive" non-public-sharing accounts https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnK...
I looked up some history behind Google+ on Wikipedia and it looks like Vic Gundotra was behind that (footnotes removed).
> His responsibilities as Vice-President of Social included Google's social networking and identity service, Google+. He is widely believed to be the man behind Google+, and was responsible for the controversial removal of social features from Google Reader. Apart from Google+, he is widely credited for his contributions to early versions of Google Maps (application) and Google I/O.
For it's time it was kind of the proto "news feed" for my group of friends.
It seems there's something missing from BigCo's understanding of how social networks operate.
This is a good step, although the well has already been poisoned.
The problem with a profile that spans unrelated services is that your persona on one shouldn't necessarily be tied to your persona on another; Google Accounts with different public-facing per-service personas are okay in a way that a single public-facing persona spanning all services isn't.
But it's still an underlying single Google Account, so Google gets its unified view of what you do, which is what they care about.
Which is why he said, "Had they stopped the delusion from the outset ... "
G+ tried to solve this with Circles, but as far as I can tell, everything related to YouTube was assumed to be public on G+ because it was public on YouTube.
G+ integration with everything seems like a massive failure of the Geek Social Fallacies: http://plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html .
This isn't really an issue of friends, because most of the people you'd be concerned about finding your random YouTube comments are not friends. It's also not an issue of Google failing to understand this. Google understood the issue, but they denied and ignored it, choosing to force this on people regardless because they felt it was strategically useful to do so.
It was a weirdly forcing move which reminded everyone how much power Google wields in this kind of user/company relationship. People are probably generally okay with how that works, but only if they aren't made painfully aware of it (kind of like DRM - just look at Steam for an example of that).
Facebook was designed from the outset to be an online platform for your real-life friends. G+ should have been an online platform for your online friends, but then it mandated that all of your online friends must now need to know your real-life name.
Are you saying the real-name policy was retroactive? I wasn't aware of that. If that was the case, wow.
And the Youtube integration was also the immediate end of the real-name policy (which was really more an "no unusual name policy, because people got blocked for having an unusual real name, whereas plausible pseudonyms were left alone).
But you're right; it was a stupid policy, and they should have known that right from the start.
[1] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/07/04/3676529/truth-be...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/chris.cox/posts/10101301777354543
Keep in mind, Google already had experience with two social networks they owned. The Real Names policy probably didn't fall from the sky as an idea without merit; they might have had reason to believe that without enforcing real-world names, the resulting social network wouldn't get Facebook traction.
And I have an `active' facebook account with a fake name and people I really want to `follow' or people I let in.
I have somewhat similar feeling about the upcoming Win10 launch, and in near future a lot normal user will learn the hard way why they got Win10 in exchange for the current Win7/8 license.
Simply don't outsmart your user base.
Everyone knew what Google was doing was monumentally stupid on so many grounds.
There was widespread criticism over the real names policy and linking across properties.
When you're providing a platform, you can't afford to be opinionated.
How is that different in kind from what Google offers to consumers?
Google also offers binary blob data storage/sync, and a phone OS. Is that key?
In particular, when people came to gmail in the first place, they were using it as an email service. When they came to youtube, it was as the world's largest collection of videos. They did not want these conflated.
You could list all those items for Yahoo and for AOL as well. But Youtube is distinctive in offering a huge collection of searchable videos. You name it, it's there, until it gets taken down by contentID or made unavailable in your country. Can you even search for videos on Facebook?
Google offered a lot of totally unrelated things, from a phone OS to a video site, a search engine, and a social network which did incorporate some stuff on its own (hangouts and photos were well integrated and not really a problem as far as I can tell).
Suddenly introducing connections across all those different sites, so your mail contacts end up on your phone, your Youtube posts on Google+, and identities that you want to keep separate get merged against your will, that is stupid, harmful and a betrayal of their users.
Google instead tried to shoehorn existing users with a different culture. Perhaps they could have created a separate service with different expecteations and grown that, but they seemed to feel entitled to a create a short cut to success at their user's expense.
If they build a profile based on your browsing and social graph to show you ads, what does it matter who you actually are, so long as you have those interests? Like a node in a graph being distinguished only by the arcs connecting it.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/myspace-quietly-begins-enco...
Why would you care to use Google+ in any other way, he thought.
Once again, if your verification of real names excludes a whole group's conventions, you have failed hard.
https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/WegYVNkZQqq
A few days ago, +David Brin shared a post about GamerGate, in which he opined that this is a problem which would be solved by greater transparency: "It is only anonymity that lets bastards like this operate," he says, "Accountability is the light that sears most kinds of badguys, whether they operate in criminality or in high places."
I disagree with his analysis, and this disagreement is rooted in part in my experience of information-revelation policies on social networks. (e.g., name requirements) While there was an expectation that people would behave better when their activity was tied to their own identity, as that identity is presumably a highly valuable and non-renewable resource to them, the evidence weighed against it: people seem quite willing to be jerks under their own identities....
In practice, the forced revelation of information makes individual privilege and power more important. When everyone has to play with their cards on the table, so to speak, then people who feel like they can be themselves without consequence do so freely -- these generally being people with support groups of like-minded people, and who are neither economically nor physically vulnerable. People who are more vulnerable to consequences use concealment as a method of protection: it makes it possible to speak freely about controversial subjects, or even about any subjects, without fear of harassment.
The thing with tracking people, they ALWAYS want more data.
To make matters more fun, I use my fake name more often online and in real life than I do the name on my ID. Reality is funny that way.
Yes, I'm an outlier.
Facebook has a huge userbase. "Critical mass" is definitely valuable but as other social sites have shown, it's not enough to make you invincible to competition. I think that the issue with Facebook is that not only is "everyone" on it, but it was the first such site to really get everyone on it. MySpace was huge with the under-30 crowd and yeah, even some people's moms got accounts but Facebook was really the one that got all of your non-techie relatives, your boss, your doctor, your local bar, and your neighbors to all sign up.
While I would have no issue just pulling up stakes for G+ (real names or not) because I like the interface, the mobile app, and the granularity and easy accessibility of sharing settings better, I have loads of friends and acquaintances who don't care about the real name policy and still claimed to hate G+. The most common reason they gave was that it was "too hard" or "not like Facebook".
Unless those people see enough reason to overcome the friction of learning a moderately different service, they'll never leave the comfort of Facebook. Hell, even minor changes to Facebook are inevitably followed by weeks of complaining (on Facebook, natch).
Which brings up the second point: when none of these services are compatible or built on any common protocol (like email), you can't just pick the "provider" you prefer with the interface you like best or the most appealing TOS. I have a Facebook account and like a lot of other people, I set up a G+ profile when it became available.
The issue is that it can only go one of two ways: everyone leaves Facebook for G+ (or any other competitor) or I need to maintain two separate profiles and post things I want to share on two separate sites, defeating the entire purpose of the services to allow casual sharing with large groups of friends and acquaintances. Actually, there's a third way it can go and it's the way that ended up happening: hardly anyone uses G+ outside of some niche areas and in herd mentality terms, that means it's a joke and only deserving of derision.
I'm sure something will come along and replace Facebook eventually but I can't imagine it will happen by literally trying to build a better Facebook. It'll happen when people start using different types of services for that sort of interaction and Facebook sort of just trails off as that annoying place where the only ones left posting are radio stations, meme pages, and your aunt that likes to post pictures of those "minion" guys.
They fail to understand that people at the time wanted to consume it in their own way (and still do, to some extent).
At the time G+ came to exist people loved it. They wanted the conversations like that. They liked the circles idea (at the time Twitter didn't have lists or any such concept), and it's still better than what the other social media services have.
But to use it you only had the choice of the G+ app, or the website, which wasn't how people were consuming social media. They were using things like TweetDeck to connect to multiple services so that they could consume their social media stream, especially businesses.
https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX (Steve Yegge's rant still seems to apply 3 years later)
However, both Twitter and FB had lists long before G+ was even a thing. Twitter has done little/nothing to promote the list functionality other than to increase the 500 member limit on lists. FB went head to head with G+ Circles by enhancing the FB list functionality to include standard lists and school/workplace lists.
I wasn't going to stop posting on FB, and I wasn't going to write everything multiple times.
Being able to feed from FB to G+ would have at least meant I could be active on both sites. As it was I had to pick one, and FB had a lot more of my friends on it.
I, for instance, after the second or third time Youtube tried to (literally) trick me into allowing it to display my real name, decided to log out permanently. Now I have another browser totally dedicated to GMail, and use my normal one for the rest of my surfing, Google Search and Youtube included. This raises the entry barrier to use many Google services quite a bit, since I'm logged out more often than not.
And then they could have done really cool shit like displaying references to you with your real name only to people authorized to know it, and with your handle to others.
No company is immune to that cycle, not even Google.
This isn't past-tense yet. Until this change, which isn't fully deployed yet (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.... , "in the coming weeks"), YouTube still requires a G+ account to comment or upload videos.
Good example of Strong opinions, Weakly-held.
I hope other sites learn from this and not jam social networks down people's throats.
I've personally lost a lot of respect for them and I know a lot of people that feel the same way. It went way beyond offering a new product to people to see if they liked it or not.
- Facebook surpasses Google for proportion of users’ time, http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/facebook-surpasses-google-f...
- Facebook surpasses Google as most visited site in US, http://www.livemint.com/Industry/ct3JSccQisManKjJ6qt43N/Face...
- Prediction: Facebook Will Surpass Google In Advertising Revenues, http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/05/facebook-will-surpass-googl...
- Facebook Readies 'People Targeting' To Take On Google In Advertising, http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-readies-people-targeting-tak...
Has Google's search improved since the launch of Facebook? Not many people think so. Search results are loaded with spam, click-bait, content farm crap, and ever more Google's own stuff. Shouldn't a better search that found high quality results be where Google put its efforts, if it really cared about its users?
There used to be a time where i quite often had to check a few pages back and rephrase the search, These days whatever i search for the thing that i want i generally at the 3 position (1. being an ad. 2. is for some reason most often useless )
Hmm - don't know, but I can tell that https://duckduckgo.com has.
If they thought it was great, it was because they weren't listening to user feedback.
That said, the distinction between
Google account
G+ Account
Google Profile
I .. don't see what's changing. No reason to grab the pitchfork, but no reason for cheers or kudos either.
As far as I can tell, I have FIVE Google+ accounts (there may be more!):
1. Nickname email for friends
2. Real name email for family/jobs
3. A SECOND nickname account that somehow got created when I logged into YouTube one time
4. A SECOND real name account that somehow got created when I logged into YouTube some other time
5. The YouTube channel I shared with a friend, which has a Gmail account but inexplicably is only a single Google+ account unlike the two listed above
I honestly have no idea why 3 & 4 exist. They seem to have gotten created at some point for some reason I never understood.
In my eyes, the biggest problems with Google+ are:
* It's CONFUSING AS HECK. Just figuring out what an account is, or why it got created, is way more effort than I care about
* Their integration with YouTube was ridiculously not thought-out. Not in ANY way. They somehow seemed to think there was a 1:1 relationship users -> channels, when in reality it's a many:many relationship. Why did they think that? Why didn't anybody say, "uh, guys? A person can have more than one YouTube channel. And two people or more can run a single YouTube channel."
Everybody has done this sort of thing simply for blindly hopeful SEO reasons, surely?
If I'm forced to create a single account, now I have to take the time to understand how it works and what it exposes to the world. I have better things to do than to try to keep up with Google's business model du jour and anticipate the many ways they might alter the deal in the future to my disadvantage. It's so much simpler for me to do the worst thing for Google that they can possibly imagine, which is to ignore their offerings altogether.
I think that's how they ended up with a ghost town full of millions of unused Google+ accounts.
I thought I had it all sorted out, and started using separate browsers for each account. However, the company I work for have now decided to use gmail - so I'm back to having to clear my cookies all the time, and keep getting that "New sign-in from Chrome/Firefox on Window" spam.
Hmm - I wonder if this is also hurting their corporate customers?
Google messed up when it tried to make some master account with Google+. Maybe everything could be incorporated into one account, but the way they've done it is one of the most complicated and confusing systems I've seen in computer engineering, and that's pretty sad considering it's Google.
Take YouTube. When I go there now, I have my Google+ account, but I have my old YouTube account that has been consumed by the Google+ account, but yet it's still separate on YouTube?? Now when I use YouTube, I have to make sure it's my old YouTube account being selected instead of my Google+ one. Why is this so hard? What's going to happen to my old YouTube account when it gets owned by this new "Google Account"?
If you can't do this right, which is obviously an issue, then just keep everything separate. Stop Google-fying services that are separate.
This is extremely simple, and Google has made this horribly invasive and it's flat out broken at this point.
It is a gmail account. Every time you are prompted to enter your google account, what do you enter? Yup, it was that simple.
You're completely incorrect. You see how this actually is confusing!
A 'Google Account' is just a login that allows you to use a Google product. You can sign up with your own email address if you like. Go and try it:
> You're completely incorrect. You see how this actually is confusing!
This is historically inaccurate. I have never signed up for a Google Account and yet I have one.
Before Google+ and Google Apps existed as concepts, people had GMail accounts. Then along came other Google Apps, and GMail accounts were upgraded to Google Accounts which could do more than just GMail.
Fast forward a few years, and Google+ comes along, and confused the hell out of this even further.
Google had products that required accounts way before Gmail came along. Adwords started in 2000 and I think Google Groups started in 2001. I'm pretty sure I personally remember having an account for Google Groups before Gmail even existed, but I could be wrong.
I'm also certain I had a blogger account with Google back in 2003 sometime and Gmail didn't come along until 2004 for an April Fools day joke I think.
Yep, but you can't move from Gmail back to your own email address any more.
A "Google Account" is the same as your gmail account, which is likely the same as your Youtube account. This was true before Google+ came along.
The main reason (by far) Google unified them is so they they can more easily track everyone across multiple properties.
For many others (self included), the account integration is a killer feature.
Comparatively if I have to switch between my twitter accounts, it's way more convoluted than it needs to be on a PC/browser. Still, it used to be much much worse when going to their login page gave you a redirect to their app download page. It used to take me ages to locate a workaround.
"When we launched Google+, we were scared of Facebook winning over the internet and knew how powerful the network effect is. So we decided on a douchebag move - abuse all of our monopolistic powers and superior engineering in order to shove a Facebook killer down our users' throat at maximum speed, integrating it with each and every google service in existence (whether it made any sense or not) and killing social features that actually work in exchange to experimental G+ social features that might work eventually. According to our analytics, it didn't work, so... Never mind."
But maybe they tried signing up but failed getting a custom G+-url. We see that you registered google@gmail.com, but we can't let you use google.com/+google, why don't you use google.com/+google1425 and youtube.com/c/12868126nvesfz1761, which you can change to youtube.com/c/google6823_xw once you reach 500 subscribers.
In order to create a consistent online profile, it's ideal to choose a name which is available on all major social networks.
Google is just not capable of offering a service like that:
You can't check in advance if a given g+ or youtube name is available. If you sign up for a gmail-account, the new account newname@gmail.com doesn't mean you get youtube.com/newname or plus.google.com/+newname.
A custom youtube name oddly gets created at /c/username and not youtube.com/username and I somehow had to switch profiles (I think between my youtube account, for which I signed up using my gmail-account and my g+-profile which was created when signing up for gmail?!) while logged in into youtube to make changes which was extremely confusing.
Getting a custom g+url is even more difficult, as google adds some patronizing and suggests a name, which can not be edited.
Why is it not possible to register a consistent name accross all google products with 1 signup process: a gmail-account, a youtube username, a g+ account? Creating a new page or signing up at any other social media site maybe takes 5 minutes, the "Google experience" took 1 afternoon (!) with not the desired result.
You're also correct that this is something you'd think a company like Google would be able to execute well on. Well, you guessed wrong...
This probably has to do with the ease of setting up or subscribing to a mailing list with Google Groups, even despite how its usability has devolved. There aren't any free mailing-list services that are as easy to get up and running with--partly, of course, because almost everyone already has a Google account, making it trivial to join a group.
Still waiting for somebody to create a good mailing-list service based on "subscribe with GitHub" (i.e., OAuth) to take this all away from Google and crappy self-hosted Mailman both.
"Don't be evil, but only after trying really hard to be so, and then grudgingly accepting that perhaps your users have alternatives that they might avail themselves of, and capitulate"
It's not as catchy, but perhaps a little more honest.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/
I'm not saying that annoying people by forcing G+/YT integration is evil. But presuming that an annoyance to you is an annoyance to all is faulty.
Why is Google being singled out here?
Whether that qualifies as "evil" is semantics, but excusing it with a comparison to puppy kicking isn't valid. It's a fundamentally different kind of issue and requires a fundamentally different kind of reasoning.
(Also, presumably "half the people you happen to know who joined G+ that you circled" has some selection bias to it.)
Requiring a Google+ account probably still doesn't rise to those levels, but it's a lot closer.
The launch of Buzz was definitely somewhere on the thoughtless-evil spectrum, though. A major breach of trust, at the very least.
If it was greedy, annoying, and user-hostile, then yes--according to the context of Google's motto[1]--it could be considered evil. "Evil" in this case doesn't mean the same thing it does when we're talking about rapists, murderers, and Dow Chemical.
Well, Google did buy a company that makes military robots....
they saw that the most profitable info they could get was tagged pictures (in use even on their captcha service).
So they moved it out of G+, and forced everyone with an android phone to upload things for them with or without a g+ account.
that's another level of evil.
Genuine question: what do the videos I view, the apps I install on my phone, and the locations I search for have in common? And what's "social" about any of those?
Before there were always discussions with answers, nowadays you see mainly "check out this video my friends on G+" kind of "trash" in the video comments.
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2015/07/youtube-comments....
It also mentions improvements to the ranking system "that reduces the visibility of junk comments. It’s working—the rate of dislikes on comments has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube."...Is there a whitepaper or engineering blog post about their technical approach to this?
Why can't they for once be honest and say something like: "We wanted to get on the social network train, it did not work out".
Just without these corporate lies about "connecting people"
Incidentally, Android phones work fine with no Google account. If you buy the phone new and unlocked, click "Later" when it asks for your Google account, and delete the "Google first time activation" app, they're fine.
This includes Android phones: I don't know why people claim that they can't be used without a Google account, because I'm on my second, I've never put any Google account credentials into either one, and they've worked just fine. Can't use the app store, but I don't care about that anyway.
It's a mystery to me, whom they are targeting.
Does anybody like their UI? If so, what device are you using? What do you think of FB vs G+?
I mainly use Firefox on the Desktop. And Facebook is somewhat ok. G+ feels completely out of sync.
Now fb got little nicer, but a year ago it was a terrifying ugly mess. G+ is much nicer and more fun to use, in my opinion.
I love circles, and communities, and how it's post can be somewhere between a blog post and a tweet.
Google+ is being used by a lot of really interesting people with cool interests. The quality of content is very high. Well, it was, until Youtube got hooked into it.
And all that in a very freeform manner, in a way that makes it easy to find people with similar interests. To me, it's the closest thing to usenet since usenet.
What new value does Google+ add? Does anybody sign up for Google+ for reasons other than 1) Google Hangouts, or 2) accident? How is Google+ "quickly becoming a place where people engage..." and yet I don't know anybody who uses it? Am I hanging out with all the wrong people? I don't really actively engage with people on Facebook, but everybody I know uses Facebook in some capacity and people talk about it from time to time. I've never heard a single person in my life talk about Google+, other than, "I think you have to have a Google+ account to..." (e.g., Hangouts).
Am I hanging out with all the wrong people?
I don't watch big Bang Theory and I don't know who does but it's been on for 7 seasons and their cast is the highest paid on TV.
They were much too clever with YouTube - the whole "posting to your G+ feed is the same as commenting on the video" thing was a bone-headed idea. They're different intents, they should be handled differently. Let G+ handle both of those actions, but don't call them the same action.
The nymwars thing was another one - when you try to sneak new social integration through the back-door like that, with a massive existing userbase? You can't be opinionated about it. You have to accept and work with all the existing workflow, and that includes allowing pseudonyms.
I liked the idea of a unified social layer... hell, unified anything in Google's sprawling service map. But G+ had too many mistakes, and broke too many promises over and over and over again.
All were available.
Close to 2, or at least more than 1 year later - all those URLs are still available.
But no, Google still thinks I must add a digit or two to that URL. I had forgotten that I have a G+ profile. I don't know anyone who uses this. I mean I don't know about others but why would I even want to use such a tool that is this effed up. While some might defend or even be kinder to G+ (well...) but I personally just can't accept a service this broken.
I just as soon forget about it, but I'd like to have the google voice messages go to the Google Apps for Work email.
Probably how they were hoping/expecting people would act.
As someone on the internet, they can already crawl any publicly available data about me, including blog posts, tweets, forum posts, mailing list emails, and social network metadata like marital status, gender, etc.
Google+, in theory, doesn't really tell them they don't already know, or can't easily figure out already, so it's purely value add.
They're the most prolific internet crawlers anyway. The Pandora's box of my personal information is blown wide open (to them), so I'm just trying to contain the blast. They also have my search history, which is a better diary than I could ever purposefully write.
Information becomes more powerful when you connect all the dots together. Hence, it is better to divide information among services, so they all know a bit, but cannot decipher the "big picture".
Lot's of flowery, content-less, lovey-dovey text on their landing pages explaining why you have to do XYZ and what the implications are, that then never were exactly what I understood them to be. It only takes being confused once to stop giving a shit what they are writing and never trusting them again. Whenever I read anything from them now, I always think they are sugar coating some new pain they've decided to inflict.
Shit like that, added with, you have to accept it mentality. It's what gets people deranged and they want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So this blog entry just demonstrates to me they don't get it still.
Edit: Yes my mom is "mom" in my contacts. When I type in my sister's name, it does the same crap, it shows me everybody else with the same first name as my sister, but not my sister. WTF?
You can already share location on Hangouts, but it is deeply broken. Or do they mean "bring back Latitude"?
Not long ago I had experience where I had to meet online friend, we were on the same route, just different directions. It all went like sharing our current location every 5 minutes (with increasing frequency towards meeting point) and still managed to miss each other, because "you said your car was grey, but its silver!". Live location sharing is necessary for many workflows and there are tons of apps for that with disputable trustworthiness.
I hate facebook and can't use it, but g+ is really nice, and has all the best features of fb/twitter/tumblr. I'm still rooting for it.
This sounds like a sensible decision though.
As such, I've deleted my old Google + profile and started over with a new one. I enjoy sharing on the internet, but too many fragments tied together paints a picture of me I don't want to share.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5080630/youtube-co-founder...
they should've just listened to him
But I put question mark on the startegist of Google products they initiate step and move backward again and again.
Google is only alive due to Google search engine it self. It's my opinion.
Otherwise the way Google introduce things and all the time they are facing negative feedback on their new products.
Buzz, Orkut, Google Glass (not that much penetrate in market)
Hope Google will get some awesome minds now.
git merge --no-ff plus