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0 pointsams611011y ago0 comments

I don't use social media. Facebook, Twitter, the rest of them. So I wasn't ever a likely Google+ user. I do use Google Apps, Sites, and mail however, and what really annoyed me about Google+ and their big "identity" push was the insistence on trying to consolidate three separate Google "identities" together and sort of mush all of those things together. Those identities represent "me" in separate roles and responsibilites with separate organizations. There was no need and no desire on my part to have all of that merged under "one" Google identity. In fact I actively wanted to keep them separate. The amount of extra work I have to do to keep it that way (deleting cookies, maintaining separate browser profiles, etc.) is just needless pain they are imposing on me.

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dredmorbius11y ago

Quite. I even managed to land three top-of-the page HN posts on the same day on that topic: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1qsnks/dont_loo...

That issue hit quite a nerve, and it's been commented on at length in some of the news discussions. Ron Amadeo at ArsTechnica most especially:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/report-google-to-end-...

The social network hasn't gained the massive userbase it would need to rival Facebook, and the aggressive integration strategy has been universally hated by users. As Google gets bigger and bigger, it faces harsher scrutiny, and few things the company has done have been more disliked than Google+. According to the report, Google+'s YouTube takeover was seen as "a rocky move" even inside the company...

As a brand, Google+ is about at toxic as you can get.

Ouch.

As I'd previously commented answering Eric Schmidt's "My biggest mistake at Google was not anticipating social": No, Schmidt, your biggest mistake was failing to realize that vast hoards of highly detailed and categorized personal data are not only an asset, but a tremendous liability.

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_...

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