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.
This is a good step, although the well has already been poisoned.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
No company is immune to that cycle, not even Google.
I hope other sites learn from this and not jam social networks down people's throats.
Good example of Strong opinions, Weakly-held.
>>"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>
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki
Disaggregate content from commentary. That's the internet I want.
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.
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.
To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"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.
Requiring a Google+ account probably still doesn't rise to those levels, but it's a lot closer.
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.
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.
The launch of Buzz was definitely somewhere on the thoughtless-evil spectrum, though. A major breach of trust, at the very least.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5080630/youtube-co-founder...
they should've just listened to him
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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