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Dear Googles: Stop asking

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221–230 of 261 posts

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#221
The decision makers, and most people who work at Google probably don't see this problem. They just hand over the information and move on.

It's like the Delta Airlines management team who had a special bus to the airport and a hole in the fence to go straight to their first class seats in their airplanes, or senior Apple employees who (less so now) appeared to never to actually travel outside California and London.

If you don't see a problem you will never fix it. Google and Facebook folks are content with living inside their bubble, while the rest of us get more and more frustrated and use their products less and less.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#222
post #136

I am happy Google is pushing lots of annoying questions to remind everyone there is no reason to be logged in to Google to view Youtube videos.

There are some videos, generally flagged for violence, which cannot be viewed unless you're identified to the service. A surprising number of breaking news story coverage is unavailable on those grounds.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#223
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why people talk about huge corporations like they have hive mind and are in total unity? Google is now a mega-corp, comprised of thousands competing for finite success outcomes (raises & promos). It is also data driven hence they look at metrics that are considered success like registers over abandonments. Brand tarnish is a long term outcome, therefore it can not be seen in typical a/b testing cycles.…

By all accounts the consolidation and Plusification of Google's services is being driven from the top, by Larry Page specifically.

Do you have any specific references to those accounts?

The consistency and duration of the push certainly makes it appear to me to be a top management directive. Which is among the reasons my faith and trust in the company has fallen so drastically as I've watched its G+ offerings evolve.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#224
post #122
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem comes from the fact of treating Google+ like any other social network like Facebook. Google+ is supposed to be an identity layer for all of Google. The fact that they have status update posting, etc is secondary. Google would like to assign a face, name and phone number to every Google account. And why is that? For various reasons. A face and a name is very valuable for targeted ads. And a phone n…

If that's the case, why not be up front about it?

Has Google ever gotten marketing right?

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#225
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search , turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fu…

We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived. The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, wh…

True. And the people objecting against the whole G+ / YouTube integration are probably the early adopters that could lead the herd.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a bad plan comes from a famous person doesn't make it any less of a bad plan. In the spirit of Google: +1 for people and +2 for companies now actively moving away from almost all Google properties because they're becoming so unpleasant and/or unproductive to use. I know they're all about being data driven and running empirical tests: that's why the {expletive deleted} page moves around every time I come back and…

Do you have any proof that significant number of people are moving away from almost all Google properties? This sounds very anecdotal.

I've got little more than anecdata to contribute as well.

Personally, I make use of some Google products but have been very consciously trying to shift away from them. Too much data, too long a retention period, and too obvious a target for snoops (ours, theirs, black hats). I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect.

A few years ago, now, I was at a conference largely serving NGOs and the question of cloud computing came up. The idea was fairly novel then, and I expected the discussion to focus on technical aspects -- "how do we move our services to the cloud" type questions. Nuh uh.

It was virtually all about privacy, data control, jurisdictional control, and other legal issues, as well as some discussion of lock-in and similar issues. Now, I think of these things, and they come up on a corporate context, but for these people, many of whom deal with refugees, undocumented aliens, whistleblowers, and others basically in fear for their livelihoods if not their lives, these were all very, very real issues. And this was years before Snowden's disclosures.

Mind, I've followed online privacy issues for a few decades (and butt heads regularly with Lauren Weinstein on G+ over how significant Snowden's leaks were -- I say they're tremendous, he generally claims otherwise), but this level of direct awareness and concern in a largely non-technical audience was eye-opening.

For myself:

I decided to check out G+ and have stayed with it (though I quickly deleted my Real Name account). It has mostly not been particularly useful ... until early in 2013 where I found that rather than commenting about G+, I was actually using it to engage on other topics. I still see it as flawed (and quite possibly fatally so) in conception, but the technical underpinnings are very solid: the back-ends are fast, stable, and highly reliable, and even with rapid and continuous development the site rarely if ever breaks.

Utility-wise it's been another story. The DOM is so bloated I can rarely keep more than a tab or three open (and constantly have to re-kill those to reclaim RAM), the interface is atrocious, the underlying data and interactions models are utterly broken, and more (I've posted long rants many times, they're on my G+ profile, and I'm really beyond caring now). I went to the extent of very extensively modifying the UI through a monster (nearly 2000 lines) CSS stylesheet fixing endless annoyances (to be fair, I do this to many sites, HN included, but none is as extensive as G+). Adding joy to this is Google's obfuscated CSS (it's run through some sort of minimizer) which does wholesale class renaming periodically.

But other than G+ I've been trying to cut Google out. I set DDG as my search engine, returning to Google for a while before committing again this past June. The results are actually quite good, and though I return to Google occasionally, the bulk of my search is DDG.

I've got an Android device tied to Google as well, which I'd very much like to replace with something independent of it.

I make use of a few other services, though mostly not logged in.

And it's not that Google doesn't provide utility. I just have very serious problems with it (or anyone else) watching every breath I take.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#228
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me see if I understand you: The revelation of the NSA's activities made you fearful and so you decided to make fake Google accounts with fake phone numbers to alleviate those fears. All from the same IP address? How exactly does this help keep your identity safe? Because they don't have your phone number tied to your account? How many times have you put your phone number in your emails to people? I looked, and ov…

this action doesn't keep me safe, IPs are the same, behaviour is the same, search terms don't change, etc. All i'm saying is that the entire prism story, corporations not making an effort to keep users data safe, constant ad spam because i'm in the "ideal consumer" age range and location, etc, made me rethink how i present myself to google (and other services such as FB). i can only encourage you to simply change you…

If I'm going to get spam, I'd rather get spam targeted towards me vs. a 70 yr old woman

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#229
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but once trust starts to erode, the effects of it may not be seen for a few years. And once lost it's extremely difficult to get back. I certainly get the feeling that Google's halo is slipping.

During the nymwars, I saw techies moving to Bing for search. Bing for search! That's when you know your brand is going toxic.

I'm considering Hotmail over Gmail.

I you how much the thought pains me.

Though I'll likely end up with a smaller provider somewhere. Gandi.net or Sonic.net both have very strong pro-privacy and freedom reputations.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my issue. G+ isn't much of a hassel to me as I avoid it but its practically impossible to stop using youtube. From the another thread here are two semi-solutions for now: http://fixyt.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta , Never really thought about it before but Google definitely has the video market locked. Vimeo, dailymotion, liveleak, et al don't even come close in terms of content.

My main issue is the things damn insistence on flash. I want my MacBook battery to last. My recent solution has been to enable developer mode, change user agent to iPad, and all is well. But why the hell does it just flat out refuse to play when you don't have flash installed - even though it can?

There's youtube-dl which supports a whole slew of video sites and updates really quickly when things break. This lets you download content locally, play it via your choice of player, and avoid a whole mass of embedded-browser-player issues. It's generally my preferred route for playing videos, though I'll generally preview a few minutes (or watch shorter ones entirely) in a browser.

The negative of non-Flash movies (YouTube has some) is that they auto-play. Few things annoy me faster than sound coming from a background tab. I generally close them immediately (I usually queue up stuff to look at).

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