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Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

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Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#161

Post by IanCal »

MaysonL wrote: post #154
magicalist wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard may be what you're looking for.

Thanks for that link: it taught me something interesting. Photos that I attached to a Gmail message were stored in my (never signed up for or desired) Picassa account. That is fucking batshit insane.

What is the difference? All they are doing is giving you a different way of accessing them. It's the same bloody company! It's not like they've created and passed the photos on to someone else, they're just in a bucket with "picasa" written on it.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#162

Post by IanCal »

dredmorbius wrote: post #160
IanCal wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> burning every other Google service and product to the ground I think this is a massive exaggeration. The people who don't care about linking their accounts (like me) aren't filling up the front page of HN with "The google plus thing is fine I guess" stories. I don't care if they ask for my phone number, I've got an Android phone so the data is all already there, and I like the security of having it text me to check…

If you think it's a first-world problem, ask yourself what the situation in a third-world or repressive government would be where all search and email traffic would be individually assignable and identifiable as it passed through the national firewall and surveillance systems.

What? It's the same sodding data, passed to the same company, how does merging two accounts that they already know are linked change anything?

Also, you can search without logging in, and sign up for as many different email accounts as you want. Are you honestly saying that google asking you to make a G+ account is a serious problem for activists?

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#163

Post by moon_of_moon »

So really the only way to identify high quality information is by what some would call "peer reviewed, authenticated content". That means you know something about the person who generated the content and a bunch of people (who you also know something about) review it and vote it up. Thats why a large percentage of high ranked search results come from wikipedia and stack overflow/exchange and quora.

LinkedIn and Facebook are leading the market in the authenticated peer reviewed content business, which is locked in to their platforms, and which search engines cannot index.

Extrapolate ten years down the line, and that means a scenario where existing search engine leadership is severely compromised.

And thats why the push for G+. Its do or die.

tl;dr: the goal is to have search access to authenticated peer reviewed content, and to mitigate the risk of existing market leaders in that space from cannibalizing the search business, and with it the lucrative advertising business.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#165

Post by tzs »

psn wrote: post #142
r0h1n wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if reproducing a dead comment violates some kind of unwritten HN guideline, but here it is: =============================================== Gthrowaway1 2 days ago | link [dead] The Google bashing is well deserved. Even people at Google despise Vic Gundotra (just check memegen.googleplex.com today), yet this incompetent figure is allowed to continue alienating users and driving Google's brand into the gro…

I can't help but feel that if someone deletes their comment, its polite to respect their wishes and keep the comment deleted.

I don't think that the person who posted that comment deleted it. I think his account got hell banned.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#166

Post by leoc »

dredmorbius wrote: post #66
jmillikin wrote: post #30

Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system. Management's stated reasoning goes something like: * It's silly to force users to have separate accounts for Google services because most users would prefer to have Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Calendar, and so on under the same account/identity. * Users who want to have separate public identities will create pseudonymous "Pages" for each of their identitie…

It's equally silly to force users who'd established and clearly indicated they wished to maintain separate accounts for separate services, to integrate these. Doing so where the user had clearly indicated they didn't wish that to happen was even worse. Forcing users to not be able to independently toggle whether or not services were enabled for an account is another. I neither want my pseudonymous G+ account ("Edward…

> It's equally silly to force users who'd established and clearly indicated they wished to maintain separate accounts for separate services, to integrate these.

[...]

> I neither want my pseudonymous G+ account ("Edward Morbius") nor my personal Gmail account(s) (unspecified) to have any association with YouTube.

I disagree: in principle, making services and identities orthogonal is clearly the right thing to do. Having (for example) three different, unlinked identities, any of which can use or not use GMail, G+ or YouTube at the user's discretion, is clearly preferable to having a YouTube account, a G+ account, and a GMail account. If pseudonymous identity A doesn't want to use YouTube, then "don't do that, then". If the user later decides that identity A should post a video to YouTube after all, he/she can just do so. Under the old system, that would require the user to either give away the connection between (say) the G+ account and the YouTube account, or to create a fourth account - a second YouTube account - for identity A to use on YouTube.

The problem is that in practise Google is making a bags of the transition to the new model (or what they're telling jmillikin the new model is) - whether through incompetence, or not caring enough, or because they're duplicitous in claiming that they really want to support multiple (externally-facing) identities per Google user.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#167

Post by gbog »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #115
jmillikin wrote: post #30

Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system. Management's stated reasoning goes something like: * It's silly to force users to have separate accounts for Google services because most users would prefer to have Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Calendar, and so on under the same account/identity. * Users who want to have separate public identities will create pseudonymous "Pages" for each of their identitie…

There's another thing Google hasn't quite figured out, nor have any of the other big players in this space (Maybe Microsoft will, under a new CEO). They have to commit to being conglomerates, not platforms (not at a user visible layer at least). They need to run a multi-brand strategy or these troubles will only get bigger as user communities get more diverse. Interconnecting all offerings of such a huge diversified…

That's a bit short. Consumers of coffee, biscuits, etc do not need to know their trademarks are owned by the same legal entity or their subsidies, nor would they benefit from this knowledge.

Completely the opposite with Google or Microsoft. You need to know that YouTube is Google because it has an impact on privacy things, and you arguably benefit from their link with single sign on, reduced complexity, unified notification center, etcetera.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#168

Post by return0 »

jmillikin wrote: post #30

Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system. Management's stated reasoning goes something like: * It's silly to force users to have separate accounts for Google services because most users would prefer to have Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Calendar, and so on under the same account/identity. * Users who want to have separate public identities will create pseudonymous "Pages" for each of their identitie…

Except YouTube has a separate identity. It's not ever google-branded. If people weren't told explicitly, it's not obvious that its a google site.

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#169

Post by [deleted] »

mbesto wrote: post #151
davidgerard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's relevant to ask in the context of "just what the hell do you think you're doing when you get up every morning to feed this thing? You do actually have to justify that."

Actually you don't. Let's stop pretending that any you can't trace any product/service back to something "evil". "Oh that MacBook you use for work...ya it was made in a sweatshop in China. How do you justify that?"

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users?

#170

Post by frostmatthew »

jrockway wrote: post #133
dizzystar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> While I know a lot of people by their online handles, I also know their real name, This can't possibly be true. I easily interact with 100+ people on various platforms. I don't know any of their names. I consider them "friends" in a way, but their real names are wholly irrelevant to me. >> if you're talking to your friends via YouTube No... You are having a discussion about the video. This is certainly not your fr…

I define friend as someone I'd invite over to my house. Those are the people I interact with on social networking sites and send YouTube links to. Discussion forums are, socially, a very different thing than hanging out with friends, even though they both involve people and saying things. That's what I think HN collectively misses when talking about Google+ or Facebook; they think those are Internet Discussion Forums…

> You have to understand that very few people are willing to write this much on the Internet for public consumption by total strangers -- we are very unusual people

Seems you're a bit out of touch with "usual people" - or at least "usual people" under the age of 35. I do agree HNers are unusual, but if anything I would say they are more likely to be concerned with what they share publicly, not less.

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