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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.
It's incredible how lightly they have thrown away the Google+ Account For Everything stance given how merciless they were in imposing it at the time. The wails from YouTube in particular have only just died down. 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.
I hope other sites learn from this and not jam social networks down people's throats.
It's incredible how lightly they have thrown away the Google+ Account For Everything stance given how merciless they were in imposing it at the time. The wails from YouTube in particular have only just died down. 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.
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Your system of morality has an astonishingly low bar for "evil" if "requiring a Google+ account for access to a service" qualifies. I don't think something that harmless would go past "somewhat dickish" for most people. If that's evil, what's the word you use for people who kick puppies or otherwise cause harm to the world?
Is outing someone against their will and possibly ruining their life merely "somewhat dickish"? 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.
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The Nymwars is why Google+ lost, but they'll never admit it.
Facebook has, and has long had, a real name policy. If you want a reason why Facebook succeeded and G+ didn't, you'll need something that's actually different between them.
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.
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Your system of morality has an astonishingly low bar for "evil" if "requiring a Google+ account for access to a service" qualifies. I don't think something that harmless would go past "somewhat dickish" for most people. If that's evil, what's the word you use for people who kick puppies or otherwise cause harm to the world?
I think chc has a good point. The G+ debacle was greedy, annoying, and user-hostile, but _evil_? Really? 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.
It's incredible how lightly they have thrown away the Google+ Account For Everything stance given how merciless they were in imposing it at the time. The wails from YouTube in particular have only just died down. 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.
Honestly, I think the sticking point on most of it was the Real Name policy. Had they stopped the delusion from the outset that they could be a Facebook competitor and simply made Google+ a correlating landing page for your online persona, rather than your real identity, I think it would have worked. I wouldn't necessarily mind everyone knowing that AdmiralAsshat likes Black Sabbath music videos on Youtube, hangs out…
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.
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Your system of morality has an astonishingly low bar for "evil" if "requiring a Google+ account for access to a service" qualifies. I don't think something that harmless would go past "somewhat dickish" for most people. If that's evil, what's the word you use for people who kick puppies or otherwise cause harm to the world?
The word "Evil" in Google's motto doesn't refer to puppy-kicking or kitten-drowning or armed robbery. It was a reaction to the typical bad behavior of corporations trying to squeeze another couple of points out of their profit margins in customer-hostile ways; to monopolies throwing that monopoly power around; to companies bundling crapware with their goods. Things like that. Requiring a Google+ account probably stil…
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.
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The Nymwars is why Google+ lost, but they'll never admit it.
Facebook has, and has long had, a real name policy. If you want a reason why Facebook succeeded and G+ didn't, you'll need something that's actually different between them.
When you're providing a platform, you can't afford to be opinionated.