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Using Google without a Google+ profile

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Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#71

Post by marssaxman »

joeevans1000 wrote: post #20

Thank god. However, the G+ debacle was a wake up call to the fact that at any point the use of my good ol' email account and search page could become an absolutely complicated mess, and completely out of my control.

Makes me glad in retrospect I never switched over to gmail. My email experience hasn't changed in a decade but it still works just fine and I never have to worry that some megacorporation is going to arbitrarily change it out from under me in order to better pursue their corporate goals.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#72

Post by wyclif »

throwaway16384 wrote: post #31
chc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When you operate at Google scale, thinking about morality means trying to anticipate and aggregate the total effect of your actions. Requiring a unified publicly visible and "real name" discoverable identity associated with all (Google-owned) online activity can have huge chilling effects on significant demographics - generally not the demographics deciding these policies, building these systems, or even the most pro…

I've been using Google+ since the first day it was available; I figure about half the people I have circled are not using their real names.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#73

Post by Animats »

They mean "Using Google with a Google account but without a Google+ profile", not "Using Google without a Google account". Google pushes really hard for people to be logged into Google. Google search results pages have a whiny banner ad if you don't log into Google. (And it won't go away if you have their cookies blocked.)

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.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#74

Post by exodust »

nogridbag wrote: post #47

I find it incredibly amusing and also very frustrating that all the top comments to this article are simply G+ re-shares that add absolutely no value to the comments section and simply more garbage the reader has to sift through in order to view legit comments. >>"Google has been doing some rethinking" thanks I already read that >>"#googleplusupdate #youtube " thank you that was valuable >>[another summary of the art…

Yep, it's frustrating. Youtube comments really are hopelessly broken.

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.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#75

Post by nissehulth »

mkozlows wrote: post #12
marbletiles wrote: post #5

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.

They haven't thrown it away. It's still a shared Google Account For Everything. The distinction they're making now is that they're no longer requiring that account to be tied to a "G+ sharing stream" in a publicly exposed way, which was never the most essential part of anything for them.

Google Accounts were around long before Google+.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#76

Post by Yhippa »

beambot wrote: post #10
marbletiles wrote: post #5

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.

Grumble grumble... Google Reader... grumble.

Oh man did I have some great conversations about articles on Google Reader. My friends would share great articles to a common stream that we would fight over. It was so much fun because we could be honest without worrying about information leakage to friends, grandmas, and the public.

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.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#77

Post by alwaysdoit »

exodust wrote: post #74
nogridbag wrote: post #47

I find it incredibly amusing and also very frustrating that all the top comments to this article are simply G+ re-shares that add absolutely no value to the comments section and simply more garbage the reader has to sift through in order to view legit comments. >>"Google has been doing some rethinking" thanks I already read that >>"#googleplusupdate #youtube " thank you that was valuable >>[another summary of the art…

Yep, it's frustrating. Youtube comments really are hopelessly broken. 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 wha…

To be fair, it's not like YouTube comments were ever working well.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#78

Post by pjc50 »

skj wrote: post #54
msandford wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a line to be drawn between "don't be evil" and "don't do evil". With such a huge organization, things slip through the cracks and accidents happen that result in bad things. But I find it hard to believe that Google decided to out someone.

They were warned about the negative consequences of identity conflation, then built a system that did just that. They didn't "decide" to out someone, but they built a machine for outing people.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#79

Post by legohead »

This is confusing to me. What IS a "Google Account"? Is it my gmail? That makes no sense to me, it's an email service. A "Google Account" sounds like I work at Google. If you were to tell me I had a "Google Account", I would assume it's Google+.

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.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#80

Post by wyclif »

Yhippa wrote: post #76
beambot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grumble grumble... Google Reader... grumble.

Oh man did I have some great conversations about articles on Google Reader. My friends would share great articles to a common stream that we would fight over. It was so much fun because we could be honest without worrying about information leakage to friends, grandmas, and the public. I looked up some history behind Google+ on Wikipedia and it looks like Vic Gundotra was behind that (footnotes removed). > His respons…

Yeah, I was also a huge Google Reader fan for those reasons. But Google couldn't leave it alone or admit that it was its own social network with its own identity and unique character. Then they killed it. It was one of their products I used every day on the desktop, to get my news.

It seems there's something missing from BigCo's understanding of how social networks operate.

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