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Using Google without a Google+ profile

googleblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#81
Why is this not a Google+-post?! Why should we use it if even google isn't using it?

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.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#83
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, because I've been thinking, "They already know so much already anyway." Probably how they were hoping/expecting people would act.

I'm an Android user, they can already see my contacts, thus they can already deduce who I know. 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…

Exactly my reasoning. Also an Android user.

They're the most prolific internet crawlers anyway. The Pandora's box of my personal information is blown wide open (to them), so I'm just trying to contain the blast. They also have my search history, which is a better diary than I could ever purposefully write.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#85

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 mo…

I wish they would just get it right, and let me create different accounts for the apps I want to use. I just want a YouTube account. No Gmail. No G+. No tying my adwords account to anything else unless I request it.

This is extremely simple, and Google has made this horribly invasive and it's flat out broken at this point.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#86
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Reader never had many users. Feedly claims to have captured 80% of the Reader userbase when it shut down, and they have 15 million users. That is incredibly small by the standards of social networks, much smaller than even the pessimistic active-user estimates for G+.

Feedly probably isn't claiming those numbers with any basis in reality. In particular, many people made Feedly accounts in a hurry out of panic when the shutdown was announced. Having used both, I highly doubt users of Reader are still regular users of Feedly.

I'm a former Reader user and now use Feedly. What do you use that's better than Feedly? I settled on it since it was "good enough" but I haven't invested the time to explore other options.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#88
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is them finally admitting they were being evil. They put their empire and monopoly ambitions (defeat Facebook and dominate social networking as they do search and ads) ahead of the actual interests of their users.

I see this as them admitting "hey, we tried to bring our users we thought was something really great, as it turns out, they didn't agree with us so much, so now we're not going to do that anymore."

That comes across like marketing speak that does not in any way reflect the aggressiveness that Google tried to push G+ and it's features on google/youtube/misc google service users. I personally held back for about a year before youtube insisted I assign a blank G+ profile to my youtube account or I will lose my commenting prividges, so I lost the ability to comment until one day they just made me a profile anyway.

I've personally lost a lot of respect for them and I know a lot of people that feel the same way. It went way beyond offering a new product to people to see if they liked it or not.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G+ has not required a real name for a while now. 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…

> 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. G+ tried to solve this with Circles, but as far as I can tell, everything related to YouTube was assumed to be public on G+ be…

That's an interesting read, but I fail to see how it has anything to do with Google+.
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