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Using Google without a Google+ profile

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Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#111

Post by balladeer »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15
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.

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…

Seeing some of the extremely stupid limitations they put on G+, right since the beginning, I doubt they were even thinking of beating or equalling Fb without actually have lost their faculties.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#112

Post by PuffinBlue »

baby wrote: post #94
legohead wrote: post #79

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…

> 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+. It is a gmail account. Every time you are prompted to enter your google account, what do you enter? Yup, it was that simple.

> It is a gmail account.

You're completely incorrect. You see how this actually is confusing!

A 'Google Account' is just a login that allows you to use a Google product. You can sign up with your own email address if you like. Go and try it:

https://accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#113

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#114

Post by Twirrim »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15
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.

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…

Besides that, the other most significant thing was the lack of open API for it.

They fail to understand that people at the time wanted to consume it in their own way (and still do, to some extent).

At the time G+ came to exist people loved it. They wanted the conversations like that. They liked the circles idea (at the time Twitter didn't have lists or any such concept), and it's still better than what the other social media services have.

But to use it you only had the choice of the G+ app, or the website, which wasn't how people were consuming social media. They were using things like TweetDeck to connect to multiple services so that they could consume their social media stream, especially businesses.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX (Steve Yegge's rant still seems to apply 3 years later)

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#115

Post by rayalez »

helly wrote: post #30

To me, the UI of Google+ feels so bulky and slow. Everything seems to be out of place. It's a mystery to me, whom they are targeting. Does anybody like their UI? If so, what device are you using? What do you think of FB vs G+? I mainly use Firefox on the Desktop. And Facebook is somewhat ok. G+ feels completely out of sync.

Yes, I like their interface, design and functionality much more than I like fb.

Now fb got little nicer, but a year ago it was a terrifying ugly mess. G+ is much nicer and more fun to use, in my opinion.

I love circles, and communities, and how it's post can be somewhere between a blog post and a tweet.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#116

Post by tacone »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15
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.

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…

It will take them a fair bit to recover from the real name enforcement. People got sick of that.

I, for instance, after the second or third time Youtube tried to (literally) trick me into allowing it to display my real name, decided to log out permanently. Now I have another browser totally dedicated to GMail, and use my normal one for the rest of my surfing, Google Search and Youtube included. This raises the entry barrier to use many Google services quite a bit, since I'm logged out more often than not.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#117

Post by nileshtrivedi »

hyperpallium wrote: post #57
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why did they need real names anyway? 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.

Without a real name, they cannot link you to your insurance, tax payments, investments etc.

The thing with tracking people, they ALWAYS want more data.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#118

Post by JoeAltmaier »

[deleted] wrote: post #113
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…

[deleted]

Ouch! Leave my mother out of it!

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#119

Post by balladeer »

dimbirol wrote: post #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.

Yes. This is exactly where I had kinda foresaw G+ was going down, either today or some other day in near future.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#120

Post by davidcgl »

frik wrote: post #55
mkozlows wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

G+ lost because Google forced G+ to every Google account. Post something to Youtube, you silently created a G+ post. Upload something to Picasa, you silently published the photo to your G+ newsfeed, etc. - quite toxic. And have they learned from their Google Buzz (G+ predecessor)? Nope, same behavior. I have somewhat similar feeling about the upcoming Win10 launch, and in near future a lot normal user will learn the…

G+ wanted to be a rendezvous for all social/sharing activities on Google, and it turned out that many users didn't like it. Would G+ have fared better if it didn't force G+ onto every Google property? Maybe? It's easy to do armchair analysis, but hindsight is 20/20.
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