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Using Google without a Google+ profile

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Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#231

Post by dredmorbius »

brownbat wrote: post #223
dredmorbius wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I noted at the time, fixing a roiling cesspit by draining it into the freshwater supply is hardly a solution. YT comments should have been hauled out and shot. Not jackboot-forced onto other platforms as well.

Yeah, there was a project comparing YT comments with Metafilter comments at one point: http://comments.thatsaspicymeatball.com/ Looks like the latest comments are from Feb 2015, sad that it's not still live. Not a terrible quality snapshot though.

Metafilter's highly underappreciated.

Sometimes I think that's a good thing.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#232

Post by dredmorbius »

mkozlows wrote: post #221
dredmorbius wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of active G+ accounts -- publicly posting in any given month -- is less than that. I and Eric Enge, he of Stone Temple Consulting, have independently estimated this based on G+ sitemap sampling. I pulled about 50k profiles off a single sitemap, Enge 500k from multiple. My pull was based on strong evidence that the profiles are randomly distributed through sitemaps. Both of us found ~6-12m publicly active p…

That is a bad definition of "active," particularly considering that the original selling point of G+ relative to Facebook was its privacy controls (circles). I know many people who post to G+, only a few of whom do so publicly.

That is a bad definition of "active"

Both Enge and I address both the definition of "active" and of "invisible" non-public activity.

1. We're limited to directly observable public actvity. Given the sitemaps providing a population of profiles to sample, that means looking at actual public posts. Anything else would be Making Shit Up, which I prefer not to do.

2. It's possible get some sense of non-public activity by looking at followers and views for profiles with and without public activity. Evidence is that profiles without public posts have about 4.3% of the activity of those with. That gives roughly 4% of the total G+ userbase, or about 95 million users.

Again: showing activity at any time. That about doubles the active users count in total. (112 million + 95 million). It doesn't speak to recent activity, though.

My initial G+ "public activity" analysis: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ

Follow-up "active" public sharing accounts vs. "inactive" non-public-sharing accounts https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnK...

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#233

Post by pmontra »

tacone wrote: post #116
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…

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…

I also use a separate browser to log into Google for those customers that use Google Docs. Email is in Thunderbird with my own accounts, but I have a gmail account for YouTube and Gdocs (and Android, Analytics, ). I'll be happy to be able to have the option to separate the accounts of all Google properties as if they were from different companies. I don't need to share data among them and I don't log into them anyway unless I really need to do something (example: tell gmail to forward me invitations to share documents). Not the most common setup, that's sure.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#234

Post by ycosynot »

marssaxman wrote: post #154
Pxtl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are replying to users but the reply username doesn't match the display username. To be fair, Twitter suffers from this too.

Maybe that's part of the reason I can never figure out what's going on when I follow someone's link to a conversation on Twitter.

Twitter, I'll never understand... I have a theory you need the brain to be wired differently.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#235

Post by reagency »

try_sincerely wrote: post #157

"When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. " Why can't they for once be honest and say something like: "We wanted to get on the social network train, it did not work out". Just without these corporate lies about "connecting people"

Does "social network" mean anything more than the other buzzwords you derided?

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#236

Post by reagency »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #198
macintux wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the convenience, but that only works if you're willing to bare your soul to Google. If you want to have one identity for YouTube, a different identity for Gmail, and don't want Google to know where you are via Maps, that becomes much more problematic.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a browser that manages your various identities across multiple sites.

Chrome has had this feature for years. You can create separate Profiles for YouTube, Gmail, etc. I do this with Facebook to minimize exposure to the Like Button virus.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#237

Post by reagency »

silverbax88 wrote: post #85
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…

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.

Create a second Profile in your browser.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#239

Post by reagency »

silverbax88 wrote: post #211
colinbartlett wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we all know why they forced the unification of these accounts. So they can correlate our activity across services to "better serve us". (Read: serve us ads.)

Even if that is the goal (which is likely), it does not explain the need to force me to create accounts for applications I don't want, like Gmail. That's like going to a car dealership, buying a sedan and the dealership forces you to take five crates of crab apples with you at gunpoint.

It is more like a car dealership putting their dealership license-plate holder and the car make/model sticker on the back. And the crappy non-replaceable Navi system.

Re: Using Google without a Google+ profile

#240

Post by reagency »

arto wrote: post #192
realusername wrote: post #130

Can we talk a bit about Google Groups also ? Dear Google, please do something about Google groups... It's just unusable. Everytime I see a Google groups link I just don't click. The contrast is horrible, the padding is making 3/4 of the screen useless, it takes forever to load, when you click on something it's lagging again... And the worst part in all of this is that people are still using it, please do something ab…

> And the worst part in all of this is that people are still using it, please do something about it... This probably has to do with the ease of setting up or subscribing to a mailing list with Google Groups, even despite how its usability has devolved. There aren't any free mailing-list services that are as easy to get up and running with--partly, of course, because almost everyone already has a Google account, makin…

Yahoo Groups is still very popular.
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