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Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

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Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#161

Post by kibwen »

scrame wrote: post #155
kibwen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't > reading sites like HN. Anecdote: a decidedly non-technical friend of mine with the last name of "Star" had his Google+ profile disabled after having his name falsely classified as a pseudonym. The only Google+ service that he actually cared about using was Hangouts (a sentiment universal among my friends, it seems... despite its faults, Hangouts really is b…

Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell My S4 updated from gtalk to hangouts, and I loathe it. It now crashes quite regularly, sometimes multiple times in a single chat session, and included a stupid button that starts a video chat on my phone, a feature I have never wanted and never will want, but manages to get fat-thumbed, or randomly turn itself on when I am trying to communicate with someone.

I should have clarified: best-in-class for what my friends and I need, which is essentially simultaneous multi-user voice chat that doesn't require installing an external program (if they have Chrome, it doesn't require installing anything at all), works on all platforms, doesn't mandate a laborious microphone calibration on first use, and has pretty decent echo cancellation. We were just looking to replace Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble, rather than e.g. looking for a replacement for Skype. It's been invaluable as a permanent place for our geographically-distributed friend group to idly loiter and connect to whenever anyone has a free moment.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#162

Post by makomk »

watwut wrote: post #133
wtbob wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential. Or worth being influenced by…

Any time you use your real name, real HR or potential employer sees what you did. I do not want my chance to find work be influenced by random HRs opinions on what google play games I rated or which youtube videos I have in playlist. Nothing really controversial there, but people tend to be judgmental about details. Forcing me to use real name means that I suddenly must be super careful about everything and control e…

Yeah, and Google+ launched at around the same time this issue was already getting quite a lot of negative attention, including in the mainstream press and media as I recall.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#163

Post by kibwen »

gwillen wrote: post #153
kibwen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to being safe, understandable, and wrong, it was completely out of touch. Did nobody stop to think why people would ever elect to use MetalHead444 over their real name in the first place? The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.

The engineers -- the ones down in the trenches -- practically revolted over it. The decision was purely from On High, i.e. managerial. It came down from the highest levels.

Glad to hear it. I apologize to Google's engineers for my uninformed implication.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#164

Post by eitland »

saidajigumi wrote: post #34

> Former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview at the D conference in 2011 that he missed the boat on the rise of identity on the Internet. > “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.” I think Eric screwed up in a deeper way that this quote admits. Google+ came up at a time of broader dissatisfaction with other social networks, pa…

The easy nym fix is to create a "page" with your handle. The "page" can post, comment on YouTube etc. Not heavily advertised though, I only became aware of it when I had to give up my old YouTube account.

You can easily switch between main account and nym account and you only need one password.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#165

Post by traek »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #110

I like G+ for the photo back-up from my Android phone. In fact, that seems to be the killer feature. I wonder what will happen to G+ if Facebook adds a similar feature. The stream is interesting if you add enough people and organizations, but I find I can go for days or weeks without checking it. I know some people spend all day on G+, but it's unclear to me why. Between FB, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a host of other…

> I like G+ for the photo back-up from my Android phone. In fact, that seems to be the killer feature. I wonder what will happen to G+ if Facebook adds a similar feature.

You'll probably find this interesting, then: https://www.facebook.com/help/photosync

Google+ Auto Backup is still far ahead of Facebook's solution for me, though, because of its superior online photo editing and automatic touch-ups.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#166

Post by walshemj »

gwillen wrote: post #153
kibwen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to being safe, understandable, and wrong, it was completely out of touch. Did nobody stop to think why people would ever elect to use MetalHead444 over their real name in the first place? The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.

The engineers -- the ones down in the trenches -- practically revolted over it. The decision was purely from On High, i.e. managerial. It came down from the highest levels.

Who strangely enough for people who presumably know a lot about the internet and online didn't seem to understand why people might have completely different online personas and identities.

I have friends from the pre Internet online communities (telecom gold and Prestel) who would probably not even know my real name as we went by handles I even have a dedication using that name in a booker (think uk version of the Pulitzer prize) shortlisted authors book about that time "cybergypsies" by Indra Sinha.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#167

Post by walshemj »

igorgue wrote: post #37

Sorry if I'm asking a stupid question, but: How come all these "internal memos" always leak? Is it fine to share an internal email without getting in trouble at a public company?

Politics you know the 8th layer of the OSI stack :-)

Normally some one has a line they want to run and have their friends in the media to spin stuff to its the same in politics.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#168

Post by ams6110 »

zippergz wrote: post #65
saidajigumi wrote: post #34

> Former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview at the D conference in 2011 that he missed the boat on the rise of identity on the Internet. > “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.” I think Eric screwed up in a deeper way that this quote admits. Google+ came up at a time of broader dissatisfaction with other social networks, pa…

My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users. I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't reading sites like HN. Those people still don't use Google+, but it's because none of their friends were there, they found Circles confusing, and they didn't see any real benefit to taking the effort to learn about it. Social networks have a lot of inertia…

I don't use social media. Facebook, Twitter, the rest of them. So I wasn't ever a likely Google+ user. I do use Google Apps, Sites, and mail however, and what really annoyed me about Google+ and their big "identity" push was the insistence on trying to consolidate three separate Google "identities" together and sort of mush all of those things together. Those identities represent "me" in separate roles and responsibilites with separate organizations. There was no need and no desire on my part to have all of that merged under "one" Google identity. In fact I actively wanted to keep them separate. The amount of extra work I have to do to keep it that way (deleting cookies, maintaining separate browser profiles, etc.) is just needless pain they are imposing on me.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#169

Post by zmmmmm »

cookiecaper wrote: post #86
qq66 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real-name policy itself was only known by a small group of people. However, the idea that G+ would be a place for a your One True Identity was directly attacking Facebook, which is not the way in which Facebook was vulnerable. If they had built the entire product (not just the real-name policy) around the idea of pseudonyms or ephemeral identities or multiple identities like Reddit, they may have found more succe…

Google doesn't want to be reddit.

But therein lies the problem: people clearly want Reddit. Companies succeed when they find a significant niche where their interests happen to align with that of their users / customers in a significant way. When a company starts putting its own needs ahead of its users that's a huge danger sign for its future. Google arrogantly thought that they could put their own needs first and if they just shove it hard enough at people they can win with brute force. I think that's a terrible mistake.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#170

Post by wtbob »

magicalist wrote: post #157
wtbob wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like G+ for the photo back-up from my Android phone. See, I don't use any of Google's 'let us manage your plaintext data' services except for mail (because email travels in the clear anyway, I'm not too bothered by that). If they would enable me to store my phone, tablet & app settings, Chrome passwords and backed-up data on their servers, encrypted on the client with a key known only to clients I control, then i…

Chrome sync (including passwords) can all be encrypted on the client. Just go to settings -> Advanced sync settings -> "Encrypt all synced data with your own sync passphrase". Also, if you're this worried, you really owe it to yourself to put in a little effort on your email. Email is often not transmitted in the clear, especially if you're using gmail already, and if you would just switch to a desktop client and IMA…

I'm aware of the Chrome sync passphrase. If I used Chrome on Android (I don't—I use Firefox), would Chrome back my passphrase up to Google's systems? I dunno.

Is the crypto behind Chrome's sync anywhere near as good as that behind Firefox's? Not last time I looked.

I'm also aware that email often travels via SSL—but it's always cleartext to the sending and receiving hosts. I don't see that I'm suffering an especial risk with Gmail, since someone will always have plaintext versions of all mail I receive; I would be were I backing up data to them which I would never back up to anyone.

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