Google+ GOING, GOING ... ? Newbie Gmailers no longer forced into mandatory ID slurp Google has quietly removed mandatory signups to its unloved "network thingy" Google+, which new Gmail users had been automatically shoved into when creating accounts on the ad giant's web-based email service. The Chocolate Factory was criticised by former employee and Digg founder Kevin Rose in January this year for linking …
Buzz, Wave and friends came and went. Some google products are lemons, others quite good - problem is they don't know which is which until they find out. Android and Chrome OS seem to be making positive headway, GMail and search obviously are getting it right, drive is fine, Sheets is actually pretty good for basic spreadsheets if a few of you want to work simultaneously etc.
Basically some hits some misses, just like every other company
or more like, some ideas well thought through, others with little deep thought and often with little desire to really push development to any significant degree. Normal effort risk balance that most businesses take on. Sadly most people "trying" these services don't go in with eyes open to the risks of that service being dumped
But this is a case of "Have a supremely bad idea, try it, fail, then RAM IT DOWN USERS' THROATS".
Well that worked brilliantly for Microsoft with Metro, so why shouldn't Google try? In the end, the users came around to their point of view, sales sky-rocketed, and so they made Sinofsky CEO. Then everybody lived happily ever after...
Well, there's Linux, and then there's Linux. Canonical , pretty much did a "Windows 8" with Unity.
Yes, I know you can use a different WM, but that is beside the point. They still blindly push ahead with a default user experience that is generally disliked by users.
They try some things... some win, some lose. I think it's like any of the other giants in the industry. After the PR and BS of rollout, it either works for users or it doesn't. Either way, the press and everyone else has an opinion and it gets expressed and it doesn't matter if it's Google, Apple, MS, Oracle, or who.
Since FB is currently at the top of the steaming heap, I suspect any social network will be compared and almost all will fail due to the momentum of FB. The public is fickle and the market gets sorted out accordingly.
I tend to agree to an extent - there seem to be a far lower amount of dribbling fucktards in some of the community groups.
The Linux user group is particularly good - patient, friendly and fairly open about other OSs.
Is it a Facebook beater? No. Is it useful? Yeah, it can be.
Steven R
Same here. I use the communities because that's all I really want from social networking, not endless blathering about the food you just ate at some trendy restaurant and the vacation you took that I can't afford.
The communities are actually pretty cool and *gasp* dare I say it? useful if you are discriminating and have somewhat good judgement.
Nope, i have a very good experience of google plus. I havnt needed facebook fir two years now. Most of my family and friends (that matter) are on it, and the circles i am in are full of interesting people. Certainly not your usual facebook pleb posts.
Google+ is a true breath of fresh air in social networks, social networking done right. If anyone in the press thinks its dying or a ghost town, they clearly dont know how to use it.
Just with any social network, you need to connect (circles in googleplus) and contribute. Looking at all of the registers staffers public posts, they dont do either.
I have started to use it in moderation, and found it quite OK. There are some useful groups on it, and I do not get bombarded with loads of idiocy. I also like to post the odd solar image on it. Not a Facebook or Twitter user, but I find G+ tolerable.
To make it more geeky, they should have called it Google++, of course, but that plan might have offended g++ users.
The system itself actually seemed pretty good, but the linking of all google services with it and requirement to use your real name (and trying to impose use of that on other services too) was a real pain and put me off using it. I ended up doing whatever I could to close my G+ account just because I had no idea what I was posting elsewhere would be re-posted there automatically
When I first got and Android phone, signing it up for Google Play also signed me up for cross-sell services like GMail, Drive and, yes, Google+. I do use Drive, but not the rest.
I don't use social media much to start with, and what I use it for, Facebook is sufficient and also where everyone I want to interact with in that way is found. Google+ thus served no purpose, and I considered it more unwanted "attack surface" for my online presence than anything, though I don't mean to suggest I was deeply paranoid about it.
Thus it was that I was pleased to learn how to disable my public Google+ profile. If anyone didn't know that was possible, ironically the best way to find the instructions is probably to Google "delete Google+ profile". You do want to read the instructions - some Google products are intimately linked and deleting your profile can delete other data, too, but most of the mainstream services like GMail and Drive are unaffected.
So I do wonder if they'll unlink automatically creating a Google+ account from any other of their offerings, since it's clearly not deeply integrated.
I certainly hope it gets decoupled from Google Play. I've been using Android long enough that my account doesn't have a G+ profile. This means, however, that I can no longer rate or review apps unless I submit to the borg and create one. I find this rather annoying, since I have zero interest in social media.
I tried used G+ as an alternative to Fecesbook, and it has lots of problems. For example, I have my monitor in portrait, and it often can't understand that my layout is taller than it is wide. I'll have 4 columns, of which I can only see 2-1/2 w/o scrolling horizontally.
Another real irritation is when I click my G+ bookmark and 70% of the time get a "here's lots of people you might want to add to your circles!" dialog which won't go away after repeated clicking. This means I can't actually get to my G+ content when I have a couple minutes to waste during a compile or something.
When you actually write a post, it'll see random links or site names, and decide to add all sorts of hashtags, images, previews, summaries, and other annotations. Half the time if you delete these annotations, it deletes the post.
I finally had to say fuck it, it's too much effort for something I didn't want to use anyway.
They can be big in a lot of areas. They don't need to be big in everything, and especially in the social media stuff they don't really need to be dominant in that. They might get more success if they allow people to hold on to their nicknames instead of pulling a Facebook and forcing everyone to use their real names. Sure, the whole "social media" stuff is a moneymaker because of the data slurp, but in this area Google doesn't really need to make money, they can simply hang the social media stuff on their servers which do other stuff that does give Google revenue, and keep users' privacy intact.
Come on Google, you can do it. You're already doing ads on GMail, you don't need to slurp ID data!
It means I no longer comment on YouTube, but I don't care. The balance to that is that there seem to be fewer 'fuk of u gay fag' / 'no ur gay faggot n die' blathering morons, and that's no bad thing. YouTube comments used to be the 7th circle of hell, now probably only around the 5th circle
Two tools I cannot live without.
Number one is AdBlock Plus. Adverts? What are they? That pulls the rug immediately away from Google -- no adverts no point! I'm still amazed they haven't outlawed it.
And the other is No Script. Have you seen how many other pages get linked to a page when you look at it? Consider telegraph.co.uk (NO -- I'm not an old crinkly Tory voter, but sometimes they do have something I want to read, or rather laugh at). No Script just shows how many other sites it blocks. That's comforting, knowing my HTTP GET requests are not going to their log files. [And if they are, I *always* delete all my cookies when I shut down Firefox, which I do regularly (coz of it's memory footprint :( -- but hey!)]
There you go life's sorted!
The forced google plus signon has reduced the trolling yes, but the way they've implemented it is idiotic. I follow several tech/science channels on youtube, and have done since long before the plussage. You now have to trawl through tons of "DESCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO: posted by J.Random.User via google+" 'comments' that aren't actually comments, youtube/google has just slapped them there for no clearly apparent reason.
Also, the dreaded 'troll' post appearing 'most popular' simply because it has the largest number of replies... all of which are telling the troll to FOAD.
And the fact some posts can't be replied to because of a setting on google plus somewhere that the user probably isn't even aware of.
Additionally: Some replies to my posts that I can't see because when I go to youtube, they're not there... and it turns out that they were actually on google+ and I'd have to go there to even SEE them and reply to them and so forth. Ugh
All of these problems more than 'make up for' the positives, I'm afraid
Can't agree with some of the methods they have imposed to push its membership up but I do actually like G+. This of Facebook without the bad bits. No advertising in the newsfeed, no promoted posts, no stupid game alerts or sign ups. How long it would stay like that if successful is obviously a concern.
The thing I like most is, if I publish a post everyone in my circle sees it! On Facebook I think I see about 5% of the posts of organsations and pages I am a member of (have to make room for the ads somewhere). When will Facebook realise when subscribe to a page or organisation it's because I WANT/NEED to receive their posts. If I don't want them any more I can unsubscribe, if they send out too many, I will unsubscribe. It should be my choice.
Facebook has made itself unusable for groups and organisations who need to ensure that every members see the information and this is where G+ is making gains (IMHO).
Yet another writer who hints that Google+ is on the way out because nobody likes it and presumably few use it.
All they have done is to stop reminders to update your G+ profile. You still have one. In the same way, you still have Drive space, Calendar, a YouTube account and do on. An enormous number of people over the age of 35 will have no use for anything except email. They will have no interest in YouTube and telling them about Drive is pointless. Few people have use for it. Like my fellow geeks, I use the lot but it will take a generation before this sort of thing gets anywhere near universal.
What is G+ for? Lots of interesting news and discussions about anything you like and a lot you probably don't like. Finding interesting people all over the world. The fact that it links nicely to Google Translate means that I can discuss things with people I have no common language.
Is it a ghost town? Emphatically no. I could spend 25 hours a day on it. There is everything on there from fantastic photographers showing how it can be done to developers and even some extremely strange US political conservatives. Winding them up by telling them how I work for the NHS and how fantastic it is can be really funny!
... An enormous number of people over the age of 35 will have no use for anything except email. They will have no interest in YouTube and telling them about Drive is pointless. Few people have use for it. ...
I'm retired, but volunteer to teach computing to retirees. Many of our pupils do use e-mail, but almost all of them like and use YouTube. Mostly they had heard of YouTube but (Perhaps because their children and grandchildren think that YouTube is not for old people), we have to demonstrate that you can get real music (from the 1950s-1980s) on it for free. Other YouTube resources that are appreciated include demonstrations of DIY, knitting, handcrafts, etc.
Not so much interest in G+ news and discussions though.
Spanners stated:-
"In the same way, you still have Drive space, Calendar, a YouTube account and do on. An enormous number of people over the age of 35 will have no use for anything except email. They will have no interest in YouTube and telling them about Drive is pointless."
I am way, way older than 35 and use Drive all the time as well as YouTube and Calendar features heavily on my smartphone. Ageist remarks like the above are not appropriate in this forum.
Well its obvious, its a game where you click on all the random bits and if you win you actually get to where you were trying to go in the first place, sadly I only seem to win about once every 9 attempts. Perhaps I should practice more, RTFS does not seem to help.
Now where the hell is that photo of my cat I was looking for...
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