Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system. Management's stated reasoning goes something like:
* It's silly to force users to have separate accounts for
Google services because most users would prefer to have
Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Calendar, and so on under the
same account/identity.
* Users who want to have separate public identities will
create pseudonymous "Pages" for each of their identities.
These pages will still be owned by the same account, so
the user only has to log in once.
* Users who are strongly opposed to a unified Google account
are a sufficiently small population that it is acceptable
to inconvenience them if doing so improves the experience
of every other user.
By itself, these arguments are reasonable and could probably have been implemented without too much trouble (though "Pages" continues to be a confusing and unclear term). The problem is that the new account system was introduced at the exact same time as a social network, with the /same name/, and that the social network decided to inject a hard requirement of Facebook-style name validation rules into the new profile system.
Now the term "Google+" has become so strongly connected with the Google+ social network (and its infamous names policy) that any attempt to expand the Google+ account system is met with fear and outrage. I don't think upper management expected this or understands why the community reacted thus, just as they didn't expect or understand why requiring a Firstname Lastname format on the Internet was problematic.
I don't believe Google+ management is malicious, but they do seem woefully unaware of how internet-native communities behave.
It's equally silly to force users who'd established and clearly indicated they wished to maintain separate accounts for separate services, to integrate these.
Doing so where the user had clearly indicated they didn't wish that to happen was even worse.
Forcing users to not be able to independently toggle whether or not services were enabled for an account is another. I neither want my pseudonymous G+ account ("Edward Morbius") nor my personal Gmail account(s) (unspecified) to have any association with YouTube. I simply cannot independently disable the latter, and my data leaks across the services.
I've consequently been experimenting with setting up hostfile blocks of various Google services. I'm in a weaning-off phase right now (I'm trying to unwind my Google presence rather than just nuke it entirely in one go), and I can assure you it's painful. A proxy front-end to YouTube would be helpful. I already have been making extensive use of youtube-dl largely because the UX sucks vastly less than running YouTube through a browser (and in some related side commentary I've seen references that other folks offering streaming vs. downloaded video saw 4x the downloads than streams, for, I suspect, similar reasons).
So, the fact is that Google outed me (fortunately, a pseudonymous profile), despite my clearly indicating repeatedly "no" (and documenting some of those "no's" in earlier G+ posts. I'd even brought this up on a post of Yonatan Zunger's, and, despite his really well-inentioned "Edward Morbius Hrm? If you want to keep the names separate, why not simply click on that option?" response (and I've really got no reasons to doubt his sincerity), 1) the option isn't presented, 2) the workflow I'd think I'd go through doesn't accomplish what I'd expect, and 3) I've reached the stage of a) having lost my trust in the company to respect my privacy wishes and settings in future and b) not wanting to continue jumping through hoops to fix what they broke in the first place.
I don't know what the hell's going on with Google's management team, but something's badly broken. And I do agree with you that they utterly fail to understand the social aspects of communities.
> It's equally silly to force users who'd established and clearly indicated they wished to maintain separate accounts for separate services, to integrate these.
[...]
> I neither want my pseudonymous G+ account ("Edward Morbius") nor my personal Gmail account(s) (unspecified) to have any association with YouTube.
I disagree: in principle, making services and identities orthogonal is clearly the right thing to do. Having (for example) three different, unlinked identities, any of which can use or not use GMail, G+ or YouTube at the user's discretion, is clearly preferable to having a YouTube account, a G+ account, and a GMail account. If pseudonymous identity A doesn't want to use YouTube, then "don't do that, then". If the user later decides that identity A should post a video to YouTube after all, he/she can just do so. Under the old system, that would require the user to either give away the connection between (say) the G+ account and the YouTube account, or to create a fourth account - a second YouTube account - for identity A to use on YouTube.
The problem is that in practise Google is making a bags of the transition to the new model (or what they're telling jmillikin the new model is) - whether through incompetence, or not caring enough, or because they're duplicitous in claiming that they really want to support multiple (externally-facing) identities per Google user.
If Google wanted to offer combined accounts going forward, that would be fine by me. Though I'd also prefer the option of disaggregated accounts, and of disabling specific services on accounts.
If they wanted to offer the option of merging existing accounts for which there was an underlying connection, that would also be fine. Though I'd really prefer they not do it with interstitials.
Merging identities in express violation of stated intent, or simply not offering the option to decline, is simply wrong, and will inevitably turn into a major PR disaster, as this is.
I've installed SRWare Iron [0] as a sandbox browser for GMail, Facebook, Twitter et al. It is a privacy conscious fork of Chromium (no data sent to Google except when you visit Google sites). It lags a bit behind the official release, but it's good enough for that purpose.
I use Firefox for the rest of my browsing, signed out of these services, and Chrome for webdev.
For me the simplest solution is keeping different accounts active in different browsers. I've not cheked all the options with youtube and such, so maybe it doesnt work for youtube alias, but it seems to behave correctly so far to have several accounts open at the same time but not merged.
I'd been remaining logged into Google pseudonymously much of the time in an incognito Chrome session. I'd occasionally hop onto my other Google accounts in another Chrome session, though by preference I'd stay logged out.
Among the other benefits: simply not having to put up with the blasted Notifications icon every time I'm on a Google property.
Why is Google Plus (the social network) worth burning every other Google service and product to the ground in an attempt to drive adoption? Is Google really that scared of Facebook?
The fact that this post turned into a YouTube complaint fest highlights the bad decisions being made, but I am more interested in the big picture.
> burning every other Google service and product to the ground
I think this is a massive exaggeration. The people who don't care about linking their accounts (like me) aren't filling up the front page of HN with "The google plus thing is fine I guess" stories. I don't care if they ask for my phone number, I've got an Android phone so the data is all already there, and I like the security of having it text me to check it's actually me signing in from some new computer.
I genuinely find the level of complaints embarrassing. I've seen someone call being asked to create a G+ account "sickening". Sickening. What an astonishing first world problem, that one of the worst things happening to them is being asked to sign up for a free account with a company you already have a free account with. The horror!
If you think it's a first-world problem, ask yourself what the situation in a third-world or repressive government would be where all search and email traffic would be individually assignable and identifiable as it passed through the national firewall and surveillance systems.
What? It's the same sodding data, passed to the same company, how does merging two accounts that they already know are linked change anything?
Also, you can search without logging in, and sign up for as many different email accounts as you want. Are you honestly saying that google asking you to make a G+ account is a serious problem for activists?
I'm entirely confused by this. I have my G+ account linked with youtube. Just now I unlinked them, and changed the visible name from one that was obviously mine to a more anonymous name and posted a comment with absolutely no issue.
No picture, no name, no link to me. And this is from after linking the accounts and then unlinking them (which took under a minute to do and was pretty easy to find).
I changed from my real name to somenamefortestingpurposes, and seem to be able to change this to anything else. I've also tested posting comments with this, and they don't appear with my real name.
I also have the option of deleting my "channel" which I think is pretty much the same as deleting my youtube presence.
What works for Youtube is to create another channel and use that channel and the created page to post comments via pseudonym. I can switch between my original Google Account and the newly created channel. I don't have an option for my primary account through. For this does not matter but if you had personal data in your old Youtube account there is no easy way to hide this information without loosing Google+ as far I understood that problem now.
So I guess you also missed the part where her comment showed up on her real name and it surprised her?
(and let me ask in advance not to give me that "she may have accidentally clicked some button on one of those popups and given permission" crap. That's like seeing the vampire's fangs in someone's neck and saying "But you invited him over for dinner!")
I actually have two Google accounts, my "real" one and the one I use to joke around on video game clips on YouTube. When Google strongarmed the second one into g+, I knew that even if I decided I wanted g+ for some reason, I would never, ever, ever want a g+ page on that YouTube account.
So imagine my surprise when I received an email beginning:
"This email was sent to you because you indicated that you'd like to receive Google+ Pages performance suggestions and updates"
Go to Hell, Google. I asked for no such thing, and if you somehow tricked me into accidentally not opting out of any such thing, you can still go to Hell. So if anyone says g+ tricked them into something, I'm going to believe them barring hard evidence to the contrary.
The accounts weren't "already linked". They shared some metadata. I was asked if I wanted to link them. I responded "no". Multiple times.
Persisting when someone says "no" is at best, disrespect, at worst abuse and, in the right contexts, rape.
Oh, did I mention I'd organized an ad-hoc anti-harassment policy discussion on G+ at the suggestion of Yonatan Zunger? Irony, it's got an enduring entertainment value.
Oddly enough, I was fine with a G+ account, in fact, that's pretty much the only part of Google I'd been using any more. The YouTube account was just to access videos, and I'd pretty much gotten used to purging its history regularly.
The actual harm to me? Pretty little. Both accounts were pseudonymous. For other people, not nearly so little.
And the message on Google's respect for its users and trustworthiness? Loud and clear: nil and nil.
> Persisting when someone says "no" is at best, disrespect, at worst abuse and, in the right contexts, rape.
I'm not sure I can continue to debate the problems of linking multiple google products together when a comparison is rape. Instead I'm simply going to repeat my original statement
> I genuinely find the level of complaints embarrassing.
Calling the other names for making a (non offensive to anyone in particular) remark, just because he used a notion your particular culture finds "taboo"?
Not to mention the irony of being offended by the mere use of the word "rape" (to correctly describe the feeling of being continuously probed after repeteadly saying "no", without trying to offend anyone), while in the same time you find it acceptable to comment on his mental state ("crazy idiot", "deranged" etc), as if mental health issues are funny.
Is that what you consider responsible behavior?
Or were you just conditioned to think people using the "r" word are to be prosecuted, however innocent and justified their use?
I think what OP is saying is that they are arguably not attempting to drive adoption of Google+ the social network, but rather drive adoption of Google+ the single-sign-on system.
The fact that both things are tied so closely together is what's causing all the problems.
Personally it seems like they could have just stuck with the concept of a Google Account, which I think still exists anyway. Use that thing for single-sign-on and let people link GMail, YT, AdWords, G+ accounts to it.
They are essentially attempting to "rebrand" their identity system with G+ at the core. But what we are seeing is that there is major friction and unintended consequences when you attempt this kind of shift and have so many users with tons of different use-cases across different individual identity systems.
I don't envy their position, although I do think this was probably mostly avoidable, or at least a lot of the problems (especially with YT) should have been foreseeable, and so they really only have themselves to blame.
It's silly to force users to have separate accounts for Google services.
I don't understand how this wasn't the case before Google+. I've had my Google account for years and it always worked on all the Google services I've seen. I've never had to use a separate account for anything.
Either you were very late to the party, or you have a very short memory.
Most people didn't have a "Google account". They had a GMail account. If they had Blogger or YouTube accounts, they usually had them before Gmail.
It was bad enough when Google started shoving those accounts into one and tacking services on people didn't ask for without politely asking them to sign-up. But now they are forcing people into an entirely new service that has the explicit purpose to expose them and to annihilate their privacy.
I wouldn't mind the principle of one single account for all Google services in principle, if a) I can have multiple accounts, b) such an account can be know as "honeybooboo666", and doesn't need my real name or phone number, and c) that account does not to automatically sign me in to services I didn't sign up for and I don't want to use on that account.
The latter is especially important so that anything "honeybooboo666" does on YouTube isn't accidentally registered under my other accounts of MyJob@BigCorp and MyRealName@Family
That's why people have separate accounts. honeybooboo666, MyJob@BigCorp and bowlofpetunias are very different entities, and trying to "out" them all as "MyRealName who works at BigCorp" is just not on.
> The only system with a separate login was ever YouTube
Rewrite history much?
Every platform Google ever acquired had it's own login, and Google didn't have a login for a loooong time.
But all of that is besides the point. This is not about SSO, this is about an SSO fully integrated with a service geared at destroying anonymity and privacy.
I wouldn't mind a single Google login if that was what it was: a login, a username and password. Google+ is so, so much more.
OK, look: the other people who responded about orher systems Google had that had other login systems (hours before you) were both constructive (showing specific examples) and general not jerks about it... They also kept this thread about SSO on topic--jmillikin specifically states "unified login/account system"--nor did they then decide to respond this negative without any real argument. The whole point of this Ask HN was that a bunch of us dislike G+, but the goal was to discuss the reasons why G+ was being pushed internally at Google, and some people from Google were nice enough to actually respond, so let's do away with the random "service geared at destroying anonymity and privacy" rhetoric for a minute.
So: I'm sorry. I did mess this one up. I don't think, however, that my mistake was actually important from the perspective of the article. I've been using some of the services people are saying had third party login support now for many many years, and unlike YouTube I do not remember ever seeing any kind of disconnection between account models used on each. Maybe they were just integrated faster, or maybe its because I had a YouTube account that was ancient and had options that others long since did not.
But either way: it doesn't seem like SSO is an argument for Google+. Google already had single sign on, and to the extent to which it ever had separate login systems that it maintained for its acquisitions they were all rapidly merged. Maybe even in the case of YouTube (which I still feel was different, give that as recently as a year ago I remember still having the ability to manipulate my underlying YouTube account).
Forcing the account to use G+ does make it get forced to use the underlying picture and name from the other account. I can see that as being vaguely interesting. But that goes beyond a "unified login/account system".
You could even link your main Google account to your old-style YouTube account, and get the benefit of single sign-on, but still maintain your old YT identity separate from your Google one. So really I don't understand why Google thinks they're doing anyone a favor single-sign-on-wise: nothing has changed here.
Every Google acquisition with a pre-existing account system kept that system for a period of time (IIRC, typically years) after being acquired. AdSense, Blogger, and FeedBurner are examples.
> Internally, G+ is marketed as a unified login/account system
Wait, there's already Google account - a unified login. Is it not?
> though "Pages" continues to be a confusing and unclear term
Pages were meant to be confusing because you discourage multiple identities. Most people have no idea they even exist.
> I don't believe Google+ management is malicious, but they do seem woefully unaware of how internet-native communities behave.
I'd be glad to attribute it to stupidity, as well, but it's one big assumption to consider the whole upper management at Google+ (one of the crown jewels) "woefully" incompetent at the very subject they were put to manage.
You know a company has jumped shark when employees start explanations for their behavior with a phrase like "Management's stated reasoning goes something like:"
How can you object to this? The original post asked why Google engaged in certain behavior. The person who replied was not the one who made the policy, so he explained the reasoning of management.
If you are complaining about the fact that this phrasing suggests that jmilikin does not agree with management's stated reasoning then again I don't understand where you are coming from. I have seen some startups where every employee always agreed with all corporate decisions, but those were single-person startups that had not yet made their first hire. Disagreement is normal. Handling disagreement well is a sign of maturity. Being open about the reasons for the disagreement while still going along with it (and avoiding personal criticism) is a sign of maturity.
If anything, this reply reassures me. I think that the insistence on the use of "real names" with G+ and the use of G+ with all their offerings (even in the face of vocal and well-reasoned opposition by their userbase) is a sign that Google may have lost it. Hearing the reasons is (slightly) reassuring. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding which will eventually be corrected, rather than a conscious intention to screw over their users.
I believe that many internet flame wars are caused by inaccurate or imprecise statements. It is important to me to indicate the source and quality of information that I post.
It's not that your phrasing is incorrect in any way, it's that the subtext is "Management has no clue about the real world, but this is what they claim. It may not be their real motivations, or true in any way, but the statements we hear are" - a level of distrust in management that requires that sort of disclaimer is a bad sign.
Its hardly "subtext", when the last sentence is "I don't believe Google+ management is malicious, but they do seem woefully unaware of how internet-native communities behave."
(I must admit I did shake my head at that and think "even at _Google_?")
For the record, I was not meaning to criticize jmillikin's remark. Rather, the tone and phrasing of the remark made it quite clear (to me at least) that Google now has, at least in some quarters, gravitated towards the common and pedestrian situation where employees and management are intrinsically at odds with each other, operating from vastly different perspectives, and having to work hard to even maintain civility, having essentially lost respect for each other. Phrases such as "their stated reasoning goes like this" implies that their stated reasoning differs from their real reasons, and by further implication, their real reasons are either wholly misguided, delusional, capricious, evil, or some combination thereof.
It's just a far cry from "do no evil", and the tone is wholly different than what I heard from early G employees, back in what I respectfully have to consider their heyday.
"I don't believe Google+ management is malicious, but they do seem woefully unaware of how internet-native communities behave."
After a while, the question of motivation is a red herring. The problem is the actions, and they've been told enough times that if they claim now how to understand then they're just stupid. They're not stupid, they're contemptuous - that's different.
There's another thing Google hasn't quite figured out, nor have any of the other big players in this space (Maybe Microsoft will, under a new CEO). They have to commit to being conglomerates, not platforms (not at a user visible layer at least). They need to run a multi-brand strategy or these troubles will only get bigger as user communities get more diverse.
Interconnecting all offerings of such a huge diversified enterprise is bound to create conflicts of interest. It doesn't work. IBM almost went bankrupt over it. It leads to idiotic decisions like killing Google Reader instead committing to serving a long tail of diverse communities.
> It leads to idiotic decisions like killing Google Reader instead committing to serving a long tail of diverse communities.
Reader was even more significant than that: had they actually been trying to make Google+ a desirable service, first-class integration with Reader would have brought a large, very active core of G+ users to launch the new service.
Instead, they shipped something which had obviously had almost no effort attempted — I'd say they had an intern do it except that most interns take more pride in their work — with things like mobile support being completely broken for at least a year, flaky desktop support and forcing a disruptive unidirectional model where you could share to Google+ but not see what other people were sharing, comments, etc. which had been the core of the Reader experience. Forget fancy things like clustering shares of the same URL, simply appending a "#googlereader" hashtag would have made the experience far better.
Toss in all of the strategic mistakes like waiting a year or two before taking spam seriously or offering better control over push notifications than uninstalling the app and they basically trained all of their early adopters to see Google+ as an unrewarding, un-QAed mess of bugs and noise with very little signal.
This would have been bad in its own right but an almost comical stumble when you really how many journalists, bloggers and other influential people used Reader heavily, ensuring that future Google stories for years were going to have a heavy note of “How will Google will let you down or exploit you” instead of the “Here's why you want to use this” tone which was pervasive during the era when Google was focused on making products you'd voluntarily use.
I've had nothing buy a joyous experience there. Spam? Don't add spam to your activity feed. Just remove it from your circles, gone. An intern built it? It's one of the most finely crafted, expensive looking pieces of social software that has ever been built.
Excuse me but what the hell is this fantasy about Google plus? I'm not convinced that Reader was shut down and that Google plus was meant to be its replacement, the products are just far too different. I don't know where or why that rumour started other than to suggest maybe it was born of this same ridiculous hate fantasy.
Maybe I'm Google's target demographic but every complaint I've seen stems from absolutely refusing to allow Google to change anything. And a flamboyant hate for a product they refuse to use no matter what, which is a very carefully designed and free social product.
> "one of the most finely crafted, expensive looking pieces of social software that has ever been built."
Glad you like it. I find it slow, clunky, limited, and information poor. And annoying, because it always puts pointless design tricks ahead of functionality.
I'm an admittedly harsh critic of G+ (though I very honestly wanted to like it).
Someone who's more inclined to be favorable is Robert Scoble. He worked under Vic Gundotra at Microsoft, and joined the service early. He's also had a long list of rather frighteningly consistent complaints:
> Spam? Don't add spam to your activity feed. Just remove it from your circles, gone.
For the first couple years, there was no way to avoid notification spam if, say, “Real Russian Pharama” added you to a circle. This included push notification spam for at least a year – they added a setting after ~6 months but it didn't actually work, requiring the iOS app to be uninstalled to stop it.
> An intern built it? It's one of the most finely crafted, expensive looking pieces of social software that has ever been built.
a) Scrolling the G+ timeline would show this is a very rosy depiction: notice how it's jerky even in Chrome? Hit the spacebar and notice how, unlike almost every other page on the web, you can't scroll? Now try touch scrolling on WebKit and notice that it's being faked in JavaScript, which is why it's incredibly janky.
b) I was specifically referring to the Google+ integration they replaced Reader's social features with: it went from something which provided a simple way to share items, see other public shares and comments on the same item and see what your friends had shared to a simple button which didn't work on mobile devices (the dialog was clipped so none of it was visible) for at least a year and there was no attempt to see other shares of the same item, aggregate the same item being shared by multiple people you follow, or make it possible to see Reader shares separate from, say, status updates by people in your circles.
> And a flamboyant hate for a product they refuse to use no matter what, which is a very carefully designed and free social product.
I tried using it heavily when it first came out. I still use it more than most other people I know but … much as I might have wanted Google to give Facebook competition, they just failed to produce a quality product. I was willing to put up with bugs at launch but when there were basic QA oversights which took a year to fix (i.e. notification spam above) it was really obvious that it's about making something they want to push as a wedge against Facebook rather than something you'd choose to use — when anyone who actually uses it could find basic bugs in a few minutes, so it's unbelievable that nobody at Google noticed or was able to fix them in anything like their normal timeframe.
> For the first couple years, there was no way to avoid
> notification spam if, say, “Real Russian Pharama” added
> you to a circle.
Plus launched on September 20, 2011 -- that's just over two years old. The default notification setting changed from "everyone" to "extended circles" in October 2011, which blocked notifications when strangers mention you in a post.
The default for being added to a circle is still to notify you regardless of whether you know the other party, which seems to match the behavior of most other social networks (people like to know who's watching them).
> Scrolling the G+ timeline would show this is a very rosy
> depiction: notice how it's jerky even in Chrome? Hit the
> spacebar and notice how, unlike almost every other page
> on the web, you can't scroll?
Scrolling is smooth for me in Chrome on MacOS. The spacebar pages down properly, and shift+spacebar pages up. You might want to verify whether the behavior you're seeing is due to a misbehaving browser extension or user script.
> The default for being added to a circle is still to notify you regardless of whether you know the other party, which seems to match the behavior of most other social networks
This does not, however, generate a push notification to your phone as it did uncontrollably for much of Plus' history. Even after the setting was added to control this, it didn't work for a long time.
What this really came down to was the lack of prioritization: the follower model is closer to Twitter than Facebook, being very public oriented, so you're far more likely to receive notifications about complete strangers but the UI copied Facebook's notifications. This meant that most users were trained to ignore the notification bar on other Google properties for a long time as everyone they'd ever exchanged email with was pushed into the service. Anything more than casual testing would have made it obvious that they should have had a way to group notifications so e.g. replies wouldn't be flooded away and to prioritize "added you" less than "added you back".
> You might want to verify whether the behavior you're seeing is due to a misbehaving browser extension or user script.
Nope - vanilla Chrome on OS X (also Firefox, Safari and Opera). Similarly, even on iOS where you can't add user scripts at all, the touch scrolling is jerky and buggy, requiring a scroll/wait/scroll cycle to get it to scroll to the bottom of a comment thread.
Gundotra spent 15 years at Microsoft before joining Google.
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra
"Before joining Google, he was a general manager at Microsoft.[3] He joined Microsoft in 1991 and eventually became General Manager of Platform Evangelism. His duties included promoting Microsoft's APIs and platforms to independent developers and helping to develop a strategy for Windows Live online services to compete with Google's web-based software applications.[4] Gundotra joined Google in June 2007, after taking a one-year delay working on charitable endeavors[which?] due to a Microsoft employee non-compete agreement."
That's a bit short. Consumers of coffee, biscuits, etc do not need to know their trademarks are owned by the same legal entity or their subsidies, nor would they benefit from this knowledge.
Completely the opposite with Google or Microsoft. You need to know that YouTube is Google because it has an impact on privacy things, and you arguably benefit from their link with single sign on, reduced complexity, unified notification center, etcetera.
You're repeating the justification for the status quo, but at some point these undeniable benefits of an integrated platform start to be dominated by growing complexities, weird interdependencies and conflicts of interest. I think we're over the tipping point now.
this is a classic branding failure. Once something is associated with a category (i.e. G+ = Social Network) every time you try to associate it with another product or service (i.e. Universal Login) the messaging gets fuddled, and people get confused and it hurts the perception of both products.
This is the same reason Google+ was a poor brand name choice since Google is already associated with Search, making a new product with a line extension name just hurts both products ability to differentiate themselves...
This is why DuckDuckGo, and other new search engines are able to grow market share... Because Google started believing their own lore, and fail to accept that they simply don't understand why their initial branding of Google was successful, but all their future products they fail to establish strong brands with...
This is why Google Wave died, and many other google products.
I've never heard of "Pages" in the context of pseudonyms, only as a way to create Google+ profiles for (small) businesses. It's a bit confusing and ironically a search for it on Google isn't really helpful. How is a "Page" as a separate public identity treated differently compared to a pseudonym? How reliable is it to protect your real identity?
> How is a "Page" as a separate public identity treated
> differently compared to a pseudonym?
If I remember correctly there's some anti-spam restrictions on interaction with people not in your circles, but that was a few months ago and they may have been lifted. The current documentation[1][2] doesn't mention any restrictions.
> How reliable is it to protect your real identity?
There's no public link between identities, so most pseudonymous use cases are met by Pages. Users with unusual privacy needs will still need to be careful, as adversaries could perform statistical analysis of text style or activity times to determine if two identities are owned by the same person.
But it is impossible to create a page if you already linked your Youtube account with a Google+ profile. I did so because I just did not understood what that page was all about. There is no way back. At least I could not find a way.
Yup this works. But this creates a new Google+ page and I have no way to connect this to my (old) Youtube account. I can create a new Youtube Channel and another new page but this had no effect on my old Youtube Account and the data in this account.
Youtube also defaults to my real identity if I visit the viste. If have to manually switch identities.
Doesn't the pseudonym policy still require your pseudonym's "brand" to be previously established (as arbitrated by Google) in order to create a "Page"? Because that's kind of completely terrible for being the only way to separate identities.
Also, in theory I'm not opposed to a unified login (nor are most of the people complaining I assume.) I've simply lost any faith I had that Google will keep different identities on the same account separate, after years of slip-ups, mistakes, and "oversights".
Nope, pages don't have to be established at all; that requirement is only for using pseudonyms on a "personal" account. Hence the flood of Adolf Hitler page identities posting on YouTube.
Google is totally right to not care what a "sufficiently small population" of users think if it improves the over all experience. The trouble is - that small population accounts for a very large portion of the popular videos. At the end of the day, youtube is nothing special without it's giant farm of servers and fast loading videos, which they seem to struggle with. Upsetting your power users almost never works out.. Some internet math.. Google + Youtube = Digg 4?
That sounds entirely reasonable for the 99% use case - you have one convenient login, pseudonymous accounts on different services, and the only problem is that Google knows your accounts are the same person. Which they could almost certainly work out anyway from IP addresses etc. Your accounts are not safe from government snooping or unethical behaviour by Google - policy, or individual malicious sysadmins - but you are safer from harassment by other net users.
What we have in practice is people complaining that their real names and photos are appearing next to comments on their previously-psudonymous Youtube accounts. Google seem to have flubbed either their user-education, or the mechanical steps put on offer to find what people wanted for their accounts when the policy was rolled out.
I don't know what was offered to Youtube users - were they given warning of policy rollout? Clear pages of settings to adjust when they logged on? Was a 'page' containing their current Youtube identity in place by default? These would sound like reasonable steps to take to avoid an outcry.
It makes sense to have a single sign-on system (although this also raises questions of privacy over what actions are tracked and recorded by Google - I'm guessing evrything possible is tracked and recorded).
Why doesn't Google provide a dashboard for all their services accessible from every Google service when you're signed in? The Dashboard presents all of Google's services with the ability to opt-in to additional services.
So, for example, if I sign up for a GMail account, my dashboard only shows I've activated the GMail service, but also lists all the other Google services such as Google+, Docs, Drive etc. You can use the dashboard to promote your services rather than cluttering the GMail interface with promos for Google+, Google Chat, Hangouts etc. It's a bit ironic that one of the stated goals of Gmail is to minimise distractions and yet the GMail interface is stuffed with promos for other Google services.
What is the difference? All they are doing is giving you a different way of accessing them. It's the same bloody company! It's not like they've created and passed the photos on to someone else, they're just in a bucket with "picasa" written on it.
The difference is that the user never knew anything about the Picassa service. It should be their decision (not Google's) to add photo attachments to Picassa. It is unsettling to find your photo attachments in email (which most people consider private) suddenly placed in a photo app you've never accessed or may never have even heard of. The feature might be fine if you ask users for their permission. Doing it silently without their knowledge is just poor UX.
Google needs to make it much clearer that signing up to a Google account gives you access to all Google services. Their current sign-up page shows a line of tiny Google icons which completely fails to convey this. The icons are one image in a row, so you can't even hover over each icon to see a tooltip description of what they are. Once again, this is just clumsy UX.
In my view, if a user signs up for a particular service such as Gmail, only that service should be activated. Other Google services are only activated when you actually decide to use them (i.e. don't create an empty Google+ site for me unless I opt-in to using that service).
> Google needs to make it much clearer that signing up to a Google account gives you access to all Google services.
Perhaps this comes from different expectations. When I signed up with google this is exactly what I expected, to have access to every service they offered at that time and all future services.
> (i.e. don't create an empty Google+ site for me unless I opt-in to using that service).
This one I can see more (although I'm not sure quite what happens here, I'd need to create a new account and have a look).
I don't think that is the point being made. The point is that there's been a lack of transparency on Google's behalf, and a lot of users, like myself, have grown tired of it.
Well taking this example, what's the lack of transparency here? All they've done is given you (not anyone else) access to files you've already uploaded under a different heading. That's it, and they were calling it "batshit fucking insane".
When I looked at the Google+ account I didn't want or ask for, the default picture was from an Orkut account I signed up for on a lark before Google bought them.
I don't think some people in this thread understand that having something stored on the Internet, and having it be public, and having it to be tied to other public identities, and those identities being tied to your meatspace identity are four different questions.
WTF !?
I see on the dashboard I now can "manage my devices", click on it and ... get something like "Authorize the manager to use geolocation data" with _only_ an accept button.
I can't even say No ! This is way out of line. They lost it. It's not mismanagement, it's concious dark pattern all over the place. It rubs me the very wrong way.
Uh, looks like there is a misunderstanding about what that manage devices link is for. It takes you to the device manager, which allows you to track the location of your Android devices (which you've enabled it on). So it does need location data, that's not unreasonable.
Well, it that's the case Google should really start to be very careful about wording and explanations. How I am suppose to know ? After the fact by accepting something I don't want to ? Discovering it by bitching on HN is not the solution. If I want to manage my device, I don't want to locate it. At best a locator is a inner functionality a device manager. But the real question here is : is it misunderstanding on my side or misleading on Google's ?
It's ambiguous and given Google's recent trend I am a very lot less forgiven than i used to be. The more pushee they are, the less forgiven people will be, even the small mistakes will be less well received.
That's my strong and unobjective opinion. Google is getting too pushee to my taste. I pushback.
I heard this same line about a year ago, and I created a separate "page". That page is nearly unindexed. People don't follow the page, they follow my other two profiles. When they're searching for me, that's what they find.
What I need, in order to make that second bullet true, is the ability to HIDE my first-party login pages (people find them), associate my emails with that "Page" and login to EVERY SERVICE as that public identity. This means leaving G+/Maps reviews, this means Maps Location services, everything.
With "Pages" useless and broken, the logic of this system falls apart.
But it's obviously more than that. One example; YouTube content creators now get notified of comments to their videos on G+ instead of directly on YouTube (I have yet to actually find these notifications on G+, but that's another issue). So this is an obvious grab for more G+ users/activity. No one actually believes that this nonsense is all being done to provide a single sign-on.
If SSO is the goal, why can't Google simply implement alternative persona a la Yahoo groups that has the feature for more than a decade? You still have SSO but _can_ have different public persona per property, should users choose to do so. Isn't this a solved problem?
I remember being Google very proud about the fact that they don't need your real name in order to track you with ads, a few years ago. But somewhere along the way, Google caught a lot of Facebook envy, also influenced hard by the media who kept saying Google will die if it doesn't create its own social network, and once Facebook creates its own search engine, it's game over for Google. Of course that was silly, because Google's search engine doesn't work just through social media signals, which is why Facebook's search engine could never have been as good as Google.
But anyway, the point is they caught this Facebook envy, and they wanted the real name policy, too.
Now the term "Google+" has become so strongly connected with the Google+ social network (and its infamous names policy) that any attempt to expand the Google+ account system is met with fear and outrage. I don't think upper management expected this or understands why the community reacted thus, just as they didn't expect or understand why requiring a Firstname Lastname format on the Internet was problematic.
I don't believe Google+ management is malicious, but they do seem woefully unaware of how internet-native communities behave.