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There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions. Apple gives you a single signon for their App Store, iCloud, and many of their other services. It unifi

There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions. Apple gives you a single signon for their App Store, iCloud, and many of their other services. It unifies your interaction with Apple related HW and services to a single identity. Does it anger you that Apple forces you to sign into your AppStore account to use iCloud when they could be separate? Facebook is used by many sites as a signon credential (which is what I mostly use it for). For the most part, all of this talk about Google "forcing" you to use G+ to access their other services is really about promoting a single signon, centralized account profile, instead of having different accounts on different properties. This yields a consistent user interface, and centralized location for you to view what information Google knows about you for all their services, and how to delete or export it. You can choose to not "sign in" on some of the properties, for example, legacy YouTube logins still work, but honestly, is it really better for the user if you had a different account for YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, etc and had to log into all of them separately? For example, having Google Wallet linked to your profile lets you buy something on YouTube, in Google Play, or elsewhere, without fumbling with a credit card. Unlike some of Facebook's services/apps, Google does not automatically share your activity on some news feed every time you do something on their sites, you have to specifically choose to share it. Indeed, it appears G+ doesn't want to pollute the feed with lots of autopublished stuff which interferes with S/N search quality, which is one reason theorized as to why no "write" API exists yet. G+ is plus.google.com, if you are on other properties signed in, then the biggest benefit is having the Share button be able to pull your contacts, combined with a single place to manage your settings for everything. In many cases you have a choice. You can use Chrome without signin. You have incognito windows. YouTube doesn't require signin unless the video is NSFW, etc. I for one, appreciate the "G+ as a common layer across Google Websites" for the purposes of unified profile/single-signon. The plus.google.com newsfeed service is just one addition service you can either choose to use or not. It's best not to think of G+ as a social network + activity stream like Facebook.

taligent 14y ago
There is a lot of hyperbole. And also a lot of ignorance as in your post. Today on Youtube. I am signed in and wanted to bookmark a video I just saw. I can't do that without them creating a PUBLIC Google Plus account with my FULL NAME even though I am already logged in. Care to explain that one ?
- nwh 14y ago
  Ditto for me, only it was to view a public post on Google Plus. Nope.
- abraham 14y ago
  That is because you are signed into YouTube using your Google account and not a YouTube account. If you create a YouTube account that you sign into using your Google account you would be prompted to update to Google+ but would not be required to.
- zenuts 14y ago
  i don't get your point: why is that a bad thing?
paganel 14y ago
> There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions. Not really. Just the other day I was asked for the second time in two months by YouTube if I wanted to use my real name. I almost did accept it, by mistake, after pressing 2 or 3 buttons that had "Yes, I do want to use my real name" pre-highlighted by default. Don't get me wrong, I think Google builds a lot of other great (that's an understatement) products, YouTube being just one of them. But in the case of G+ they should have declared it "mission accomplished" and move on to other more interesting stuff. And yes, outside of Silicon Valley and a couple of other tech-related areas G+ is a ghost-town.
vvhn 14y ago
you don't have to sign in with your App Store account into iCloud. You can use different accounts to sign into each apple service which needs one on the same device ( or computer) I.e for App Store , iCloud , FaceTime , messages. But your parent comment is an active user of g+ by using hangouts - it is one of its main features. And he definitely should be counted as one.
blablabla123 14y ago
> Unlike some of Facebook's services/apps, Google does not automatically share your activity on some news feed every time you do something on their sites This is not really correct. In fact Facebook publishes only the activities "share" and "like". But not only that, Facebook gives me full control over who will see this. G+ is really dubious in this respect. Sometimes when I google search I see "xyx also goes to this page". Damn, so now I need to use Incognito every time I search for Christmas presents? Or what happens if I search for a different employer, will my work colleagues see that? Since one or two years Youtube is bugging me to be less pseudonymous. Yesterday they asked this weird question, at least this general bugging stopped. Sorry Google, if this is really only about Single-Sign-On, then keep a more clear separation of your services. Google+ sounds like a pretty heavy-weight Single-Sign-On solution, right? If this is your competition, you will lose your customers to competitors like Mozilla.
- jsnell 14y ago
  I find it hard to believe you're seeing any kind of "xyz also visits this page" message. Are you perhaps confusing it with "xyz explicitly chose to endorse this page with a +1"?
  - blablabla123 14y ago
    Maybe, probably in combination with a feature that sometimes tells me that I searched some term some time ago and how often I visited a hyperlink. What disturbs me: these features are hardly explained anywhere, making this an incubator for FUD. (I can delete my browser history - how do I delete this?)
    - jsnell 14y ago
      http://history.google.com http://history.google.com . You can delete everything, delete just specific entries, or turn it off completely.
      - blablabla123 14y ago
nonamegiven 14y ago
A gmail-using friend sent me an email. He attached an image. I would have expected to just, you know, see the image in the email I received. Instead, all there was was a link which google helpfully put in place of the image itself in my friend's email. That link was to an image that my friend was "sharing". When I clicked on the link, I had to log in to my G+ account (which I virtually never use), and then get "permission" to view the document (image). Am I counted as an active user? Given Google's incentives, I'm guessing yes. Was the simple act of attaching an image hijacked for those same incentives? I'm guessing yes.
- myko 14y ago
  It sounds like your friend put a link to an image (hosted on G+) in their email. Source: I just emailed an image from one Gmail account to the other and what you stated didn't happen.
- DominikR 14y ago
  How is that different than getting an email from Facebook that some friend has shared a photo with you? You would have to login to Facebook to view that photo. (and would therefore be counted as an active Facebook user) Anyways, your friend never attached an image, he just send you a link. It wasn't Google that replaced that image with a link, it's your friend that chose to share that image using Google's services instead of manually attaching it to every email. And yes, I am pretty sure that you are counted as an active user after accessing Google+ while beeing logged in with a Google+ account.
  - nonamegiven 14y ago
    Possible he sent me a link, but we discussed it, and he said he followed the same steps as he usually did when he'd attached images before. I didn't watch him.
saraid216 14y ago
> There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions. I'm starting to see these discussions as an example of fundamentalism. A lot of people talk as if they're being threatened by this; it's reminiscent of listening to people talk about how marriage is under siege. I'd love to see a language analysis comparing the two, actually, for a more objective perspective. I mean... how much of this debate is driven by an unconscious thought along these lines: "I still use Facebook, even though everyone agrees it's evil. I feel bad about that, but I don't want to leave my friends there. We could move to G+ or something, but it'd be hard to get everyone to go."

taligent 14y ago

There is a lot of hyperbole. And also a lot of ignorance as in your post. Today on Youtube. I am signed in and wanted to bookmark a video I just saw. I can't do that without them creating a PUBLIC Google Plus account with my FULL NAME even though I am already logged in. Care to explain that one ?

nwh 14y ago
Ditto for me, only it was to view a public post on Google Plus. Nope.
abraham 14y ago
That is because you are signed into YouTube using your Google account and not a YouTube account. If you create a YouTube account that you sign into using your Google account you would be prompted to update to Google+ but would not be required to.
zenuts 14y ago
i don't get your point: why is that a bad thing?

paganel 14y ago

> There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions. Not really. Just the other day I was asked for the second time in two months by YouTube if I wanted to use my real name. I almost did accept it, by mistake, after pressing 2 or 3 buttons that had "Yes, I do want to use my real name" pre-highlighted by default. Don't get me wrong, I think Google builds a lot of other great (that's an understatement) products, YouTube being just one of them. But in the case of G+ they should have declared it "mission accomplished" and move on to other more interesting stuff. And yes, outside of Silicon Valley and a couple of other tech-related areas G+ is a ghost-town.

vvhn 14y ago

you don't have to sign in with your App Store account into iCloud. You can use different accounts to sign into each apple service which needs one on the same device ( or computer) I.e for App Store , iCloud , FaceTime , messages. But your parent comment is an active user of g+ by using hangouts - it is one of its main features. And he definitely should be counted as one.

blablabla123 14y ago

> Unlike some of Facebook's services/apps, Google does not automatically share your activity on some news feed every time you do something on their sites This is not really correct. In fact Facebook publishes only the activities "share" and "like". But not only that, Facebook gives me full control over who will see this. G+ is really dubious in this respect. Sometimes when I google search I see "xyx also goes to this page". Damn, so now I need to use Incognito every time I search for Christmas presents? Or what happens if I search for a different employer, will my work colleagues see that? Since one or two years Youtube is bugging me to be less pseudonymous. Yesterday they asked this weird question, at least this general bugging stopped. Sorry Google, if this is really only about Single-Sign-On, then keep a more clear separation of your services. Google+ sounds like a pretty heavy-weight Single-Sign-On solution, right? If this is your competition, you will lose your customers to competitors like Mozilla.

jsnell 14y ago
I find it hard to believe you're seeing any kind of "xyz also visits this page" message. Are you perhaps confusing it with "xyz explicitly chose to endorse this page with a +1"?
- blablabla123 14y ago
  Maybe, probably in combination with a feature that sometimes tells me that I searched some term some time ago and how often I visited a hyperlink. What disturbs me: these features are hardly explained anywhere, making this an incubator for FUD. (I can delete my browser history - how do I delete this?)
  - jsnell 14y ago
    http://history.google.com http://history.google.com . You can delete everything, delete just specific entries, or turn it off completely.
    - blablabla123 14y ago

nonamegiven 14y ago

A gmail-using friend sent me an email. He attached an image. I would have expected to just, you know, see the image in the email I received. Instead, all there was was a link which google helpfully put in place of the image itself in my friend's email. That link was to an image that my friend was "sharing". When I clicked on the link, I had to log in to my G+ account (which I virtually never use), and then get "permission" to view the document (image). Am I counted as an active user? Given Google's incentives, I'm guessing yes. Was the simple act of attaching an image hijacked for those same incentives? I'm guessing yes.

myko 14y ago
It sounds like your friend put a link to an image (hosted on G+) in their email. Source: I just emailed an image from one Gmail account to the other and what you stated didn't happen.
DominikR 14y ago
How is that different than getting an email from Facebook that some friend has shared a photo with you? You would have to login to Facebook to view that photo. (and would therefore be counted as an active Facebook user) Anyways, your friend never attached an image, he just send you a link. It wasn't Google that replaced that image with a link, it's your friend that chose to share that image using Google's services instead of manually attaching it to every email. And yes, I am pretty sure that you are counted as an active user after accessing Google+ while beeing logged in with a Google+ account.
- nonamegiven 14y ago
  Possible he sent me a link, but we discussed it, and he said he followed the same steps as he usually did when he'd attached images before. I didn't watch him.

saraid216 14y ago

> There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions. I'm starting to see these discussions as an example of fundamentalism. A lot of people talk as if they're being threatened by this; it's reminiscent of listening to people talk about how marriage is under siege. I'd love to see a language analysis comparing the two, actually, for a more objective perspective. I mean... how much of this debate is driven by an unconscious thought along these lines: "I still use Facebook, even though everyone agrees it's evil. I feel bad about that, but I don't want to leave my friends there. We could move to G+ or something, but it'd be hard to get everyone to go."