3 ms·

Google+ = Single Sign On across Google Products Plus Single Access-Control-List/Rolodex/Address Book Across Google Products Plus A social stream site that y

Google+ = Single Sign On across Google Products Plus Single Access-Control-List/Rolodex/Address Book Across Google Products Plus A social stream site that you can decide to use or not. The first two are absolute needs. Having a separate set of credentials and identity for GMail, Drive, YouTube, Play, Maps, et al is anti-user and highly annoying. (you can still have multiple identities if you wish by creating separate accounts). When I share documents on Drive, or content from Play, or some other function that requires me to curate a list or group of people, why not have this span services as well? Now, I sympathize a lot with the notion that these things should be open and federated and not siloed to Google or Facebook. But remember, Google tried OpenID/OAuth/WebFinger/ActivityStreams.ms/PuSH, et al early on, and got crushed by Facebook, and to some extent, all of that lost time on OpenSocial and Buzz allowed Facebook to get further entrenched as the Web's identity provider. Facebook connect is now on every site, and IMHO, it's a lot more onerous than G+ profiles when it comes to privacy. Long long ago, we had a federated vision of stuff like LDAP + ACAP for distributed identity and profile configuration. If only we could get back to the days of IETF collaboration on fundamental features like this.

saurik 13y ago
Google already has single sign-on between all Google products... you make it sound like they are just getting around to this with G+. They have always had a single set of credentials and identity for all of the services you call out, including YouTube (which is a little sketchier as they purchased it, with existing accounts, and so there is an account import and attachment process: but once you've done that, you've always been able to use your Google account to sign in to it).
- cromwellian 13y ago
  They had single sign-on, but they did not have a unified data-model profile as the TOS/privacy policies made sharing data between services iffy. My point is, part of G+ is simply a rebranding of functionality that existed before, but now people are all upset over having to have a G+ profile, whereas before, they had a Google Profile. Creating a Google account should imply creating a G+ account, the same way it implies provisioning Gmail, Drive, et al. If you don't like the G+ news feed, don't use it, it's as simple as that, just like if you're a Dropbox user, don't bother using the free GDrive storage.

saurik 13y ago

Google already has single sign-on between all Google products... you make it sound like they are just getting around to this with G+. They have always had a single set of credentials and identity for all of the services you call out, including YouTube (which is a little sketchier as they purchased it, with existing accounts, and so there is an account import and attachment process: but once you've done that, you've always been able to use your Google account to sign in to it).

cromwellian 13y ago
They had single sign-on, but they did not have a unified data-model profile as the TOS/privacy policies made sharing data between services iffy. My point is, part of G+ is simply a rebranding of functionality that existed before, but now people are all upset over having to have a G+ profile, whereas before, they had a Google Profile. Creating a Google account should imply creating a G+ account, the same way it implies provisioning Gmail, Drive, et al. If you don't like the G+ news feed, don't use it, it's as simple as that, just like if you're a Dropbox user, don't bother using the free GDrive storage.