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Google+ spamming people every 2 weeks to put up a profile photo
- ensmotko 13y agoAnd they keep telling me to update my cover photo (not via email though), but the new cover photos are so big that most of the users need to scroll down to see my name. A horrible user experience.
- Subuatai 13y agoWhy do you think Google has bad so much trouble delivering a product that is enjoyable to use in Google+? I understand the market saturation from Facebook, but something about Google+ is off. It should be a much better user experience.
- Steko 13y agoYou can't beat an entrenched incumbent with a +1 product (lol). You need a +100 product.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- franze 13y agojust re-visited my google+ profile to see what the cover photo stuff was all about, and yeah, it's big. the bigger issue is, that scrolling on the profile page feels sluggish and jumpy (on my mac book air 2013 - latest stable chrome browser). google seems to have some serious issue on that one.
- RobAtticus 13y agoDo you actually use G+? Because when you go to someone's profile it starts scrolled down on the picture so you're at the profile pic/name/basic info. You can then scroll up to see the rest of the cover photo if you want. Edit: This is on Chrome, so if it doesn't work like that on other browsers it's most likely a bug.
- ensmotko 13y agoYes it's scrolled down when you visit a profile that is not your own. It just goes to show the picture shouldn't be that big in the first place it's just wasted bandwidth...
- tiziano88 13y agofrom all the stuff that Google+ loads without you even having to click anything, you're worrying about 40k of "wasted bandwidth" for a profile image?
- Mitchella 13y agoTo be honest... just upload any image and move on. If you need help I can provide detailed instructions about using a "file upload" system.
- TeeWEE 13y agoProduct people will think "once every 2 weeks is fine, since we really want to get profile pictures for everyone". Dev guy implements it. Customer complaints. Product people review it, and exponential backoff emailing is implemented.
- megfitz 13y agoIt'd also be really nice if, every time I logged in, I wasn't prompted to tell them if there is "someone special in my life." Really? Is relationship status that critical?
- rwg 13y agoFor targeting advertisements? Absolutely.
- nmridul 13y agoIt is even more irritating with Youtube. If I am logged in to any Google account it pesters me to select my Real name every time I watch a video. And every time I end up opening the video in another browser.
- warp 13y agoif you make the (non-obvious) correct responses to that dialog, it will go away for a few weeks.
- Ntrails 13y agoWhat about making it sod off for good. If I wanted to use my real name to watch cat videos and subscribe to gaming feeds it's likely I would have bloody well done so in the first place. In part I assume at some point google wants to start putting this on my google profile automatically. Olive watched "Kitty Corliss, grinding the crack" for the 87th time today. See what has them so hooked[linku]
- PavlovsCat 13y agoI'm actually using my real name on Youtube, but written like "JohnDoe" instead of "John Doe"... Youtube still buggers me about my "real name", and I always deny just because it's such a stupid idea and all the arguments for it suck, so I'd rather be annoyed than give in. Stay strong :P
- frou_dh 13y agoSeriously though, the Japanese totally make the best cat videos. Very regular, too. http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRVruzlQF5cqpw9jQgIgNdw http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRVruzlQF5cqpw9jQgIgNdw http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuZp-cf0yOTqQEOuKGGnocg http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuZp-cf0yOTqQEOuKGGnocg http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk5cqns8Bi6Bv5Ji1YlSMDQ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk5cqns8Bi6Bv5Ji1YlSMDQ
- codyb 13y ago
- jacques_chester 13y agoI uploaded a white square.
- hannibal5 13y agoI took the default profile picture and uploaded it.
- m_ram 13y agoEvery social network opts you in to a long list of email subscriptions. You have to uncheck a bunch of boxes in the settings if you don't want them. G+: https://www.google.com/settings/plus https://www.google.com/settings/plus Twitter: https://twitter.com/settings/notifications https://twitter.com/settings/notifications Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=notifications§ion=through_email&view https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=notifications§ion=thro... Update: It looks like Facebook switched from a long list of checkboxes to an all-or-nothing system.
- monsterix 13y agoFun begins when someone signs up on Facebook using a gmail id 'firstlast@gmail.com' and your gmail is 'first.last@gmail.com'. Facebook doesn't stop sending notifications, and Gmail is blind to the dot ... :-) It's like two beautiful girls talking to each other and not listening to any body who is around trying to interrupt their loud gossip.
- omerta 13y agocheck out my social network, pplrep.com, and unlike other networks, it's not egocentric. Email verification not required and we never email users, unless they request their password if they've forgotten it. Also not in bed with the NSA.
- lazyjones 13y agoSocial networks suck like that - FB still sends me spammy e-mails about invitations and "people from ... you might know" even though I've turned off all mail notifications. It's a good indication that you are serving their purpose and not the other way round, though.
- prawn 13y agoSigned up for FB with a fake account to do a client job. No friends or anything. Every couple of days, they send an email with random people I might know. Never heard of any of them. Got sick of it, so I signed in to cancel the notifications I'd missed. They sent me a "welcome back" notification because I'd signed in. Deleted the account.
- lazyjones 13y agoI'm in a similar situation - 0 friends because I just follow some NGOs and use the API to provide FB login for some pages. I get notifications almost every day and the "unsubscribe" link leads to a page that lets me opt out of the notification type: "Updates about your friends since you logged in", while my notification settings show that I get no Email notifications at all. So that's the price I pay for allowing FB login on some of our pages.
- ucho 13y agoDo you want to use your real name for YouTube: - Yes - Remind me in a week How about: don't bug me ever?
- frou_dh 13y agoIIRC YouTube has presented me with 3 completely different iterations of that dialog, all trying to bamboozle me in to G+ing it up. The latest one was in fact blatantly wrong because the two answer choices began with "Yes, do ..." and "No, do ...", which didn't make sense because the question was posed in the opposite way.
- the_rosentotter 13y ago"No, I don't want to not link my Google+ account to YouTube"
- stopcodon 13y agoThis is probably one of my largest complaints about a google product at the moment. It feels like they're trying to trick me in to doing it with that invasive pop-up I get every week. I don't even use YouTube for uploading or commenting, but I also don't want my real name and a photo of me on that site in any form. There's always the small chance they'll do something stupid like roll an update that makes my "previously viewed videos" available to my "social connections" by default without notifying me.
- workbench 13y agoMy favourite wording of this dialog was "Change your hard to remember username to your real name!" Actually laughed at that one.
- aryastark 13y agogod, how I hate what YouTube has become. It really used to be so nice until Google got their grubby hands on it. Nowadays I can barely get through a single video without massive stalling issues, or 30 second ads for a 10 second video. It's ridiculous.
- znowi 13y agoWhat if you upload a blank image? Will they recognize it's not a person and keep bugging you anyway? :)
- puzzlingcaptcha 13y agoI did just that as Google kept replacing my youtube profile image with a random snapshot from a video I once uploaded. A blank white .png did the job.
- znowi 13y agoGeez, this is a little invasive. Must be an additional "marketing feature" to coerce you to upload a profile picture. Who'd have known a userpic is so highly valued in the social data market.
- ralmeida 13y agoI wrote for a music ezine sometimes, and once I interviewed a artist and asked him to say hello to our readers on camera. Since the ezine had no YouTube channel back then, and we were in a hurry, I uploaded the video to my own channel. YouTube must have thought that, since it was a short (~20sec) video with a person's face depicted prominently, the person had to be me and updated my profile image with a snapshot of this video that actually looked like an intentional profile image. Maybe it was just random, maybe they actually tried to select a fitting image.
- antninja 13y agoNope. I have a monochrome image. I don't receive any notification.
- adventured 13y agoI did this on LinkedIn, because they have a rating system for being able to set up a business account (and so they basically require an image). It works on Google+ as well.
- sp332 13y agoHere's the default profile icon: https://ssl.gstatic.com/s2/profiles/images/silhouette28.png https://ssl.gstatic.com/s2/profiles/images/silhouette28.png You can change "28" to any size you want. Just download that, then upload it as your profile image :)
- spindritf 13y agoI know that those notifications are annoying, especially when they get mixed up with important e-mail and send you scrambling for your phone, however... How 'bout you just set a profile photo? It doesn't need to be your face, doesn't even need to be photo. Actually, a distinct avatar would probably work better than a photo. But put something there. It's tiresome to try to follow a conversation without an easy way to distinguish participants. So fire up GIMP, put your initials over your favourite shade of pink and upload it to Twitter/Google+/GitHub/Gravatar/whatever. Or pick a picture from Flickr with a permissive license. Don't punish others with a generic icon. /PSA
- pieterhg 13y ago"favourite shade of pink" Completely unnecessary ad hominem here.
- frou_dh 13y agoHaha. HN is truly the home of dubious calls of "ad hominem". (Really. Use HNSærch to take a look)
- pigscantfly 13y agoWhat's wrong with pink...?
- bborud 13y agoGoogle seems to have started on a mission to annoy the fuck out of me the past 6 months or so. For instance through the neverending popups and dialogs that enthusiastically tell me about some feature and require a response from me to ask them to please fuck off. Not to talk about the amazingly stupid animations on Google+ that makes it impossible to scroll fast on an iPhone 4. I was making an effort to use Google+ more ... and then Google gives me that shit. Look Googlers, I know that you suffered under the reign of the Cupcake Princess and were unable to release anything cool because dealing with her was more painful than watching an entire episode of Sex and the City. I know that. But that doesn't mean you have to go out of your fucking way to add frivolous, pointless, wankery to your UIs. If you want to do something productive: fix the Gmail UI.
- bittired 13y ago> fix the Gmail UI. They just tried recently. I'd like to stop using GMail, but there aren't worthy competitors (free, large, mostly reliable). My ISP (which is a major one) sucks at mail compared to Google.
- stopcodon 13y ago>tried I waited 2 hours for an email yesterday only to find it hidden in a new "Promotions" tab instead of my inbox, which meant it didn't get pushed to my phone for some reason.
- freehunter 13y agoMan, waiting on Steam Guard to send me an email with a confirmation code got pretty hairy during some of the recent sales. When there's 15 minutes left to say 75% on a game I really want and the confirmation email gets sent to Promotions and therefore never seen... thanks Gmail.
- slouch 13y agoIf you click the + on the right and uncheck everything it goes back to the old inbox.
- drunkenmasta 13y agoI wanted to review something using Google and they prompted me to make a Google + account with my real name etc. I think reviews can be more useful when there is not the pressure to be overly optimistic about everything, calling everything "great" for the sake of seeming like a cheery kind of person
- gibbitz 13y agoI dropped Google+ for this exact reason. I refuse to support a platform that I didn't use when the parent company shuts down the platforms I do. My next phone will likely be Firefox os. I've started using duck duck go. Funny how this obvious information gathering and shameless promotion of what they're clearly no good at has ccompletely soured me to their brand.
- teaneedz 13y agoI wonder if this trend will increase. Moving from Chrome to Firefox and Google to DuckDuckGo for me was first about a bad taste left by a brand. That led me to alternatives that are more user focused and actually listening to users. I think Google kind of lost its way. I doubt if a majority of users though even care or value the issues which cause some of us to jump ship. The identity service of G+ was the first straw for me. I'm sure others are accumulating their own straws. I guess it shows that any company can jump in and fill a niche offered by bigger players. DDG is getting well deserved publicity. It's also nice to see Mozilla in the news again. I'm quite happy making the product switches I have and will put up with any perceived reduction of features for products that are improving and really listening to their users.
- orokusaki 13y agoI have recently cancelled my Google+ account, not only because of similar spam from Google, but also due to the lack of engagement on Google+. A little over half of my Facebook friends have a Google+ profile as well, but my Google+ feed has about 1 new post per week, while my Facebook feed has about 1 new post per 20 minutes. People I know don't like using Google+. I don't like using Facebook or Google+, but if I'm forced (social pressure) to use one of them, it will be Facebook, not Google's me-too platform. To continue my rant, I also appreciate Facebook's fight to profitability, regardless of whether that means I see crappy ads or sponsored posts. This is because Facebook arose out of user engagement, not a desire to gather more users for ad views. Nonetheless, the end is as such, but the origins of such a platform mean something to me. It's a bit like Walmart opening a Whole Foods type of market, or something.
- nfoz 13y agoWhich makes them no different than their competitors which is exactly the problem
- zapov 13y agoI was in another country recently and Google decided that because I've used laptop on an airport that two of my accounts must have been hacked. I have Thunderbird running on another computer and Claws tried to download my mail while on airport. So thanks Google, I guess I will have to stop using those accounts, because I don't like sharing my phone number ;(
- thomaslangston 13y agoThe article complains that they don't want to upload a profile picture because it is a business account. Why wouldn't you upload your company's logo as the profile picture?
- mjs7231 13y agoThe reason behind not wanting to upload a photo is irrelevant to the main conversation.
- vuldin 13y agoAdd this to the same list as the 'Install Google Chrome' message the appears every time I have to go to google.com.
- kzrdude 13y agoYou mentioned leaving facebook. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
- dannyr 13y agoWe see a lot of these posts on HN complaining about companies particularly Google asking you to do some things (register, upload photos, add your name, etc.) Have we actually asked ourselves what value are we giving to these companies in return to using their service?
- andrewhillman 13y ago...and youtube is annoying the fuck out of me, asking me to change account to real name. If you don't they try to trick you with a follow-up question. My username is my real name. Amazing that the tech powerhouse can't write a simple script that sees my username matches my real name. Google, cut the BS and spend your time making search better. Not my fault youtube comments are out of control and add NO value to your platform.
- emini_guy 13y agoCan be annoying like hell, I agree.
- diminoten 13y agoOne email every two weeks counts as spam now? Alrighty then.
- oakaz 13y agoSomebody please create a good Gmail alternative and save us from this shit.
- ryanmcbride 13y agoRIP in Peace Google.
- csense 13y agoGoogle used to be awesome. Ever since they went public, they've slowly but surely started sliding down the path to sucking. They're probably too strong in search to be dislodged right now, and will probably remain so in the short-to-medium term, but some of their non-core services are ripe for disruption by startups.
- pasbesoin 13y agoPeople are already using you, Google. What do you gain by being obnoxious about it?