11 ms·

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

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.

danbmil99 13y ago
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:"
- jmillikin 13y ago
  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. What would you have written?
  - jaggederest 13y ago
    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.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      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_?")
  - danbmil99 13y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6771148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6771148
- mcherm 13y ago
  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.
- danbmil99 13y ago
  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.
Negitivefrags 13y ago
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.
- saurik 13y ago
  Yeah. The only system with a separate login was ever YouTube, and I think that may have only apploed if your account was ancient anyway.
  - kelnos 13y ago
    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.
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    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.
  - brigade 13y ago
    Yep. Creating YouTube-only accounts was discontinued over 5 years ago, and as of 2011 all such accounts must be merged into a Google account.
  - bowlofpetunias 13y ago
    > 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.
dredmorbius 13y ago
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. https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/XVFzdMK8xbg https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/XVFz... 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.
- omegant 13y ago
  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.
brigade 13y ago
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".
- jmillikin 13y ago
  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.
yabatopia 13y ago
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?
- jmillikin 13y ago
  > 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. [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323 [2] https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1710600 https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1710600 > 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.
  - nisa 13y ago
    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.
    - jmillikin 13y ago
      Go to https://plus.google.com/u/0/dashboard https://plus.google.com/u/0/dashboard and click "Create a page"
      - nisa 13y ago
        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. Edit found the explanation: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657858?hl=en&ref_topic=3097177 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657858?hl=en&ref_...
dsl 13y ago
First of all, thank you for responding publicly. In hindsight what I really meant to ask was this: 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.
- stanleydrew 13y ago
  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.
  - __m 13y ago
    i don't think that is the case otherwise google+ would only be used for authentication without making this connection public.
- IanCal 13y ago
  > 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!
fauigerzigerk 13y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  It's not without some irony that I note Vic Gundotra's name has been circulated as a candidate for the Microsoft CEO position. In some ways I feel he'd be the perfect successor to the legacies of Gates and Ballmer.
  - scholia 13y ago
    Gundotra spent 15 years at Microsoft before joining Google. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra 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."
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Maybe he never left Microsoft? Maybe his true mission is to keep tabs on Google and given the opportunity, create long-term strategic blunders?
      - scholia 13y ago
davidgerard 13y ago
"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.
chestnut-tree 13y ago
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.
- magicalist 13y ago
  https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard may be what you're looking for.
  - MaysonL 13y ago
    Thanks for that link: it taught me something interesting. Photos that I attached to a Gmail message were stored in my (never signed up for or desired) Picassa account. That is fucking batshit insane.
    - IanCal 13y ago
      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.
      - chestnut-tree 13y ago
        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).
znowi 13y ago
> 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.
mtgx 13y ago
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.
return0 13y ago
Except YouTube has a separate identity. It's not ever google-branded. If people weren't told explicitly, it's not obvious that its a google site.
rm445 13y ago
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.
davemel37 13y ago
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.
bbulkow 13y ago
The second bullet is what doesn't work. 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.
kevando 13y ago
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?
mcgwiz 13y ago
Verified/full names are incompatible with profiles/content that are public by default.
vicaya 13y ago
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?
EpicEng 13y ago
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.
joeldidit 13y ago
The problem with this is that most users don't want their YouTube account linked with everything else. They aren't a minority.

danbmil99 13y ago

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:"

jmillikin 13y ago
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. What would you have written?
- jaggederest 13y ago
  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.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    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_?")
- danbmil99 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6771148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6771148
mcherm 13y ago
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.
danbmil99 13y ago
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.

Negitivefrags 13y ago

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.

saurik 13y ago
Yeah. The only system with a separate login was ever YouTube, and I think that may have only apploed if your account was ancient anyway.
- kelnos 13y ago
  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.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  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.
- brigade 13y ago
  Yep. Creating YouTube-only accounts was discontinued over 5 years ago, and as of 2011 all such accounts must be merged into a Google account.
- bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  > 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.

dredmorbius 13y ago

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. https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/XVFzdMK8xbg https://plus.google.com/u/0/103389452828130864950/posts/XVFz... 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.

omegant 13y ago
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.

brigade 13y ago

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".

jmillikin 13y ago
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.

yabatopia 13y ago

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?

jmillikin 13y ago
> 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. [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323 [2] https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1710600 https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1710600 > 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.
- nisa 13y ago
  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.
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    Go to https://plus.google.com/u/0/dashboard https://plus.google.com/u/0/dashboard and click "Create a page"
    - nisa 13y ago
      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. Edit found the explanation: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657858?hl=en&ref_topic=3097177 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657858?hl=en&ref_...

dsl 13y ago

First of all, thank you for responding publicly. In hindsight what I really meant to ask was this: 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.

stanleydrew 13y ago
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.
- __m 13y ago
  i don't think that is the case otherwise google+ would only be used for authentication without making this connection public.
IanCal 13y ago
> 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!

fauigerzigerk 13y ago

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.

dredmorbius 13y ago
It's not without some irony that I note Vic Gundotra's name has been circulated as a candidate for the Microsoft CEO position. In some ways I feel he'd be the perfect successor to the legacies of Gates and Ballmer.
- scholia 13y ago
  Gundotra spent 15 years at Microsoft before joining Google. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra 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."
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    Maybe he never left Microsoft? Maybe his true mission is to keep tabs on Google and given the opportunity, create long-term strategic blunders?
    - scholia 13y ago

davidgerard 13y ago

"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.

chestnut-tree 13y ago

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.

magicalist 13y ago
https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard may be what you're looking for.
- MaysonL 13y ago
  Thanks for that link: it taught me something interesting. Photos that I attached to a Gmail message were stored in my (never signed up for or desired) Picassa account. That is fucking batshit insane.
  - IanCal 13y ago
    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.
    - chestnut-tree 13y ago
      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).

znowi 13y ago

> 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.

mtgx 13y ago

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.

return0 13y ago

Except YouTube has a separate identity. It's not ever google-branded. If people weren't told explicitly, it's not obvious that its a google site.

rm445 13y ago

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.

davemel37 13y ago

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.

bbulkow 13y ago

The second bullet is what doesn't work. 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.

kevando 13y ago

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?

mcgwiz 13y ago

Verified/full names are incompatible with profiles/content that are public by default.

vicaya 13y ago

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?

EpicEng 13y ago

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.

joeldidit 13y ago

The problem with this is that most users don't want their YouTube account linked with everything else. They aren't a minority.