6 ms·

Ha, what a disaster G+ has to be for Google. They must kind of be looking at it like "ew what do we do with this thing now?" They should've taken a more holist

by debt 12y ago

Ha, what a disaster G+ has to be for Google. They must kind of be looking at it like "ew what do we do with this thing now?" They should've taken a more holistic and serious approach to bringing your offline identity online. Instead they tried to copy FB. They should've just called it Google Identity(with the same level of seriousness as Youtube's copyright protection product: Content ID) and provided real-life perks with associating say your Driver's license number with it which maybe would allow me to renew my driver's license much more quickly. I don't know. G+ is just weak. I mean at the end of the day, they DO have your identity. I'm sure their algorithms could within a certainly small margin of error determine who I am to a reasonably high degree of probability based on nothing other than lines in a bunch of log files(DoubleClick Ad requests on various sites, YouTube video watch times, Google Searches based on time of day/location, mobile usage, etc); again, regardless of where or when or how I use Google(i.e. using igonito browsers, using a friend's phone, using a computer an internet cafe, etc.). So why not throw all that information under one umbrella, Google Identity, and provide it to me once I claim it. They're likely able to treat online "behavior" as essentially unique online fingerprints and can just associate that with individual users; that is, they don't really need uniquely identifying data(unique IDs, usernames, etc.), they just need to watch your online activity(regardless of if you're logged in or have identifying cookies, etc.) for a while in order to identify you. I assume it's because consumers probably aren't ready to know just how much data Google actually has on them AND how much information can be extracted from said data. It's likely pretty accurate and pretty scary.

Aldo_MX 12y ago
To be honest, one differentiator that would me use Google+ over Facebook is a -1 button. I love to dislike things, especially if disliking them would affect their Google ranking (I'm looking at you Quora and your dark patterns!). Not only I would love the -1 button, but also negative endorsement, and pretty much any Google+ feature, but with a negative twist. That would really encourage me to use Google+, or should I say Google-.
- mmanfrin 12y ago
  A -1 button affecting search rank would be used almost entirely by dark-hat SEO firms.
  - Aldo_MX 12y ago
    How about a -1 that affects ranking ONLY to people who enables the feature and follows you? I mean, if I follow an expert in his area, it makes more sense to me to see that he doesn't endorse spammy-website.com, than to see he endorses "Chrome Beta for Android".
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      This used to exist - SearchWiki gave you the opportunity to either vote up a search result or to remove it entirely. Both of these actions would affect only your own results - there were vague plans to eventually use the data to improve ranking, but the spam/SEO implications were never solved. Basically people just used it to kill experts-exchange.com. Usage was tiny otherwise, and the experts-exchange case was fixed when StackOverflow started getting traction and Panda put the final nail into experts-exchange's coffin.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Navarr 12y ago
  I'm honestly still surprised that YouTube has a dislike button. It must be incredibly important to their algorithms there. But I'm 95% sure Google+ will never get a dislike button, much like Facebook. Dislike buttons don't belong in social media platforms. They sow disappointment and hurt egos (e.g. karma on reddit).
  - judk 12y ago
    YouTube ia public and searchable and watching a video is relatively expensive, so downvotes help ranking and warn you about bad content. Posts don't have these features, people don't read complete strangers' posts based on search queries. It's pre-curated peer user.
x1798DE 12y ago
Personally, I wasn't too concerned with Google knowing my actual identity, but more with the prospect of tons of information leaking to anyone who I ever meet. For example, it's no longer possible to anonymously review or rate android apps. They retroactively changed all older app reviews to be by "An anonymous user", but now all reviews and ratings are done under your Google+ account, so I just stopped reviewing and rating apps. If I were to rate and review apps as I would prefer to do, then anyone googling my name when they meet me would find my Google+ account, then it would be trivial for them to click around and find out essentially a list of all the apps I use on a regular basis, and how I use them. I don't know that there's anything too personal at the moment, but given that that information is essentially out there forever, I don't want to accidentally rate some app that might reveal my political, religious or cultural affliations (which could bias a future employer or landlord), or something else that might be very telling about my personal life. For me, Google having a huge trove of information on me only matters to the extent that they'd ever show it to anyone else. I don't care what they do with the data internally, I've disclosed it to them, but it's clear after the Snowden documents that Google doesn't have the ability to fight government intrusion into their databases (making their huge troves a very tempting target), and after the fiasco with Google Buzz (and this nonsense with Google+ and the "real names" policy), it's become obvious that they don't seem to have the sort of mindset that is appropriate for a good steward of my private data. It's sad, because they provide many great products, but they are simply not trustworthy - as that becomes more obvious to more people, I imagine it will start to affect their bottom line.
- debt 12y ago
  I know this is probably an unpopular idea but it seems like we set up so much infrastructure(intelligence agencies, the entire security industry, etc.) to create and secure private information that I feel like it creates an unnecessary economic burden and has an unnecessary psychological effect on people. We as a society need to first trust a large entity(which obviously right now is not gonna happen) with as much personally identifying information as possible in the hopes of creating an authority and allowing us to navigate the "system" much more easily(like I said renewing a Driver's License, getting a welfare check more quickly, processing a zoning request more easily, getting a medical history, etc.). After that happens, we should hopefully then feel okay about sharing that personal information publicly. Not a selective news feed like FB but the equivalent of a publicly available intelligence dossier on yourself that anyone(including yourself) has free access to. I know it seems crazy, but I really believe that's where it's headed anyway. No more background checks or credit score checks or walled gardens etc. My current location, my current heart rate, my arrest record, all my google searches(eesh) my last mammogram or testicular cancer exam, etc. is on display for all(including myself) to check and find out instantly and for free. The world would collapse. Economies might actually collapse though. Obviously, society is not ready for that sort of thing just yet, but that should have been the direction Google should have gone with Google+(or Google Identity or whatever they want to call it) eventually. You can't index the world's information if most of it is "private".
zmmmmm 12y ago
> I mean at the end of the day, they DO have your identity. This was always the dumbest thing about the real name policy: Google knew anyway. They could have let everyone have synonyms and pseudonyms until the cows came home and it would only disadvantage their competitors who don't have enough data to do the linkage of identities. Instead what they did was literally drove me away from putting any important information into G+ profile because it was linked to my real name - so Google is the loser all round.
- aiiane 12y ago
  FWIW - the Real Names policy was never about providing Google with your name. It was about the name that was displayed to others. I was never a supporter of the real names policy, but I can still understand the motivations behind it - even if I think it was a mistake. Quoting Yonatan (tech lead for G+): > There were quite a few things we were trying to achieve, some of which turned out to be key and some of which didn't. Greater authenticity was actually one of the big successes: it set the culture to be one where people, by default, act as themselves rather than as a persona. That makes a huge difference to how people behave, and now the culture is stable enough that it's OK to relax that. Reducing trolling, on the other hand, turned out not to be as tied to names as anyone thought. We had lots of reasons to believe that might be the case at first -- look at YouTube, 4chan, and Facebook comments back then -- but in retrospect, the dynamics which control trolling seem to be somewhat different. Or to put it a little more bluntly, people are quite willing to be assholes under their real names, too.
  - judk 12y ago
    Really shows how out of touch G+ leads were from Internet users. At least they learned eventually.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    I find it quite interesting that they didn't realise that making people use their real names pretty much is guaranteed to make a lot of people NOT act as themselves rather than a persona. Lots of people who are happy to "be themselves" in safe settings, around likeminded people, will "clam up" or take on a persona they don't like immediately if the alternative is that anyone can link something to their name. Political beliefs, religious beliefs, sexual orientation etc. Even gender - there are plenty of women online in male oriented environments that are uneasy about using their real name in certain settings because of bad experiences with sexism. If they'd bothered to listen to any of the people they affected, they'd have learned this on day one. But it ought to have been blatantly obvious: In real life we don't go around with name tags and hand out dossiers on ourselves to random strangers, which is the equivalent effect of using full real names online. I don't know what it says about the culture of Google that this was such a hard realisation for them.

by debt 12y ago

Aldo_MX 12y ago

To be honest, one differentiator that would me use Google+ over Facebook is a -1 button. I love to dislike things, especially if disliking them would affect their Google ranking (I'm looking at you Quora and your dark patterns!). Not only I would love the -1 button, but also negative endorsement, and pretty much any Google+ feature, but with a negative twist. That would really encourage me to use Google+, or should I say Google-.

mmanfrin 12y ago
A -1 button affecting search rank would be used almost entirely by dark-hat SEO firms.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  How about a -1 that affects ranking ONLY to people who enables the feature and follows you? I mean, if I follow an expert in his area, it makes more sense to me to see that he doesn't endorse spammy-website.com, than to see he endorses "Chrome Beta for Android".
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    This used to exist - SearchWiki gave you the opportunity to either vote up a search result or to remove it entirely. Both of these actions would affect only your own results - there were vague plans to eventually use the data to improve ranking, but the spam/SEO implications were never solved. Basically people just used it to kill experts-exchange.com. Usage was tiny otherwise, and the experts-exchange case was fixed when StackOverflow started getting traction and Panda put the final nail into experts-exchange's coffin.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Navarr 12y ago
I'm honestly still surprised that YouTube has a dislike button. It must be incredibly important to their algorithms there. But I'm 95% sure Google+ will never get a dislike button, much like Facebook. Dislike buttons don't belong in social media platforms. They sow disappointment and hurt egos (e.g. karma on reddit).
- judk 12y ago
  YouTube ia public and searchable and watching a video is relatively expensive, so downvotes help ranking and warn you about bad content. Posts don't have these features, people don't read complete strangers' posts based on search queries. It's pre-curated peer user.

x1798DE 12y ago

Personally, I wasn't too concerned with Google knowing my actual identity, but more with the prospect of tons of information leaking to anyone who I ever meet. For example, it's no longer possible to anonymously review or rate android apps. They retroactively changed all older app reviews to be by "An anonymous user", but now all reviews and ratings are done under your Google+ account, so I just stopped reviewing and rating apps. If I were to rate and review apps as I would prefer to do, then anyone googling my name when they meet me would find my Google+ account, then it would be trivial for them to click around and find out essentially a list of all the apps I use on a regular basis, and how I use them. I don't know that there's anything too personal at the moment, but given that that information is essentially out there forever, I don't want to accidentally rate some app that might reveal my political, religious or cultural affliations (which could bias a future employer or landlord), or something else that might be very telling about my personal life. For me, Google having a huge trove of information on me only matters to the extent that they'd ever show it to anyone else. I don't care what they do with the data internally, I've disclosed it to them, but it's clear after the Snowden documents that Google doesn't have the ability to fight government intrusion into their databases (making their huge troves a very tempting target), and after the fiasco with Google Buzz (and this nonsense with Google+ and the "real names" policy), it's become obvious that they don't seem to have the sort of mindset that is appropriate for a good steward of my private data. It's sad, because they provide many great products, but they are simply not trustworthy - as that becomes more obvious to more people, I imagine it will start to affect their bottom line.

debt 12y ago
I know this is probably an unpopular idea but it seems like we set up so much infrastructure(intelligence agencies, the entire security industry, etc.) to create and secure private information that I feel like it creates an unnecessary economic burden and has an unnecessary psychological effect on people. We as a society need to first trust a large entity(which obviously right now is not gonna happen) with as much personally identifying information as possible in the hopes of creating an authority and allowing us to navigate the "system" much more easily(like I said renewing a Driver's License, getting a welfare check more quickly, processing a zoning request more easily, getting a medical history, etc.). After that happens, we should hopefully then feel okay about sharing that personal information publicly. Not a selective news feed like FB but the equivalent of a publicly available intelligence dossier on yourself that anyone(including yourself) has free access to. I know it seems crazy, but I really believe that's where it's headed anyway. No more background checks or credit score checks or walled gardens etc. My current location, my current heart rate, my arrest record, all my google searches(eesh) my last mammogram or testicular cancer exam, etc. is on display for all(including myself) to check and find out instantly and for free. The world would collapse. Economies might actually collapse though. Obviously, society is not ready for that sort of thing just yet, but that should have been the direction Google should have gone with Google+(or Google Identity or whatever they want to call it) eventually. You can't index the world's information if most of it is "private".

zmmmmm 12y ago

> I mean at the end of the day, they DO have your identity. This was always the dumbest thing about the real name policy: Google knew anyway. They could have let everyone have synonyms and pseudonyms until the cows came home and it would only disadvantage their competitors who don't have enough data to do the linkage of identities. Instead what they did was literally drove me away from putting any important information into G+ profile because it was linked to my real name - so Google is the loser all round.

aiiane 12y ago
FWIW - the Real Names policy was never about providing Google with your name. It was about the name that was displayed to others. I was never a supporter of the real names policy, but I can still understand the motivations behind it - even if I think it was a mistake. Quoting Yonatan (tech lead for G+): > There were quite a few things we were trying to achieve, some of which turned out to be key and some of which didn't. Greater authenticity was actually one of the big successes: it set the culture to be one where people, by default, act as themselves rather than as a persona. That makes a huge difference to how people behave, and now the culture is stable enough that it's OK to relax that. Reducing trolling, on the other hand, turned out not to be as tied to names as anyone thought. We had lots of reasons to believe that might be the case at first -- look at YouTube, 4chan, and Facebook comments back then -- but in retrospect, the dynamics which control trolling seem to be somewhat different. Or to put it a little more bluntly, people are quite willing to be assholes under their real names, too.
- judk 12y ago
  Really shows how out of touch G+ leads were from Internet users. At least they learned eventually.
- vidarh 12y ago
  I find it quite interesting that they didn't realise that making people use their real names pretty much is guaranteed to make a lot of people NOT act as themselves rather than a persona. Lots of people who are happy to "be themselves" in safe settings, around likeminded people, will "clam up" or take on a persona they don't like immediately if the alternative is that anyone can link something to their name. Political beliefs, religious beliefs, sexual orientation etc. Even gender - there are plenty of women online in male oriented environments that are uneasy about using their real name in certain settings because of bad experiences with sexism. If they'd bothered to listen to any of the people they affected, they'd have learned this on day one. But it ought to have been blatantly obvious: In real life we don't go around with name tags and hand out dossiers on ourselves to random strangers, which is the equivalent effect of using full real names online. I don't know what it says about the culture of Google that this was such a hard realisation for them.