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[inteuniso]

Google+ should advertise as "Facebook with a hint of Twitter and without that annoying scrolling thing in the corner of your version constantly changing that you can't get rid of. Seriously, is this 1995? Am I on a geocities web page? What the fuck were they thinking?". That'd make a lot more people switch over. Usually I find myself defending facebook's GUI updates to my friends since they are usually not negative changes and people just dislike them because "omg changezors!" but this time? This time they done fucked up -.-

to be fair, you can just edit the html with chrome and get rid of the sidebar.

[SirAaronIII]

How? Do you just slap the chrome:// onto the beginning, or is there a deeper, more powerful method that involves beings that should never be spoken of in the darkness?

[Scaraban]

Eh, I check it when I can't think of anything better to do. That is to say, not often.

[optimumtact]

As I understand it, the real talking point of Google + is the crop circles, or something like that anyway.

[klingon13524]

I would switch over from Facebook to Google+ in an instant, I'm just too young according to Google .

[Ringmaster]

I prefer Tuenti.

[Enzo]

Oh man, I was looking for a simple way to send Google even more of my personal information. This is perfect!

Oh wait, Vector already said this. But it's true. Google has a reputation for, you know, tracking and storing basically every piece of information they can get their hands on. I'm not bringing my offline life anywhere near them.

*Not that I'm not paranoid of Facebook for the same reason, but Google is just better at information mining to begin with.

[GlyphGryph]

Spoiler: rant (click to show/hide)

I'm not going to be using google plus because they insist my name is, like, totally fake, unless I give them a drivers license and maybe a passport but you know maybe they'll just keep that info and keep my account suspended, that sounds good.

Unless I'm, like, a celebrity or something! That's different. But little old me? Hahaha, no, we only want REAL people on our service they say. No one even KNOWS me by my real name, so I'd just use a psuedonym, but of course that doesn't work either. I don't know what the goddamn problem is, they already "verified" my google account, why is this such a big deal comparatively? They know I'm not a spammer or anything.

Well, screw you google. I hope your social networking site dies in a fire, no matter how intent Facebook seems on driving people to it. Screw you and your policy of only letting "desirably named" people in, and most of all screw your insulting and demeaning interpretation of "customer service" (more like form letters, accusations, and demands). My name will probably even be good enough for you by the end of the month, since I'm changing it after the wedding, but you've already lost any chance I ever had of joining.

Short story short: All the good people got kicked off the project, it was half-assed by a bunch of control freaks, and they have a whole bevy of "name" issues (of which my rant only touched on one aspect). They've also got piss-poor customer support, and if someone "reports" your account for anything it gets insta-suspended without even notifying you or really telling you why and with very little in the way of things you can do about it.

[Vector]

... Yeah, I wouldn't be able to get an account anyway, then.  My name is not sufficiently normal.

[GlyphGryph]

Might be worth a try just to see if you get booted. Sometimes its REALLY odd what the algorithm will/won't accept.

My only issue is that they've repeatedly lied about what will/won't pass, AND what will/won't be made an exception for after talking with them, AND over what name you should use, AND what is good enough to prove your name is real.

It's the lying that really gets my goat.

[olemars]

Erik Eric Schmidt recently held a talk somewhere (think it was in the UK) where he explained a bit about how they think about identities and Google+. Let's just say that both Google and Facebook have really fucked up ideas about personal privacy and data protection (both generally seem to feel they're unnecessary - to them anyway). Google+ as a business strategy is in fact built around it becoming an "identity service" or some such.

edit: Here's a transcript of what he said (ironically the transcript is on Google+)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Q: Can we talk about social media for a while? Last night you admitted again that
Google was slow on social media. Why was that, why didn’t you get it as an organisation?

Well, I think the defensive answer would be to say we got a lot of other things right.
When I look back at my decade as CEO, there are many many things I’m very proud of.

In the area of social media, we knew upfront 10 years ago that the Internet lacked
essentially an accurate identity service. I’m not here by the way talking about
Facebook, the media gets confused when I talk about this. If you think about it,
the Internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real
person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer or what have
you.

And the notion of strong identity was never invented in the Internet. Many people
worked on it - I worked on it as a scientist 20 years ago, and it’s a hard
problem. So if we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold
them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could you
know bill them, you know we could have credit cards and so forth and so on,
there are all sorts of reasons.

And the Internet did not develop this in many ways because the Internet came out of
universities where the issue of authentication wasn’t such a big issue.
Everybody trusted everybody, you didn’t have these kinds of
things.

But my general rule is people have a lot of free time and people on the Internet,
there are people who do really really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and
it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out. I’m not
suggesting eliminating them, what I’m suggesting is if we knew their identity
was accurate, we could rank them. Think of them like an identity
rank.

So we’ve had all those conversations at Google but the real mechanism that helped
this was the technology that was invented first by MySpace and then eventually
by Facebook, where you could disambiguate names by looking at people. So if you
have John Smith, they show you there’s five John Smiths, well here’s a John
Smith and then based on the pictures, you say this is the John Smith who’s my
friend. And that’s how identity is in fact managed in Facebook.

We were very, very slow to figure this out in my view, and I’ll take the criticism
as the leader.

So the solution of course that we’ve come up with is called Google+, which is in
essentially early beta, and it looks like it’s doing very well so far. It
essentially provides an identity service with a link structure around your
friends, similar to what I just described.

When we’ve got that, we can improve our products. So for example if you and I are
friends, and - with your permission, this is very important - we can have
slightly better search results if I know a little bit about who you
are.

What about YouTube recommendations? We have this Leanback model where we suggest YouTube videos that you should just watch one after the other. Well if I know the ones that you like, and again with your permission, I can merge that as a
signal in, and get a better result.

So it’s central for Google to have such a service, and that’s what we’re trying to
do.

Q: One of the early controversies around Google+ is you not allowing people to use
nicknames. Andy Carvin, who’s over from NPR actually at the festival, is asking
on Twitter: “How does Google justify its real names only policy on Google+ when
it could put some people at grave risk?”.

Well, the first comment is that Google+ is completely optional. In fact, many many
people want to get in, if you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to.

Q: But you wouldn’t use it in Iran or Syria would you?

Well Iran and Syria are - let’s come back to that because that’s a more complicated
question. But in the Western world, what we decided to do was to take the
position that we wanted people to be willing to be at least identified by some
sort of a real name. And the reason had to do with this identity point I was
making earlier.

So that’s the genesis of this real name - and I should say, by the way, that this
real names debate goes on and on and on. But we want people to stand for
something, we want people to be willing to express themselves. There are
obviously people for which using their real name is not appropriate, and it’s
completely optional, and if you’re one of those people don’t do it. Seems
obvious.

In the case of countries like Iran and Syria, and in fact I’m working on a book on
this so I’ve looked at this pretty thoroughly, it’s a whole different ball of
wax. There, there’s no assumption of privacy, everyone assumes that the Internet
is bugged and that the secret police are after them. So their sensibilities are
extremely different.

[Phmcw]

Google+ and facebook are a problem in the fact that they are supposed to be medium of communication between peoples while completely public as he same time. You have zero privacy on them and should use them as public places .
Therefore you should absolutely avoid using them for chitchat with your family and friend , which is their purpose.
Instead use it as a rather impersonal social vitrine.

[G-Flex]

Google+ and facebook are a problem in the fact that they are supposed to be medium of communication between peoples while completely public as he same time. You have zero privacy on them and should use them as public places .

This isn't remotely true. I don't know about anyone else, but on Facebook I restrict my updates to people on my friends list.

Not that Facebook or Google have the best track records with regard to privacy, but they aren't wholly public spaces either. And the chat/messaging features are even less public than that.

[Johuotar]

Im forced to use facebool because of school.

[ECrownofFire]

Im forced to use facebool because of school.

Funny you mention that, because MY school is using Google Apps