Thanks for nothing, jerkface

[vivek.krishnan]

What the Google PR did (IMO) is gray, but more with shades of black.

Having used G+, I think that G+ posts on the searches really have decreased the search results. However, with respect to reviews, its slightly better. Ditto for certain news articles or DIYers. Youtube & Play store comments initially were bad, but on the whole should improve. Overall, it should improve.

I knew about the G+ name issues, and to be honest, its a "I dont care" attitude. Facebook also did something of the same, and you do need to prune fake a/c's. Else, you have anon boards for you.

As for the Hangouts and Scroogled issues, the writer has clearly not used Hangouts. As for Scroggled, Bing still sucks. Yeah, its improved, but still sucks.

As for tracking you with G+ - again, dont care, dont bother. I like most of the Google services, like the password saving facility in Chrome (which works great on the Android browser as well!). Ditto for recent tabs and unifying the history.

Google, Facebook and the rest track you online. Microsoft might be tracking you offline (not sure though) through your Windows apps as well (it keeps reminding me to shift to a Microsoft a/c from a local a/c - I aint doing that, MS).

Brin told the audience at boutique Bay Area tech conference Recode that he was "kind of a weirdo" and that, "it was probably a mistake for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with."

It runs in stark contrast to when Brin told the world how he came to love Google+, and admitted to taking a direct hand in its design at the October 2011 Web 2.0 conference.

Seated onstage next to Brin, Vic Gundotra told the audience that its "design owes a lot to Brin's vision."

Brin's statement comes only one month after the man he hired to create and run the search giant's social network, Vic Gundotra, quietly quit the company, and without explanation.

Google+ broke our trust
Thanks to one crystalline moment of Google+, it became clear that a company we trusted couldn't be trusted at all.

The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be described as a confusing, velvet-glove-cast-in-iron policy where users of Google+ are required use their birth or government ID names — and when flagged, must prove it, and submit official documentation as proof.

"Ex-Google employees were deleted. Writers, musicians, programmers and more were deleted. Editing your name raised suspicion and still risks getting you flagged."
Google began its "real name" enforcement with mass Google+ account suspensions and deletions shortly after Google+ launched in July 2011. The whole mess is called Nymwars.

Ex-Google employees were deleted. Writers, musicians, programmers and more were deleted. Editing your name raised suspicion and still risks getting you flagged.

Google+ remained silent while Nymwars raged through the headlines — until it told press it would allow "alternate names" — which was incorrectly reported (at first) as if Google had begin to allow pseudonyms. This was shown to be untrue when Google told ZDNet that "nicknames" had to be proven with your real name and government ID.

In the background, Google+ began "unifying" people's identities (combining its background matching of users names and profiles) in Android address books.

For LGBT, political dissidents, activists and at-risk people everywhere, Google's little Google+ project became a loaded gun pointed right at anyone whose privacy is what keeps them alive.

Users found out in January 2014 when Google+ force-integrated chat and SMS into "hangouts" in the Android 4.4 "KitKat" update.

At-risk users were disproportionately affected, most especially transgender people who needed to keep their identities separate for personal safety and employment reasons.

One woman was outed to a co-worker when she texted him, and risked losing her employment.


Google's response was that her outing was "user error" — Google blamed her, the user for not understanding the new, confusing integration.

After Sorensen's nightmare hit the press, more stories emerged from transpeople who had been outed at the hand of Google+, spanning all the way back to the beginning of 2011's Nymwars.

Google+'s appalling, absolute inhuman detachment was probably deemed a necessary price tag attached to the shiny prize of product saturation.

In case you're wondering, the "Hangout" feature was Sergey Brin's idea. Gundotra had told 2011's Web 2.0 audience, "He was intimately behind pushing us to make Hangout happen."

Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched
YouTube got hosed by Google+.

On November 6 2013, Google changed its YouTube property to only allow comments from Google+ accounts, thus de-anonymizing commenters, as the principal element of its site-wide comments overhaul.

Google's war on anonymity imploded with this move to force Google+ — and its unwanted "real name" policy — onto YouTube users. The outraged the YouTube community's anti-Google+ petition currently has over 239,000 signatures. The co-founder of YouTube slammed Google for forcing users to use Google+.

Google's problems with Google+ identity control malfeasance became pop culture fodder.

Link : http://www.zdnet.com/thanks-for-nothing-jerkface-7000030306/

 

[ayanavish]

Everything Google does is more like shoving it down one's throat, with Google plus leading the pack