We Need To Talk, Google | Hacker News Reader

We Need To Talk, Google

f-secure.com

470 pointsSami_Lehtinen234 comments

Google is simply trying to unify their services. YouTube was an acquisition, with it's own login system and social network. They don't want to maintain this separation forever, they want a single signon for everything.

Ditto for sharing and contacts. You had separate 'contacts' in Gmail, Latitude, G+, Reader, YouTube, and probably others I'm missing. Users shouldn't be prompted to maintain N different copies of this information and manage it in confusing ways.

It's a mistake to view this as "they're forcing me to use the G+ social stream". It's more "they're consolidating my 5 different profiles and authentication credentials across services."

Google could axe the social stream and this would still make sense.

"Google is simply trying to unify their services."

Right, well, that's the problem. Google wants to unify their services, but I don't want to use the thereby unified services, which are, after all, conceptually distinct anyway.

The complaint is that they're trying to unify their services. The explanation, when faced with that complaint, that they're trying to unify their services is a non-starter.

They are not conceptually distinct, to the vast majority of users.

I mean, I'm sorry you feel that way. But it's an indefensible position.

"thing I use to send email" and "thing I use to watch music videos" are not conceptually distinct?

Most users would send as emails to others the kinds of things they leave as comments on youtube?

The word "I" showed up in both of those sentences. To most users, unifying all of their data adds a lot of value.

Google reads my GMails from major airlines, and shows me when my next flight is when I Google Search for "when is my next flight". The flight also just pops up on Google Now on my Android phone. It also knows where I am, and where the airport is, so it tells me how long it will take to drive there.

When I Google search for La Cucaracha on my desktop, when I walk out to my car and look at my phone, it automatically suggests Navigating to La Cucaracha.

When I Subscribe to a YouTube video, it automatically shows up in my GMail as a feed.

I find value in these things, and I'm sorry you don't.

> I find value in these things

Well then good for you, and you should be able to merge all your accounts with Google into one; but why should this be almost compulsory?

What's more, if there's so much value into this, why does Google have to force its users to do it?

> Well then good for you, and you should be able to merge all your accounts with Google into one; but why should this be almost compulsory?

Quite often here on Hacker News we sit around and talk about how removing features or options from an App is often the best thing to do for usability. I think this is true. At the same time every time this comes up with regards to Google or some other large company the response flips around completely.

Ultimately I think the readership here is just the 10% of users that want the option, exactly the group we often say that should be ignored for the overall good of the product.

"I'm annoyed at YouTube for bothering me to use my real name" is not exclusively an HN thing. Most content creators in the video game community who publish on YT do it under an alias, or under an account representing their website/community. For us, YT's failure to separate personal accounts from organization/business accounts (the main complaint in the article) is a constant problem.

It's not that.

It's Google becoming more and more mainstream. It's Lowest Common Denominator Google.

Every revision, something else is gone. Another menu is missing, another option.

After scouring enough Google Support forums, tinkering in enough settings and trying enough workarounds, it's the only solution I can come to.

Google isn't the hacker search engine we fell in love with over a decade ago.

It's an advertising company looking to monetize on a user's lack of privacy to help connect them with advertisers. Adwords is 99% of their business. We can't just ignore that forever.

The lowest common denominator of user is the the type of user is probably most susceptible not controlling their privacy well enough and for Google being able to target them widely. How much does Google really care about us ad-block toting hacker types anyway?

I really hate that attitude. I'm tired of seeing features and options constantly disappearing from the applications I use.

They want it because it is simpler and more efficent. Only a small amount of users (very, very small) would explicitly opt out to a non unfied system. For those few user, keeping up the old system or building stronger separation in the new system is just nosensical for them.

Not happy with the options in there service, use something diffrent.

Well, it's not. YouTube asked me exactly once if I want to use my Google+ name and pic on YouTube. I said no. It said Ok. Didn't ask since then.

I've been asked multiple times, trying to get me to use my real name on YT.

I haven't been asked for years. I have the same username i had in 2006.

Well, if you really didn't want to, you could always create separate Google accounts for each service.

I think that at least Youtube accounts now require a phone number when registering. I don't know for sure, but I doubt you can give the same number for multiple accounts.

Create a fake phone number

"The word "I" showed up in both of those sentences. To most users, unifying all of their data adds a lot of value."

So you want your every identity online to be tied together? Your usenet posts to alt.sex.hello-kitty, your responses to ads on Craigslist, your interactions with old friends on facebook, your interactions with professional contacts on linkedin (if you use it), your interactions on some neighborhood blog, your political commentary on some political blog, whatever?

After all, if you were describing all of them, you'd use the word "I"!

So, the only reasonable interpretation of my position is to carry it to the ridiculous extreme?

Or do you acknowledge that there's clearly a balance of benefit and pain, and Google is merely slightly to the wrong side of where you'd want them to be?

How is that a ridiculous extreme? People have different persona and personal facets in real life that the prefer to keep separate for various reason. That can be as simple as "Work" and "Home" to political views, lifestyle choices etc. The simplest solution online is to use multiple accounts, Google (and others) desperately want you to use only one and do their best to force it. Yes, this way they can provide/extract "value" by being able to collect every thing about you. The flip side is that they have everything about you all linked, personally I view Google et al or the Government doing it just as creepy.

I wouldn't say Google desperately wants you to have one. I use three separate Google accounts and switch between them with ease. YouTube is the only one that hassles me to merge, but given the quality of YouTube comments I can understand them wanting to tie your account to your real name.

Your justification for tying everything together, not only a single method of signing on but a single pervasive identity, was just that ... it's a single person using the things. That's not a very good justification. And your example of a Good Thing that comes from it, by way of contesting my claim that youtube and gmail (or g+) are conceptually distinct, used something else entirely, involving email and planes. (And actually I would prefer those things not to be done automatically!)

The funny thing is that all those features work right now, without unifying your Google accounts.

I trust Google to come up with clever integrations in the future. The OP does not. I think it's his loss.

Even if different properties have different profiles, Google will still have access to each more then enough data to create these clever integrations in the future. I don't even mind if they have a hidden 'aggregate' profile they use for those features.

The frustration comes from removing the option of customizing my profile for each service.

Banana72 shared a YouTube video with you...? What the hell?

Banana72...? Oh, right, on YouTube VikingCoder is called Banana72.

I think you're asking for a feature which would confuse the hell out of most users.

Unfortunately, that's hard to say without doing proper usability testing.

I managed to find a decent looking study that somewhat supports my position [1]. Here's an interesting quote from the abstract:

"many (40%) were hesitant to consent to the release of their personal profile information; and (6) many (36%) ex- pressed concern with the use of SSO on websites that contain valuable personal information or, conversely, are not trust- worthy. We also found that with an improved affordance and privacy control, more than 60% of study participants would use Web SSO solutions on the websites they trust."

[1] https://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2011/proceedings/a4_Sun.pdf

This is a very important discussion -- I'd love to see some papers that study the benefits of a single login / profile, rather then the negatives.

Many (40%) were hesitant to use Facebook, when it was described to them, citing privacy concerns. And then 98% of them did.

How people say they will act, and how they act, are completely different animals.

That probably has a lot to do with network effects - even if a lot of people would be hesitant to use Facebook, all their friends are on there rather than a more privacy-preserving alternative. Same reason everyone keeps using eBay even though they continue to get shitter and shitter.

Hence the need for studies ;)

I don't disagree with your sentiment so I had to go back and re-read the OPs thoughts.

I think he had a Group Youtube channel. He logged in using his individual account onto his Group Youtube channel and it linked his individual G+ to the group Youtube. When he unlinked this, it disable his Group Youtube.

I think this is pretty serious stuff. If youtube allows you to group individual accounts, then you dont want to link a group channel to an individual account. I think thats the concerns being raised here.

It's a transition time. They're making the right choices. It's unfortunate that the transition from the current state to the new state is painful.

Ultimately, do you agree with the direction, and can you forgive them for the missteps?

I mean, how many times was "re-install Microsoft Windows, and all of your applications" the only option?

I get that it's painful for some people, and I don't mean to diminish that. But my God, this guy wasted an entire afternoon on configuring his free service.</sarcasm>

It's not free if the content we upload becomes content Google offers to other users for entertainment, which advertisers pay Google to be a part of. It's not free if Google offers advertisers inroads into our "mandatory unified profiles and connected personal data streams".

The OP is merely expressing what a lot of people are experiencing, and not just technical people. I know plenty of non-technical people who avoid mainstream Google because it's like "getting a passport" and "signing over your life" just to upload a video.

The user experience of being part of YouTube is crap. The barrier to entry is too heavily weighted towards "registration" and "validation" rather than just having fun and joining something fun.

Email is NOT related to Youtube, not by any stretch. So you get emamiled when someone posts a video? Wow, that really is lame. That notification could happen a million different ways, including an email to your Yahoo email address.

Google forces completely different services to be connected. It's no longer possible to rate a video out of 5 unless you have a Google+ account. It's no longer possible to have a Google+ account unless you provide Google your mobile phone number and access to all your contacts, etc etc.

Youtube was once a cool service for YOU, US. Now it's a service for "content partners" and YOU/WE are permitted to join in, provided that certain commercially motivated conditions are met. That's crap. It's like a movie cinema denying entry unless you wear a (free) t-shirt advertising their cinema. VikingCoder would say "hey, it's a free t-shirt, what are you complaining about". Well, I just want to watch a film, I do not want to be locked into the Cinema's desperate social media marketing eco-system.

"Who the hell is VikingCoder? hmm... if I click here, and here... and cross-reference these histories... yeah, looks like that's the Nicaraquan guy I talked with last week in Counter-Strike after researching fruit flies. Banana something, I think he called himself."

1/2 OT:

Navigating to La Cucaracha, i.e., literally to The Cockroach?

Is there really a place called La Cucaracha? I would have expected Google to show ads for exterminator services or maybe a link to a YouTube video featuring the La Cucaracha song … ;)

I've been to a great Mexican restaurant named La Cucaracha. Great name, huh?

I've always wondered how Chi-Chi's stayed in business, BTW.

Because who wants to go to a place called tits? Me, that's who.

Do you really consider cockroaches and tits to be on the same level?!

I doubt that most users understand that Youtube and Google are the same company. Having a single signon between those two services makes very little sense. As for the other services, those under the Google brand, it makes more sense.

It's the attempt to push Google+ on me that I dislike.

> Having a single signon between those two services makes very little sense.

Where do you draw the line? GMail, Calendar, Drive, Contacts, YouTube, Google+, Android, Chrome, Voice, Hangouts? Should they all have different sign-ons?

Is Google forbidden from integrating signons for all future companies it acquires?

Google has always integrated sign-ons between those services.

It is the unification of user profiles that is causing all the uproar.

You have a very short memory. Google has NOT always integrated sign-ons between those services, and there was an uproar when it happened.

You are right -- I don't really remember when I had to login with different credentials for Youtube, et al.

Just to clarify, I am making a distinction between being able to sign into a Youtube profile with a Google account and forcing the same profile across all Google properties.

Judging from my preferences, and based on my (limited) anecdotes, it seems that users appreciate the convenience of single-signin solutions, as long as each property they are signing into has a profile that can be managed separately.

If you seriously don't want to, just create two Google accounts...I'm using multiple sign-in across many of their web properties with my personal account and my corporate Google Apps account.

> Is Google forbidden from integrating signons for all future companies it acquires?

Forbidden, yes; held hostage by their users for all the free platforms they provide in exchange for all the theoretical dollars they generate in page views

They have their own domain name. How are they not distinct?

If you used a single site for gmail, youtube and G+, integrating it all into a single service, then you'd have a point. But they're different sites, different services. It's nice if you can use a single account for them all, and if it's easy to move content from one to the other, but that's not the same thing.

The problem is that they're not unifying their services well.

In UX discussions this always comes up as one that sucks.

Basically the Google UX, to me, is "Here's a bunch of stuff that we have. Good luck!"

They need to seriously put the unifying UX of their entire brand from end-to-end as their top priority, so that you go to Google and can actually use what they offer in a cohesive way, instead of with piecemeal walled-off divisions of inconsistency.

It's a huge problem to be sure, and there's no easy solution. This blog post is just a description of one annoying symptom.

Meanwhile, what Google thinks of as good UX these days is removing features from their already minimal individual products. See: New Maps; Gmail New Compose. Their priorities are upside-down and I have no confidence they can turn their ship around...

Plus, it's very hard to tell if a feature has been _removed_ or just hidden away where you're unlikely to find it.

The core of the Google UI at the moment is: "Hey, move your mouse around the screen or just click somewhere and maybe something useful will slide out from where we've hidden it!"

I exaggerate, but only slightly....

I exaggerate, but only slightly....

If anything, you're understating the frustration of the new GMail compose UI. My browser window hasn't gotten any smaller, but the amount of important information displayed at any given time by GMail continues to decrease.

"Oh, you don't really need to see who you're sending this e-mail to, nor could you possibly care whether they're a To:, CC:, or BCC:, so we'll just hide them all behind a single line."

"While we're at it, we'll make you use your mouse to see what formatting and linking options are available. Never mind that they're always in the same place, we just feel like hiding them from you, you know, to watch your mouse squirm!"

"As an added bonus, we'll move the cursor back to the top of your composed text when our silly algorithm decides to unhide the quoted text! For free!"

Well said! ;-)

> Never mind that they're always in the same place

Except sometimes they're not. Select an email and "More" shoots over from being the third item in the menu bar to being the seventh.

Then there's "Archive" which can either have its own button or magically appear as a dropdown menu item. And so on.

Drives me crazy....

I don't want that! I want to remain anonymous to help improve the content of youtube without exposing myself to risk. For example I might want to post something bad about a competitor's youtube video, which will contribute to the discussion but I don't want my affiliation or name to distract from this conversation.

The real problem is that the elimination of privacy that Google has so meticulously pursued has left their communities dull and idol, producing poor quality and non-stimulating content.

Now I am going to think twice about upvoting that crazy youtube video, and something more mild will take its place in the rank hierarchy?

What happened to the cool internet?

If you're giving Youtube comments as a shining example of quality and stimulating comment, I guess something is totally wrong in this world.

Even with the new rating system, the comments on Youtube are the best example of human stupidity.

That may be so, but the real name policy still has detrimental effects for some users. For example, I've stopped giving reviews to anything on google. Why? I don't want the things I like and dislike, and use broadcast to the world.

Why should the entire planet know where I like to eat? Where I live? What I do in my spare time with apps? What my hobbies are? This is a massive privacy loss, and thus I don't review anything on google's platform.

Anonymous reviews have value, even if they are more susceptible to being gamed.

Its not about stimulation, it about ranking and feedback. Comments like 'This sucks' are also good.

I disagree. That sounds like a pretty useless comment to me being that you can already like or dislike a video. It's redundant.

Why don't you think you can stay anonymous on YouTube? Don't all the prompts let you keep your channel name?

I love to be able to refrigerate my soda while washing my clothes, all in my nexus 4.

... just sucks to have the soda can burst out because you know, my freezer is integrated in the washer. And my nexus battery now weights 100Ton. But thankfully LG will buy some small truck brand and solve that too!

...sounds retarded, but that's how I see what's google is doing. A total lack of connection to who uses their services and with common sense. All their services more or less already worked like this, with open APIs and decent standardized integration. but they decided to move away from it and use g+ as the glue. which they are probably sniffing.

> Google is simply trying to unify their services

That's silly. If they wanted to unify their services, they'd turn youtube channels into G+ profiles. And they'd do it without any hassle for the users.

I'm sorry, but it's obvious that Google is desperately trying to inflate their G+ profile numbers by any means they can devise, because they won't admit to themselves that they've already lost the social network battle to FB. No amount of being apologetic and spin-doctoring can make this less obvious.

Turning a YouTube channel into a G+ profile doesn't fix it. YouTube channels are often owned and managed by multiple people. A G+ profile is a user identity, G+ pages represent places or things. So you'd then force everyone to have a separate G+ account just for their YT channel so that they can share non-personal login credentials with other people managing this.

This if anything would inflate G+ profile numbers more.

I think the marketing mistake has been using the same brand name for the unified profile/login as the social stream.

But why force me (if I link) to change the name I appear as on youtube to be the real one they required for g+ ? I can't believe I'm the only one with things I posted as FooBar42 that I don't want under the name Mr John Smith, not in an age where your name is googled for about anything.

The argument is that if you didn't want them posted under "Mr John Smith" you shouldn't have posted them at all. I think they let you delete/hide all your old comments as part of the transition, but agreed that only accounts for the personal account use case, not the corporate YouTube channel use case.

That argument, though, makes no sense at all.

I'm a homosexual, and living in a very conservative and homophobic part of France. I don't want any things related to homosexuality and the lgbt community posted under my real identity, because then any member of my family or any of my friends could stumble upon it and make problematical deductions.

Does that mean that I shouldn't be involved online in the lgbt community whatsoever, because it's not something my relatives support?

Another fairly easy counter-example would be the one of an anonymous online political activist. I don't get people who support that kind of arguments.

Anonimity is a basic human right that one should be free to exercise at any time. Without it, those in power or those crazies out there that have nothing better can easily find something to attack those they don't like. This is not the providence of "something to hide" but that people should be secure with certainty against all forms of intrusion that lacks probable cause.

Anonymity is difficult for naïve people to understand: that what you say, online or offline, can at any point in the future (potentially indefinitely) may arbitrarily be used against you in familial, legal, political, business, personal, romantic or any other context. This amounts to individuals unwittingly manufacturing ammunition and handing it to their enemies.

I think that anonymity is impossible; you could assign a unique number to each individual in something like 33 or 34 bits, which means you could de-anonymize your pseudonym in as few as 33 or 34 bisecting pieces of PII. (Gender identification provides at least one bit, and possibly more for someone who is homosexual; specifying a geographical region provides a few more.)

It's a nice ideal, but I think being anonymous is going to die in the next five years -- if it hasn't already.

Agreed, but there is something wrong if people have to use it all the time.

The world is the world.

Because there are so many other people out there that might be up to no good, so many laws (US commercial code, anyone) that an individual will create so much digital dirt over their lifetime, it becomes very easy to attack anyone that does not just keep most things private as a best practice. It's nearly impossible to know which digital bits will be at some point in the future X years taken out of context for political, employment, romantic, legal or other purposes.

"Three Felonies a Day" https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-J...

Of course, how much that matters depends and if you limit to a subset it becomes much easier, but I definitely agree that people should have the right to be anonymous. I just don't like it when people have to do so, and do want to fix the problems if possible.

I would like to add that while I disagree with the comment you're replying to (reminds me of "why disagree with spying if you have nothing to hide" ...), I understand that nothing forces a particular company to allow anonymous content on their website and that's fine by me.

But there is a world between refusing anon, and suddenly and posteriorly displaying the real name of people on top of content they thought was anonymous. I don't claim to be particularly smart but if their popup was unclear for me, I can't imagine how it is for people who are less tech literate.

You shouldn't rely on Mother Google or Daddy Facebook to fight your battles for you, because their interests are not the same as yours.

Real Names was protested to death the moment that Google+ came out; my understanding is that their compromise was that your entire Google profile was to use the same name, but that name could be a pseudonym so long as it was realistic. (If your legal name was weird, well, too bad, send in some ID.)

There's nothing we can do about this now, whining about it on HN. Choose to stop using YouTube, switch to a new account with a pseudonym, use Vimeo instead, start your own.

There's a huge amount of social pressure against being so paranoid about whether Google or Facebook might hypothetically decide to do something bad in the future. Saying that people should stop whining about it once it actually happens is effectively equivalent to saying that no-one should complain about it at all.

> Does that mean that I shouldn't be involved online in the lgbt community whatsoever

What I'm saying is that YouTube is a terrible place to have a lgbt community. Most of the closed-garden Internet is a terrible place to have a lgbt community, because all it takes is Zuck or Brin or some other "benevolent" dictator deciding to reveal all your secrets, and you're dead.

Like, there was that girl who was disowned by her parents once Facebook made group memberships public on profiles, because she happened to be part of a lgbt group at her university.

You're putting a hell of a lot of trust in Google or Facebook over what is, for you, a life-or-death situation.

Choose a community where people only use pseudonyms, and which isn't driven by corporate profits.

Edit: Also, a "anonymous" online political activist is going to live a miserable life; look at Snowden and Manning and Assange. You can't even send stuff to the newspapers any more without angry people coming to destroy your hard drives.

It's problematic that telecoms get retroactive immunity for their revelations of personal information, but ordinary people get retroactive punishment when their previously pseudonymous information becomes personalized.

I think his complaint was more about feeling forced into creating a G+ profile, not about unified sign-on. The unified sign-on should be able to work just fine whether or not one has a G+ profile, just like it works whether or not one uses Blogger, YouTube or any other service...

You would be fooling yourself if you think somebody within Google isn't planning for the day that YouTube commenting is merged with G+ social streams. As they look to leverage social signals to improve search, centralizing the user's social footprint will be an important component, and using one of their more prolific social streams (YouTube) to prop-up G+ will be key.

If that day comes, I'll might celebrate, because YouTube comments are mostly worthless, full of sexism, racism, insults, and sheer idiocy. I rarely come across a YouTube comment that imparted useful information.

G+ doesn't really need propping up, most of the people I enjoy reading are on it, I get more engagement than I ever did on Twitter or FB with the people I'm interested in (note, not friends, but interests), and with a less infuriating comment system. I'd personally rather not have G+ turn into FB.

In fact, I take back my first sentence, now that I think about it, I'm somewhat fearful of YouTube adopting G+ comments, because rather than improving the civility and intelligence of YouTube's comment audience, it might destroy the civility and intelligence of the G+ community.

> If that day comes, I'll might celebrate, because YouTube comments are mostly worthless, full of sexism, racism, insults, and sheer idiocy. I rarely come across a YouTube comment that imparted useful information.

One could argue two ways here. On one hand I think it's actually interesting and instructive to read comments from anonymous sources - what people "really" think, without the filter of being tied to their real identity. On the other hand, there are countless examples of people proudly posting/tweeting/etc horribly sexist, racist, insulting, and idiotic things under their real names along with a profile picture of themselves, so it's not so clear that removing anonymity will transform the comments section into a particularly erudite and informative place.

I really wish there was some magic way for Google to figure out what is good quality content and float it to the top. I'm sure they are working on it c'mon Google you can do it! Before all the people on Youtube complaining about being asked to link a G+ profile finally adopt.

Google comments are invaluable for one thing--identifying the name of that song in the background.

As well as spoilers. Grrr... They ruined the Red Wedding for me.

I wouldn't mind if YouTube showed me comments from people I know on top. It's not like YouTube comments could get worse...

Except where it doesn't. I have a Google+ account. I also have a separate work email that uses a Google Apps account.

Without my prompting, and after already indicating that I didn't want a Google+ account for my work account, Google displayed a distracting notification that I should add people to my (work) Google+ account, the account that I didn't create and definitely didn't want.

Sometimes I don't want to use any of those five other services. And if I happen to watch some YouTube videos at work from time to time, I don't really want those to be associated with my Google Apps work account.

So no, it is not a mistake to view it as Google forcing me to use social features that I don't want; that's exactly what it is!

The acquisition of YouTube isn't that recent. It's been thoroughly integrated with Google's other stuff for quite some while now. The problem is that they want to make G+ the center of everything, and that's a stupid assumption.

I mean, I love G+, and my YouTube account now also sports my G+ avatar, but it's obvious that that kind of integration isn't for everyone.

There are older examples of problems with G+ integration: a year ago or so, G+ had that stupid "normal name" policy, and people who used an unusual name had their G+ account blocked. And if your G+ account was tied to a GMail account, that was also blocked. But if you only had a GMail account without G+, Google didn't complain if your name was unusual.

The main thing that sort of stuff accomplishes, is that it gives people a good reason not to use G+.

You've already been able to log in to youtube using your Google account for some time. Only recently have they begun pushing to link the account to G+.

All Microsoft was doing is integrating a browser into the operating system, and trying to make it impossible to separate them.

I don't regard that as grounds for anti-trust, but I do view it as ridiculous. And it's equally ridiculous for Google to try to trip users into using their other services by leveraging their overwhelmingly dominant search and video products. It'll be interesting to see if Google eventually claims that you can't separate G+ from YouTube and search, going down the same conceptual road as MS.

It wasn't ridiculous. The idea was for IE to use existing components in the OS, and to allow other programs (including ones from third parties) to use components from the browser. This enabled you to open web pages in other applications, including Windows Explorer.

Microsoft had to rewrite the IE3 browser into components, and this componentization was very popular at the time. It won Microsoft a huge deal with AOL and meant ISPs could customize IE (which Netscape wouldn't allow), which also contributed to IE's victory over Netscape Navigator.

In the end, Microsoft won the browser case by 2-1 on appeal, and the US Justice Department lost it.

It's nothing like the Google case.

But everything worked just fine before, I had a single Google account, a single Youtube channel and a single G+ page, and signing into either of these would sign me into everything else. After Google decided to "unify" Youtube and G+ accounts, I now have 1 Google account, 2 Youtube channels and 2 G+ pages , and that's not counting an extra Youtube channel I created, which accounts for 1 extra Google account and 1 extra G+ page. I have more goddamn accounts than ever before, and it's a total pain to switch Youtube to the correct one. How is this unification?

I think the idea is one name per account. So if your Google Account was Sam Smith, your channel was Batman, and your G+ page was Joker, you would end up with three "accounts", each with its own G+ profile/page and channel.

Youtube can be unified, without displaying my G+ picture and profile on it. It simply requires a checkbox, and a new field - Youtube alias to be displayed.

*its own

This is just one of the many issues with Google products these days.

I dread using anything from Google because of the confusing accounts mess, the language and localization chaos, the forced de-anonimization, the consistent ignoring of explicitly set preferences and the countless bugs in all of those.

The way I feel about using Google services today mirrors how I felt about Windows a decade ago. You start out trying to accomplish a simple task, like doing a search or watching a video, end you end up spending minutes jumping through all kinds of hoops.

Pretty sure that performing a google search is just as easy today as it ever was.

No it isn't.

For starters, I regularly have to first convince Google that I don't want to do just a local search in my country or my language. Simply setting my preferences (which are hard to find and confusing) once won't do it.

If I do happen to go along with Google's insistence in making my world a smaller place, I get confronted not having my options at the usual place, or under the usual labels (Google still can't keep interface language and local search apart), or worse: features that are missing completely.

Try to find something that has to do with software development but that happens to contain one keyword that also has meaning in the local language on a localized version of Google. It's a fucking joke. Gets even worse if Google assumes you misspelled the technical term in question.

Not really. Google's autocorrect regularly 'corrects' my search term to something else. Or Google suggests a similar search, where by "similar" they mean "the same search but with the most important term missing".

Sometimes Google instant stops working and I can't search anymore. I have to reload the page before I can enter new search terms.

Google used to be so simple, predictable, and it always worked. Now it is a complex, intransparent mess.

Google Search is becoming more and more like Altavista and Yahoo were like when Google started.

It definitely isn't. I do a lot of searches at Bing now just because just entering one character will bring up a whole list of my previous searches, so I can re-use them. This is incredibly useful.

Google used to do that too, but killed the idea so it could provide crappy "instant" results.

Another thing that makes Google's search dramatically worse nowadays is the way it prioritizes "freshness" and de-prioritizes quality. It's now almost impossible to find any high quality results because the majority of the first few pages are taken up by rubbishy blog posts. Most of which are 5-line knock-offs of other blog posts.

The display of adverts on top of search results -- which deceives a lot of people -- is another example. When you look at the adverts and results that promote Google's own properties, there's less and less room for the organic search results that might actually be useful.

tl;dr -- Google search is significantly worse than it was three or four years ago.

Things that go wrong with Google searches for me on a weekly basis:

* I search from Firefox and my browser spends 30 seconds in the middle of the redirection from .com to .co.uk

* I click a search result and my browser spends 30 seconds waiting for the redirection/click tracking script, and there's no easy way to get the actual URL you are going to any more, so you have to wait

* I type in a query and the auto-refresh kicks in, but it lags, and I (unnecessarily, because I am not used to the auto-search feature) hit enter on the keyboard as well, which leaves Google in a completely broken state where updating the query and hitting enter or the search button has no effect

* I make a new search from Firefox and then perform a second search from inside that page, and the whole page locks up in the greyed out "I am loading more results" state. I hit refresh but the URL is still that of my original query, so I end up looking at that again instead

* The search-as-you-type feature is enabled, despite me having disabled it over a dozen times now (and yes, I am signed in)

For one reason or another, I have to wait several seconds to see my Google search results multiple times per day. That's a pretty low barrier for complaining, but it's also enough time to open a new tab, go to Bing.com, type in my original query again, and click the results - all before my Google query finishes loading.

Other than issues with the unnecessary number of HTTP requests between my clicks and actually getting to the page I want, the obvious sticking factor is the search-as-you-type feature: It's reimplementing too much of the normal browser cycle, but isn't implemented well enough to not fall over, and these types of solutions don't integrate well with the tools I have to control page loads (the stop and refresh buttons).

Edit: Also as a programmer I realise I am not in their 99% use case, but it is incredibly difficult for me to find the information I need these days. The auto-correct feature is in overdrive compared to how it worked a few years ago, and frequently 'corrects' technical terms to totally useless queries. Aggravating the issue is the removal of the '+' operator, and the fact that even quoted search terms now allow synonyms and corrections. There are lots of other issues with the search results in recent times, such as the predilection to give me 10 results all from the exact same website, but I drilled down on the technical issues because frankly the search results are still better on Google than their competitors. But the technical implementation and user experience? They are falling behind in those areas.

Concerning the click tracking thing, there's a browser extension for Safari that replaces the tracking links with the real links. This extension has made Google search a more reliable for me. Maybe there's a similar extension available for Firefox?

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it!

This is a good example of a "forced" or "assisted" conversion. The user really doesn't want to do it, they just want to view the damn YouTube video.

Google is employing these same optimization techniques elsewhere. I've noticed very subtle, and consequently expensive, things that have been done with Adwords.

There is a simple solution to this, which unfortunately castrates Google's entire platform. Its the same reason why I've been avoiding Android. It is also why I have to tell my friends I can't view their Youtube link because it says I have to sign in.

FYI, you can replace "watch?v=12345" to "/v/12345" to view videos without logging in (works for age-restricted content as well). As a bonus, the video fills the browser screen, and removes all the annoying "related" content, comments, etc.

Or if you're on Linux, you can use youtube-dl + mplayer to get a high-quality hardware-accelerated glitch-free viewing experience, instead of the RealPlayer-esque experience Flash provides.

Also try youtubedown in place of youtube-dl - I think it works with a bigger percentage of videos.

http://www.jwz.org/hacks/#youtubedown

Source ? If some video doesn't work with youtube-dl, I'm sure they'd like to hear about it.

Own impression, but might just be luck vs. me updating them. Youtube changes the obfuscation around periodically to discourage apps like these.

That's one hell of a goddamn tip. As someone who recently closed their Google account, this will come in handy. Thanks.

> * It is also why I have to tell my friends I can't view their Youtube link because it says I have to sign in.*

You can avoid this by deleting assorted Google cookies. It only tells you to log in because Google is tracking/recognizing you anyway, even when you're logged out, because of their cookies.

A friend of mine who is interning at Google this summer started pushing Google now on me really hard over dinner this week. Your post mirrors the queezy feeling I got from thinking about the prospect of going even deeper into the Google services quagmire. It just doesn't feel quite right.

Google has gotten really really bad about this. I don't typically log in to Gmails web interface, but when I do I'm accosted by little yellow popups everywhere that obscure the interface. After logging in to google services, the first thing I have to do is cleanup all the unnecessary clutter.

And this pushiness with Plus has consumed all my good will with Google. They used up their reputation advantage, and are just another tech company to me now. I hope it was worth it, because reputations are very very expensive things to change.

Get over it people, Google+ is the new account system for all Google products. If you don't like Google having a single account/profile system, or the fact that Google+ profiles include a "social" network product, then you best look for alternatives ASAP.

Get over it people

It's OK to not like things.

then you best look for alternatives ASAP.

This is exactly what the author is doing.

But even when the good outweighs the bad, its totally fine to stay using a service without some obligation to pretend like the negatives don't exist or never talk about them.

Does ever single person have to blog about their decision though? Every other day there is some random post that someone doesn't want to use Google services for whatever reason. I don't care. Apparently HN does because a majority of them end up making the front page.

> Get over it people, Google+ is the new account system for all Google products.

Maybe Google should finally get over the fact that they've lost this fight and that noone wants to be in a social network whose member numbers are inflated by such desperate moves (which most of us have experienced now and are well aware of).

If you follow Google's strategy, you'll see that they really are not interested in the "stream-view war" with Facebook that everyone seems so intent on their playing. Instead, Google+ is a social backbone that connects all Google products (present and future) and gives you a single Google identity across the internet.

I try to. The single thing I struggle with? Android.

Maybe Firefox OS will be interesting, iOS isn't. And .. right now I can pay for Android apps, but I'm banned from rate them, comment on them. Ignoring all the 'Do you want to be tracked to provide Better Services (tm)" stuff in that ecosystem.

Somewhat ironically, I had a Google account already (albeit only lightly used, losing Reader killed ~95% of the utility for me), but when I got my Android phone, it simply refused to link to it. I think perhaps because I didn't have GMail? To be honest the error messages were never that clear to me. So instead of linking in my "real" Google account, I had to create a new one. One I never browse with, one that has no services, one not linked to the greater anything. Instead of a lightly-but-really-used account now they just have an Android account floating in space, being virtually useless to them.

That anonymous account knows where you live, who you talk to, where you go, what you read online, ...

Linking it to your legal identity isn't hard. Data show that just two ZIP Codes (in the US) can indentify an individual with 95% accuracy: your home and workplace.

Makes me want to rightgrade to an uncontracted dumbphone and a custom-ROMed tablet. Not linked to any Google accounts.

Yeah, but that's mostly useful to law enforcement, if they were interested, and for that the mere fact of a cell phone is enough to get everything you mentioned. What Google gets of value out of this account is greatly reduced, especially as I've been buying the ad-free version of the apps. (While in theory Google could get everything you say, I believe that in practice they actually do not, say, forward all of your "Reddit is Fun" actions up to the Great Google Motherserver.)

And no, I did not say eliminated. Just greatly reduced. (Again, the moreso after shuttering Reader, although I must say that while you could learn a lot about me from my blog reading list, its utility for selling me stuff was pretty low.)

Yeah, but that's mostly useful to law enforcement, if they were interested

De-anonymization has been studied and applied by various parties, and I'm personally aware of at least one non-LEO application. I don't know that Google does or doesn't do this, though it wouldn't surprise me at all if marketing/advertising and/or other "personalization" services did. It would annoy me intensely to find that they were.

For that the mere fact of a cell phone is enough to get everything you mentioned.

A dumb phone can only report coarse location information, SMS messaging, and calls data. Frequently expiring SIMs would limit the useful duration of much of that information, though you'd need something like a self-hosted Google Voice forwarding service to be able to use the phone usefully while maintaining reasonable anonymity. It's not currently practical for most purposes.

Relying on a Free Software VOIP service based on the tablet preferentially for voice calls would further reduce exposure.

You should have a look at Jolla and their Sailfish OS. Beautiful Linux system based off of MeeGo, not tied to any Google or even American servers.

Google it--wait, no. Duckduckgo it ;)

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/5072264/googling-with-bing

The verb for searching the internet would have been Altavista had Altavista sounded like a verb:)

If your phone is supported, you could install CyanogenMod (it works fine without gapps installed). From there you can use f-droid for apps, but possibly Amazon App Store could be a good alternative to the Google Play morass.

I'm running Cyanogenmod, but I like to have (potentially paid) applications (to avoid the 'apps' non-word). I paid for quite a lot already.

I'm never allowed to rate them, to comment on them in the Google Play store, since .. I cannot have a G+ account (and frankly, I don't want one).

I run CM too. I killed my G+ account when I found it difficult to change my privacy settings. Not being able to rate apps pissed me off.

>possibly Amazon App Store could be a good alternative to the Google Play morass.

Sorry but the last time I tried, Amazon App store was a resource hog. Also apps will stop working if you get signed out of the Amazon app store app. It is like they are trying to prevent one guy who they think will buy a copy of their app, get on a stranger's device, log in to the app store, download their apps, and log out and repeat it for all devices in the world.

I don't think any of that is true anymore.

Unless it's changed in the last couple of weeks, it's still the case that you have to remain logged in to Amazon's app store. They don't use the native account manager either, which is irritating, and the store app sometimes loses your login credentials.

It gets confusing very fast. I have a personal account, and a Google Apps account. I did work with a company that gave me a google apps account for their domain. And my youtube business page has a Google+ profile.

It is very, very difficult to figure out how to not create duplicate Google+ profiles. There's no clear way to tell Google "This is a different email address that I, a person, use. You should link it to my personal profile".

I don't think that's the point. The point is that Google isn't differentiating between a business profile and a personal profile well.

Which is a UX problem, not a "Google attempting to drive me into yet another unwanted "social" network". You don't think it's in Google's best interest that channels create Google+ Pages rather than individual Google+ profiles?

It is in Googles interest to have as many G+ profiles (aka potential userbase) as possible.

But they want each one to be tied to a single physical person. They actively dislike alts, which makes having a home profile and a work profile and $counterculture_of_choice profile or two awkward and annoying.

I have gotten over it, and I have already switched to alternatives, but maybe your message would go over a little better if it included some trace of sympathy.

What other altenratives are there that host video in HTML5 webm? Vimeo dropped the whole effort. This is really sick that Google forces thins G+ junk on Youtube users.

I moved from chrome to FF and google search to duckduckgo search after prism.

You know that DuckDuckGo is a US company, right? And thus subject to the same exact laws as a company like Google (and the same NSA snooping). It's true that they don't log your search queries, but if the NSA has access to the root CAs they can snoop on you anyway. And what do you think happens if the government subpoenas DuckDuckGo and tells them to log your traffic? They will of course do so. And they have a MUCH smaller legal budget with which to fight such government requests than, say, Google.

DuckDuckGo is a cool company, and I think they have a neat product. But if you're worried about the NSA, then you're kidding yourself if you think DDG is safer than any other search engine. Just use Tor and be done with it.

Yes you are right. But my switch was based more on a general "getting tired of google's bullshit" feeling that has been building over the last 2-3 years, especially my experience with google support, adwords, youtube integration, and all the crap that they know about me. At one time I was doing almost 90% of my work in google ecosystem.

Now its spread between yahoo, ddg, dropbox, etc. I feel even more strongly about Facebook. If and when a viable alternative is available, I'll be switching. Similarly with email. For the first time I'm starting to become open to paid email that is secure. I guess it has to be a non-US company.

DuckDuckGo Tor Hidden service address, for anyone interested: 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o...

Google used to be the wunderkind, I remember when absolutely everything they touched was gold...and now they seem to have so much stuff that is broken across so many products.

Alot of it is just dumb stuff and the rest is stuff that should have been caught.

This is the last week..

Google Apps Admin Interface - It's an unnavigable mess, I use it so seldom that it's not familiarity or the lack of that makes me hate the new one, it's the fact I can't find anything.

Android - Factory Reset Android 4.3 - Open the play store and it hangs, force close it then reopen and it shows you the "Accept Terms" dialog (which was on-screen but not shown the first time) so you can't assent to the terms.

Gmail - wildcard forward for an entire domain does not work and if the support forums (which never got answered) are to be believed this is an issue going back to August last year.

Myriad services don't load on the first attempt, strange error messages.

Throw in the privacy stuff coming out of Google recently and I'm seriously thinking about bringing everything back in-house, I've worked as a sysadmin in the past (though I'm a programmer by trade) and for the hassle I'm having with Google products I could do this stuff myself.

Old google made cool things and make their money off ads and search ranking.

New google only cares about beating facebook because they came onto the scene and took over the front page of everyones Internet role.

I don't even think it has anything to do with bottom lines, either. I can't understand how knowing who spams my G+ page with crap who I friended for an arbitrary reason is more valuable information in how to target me with ads than what RSS feeds I subscribe to and read, which is a direct link to my interests and engagements. A social network doesn't reflect pretty much at all what I am interested in spending money on.

On this matter, there is this blog post:

http://piaw.blogspot.ca/2010/05/organizational-thinking.html

I wonder how and why Vic Gundotra was chosen.

Indeed and I think caching all your search queries is a vastly more effective way to figure out how to advertise you than Google+ but I suspect they must see some value in it else why do it.

It's possible that what matters is not whether Google sees any value in Google+ but whether Wall Street does.

Or the NSA.

As someone who agrees, I confess I'm actually happy that Google is no longer perfect, because that is a necessary precondition for new challengers to emerge and for the cycle of innovation and progress to begin anew. I don't know what those new companies will be, but I'm excited to find out.

Very insightful comment.

What you are predicting will certainly occur. However it will take time. Lots of time. Years. Perhaps decades.

In the long run, we are all dead.

Not to mention YouTube is all but unusable now. I understand that this may be local ISPs trying to kill YouTube by throttling it. But all I know is that I have a 75/35 Mbps account from Verizon FIOS and everything else is unbelievably fast but YouTube which hardly ever works anymore during peak times.

Here in the UK I've noticed that accessing YouTube directly is slow, laggy and choppy. But when I accidentally visited while using a SOCKS proxy running over a VPS in the US it was snappy. After some more testing it seems that my local ISP is indeed throttling YouTube, but their inability to look inside an SSH tunnel means I can still access it at decent speed.

I switched to HTML5 video for youtube because I don't have flash on this machine. Initially I couldn't watch about 30% of videos because "flash player is required". Now it's closer to 90% - either because "flash player is required" or "this video is unavailable" - and yet the youtube-dl script still works. Stop lying to me, Google!

As an additional insult, when an item in my RSS feed is a YouTube video, I can play it in Feedly in a (flashless) Safari. However, if I go to the youtube page (the embedded version in Feedly lacks fullscreen, for example), "flash player is required." Who is youtube's most viable competitor? Vimeo? Is there anything consumers can do to encourage content to be posted there instead?

You tube is basically real player now. Buffering...

Felt like extortion? To freely post your video to their free hosting service, which allows you free distribution and marketing of your brand to the entire world. For free. And this felt like extortion?

Yes, extortion. "Wouldn't want something nasty to happen to all that good will you've built up on youtube, better get a G+ profile"

That you didn't pay money to get into the trap doesn't make it less of a trap.

Google services are free the way the food for the rabbits was free in "Watership Down."

Yes, "extortion" - give me more data about you if you want to use our so-called "free" services. Extortion in my book too.

Your book is missing a few key pages.

Agree- poor choice of words. I think the proper way to verbalize it is 'piss poor user experience, annoying, inconvenient'.

If you're not being sold anything and the company is making money, then you're the product. Nothing is free.

Logging into Google and its services has always been a mess. Once upon a time you could even have a Google Account associated with an e-mail address hosted elsewhere, not through Google Apps.

It was always a confusing maze of separate cross-associated accounts (YouTube, Google Account, GMail, Google Groups...) strung together. Actually, it's one of the aspects of Google's services that has clearly improved over time. Even with all the G+ nonsense.

>Once upon a time you could even have a Google Account associated with an e-mail address hosted elsewhere, not through Google Apps.

You still can; that's the only good thing. Earlier Androids required you to have a Gmail account (I just tried a 2.3 Android phone out). So now I have a stupid, half-used Gmail account, and a separate, proper account with my own email. No way to merge them, and then no way to setup older devices without Gmail. And now when I'm in Google Play or their other apps, I've got to switch between accounts -- it's an idiotic mess.

On a side note, Microsoft had functional SSO in the 90s. For all the silly rebranding (and killing and reviving it) at least you could sign in with an email address.

Yahoo also has a competent SSO that was well integrated across products.

You still can use an external email address. On register screen, I still see a "Use my existing email address" link.

I've almost never used gmail, and things work fine.

You can still do this, and I recently did. You have to have an alternate email address set and confirmed. Then, you delete your GMail account, which can by done through the products section of the account management page. After that, your Google account's primary email (and thus login) will be whatever your alternate address was set to.

Do you have solid instructions on this? I tried this once, and it sorta worked, then didn't. Then I re-registered the Gmail address (separately) and all my Google Groups subscriptions snapped back over and so on.

Plus, don't Android 2.3 devices require a Gmail account to setup/login? I just tried using my normal Google Account and it complained "oh you don't have Gmail".

I still have two Google accounts on my phone for this reason. I've turned off syncing for most things for the GMail one, though.

Your experience may be different, but I welcome any confirmation from anyone using a tablet:

I notice that when user signs up for a Gmail account on a tablet, after she completes all the required info, she is then presented with a "one-click" style sign up screen for Google+. This screen does not have a "No thank you" option. Nor is there a "Back to previous" link. There is nothing to indicate the new Gmail account has successfully been created. It is more or less a dead end. There are only two options: Sign up for Google+ by clicking a link or close the browser tab.

How many users will know their Gmail account has successfully been created and close the tab?

Closing the browser tab and then navigating to gmail.com will take the user to her new account. There is no need to sign up for a Google+ account.

I have a difficult time believing this process of opening a new email account where seemingly "all roads lead to a Google+ account" is accidental. Then again, it could be. If not, then I'd say the G+ team is doing a fine job at manufacturing consent.

The question is why do they need to do that? I thought Google was in good health. This just seems desperate and try hard.

I think this can be remedied by providing a sufficiently unnatural sounding "real name" for the pseudonymous google id you use on the tablet. Then you get kicked out of Google+ automatically.

For some reasons, I actually do agree. My dad just yesterday enjoyed some hard time trying to get even simple services like Gmail to work. Because he knew how to use it earlier, but now things works differently than they used to. Cloud services, nice, you'll get always latest version. But what if the latest version simply isn't something you want?

But what if the latest version simply isn't something you want?

Exactly. Even worse, what if the old version was what you wanted, and now it's gone?

For example, Google's book reader on Android. I started using it frequently about 6 months ago. Since then, every UI change they have made has made the experience worse for me. The only reason I still use it is that it does have one big advantage over the other readers I use (the main ones are Aldiko Premium and the Kindle app): it senses and handles page turns really well, and the other readers suck at it. (And I suspect that even that advantage is because Google is using some kind of back door in the Android OS that other readers can't access, to be able to sense swipes with greater accuracy.)

I know how you feel. Gmail's interface has become incredibly complicated and every change feels like a step backward.

But as much as I don't care for Gmail's current interface, I can't and don't expect Google to support older web interfaces. If I really wanted interface consistency, I would run my own mail client.

That's exactly why I do run completely own servers, email, website, private communication platform etc. I don't like Google at all. Using Gmail is a trap, as we have seen here in other discussions.

I don't use Gmail or other Google services either, but that has nothing to do with their UI; it has to do with me not trusting them with their data. You don't need to use Gmail's web interface to use Gmail; you can access it using any IMAP-capable email client.

If I really wanted interface consistency, I would run my own mail client.

That's what I do; in fact, I run one that's unlikely to change its UI much (KMail from KDE version 3, the Trinity Desktop Environment build).

Is it "evil"? No. While I agree with the author that it sucks, I feel that calling it evil dilutes the word of the power it should have when used.

So much ink has been spilled on the "evil" stuff that it seems as though people's energy and attention spans are exhausted when the more "banal" stuff comes around. And so Google can get away with shoving as much G+ on us as they like.

"Google, don't be banal"....more accurate, but decidedly less catchy

Tricking/coercing users into broadcasting their real name to the internet (through repetition, malicious UX design and just plain broken software) is actually pretty close to 'evil', since it can put some groups at risk. Less relevant for a Youtube account, perhaps, but the same criticisms of FB and G+ 'Real Names' policies apply here to Google trying to force YT users to display real names.

I unfortunately got tired of those damn dialogs one day and ended up with a G+ profile. Their methods are getting more and more like dark patterns (just colorful ones).

I deleted my G+ account and fortunately didn't lose my subscriptions.

Thanks to that I'll never comment on another youtube video again.

Exactly. They pester you quite often to try to link YouTube with Google+. I'm surprised I haven't accidentally clicked the wrong choice yet. The copy for the two options is confusing!

They've changed them/moved them a few times, too. Presumably in the hopes that you'll screw up.

It just happened again. It is a two step process. 1) "Hey fix your name, you better do this!" and then if you click "No", it does 2) "Are you really sure?" with a new way of presenting the same two choices! It is absolutely a dark pattern and I am thinking about finding/writing a browser extension to take care of it.

Okay I concede I hadn't considered that. It can definitely be upgraded to evil status then.

Definitely falls into the 'dark pattern' category as well.

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/07/23/the-slippery...

The fundamental problem here is that some Google properties, like Google Analytics and Google Plus, recognize the concept of enterprise account management, and some, like YouTube, do not.

Want a Google Plus page for your business? Great, first create a personal account for yourself, then create a Page account for your business. You can add other employees as admins on that Page.

Want to create a YouTube channel for your business? Great, create an account called "yourbusinessname." Only one login can manage it, so email the password to your other employees. (Real secure, Google.)

YouTube still can't tell the difference between a person and an organization, which is IMO indefensible. Twitter does this too. I find it astounding that they have not improved this yet.

Google is getting pushy now because they can. They've become habitual and omnipresent. Now is the perfect time.

A couple of years ago I could see Google's vendor lock-in strategy unfold. I've been trying ever since to completely purge myself of Google, but it hasn't been easy.

For anyone thinking of doing the same, be prepared to test many services out.

Unfortunately Android's still the only really reasonable choice. Apple and MS are far more restrictive on the devices, and nothing seems to come close to the Nexus line of devices anyways.

It's pretty annoying that I can't rate apps I buy though.

Is privacy and device restrictiveness the same thing?

I don't want "open" necessarily, I want "respect" (for my privacy).

Unless you're going to inspect all the code/apps running on your system, an open-source OS isn't necessarily going to guarantee your privacy.

You're right, it's not. I don't really care about open source. I don't trust Google and I don't like their intrusive tactics. I'd actually feel more comfortable with Microsoft, as they probably have more layers of management preventing stuff getting done. I can't believe the part of the company that mismanaged the largest IM network into nothingness is competent enough to really invade my privacy to a disturbing degree.

More what I care about is making sure I can run software I'm interested in, and have my device do what I want it to do. Tethering (on a phone) regardless of carrier policy, for instance. Apps that might violate store policy -- I simply don't have the potential worry with Android.

I went with a Blackberry Z10 after reading about its built in encryption and privacy features in the book Cypherpunks.

As an aside, I checked out the new Q5 yesterday and it has refinements in all the right places. Both are highly underrated smartphones.

There's no reason to trust Blackberry. Even though the new devices can do IMAP directly (not indirectly through the "cloud"), they send your login credentials to RIM.

Details: http://frank.geekheim.de/?p=2379

Really though, try Jolla's Sailfish OS. It is a phenomenal product, and will beat Ubuntu Touch to market quite handily.

Yeah, the YouTube one is really bad. The pop-up really needs to be redone too. It used to be a nice easy to understand wizard and as soon as you saw it you could tell instantly you weren't interested. Now it's an awkwardly worded choice and you have to take the time to read and think about it. I might even go so far as to call it a dark usability pattern. Where's the "don't ask me again" checkbox?

Personally, I like commenting on really unseemly videos and only having an obscure username attached to it.

The "display your real name" Youtube pop-up is clearly designed to be misleading. The damn thing doesn't even have a "close" button. Nor does it have the option everybody wants to choose ("I'm not displaying my real name because I just don't want to").

I'm with you on this, I had no trouble with my accounts being associated until they decided it had to mean my real name appeared on youtube. I understand why they do it given the state on comments there, but for me this is why I keep my account dissociated ever since (despite the stupid popup that keeps asking me the same question every couple of days).

Why the fuck does everything have to be social!? SOCIAL THIS AND SOCIAL THAT, CAN'T I JUST SIT DOWN AND WATCH A FUCKING VIDEO FOR MY OWN SAKE. I've just about had it with everything Internet 2.0 and beyond these days.

If you click long enough on any Google service, you will end up with a Google + account. It's just statistics.

If your product isn't good enough to succeed (or "win") on an opt-in basis, then your problems run deeper than what coercive sign ups can fix.

What product? they're trying to consolidate their login system across products, and you happen to get a social profile with the bundle. It's not like you even have to use it or be aware of its existence, if you don't need it.

The Google+ "social" product. I'm not sure of its current state, as everything is a moving target, but at the time I acquired one, the creation flow was deliberately somewhat misleading, for example not pointing out that you don't need to supply a profile photo. And/or there was one question that required a response; some googling (irony?) revealed that one could remove the answer or its public visibility after signing up.

And this was after much of the initial foofera (sp?), that had already caused Google to scale back some of its demands for/during the sign up flow, IIRC.

Plus had/has a lot going for it. Then, they tried to cram it (and "true names", etc.) down our throat.

Opt-in. Carrot first, not stick.

P.S. Let me put it this way: I want the ability to choose for myself and entirely what aspects of a "Google profile" I make public.

Separately, I'll also add that as Google has gobbled up more and more popular products, I've become increasingly leery of a single profile that tracks and analyzes me across all of them and their varied and diverse functionality.

I'm not doing anything particularly nefarious. But when the price Amazon charges me depends on a profile, and my insurance rate or ability to get insurance may depend on another profile and "social graph", etc., etc... And also on principle and for some sense of privacy and peace of mind (however incomplete)...

Monocultures are subject to disease and corruption. One analogy that I might extent to online cultures. I don't want all my eggs in one basket -- especially when it's not even by my choice.

You do realize that YouTube is still owned by Google, and therefore if they wanted to consider your profiles as one, they probably can already? My guess it's that they're trying (more or less successfully) to reduce the confusion, by not letting users sign up several times for all their products (which in the end is only one product -- Google).

About three months ago I wanted to download the original of a video I had uploaded to Youtube since I had lost my local copy and it was sentimental. I was unable to even access the video without first creating a Google+ account, I was unable to download my data and cancel my Youtube account without first creating a Google+ account. I went to Google Takeout and removed everything, and cancelled. (Note: This was a business account that I was paying for, not a free account. I felt as if my data was being held hostage despite me paying for the storage and usage costs.)

Don't mistake piss poor execution for being evil. Google has had more missteps with its acquisitions and cross service communication than any other company I've worked with in recent memory.

Equally is best not to allow piss poor execution to be an excuse for evil.

The Youtube/G+ insistence is so frustrating. It's driven me to Vimeo several times.

I still do not understand why google is trying to force everyone to use google +. The other day, I tried to give a great review for an app that i purchased from google play but couldn't because it required that I sign up for google plus..that just doesn't make sense.

Kind of ironic for someone who works for an internet security firm to say that he's deleting his Google account not because of privacy issues but for other "inconveniences". I get where he's coming from though. That YouTube pop-ups are really annoying.

I have the same issue. I don't want a presence on G+. Why can't the unifying account mechanism be like a Microsoft account, that exists on a database without a public front? Also, Youtube is now looking like a social network, it has lost it's identity.

Don't use Google Account then. I have one just for unimportant stuff (like for registering on certain forums) and only access it via imap with mail client. Don't know why you want to be logged in to Google while searching the web. Same for Youtube.

Wow so much hate for Google lately. I'm not so sure about these people claiming the "NSA thing" has nothing to do with these feelings their having. I'm also not to sure why the author is upset. It seems to me that the request Google sent to link the Youtube account with Google+ WAS asking whether or not the account was an individual (and wanted to use G+). It seems to me that this is someone either doing this without thinking or really reading it, or accidentally and then getting mad about it. IIRC, I believe I've done this once before with a Gmail account and figured out a way to reverse it. I remember they didn't make it easy though.

I found the way Google dealt with YouTube logins to be pretty horrendous.

For a long time YouTube kept asking me to associate a google account with my YouTube user ID. So I gave in and tried to do that.

I tried to use one of my three other gmail addresses — no, that doesn't work because they were existing Google accounts. I had to create a brand new gmail address just to associate with my YouTube user ID.

I also keep forgetting the email address I used to associate with that ID. They have user name recovery, password recovery, but not email-associated-with-username recovery.

The whole experience was drawn out and terrible.

I agree that this overzealous cross-promotion of services and unification into the One Account (to in the darkness bind them) is annoying and clearly only in the best interests of Google and not their users. There may be a minor benefit to users, but if it were about providing convenience, it would not be pushed so aggressively.

I've stopped recommending Chrome to my friends/family when it sprouted that evil "Not signed into Chrome - you're missing out!" button, trying to lure them into sharing their live browsing history with Google.

No offense Google, but Google+ is not good. I dont want another social site or to be forced into yours. It should go the way of Google Reader even though Reader was a much better service.

> And to be clear, it has nothing to do with recent allegations that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy when using Gmail.

This claim has been a huge story about nothing. I think this has been proven false quite a few times over. Nilay Patel at The Verge has a great article about this.[1]

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/14/4621474/yes-gmail-users-ha...

> And it has nothing to do with any sort of concerns that Google provides the NSA direct access to its servers. > (Google's security engineers can be trusted, I think.)

A bit off-topic, but I'm not sure what you mean here. Yes, they can be trusted - to do their job. Which managers dictate. Which includes whatever NSA dictates. So yes, you can bet NSA has total access to everything it wants at Google, direct and total.

And relatedly requiring "Real Names" a la Facebook at the same time. That makes it feel like a regression to a vocal minority of users.

You get this popup if you're doing anything on youtube, even just trying watch Baby Mozart. (My son is one.)

For viewing, you can just delete the cookies and reload the page. With Reader gone (and forwarding for GMail, which I've also deprecated), I don't stay logged in to google.com anymore.

That doesn't work of course if you actually want to use your youtube channel, but hey.

I don't know how many times I can watch a ball bounce or a hand put the round peg into the round hole. I've watched way too much Baby Einstein videos and I don't even have kids (wife just babysits).

I think Google needs to realize that Google+ is a failure and any attempts to link G+ with their other products will hurt those products.

I continually say No when Google asks to link my accounts, but it's getting rather annoying. Google is doing whatever it can to get users on Google+ which I think makes sense for them. Maybe they have some greater vision that I don't know about, but Google isn't one to advertise that type of stuff.

Might want to remove your site search with google and link to google maps on your masthead image, then.

I'm still convinced that Google's insistence on funneling all activity from their services into Google+ accounts (even in cases where it clearly doesn't make sense) is being done solely so that Google can go back to their shareholders and report a large amount of "growth" in their social platform. They don't seem to have any end game or plan beyond merely pumping up the numbers as high as possible. Maybe they are just aiming for the day when they can claim Google+ has more members than Facebook?

Shareholders don't care about G+, Facebook's IPO and returns have already shown them that search advertising is way better and social network ads are not the real threat that was sold.

What Wall Street looks at is search and display ads. Reporting 400 million active G+ users wouldn't do anything, anymore than 700 million GMail users, 750 million Chrome users, Android with 80% of the market. None of those really drive any direct revenue. (GMail does, but not much)

The problem with free services is that you're not entitled to demand anything. The customers of YouTube are advertisers, and you are their potential customer. I'd suggest lobbying up the chain of command.

btw, if you do use an alternative, please know that Vimeo runs like a crippled dog outside of the US. If you believe that the service of customers is important, the quality of the actual video service really should be your first priority right?

last night i was trying to comment a youtube video, and before i could post, i got this message: "you must have a g+ profile, we will create it for you" but i dont want another social network profile (im even leaving my facebook acount) i already have a gmail account and think that this should be enough to someone comment on youtube..

anyway.. nevermind the comment to youtube, ive drop it.. I dont like to be forced to do something i dont want to, without a reasonable fairness to the matter..

this is a sign that the corporate internet is swallowing day-by-day the belle-epoque internet that used to represent freedom, knowledge share, and power to the voiceless for all human kind..

its that kind of internet we all want to grow... the bad feeling this guy has, i think we are all feeling it..

a feeling that the internet we used to know is disapearing because greedy people want to own the internet and the people who use it..

its a shame its being going this way.. its a sign we should not trust the corporate world to take the lead on where the internet should go...

we should do it! they should not lead us, they should follow.. we can do it, we can act as a collective mind stronger than anything else..

use other services, create new ones, we should be in control.. use your choice as a weapon

This is really irritating. I use a nickname on YouTube and they keep on asking me whether I want to switch to my real name (I do not) like I do on Gmail... There is no way to permanently refuse that nice offer, so it keeps coming up, presumably in hope that one day I'll finally misclick and after that, the case will settle. I tried Google Plus for a while too, but I deleted the profile because they were so shoving it down my throat.

My sentiments exactly. I don't want to have my full name displayed on a social network. But once I change it on G+ it also changes on the emails I send.

Bye Google.

If anybody working for YouTube is reading this, here are my comments:

I was actually supportive of G+ until I had a very bad experience with YouTube and the forced G+ integration recently. Now what I want from YouTube is

(1) Ability to keep my current username and not use my real name, and not be linked to my G+ profile. I do not want to inadvertently broadcast my YouTube "Likes" to my social network.

(2) I do not want a public channel (not even something like youtube.com/user/<username>) but I want to create private playlists for myself (which is currently not possible without a public channel). The reason I do not want a public channel is because I have no doubt at some point YouTube will manage to "reset" my privacy preferences and expose all my likes, comments etc. to the world through my publicly accessible channel page. And since my YouTube username is just my FirstnameLastname, anybody who googles my name will find all my YouTube activity history.

So till recently whenever YouTube would pop up its dialog boxes insisting I link my channel or use my real name etc., I would always try to choose the option that was closest to what I wanted (as described above). However these dialog box options gave little to no hint as to what are the hidden consequences of choosing one option or the other, and long story short, I managed to somehow end up, first with a public facing channel (yt.com/user/<username>), and then when I tried to get rid of it/make it private because of above mentioned privacy concerns, I ended up losing access to all my playlists INCLUDING my Favorites and Watch Later default playlists.

Now of course that was probably a result of what I unknowingly did, but at no point did YouTube warn me that I would lose my playlists and favorites (YouTube never gave me the slightest hint that private channels cannot have playlists, I had to google it out later from the product forums). I have been a user of a lot of badly designed websites, but no website so far has ever allowed me to delete all of my data without a warning of some sort. Anyway, I got very scared at what YouTube and G+ had done to my account, so I quickly unlinked G+ from YouTube and deleted my G+ profile (I didn't want to end up losing my data in Gmail too).

Thankfully, after I contacted YouTube customer support, they got back to me pretty soon and restored my old YouTube account, somehow I had managed to delete it and create a new one in its place with my real name (hmm I wonder how), and I got back access to my playlists. However the incident has shaken my confidence a lot in Google and its services. I have now started backing up all my data in Gmail to my laptop using Thunderbird. Since YouTube support restored my account to what it originally was, I still keep getting those YouTube dialog boxes asking me to use my real name etc., on average once every other video I try to watch. Now I just refresh the page or watch in incognito mode if it won't go away, hopefully someday YouTube will realize I am not interested and stop annoying me.

To be honest I am nowadays actually really scared to mess around with the account settings of Gmail or other Google services. I remember that whole Google Plus real name policy and en-masse accounts deletion fiasco. I actually have two Google accounts, both made a long time back, both with my real name and I am sure this violates some TOS of Google, and I am genuinely worried that one day Google will suddenly just suspend/delete my accounts without warning because of this.

I never thought of contacting customer support to try and restore my old account. I lost all of my playlists when they "helpfully" suggested that I delete my "unused" channel. The popup said this would have no effect on my youtube experience.

But it did. It deleted all the playlists I had created, and I couldnt re-create them without linking a Google+ account to my youtube account and creating a public channel. I didn't do that because that account is the one I don't associate with my real name. It was a very frustrating user experience, and has added to my list of reasons to get away from google services.

(1) You can keep your username, and it won't be linked to your profile. (You get a Google+ page instead.)

(2) You don't have to have a channel at all if you just want to watch videos, subscribe, etc. But you do if you want to create playlists, even private ones.

Your channel has privacy settings so you can hide everything. But if you don't trust YouTube to keep them hidden, then you probably shouldn't use it.

The Google+ push is annoying but expected. Somewhat off topic but I really wish Google would normalize the volume of ads/videos. These days I tend to get super loud ads then often a quiet video so I'm constantly adjusting my audio levels. Same problem with audio levels between videos but I can accept that's a bit harder to get right. The loud ads though IMO are unacceptable.

I had the exact same problem when I tried to make a channel for my band.

I'm tired of corporations trying to force me to use their other services. Let it happen naturally, if it's gonna happen. Don't make me shape my workflow based on your needs.

You should try to build own your video hosting site or SHUT UP. At least Youtube is free, the last time I checked F-Secure was not, so SHUT UP! or build your own :)

You've an interesting perspective.

So, in your mind, someone shouldn't complain about something unless he/she has tried to build his/her own version of it?

Either build your own or do not complain when it is free. Its fair. You cannot "demand" in exchange for FREE

Complaints != Demands

Youtube is not free. I get ads all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com