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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform

Er, Google announced that when they announced Google+, that it wasn't primarily a separate product but a social layer that would weave together all of Google's services. The Facebook-esque site has always been the tip of the G+ iceberg. (The Forbes article on the departure, interestingly, notes that the platform position has always been Google's position, but that the tech media never believed it [1].)

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-...

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My understanding was that Google+ was primarily an identification platform. Up until that point your Gmail was considered your Google identity.

Nobody it seems ever picked up on that and were focussed intently on spending all of their energy not leaving Facebook for some reason. The hate-on for Google+ was above tepid. People would take seemingly any opportunity to call it down even though the service worked incredibly well on mobile and the company wasn't swamped with privacy allegations.

It was just a small thing Google+, a free social platform attached to ones' Google identity. That so much controversy ended up surrounding something that I feel was really rather clever and innocuous will continue to surprise me for some time.

A lot of the hate I've seen for Google+ centred around being badgered constantly to 'use my real name' on things. YouTube was a particularly egregious example. Every time I logged in, it would say 'Hey, do you want to use your real name? How great would that be!' When I said no, it would reply with 'Hey, are you sure you want to not use your real name?', and if I then confirmed that no, I didn't want to, it would say 'Okay, well we'll ask you later then.'

If they had just said that 'Okay, your Google profile is now called Google+, and your YouTube account attached to your Google Profile is now your Google+ profile, and you can go to your settings to complete the migration', it wouldn't have been so bad. What they didn't do is offer anyone any reason to change.

All the benefits they hawked for YouTube's Google+ comment integration were actually such huge drawbacks that many top YouTubers turned off comments entirely. Unsurprisingly, YouTube comments had gone from the mindless, racist, misspelled prattling of the internet's ignorant masses to giant spam-filled, link-filled dumping grounds of (varyingly) penis enlargement spam and giant ASCII dicks, and YouTube comments went from bad to worse, a feat no one thought possible.

It really feels like the decision was made for the YouTube team by someone else (Page? Gundotra?), and the YouTube team just had to roll with it, with their input being ignored and the Google+ team saying 'No it'll be great, don't worry, you'll see, everything is better with Google+!'

To this day, people invite me by gmail address to threads, which I cannot leave unless I tie my Google account to a Google+ account so I can join the thread so I can leave the thread.

The entire thing was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and everything that they wanted out of it could have been accomplished by providing value, rather than extrinsic rationalization.

I finally gave up and just blocked all cookies from youtube.com

It nicely solved the annoying google+ problem, with the added benefit that I haven't seen a youtube ad since.

Apparently if you block youtube cookies, the ad server mostly just gives up.

Odd. I have cookies disabled period, and only enable them for specific domains where I want to log in to something. I still get constant ads on youtube unless I use an ad blocker.

FWIW I still get that annoying "real name" popup almost daily on YouTube. I'm going to try the fix mentioned below (blacklisting all cookies from YouTube)

Really? At a certain point (months ago, at least), it finally just consented to creating a Google+ profile based on my current Youtube username. As far as I'm concerned, it was a no-op, since I don't really care what system they're using on the backend for my YT acct.

Google doesn't support how you are doing things. You say you are using Google products but haven't created a Google identity so therefore you get emailed when the services that you use, are interacted with. Well, create a Google identity problem solved forever.

I don't get why you guys fight it so hard. It asked me to enter a name one time. It was clear that it was asking me because it was part of my profile and I had never entered my name on a Google product before. So I entered my name and you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing forever.

Apparently everyone else has been "hassled" endlessly for years to give their name to Google. They already know who you are. You should be appreciative of the transparency. Type in the name. It immediately sorts everything out for you. Google needs to keep moving forward as a company and with their products. They cannot support legacy use cases forever. You need a Google account to use their services. The Google account requires your name, well ok so big deal that isn't a big ask most companies ask for that.

Entering the name carries a risk, which varies from person to person: the risk that Google might decide your name is not "real enough".

It also publicises your name, which may be a big risk for some people.

Ah I think I finally am starting to understand. It is a thing about some people not wanting to use their real name on Google products.

Isn't that a bit of a problem whether you are using a alias or not, since a co worker or anyone will eventually come across your alias while doing whatever it is on Docs or Hangouts or similar. Then look you up using that? I use Google apps constantly it seems that would happen quickly.

Is it possible to use Android without a Google+ account?

Use one name at work and another at home? The whole point would be to keep those spheres separate.

There is also the issue of (for example) the person with the surname "Yellow Horse" having her account closed down by the policy, as Google didn't believe it was a real name.

> Everybody [...] focused intently on spending all of their energy not leaving Facebook for some reason. The hate-on for Google+ was above tepid.

Really? I don't think so. At the very beginning there were two distinctly separate groups: The geeks, a minority which were eager to jump on the G+ boat -- And the non geeks, which were helplessly oblivious of it, or the advantages were not worth the hassle to them.

It just didn't gain enough momentum, and it was not because of any hate.

Years later though, they began cramming it down people's throats, for example with the annoying pop-ups in Youtube, riddled with dark patterns. Really, don't-be-evil Google? Really?

That's when people started (rightfully) getting pissed off.

It just didn't gain enough momentum

You write as if Google+ is past tense. I think you've drunk the Kool-aid that TechCrunch is serving. Disclosure: I'm very, very active on Google+, and so are a lot of my friends. I've been circled by about 10,000 users and have almost 1,500,000 views. Google+ is quite popular with a certain demographic: very technical people, engineers, developers, and programmers. Also Android fans, photographers and artsy people.

I'm sorry you don't like Google+, and it's fine with me that you express a negative opinion about it. But let's stop the silly "Google+ is a ghost town" false rhetoric. It's manifestly, demonstrably untrue, and it doesn't do you any favours when you try to make a case like that. Let it go. Let the people who appreciate Google+ enjoy it. Google+ is still growing by leaps and bounds, and I expect it will continue to do so whether you like it or not.

>Disclosure: I'm very, very active on Google+, and so are a lot of my friends. I've been circled by about 10,000 users and have almost 1,500,000 views. Google+ is quite popular with a certain demographic: very technical people, engineers, developers, and programmers. Also Android fans, photographers and artsy people.

Those are hardly enough to make it viable.

1.500.000 views? There are cat videos that have as many...

His anecdote is no better than yours from where I'm sitting. I've got lots of tech savvy friends including developers, engineers, photographers, and artsy people. My friends are in my g+ circles from whenever Google opened the flood gates. I haven't checked in a while, but iirc the last post was over a year (or two) ago.

Saying, "it's not a ghost town [for me]" is no more or less valuable than the opposite experience. I'm glad you're enjoying g+, but that fact doesn't say much about the service.

According to Wikipedia there are 540 million active accounts as of Oct 2013, the ghost town trope needs to die because it is simply incorrect.

As defined as: "has at least left a comment on YouTube". I'm not sure I'd count that as "active G+ users".

I don't think it matters what people call it. If G+ works for you, who cares if people call it a ghost town? Your G+ certainly doesn't sound like one.

If we wanted to have a substantive discussion about how well G+ is doing, we'd need to know a lot of specifics about G+ (as well as define what 'well' means in this context). Can 540 million active accounts be a ghost town? Depends on what 'active' and 'ghost town' mean. If we're just going to throw around labels without definitions or data, people just end up supporting the idea that feels right in their gut.

I don't have anything against G+, or people using it! Where did you get that impression?

What really bothers me is Google trying to force it on people through other Google products.

I read Linus and other personalities on G+, I'm also not implying it's a ghost town.

It just didn't gather enough momentum to attract the mass of "regular" casual users.

It stopped being just an ID platform the second they started forcing "sharing" from the same account down people's throats, like photos, social, video, comments.

So here is the elephant in the room "privacy allegation": if I mess up and make a drunk post on Facebook, I can purge the entire profile and move on. Gmail, however, and a host of associated tools have been critical for my jobs and business for many years. If i make a stupid drunk post on Google+, I don't even want to think how and what parts of my job and business it might affect, so in the foreseeable future I'm staying miles away from anything "social Google".

Hmm.. AFAIK you can delete your G+ profile and still keep your Gmail - https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1044503?hl=en

Except if you went with the "sign in with Facebook" option for third party apps.

You'll be losing saved games in Farmville for instance (maybe no big deal to you but still friction for some).

I would lose my Endomono fitness tracking account, that would make me pause.

I'm sure there are many others, just like for Google+.

There are people who just love hating. Back in the days, VB6 was an easy thing to pick on. Now it's PHP. And G+.

It's not that people hate it for the real name thing or whatever. More likely, they hate it because many other's do so why not.

I think you might be reading it incorrectly. G+ was certainly a platform internally but it was never a platform externally. Google has offered no useful APIs for it and has been totally non-commital about ever creating any. Whether this prompts a rethink on that will be interesting to see, but it certainly has set them apart from Twitter and to some extent Facebook who both offered better APIs and benefited a lot from that.

> G+ was certainly a platform internally but it was never a platform externally.

It is true that there was a substantial delay before G+ was made a public external platform (there were initially some external, selected partner, integrations), but G+ has been a public external platform for some time.

> Google has offered no useful APIs for it

"Useful" is subjective, of course, but they offer a fairly extensive set of G+ platform APIs. [1] It's true there isn't a write API for the Facebook-style news feed, but that feed isn't central to G+-the-platform, only to G+-the-product.

[1] https://developers.google.com/+/web/

Where's my access to an RSS/Atom feed of G+ posts?

Where's my access to pushing content from another network or platform onto G+?

Other than Data Liberation, were's my ability to extract content from G+?

It's a fucking silo. Always has been.

> Where's my access to an RSS/Atom feed of G+ posts?

There's a read API for activities, but its not RSS/Atom.

> Where's my access to pushing content from another network or platform onto G+?

Push it from the integration app as App Activities using the Moments API.

> Other than Data Liberation, were's my ability to extract content from G+?

There's read APIs for the various kinds of Google+ content.

> It's a fucking silo.

Well, except for all the ways to get content in and out of it, sure.

Why not RSS/Atom? I can use that for every other feed I follow.

I've looked for push tools and haven't found them.

Links on this stuff you're referring to?

It's still a fucking silo.

It's both a product and a platform. plus.google.com and its "What's New?"-style newsfeed is a tangible product.

The news that Google+ integration is no longer required for other Google products means the platform is deprioritized.

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