Nomyte: Well, that's one consequence of putting your public life in the hands of a private business ... and yet many people have chosen to allow a private business to mediate their communication with friends and colleagues. All your self are belong to them.Exactly right. Use social networks and web mail all you want (I do) but don't believe for a second that what you post is in any way yours, or that the social network owes you anything. They can change things for their own benefit and you have no recourse.
OK, do you all know the circles model is asymmetric? Just because someone adds you to one of their circles does not mean they're added to your circles and unless you go an manually add them you will not see their posts.I think most people understand that. But the problem is, if you want to share with them then you need to add them to your circles (or else make the posts totally public, which means anyone who might Google you could find it)
A lot of random people have added me on G+ and I have added none of them back and I see none of whatever it is they are posting.
What's the disconnect here?
Maybe we can get this banned under the new anti-foie gras laws.
Facebook isn't a success because they attracted Linux geeks, they are a success because people's grandparents are on it.I think you've reversed causality there. Facebook was successful because college students were on it. People's grandparents are on facebook so they can keep up with their grandkids.
the Android integration is a joy if you've got one...Actually I have a friend who got completely freaked out by the photo auto-upload. This is a story I think I've told before, but whatever. She had a "Google Profile", and so she got a G+ account really early on. She ended up installing the google+ Android app, and apparently didn't notice the 'opt-out' for having it upload all your pictures to Google.
You know what. Oh, Go fuck yourself, Google. I used to really like you, but you're fucking it all up.Well, one key thing is that they changed CEOs. Frankly, I do think they were getting a little stodgy. I think the redesign was a good idea, their designs had gotten pretty stale. Youtube, especially, looks WAY better. Google reader was not that great (and I hardly ever use it anymore). Gmail: Meh. either way is fine.
The new google designs are much more useable. Period.This is just plain not true. The redesign violates the most basic design standards. One example is the fact that the same icon is used for different functions. Another one is the muddyness of the thread view where messages can now be told apart less well. There's also the two clicks instead of one and lots of other things.
They went with the new designs because the most # of people liked them.While I have no means of proof I strongly suspect that this is indeed not the case. As with the forced G+ membership the new designs were forced onto people. You do not need to force people if people choose out of their own free will.
Google is one of the world's largest companies, with some of the world's smartest peopleMust be very frustrating for all those people to see their genius distorted into the massive clusterfuck that Google is becoming.
Presumably you selected 'upload photos' on the screen that it specifically asks for permission about that on at install, right?I made sure to click no on that, because I knew to look out for it. But lost of people randomly click "yes" or whatever on dialogs as they go passed when installing new software. That's obviously what happened with my friend. Usually it's just some pointless terms of service nonsense that no one cares about.
The great annoyance these days, for me, is that I have so much muscle memory built up from years of just closing the tab after I'd signed in to check my mail. Now, if I forget to sign out, I've got Google throwing me crazy 'customized' search results, trying to log me on to places I don't want to be signed in to, bouncing me around to a bewildering array of authentication routines, begging me to sign up for Google+ when I know goddamned well if I accidentally hit the wrong button and do soDo what I do with Facebook: Only log in with another browser. I use Firefox most of the time, but for a couple sites I'll use chrome. Facebook, so I don't have to deal with tracking BS, and I do use chrome for google sites or anything javascript heavy.
stavrosthewonderchicken - use the "sign in to google chrome" feature - it ring fences chrome browsers - I am logged into 5 account - home and 4 x work - all discreet.Yeah, and also uploads all your bookmarks and open tabs to Google's servers! (in order to keep them 'synched' of course, because apparently what I really need in my life is synching browser tabs with my phone)
G+'s Circles gives me an "enemies list" function that was lacking in Facebook.FB actually does have some kind of circle-like functionality now, good luck finding it.
No, it wasn't. The point was that I don't really give a crap what numbers Google releases, because it does not matter. Why does it matter what numbers they release anyway? They're just a company, and as such are fairly incidental to the Google+ community itself.Well, they are a publicly traded company - lots of people have a stake in how well they do or do not do. Why do you think the press covers the tribulations of random corporations in the first place?
This is just plain not true. The redesign violates the most basic design standards.Er, there's a missing step in your logic: Will a site always be more usable if it follows standards, or are standards incorrect?
For me, the loss of nyms was a big deal. I know Mefites and other online buddies by their nyms. I can't map real names to Mefites in my head, although that circle is one of my more interesting ones.Actually, this is one thing they did fix. Kind of. You can get a 'page' and put stuff on there. I actually did make a "delmoi" page on g+. But, because you can't add people as a page, there is no way to 'meet' people as the page. You have to wait for them to circle you, or whatever.
Perhaps I am an outlier in this, but I closed my Facebook account (under my real name) years ago, because I discovered that, as pleasant as many of my memories of youth are, these days I have no interest in fielding random semiautomated notifications and 'have this .gif of a cocktail' requests from alcoholic millworkers in their 40s who never left our hometown and vaguely remember my name from highschool. If I want to interact with people through the mediation of some social networking site under my real name, for professional reasons, LinkedIn works fine for that.FB did get rid of most of that stuff. I looked into the facebook API, and it isn't even possible for FB "apps" to send direct messages to users, all an app can do is post to your own wall.
You can provide lots of refinement options, sub-searches, substring matching, stemming, and a bunch of other sophisticated stuff, but probably all of those things combined fail to improve search quality as much as simply making the engine 2 - 10x faster. The reason for this is due to user behavior: when most people conduct a search, they generally scan the first page of results very quickly and simply type a new query if they can't find what they're looking for.Ah, now I finally know why Google sucks! They don't understand their own user behavior studies!
When I redo a search it isn't because I didn't find what I was looking for. It's because I'm trying to gain some insight into how Google works by moving my result higher and lower in the list by experimenting with different terms.I always find these criticisms of Google search pretty weird. The vast majority of the time, it's from people who feel like they know how search engines should work, and because Google search doesn't work that way, it must suck.
I won't name names, but there was a person near the top of the org who was essentially blocking any forward process in terms of visual design.*cough* Marissa Mayer *cough*
If they weren't enforcing the nym thing anymore than why is my profile still blocked and requesting a scan of govt issued ID?They created a way to be pseudonymous on G+. You create a regular account with your real name, then create 'pages' as pseudonyms. It's not really that great though because you can't add people, you have to wait for them to add you, so you need to 'promote' the page outside of G+. (On the other hand, the Spam potential of not doing that could be pretty problematic) And while you would be anonymous to other G+ users, google would still know who you were.
It strikes me that most of the responses to criticism here about Google+ and gmail and various other Google features has been of the 'You're doing it wrong' variety. Fair enough, but although this thread cannot certainly be taken as representative of people who use Google, it is still overwhelmingly critical of many of their new features.Well, like I said: G+ has some pretty serious flaws, and no interesting content. However, the criticisms of google search seem to be that it can't do highly technical kinds of queries that most people wouldn't even know how to do anyway. Like arguing New Coke failed because you couldn't use it to do a "mentos and coke" rocket. With the Gmail UI, I don't really care. The new UI doesn't really bother me. The Reader UI was bad, but they dialed it back a little. The main problem there is the lack of features.
Dark Days Ahead For Facebook and Google?Man, I still don't get the whole "mobile will take over" arguments. I'm sure there's a lot of growth there, but why are people so sure it's going to overtake home/office internet surfing. Maybe people will switch to tablets for a lot of their home surfing, but those still have plenty of screen space, and you can use them with wifi at home.
Gee, I dunno, man, maybe they're actually looking at analytics and traffic instead of guessing?Well, first of all like Zuckerberg I don't really consider tablets to be "mobile". They aren't much more portable then a laptop. You use them the same way you use a PC as far as the web is concerned.
Not to mention the countless groups of individuals who can afford a cellphone (with two year plan) who can't afford a home computer, internet connectionEh, Computers are pretty cheap these days and a lot of phones support tethering now. I can actually connect my laptop to the internet via my cellphone.
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posted by AndrewStephens at 8:02 PM on May 21, 2012 [8 favorites]