People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.
So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you’ll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. YouTube will be one of the first products to make this change, and you can learn more on their blog. As always, your underlying Google Account won’t be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles. And for people who already created Google+ profiles but don’t plan to use Google+ itself, we’ll offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles.
Google is getting rid of its horrible social network and all the means with which it tried to shove it down our throats. Great move, but long, long overdue.
I think autocorrect got you.
Also, while I guess this is cool (Doesn’t bother me, I rarely comment on YouTube videos), the thing that still pisses me off to no end is that YouTube and Google share SafeSearch settings.
I keep SafeSearch on when I use Google, but I want it off for YouTube, especially since it is such a pain to disable it from YouTube.
Just like everything being shoved into Hangouts which I have no interest in.
I don’t want my Google Voice or Google Talk smashed into Hangouts. Highly annoying.
I don’t understand what’s so exciting about Google Talk, Google Voice or Hangouts that they should all be separate products?
Yeah. Seems to me those products make sense merged. Only problem is, the support for Hangouts on anything but mobile requires you to keep a damn web browser window open unless you’re content to just use the basic XMPP messaging support.
I was actually a big fan of Google Talk. It was a no frills IM service that was lightweight and had notifications that were not annoying. I ran it since it first debuted back in 2005. I was rather bummed out when they dropped support for the app this last February.
I still use it through xmpp, even though supposedly Google Talk’s xmpp support was removed. And it’s not a grandfathered authorization, since I set this connection up on a new machine less than a week ago.
As I understand it, the “XMPP removal” was actually “de-federation” (eg. killing off the ability to cross-communicate between Google Talk users and non-GTalk XMPP users)
[wishful thinking]
Feature request: please Google, re-introduce the + usage in Google searches
[/wishful thinking]
From what I have read, surrounding a word with quotes is equivalent. However, Google still may not obey unless you choose Verbatim under Search Tools –> All Results
Actually, I find it the best social network out there. I understand that no one wanted it, and that it was “shoved down people’s throat”, but the actual implementation is great.
Compared to horror story that is Facebook, G+ is clean, organized, visually appealing, and best of all I am not bothered by the endless stream of crap that Facebook generates (videos my friends saw recently, their selfies from vacation, or simply some random stuff Facebook throws into my face). Especially this last thing, Facebook does not have access to my e-mail, and it has done a really, really poor profiling job. That simply means == “crap content” whenever I login. Which is rare these days.
G+ on the other hand, gives me great organizational features. And they are so easy to discover. I can create “circles” according to my interests, and explore each circle individually. And when I am offered something automatically, nine out of ten cases it is relevant. In fact G+ has recommended some great books, articles or blogs related to any of my interests (say programming, video editing, photography … or anything else).
Most people think “I don’t need a Facebook copy, all of my friends are already on Facebook”, but I see G+ not as a copy, more like a Facebook 2.0. Unfortunately, you just can’t beat Facebook by trying to be another Facebook, so this news is hardly surprising. I just wish Google won’t kill this project entirely.
I was just about to post the similar comment. Is Google+ redundant? Maybe. But horrible? I don’t see anything horrible about it (apart from showing down our throats part, but they are obviously giving up on that).
Edited 2015-07-28 08:48 UTC
I entirely agree. It could still be great if there were more people on it, because right now, it’s barely more than a news stream for me, although a quite high quality one..
I wonder if there at some point could be another threat of exodus from Facebook again, and if that happens, I’m sure G+ will be ready.
While not nearly as many as in Facebook, there’s a lot of active people in G+. You have to go and join communities to find them, though.
My whole stream is exclusively from discussions in the communities I’ve joined.
I love Google+. I use t all throughout the day, and in fact, have lessened my use of FB through the use of G+.
Personally, I do not think that Google will kill G+, but instead work on making it stronger and more inline with the flow of tools and options.
I am thankful that they severed the Youtube option though. I hated having comments showing up out of nowhere because I liked and commented on a video.
Indeed. The only horrible thing about Google+ is that no-one is using it. In every other aspect it has Facebook beat, hands down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9MtttXI2q8
Why is Google + horrible ?
I personally stopped using google plus when google decided it was a good idea to force it down peoples throats.
No one likes being forced to do something, if they had let it naturally develop I am sure it would have actually gained more traction as its a much cleaner / more intuitive interface than facebook.
It is certainly not horrible how they handled its marketing and its inclusion into everything yeah I would call that horrible, but not google + itself.
Because hyperbole is the standard in news reporting.
And Thom is prone to just repeat what other people believe, and that Google+ is terrible is a common belief among people who never used it, but had an account forced on them.
I tried Google+ for about a week and found the experience to be pretty horrible. Navigation was bad, I anytime I wanted to change a setting or set something up I had to google a how-to on how to properly use the feature. Plus I kept getting notifications about people/feeds I hadn’t subscribed to and had no interest in.
Google pushing its G+ stuff on users has basically pushed me off of the Google services I previously used.
I agree on the badness of G+ being forced on everyone.
But I was really hoping for a competitor to Facebook.
There are plenty of other small players out there but nobody that could seriously be a threat at all.
Finally that piece of s**t is going away, but i trust google to replace it with something equally shitty…. I just wish they could go back to youtube comments like it used to be!
Combined with Google once again accepting spamcop reports against GMail accounts, it sure it nice to see positive progress from Google for a change. Maybe now they’ll actually get around to implementing outgoing filters for GMail, so their servers stop bombarding the rest of the internet with SEO/web dev spam from India? Or at least actually act on spam complaints reported directly to them?
Or if we’re really lucky, maybe they’ll fix their search indexer so that it doesn’t index obvious spam content from compromised sites? It’s reached the point where SEO manipulation is by far the most common type of compromise I see – and so far Google has done nothing to address it. If a site is updated infrequently and all of a sudden every page is modified on the same day to include obvious spammy terms like “cialis” and/or “levitra,” you’d think that would be enough for Google’s indexer to realize that something’s amiss and maybe they shouldn’t just index the changes – but evidently not, even with sites that are registered in Google Webmaster Tools.
does this mean i will be able to comment on youtube again?
I always hated the name. It doesn’t say anything relevant. I understand facebook (book of faces/selfies). Linkln (networking links). Twitter (tweets, gossip). Google+ (better searches???)
Hated the implication that somehow a social network was better (The Plus Sign) than a search engine (or the many other tools we use to get work done).
Never created a Google+ account but I’m glad that they’re separating their services. Now it’s time to change the name to something that hints at what the service is about.