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Google Trying to Lure Celebs to Google+
alphadogg writes "Part of the buzz this week about Google+ is that Google is reportedly working to lure celebrities such as Lady Gaga to its new social network service with verified accounts. Not sure if tech big shots beyond Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg count as celebrities, but the list of the technology industry's biggest names using Google+ is on the rise. Dell chief Michael Dell – yes, the real Michael Dell — has grabbed headlines for his early enthusiasm for Google+ and interest in using it as a newfangled customer support and interaction tool. Open source movers and shakers like Linus Torvalds, Miguel de Icaza are also posting away."
If they can get Mark Shuttleworth on board, they'll have Google+ replacing Thunderbird in Ubuntu by the next release...
Bill Gates will use it and be friends with Linus. Can't wait to see his profile...
William Shatner... Then you are not welcome.
It worked for Scientology after all.
Does this mean Google is finally evil, though?
Open the damn thing up to us normal people who so far haven't been able to get an invite.
Yes, having people who other people care about use your social network is a clear sign of desperation and not completely standard marketing.
You're dumb, I suggest not breathing anymore.
Google+ seems to have inherited several of these problems. And it provides no means for pointing them out to the development team...
... there's a "send feedback" button on the bottom right of every page.
Why?
I'm already there!
bickerdyke
And it's pretty nice, too. It takes a screenshot and allows you to highlight what items you're talking about in your note.
I just canceled my Facebook account (member since 2006), I will not be giving up my personal information to the king of data collection. No thank you.
Yes, Google is my default search engine but googleanalytics, recaptcha and googleapi are blocked.
^^vv<><>BA
Dude!
The simplest way to push Google+ is to leverage the noise-making power of fan-boys the world over. Imagine the volumes of traffic and the recruitment potential for Google+ if they can attract enthusiastic fanatics to fight classic holy wars such as:
VI vs EMACS
Harvard vs Yale
Liverpool vs Manchester United
Edward vs Jacob
Barbie vs. G.I. Joe
With the trolls so distracted, maybe they'll leave slashdot in peace for the rest of us, at least for a while.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Really says it all.
none
...maybe if they stick a small amount of notoriety under a box propped up with a stick, tie string to it and wait around the corner?
Oh no wait, that'll just get Youtube celebrities.
Both Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day are pretty active users of Google+. I know that these people aren't going to draw in your everyday user, but I'm sure entertained by Wesley Crusher posting videos of cats on the internet.
Well, I suspect that google+ will develop very quickly in another direction. Recently google is getting more and more in location based services, searches, and ads. So i think google+ will be less about gaming and more about luring customers with android smartphones to places integrating well with this concept.
I predict that as soon as Google+ is opened to the public, Facebook will implode like a wet paper bag. Heck, with the rate people have been sneaking in by asking everyone they know for invites, it might happen even before the official launch.
And by personal information you mean First Name, Last Name and Gender? Because that is all you need for a Google+ profile. I don't think that even the brilliant minds at Google are going to find a way to make a huge profit off of information like that - especially since they already have all of that information already...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Oh, you're dissing Google... that's going to land you in Circle #6 (Heresy)...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Strong typed and object oriented, only bots and web crawlers can join, but there are BILLIONS of them. You know, the Internet of Things, so farsighted of them.
Social networking offers up far more information than name and gender my friend.
^^vv<><>BA
Personal data also includes the messages, photos and other media that you post, as well as the inferences that are made in respect to the interactions you make with other people using the service.
signature is pants
...Google+ doesn't even have a "most recent" button on the Stream). And certain things just don't seem to work (when a link has a number on it, it means there are that many messages or something waiting at the other end; click it, and the number goes away because it assumes you've read them; except it doesn't on about 10% of those widgets...)
You DO understand that Google+ is only in a limited field trial, right?
Any good techie wants to try the next big thing, even if the craze doesn't last that long. However, getting celebrities to post content that vast hoards of people are interested in seeing is more what Google is going after here. It gets people to actually use the product and maybe tell their friends about it-- the same people who tell their friends they are going to go to a concert.
Yeah, like this.
Of course not, but then what's the point of joining a social network if you're gonna simply setup a profile and do nothing else?
^^vv<><>BA
First Name, Last Name and Gender
And who all your friends are.
And everything they say to you or about you.
They get your birthday and age the day all your friends wish you a happy birthday...
They get your eye color from the photographs.
Give me 6 months of google+ data along with what gets linked to your profile using google search, google analytics, and google ads, and I'll know more about you than you thought possible...
Give all your personal data to evil company A or evil company B - what difference does it make?
Way better than Notepad++. Way better.
If Lady Gag-me-with-a-stick-a gets to use a pseudonym, what about the rest of us? Or are there different rules for the peasantry?
I know...I shouldn't ask rhetorical questions...
And it will take you 6 months and all the data you'll have will be fairly useless.
Remember, Google isn't paying people to read up on what you think or who you are. They really don't care about you that much.
If you create an account and have friends... your associates are there, events you attend or are likely to attend are in there. Photos tagigng you are there. There is a hell of a lot that can be inferred. If someone happens to know where you live and is in one of your friend's contacts, they can use social networking to discover when you are not at home, for example via information posted by others.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You planning to change your appearance and move house in 6 months? Every 6 months?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I've never seen it until now. But this isn't my usual browser. I've only gone to g+ on the computer where I default to using Chrome.
It's got potential, but the people marketing it seem to have forgotten one important thing: it took YEARS before either Twitter or Facebook was a major presence in social networking. My first tweet is about 3 years older than my second one.
They think that it was the rise of celebrity cachet that made those things, when that celebrity population didn't get there until numerous people around them were already involved.
They're jumping the gun. They should let it build slowly, get the bugs worked out, let the early-adopters tell them what corners to knock off or stretch into spires, and only then push it hard to people who will drag it to the mass market.
Uh, sure. With 10 million extant users and an attempt to bring Lady Gaga and her 50 million FB kiddies into the "trial".
This is no beta test. This is beta-by-deployment. And they're overdoing it.
Everybody else: invites sent - have fun!
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
If Lady Gag-me-with-a-stick-a gets to use a pseudonym, what about the rest of us?
If Ms. Germanotta can file a DBA, you can too.
Google+ seems to have inherited several of these problems. And it provides no means for pointing them out to the development team. It's like walking into a half-built building and finding many rooms have no way in or out, there are windows missing, the cold-water faucet shocks you, the kitchen appliances run on diesel, and you're encouraged to invite your family and friends to join you there.
Could you be more explicit? I've barely touched Facebook and haven't looked at Google+ at all
Finding people that you want to follow on G+ is not very easy. But this site seems to work pretty well at making is somewhat easier: http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/
Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman have already given up - they were flooded with notification spam as people added them to their circles. Neither celebrity is a net newbie, and if they couldn't be arsed with it a lot of other celebrities aren't going to be arsed with it either.
Yes, having people who other people care about use your social network is a clear sign of desperation and not completely standard marketing.
You're dumb, I suggest not breathing anymore.
Honestly just about all of marketing looks like desperate pandering to me. By that I mean celebrity endorsements, bandwagon appeals, misleading statements, you know, just about anything other than letting the product or service stand on its own merits.
Just because it's standard practice doesn't make it less true. That a singer really enjoys Google+ has no bearing whatsoever on whether I am going to enjoy it. At least if it were someone famous for technical skill like Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox the endorsement would make sense, as one would assume people like that would recognize and appreciate a well-designed system.
But then they aren't going for a "here's why we have a superior service and this is what it can do for you" approach. They're trying to piggyback on the emotional hysteria surrounding a trendy performer. I guess the audience who happen to like pop are supposed to think something like this: "wow I sure like Lady Gaga's music, therefore it follows that I will like everything else she likes however far removed from music it may be -- yay, now I'm one step closer to becoming a clone of her, a truly worthy life goal indeed, surely that's better than having my own individual tastes and preferences". How is that not pandering?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
StartGoogle+ looks very interesting. It effectively brings FaceBook and Twitter into Google+. Watch everything there, post to everything there... quite nice even for early beta software.
I expect that it allows us to start using interfaces designed by other people (i.e. non Facebook, Google or Twitter) that pull things together in interesting ways.
For the Google+ with StartGoogle+ just looks cleaner than FaceBooks older interface.
Um, so you don't like pop or Lady gaga and think Linus Torvald would be a good person to pick as an endorsement for a SOCIAL network. I'm all about being an individual but it's silly to dismiss anything you don't like or don't understand as 'other people are sheep and I'm so above that'. We're talking about a social network. If someone likes an actor it makes sense that they would be interested in their movies. Same with singers and songs. I think it makes sense to use celebrities to endorse social networks but if you think Linus Torvald makes more sense you can have my geek card, one is not enough for you :)
Why would they care what your real name is?
Likewise, it's silly to dismiss every opinion you don't share as arrogance. I gave my reasons for why I disagree with celebrity endorsements in general. If you can find an error in my reasoning, feel free to tell me. This hand-waving of yours is a sign that you don't like what I said, which is your problem, but cannot actually tell me what's wrong with it. That's quite weak.
My point was, Google+ is a computer and network-based system. It required technical know-how to put it together. How well it works as a system to enable people to communicate depends on how well it was designed for this purpose. Otherwise why would people who want this kind of site leave Facebook where all their other friends already are? There has to be some superior offering to convince people to jump ship.
This is where you say something that actually is reasonable and try to tie it into your personal dislike of what I said, as though that lends credibility to what is really just your opinion. This is either very weak or it's deceptive, the difference of course being whether you know this is what you are doing.
If I think a person is a great actor, of course it makes sense to be interested in what other movies they star in. If I think someone is a talented singer, it makes sense to look for other songs they perform. But Lady Gaga could be the very best singer in the world; that doesn't make Google+ any more or less useful for me. That's the fallacy of this kind of endorsement. How much simpler does the point have to be?
I know the fantasy is that because someone is famous it's as if you know them the same way you know your friends with whom you actually spend quality time. I don't know why that fantasy has so much appeal but that's what it's all about. The fact of the matter is, none of us is likely to have any one-on-one time with any celebrity, not even if they use the same social network. Lady Gaga has her own actual friends (i.e. people she actually does know personally and does spend time with) and has her own family members. For all the rest of us, any communication from her will be one-to-many, exactly like her songs. Again this is not a compelling reason to use a social network.
Now if you have something substantive to add other than a long-winded "I don't feel the same way you do about this opinion-based issue, therefore you're wrong", please chime in any time you want. Otherwise there are plenty of good conversations you can ruin with your pseudo-logic.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Another vector they might want to approach is to make profiles available to those of us with Apps domains. You know. So we can USE google+.
Just throwing that out there.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Who are you to bring facts into this!?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Here is data from the worldmap of google+ users. It seems that google+ is getting popular in India.
United States 433,545 (55%)
India 142,339 (18%)
Brazil 41,605 (5%)
United Kingdom 38,917 (5%)
Canada 29,490 (4%)
http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/statistics/
I thought Google+ and aliases didn't get along.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I've seen the name credited as p/k/a ("professionally known as")
DBAs are more for smaller-scale business ventures (whatever the industry); there's a web of LLC's and regular corp's here.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The signal to noise ratio on Google+ is horrible. Some of the worst spammers in my network have joined Google+, whereas the sensible slow-posting people have stayed behind. My Google+ feed is full of links to reddit and Youtube.
I don't want to unfriend the spammers, but I would love to be able to filter their posts. Perhaps Google+ could aggregate most of their daily posts into a single entry in my feed: "Rupert posted the following and 5 other posts - click to read"
(Anonymous for obvious reasons)
I know mainstream celebrities tend not to be popular around here (mentioning Gaga in the summary was asking for trouble IMHO), but if you want to use the social network in question for other things, does it really get in your way?
It might even be a good thing even if you don't care about it, the crowd helping sustain the social network's business model [with a small marginal cost for less-popular uses]
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Can somebody send me an invite please? My e-mail address is:
mark.zuckerberg AT facebook.com
I want to know what all the fuzz is about.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Actually that is a beta test. A beta test tests a feature complete application's behaviour under load. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software_release_life_cycle
Except wave wasn't trying to compete with one of the most painfully, deliberately obtuse (security wise) websites on the web. If G+ is even half as "good" as facebook, but doesn't keep deliberately fucking with your security settings without advance notice every 6 months, then I expect users to leave en-masse. I've already noticed that the number of people requesting to add me (ex facebook) has doubled in number in the past 48 hrs.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You are logic incarnate.
GP is trying to connect a celebrity's choice of some product as a legit recommendation when it's obvous it has been paid for. Be it a brand of toilet roll, make up or hairspray. A choice of said product has no bearing on the skills and abilities of that singer. You might trust the celebrity but that probably makes you an idiot. (If you trust a celebrity, on a commercial television show or commercial network advert or on commercial radio or commercial interview, you are naive and gullible.
I too can see that you might want to know what films an actor or actress likes, perhaps they drew inspiration from it. But if they were recommending a mobile phone or some jeans, that is just product placement and absolutely without credibility.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Many thanks
Non-Sequitur, the slower take up of facebook and twitter reflect the take up of the internet as a whole, those not motivated by technology or business, the general internet users.
Add in some time for experience and, then the slow pull away from myspace (people had an investment in their pages, as bad as they were). Now the question is whether google+ will be "just good enough" and not too publicly evil to allow people to abandon facebook enmasse.
Google is also likely playing the marketing game in making invite only (if you remember facebook was originally university students only) more 'special'. M$'s $250 million investment in Facebook is looking pretty bad.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Sure would be nice to check this out, but since I'm a loyal Google Apps customer and have my mail hosted with them, I can't use it easily since I can't have a Google profile.
This is an epic fail on Google's part.
And it's pretty nice, too. It takes a screenshot and allows you to highlight what items you're talking about in your note.
Something I liked a lot about the "send feedback" in Google+ is not just the highlight, but the blackout capability. You can cover up personal information you don't want sent as part of the screenshot.
What is extra handy about this is that it seems to automatically distinguish blocks from each other so you don't have to drag a rectangle around some parts, you can just click it and it blacks out the whole box (try it by juck clicking on a profile photo for example). I think the same functionality works for highlighting things too, but I mainly use it for blackout.
Social networking offers up far more information than name and gender my friend.
Well, yes, if you keep posting stories about how you went out last night, got arseholed on crack and knocked down an old lady as you drove home in a stolen bus, what do you expect?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Is Goatse on G+ yet?
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
You do, clearly.
It's been a long while since anyone did real Beta testing, which is something you do before letting putative customers in the door. Now the norm is to open the door, put out a "pardon our dust" sign, and claim you're beta testing. Letting customers step in your mortar pail is not testing. Especially when you didn't let those customers help with your use cases in the first place...
Not really. Facebook was a sleepy little town when MySpace was the hip city with a hundred million users and Rupert Murdoch looking to buy it.
Then Facebook got big by word-of-mouth, MySpace drove away its own base, and here we are, with Google trying to bury Facebook in features and steal its population away in a blitz.
The one thing that Google needs to do to make people otaku is the games. People like the social part, but the games make them click like lab rats.
As for MS, it's running on fumes, knowing that Windows and IE are all but fungible with Linux and N other browsers. But it's got a lot of fumes, so it's trying to diversify, to keep in as many games as it can. Story yesterday said they even made a sweet birthday video for Linux.
I see what you mean. The google way of doing eternal betas does indeed file like a joke sometimes. And what they are doing with google+ right now, with celeb invites and all that, is more marketing than anything. But I do wonder whether one can do a realistic load test on a social network software without significant numbers of real users.
That's a high compliment -- thank you. It'd have to be true of you as well, for you have to cherish reason yourself to appreciate the same in someone else. It's a type of resonance.
Of course, others see reason as a pesky obstacle to what they are trying to assert. It's exactly the same way that a lot of politicians see the Bill of Rights as a nuisance to be worked around, rather than something sacred to be honored and protected that they were fortunate enough to inherit. The AC is like this; in fact he is probably reinforced by the way most don't know how to deconstruct and counter his assertions.
The entire celebrity deification culture depends on the naive and gullible. To that I would add, it depends also on the emotionally immature. Have you ever watched a show like Entertainment Tonight and witnessed the petty, frivolous, insignificant things that are treated as though they mattered? The mark of such people is that their feelings are placed above whatever reason they have, making them easy prey for the manipulations of marketing. What marketers and deceivers understand well is that manipulation is done through the emotions. That's why there always has to be some big excitement over everything, why there is so little dispassionate inquiry.
Of course this suits the marketers, PR types, and politicians just fine. Therefore it is not viewed as a problem to be solved by those who could do something about it on any sort of large scale. In many ways, it is encouraged through repeated examples portraying it as normal merely because it is common. It also exploits the human tendency to feel part of something greater than oneself by redefining "greater" in terms of "greater numbers" rather than "greater sophistication" or "greater understanding".
The "trick" is to have emotions and value them as another way of experiencing life without being ruled by them. It is about putting them in their proper place. Just as a working car does not have the stereo where the spark plugs should be, a healthy person does not have emotion where reason should be.
Marketers do these things because they work. I doubt they have much more knowledge than that, else most of them would be horrified at their own profession. Compared to anyone who can sing, dance, become an athlete, or act, the doctor who finally cures cancer will be an anonymous figure. Ever think about why that might be?
"We" love our entertainers the way an addict loves his drug. There is a tremendous discontentment with life, many people feel it, and entertainers temporarily make it feel better by amusing or impressing us. For that dubious "service" we place them on pedestals and pretend they are better and more worthy of adoration than the scientists who created telecommunications so we even know who they are, the farmers who raise our food, etc.
The real pathology is that if so many didn't engage in this sort of escapism, there would be a large amount of excess time and energy that could be put towards actually addressing the political, social, and personal problems that made escapism seem so appealing in the first place. It's your classic feedback loop. I'm convinced that all psychological pathologies take the form of a feedback loop or self-sustaining cycle.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Load testing, yes, using virtual users. In fact, you can do it much better that way because you can ensure that all the things you want loaded will get loaded, even if they're crufty crap no user is going to even try to use.
But that takes writing test software, which can be as expensive as writing the original code. While convincing your friends to whitewash your fence for fun is an American tradition.
Games keep people on site, free mmo's draw in friends to play together but the nickel and diming can become offensive. Google can of course launch circles of it's own, sporting clubs, politics, religion, computer interests etc. it doesn't really have to wait for others to kick them off.
When it comes to social media it is all like trying to herd a horde or nervous cattle ready to stampede at a moments notice, getting them to stampede might not be that hard, getting them to stampede in your direction is trickier.
Reason or no reason, history has proved every social media site has died, either completely and just down to most regular users rather than a broad audience and Facebook has now just got that smell about it, that taint of a fad coming to an end, which makes it vulnerable to abandonment to what ever is 'newer' more 'current' more 'in fashion', what ever that might be.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Sound like Google is desperate to keep Google+ in the spotlight if they are dredging up ho bags like Lady Gaga to push it.
Well, she's certainly more influential than a sweaty nerd who wouldn't understand talent or normal human sexuality if it were walking around right outside his mother's basement bedroom window.
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