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Google+ Photos To Be Separated From Google+
An anonymous reader writes "Speculation on the eventual shuttering of Google+ has once more risen with news that Google+ Photos will soon be developed and run separately from the social media site. This news follows observations that Google+ "was barely mentioned at Google I/O 2014, while there were 15 sessions dedicated to the service in 2013" and that the company has ended its controversial real name policy. Google Hangouts was also separated from Google+ at the end of July." I've actually heard several people praising Google+ lately; scaling it back to "just a social stream" probably fits into some kind of corollary to Murphy's Law.
First there were Picasa Web Albums. Last year my albums got moved to my Google+ account. Now there is a new branding coming along.. My albums will be moved to another service once again..
Until they come clean on what they're mining from your activities, I'd stay away from it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The only thing google plus is used for by me is games on android. I prefer it than having 1000 logins, nor using facebook for game logins. I havent found a real use for it other than that
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Sigh.
De-plus youtube while you're at it... Fuck that noise.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Good lord people. They use your information to display ads. Just like almost every other social network in existence. Clearly this isn't a sticking point for most people or Facebook would be a ghost town.
Problem for you? Fine don't use it, but it's not like it's a secret. For most people it's worth the conveniences Google provides to have their data mined. I know it is for me.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
One of the big problems that EU countries have with Google is the inter-linking of the services it offers, which is a strong intrusion on privacy in European eyes. Americans seem not to care about that, but all EU countries have Data Protection Authorities and applicable laws about that kind of thing, so Google has been getting a lot of heat over it. Indeed, Google's banner line of "One account. All of Google." reads like a threat over here.
So, it's possible that Google has realized that its previous business plan just isn't going to work in Europe, and may be dismantling some of the interconnections between services. They probably don't care too much about the EU fines, but the bad PR every time a fine or an investigation is announced does them no good, and might well spread EU discontent beyond the European countries.
Google needed to sort out users versus user accounts. They had to distiguish all of the duplicate human beings, as separate from their various accounts. The high value data is gmail storage, google docs, and especially picasa web albums. Google sites hosted my web site experiments, and docs and forms, cloud stored my binaries, and voice relayed to my phone numbers, wallet, etc etc. The process of attempting to force feed Google+ to me, though futile, still accomplished their primary objective: It functioned to consolidate my multiple user ids and to figure out what I claim is the meaningful data.
While Google+ is a marketing fail, it was a database validation success, while also changing the overall TOS. This process unified various random accounts to identify the actual user. It combined the data of browsing habits, purchases, phone numbers, handles, ips, mac addresses, adress books, etc. They were all mined and combined to fully implicate individuals accessing anything Google. The fact is, that until all of this Google+ bullshit, I had quietly tucked away thousands of photographs which filled several accounts to the brink. The process of contending with the change forced me to access everything which eliminated the redundancy of me as multiple users. Now Google can be sure its all one of me, which they knew all along, but this just confirms my usage profile and actual breathing existence. I'm not worth as much money to advertisers if I am a redundant user already counted and sold. Just one of me is their assurance to clients so there's no double dipping on real head count. I feel so special, like social currency of unique importance to statistical metrics....
Whether you work for yourself or a company you dress a specific way.
I don't care about the clothes I wear. I go to job interviews dressed in what are essentially rags simply to eliminate employers who are worthless and superficial. Other than that, I just dress in random comfortable clothes (not suits or anything formal, since I don't find them comfortable).
Slobs don't make money.
I seem to be making quite a bit of money, so your absolutist statement is incorrect. It's all about finding the right place to work in. I choose not to surround myself with worthless people who only care about the superficial.
But it's probably true more often than not. But what does that mean, other than that our species is mentally diseased?
If you brush your teeth to remove bad breath, you are a] doing it wrong.
Nope. It does actually help.
the true purpose is to keep your teeth white.
You don't get to decide what my true purpose is; I do. Society can go fuck itself, because my teeth aren't even straight.
Everyone is an attention whore.
Speak for yourself.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Have you actually used a Chromebook? As a 20% Linux sysadmin, 80% manager, I have no difficulties using my Chromebook as my primary computer. Access to web and SSH is pretty much all I need.
Considering Google killed off Orkut at the end of last month, and still haven't killed blogspot/blogger i suspect Google+ will hang around for a while longer.
It's a lot more integrated into their other services than Orkut and blogger ever were as well.
I suspect Google+ will morph into a "Value added" social backend for some of their products, youtube, hangouts, gmail all have Google+ hooks. They are starting to use Google+ to rank your searches, I see my friends posts in my search results often now. They could use this to add personalization to Google Now.
In a couple of years Google+ may be closer to Discus's "embed everyone" model than Facebook's silo. They might end up using Google+ to integrate the data across their products, which were (and still are) siloed until recently and just remove the Google+ homepage.
Anyone that hates the Chromebook has probably not watched "regular people" use one. I picked up a c720 new for $175, put a larger SSD in it to dual boot Linux and Chrome OS and its been worth every dime. Everyone that has used Chrome has loved it as they just want a browser and email and I have found it to run Linux very well with the right config. I have been a UNIX sysadmin fo over 20 years and the fact that I can use a sub $200 device to do most of what I need when visiting a client blows my mind. I remember when people dreamed of being able to buy anything that you coukd run X windows on let alone a cheap laptop with 7 hour battery life. Kids these days...now get off my lawn.
You're not really using the Chromebook at all in that case, then. It's the servers you're connecting to using the web browser or ssh that do all of the real work. The Chromebook is, at best, a dumb terminal. But unlike a traditional dumb terminal, your dumb terminal may very well be sending information to Google that they then use when advertising crap to you.
I have seen regular people use a Chromebook, and they are not at all happy when they find out that it doesn't run Word, Excel, games, and other Windows or OS X apps they've bought. They're pretty pissed off when they find out that they're stuck using shitty web-based alternatives that rarely do what they need. And so they go out and buy a real laptop, which these days may only cost a couple of hundred dollars more than the Chromebook, but is far more capable.