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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..
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.
Until they come clean on what they're mining from your activities, I'd stay away from it.
What's to "come clean" about? Their privacy policy says they aggregate information about you from all your uses of their services. There you go. That's it. What else do you want to know? What they'll use it for? For providing you services, and for selling ads which they display to you.
Seems pretty obvious and straightforward to me.
(Disclosure: It's not really relevant to the content of my comment, but I'm a Google employee. I'm not, however, a Google spokesperson. The above is my own words and opinions only.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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....
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.