We know you’ve been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today’s change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.
Good move, but Google+? Who cares about Google+?
I couldn’t care less about Google+, but if this affects Youtube names, too, then it’s a good thing.
+1. I hope this means I will be able to comment on Youtube again.
I always kept my YouTube screen name, every time they prompted me to switch to my real name I just closed the modal window. At one point they eventually separated my screen name to its own channel and force-created one with my real name. Every time I log in now I have to change which channel I’m operating from. Hopefully they’ll get rid of this too.
Edited 2014-07-16 14:35 UTC
Best programming/development groups you can find are on Google+.
Actually, I wish facebook could die and everyone migrate to G+, as it is a much better platform than fat and buggy facebook
How do you figure? At least Facebook has an open API so you can fix a lot of it with extensions like Social Fixer. With G+, if you don’t like the default setup, you’re pretty much shit out of luck. Besides, the one GOOD thing about G+ is that everyone from Facebook isn’t on it
My mistake, you are obviously corrent, but for platform I did not meant for programming, but for using
Thanks for insight anyway.
Still remains that facebook is a cancer that spreads into everything you love. So far the g+ cancer only has spread to youtube and gmail. Facebook even came into my games!
Apparently about 350 million users may care:
https://econsultancy.com/blog/64319-google-just-35-of-users-are-acti…
I don’t understand why news items such as “Visopsys 0.74 released” (http://www.osnews.com/story/27824/Visopsys_0_74_released) don’t get tag lines like “Who cares about Visopsys?” ?
Edited 2014-07-16 11:20 UTC
Are most of those not just forced gmail, android and youtube users? Most g+ pages rarely seems to have any activity at all.
They distinguish them (somehow) as active. So if they were forced to register they kept using it, so I don’t know if it matters.
If I post a comment on youtube it wants me to post it to g+ at the same time. I guess Google counts that as active?
Hey hey hey, buddy… I *DO* care !
Kochise
To be clear, I don’t think any news item should be followed up with “who cares?”
I still don’t know how they count active users. But for FaceBook the percentage is roughly 76% daily (http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/)while for Google+ it is 35% monthly (and I still have a very hard time to believe that number). I never did anything for Google+ but because I uploaded some videos to youtube years ago I now receive weekly updates from “my friends on Google+” and from “things that might interest me”….friends in this case are people that have subscribed to my videos years ago and that weekly mail is often entirely empty
A) Sadly, they often do.
B) Visopsys releases are Operating System News, ya know, the primary subject of OSNews.
1. It’s OS News and Visopsys is an OS
2. Visopsys isn’t forcing itself upon some of the Internet’s largest communities i.e. YouTube
I do not think i have seen a google plus user that used their real name. Not now, not ever. Most users are named with silly made up names or real names of famous people. I do not know how many of Barack Obamas and Adolf Hitler there are on G+ and youtube but i have encountered loads of them.
I’ve used my real name in g+,facebook and here at osnews.
I’ve found Google+ hangouts to be much better than Skype. Thats the only part I use. I guess a bunch of systemd developers used Google+, also Linus does.
Its like a make your own slashdot circa 2001. Great posts from really smart people, that aren’t limited to 140 chars.
Or if you happen to be an idiot, you can subscribe to idiots posting about how great it is to make pasta in a slow cooker to save time ( hint, it doesn’t) and money ( hint, it doesn’t).
Anyone who wants to comment on the Play Store is forced to care.
Damn Google got my real name. I was afraid that giving a fake name would cause a ban some time, with Google enforcing the real-name policy back then, and evaporate my Play Store purchases, so I gave them my real name to be safe.
Edited 2014-07-16 12:50 UTC
This comment should be a wake up message to many companies who forget not instill fear in their users.
I think I’ll stay off Google+ stuff like YouTube comments until I find a suitably comfy way to ensure that YouTube comments, Google+ hangouts, Google Play comments, etc. never see the same account cookies.
I care only long enough to delete it from my mobile along with hangouts
Quite a while back, Google changed the Play Store reviews policy so that you had to have a Google+ account to review an Android app/game on the store. It’s a very arbitrary restriction, because for years before, a simple Gmail store account would allow you to review an app/game and I can’t see what Google+ brings to the act of simply reviewing an app/game.
So I joined Google+ because of this and was appalled – like all the other social networks I suspect – at how much was set to share with the entire world by default. After many sections (and probably 40+ settings that I changed), I finally isolated my Google+ account from having anything visible.
Needless to say, the next new feature added to Google+ automatically set for the world to see in my account without even asking me first. So now I have to periodically log into Google+ just to check my options don’t have anything turned on.
Since, then the Google Play Games system sprung into action, which actually is useful, but again defaults to the world seeing your info and I have to turn that all off when the dialogue pops up.
Yes, I know this is me being “anti-social” on a social network, but I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want the social features of Google+?
Edited 2014-07-16 15:26 UTC
Hardly the only one. I was forced to root my phone to get rid of some of this ~!@#$. If I had a real choice other than Windows phone or iPhone I would dump Google/Android.
Google is the most anti-social company out there, even more than Facebook. I remember once, I was in a net-cafe terminal which didn’t have adblock, and clicked on a google ad, and then youtube bombarded me with videos that were the same topic as the ad.
Now, I don’t have a problem with targeted advertising, or even with ad cookies, but ad cookies polluting my youtube feed is too much.
So… you are not “anti-social” on a social network, you are doing the smart thing and use Google+ only when forced to, because it’s not really a social network but a thinly veiled attempt by Google to build a super-profile of you.
Edited 2014-07-16 18:24 UTC
That’s the pay you receive when you use Google. You are using their services for free, and this free thing needs a payment in the form of ads.
The push towards google+ made me paranoid about using Google services
Google fu&kup so badly with google+ no apology will make it right. How about the policy of exposing all my picasa images to the world??? Or exposing all my online comments without my knowledge?
I joined and left google+ twice, each time earnestly trying to figure out privacy settings to be able feel safe, but to no avail. It was like playing cat and mouse. I cover this and then discover something else exposed. Like I kept pulling up my pants and Google kept pulling them down (without my knowledge, so burden was on my to keep checking to see if my pants are down again)!
I am actually glad about all their missteps because of wakeup call about how nothing on the web is free and corps will shamelessly use every aspect of one’s private life to make a buck. Google pushes and prods at every turn to get me to join again and the more it does, the more I move away. My images are stored on my own private web hosting space now, I host my own videos, my own blog, as well as my own rss reader, and working on weaning myself off gmail. I certainly never use a gmail email address and forward everything from my domain names.
Google, thank you for rampage through my data. It woke me up.
But the battle keeps going on. Just last night discovered a slew of crap being stored by Android, such as Location History. Damn it!
Edited 2014-07-16 18:34 UTC
Forcing real names never accomplishes anything other than making people lie about their real name. It’s a stupid policy for things like social networking, email, etc. because it can’t be enforced at all.
Love G+. But I didn’t really left FB. I kept minimal presence just to let people know I’m not actively using and checking it anymore.
This is simply a move made out of weakness and market failure. If G+ were challenging FB (or even other social nets), they wouldn’t be making this change. After all, Google’s revenue model is built completely on collecting and selling peoples’ data.
Actually I would argue that the decision to require users to use their true name was the single most important sucess factor for Facebook. There were already dozens of social sites out there before Facebook came, some of them quite established. But they all allowed their users to hide behind a pseudonym because that was simpler in the short run to acquire traffic. But on Facebook it was possible to recognize real world acquaintances and connect with them electronically.
When FB gained traction, others like Yahoo Profiles hurriedly required their clinentele to reveal their real names. But by then it was already too late.
I’d argue Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Myspace was the single most important success factor for Facebook.
So it sounds like you never got the memo that Facebook is littered with fake names… You can point to several reasons Facebook became a success but I can’t say `requiring real names` would make the list.
My whole problem with Google is their need to force me into tying everything I do on the web together. I really don’t need that kind of experience. It just makes it easier for advertisers and God knows who else to keep track of me. It gets kinda sickening after a while.
Who cares? Oh, dunno, Linus Torvalds and a bunch of other intelligent guys that spends their time creating stuff instead of blogging on a lame site like this.
I don’t care. I only have it so I can provide feedback to Android app developers when I want.
Who cares about google+?
Actually my connections at google+ are active users. Many of us actually cares. This means that social networking world doesn’t revolve around Thom’s tech radar.
Thom, you don’t have the bird’s eye view of what’s happening around you.