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Ars Technica and Bloomberg are both reporting that Google+ photos is being separated from Google+ and may be rebranded (probably back to Picasa Web from whence it came).
After prying Google Hangouts out of the clutches of Google+ and backing down on their Real Name Policy analysts are starting to notice the slow dis-assembly of Google+ and the death sentence to anonymity it tried to impose.
This move comes after the departure of Vic Gundotra from his prior tenure as Google+ czar. In fact Google+ was barely mentioned at Google I/O 2014, a point noticed by many tech sites, and discussed here on SN.
Separating Google Photos, especially when re-combined with the free rather elegant Picasa photo management tool may put Google in a better position to compete with Yahoo!'s Flikr.
Is this really the plan, to go after Flikr?
Or is it just a realization by Google that monetizing Google+'s has been a failure, even while Google+ shows some popularity.
Or is it in fact due to the growing pushback by Google users refusing to joing Plus?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday August 04 2014, @10:35AM
Truer words have never been typed! And unfortunately true of most the the internet.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Kell on Monday August 04 2014, @11:32AM
I still use ICQ today (in the form of Pidgin), as my primary means of connecting with my friends for online discussion. Really, the medium always gave me what I wanted: a simple to use peer to peer text chat client, and I never had a reason to change to anything else. Facebook and its ilk simply do not offer anything we need. If it ain't broke...
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 04 2014, @12:25PM
For me, ICQ is lost. I have an account I haven't logged into in at least 10 years because I do not remember the password, and I can't do password recovery because the provider of the email account it's linked to shut down years ago.
ICQ is only one service that is lost to me in similar fashion. I have a fake Facebook account which I cannot access either because it somehow became "locked" and can only be unlocked by providing "proof". I have the password but that's not good enough for Facebook security. I still have access to the email account I used for it, but that's no help either. The only proof Facebook allows me to provide is the birthday. I don't remember what fake birth date I used. Didn't think I'd ever need to remember that. It's definitely not Jan 1. I'd delete the account if I could, but can't do that either. All that I have been able to do is unsubscribe the email account I used from most of Facebook's spam.
Another account had a recovery process that used tokens that expired too quickly. The email it was linked to often delayed messages by 8 hours, and the tokens expired in 6 hours. Managed to recover by continuing to request password reset tokens until I got lucky with the email service forwarding the message soon enough.
Security measures are too rigid. Security people do not seem interested in providing outs for such cases. Starting a new account serves as a workaraound, but an unsatisfying one.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by tangomargarine on Monday August 04 2014, @02:37PM
If you use Pidgin, it really doesn't matter whether it's MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, Jabber...just which network your contacts are on, since it's all through the same interface.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"