SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by Tork on Monday August 04 2014, @09:20PM
Seeing as how lots of places have sprung up to replace them I'm guessing that monetization wasn't the issue. They probably felt like they could use it as a carrot to get people into G+.
You know what I wish Google had considered? I do not want my email, which they have explicitly encouraged us all to keep and never delete, connected in any way to a forum where I broadcast stuff publically. In other words, I do not trust Google (or anybody....) to not fuck up in a way that will expose my personal email to the world. It's the same reason I'd never use a Facebook.com email account. I do have trouble imagining I am the only one like that, I mean we've all seen Facebook trip over silly tech issues involving people seeing what they weren't supposed to see.
I really do hope G+ dies a horrible death and the rest of the industry learns the right lesson from it.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 04 2014, @09:41PM
"to not fuck up in a way that will expose my personal email to the world."
I've noticed that having had internet accessible email continuously since 1988 or so, that I'm running out of personal email.
I remember dating girls and trading semi-private-ish email I wouldn't want to see on the net. Well culture being what it is with double standards I wouldn't care nearly as much as the girls if this stuff was public, but whatever. Other than I don't wanna hear all "holy F VLM, you look a lot older now" or whatever.
But in 2014 my email is all stuff like amazon receipts, reminders from the electric company to pay my $300 bill, my bank got my direct deposit paycheck, my cellphone bill is about to be auto-charged to my CC, I got a CC bill due in two weeks. This stuff is all true and here I am putting it out there in public. I think if my bill providers were smart enough to censor my acct numbers I wouldn't really care if the whole thing were on my facebook feed. Its been a long time since my email involved, like, naked .jpegs and stuff that I really would want to keep secret.
Corporate email is different, lots of confidential / sensitive stamped stuff. But thats corporate, all outlook and stuff. Not like "real internet email" like gmail.
In that line of thinking I could see a bifurcation where gmail is public for stuff you don't care about and ... some other provider handles confidential stuff. Maybe confidential stuff would be GPG encoded email attachments. Gmail need not know my secret key, after all. Maybe confidential stuff is for work. Everyone knows the NSA sniffs everything anyway so you'd be pretty dumb to use email for private stuff and that might percolate thru culture.
I can think of only two other problem with making all my email public, and that's password resets. I need like an hour worst case so someone doesn't reset my passwords faster than I can. And the other problem is keep my birthday/christmas shopping receipts secret, Amazon and the like should have an option toggle to just plain old not send email receipts. I could change my christmas shopping emails to example@example.com just for the xmas season but thats kinda lame.
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Tuesday August 05 2014, @03:27AM
You've hit the nail on the head. That bit in the summary about no longer requiring a G+ account for hangouts? They've only said they're removing that requirement for google apps users, which is primarily business and education.
So up until this point, if you wanted to use the corporate chat client you're paying for, you'd have to create a public G+ profile. That was a really, really stupid decision - they're not just playing with users who might generate a small amount of advertising revenue, they were antagonising companies who're handing over large sums of money directly to them. It shows a fundamentally different attitude compared to a 'traditional' enterprise company like Microsoft, who would be (correctly) dragged over the coals and throw in an 'optional' checkbox within a week.
I hope they do remove the requirement for all gmail users, I liked having Google Talk on my phone. I wonder if there's anybody left to talk to on it.