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A sigh of relief has been heard across the Internet as behemoth Google has finally relented in it's ever intruding necessity to have a Google+ account from every service and function from signing up for Gmail to posting comments on YouTube.
From Slate to The Verge and everywhere in between there is dancing in the streets as Google finally got the message... no, not today Google, I don't want Plus. Plus will not be going away, it will become it's own property, left to stand on it's own, and unhooked from every Google service under the sun.
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No More Google+, They Finally Got the Hint
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I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so.
-- John Donne
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @12:37PM
real name bullshit
An interesting local anecdote is a local dentist is getting a social media and protestor and threatening phone calls shit storm because some other completely unrelated yet vaguely similar named dentist shot some lion in Africa that nobody ever heard of or cared about before it got shot, and its this week's SJW rallying cry to ruin everyone connected, or in this case, unfortunately named and completely unconnected.
I have a weird name so I'm "safe" but god help anyone named John Smith given all the politically incorrect libel slander and criminal record the collection of all the worlds John Smiths have accumulated over the last century. I dated a girl named Jennifer (insert German name here) and in a fit of nostalgia I searched facebook for her to see what happened to her after all these years and there's about forty of her and at least a dozen could visually be her based on appearing to be my age. So she's got between zero and five kids, lives in about six states, about ten different employers, about zero to five addictions, "she" as an aggregate is quite a mess. Possibly she's gone super private or died in which case none of the forty on facebook are the individual one I dated in high school.
The reason they pushed real names is their focus is big corporate for ad sales and marketing. They know that at a corporate/gov level, real names is dead and everyone knows everything about everyone EXCEPT the general public, they're the only people still in the dark. So Ford, Nestle, and NBC already know everything about me by my real name, so what could possibly go wrong with having the powerless general public know my real name? Well apparently a lot of people get really loudly unhappy about it.
The real death of G+ was it had HUGE uptake in certain hobby communities, photography, ham radio... but the half life of hobby web discussion forums is like one year, so its dying and I no longer go there, there just isn't a point anymore. It could have been something like a Reddit-killer, maybe not a Facebook-killer.
And the Reddit-killer aspect points out a disadvantage of real names, looking at the SJW fanatics on Reddit, not using real names is probably an excellent idea.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 03 2015, @01:25PM
Specifically, everyone using real names rather than aliases makes it so the mined data is cleaner. The whole point of social media, from the point of view of the company running it, is to provide advertisers with detailed information about individuals so that they can be marketed to more effectively, and demanding the use of real names makes it easier for somebody to, say, tie your post about liking Dave Matthews Band to the fact that you spent $197.35 on digital music streaming services last year to the fact that your email address is mike.smith@example.com to the fact that you live at 905 W 19th Ave, Gary, Indiana to the fact that you make approximately $54,600 a year, etc, etc.
That kind of profile on every individual on the planet is the dream of marketing types.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @04:12PM
They already have that, especially when looking at relationship data, geographical IP data, etc.
The only people who don't have that data are the general public, my neighbor, random social media contacts, etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 03 2015, @04:35PM
They have something close to that. The reason the "real name" policy matters to the social networking folks is that pseudonyms are hard to detect and make their profiles less accurate.
For example, let's say that our subject John Smith had established an online pseudonym of "Jack Jones", with a separate email address and photo with a distinctly different look than John Smith. An automated algorithm has a really hard time connecting the real John Smith and the mythical "Jack Jones". Unless "Jack Jones" screws up and provides his real name, email address, cell phone number, etc to the particular social network, they really have no way to put two and two together.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday August 03 2015, @11:58PM
More than that, they want to know where you stand in the web of your social connections. If you fit the profile of an influencer for those you know, advertisers will target you even more.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday August 04 2015, @05:10AM
Or you will become a "person of interest" to certain 3 letter quasi-government oranizations.
When life isn't going right, go left.