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?
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Vic Gundotra, long time head of Google+, suddenly announced his departure from Google yesterday. Reports indicate that a lot of Google+ resources will be reassigned to other projects. Is this the beginning of the end for Google+ as we know it?
According to the Google+ Page, Google is finally giving up on forcing everyone to user their real names to join Google+.
When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.
Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.
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.
I know many folks that refused to join Plus, just because of the restrictions and the fact that they *cough* suggest you to anyone in your contacts. They've given up on youtube comments, app store ratings, and a dozen other things that require Plus accounts.
Some might now join, though most probably won't simply because Google was so darn stubborn about this for so darn long.
What say the Soylentils?
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Monday August 04 2014, @08:39AM
I have an Android phone (which I am very happy with), but I don't not use any of Google's other services (apart from the Play store for apps). Email is via Yahoo!, Calendar and contacts are hosted by myself using ownCloud - so that I can sync with my wife's iPhone.
I don't us Google Docs, Music (Play), or any other service they offer - I even use DuckDuckGo for search.
To me Google+ is just another social offering, and I am anything but social. :)
(Score: 2) by geb on Monday August 04 2014, @09:59AM
I didn't use G+, and although the constant nagging to join was annoying, it didn't stop me doing the things I wanted with google services.
The forced switch from the Android googletalk app to the newer Hangouts app was really annoying though. Googletalk was a neat, simple little xmpp client that did one thing well. Hangouts has to make compromises to merge all the various protocols it handles.
If the trend for integration is stopping, I'd like the old app back.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by elgrantrolo on Monday August 04 2014, @10:10AM
Maybe you can try ICQ! Yesterday my friend was sharing on Facebook an article about how people can tell if they are addicted to... Facebook. He went on to say that he'd start using the messaging app and forget about the FB app itself. First it was the teenagers abandoning the social network their parents joined, now Google may be unbundling some of their apps.
I decided to have a look at ICQ yesterday and all my friends there had disappeared (last log in must have been 10 years ago!). I had to add them from FB and GoogleTalk to have someone to chat... Loved the "Status update" picture on the ICQ site though. Lovely and retro.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by geb on Monday August 04 2014, @10:19AM
I have tried ICQ, for about half an hour. After the tenth spam message I decided to give up on it. It's unusable for anything other than signing up to be scammed.
(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?"
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by WizardFusion on Monday August 04 2014, @11:10AM
Wow, ICQ.
It's been 10+ years for me too.
That is a blast from the past. Just like dial-up and AOL.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cykros on Monday August 04 2014, @01:10PM
Nothing stopping you from using a normal XMPP client with your old Google Talk address (for now anyway). I personally use a draugr.de xmpp account, due to it being one of the more transport heavy servers out there (I keep all my old instant messenger accounts up that way until/unless they got overly spammed just in case of ghosts from Internet past trying to look me up....beats facebook). Still notice the occasional google talk contact on there.
If you're doing it on Android, I'd strongly recommend ChatSecure, as it has builtin OTR encryption. Whether it is actually affiliated with TextSecure (the encrypted SMS app Moxie Marlinspike is affiliated with) or if the naming was merely opportunistic, I'm not actually sure, but it works nicely as a program in my experience either way.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Monday August 04 2014, @11:31PM
Wow - someone has come along and downvoted a whole thread about ICQ as off-topic, even though a big part of social networks is user to user communication. Guess somebody out there reaaaallly doesn't like ICQ.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Darth Turbogeek on Monday August 04 2014, @11:28AM
I really do not want to be a part of G+. EVER. I just will not use any service that requires it. I closed Google accounts because of it. I'm not the only one.
Users just do not want to be forced into something they percieve as a steaming pile of shit. Frankly I think all social media is a steaming shitpile so no fucking thanks Google, I want no part of this at all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RaffArundel on Monday August 04 2014, @01:14PM
You are clearly not the target audience, and while likely a minority with hating social platforms, this does indicate where their strategy failed. Caveat: making some assumptions about their strategy which in turn may result in begging the question.
So, you (Google) want a social network. You realize you are late to the online presence (MySpace/Facebook) and status linking/tracking (Finger/Twitter). Picasa never took off - the only people I know who use it were already in the Google ecosystem. When you talk about online photos, you hear Flikr, Instagram and Pinterest not Google Photo and Picasa. What you (Google again) do have is an email infrastructure which has a strong following and a video service with a lot of publishers (and even more consumers). Additionally, you have myriad tools with various adoption rates and quality. Basically, you want to make money and someone in some meeting is going to say "monetize our cloud platforms with a unified paradigm that creates synergy for all our stakeholders" (pardon for missing some buzzwords, the bile was rising) so you create a social media czar and go to town.
Apparently, you bundle them all together into one "product". I have no idea why you don't want to be a part of Google's, mostly because there are a lot of reasons why you may want to avoid them - and some don't even require a tinfoil hat. People didn't rush to the platform (join G+), they didn't want to be held accountable (real name), they didn't abandon their preferred fractured platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Flikr, etc.) to have one unified platform.
So, would it have made a difference if Google wasn't so aggressive forcing the customers (well, their accounts) of the individual tools to merge everything into one G+ universe?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @12:07PM
machines can be made to do more in less time (or the same amount of time) but humans cannot.
there are only so many hours in one day.
obviously that limited time is sucked-up and hogged my "the other google+" so humans don't have time to check for other (more important?) things.
but at least google has something like "amazon ecs" (is that what it's called) so maybe it can be put to more better use : )
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 04 2014, @12:26PM
The real story is unlike a little dotcom that can barely afford to pivot, GOOG can afford to follow the trends. And social media is dying. Pretty soon it'll be like a slightly more upscale version of usenet, with nothing but spammers and bots and most humans avoiding it.
Note that I'm talking about the entire field, not just myspace or livejournal or now G+ as examples.
I took five years away from FB and recently returned and I'm not seeing a point in staying. Five years ago it was a huge time-sink. Now with the same people there's pretty much nothing worth seeing. Regular people just don't use it anymore, its just axe-grinders still grinding the same axes (religion, politics, whatever) and brandspam which I don't need.
For a couple months/years G+ was the place to be for some hobbies. Ham radio, also photography. But I'm not using G+ anymore, not for some hatred or new fad, but just bored with social media. If I wanted to talk to a bunch of hams I'd do it on my radios.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Monday August 04 2014, @12:35PM
I wonder how this "social media dying" will affect those who swore that Facebook is the best thing since sliced bread, and that it is indispensable for them for keeping in touch with distant friends/relatives/whomever. If they were telling the truth, then they should keep using it - unless something better comes along, and manages to overcome the network effect of FB.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 04 2014, @12:47PM
I like your idea of "something better". Remember, every past fad, no matter how stupid, had its time as the best thing since sliced bread.
I have a few ideas. What happens with geotagging combined with google glass, so you kinda sorta optionally sometimes get to know your neighbors. Another one is the ever popular grind game, if all you're doing is Zynga farming, get the social network out of the way and focus on the grind.
Then again the "next big thing" for decades in "electronic car mounted communications devices" after CBs was ... nothing. Nothing at all. There is a possibility that post-social media there is no computer-ish / electronic-ish fad at all. You can imagine hearing the comedians making fun of 2010's social media already. "No wait, really, your grandma in he youth spent 4 hours per day carrying an old fashioned phone around everywhere sending cat videos and ripped off precious moment gift cards and gossip to people she didn't know but called them friends anyway, ha ha ha ha ha social media how stupid and I bet she wore bell bottoms and had an avocado colored fridge and shag carpet too no wait that was CB ha ha ha"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cykros on Monday August 04 2014, @01:29PM
Google+'s biggest failure has been how pushy it has been from the beginning. You HAD to use your real name. And then you HAD to use Google+ if you want to comment on youtube. Want to use Hangouts, just to quickly videochat with distant family? You'd better have had a Google+ set up.
The platform itself isn't terrible, if you're looking for it. It's fairly useful among the Ingress crowd, as we use it to organize faction events, and honestly while other things could work, I'm not sure that any of them would be quite as suited to the task due to the way Ingress works (It's at the same time quite local and quite global, and on top of that people often carry out fairly secretive operations composed of just a few people), making the circles as well as the community structure a pretty smooth system to use (based on UI if nothing else). Can't say I ever filled in a bit of my profile on there (it's just not in any way relevant to how I use the site), but then I'm also not on Facebook either.
If forcing it has been losing them customers from their other services (and it absolutely sounds like it has), then that they're coming to their senses has been long coming. It always seemed to be an utterly desperate move, much like some of Microsoft's thrashing after being trounced in the smartphone world after getting to the market before Apple or Google had even considered it and finding the carrier technology just not ready yet. Google should learn from how well desperate acts work out in the market from their mistakes, and continue to focus on creating products that people want to use and advertisers want to pay them for (not my personal favorite business model, but I didn't make it).
All that said, I'm not sitting here hoping they get rid of G+. As I said, it has its place, and given that my city alone has about 800 people playing Ingress (and that only counts those that are on Google+, but that is most of them), and that the game is global in scope, it seems foolish to entirely can (unless they really are failing to monetize it on top of everything). Seems better to just back off on being so pushy and take a bit of a different angle before they chase away their own Internet dominance.
As for "but who will kill Facebook?"... Sadly, I couldn't say I have a clue. Hopefully someone, and the sooner the better. G+ has simply clearly shown itself not to be up to the task, and it should stop trying.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday August 04 2014, @03:02PM
"unless they really are failing to monetize it on top of everything"
Google Reader, the sequel.
How could they not have monetized the data source that google reader provided? Curated lists of human selected important topics?
Yet they flushed it.
Merely being impossible to imagine how they could fail to successfully monetize G+ doesn't mean they won't somehow find a way to fail, and then flush G+ just like Reader got the giant flushing sound.
(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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fadrian on Monday August 04 2014, @03:18PM
As for "but who will kill Facebook?"... Sadly, I couldn't say I have a clue. Hopefully someone, and the sooner the better.
I don't know why everyone wants Facebook's death. It will fade into irrelevancy on its own - no need to kill anything. And, yes, at the same time some other site (or group of sites) with the idea of connecting people in some way will become the hip, new place to connect with people in your group. But did it (they) "kill Facebook"? Probably not - Facebook will do it to itself by becoming crappier until it dies.
By the way - you want to know why social media is dying? You've basically turned the web into the restaurant industry. Facebook is like McDonalds - cheap and nasty but ubiquitous and always has a restroom that's (relatively) clean. G+ is like some odd high-tech roboticized fast food place with a few good items, but the rest are just crappy, so no one goes there. I'm sure this can be extended beyond reason. The problem is that all of these sites want to be "the next big thing", so they're all plastic and stupid cheap and nasty and ugly anyway. No wonder people are staying away except for "maintenance interaction".
The sad thing about this? Most restaurants have a short run - two, maybe three good years and, then, down the tubes. They are lousy investments unless they do get large. And, if they get large? The crappiness increases faster and their growth declines. And then folks find a better place to eat. And, since all locations on the internet suck, you've basically thrown your money away on a trendy place that had a good run for a couple years, but now needs a turn-around expert to "monitize the existing customer base". So you start selling add-ons to your fajitas for a buck when everyone's gone over to Asian fusion anyway.
God, this industry is really stupid sometimes.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Monday August 04 2014, @09:27PM
Well, with any luck, it'll be the group of sites with an open standard, rather than a site. The whole idea of the big centralized social network that stands apart from the rest of the Internet is perhaps what I find most abhorrent, and antithetical to the flourishing collection of open standards that have helped it to grow into what it is today. That people ignore their email inboxes in favor of their facebook messages (making many of them quite difficult to reach without being inside of the walled garden) is pretty gross. Its effect on messaging (all the while making use of XMPP while refusing to federate) is likewise sickening.
Why do I want Facebook dead? Because I simply don't have enough faith in humanity to have the rationality to leave it in favor of the multitude of better, more open alternatives that we've had since before it existed in the first place, choosing instead to volunteer massive amounts of personal data (and again, the worst part here is that it's not only the users' personal data ending up on the site) for inferior service. That my only reasonable methods to avoid ending up going into their facial recognition database are to either stay at home or sew infrared LED's into my clothing (or perhaps just refuse to let anyone know my real name) is pretty heinous.
I never had hope that G+ would change this trend, frankly, and am glad it hasn't lived up to its original goals. It would have been nice to see it be a little more effective though, if for no other reason than having enough splintering with the standalone social networking sites would serve to better illustrate to the average person just why open standards are so important.
Facebook is the AOL that AOL only wishes it had been.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @01:48PM
Especially since g+ was made mandatory for gplay ratings.
One account per device.
So far that is 5 phones 3 pads 1 tv box = 9 fake accounts just to use with devices.
Thanks Google!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @06:38PM
Why one account per device?
If you want to pay for apps you might as well use the same account for all devices. If you're not then you can install an alternative app store and not use a Google account at all. It sucks that you need to sign up to Google+ to rate apps on the Play Store, but that is something I can live without.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @06:41PM
"social media how stupid and I bet she wore bell bottoms and had an avocado colored fridge"
Real people (esp women) are social creatures that like to talk to each other.
Get over it.
(Score: 2) by zsau on Tuesday August 05 2014, @04:39AM
Real people are social creatures regardless of their gender. Some people for whatever reason have problems with dealing with other people, whether that is social phobia or autism or weird cases of personal taste. But these things correlate differently with different genders in different societies and amongst themselves.
(Score: 1) by No Respect on Monday August 04 2014, @08:15PM
I'd rather do without it than sacrifice my pseudo-anonymity for "benefits" I find questionable at best.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by arslan on Tuesday August 05 2014, @03:17AM
Picasa is pretty good. I've switched non-techie friends and families from Flickr + iPhoto and no one have complained. So I think it is a good move for Google to try to move all the photo content from G+ to Picasa if they do intend to kill G+.