Google+ Photos To Be Separated From Google+ 114
An anonymous reader writes "Speculation on the eventual shuttering of Google+ has once more risen with news that Google+ Photos will soon be developed and run separately from the social media site. This news follows observations that Google+ "was barely mentioned at Google I/O 2014, while there were 15 sessions dedicated to the service in 2013" and that the company has ended its controversial real name policy. Google Hangouts was also separated from Google+ at the end of July." I've actually heard several people praising Google+ lately; scaling it back to "just a social stream" probably fits into some kind of corollary to Murphy's Law.
Until Google comes clean (Score:2, Insightful)
Until they come clean on what they're mining from your activities, I'd stay away from it.
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Until Google comes clean (Score:5, Insightful)
Until they come clean on what they're mining from your activities, I'd stay away from it.
What's to "come clean" about? Their privacy policy says they aggregate information about you from all your uses of their services. There you go. That's it. What else do you want to know? What they'll use it for? For providing you services, and for selling ads which they display to you.
Seems pretty obvious and straightforward to me.
(Disclosure: It's not really relevant to the content of my comment, but I'm a Google employee. I'm not, however, a Google spokesperson. The above is my own words and opinions only.)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
De-plus youtube while you're at it..
I have to disagree with that. YouTube is a much friendlier and saner place since the integration. The integration did increase the noise on Google+, but all in all I think it's better.
y mine everything just like everyone else. (Score:4, Insightful)
Good lord people. They use your information to display ads. Just like almost every other social network in existence. Clearly this isn't a sticking point for most people or Facebook would be a ghost town.
Problem for you? Fine don't use it, but it's not like it's a secret. For most people it's worth the conveniences Google provides to have their data mined. I know it is for me.
EU may have contributed pressure (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the big problems that EU countries have with Google is the inter-linking of the services it offers, which is a strong intrusion on privacy in European eyes. Americans seem not to care about that, but all EU countries have Data Protection Authorities and applicable laws about that kind of thing, so Google has been getting a lot of heat over it. Indeed, Google's banner line of "One account. All of Google." reads like a threat over here.
So, it's possible that Google has realized that its previous business plan just isn't going to work in Europe, and may be dismantling some of the interconnections between services. They probably don't care too much about the EU fines, but the bad PR every time a fine or an investigation is announced does them no good, and might well spread EU discontent beyond the European countries.
Re:What's the issue? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether you work for yourself or a company you dress a specific way.
I don't care about the clothes I wear. I go to job interviews dressed in what are essentially rags simply to eliminate employers who are worthless and superficial. Other than that, I just dress in random comfortable clothes (not suits or anything formal, since I don't find them comfortable).
Slobs don't make money.
I seem to be making quite a bit of money, so your absolutist statement is incorrect. It's all about finding the right place to work in. I choose not to surround myself with worthless people who only care about the superficial.
But it's probably true more often than not. But what does that mean, other than that our species is mentally diseased?
If you brush your teeth to remove bad breath, you are a] doing it wrong.
Nope. It does actually help.
the true purpose is to keep your teeth white.
You don't get to decide what my true purpose is; I do. Society can go fuck itself, because my teeth aren't even straight.
Everyone is an attention whore.
Speak for yourself.
Re: We called out these failures years ago. (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you actually used a Chromebook? As a 20% Linux sysadmin, 80% manager, I have no difficulties using my Chromebook as my primary computer. Access to web and SSH is pretty much all I need.
Re: We called out these failures years ago. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not really using the Chromebook at all in that case, then. It's the servers you're connecting to using the web browser or ssh that do all of the real work. The Chromebook is, at best, a dumb terminal. But unlike a traditional dumb terminal, your dumb terminal may very well be sending information to Google that they then use when advertising crap to you.
I have seen regular people use a Chromebook, and they are not at all happy when they find out that it doesn't run Word, Excel, games, and other Windows or OS X apps they've bought. They're pretty pissed off when they find out that they're stuck using shitty web-based alternatives that rarely do what they need. And so they go out and buy a real laptop, which these days may only cost a couple of hundred dollars more than the Chromebook, but is far more capable.