Google Trying to Lure Celebs to Google+ 198
alphadogg writes "Part of the buzz this week about Google+ is that Google is reportedly working to lure celebrities such as Lady Gaga to its new social network service with verified accounts. Not sure if tech big shots beyond Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg count as celebrities, but the list of the technology industry's biggest names using Google+ is on the rise. Dell chief Michael Dell – yes, the real Michael Dell — has grabbed headlines for his early enthusiasm for Google+ and interest in using it as a newfangled customer support and interaction tool. Open source movers and shakers like Linus Torvalds, Miguel de Icaza are also posting away."
Mark Shuttleworth (Score:5, Funny)
If they can get Mark Shuttleworth on board, they'll have Google+ replacing Thunderbird in Ubuntu by the next release...
Re:Mark Shuttleworth (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't he going to replace the Linux Kernel in Ubuntu with Skype, too?
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Nothing appeals to small-minded people more than what other people are up to.
Nothing appeals to small minded people more than looking down on other people, the way you do.
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Eh what's the point? The kind of immature mindless idiots who give a damn about what Lady Gaga does with her free time are exactly the kind of riff-raff you should want to keep out of any good site.
You're not going to beat Gacebook's 750 million (or whatever) members by having high entry requirements. And unless Google can attract enough users to get advertisers interested, they're dead in the water.
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Pointless bets (Score:5, Funny)
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You don't have "friends" in G+, you just have people "in your circles". They don't know which circle it is, either - it can be named "people I wish to see die in the most painstakingly way possible" if you want.
Re:Pointless bets (Score:4, Informative)
"people I wish to see die in the most painstakingly way possible"
Sounds very thorough, but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Unless your name is... (Score:1)
Proven Strategy (Score:4, Funny)
It worked for Scientology after all.
Does this mean Google is finally evil, though?
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Geeks are well served already - this is, after all, where you go if you want to follow Linus.
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It means Facebook's has got thetans all up in their business.
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Mostly just poking fun at Google's slogan there :P
I'd expect any corporation to be "Not good" - shady, unethical, etc. Otherwise they'd probably go out of business, But outright evil is a whole different league.
Here's an idea (Score:1)
Open the damn thing up to us normal people who so far haven't been able to get an invite.
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It not hard to get invites. It looks like users have unlimited invites now. Or at least I've haven't run out yet. All you need is a friend on google + .
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What about those of us who want to get on Google+ but don't want to go through the effort of making friends?
Re:Here's an idea (Score:4, Funny)
Then you get sent an unsolicited invite. Check your inbox.
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It not hard to get invites. It looks like users have unlimited invites now. Or at least I've haven't run out yet. All you need is a friend on google + .
I don't have any friends, you insensitive clod!
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- Drew
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soupisgoodfood
Much appreciated, if you're still sending them out.
Thanks.
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So, Me too!
I_dont_mind_posting_my_email_address_on_a_public_forum@gmail dot com (see how I disguised it there?!)
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When is Slashdot not in some ways similar to an AOL chatroom?
astralbat (same as slash name) at gmail.com (Score:2)
G+ invites (Score:2)
Everybody else: invites sent - have fun!
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I'm ok to wait. I just hope my username isn't taken already. Or perhaps it's reserved if I already have Google account?
Why? (Score:2)
Why?
I'm already there!
adoption? Easy! (Score:3)
Dude!
The simplest way to push Google+ is to leverage the noise-making power of fan-boys the world over. Imagine the volumes of traffic and the recruitment potential for Google+ if they can attract enthusiastic fanatics to fight classic holy wars such as:
VI vs EMACS
Harvard vs Yale
Liverpool vs Manchester United
Edward vs Jacob
Barbie vs. G.I. Joe
With the trolls so distracted, maybe they'll leave slashdot in peace for the rest of us, at least for a while.
Google+ is my favorite text editor. (Score:2)
Way better than Notepad++. Way better.
'Luring' celebrities... (Score:2)
...maybe if they stick a small amount of notoriety under a box propped up with a stick, tie string to it and wait around the corner?
Oh no wait, that'll just get Youtube celebrities.
Geek celebrities (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just Another Name.
Prediction (Score:2)
I predict that as soon as Google+ is opened to the public, Facebook will implode like a wet paper bag. Heck, with the rate people have been sneaking in by asking everyone they know for invites, it might happen even before the official launch.
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Somebody should let Rupert Murdoch know, he likes to buy imploding social networks.
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The problem with Wave was that it didn't have an obvious utility and wasn't given time to develop one. I had an account and pretty much immediately stopped using it because I couldn't figure out what it was for.
Google+ at least has an obvious function which puts it well ahead of Wave.
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...
You don't want to unfriend spammers? Really?
Enjoy your buckets of spam then.
Microsoft Introduces Microsoft++ (Score:3)
celebrities? (Score:2)
Yeah, like this [techcrunch.com].
pseudonyms? (Score:2)
If Lady Gag-me-with-a-stick-a gets to use a pseudonym, what about the rest of us? Or are there different rules for the peasantry?
I know...I shouldn't ask rhetorical questions...
Doing business as Lady Gaga (Score:2)
If Lady Gag-me-with-a-stick-a gets to use a pseudonym, what about the rest of us?
If Ms. Germanotta can file a DBA [wikipedia.org], you can too.
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Is Google+ for doing business? Facebook and Myspace had options specifically for artists. G+ doesn't...yet.
close but not quite (Score:2)
I've seen the name credited as p/k/a ("professionally known as")
DBAs are more for smaller-scale business ventures (whatever the industry); there's a web of LLC's and regular corp's here.
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DBA just means "doing business as", and the requirements vary. Or the lack thereof -- sometimes it's merely a de facto thing rather than needing registration in some states.
I do wonder if I could use JabberWokky -- I'm registered to vote and get regular mail under the name (it's a real world nickname from theater... even my wife calls me it). I do some non-profit work under the name, and have performed on stage with the name.
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Yes, just look what a complete failure that actor was with that weird foreign, long, impossible to even spell name; what was it - "Arnold Schwarzenegger" or some completely, utterly hopeless name like that. No way it could have worked.
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The name changing seems more prevalent with actors and actresses; a lot of pop stars seem to use their birth name as-is, or use part of their birth name as a mononym. Ahnold is mentioned above as an exception to the actor naming pattern, Katy Perry (born Katheryn Hudson) is another exception to the popstar naming pattern.
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It can be a requirement for professional actors. Michael Keaton was born Michael Douglas, but SAG wouldn't let him use his birth name. There are lots of other examples; in an industry where your name recognition is critical and credits are key, your registered name with the 4As often varies from your birth name.
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yeah, I've heard that before - if an actor has the same name as another actor, SAG makes said person change their business name even if not their real name.
(back to my example, Katy Perry chose to take that stage name so as to avoid confusion with the actress Kate Hudson)
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Dude. Just don't list your real name. If I learned anything from Facebook, it's to never use your real name. I'm now under a nickname that everybody who has known me since college will recognize (and probably know to search for). If I really need my actual name out there, I'll create another account and make sure that it looks good
no aliases (Score:2)
I thought Google+ and aliases didn't get along.
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You put in the name you commonly go by. If you ask people who Lady Gaga is, they're a damn sight more likely to know that name rather than the one on her birth certificate.
Google Profiles for Apps users? (Score:2)
Another vector they might want to approach is to make profiles available to those of us with Apps domains. You know. So we can USE google+.
Just throwing that out there.
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Amen, grasshoppa!
Seriously -- I am not only paying for it, but I've set dozens of clients up with it, both free and paid. This is not a good situation. Luckily for us, they pretty much have to support it by the time schools let in for the fall. Otherwise, they just borked themselves.
do the celebrity crowds get in your way? (Score:2)
I know mainstream celebrities tend not to be popular around here (mentioning Gaga in the summary was asking for trouble IMHO), but if you want to use the social network in question for other things, does it really get in your way?
It might even be a good thing even if you don't care about it, the crowd helping sustain the social network's business model [with a small marginal cost for less-popular uses]
Please (Score:2)
Can somebody send me an invite please? My e-mail address is:
mark.zuckerberg AT facebook.com
I want to know what all the fuzz is about.
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Yes, having people who other people care about use your social network is a clear sign of desperation and not completely standard marketing.
You're dumb, I suggest not breathing anymore.
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Yes, having people who other people care about use your social network is a clear sign of desperation and not completely standard marketing.
You're dumb, I suggest not breathing anymore.
Honestly just about all of marketing looks like desperate pandering to me. By that I mean celebrity endorsements, bandwagon appeals, misleading statements, you know, just about anything other than letting the product or service stand on its own merits.
Just because it's standard practice doesn't make it less true. That a singer really enjoys Google+ has no bearing whatsoever on whether I am going to enjoy it. At least if it were someone famous for technical skill like Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox the end
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Likewise, it's silly to dismiss every opinion you don't share as arrogance. I gave my reasons for why I disagree with celebrity endorsements in general. If you can find an error in my reasoning, feel free to tell me. This hand-waving of yours is a sign that you don't like what I said, which is your problem, but cannot actually tell me what's wrong with
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You are logic incarnate.
GP is trying to connect a celebrity's choice of some product as a legit recommendation when it's obvous it has been paid for. Be it a brand of toilet roll, make up or hairspray. A choice of said product has no bearing on the skills and abilities of that singer. You might trust the celebrity but that probably makes you an idiot. (If you trust a celebrity, on a commercial television show or commercial network advert or on commercial radio or commercial interview, you are naive and gull
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That's a high compliment -- thank you. It'd have to be true of you as well, for you have to cherish reason yourself to appreciate the same in someone else. It's a type of resonance.
Of course, others see reason as a pesky obstacle to what they are trying to assert. It's exactly the same way that a lot of politicians see the Bill of Rights as a nuisance to be worked around, rather than something sacred to be honored and protected that they were fortunate enough to inherit. The
Re:Lady Gaga? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, Google is my default search engine but googleanalytics, recaptcha and googleapi are blocked.
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Re:Lady Gaga? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Social networking offers up far more information than name and gender my friend.
Well, yes, if you keep posting stories about how you went out last night, got arseholed on crack and knocked down an old lady as you drove home in a stolen bus, what do you expect?
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Personal data also includes the messages, photos and other media that you post, as well as the inferences that are made in respect to the interactions you make with other people using the service.
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First Name, Last Name and Gender
And who all your friends are.
And everything they say to you or about you.
They get your birthday and age the day all your friends wish you a happy birthday...
They get your eye color from the photographs.
Give me 6 months of google+ data along with what gets linked to your profile using google search, google analytics, and google ads, and I'll know more about you than you thought possible...
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And it will take you 6 months and all the data you'll have will be fairly useless.
Remember, Google isn't paying people to read up on what you think or who you are. They really don't care about you that much.
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Sound like Google is desperate to keep Google+ in the spotlight if they are dredging up ho bags like Lady Gaga to push it.
Well, she's certainly more influential than a sweaty nerd who wouldn't understand talent or normal human sexuality if it were walking around right outside his mother's basement bedroom window.
Re:It's not that much better than facebook (Score:5, Informative)
Google+ seems to have inherited several of these problems. And it provides no means for pointing them out to the development team...
... there's a "send feedback" button on the bottom right of every page.
Re:It's not that much better than facebook (Score:4, Informative)
And it's pretty nice, too. It takes a screenshot and allows you to highlight what items you're talking about in your note.
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And it's pretty nice, too. It takes a screenshot and allows you to highlight what items you're talking about in your note.
Something I liked a lot about the "send feedback" in Google+ is not just the highlight, but the blackout capability. You can cover up personal information you don't want sent as part of the screenshot.
What is extra handy about this is that it seems to automatically distinguish blocks from each other so you don't have to drag a rectangle around some parts, you can just click it and it blacks out the whole box (try it by juck clicking on a profile photo for example). I think the same functionality works for
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I've never seen it until now. But this isn't my usual browser. I've only gone to g+ on the computer where I default to using Chrome.
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Who are you to bring facts into this!?
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Well, I suspect that google+ will develop very quickly in another direction. Recently google is getting more and more in location based services, searches, and ads. So i think google+ will be less about gaming and more about luring customers with android smartphones to places integrating well with this concept.
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Google+ seems to have inherited several of these problems. And it provides no means for pointing them out to the development team. It's like walking into a half-built building and finding many rooms have no way in or out, there are windows missing, the cold-water faucet shocks you, the kitchen appliances run on diesel, and you're encouraged to invite your family and friends to join you there.
Could you be more explicit? I've barely touched Facebook and haven't looked at Google+ at all
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StartGoogle+ looks very interesting. It effectively brings FaceBook and Twitter into Google+. Watch everything there, post to everything there... quite nice even for early beta software.
I expect that it allows us to start using interfaces designed by other people (i.e. non Facebook, Google or Twitter) that pull things together in interesting ways.
For the Google+ with StartGoogle+ just looks cleaner than FaceBooks older interface.
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It's got potential, but the people marketing it seem to have forgotten one important thing: it took YEARS before either Twitter or Facebook was a major presence in social networking. My first tweet is about 3 years older than my second one.
They think that it was the rise of celebrity cachet that made those things, when that celebrity population didn't get there until numerous people around them were already involved.
They're jumping the gun. They should let it build slowly, get the bugs worked out, let th
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Non-Sequitur, the slower take up of facebook and twitter reflect the take up of the internet as a whole, those not motivated by technology or business, the general internet users.
Add in some time for experience and, then the slow pull away from myspace (people had an investment in their pages, as bad as they were). Now the question is whether google+ will be "just good enough" and not too publicly evil to allow people to abandon facebook enmasse.
Google is also likely playing the marketing game in makin
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Not really. Facebook was a sleepy little town when MySpace was the hip city with a hundred million users and Rupert Murdoch looking to buy it.
Then Facebook got big by word-of-mouth, MySpace drove away its own base, and here we are, with Google trying to bury Facebook in features and steal its population away in a blitz.
The one thing that Google needs to do to make people otaku is the games. People like the social part, but the games make them click like lab rats.
As for MS, it's running on fumes, knowing t
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Games keep people on site, free mmo's draw in friends to play together but the nickel and diming can become offensive. Google can of course launch circles of it's own, sporting clubs, politics, religion, computer interests etc. it doesn't really have to wait for others to kick them off.
When it comes to social media it is all like trying to herd a horde or nervous cattle ready to stampede at a moments notice, getting them to stampede might not be that hard, getting them to stampede in your direction is tr
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Uh, sure. With 10 million extant users and an attempt to bring Lady Gaga and her 50 million FB kiddies into the "trial".
This is no beta test. This is beta-by-deployment. And they're overdoing it.
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You do, clearly.
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It's been a long while since anyone did real Beta testing, which is something you do before letting putative customers in the door. Now the norm is to open the door, put out a "pardon our dust" sign, and claim you're beta testing. Letting customers step in your mortar pail is not testing. Especially when you didn't let those customers help with your use cases in the first place...
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Load testing, yes, using virtual users. In fact, you can do it much better that way because you can ensure that all the things you want loaded will get loaded, even if they're crufty crap no user is going to even try to use.
But that takes writing test software, which can be as expensive as writing the original code. While convincing your friends to whitewash your fence for fun is an American tradition.
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Re:All you need to know... (Score:4, Interesting)
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It seems to index just a small subset though. I'm not in there, and neither are any of the friends I know are on G+. Early days yet; I guess with the public API it will be easier to make a comprehensive search function.
Popularity by country. (Score:2)
Here is data from the worldmap of google+ users. It seems that google+ is getting popular in India.
United States 433,545 (55%)
India 142,339 (18%)
Brazil 41,605 (5%)
United Kingdom 38,917 (5%)
Canada 29,490 (4%)
http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/statistics/ [findpeopleonplus.com]
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