Eric Schmidt describes Google+ as an "identity service"

https://plus.google.com/117378076401635777570/posts/2y7vqXBtLny

by jdp23 • 15 years ago

88 80 15 years ago

plus.google.com

dotcoma• 15 years ago

Bullshit. It's an ad-targeting service.

ltamake2• 15 years ago

Losing hope in G+ very fast.

They're going to make the same mistakes that are killing Facebook. I'm also concerned about them selling data from G+, since Schmidt describes it as an identity service. It's a very evil concept.

yanw5• 15 years ago

I don't see how it is an "evil concept", I think what he means by identity service is a platform on which they can build social apps, it's same as social network.

And I'm quite annoyed by claims that associate a real identity requirement with selling data or ad targeting and such, they can target well enough using interests, not sure your name improves much on it.

Also instead of speculating read the service's privacy policy and be certain about it.

0x442• 15 years ago

Speaking as a caucasian male with a name that's basically unique in the world (there is only one person who has my name but that might have been a typo in the article as every where else he uses a different last name), having my name improves their ad targeting considerably.

rjd3• 15 years ago

Its because the root motivation most people including myself see is that its about control. And things that try and control other things are evil.

Years ago Google was a disruption force towards existing controlling organisations. Now Google are trying to prevent disruptive technologies eroding their market share.

Hence they have joined the ranks of the old guard such as Microsoft, IBM, Apple etc... those desiring control, and hence arguably evil.

Just the nature of business, they don't really have a choice, and many respects are bound by law to become 'evil'.

frossie• 15 years ago

It's also quite duplicitous. It was represented as a social networking service, not as an identity service. Moreover people assumed (yeah, I know) that since privacy control was Facebook's Achilles' heel, that Google would do better than that, and they seemed to be going one step forward with the Circles thing. Ever since then, it has been two steps back.

It's easy to say "Hey, if you want to be pseudonymous go elsewhere". I have no desire to be pseudonymous, but I certainly want to socialise with people who are. I can't be the only one.

HN good news: the field is still wide open for someone who wants to do it right.

halo• 15 years ago

Fundamentally, Facebook is an identity directory. The ability to easily transfer real world identities and relationships into the digital world is the big problem Facebook solves. It's one of those fundamental problems left unresolved by Internet protocols, similar to Google being able to solve search because the web has no implementation built in by design.

Facebook's communication features, the 'social networking', in itself isn't anything special.

From that perspective, Google+ becomes much clearer. Google are attempting to use Facebook's poor social networking features to elbow in on their identity directory.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

I get the feeling that any attempt to do a better job in this regard will really have to base its income on something other than advertising. The temptation is way to great and the rules that allow great targeting are not alternate name friendly.

Permit2• 15 years ago

I don't think it's fair to say a lack of anonymity or other mistakes are killing Facebook. It very may well be true that mistakes killed the experience for you, but the truth is that most people are not overly concerned with the lack of privacy on their social networks.

I think people online often mistake a vocal minority pushing for privacy settings on this network as a reflection of the wishes of everyone. Truth be told, most people are indifferent to the matter.

dredmorbius5• 15 years ago

Speaking for my own use-case, it's a mix of founder's statements (http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-use...), investments by less-than-pristine Russian businessmen, my own various intersections with data mining, personal information aggregators, and legal processes, history of wide-spread domestic spying (watch "The Lives of Others" about the East German Stasi for a chilling view, understanding that this has and does happen in many lands).

The conceivable downsides of open participation in Facebook far outweigh the positives.

Add in social fatigue in the mass market as well, I suspect the trend has peaked.

alexqgb• 15 years ago

It's not that they're indifferent to privacy in general. Rather, the system as reached a point where users are satisfied with the amount of control they've been given.

Specifically, they can render their profiles invisible to people they don't know, disengage from people they come to dislike, remove their names from pictures they don't want to be tagged in, and easily limit any personal details (except birthdays) that they don't like sharing.

For an enormous number of people, that's just fine.

cageface2• 15 years ago

Google's shenanigans around G+ were the final straw for me. I'd been growing increasingly uneasy about the amount of personal information I'd placed in the hands one of company.

As it became clearer that G+ was an attempt to harvest still more monetizable information I decided to bow out. I've now unplugged myself entirely from all Google services and I don't intend to ever again rely so heavily on any one company.

puredemo2• 15 years ago

What do you use for email? I can't think of a strong alternative to gmail.

gms• 15 years ago

'killing' Facebook? Facebook is hardly dying; rather the opposite.

fragsworth• 15 years ago

I'm kind of disappointed in their handling of it. I personally would like Google+ to succeed and at first glance it seems the real-name policy is not good for publicity, and subsequently not good for Google+'s growth.

The majority of people will use their real names anyway so I can't imagine why forcing it on everyone would help much of anything.

Can someone help me understand their rationale?

Alex39172• 15 years ago

"Can someone help me understand their rationale?"

Google is ultimately trying to turn the web into their own app store so that anyone who wants to create, view, monetize, or share content has to do it using their proprietary services.

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

Do you honestly believe that?

stingraycharles• 15 years ago

Perhaps their rationale has something to do with a bigger plan of correlating G+ info with names of people they find online.

lukesandberg• 15 years ago

Exactly if you know who authored a peice of content then you can get a pretty good idea of how authoritative it may be. Google is pretty good about finding content but you want to know that the content is actually good (no content farms) if you know who wrote it then you can get a pretty good idea of how authoritative it may be.

This goes into some more detail about this: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/google-plus-identity-and-seo

sp332• 15 years ago

The policy is temporary. They will roll out support for brand names and other potentially trademark-infringing names eventually. Just for the field trial, they want to make sure that everyone is using their real names because it's less hassle.

To downvoters: straight from the horse's mouth https://plus.google.com/u/0/110295984969329522620/posts/ExKJ... and http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391461,00.asp and https://plus.google.com/105923173045049725307/posts/E3mVj6ns...

yanw5• 15 years ago

Here is their rational:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5sRC67s9fg#t=26m25s

throwaway32• 15 years ago

just like they would release the source for gingerbread "when it was ready" ? Not everyone is ready to take Google's word on things when they are clearly moving in the opposite direction.

Joakal• 15 years ago

Facebook does suspend users for using their real name in the past. But how come it's not as known? Because they started pretty small by having a social website for Harvard, so early tech people who got suspended were quickly re-instated because they could go over and talk to Mark. Then Ivy League universities, just send Facebook an email. Then all universities, getting harder to help. Then everyone, replace support with a FAQ(?) that's quickly becoming out of date.

Early tech users of Google+ who get suspended, and have no support. What are they most likely to do; complain to other users who listen to early tech users.

Google+ is overall; a very bad execution that could do with a different strategy next time. In the meantime, Facebook is excited to adopt G+ features until G+ is aborted. Validated features are very awesome compared to untested ones.

jamesbritt2• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, how did the duplicate URL detector not catch that this was submitted four hours earlier?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2931770

tokenadult• 15 years ago

The two URLs were not identical, as the earlier submitted had additional characters at the end (which appear to be a no-op in this case).

jamesbritt2• 15 years ago

Yeah, I saw that, but thought that fragment IDs were ignore.

Oh well.

badclient2• 15 years ago

Once again I repeat: Google+ is dead.

It's over.

RexRollman• 15 years ago

I wish I could agree with you but for so many people this isn't an issue. It will probably do fine regardless of how us geeks feel about it.

badclient2• 15 years ago

In my view the naming issue is just a distraction. The bigger problem is that Google+ was always living off nerd hype whereas facebook(its main competitor) didn't come into nerd limelight until several years after launch.

I really wasn't talking about any specific issue. Google+ is dead because it has little traction/engagement and most importantly, no focused plan of growth.

dasil003• 15 years ago

Are non-geeks on G+ now?

rokhayakebe• 15 years ago

Context, please. I know it was an Q&A, hence there may not be a relation between what he said before and after answering this question. However the internet is very quick at taking one statement and turning it into something else.

ristretto• 15 years ago

I thought Google+ was more like twitter. It seems Google+ envies facebook's "intimate friend groups" that cause people to upload personal photos and events. Alas they don't realize that people are under "social fatigue" right now after five years of frenzy. They are copying something that is already going out of fashion. Anyway it's crazy. I only registered to Google+ with my real name because i want to develop apps. Google+ is not my identity.

HankMcCoy• 15 years ago

It's a fair point, nobody has to use it, that's true. But what I don't like is that there are exceptions like for "Madonna" and maybe others as well.

yanw5• 15 years ago

I'm not sure how much of that is improvisation on Eric's part or how much of his original meaning was preserved in the paraphrase, either way I doubt he is involved with the development of G+.

Not that there was much wrong with what was said, but if you're after some real insight here is a recent interview with Bradley Horowitz were he touches on psuedonyms, and basically says that the service will be more inclusive as it matures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5sRC67s9fg#t=26m25s

maeon3• 15 years ago

I prefer anonymity. Google knows too much about me already, I'd prefer they stop trying to make every fact about me known by the servers that serve me pages. I don't want every link on the internet an opportunity for the authorities to stop that click event.

ltamake2• 15 years ago

Agreed. Just because I may be anonymous doesn't automatically mean I'm evil.

baddox• 15 years ago

I don't understand how anonymity would work with a social network.

dredmorbius5• 15 years ago

That does pose some interesting questions.

Simply drawing social graphs by itself is hugely informative.

That said, a federated system in which I could present numerous identities of varying levels of persistence and/or repudiability could be of some interest.

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

I have a lot of people in my G+ circles. I've never met 99% of them before G+. As far as I'm concerned John Smith is as anonymous to me as Sp00n B4nder, neither one has any context for me except what I read from them.

And yet, I interact "socially" with them just fine, and I think of them as John Smith and Sp00n B4nder. It causes me zero problems.

Names in this context are just labels, and I don't care what the labels say, I just care what they point to.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

As mentioned in jwz's post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Papers makes a very interesting reference. You could kick around a very interesting model based on the method of publication. On the other hand, most people here really don't know who each other are except via the words written under a username.

easyfrag• 15 years ago

If so, it is an identity service run by an advertising company.

njharman• 15 years ago

Our right to anonymity trumps google's (or atone else's) right to "down vote" the "evil".

What's described is the archetype slippery slope. What's evil shifts and grows ever larger.

mcantelon• 15 years ago

This doesn't wash. Google Profiles seemed to me to be an "identity service". This seems more likely an identity characteristics service for data mining info about people.

yanw5• 15 years ago

A profile is too static to be a service, and yes the insistence is on the name in the profile.

duh_org• 15 years ago

Google Profiles _is_ the "identity service" that has tendrils into more than just G+ (and the banstick was swinging long before G+ hit the public). Schmidt just didn't generalize his comments enough to point out that subtle but critical difference.

But I did: https://plus.google.com/103653740605668919281/posts/iHugVQvM...

Astrohacker• 15 years ago

I'll handle my own identity, thanks.

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

"He replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service"

Which is becoming more and more obvious.

However, it was sold to its users as a social networking service.

A-K2• 15 years ago

Good point. It seems rather unsettling and dishonest if this was the plan all along. I guess in the coming months we'll see how the service evolves (and users react).

abraham• 15 years ago

If you read the announcement identity is very important in every aspect that was announced: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-pr...

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

OK, but most people are never going to see that. I didn't.

Most people are going to wonder what google plus is, and end up here, where Google is actively telling potential users a particular story:

https://plus.google.com/up/start/?continue=https://plus.goog...

Nowhere in there does it say it's an identity service. The closest it comes is to talk about putting different people in different circles.

Nowhere does it say that services that worked perfectly well for you are at risk if you run afoul of the name issue.

ifben• 15 years ago

Eric Schmidt says weird things (see http://dthin.gs/niXnvA). Here's what stood out to me in this talk (paraphrasing): "People don't have to use it if they don't want to."

You know you have a suspect product when that's the best defense you have for it. He wants people to use G+ yet he says that they don't have to. Saying stuff like that doesn't make current users comfortable or new users giddy to try it out.

kirillzubovsky• 15 years ago

This resonated with me too. "No one is forcing you to use it," - precisely, and therefore no one does! Just because there are a ton of nerds using the service right now, doesn't mean it's useful. My mom, who took a few years to get comfortable with email, she sure is not using it, but guess what, she's got Facebook! Google is disappointing :(

ditojim• 15 years ago

i use my real name a lot of places on the internet, and i would prefer to "sign in with G+" rather than use facebook (where I use my real name, like most of you..)

daedalus_j• 15 years ago

As far as I can see Google hasn't gone out of it's way to make + a compelling end-all identity integration platform that combines all of my other Google services, (I'm looking at you Reader. Where's my "share with circle" button, hmm?) so I'm not sure where they get this idea that it's going to be one for the web at large is coming from.

I think the phrase "they're going to build future products that leverage that information" gives away exactly who these future products are going to be designed and built for. They very carefully did not say "that are going to allow you to leverage this information."

gallerytungsten• 15 years ago

In other words, it's about making money by selling your data profile, and if you're not willing to help Google make money, they don't want you using their service. Pretty much the same outlook as Facebook, with minor variations in rhetoric.

Eric Schmidt describes Google+ as an "identity service"

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