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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Eddie's Cross Google+ Rant

Note: Google plus is a new service by Google that lets you consolidate your profiles into one identity. These past few months, Google has amped up advertising for their product, to the point of irritation.

Google is aggressively shoving me towards Google plus. Nagging me with emails, stabbing me with ads, forcing me to "sign in with X new feature".
I feel as a Google customer, that its more about me using what Google wants me to use, rather than what I actually want to use myself. Shouldn't I as the customer decide what's best for me? Decide what I like and want to utilize? If I don't agree with you, does that mean you get to aggressively antagonize me into using your product?

Ionly those were the worst of Google's customer issues. The pressure to update has been thrown upon services like: Gmail, the late Google Reader, the Chrome store, and Blogger accounts! Yep. How many times have you wanted to review a Chrome app, clicked on the little icon, and found you couldn't because you didn't have a Google + profile?! How many times have you logged onto your Gmail, only to find it clogged up with "people you may know on Google +" spam? (Just because you made it Google, doesn't mean its not spam.)

I think the main flaw/issue with Google+,  is that not everyone on the Internet wants a single identity.
Owning multiple accounts, for multiple sites, has great security benefits. It means that if one gets hacked, you at least have three viable others... But  if you only have one account for everything? One smart hacker can take over your online identity.
Having different profiles also means that whatever you do on one account, stays there. For example this blog- is written under a  different profile than all my others are. This prevents random people asking me on my (Personal) Facebook; why I didn't like "Falling Kingdoms".

Then there's...well... Let's not even start on the pedophiles.

Google's recent actions, seem to be an abandoning of their "don't be evil" mantra, which does no good for us all. So Although I am still discontented, I'll give you one last quote meant for G+; but can easily be applied to any of Google's services.
“Give users an option, and respect their choice..... Make G+ so incredibly amazing, people don’t want to ignore it, but if they do, leave them alone and quit messing with their existing user experience.”.- Wil Wheaton
(Read this article on Google forcing its plus feature onto customers!)

3 comments:

  1. I have to say I agree whole heartedly very well said.

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  2. BAHAHA! Oh my gosh, I love your google spoon feeding image. I completely agree with your post-when I first created blogger it put me in google plus, I hated it so I switched back to regular google. Cue the incessant spam messages and invites and I finally just gave up and joined again. So frustrating.

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