Terrible terrible article. Google only want people to join Google+ to get their name, location, gender and age? The same information you have to enter to sign up to gmail? https://accounts.google.com/SignUp?service=mail
I read the article and was on my way back to post the same thing. Couldn't agree more. Gender, Birthday, Location come with every Google account, and as we are all acutely aware, this information is shared under Google's new privacy policy.
To say that the G+ team doesn't care if people use G+ is ridiculous.
Something needs to be said about people not coming back even though Google is heavily advertising Plus on prime time TV. One cannot imagine the eyeballs Plus is getting versus so many other websites and still they seem to be lacking somehow.
But there's a whole lotta other info to fill out. Like cities you've lived in, companies you've worked at. People just love to fill those forms out.
And at signup they identify external accounts (can't really tell what they really called it as I literally deleted my + account 5 minutes ago). My Flickr-account showed up correctly and I could confirm it was mine. That means they could start extracting data from other services (Flickr, Twitter etc) and your activity and social graph there.
This info coupled with Gmail, Contacts, GReader faves, browsing stats (via sites that have Analytics on them and you being logged into your Google Account), searches, Android phone with registered credit card in market, Geo data via starred stuff on Maps, Latitude data & Google Talk messages will give them a quite impressive picture of the entire you. Just some extra fields in a profile might not sound like much, but I think we have to realize that this is just a brick in a _very_ large scale project.
Thanks to Google's multiple sign-on feature, I have a + identity with no relevant bio data, which is different from my search identity (with no history) which is different from my three gmail accounts.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 24.5 ms ] threadHow can this rubbish make the front page of HN?
To say that the G+ team doesn't care if people use G+ is ridiculous.
And at signup they identify external accounts (can't really tell what they really called it as I literally deleted my + account 5 minutes ago). My Flickr-account showed up correctly and I could confirm it was mine. That means they could start extracting data from other services (Flickr, Twitter etc) and your activity and social graph there.
This info coupled with Gmail, Contacts, GReader faves, browsing stats (via sites that have Analytics on them and you being logged into your Google Account), searches, Android phone with registered credit card in market, Geo data via starred stuff on Maps, Latitude data & Google Talk messages will give them a quite impressive picture of the entire you. Just some extra fields in a profile might not sound like much, but I think we have to realize that this is just a brick in a _very_ large scale project.