I almost claimed a custom URL yesterday when I was writing up the YouTube comment change and in the process updating my G+ profile. They wanted my number to claim it, which I believe they already have for 2-factor on Gmail. In the end the whole process with YouTube was so galling that I just deleted my whole account. As OP notes, it's not like Google+ was the first place people would look for me, and it's not a useful resource for me, so why have it at all?
No, the whole YouTube thing. Having a channel, unchecking a bunch of boxes and worrying about extra policies - having an extra Google+ page with its own Talk address and inbox, in addition to the channel's inbox, etc. I just realized I don't use it, probably won't ever, and it'll only keep trying to get me to connect via other means, so I thought I'd nip it in the bud.
If you don't use it, why don't you just ignore it, like 99% of most YouTube uploaders?
All of these recent Google+ changes, aside from "Real Names," only affect people with a large YouTube following.
I absolutely support you deleting your YouTube account in protest of the ever-increasing Google+ requirements. But at least call it what it is--deleting your account in protest.
Actually I sympathise with the poster here. I just tried to get back to the personalised vanity chooser thing in G+, and ended up clicking on Settings then to Account, which got me to a google account page. On the right handside there is a link to a profile, and there's a nickname listed. I can't even remember what that's for or what that profile belongs to. There's even some reference to Buzz that I thought I'd killed. I go around in circles. And don't even get the whole Youtube integration thing. So I just back away from it and try and ignore it. You get overloaded. I'm not at the point of deleting my account, but not far off - mainly out of confusion.
Given that the name I use for G+ (and HN) isn't one I'm ordinarily known by, having any metadata which tracks back to me that others could find is a definite negative.
I've got my reasons. I prefer it this way. It's beyond annoying that Google keep insisting on trying to link various accounts and/or grabbing my personal data. And the harder they pull, the harder I push back.
There's nothing that's changed my impression of Google, in a negative way, so much as using G+ and observing the commentary of its leadership (Eric Schmidt in particular, but Vic Gundotra and Larry Page as well). Yes, some individual Google engineers do tend to give me hope, but I'm seeing the fish as increasingly likely to have been rotten from the head.
That the company appears far preferable to Facebook I'd freely concede, but talk of damning with faint praise.
You can technically apply to make it anything you want, and the set of allowed names should technically be far larger than the set of disallowed ones. But I'm waiting to see if they'll let me take +akkartik rather than +KartikAgaram, so we'll see.
They made it possible to request a different URL for maybe 12 hours after launching custom URLs, but quickly stopped offering it. Probably got inundated with requests. By the time I got my invite (about a day after they started sending them), there was no such link.
Also, they weren't just allowing people to register any old nickname or brand name. It was probably more about letting people make minor corrections.
This is weird. I could suggest a custom URL typing it myself. The form said that it would be reviewed but it got approved straight away.
May be is because I just used Google's suggestion but removing the accent in my surname (I don't like them in an URL, and besides is the same thing I use in LinkedIn).
I came here to point this out. I would imagine other services have pretty much the same exact lingo in their terms. I think the author should definitely look into those before he claims Google+ to be worse. It seems like a very bias judgement before he does his background on the other services.
> GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.
That to me looks broader than Google, Twitter, or Facebook's TOU. I look forward to the impassioned post highlighted here on HN saying:
"Wait, wait, wait! Did they say that they may decide to charge me for my Github account in the future? And that they may remove it 'for any reason at any time?' A Github account is an identifier. I'll use it to identify myself on this service. I'll link to it from my website. I may print it on a business card. Like Github said in their email, I'll use it to 'make software development more collaborative.' But they can take it away for any reason or deactivate it? No way. Github is not a place I own, it's a place Github is kind enough to let me visit and have some limited activity, but they can always kick me off or ask for an (unspecified) rent."
I think the author is making it a bigger deal than it really is, nothing stops google from bringing down the google plus or any other service he might be using(just like google reader or wave) so according to his logic (printed on business card etc...) you can't even have a long unfriendly URL because google can shut down google plus any day they want to or just start charging people.
Google Profiles used your email id as your unique identifier which made more sense. Now I have an email id, a name and a g+ profile unique url which are all different.
I have a mobile number but have opted out of texting (they are blocked so I don't get charged) and instead use a free texting app which also assigns me a virtual number. Unfortunately the verification text from Google does not make it through. I tried two texting apps, and even tried my normal cell number hoping that Google had some agreement with my carrier to pass the code along.
Seems odd that Google would risk turning me away from Plus simply because I cannot receive texts. Get over it Google, I'm not giving you my cell number. Find another way to verify my identity, I only use practically all of your services and have given you pretty much all of my personal information at one point over the last dozen years.
those verification texts work when sent to google voice numbers, for what it's worth (plenty of other similar systems break when you give them gvoice numbers)
His reasoning can be applied to all free social media, which is a valid reason, and why smart people should avoid the step back in time to a central AOL-esque media hub. He has his own domain, what more does he need? Why feed the social media black hole (all things enter - nothing escapes)?
Here's how it works. The techies create something. The legals come along and say, OK, to release that in the wild it needs some T&Cs that cover our arses for everything and then some, because people keep sueing us.
In practice, would Google ever dare invoke this on a large scale? No, you know that. Yes, there should be some transparent process that is undertaken if yours were revoked, but Google only like stuff that scales, manual processes like that don't.
And really, if the ability to revoke your URL at any time wasn't in the T&Cs, do you really think it would make any difference to the revoke rate?
Sure, nobody in their right mind would depend on such a URL sticking around, but this post isn't "Why I won't get a Google+ Custom URL", it's "Why I won't use a Google+ Custom URL as the primary mechanism to link to myself online". I don't see much argument against just claiming one, if you're already a g+ user.
You forgot the part where the business guys come in and ask why they aren't making money off this and decide to either cancel the service or start charging for it.
It's not about ethics, it would just not make very much sense to charge people for their G+ handle when:
- They struggle to get adoption from users.
- They offer all these other, more essential/complex,
services for 'free'(Gmail/Search/Docs/Calendar/Android).
- Anybody can turn around and use the long form, unless
your G+ is part of your marketing and as such, you use
it as part of a business.
Really, I think they only put that condition there so they can eventually monetize handles that are used by other Big Corp.
As a quick reality check, we're talking about boring old URL rewriting here. "Cool new invention mangled by legal paranoia" is a solid story, but other stories would probably fit the circumstances better.
Me in 1993: Yeah, but seriously, nobody is going to start charging for domain names. Writing a hundred bytes in your named.conf? What would you charge, ten cents? Doesn't make sense. And everybody swaps secondary service with everybody else, and your upstream includes it at no extra charge.
It's hardly a canonical source, but very much on the 'seemingly magical' side of things -- there's a Twitter account devoted to crawling old boards and pages and tweeting interesting snippets.
Unfortunately those same search engines are placing much importance on words that appear in a domain's name. Google at least also has a clear preference for well known TLDs, such as .com, .net and .org
The domain name is also many times your brand. So it's true that you may not type "whatever.com", but you still type "whatever". In this particular instance, "whatever.com" actually exists, but has no content on it and thus it doesn't have a high ranking. But in other cases a developer of something like "go-whatever.ly" may end up with a world of hurt.
For startups, these considerations don't even factor in the importance that investors themselves place on well picked domain names.
If you think domain names are not important anymore, you're wrong.
Reigned? Based on the inclusion of one cover-your-ass clause that has so far never been exercised in the terms and conditions of one product?
If this is your idea of sufficient evidence that a company is run by lawyers, I'd challenge you to find a single company that isn't. I don't believe I've ever seen an agreement that didn't say that the company could change the terms at any time and that continued usage constituted acceptance of the new terms. All of those agreements implicitly allow exactly what Google has explicitly allowed for.
> In practice, would Google ever dare invoke this on a large scale?
Twitter has already done that on a number of primary usernames, rather than just vanity urls. Did you expect them to do that? Do you think Google is better?
Unfortunately, there is likely [please correct me if I'm wrong] a similarly-worded array of clauses in the contracts for many of their other services (or even g+ itself), that if taken seriously (i.e. not in a legalese manner), would likely cause a similar level of unjust alarm.
For this exact reason I registered my own 1-letter URL shortener domain and use it to create my own custom redirects whenever I want without submitting to someone's BS TOS.
It's better to promote your own brand than someone else's.
I tried to build business on it (didn't have time/resources to push it) then sell it in the past, but it didn't happen. Then I started seeing more and more value having your own, really short and easy to type URL shortener - for exact reason author wrote this post.
I plan to set it up like my personal "tiny.cc" allowing for vanity urls for easy navigations
I have the same thing on pkn.me. That just resolves to my normal blog which redirects to the canonical URL. So I can have, for example, http://pkn.me/r for my resume and http://pkn.me/mmp for my book landing page.
I used to give random 5 letter strings to my posts as their ID but now I actually put some thought into it so I can have good, rememberable short URLs.
I wanted to find a 1-letter domain that was the easiest to type on a keyboard (with my 2-finger typing habit).
I think that was back in 2006-ish days.
So i found that typing keys C + . + GG requires an absolutely minimal amount of physical finger effort as hands are almost perfectly positioned above these keys.
So I registered these.
In fact back then there were a plenty of other 1-letter domain available up for a grabs.
I used to do professional photo business and registered GO.GL - as my first name is Gleb (still have business cards laying around with this address).
At the same time i thought that registering GOO.GL would be cool too - but back then the greenland (owner of this TLD) charged $50/yr + the only way you can register is by sending them a FAX. So I didn't bother.
I am actually good at picking decent domain names even today.
Whatever the current T&Cs says, google can certainly reclaim or start charging for your current plus url, and heck even your google account. Google can do whatever the heck they want, and you really have no recourse.
How did Google not realise when they launched Google+ that URLs that end in ridiculously long strings of numbers (107350252619396782277) was a poor idea? Now it feels like they're adding a sticking plaster to fix their initial design decision.
Google+ on the whole seems quite poorly designed from a UX perspective. Most people seem to use Google+ like a blog, but the two column card layout on the desktop (three columns on some Google+ sites) makes it impossible to read posts in chronological order. This is so blazingly obvious, one can only wonder why Google went ahead with this pattern. If the site is optimised for mobile (which seems to be the case), why do they push the same design to desktop?
The way comments open up in a small scrollable panel also makes for a pretty miserable experience on the desktop. As does clicking a tag and having to explore everying from within the constricted space of a card (again why do they push this pattern to desktop users if it's intended for mobile users?)
Can you actually add titles for Google+ posts? It doesn't seem so. This means you redundantly repeat the name of the blog author as the title of every single card/post.
And what's with the bizarre gigantic image at the top of the page that only reveals itself when you scroll to the top? Was this meant to be a delightful surprise feature? It just feels odd.
Finally, there is a button on the left-hand side of the page in the header. It looks like a button, it's shaped like a button. But when you move your mouse pointer over the button, a menu appears automatically (on rollover). If it's meant to be a rollover drop-down menu, then don't make it look like a clickable button. As always with Google and their UX, it's one step forward, two steps back (IMO).
Most people seem to use Google+ like a blog, but the two column card layout on the desktop (three columns on some Google+ sites) makes it impossible to read posts in chronological order.
This is configurable. I set it back to the single column precisely because the crowded page of mostly images didn't suit me.
Can you actually add titles for Google+ posts? It doesn't seem so. This means you redundantly repeat the name of the blog author as the title of every single card/post.
People seem to have adopted the practice of bolding the first line of there post content (using asterisks) to have it stand out as a title. Seems to work pretty well, at least when scanning down a page of posts.
As for your other observations: Yeah, there's a bunch of odd clunky shit going on. Greasemonkey has been a big help for me. :)
There are also some Chrome extensions that mitigate some of the g+ UX pain.
I actually like a lot of the UX, at least for the content that I consume. I enjoy viewing content in some of the photography and photo sphere groups, and for this a one column layout would be too wide without scrolling quite a bit more.
Now, that said, this is more casual consumption. I don't care if I miss a post or two due to your chronological post issue. I also imagine there are a number of people like me when it comes to this.
Clicking the tag and having it inline is a nice way to see if you actually want to lose your current context and go to the full tag browsing mode. I also like this.
The image at the top? Nice way to not lose screen real estate on first load. I find it fun.
So, obviously we have some differences of opinion, and some of it may just come down to the sort of content we consume/create, but count me in the group that actually largely likes the interface.
Hidden menus that pointlessly jump out into the oceans of unused space. Half-hidden photo and a hidden search box that bobs pointlessly up and down. Clunkily-unusable Circles. Endless pages that make it impossible to access old content (Facebook does this much better). Porthole icons. Pointlessly disappearing notification system. Mouseover popups that sometimes pop up (but don't contain any useful information) and sometimes don't pop up (compare "Community invitations" with "You may know").
The whole thing is full of utterly useless bits of "design". Some of these may contribute to making it horribly slow, though I'm sure there are other reasons why it's so bloated....
I agree with most of your moans here, apart from your first. I haven't any issue with the random (probably uuids) strings and url length.
I do find G+ difficult to scan though. To the point that it's pointless for me to even bother with. I haven't loaded my circles up either, but I find the streams can get easily saturated by one individual, pretty quickly.
Another issue I have is the crappy comments - especially on public posts from popular accounts as opposed to friends' content. You open them up, start scrolling realise there is nothing of value, then wonder how you can shut them back up without scrolling back up etc.
In fact the whole thing would be far more useful if it was just one big atom-feed.
I'm following a friend's wordpress blog (an online hosted account on wordpress.com), and that's a hideous up front. I discovered RSS feeds of posts and comments hidden in the source code - and that makes for a far easier interface! Less is more and all that...
> Many people have the same name. Add a few extra letters or numbers to this URL to get one that is unique for you.
Why would I want yet another "MyName<randomcrap>" identifier? How does that help friends and family remember or identify me? What purpose does it serve?
I'm yet another person with a nickname that identifies me all over and has for years, I too own the domain. But Google+ keeps insisting I have my "real name" ... except it's not my real name because I have to add random crap to be unique.
Even though I prefer +simoneau, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simoneau, I had come around to living with +MatthewSimoneau (if only to keep someone else from getting it). When it required me to add some trailing garbage after my name though, I also canceled the process.
Not saying that I agree or disagree with Google, but they have explained their reasoning here: "It's recommended that you go by your first and last name because it will help you connect with people you know and help them find you." - https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271?hl=en
Furthermore, my name is very hard to remember the spelling of in English. This is why I go of a shortened version of my fullname, but Google isn't okay with this <_<
This whole "many people have the same name" thing is absolute garbage. using google search, i can't find a single reference to anybody else who has the same name as me. my name is unique. and yet i have to add a suffix anyways.
and my nickname is pretty unique, i know there's nobody else on google+ using it. and i have a page named 'notatoad', not that i use it for anything. but i have to put a suffix on that too.
Yeah, it's inevitable that the Jennifer Smiths are going to get miffed. I preferred the Facebook era without vanity URLs. It seemed sensible.
You could for a time (not sure if it still works) email users on facebook by using vanity_handle@facebook.com from any email address. Which is quite useful to get back in touch with people, now that people avoid listing their email addreses in email directories (people stopped doing that because they were fed up of spam). Having said that a non-vanity identifier could probably be used in the same way, so there isn't much point.
The author of this post, wants to make a land grab for his named handle all over the web. Well that's not much better.
I worked with a client yesterday that had bought 33 alternative domain names that were similarish to their company name. Why even bother! There were many obvious name / term combinations that they had missed anyway. What a waste of money and time!
I liked his resolution of just advertising his web address, and from there people could discover other handles for other services.
It's only made things more complex with the myriad of compnay handles on different services. Adverts on TV (in the UK) now don't even list their domain name, they just advertise Facebook and Twitter handles. I personally prefer loose identifiers: 'Lucy who does ITV's weather'. Even the presenters have their Twitter handles displayed on screen now!
It is not like you are likely to remember most of these handles anyway. Even if you tried to guess one, do you use camel case, underscores, spaces etc?
There is a little UI value in having recognisable identifiers, but at the end of the day vanity URLs are about as twatty as personalised number plates.
I noticed the same clause in the TOS last week and was taken aback. Ideally I'd love to be able to distribute my Google+ URL with the same confidence as I distribute my email address: namely, if you send a message to this address, you can guarantee that I'm the one who receives it. The fear here is that, should Google start charging for this "service" in the future, and should I decline to play along, someone else could squat on my former URL and intercept any traffic intended for my page. Please, Google, for my own peace of mind, either make this a paid service up-front, or pledge that a given URL will always alias to the same individual.
(Though perhaps the email analogy is a bad one, since IIRC both Yahoo and MSN periodically release long-dormant addresses back into the eligible pool. Though still unsettling, it's a more reasonable approach than "we may force you to start paying us an unknown amount at some unknown future date".)
Ultimately, I was about to go through with it anyway until I realized that doing so would require me to register a phone number with my Google account, which I have so far avoided. That requirement was the final straw.
> I was about to go through with it anyway until I realized that doing so would require me to register a phone number with my Google account, which I have so far avoided. That requirement was the final straw
That's exactly how I feel. I try very hard to not give my number out, why the hell does google force me to tell them, just to get a URL?
If I had to guess, and this really is just a guess, I'd say the phone number requirement is an attempt to discourage whatever the short-url equivalent of domain squatting is.
Perhaps that's a new requirement. Some of us don't bother with mobile phones. I signed up for an account, at one time it asked, another it didn't. Try and empty your browser cache and try again.
I love two factor auth, but I don't like that it uses my phone number. I really wish I could buy one of those RSA SecurID two factor auth key fobs from any hardware supplier like NewEgg and just register the serial number of the device with Google or any other company I want to use two factor auth with.
Even better would be to allow me to register backup two factor auth key fobs and I can just throw one or two backups in a safe deposit box, safe or similar safe place.
Ultimately, I was about to go through with it anyway until I realized that doing so would require me to register a phone number with my Google account, which I have so far avoided. That requirement was the final straw.
You might still need to go to your profile afterwards and delete the phone. You should be allowed to. Seriously though: Has it come to this? Do we need to treat Google like Facebook? Expect the worst at every turn?
As for Google taking a turn for the worse...
Am I the only one thinking they are literally fucking up every thing they do these days? I had the (dis)pleasure of re-visiting my Google Apps console this week. What used to take 30 seconds-done, now took 2 hours of Googling and experimenting until I realized that the new Admin-console was simply broken and couldn't do what the old one could do. It's completely dysfunctional.
Let me re-iterate that: The main product Google has to enable services for paying customers doesn't work any more. Now it just lists already enabled services. That's it.
When did Google get so utterly lost? One thing is PR, which is something they obviously still need to learn proper. But breaking their own services? Isn't there a single soul which still cares about delivering at Google?
Why should Google agree to give away something to you for free forever? They are doing you and the majority of the users (who will never pay for Facebook/Google Plus/Github) a favor by providing the service without charging you a dime. They reserve the right to charge you in the future. If this changes, they will let you know.
I'm perfectly fine with paying for things! In fact, I'm ecstatic at the opportunity to pay for valuable online services. Did you miss the bit of my post where I exhort Google to "make this a paid service up-front"? But what's not cool is offering a means of universal personal identity for free (with the concomitant lock-in this entails), and then sneaking a clause into your TOS revealing your intentions to begin charging for this service at some future date, especially when there is no indication as to what the magnitude of that charge would be! $10 per year? I'd pay that, if my profile was especially important to me. I already pay as much for my personal domain names. $100 per year? Almost certainly not, unless G+ was the world's most important social network. Or maybe it's $X*N per year, where X is the number of unique visits your page gets per year and N is an arbitrary multiplier? We have absolutely no idea! We can't even speculate. It's a black box, a landmine, and it's executed in bad faith by tucking it away where only the most technical of users will ever notice it.
My only concern would be the link rot that might occur if your urls are later rewritten to the new username. Which makes a mockery of having the vanity urls in the first place. Having said that I can't even work out if a single Google+ post has it's own URI, or how I find it even.
My custom Google+ URL is http://google.com/+AnžePečar even though typing letters with diacritics is nearly impossible on 99% of the keyboards out there. I should have kept the random numbers...
Does anybody know if Google plans to allow claiming a deleted account... ever? I'm hoping that since I was granted +MyName in G+ I will be allowed to recover (long story) MyName@gmail.com... (It was MyName@googlemail.com and I wasn't happy... and let it expire...)
164 comments
[ 12.0 ms ] story [ 4000 ms ] threadAll of these recent Google+ changes, aside from "Real Names," only affect people with a large YouTube following.
I absolutely support you deleting your YouTube account in protest of the ever-increasing Google+ requirements. But at least call it what it is--deleting your account in protest.
I've got my reasons. I prefer it this way. It's beyond annoying that Google keep insisting on trying to link various accounts and/or grabbing my personal data. And the harder they pull, the harder I push back.
There's nothing that's changed my impression of Google, in a negative way, so much as using G+ and observing the commentary of its leadership (Eric Schmidt in particular, but Vic Gundotra and Larry Page as well). Yes, some individual Google engineers do tend to give me hope, but I'm seeing the fish as increasingly likely to have been rotten from the head.
That the company appears far preferable to Facebook I'd freely concede, but talk of damning with faint praise.
Also, they weren't just allowing people to register any old nickname or brand name. It was probably more about letting people make minor corrections.
May be is because I just used Google's suggestion but removing the accent in my surname (I don't like them in an URL, and besides is the same thing I use in LinkedIn).
That was 9 days ago.
As I said it felt a little bit buggy ("we'll review your request", and then it was approved straight away), may be Google has refined the process.
> GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.
"Wait, wait, wait! Did they say that they may decide to charge me for my Github account in the future? And that they may remove it 'for any reason at any time?' A Github account is an identifier. I'll use it to identify myself on this service. I'll link to it from my website. I may print it on a business card. Like Github said in their email, I'll use it to 'make software development more collaborative.' But they can take it away for any reason or deactivate it? No way. Github is not a place I own, it's a place Github is kind enough to let me visit and have some limited activity, but they can always kick me off or ask for an (unspecified) rent."
Sigh.
Seems odd that Google would risk turning me away from Plus simply because I cannot receive texts. Get over it Google, I'm not giving you my cell number. Find another way to verify my identity, I only use practically all of your services and have given you pretty much all of my personal information at one point over the last dozen years.
yeah, no thanks.
In practice, would Google ever dare invoke this on a large scale? No, you know that. Yes, there should be some transparent process that is undertaken if yours were revoked, but Google only like stuff that scales, manual processes like that don't.
And really, if the ability to revoke your URL at any time wasn't in the T&Cs, do you really think it would make any difference to the revoke rate?
Sure, nobody in their right mind would depend on such a URL sticking around, but this post isn't "Why I won't get a Google+ Custom URL", it's "Why I won't use a Google+ Custom URL as the primary mechanism to link to myself online". I don't see much argument against just claiming one, if you're already a g+ user.
I took my name URL but have no plans to publicize it. I don't own it.
https://twitter.com/wwwtxt
Incredibly wonderful -- and very surreal. It's bizarre to think that only twenty years ago, the Internet was an entirely different culture.
And they started charging $70, IIRC!
There are few moments I remember as clearly as making that decision.
As I see it, the purpose of search engines is to route around squatters and find real content, no matter where it's hosted.
The domain name is also many times your brand. So it's true that you may not type "whatever.com", but you still type "whatever". In this particular instance, "whatever.com" actually exists, but has no content on it and thus it doesn't have a high ranking. But in other cases a developer of something like "go-whatever.ly" may end up with a world of hurt.
For startups, these considerations don't even factor in the importance that investors themselves place on well picked domain names.
If you think domain names are not important anymore, you're wrong.
Point taken.
If this is your idea of sufficient evidence that a company is run by lawyers, I'd challenge you to find a single company that isn't. I don't believe I've ever seen an agreement that didn't say that the company could change the terms at any time and that continued usage constituted acceptance of the new terms. All of those agreements implicitly allow exactly what Google has explicitly allowed for.
Twitter has already done that on a number of primary usernames, rather than just vanity urls. Did you expect them to do that? Do you think Google is better?
I set up plus.jamesbritt.com to redirect to my g+ profile page.
Yours is cooler. :)
It's better to promote your own brand than someone else's.
Send me email at: g@c.gg :)
Are you selling your own shortener domain you used to create your own short URL's ?
I plan to set it up like my personal "tiny.cc" allowing for vanity urls for easy navigations
For example:
http://c.gg/regex http://c.gg/az
I used to give random 5 letter strings to my posts as their ID but now I actually put some thought into it so I can have good, rememberable short URLs.
So i found that typing keys C + . + GG requires an absolutely minimal amount of physical finger effort as hands are almost perfectly positioned above these keys.
So I registered these. In fact back then there were a plenty of other 1-letter domain available up for a grabs.
I used to do professional photo business and registered GO.GL - as my first name is Gleb (still have business cards laying around with this address).
At the same time i thought that registering GOO.GL would be cool too - but back then the greenland (owner of this TLD) charged $50/yr + the only way you can register is by sending them a FAX. So I didn't bother.
I am actually good at picking decent domain names even today.
Whatever the current T&Cs says, google can certainly reclaim or start charging for your current plus url, and heck even your google account. Google can do whatever the heck they want, and you really have no recourse.
Google+ on the whole seems quite poorly designed from a UX perspective. Most people seem to use Google+ like a blog, but the two column card layout on the desktop (three columns on some Google+ sites) makes it impossible to read posts in chronological order. This is so blazingly obvious, one can only wonder why Google went ahead with this pattern. If the site is optimised for mobile (which seems to be the case), why do they push the same design to desktop?
The way comments open up in a small scrollable panel also makes for a pretty miserable experience on the desktop. As does clicking a tag and having to explore everying from within the constricted space of a card (again why do they push this pattern to desktop users if it's intended for mobile users?)
Can you actually add titles for Google+ posts? It doesn't seem so. This means you redundantly repeat the name of the blog author as the title of every single card/post.
And what's with the bizarre gigantic image at the top of the page that only reveals itself when you scroll to the top? Was this meant to be a delightful surprise feature? It just feels odd.
Finally, there is a button on the left-hand side of the page in the header. It looks like a button, it's shaped like a button. But when you move your mouse pointer over the button, a menu appears automatically (on rollover). If it's meant to be a rollover drop-down menu, then don't make it look like a clickable button. As always with Google and their UX, it's one step forward, two steps back (IMO).
This is configurable. I set it back to the single column precisely because the crowded page of mostly images didn't suit me.
Can you actually add titles for Google+ posts? It doesn't seem so. This means you redundantly repeat the name of the blog author as the title of every single card/post.
People seem to have adopted the practice of bolding the first line of there post content (using asterisks) to have it stand out as a title. Seems to work pretty well, at least when scanning down a page of posts.
As for your other observations: Yeah, there's a bunch of odd clunky shit going on. Greasemonkey has been a big help for me. :)
There are also some Chrome extensions that mitigate some of the g+ UX pain.
Now, that said, this is more casual consumption. I don't care if I miss a post or two due to your chronological post issue. I also imagine there are a number of people like me when it comes to this.
Clicking the tag and having it inline is a nice way to see if you actually want to lose your current context and go to the full tag browsing mode. I also like this.
The image at the top? Nice way to not lose screen real estate on first load. I find it fun.
So, obviously we have some differences of opinion, and some of it may just come down to the sort of content we consume/create, but count me in the group that actually largely likes the interface.
The whole thing is full of utterly useless bits of "design". Some of these may contribute to making it horribly slow, though I'm sure there are other reasons why it's so bloated....
I do find G+ difficult to scan though. To the point that it's pointless for me to even bother with. I haven't loaded my circles up either, but I find the streams can get easily saturated by one individual, pretty quickly.
Another issue I have is the crappy comments - especially on public posts from popular accounts as opposed to friends' content. You open them up, start scrolling realise there is nothing of value, then wonder how you can shut them back up without scrolling back up etc.
In fact the whole thing would be far more useful if it was just one big atom-feed.
I'm following a friend's wordpress blog (an online hosted account on wordpress.com), and that's a hideous up front. I discovered RSS feeds of posts and comments hidden in the source code - and that makes for a far easier interface! Less is more and all that...
> Many people have the same name. Add a few extra letters or numbers to this URL to get one that is unique for you.
Why would I want yet another "MyName<randomcrap>" identifier? How does that help friends and family remember or identify me? What purpose does it serve?
I'm yet another person with a nickname that identifies me all over and has for years, I too own the domain. But Google+ keeps insisting I have my "real name" ... except it's not my real name because I have to add random crap to be unique.
I have no idea why they cling to this.
I canceled at that point.
Not saying that I agree or disagree with Google, but they have explained their reasoning here: "It's recommended that you go by your first and last name because it will help you connect with people you know and help them find you." - https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271?hl=en
and my nickname is pretty unique, i know there's nobody else on google+ using it. and i have a page named 'notatoad', not that i use it for anything. but i have to put a suffix on that too.
You could for a time (not sure if it still works) email users on facebook by using vanity_handle@facebook.com from any email address. Which is quite useful to get back in touch with people, now that people avoid listing their email addreses in email directories (people stopped doing that because they were fed up of spam). Having said that a non-vanity identifier could probably be used in the same way, so there isn't much point.
The author of this post, wants to make a land grab for his named handle all over the web. Well that's not much better.
I worked with a client yesterday that had bought 33 alternative domain names that were similarish to their company name. Why even bother! There were many obvious name / term combinations that they had missed anyway. What a waste of money and time!
I liked his resolution of just advertising his web address, and from there people could discover other handles for other services.
It's only made things more complex with the myriad of compnay handles on different services. Adverts on TV (in the UK) now don't even list their domain name, they just advertise Facebook and Twitter handles. I personally prefer loose identifiers: 'Lucy who does ITV's weather'. Even the presenters have their Twitter handles displayed on screen now!
It is not like you are likely to remember most of these handles anyway. Even if you tried to guess one, do you use camel case, underscores, spaces etc?
There is a little UI value in having recognisable identifiers, but at the end of the day vanity URLs are about as twatty as personalised number plates.
Try this kind of link: profiles.google.com/[YOUR USER NAME HERE]
For example, vrypan's custom link would be: http://profiles.google.com/vrypan
Some data points:
I have a few gmail accounts. One is for james.g.britt, but profiles.google.com/jamesgbritt does not resolve to the g+ page for that email address.
I also have a g+ page for james@neurogami.com (via google apps)
profiles.google.com/neurogami takes me to the g+ page for that e-mail address.
(Though perhaps the email analogy is a bad one, since IIRC both Yahoo and MSN periodically release long-dormant addresses back into the eligible pool. Though still unsettling, it's a more reasonable approach than "we may force you to start paying us an unknown amount at some unknown future date".)
Ultimately, I was about to go through with it anyway until I realized that doing so would require me to register a phone number with my Google account, which I have so far avoided. That requirement was the final straw.
That's exactly how I feel. I try very hard to not give my number out, why the hell does google force me to tell them, just to get a URL?
Even better would be to allow me to register backup two factor auth key fobs and I can just throw one or two backups in a safe deposit box, safe or similar safe place.
Absolutely understandable.
For those who have accidentally been opt-ed in to this scummy Google behaviour, you can still opt out: https://www.google.com/settings/phone
You might still need to go to your profile afterwards and delete the phone. You should be allowed to. Seriously though: Has it come to this? Do we need to treat Google like Facebook? Expect the worst at every turn?
As for Google taking a turn for the worse...
Am I the only one thinking they are literally fucking up every thing they do these days? I had the (dis)pleasure of re-visiting my Google Apps console this week. What used to take 30 seconds-done, now took 2 hours of Googling and experimenting until I realized that the new Admin-console was simply broken and couldn't do what the old one could do. It's completely dysfunctional.
Let me re-iterate that: The main product Google has to enable services for paying customers doesn't work any more. Now it just lists already enabled services. That's it.
When did Google get so utterly lost? One thing is PR, which is something they obviously still need to learn proper. But breaking their own services? Isn't there a single soul which still cares about delivering at Google?
What the fuck happened?
Bonus: Use vrypan.com/+