Google+ Runs Out of Disk Space, Swamps Users With Notifications 321
dkd903 writes "Yesterday, many users of Google+ noticed Google spamming their inbox with multiple email notifications in very quick succession. Earlier today, Vic Gundotra, Head of Social at Google, explained what was causing it – Google ran out of disk space on the server that keeps track of notifications."
HAHA !! THAT'S WHY I ALWAYS USE WD 320 GB !! (Score:3, Funny)
Never run out of disk no more !! And I am not a gillion dollar company in case you thought so !!
Facebook(2011):Google+::MySpace:Facebook(2005) (Score:4, Interesting)
I finally got an invite yesterday from a friend. It still needs a bit of tweaking but hands down the best social website since Facebook was nice and clean back in the day. The fact that it's rising this fast should make some people over at Facebook a bit worried. I'm going to finally start transitioning.
Back in the day Facebook was only .edu and thus didn't have the lowest common denominator on it. We used to make fun of people on MySpace for "ThEiR HoRiBLZ Grammer" and such. But if you start reading LameBook [lamebook.com] or Failbook [failbook.com] this group of people is now over on Facebook. And as long as Google+ remains invite only, I can't see them ever getting over to Google+.
CSB:
Facebook royally screwed me when they did the automated bans of numerous apps. [slashdot.org] My app. User 1 (me). [github.com]. Was caught up in it.
When my grandma died I was tasked with scanning in family photos. I needed a faster way to upload them so I wrote my app. I had thousands, if not tens of thousands of photos uploaded, sorted, tagged. Most of my large family isn't the most technological, and facebook was much easier than Gallery. Plus they could tag each other, comment on the photos "Oh this is when Dad took us to that beach and set the house on fire" etc. When the auto ban bot came through it was all gone. My appeal reply was boiler plated. "Sorry our bot says you're doing spamming." Unlike some people, I do still have all the photos. (It looks like there were numerous photo uploading apps that got caught up in the ban.)
Thankfully with my app it only took about 24 hours of my bandwidth to reupload them, but all of the additional value added metadata that was lost. (I am not retagging them). Any photo less than 2048x2048 doesn't count towards your 1GB Picasa (Google+ Photos?) quota. I've already started looking at the PHP Google API. I'm hoping to have all my photos up there soon. Anyone that wants to see any new photos I take, will follow me to Google+.
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The 2048x2048 freebies only applies to G+ users, normal user freebie is 800x800. Also you can just upload using Picasa desktop app to share on Plus if you hate web uploaders.
Also G+ will not be invite only in the long run. However there will be better signal:noise feeds because of asymmetrical relationships vs Facebook's mutual relationships. Most people (myself included) seem content with starting over and keeping their G+ circles intentionally small.
Re:Facebook(2011):Google+::MySpace:Facebook(2005) (Score:5, Insightful)
get your own website and put your photos there.
jeebus cristo, you people are TECHIES. act like it. 'big content' hosting sites are not the only way to serve your own photos and html, even free forum software.
lazy. do your own site and html. its not rocket science!
stop giving all your content to the big corps.
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I have one. [github.com] I spent forever on it getting it right. Valid HTML4. Can scroll through lots of photos fast. Because I separated out the header and footer bits I've integrated it on a few websites I'm on. I have a hacked together fork that will output a valid KML file so I can view my photos from when I went to India on a map. In all it's pretty awesome IMHO. Maybe you missed out on the part where I said I used to have a Gallery setup.
But MOST people just don't get that. They want to share their photos with the
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I'm glad it's so easy for you, but for my grandmother she's not as technically inclined. If I had to make a page for each of my non-tech-savvy relatives who ask me to upload pictures or music for them, I'm sure I'd end up remaking half of Facebook's features. They're already on Facebook, might as well use what they've already got.
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Back in the day Facebook was only .edu and thus didn't have the lowest common denominator on it. We used to make fun of people on MySpace for "ThEiR HoRiBLZ Grammer" and such.
Funny, us old people say exactly the same thing about the internet. Too bad nobody's building a new one.
I suspect facebook is a walking corpse. Not because google+ is exceptionally promising, but because facebook has become so universally reviled that a lot of people seem to consider 'nothing' a better alternative. Hopefully it will become an object lesson in the extent to which you can mistreat your cattle without having it run away.
Personally I hope we'll eventually see a truly distributed social networki
Define many (Score:4, Interesting)
"Yesterday, many users of Google+ noticed Google spamming their inbox..."
Yesterday some users of Google+ noticed Google spamming their inbox.
There, fixed that for you.
I, e.g., did not get spammed, (And yes, I have a g+ account.)
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Now 1,000,000 is a number. 10,000 is a number. We call that being specific. Many? How many is many? 900,000? Or three? There's no validity to a report as vague as this was.
Douche? Way to go with the ad hominem attack. That always lends cred to an argument. Not. Well, at least you posted with your real /. account. That puts you about one step above the other basement dwelling anonymous cowards that posted their ad hominem attacks. Have a nice day.
Google Haters? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You have a point, but just wait until you actually need to get support from somebody at Google.
Re:Google Haters? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's been happening on Google and FB related threads on Slashdot for some time now - the fanboys of Google consistently upvote other fanboys and downvote anyone critical, and the reverse for Facebook.
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and obligatory http://xkcd.com/918/ [xkcd.com]
We're working hard on the technology... (Score:5, Insightful)
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the problem is the "runaway" effect
i would assume that somehow they kind of goofed on the disk space thing and the monitor got jammed because they had more or less
60 to 70% : 8 hours
71 to 80% : 4 hours
81 to 90% : 90 minutes
91 to !!! : 15 minutes
and of course its not like they can just plug a new drive in the server and flip the spill over over in a few minutes
(note this is why you set the alarm threshold low and or install new storage ahead of the need)
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somebody didn't plan ahead to allow for this and maybe that why it took them a bit to fix things??
maybe the GAdmin was at the pub having a drink and took enough time to get in that things got wedged??
Plus if a DB was involved you can't just add new storage and go without stopping the db server and doing a restart.
(and i would dispute the "mission critical" label for a notification server (short of a nuke plant monitor))
needs better name (Score:2)
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Informative)
Well its still an 'in work' product. So they made a mistake, good thing they didn't tout it as finished yet. Don't know about the rest of the allegations because I don't have an account.
It hasn't 'come out of beta', according to the page its : "in limited Field Trial" which I suppose means 'semi-open beta'.
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Insightful)
But not everyone was allowed access. It was a limited release. When a MMO is in beta do you think the game developer should be "held responsible for what goes wrong".
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I see you saw Google Buzz. :)
It seems more of my friends are trying out Google+ than Google Buzz, but for the most part it's had a "ok, so what now" reaction.
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite a long time, but this isn't a beta like the late, fully-public beta of Google Mail, its like the very early, invite-only, restricted beta of Gmail.
Uh, they aren't using to "cover their asses", they are admitting it was a mistake, apologizing for it, and explaining how it happened.
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What he's saying is that they cite its so-called prerelease status as justification for the existence of such mistakes.
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Insightful)
What he's saying is that they cite its so-called prerelease status as justification for the existence of such mistakes.
And what GP was saying is that "it is, in fact, pre-release, not the fake pre-release google often does, so it's actually justified."
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, would you mind gracing us with a link to your myriad of bug-free products?
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Informative)
Google+ uses Google's standard terms of service which say "You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit."
Pretty much exactly what you're asking for, minus the ability to claim ownership of other people's work just because you uploaded a copy.
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I personally feel that those who criticise privacy advocates are secretly ashamed of not being interesting and can't bear that there are many people out there doing things where adequate anonymity is the difference between success and detainment. There's also a bit of languor in there: "I'm so lazy I need targeted adverts to choose what I want."
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Held responsible how? You want a money-back guarantee?
Sometimes the ungrateful attitude of the entitled whiners around here takes me aback, despite years of reading it.
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You aren't paying with your privacy, because your privacy has no value to anyone but you. You may have "paid" with information, but good luck trying to make that abstraction count for anything in the real world.
Of course, if you want to be impractical about things, you can bitch till the end of time. Doesn't make it mean anything, though.
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good luck trying to make that abstraction count for anything in the real world.
Just look at any number of deals involving selling marketing data, user data, usage data (the list goes on). It's not an abstract value if there's real world money being passed back and forth in exchange for information. However, don't be surprised when you find out the actual market value for your information somewhere around 25 to 50 cents.
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Buyer's remorse? I don't see anything of value exchanged in either direction.
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At least they admit that it's not ready unlike other companies that make you pay for the beta quality product.
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You're right, of course, but because this is Google, you're going to get defenders voting you down and justifying everything they do. Google wants it both ways. They want the positive press of Google-friendly tech enthusiasts (who make up the majority of the users right now and dutifully advertise everything Google does) but none of the negative press that mistakes would generate among mainstream users.
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Re:Google+ (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't use FB (never have, never will) and just don't *approve* of google getting any more cosy with user info than they already are.
just that.
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What are you talking about? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/facebook-instant-personalization-how-to-disable-it-and-why/8006 [zdnet.com]
Facebook tracking is on something like 1 in 3 websites
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Somebody please mod this FB shill a troll...
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When you sign up they want you to give them permission to use your data anywhere in their advertising and analytics network... They have your name and all kinds of info where you browse and what you do.
You allow all that to happen. You have to use google or give permission for google analytics to run for google to know what you're looking at. Stop using google as your search engine. Stop allowing google.analytics to run on your browser. Bam, you have stopped giving information to google.
Facebook might try to target marketing for you, but at least they only do that within Facebook...
No, they sell your information to the highest bidder. If that's advertisers on facebook, that will stay on facebook yes. If it's the Israeli government trying to stifle a protest by human rights activists [slashdot.org], then that
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If there are none of those stupid fucking games on G+, I'd call that a killer feature.
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[Google +] lacks a "killer feature" though that would make anyone use it over FB. Unless it gets something that will make people use it over using FB, it will probably languish, then die like Wave, Google Health, etc.
* Hangouts (up to 10 people in a video chat room)
* Circles (a method for fine-tuning whose posts appear in your stream and who can see your posts)
* Absence of FarmVille etc.
Those are killer features for me.
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So far my only complaint has been receiving a notification before I could sign in, and how long it took me to get an invite in general which is a real first world problem if I ever heard of one. People are getting in now so there's plenty of opportunity to see where this thing goes. At least this time it's clear what we're supposed to do with it.
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What?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google did the same mistake here they've done several times earlier.. They published an unfinished product...
No, they're field testing an unfinished product. It's the reason why it's hard to get an invite.
...on a market that is already established and has the giant pain of trying to get users to move to their service.
They don't seem to be having much difficulty getting users to move to their service. In fact, most of their difficulties lies in slowing down the demand because they can't handle it at this stage of testing, as shown by this particular problem. It's expanding way faster than they want it to, with more than a million users already signed up (according to TFA). I've sent invites to a bunch of people, and none
Mod parent up (Score:2)
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There is a lack of interest in Google+ among mainstream users [...]
And exactly how does the story indicate that this is the case and will remain the case?
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Ah, the anonymous Google defenders are out in full force today. Google fanboys have become worse than Apple fanboys when it comes to slavish devotion.
No, they're advertising a product by inviting the pro-Google tech press while keeping it invite-only to prevent mainstream users from being driven away by mistakes like this one. Google wants it both ways--the news coverage of a fully released product but without th
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What are the "bigger privacy problems" ? I see it basically as _the same_ privacy problems, I fail to see how they are bigger.
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I see two clear differences between Facebook and Google+ that I think reduce the privacy issues.
1. Google has made a clear commitment to making sure you can export your data from all of their services, while Facebook is particularly shameless about lock-in. This makes the cost of shifting to a different service much lower if they start acting more evil.
2. The Circles feature makes it much easier to maintain privacy, not from Google, but from each other. By making different classes of friends/acquaintances
Not quite the same (Score:3)
Facebook thinks they own your friends list, and actively try to block you from downloading it: http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-blocks-friend-exporter-plugin-053907002.html [yahoo.com]. Google+, on the other hand, has a "data liberation" tool that lets you download all of your infromation in a few clicks.
Facebook does not let you prevent people from tagging you in photos. You can remove the tags, but not stop them from appearing in
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Interesting)
Google did the same mistake here they've done several times earlier.. They published an unfinished product on a market that is already established and has the giant pain of trying to get users to move to their service. This included with the constant problems on Google+, not really offering anything new and even bigger privacy problems than with Facebook really isn't doing good. It was hot for a few days when coming out of beta.. Now I feel like it's going to die a slow death with no interest from casual people.
Actually, if they ran out of disk space, it's more like they had a bigger response than what they anticipated, so it's probably going quite well.
As for the "same mistake they've done several times earlier", are you referring to the undoubtedly failure of products such as GMail or GTalk? Or of Google Search, maybe? They seem to have been adopted pretty widely to me...
And as both a Facebook and Google+ user, I can't really say how you manage to state that privacy is worse on Google+ than in Facebook, where they introduce new options violating your privacy all the times and without alerting you (almost all weeks I found new checkboxes to uncheck in my privacy settings, not to speak of the scam/spam apps and the poor security record FB has). Maybe you can elaborate your line of reasoning? Else, it's just trolling.
Frankly, I am closing down my Facebook account, and I'm giving a Google+ a shot. In the past three days, friends in my circles on Google+ went up from being just 6 to about 40-50. I expect this number to increase. Deep integration with other Google products, such as GMail, will most likely ensure a big number of participants.
If Google+ fails, I won't at least go back to FB. There is a lot of social pressure to do so, but quite frankly it sucks. You use it because most of your friends do, not because it works well. The only thing I will miss is the capability of creating events among friends, but there are other ways.
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/sarcasm
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Here's an interesting article [businessinsider.com] on the fact that Google Buzz also started out with "tens of millions of users" and then quickly died out. Quote:
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They published an unfinished product on a market that is already established and has the giant pain of trying to get users to move to their service.
They're actually trying to keep users from moving to their service right now. Invites are very limited at the moment while they're slowly increasing capacity and testing scalability. As you can see by OP, they failed to scale properly and ran out of disk space. There's a reason they're not in "beta" but in a "limited field trial." Unfortunately, it's a social network and a social network will never catch on if none of your friends can be on it with you... they have to perform a very delicate balancing act i
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Wait, you do understand what "beta" means, right? That's why they start many of their projects by invitation only - people are accepting the fact that it's still under development and testing. If you don't want beta quality, don't sign up for a beta.
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I've seen you comment on several of these Google articles. I went back and checked your comments to see if you have given any specifics, and you haven't. I did see that you've claimed not to be a shill. Ok. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but back up what you are saying. What are the privacy concerns of G+ that are worse than FB? If you don't give verifiable specifics, you do come off like you are spreading fud.
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They published an unfinished product on a market... This included with the constant problems on Google+, not really offering anything new... Now I feel like it's going to die a slow death with no interest from casual people.
So it's similar to facebook in the early days when we all used myspace. "Why would I switch to facebook? I've got myspace! All my friends are already on myspace! I've never even heard of facebook." Most of the features of facebook weren't there in those early days (unfinished). I think there was photo sharing, not sure if myspace did that, but I can't remember being impressed with facebook over myspace, aside from the lack of annoying music (and by parallel, I like that google+ doesn't have annoying a
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A monopoly? Over which commodity do they exercise a monopoly? Maybe it's a monopoly over their own algorithm, if they won't publish their search algorithms for Microsoft and others to use? Come on, stop working so hard to sound like a Microsoft Fanboi, alright?
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Insightful)
*sigh* Monopolies aren't illegal. Please try to remember that.
Abusing your monopoly position, that is illegal. Google doesn't abuse their monopoly.
The reason for this distinction is that you can get yourself into (and remain in) a monopoly position without harming the public. But the majority of companies can't resist abusing that power if they obtain it, and need a smack-down or break-up. (usually because it's a slow process and they just creep into a behavior of abuse as they creep into the monopoly) Technically speaking, when you have a monopoly, you become a lot more efficient - advertising costs go down, you avoid "race to the bottom" games, the best employees in a field are concentrated and working together. In the end, customers can benefit from a company having a monopoly, it just requires the company's directors to take a strong high-road stance in the face of the temptation of greed you get operating in a democracy. ("do whatever it takes, be it illegal or immoral, to maximize profit")
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Democracy requires capitalism. Capitalism encourages greed. Greed encourages corruption. That's why corruption becomes the #1 problem in any democracy. But here we can just stop to look at greed since corruption is off the topic of monopoly.
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That's not entirely true. You could have a democracy that is very socialist. Also, people confuse "Capitalism" as an economic system with "Capitalism" as a moral system. The economic system does not encourage greed. It's about economic freedom without a government dictating how you should spend/invest your money. This freedom allows you to be greedy or generous. Then there's "Capitalism" as a moral system, which is a more recent invention by rich people to justify their privilege. It's a variation on
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Democracy requires capitalism.[citation needed]
FTFY.
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Democracy does not require capitalism. To say otherwise is completely illogical. For example, true Communism would work best in a democracy.
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Human greed is a constant. Capitalism does not encourage greed, it holds greed accountable. A purely laissez-faire system has many problems, but one that it does not have is rampant corruption. You get corruption when you mix capitalism with government involvement in business, e.g. Italian fascism.
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Informative)
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Democracy requires capitalism? Not in any definition of "democracy" or "capitalism" which I've read. Nor, I suspect in any definitions which I'm willing to accept. All that "democracy" means, is that the members all have an equal voice in policy. On the other hand, "capitalism" is an economic machine - a tool. One does not have to subscribe to an economic philosophy to subscribe to a political philosophy. Or, vice versa. One might as well say that to be a good Christian, one must be agrarian. Or, to
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Democracy requires capitalism?
Capitalism probably requires democracy. The reverse might not be strictly true, but it would be very hard to imagine a government with the mindset that every person has an equal say in the governing of the people and yet not allow capitalism.
In other words, capitalism is not necessary for democracy, but any true democracy is very likely going to have a capitalist economy, so if there is no capitalism, it probably isn't a democracy.
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That being said, they have benefited from an illegal monopoly
What monopoly exactly? Seriously, someone please tell me which of the google services constitute a monopoly?
Search engine? There are like a dozen of them. Yahoo still technically exists. I hear there are people who actually use Bing. Why? I don't know. Are there any browsers that have google as the only search engine you can use? Even with Chrome, you can change the search engine.
Gmail? Again, plenty of e-mail services exist.
Google maps? No, mapquest still seems to be around.
Google+?
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How? When I try to connect my Facebook account in the G+ account settings, all I get is an error message :(
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http://crossrider.com/install/519-google-facebook [crossrider.com]
Install the extension - it works for certain in Chromium 14.0.797 (Linux) I've not yet tried connecting to Google+ with Firefox, so I can't say how well it works.
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No dice on FF5... add-on installs and then sits in the background uselessly doing nothing. Trying to connect to Facebook in the "Connected Accounts" section of the Google+ still gives me an error message...
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It's not through G+, it's through Firefox, Chrome, and I think Safari...
http://crossrider.com/install/519-google-facebook [crossrider.com]
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What's the connect to Facebook/Twitter/other function there for then? G+ Settings => Connected Accounts ...?
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You may possibly be right. But - I kind of play by my own rules. For instance - you'll have a few day's work cut out for you, trying to find my real name on Facebook, Google+, Youtube, Myspace, and all the other places I visit on the internet. You'll have an even harder time trying to tie all my identities together. If you want to know who I am, it would be easier to phish me onto a site so that you could get my IP address, and work from that.
But, whatever. I realize that few people see any need for ex
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I see what you're doing there. You expect me to deny being Fred, you'll come back with someone else, and by process of elimination, you'll narrow it down to me. Uh-huh. Yeah. How many rounds of this nonsense do we go through, to eliminate the couple billion males who COULD BE me?
Re:As an early-adopter of Google+ (Score:4, Informative)
... all I can said is that FB has nothing to worry about. The interface is utterly boring, the circles are way too hard to set up, you can't tell who you shared your posts with, and I still can't figure out how to post on someone's wall. Oh, and posting a photo, uggg. Maybe it's fixable, but this is not an encouraging start.
If you would call an interface that's not cluttered with Mafia Wars and Farmville updates "boring", then I suppose it's boring. But I prefer it over FB's.
Circles are drag-and-drop. I'm not sure how they could have made it easier. By comparison, FB has you check boxes next to names when you edit Groups.
If you create a new post and share it with only one person, that's functionally the same as a Wall post. Granular control over who sees what you post is G+'s biggest selling point.
Agreed on Photos. The integration to Picasa feels clunky to me.
Honestly, most of your criticisms seem to come from the perspective someone who hasn't spent more than 10 or 15 minutes with G+. Of course it doesn't work exactly the same way as FB. What would be the point?
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In 24 hours I've gotten half (7) of my friends to add Google+ to the other Google services they use. Since notifications are shown above their email, I know they will get them regardless of how much they use Google+, and soon I will be able to start ignoring facebook
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Except that the primary purpose of posting on someone else's wall is to publicly embarrass them in front of all their friends. This is not possible in Google+. One might argue that is a good thing.
Precisely. If someone wants to post something to me, they can do so, by sending it directly or putting me in their circle and posting it to that circle. If they want to comment on something I've written publicly, they can comment on it like everyone else, and of course, I tailor what I post to the appropriate circ
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[i]If you would call an interface that's not cluttered with Mafia Wars and Farmville updates "boring", then I suppose it's boring. But I prefer it over FB's.[/i]
Then just click on the 'x' in the corner of the offending post, and select 'Hide all posts by [app name]'. Voila, no more posts from that app. Simples.
Sure.
Unless you have people subscribing to some autoposting website that spams your feed with FarmVille news by posting as your friend instead of, you know, actually employing an app you can block or at least hide.
who you shared your post with (Score:2)
you can't tell who you shared your posts with
This is not actually true. First of all, you choose who to share with. Unless you posted something as 'public' you do have an idea of who you are sharing with. On the post itself (again, unless you posted something as public) you can click on the little link that says 'limited' and it will show you who it was shared with. If you are concerned about people RE-sharing your post, then you can disable resharing on a post as well. Naturally there is always a way for people to republish what you posted, m
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The interface is utterly boring, the circles are way too hard to set up, you can't tell who you shared your posts with, and I still can't figure out how to post on someone's wall. Oh, and posting a photo, uggg. Maybe it's fixable, but this is not an encouraging start.
A simple clean interface has better for non-power users over the years, and is considered a staple of Google's success with their products.
Circles work just like dragging icons on a desktop, better even, as you can access the functionality anywhere (see a name, click for pop-up).
Every post tells you generally how many it's shared with, without any action on your part (public/limited), and one click of that link pops up a list of exactly who it's shared with.
I posted dozens of photos in one shot (just dragge
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Some would say that a boring interface is a compliment. It should get out of the way and let you access and manage the content you're there for.
The circles are ridiculously easy to set up. If you can drag and drop, you can set them up. To see who you shared your posts with, click the word "Limited" at the top right of the post. I don't think you can write on other people's walls, but I don't really know why you would want to.
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They don't run all their services on the same cluster.
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in the "Other Terms to Exclude:" field enter "Google"
Now you will no longer see anything.
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I'm not sure who's fault it is that Opera doesn't seem to work with many javascript libraries. On one hand, Opera being the under dog should work on adding features to match webkit, gecko or IE's feature set to make it easier to port. On the other hand, I find it laziness that some javascript library developers (Dojo for example) won't even take upstream patches or test Opera support properly.
Opera is one of those browsers I want to like, but get hung up on websites not working or weird behavior with it.