Actually, you have to provide your own entertainment. We tried the other thing and it was shit.

[hirez]

I think I am experimenting with how and if four (four!) slightly different social-meejah-wossnames can be made to play well together. I note that G+ and parent org appear to be making all the fuckups in the first month that it took LJ a decade to muddle through. That's either something clever to do with the accelerating nature of the 'plug-in lifestyle' (We have been living in one or other John Brunner story for the last two decades) or an attitude of 'start as you mean to go on'.

On one hand, it seems that having some semblance of your real name attached to yr online doings does make the poo-flinging howlers shut the hell up. On the other hand, there are clear and sensible reasons why being able to bother the internet under a pseudonym is an actual safety issue. I suspect Gurgle are being aspie cock-ends about it, but that they're also utterly buggered by the relevant US legislation.

I also suspect that we're in a very odd sort of transitory period between sad old gimmers like me who have piles of records and negatives and would be buggered if physical unfortunateness happened, and ver yout' who keep all their things on other people's computers and who will be differently buggered for theoretically less structural reasons. People have coped in the past with losing all their stuff - they got to make a sad face in the local paper about it. The future version will involve the expectation of a second chance and I'm off into victim-blaming and I don't want to do that. Back to Brunner - 4GH FTW.

Obviously, I don't see fit to record or organise enough of my life to usefully bother three of the things, so I suspect it likely that one or more will fall by the wayside, which would be either sad, of minor interest or 'Who? No, never heard of him.'

Comments

[smogo.livejournal.com]

Google+ makes no sense to me whatsoever. I've got a list, sorry "Circle", of friends, and what? What are you supposed to actually do with it?

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Ditto.
G+ is not a social network. it's the aisle I shops for bras in.

[jozafeen.livejournal.com]

Applause and a gratuitous "Ding-dong!" for the mental picture! ;-)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

More or less the same as LJ; emit interesting things.

[stevenothing.livejournal.com]

"Gurgle are being aspie cock-ends about it"

I love the way that you imply there's a single, agreed-upon opinion :-)

If you feel strongly, please use the feedback button. Things *will* change if people request it.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You missed the 'I suspect' and 'buggered by relevant US legislation' - COPPA, presumably.

There is probably more to the 'Gurgle deleted my account and I don't know why' story, if only because the complaint on Twitlonger uses words and phrases I see when people complain about being booted off $employer's website(s) for T&C and/or local policy violations.

However, from the outside, yr splendid employers do jolly fine impersonations of a monolithic org. It's going to be different from the inside, no doubt. F'rinstance I don't know what HP looked like from the outside, but inside was a right cockney barrel of monkeys.

On the anon/pseudo argument, I don't know where I fall yet. As noted before, the drama-magnets will manage to exploit either position for maximal Accident. Still, I have a 'just fuck off will you' circle (Although it should probably be called 'Eight' or 'Bolgia-2' were I some sort of classicist) so that's, um, crab with brass hand.

[stevenothing.livejournal.com]

The twitlonger thing is different to the real names stuff on G+. If you enter an unreal name (a complex name, maybe, with an imaginary component) then you get your profile stuck in a state whereby you can't use it until you enter a real name. This means that you can't use Google products that require a profile: Google+ and, maybe, Picasa. Possible some other stuff, I'm not sure. This won't affect your gmail account, your youtube account, your blogger acount, etc. etc. No data is lost, all you have to do is change your name.

An account suspension, what appears to have happened with the twitlonger person (and I'm not familiar with the details) is something more severe, and for something more serious. No idea what, though.

Yeah, on the outside it looks pretty monolithic. I'm not sure there's a huge amount that can be done about that, and I wouldn't presume to state that something should be done, being a lowly aspie engineer and all that. That said, quite a few of the senior VPs, tech leads, product managers and the like are actively talking with people, in public, on these issues, so it's not totally opaque. For something as serious as account deletions though, you're unlikely to see much public discussion.

I'm not sure what I think of the real-name thing. When techcrunch went real-names with their facebook commenting system, the quality of comments increased significantly, although the volume decreased. It's since started to trend back towards the den of retards and trolls, though. So I'm... mostly indifferent.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That's... A somewhat sub-optimal design, minister.

(Says the chap with a name that blows up airline reservation systems, and there was some pisspot socially-socially site that threw a fit over the hyphen, which, while I'm prepared to forgive systems coded in the sixties when no-one had names like, I don't know, Alec Douglas-Home or Norman St. John-Stevas (nb: sarcasm) anything more recent that, oh, 1998 is on rather a sticky wicket.)

Now I have read this I am in favour of psuedonyms. (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F) Still not convinced about anonymity, mind.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

(I should note that we are all assuming good faith here and not having an internet-strop. That would be rubbish.)

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

You have to be a registered G+ user in order to provide feedback, which is problematic in itself. I left some feedback and haven't had any response, which makes me doubt that anything actually will be changed.

[stevenothing.livejournal.com]

Being a registered user is a bit of a pain.

I doubt you'll receive a response to your feedback, if submitted through the feedback tool. I can confirm that people are reading it, though, and things are changing. Reports are being read, verified, bugs filed, priorities and directions all changed based on the feedback submitted. This is why they've called it a field trial, rather than a launch, or a beta, or whatever; the point is to try and find out how the product is used, and what problems it has, whilst the user base is still relatively small. If one report in x million (nb., I have no idea how many people have submitted feedback) complains about something, it's likely to be given lower priority than something that n0 thousand in x million do.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I'm absolutely not prepared to use G+ unless/until they sort out the issues I contacted them about (because the main issue was one of security/safety/privacy). So if they don't respond to my feedback to let me know they've fixed the problem, I won't use it. I have a profile there (because they basically made it opt-out rather than opt-in; I was tagged (with a unique identifier n the form of my email address) by someone I don't wish to be in touch with, and the only way I could block that person from tagging me repeatedly was to sign up. Which, frankly, is seriously rubbish), but it's empty, and I won't use it until they've made it opt-in and not opt-out. Which thy may have done already, but since they don't respond to feedback, I'd have no way of knowing.