Office fun / actually I am in a good mood

[hirez]

"What are 'friends'?"

"It's like when you go on a social network and all these people you've never heard of or can't remember pretend that they know who you are so they can sell you things, 'invite' you to their terrible club night or persuade you to buy their dreadful music out of a sense of pity and/or duty. Because they are 'friends'"

God, strong tea with full-fat milk tastes strange and decadent. What madness overtook us when someone in alleged authority decided that semi-skimmed was 'better' and we all just went along with it? I wonder if the milkman will still deliver gold top?

Actually, the deepening G+ namefail might make a chap decide that LJ is much less worse than the available alternatives...

Comments

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

I always have fullfat milk at home. It started because I didn't realise the milkman could get organic semi-skimmed, and now I just prefer the full-fat stuff.

Mmmm, tea.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

...but it makes it all taste of milk, not tea!

This is a good thing on muesli, but a bad thing for tea.

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

Sense of pity is why I've "friended" ("circled"?) quite a few people on G+, and facebook. Facebook seems easier to instantly hide them though, I haven't sussed out how to do that on G+ (hopefully mostly because I've probably spent all of 10 minutes on it in total so far, not because I'm a complete moron. But who knows).

It seems easier to not friend people in return on LJ, less offence taken, less weight attached. Not sure why, maybe it's the burden of whole posts rather than the "I'll just skim over" burps on facebook and G+ and everyone understands that.

[zotz]

Make a new Circle up for people you don't want to read regularly. And then ignore it.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

You don't happen to know how one would go about deleting one's G+ presence, do you? Is there actually a way to opt out completely?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

This doesn't seem to be actively wrong: http://www.technostarry.com/tips/how-to-delete-or-remove-google-plus-account/

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Do you happen to know whether that will actually remove me from Google+, or will it just restore me to the state before I signed up, whereby people can tag me, add me to circles and so on, and I have no control over that?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I suspect that will just be a pre-signed-up state. I'm guessing that the tagging malarkey works when you're just an email address scraped from a gmail account?

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Ah, so basically, there is no way to opt out.
See, I _really_ don't like that, and absolutely will not use G+ until they fix that.

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that not having a gmail account is an effective way to avoid being tagged in G+. However, that's obv not very convenient if you already have one that you are using.

[stevenothing.livejournal.com]

There are two ways to share things with people in Google+ - they can either be a Google+ user, and get things in their stream, or you can share with them by email (this is handy; I use it to share baby pictures with my parents, despite their not being on G+. The email account does not have to be a gmail account).

When you tag someone, you can either enter the name of another Google+ user (and as a Google+ user, you can approve tags), and it will link to their profile. You can also enter an arbitrary contact, with an email address (doesn't have to be a gmail address). This will create a private tag, so that nobody else on Google+ will be able to see it. The person you just tagged will also get a notification email, with a URL that allows them to see the album in which you've just tagged them.

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

Damn, I thought it was just gmail, 'cos of the natural link. Seems odd you can tag people who aren't on G+.

[stevenothing.livejournal.com]

It's a private tag; it's not visible to the public. It's the equivalent of sending that person an email saying "here is a picture of you".

[hirez.livejournal.com]

... Since you are not in the list of the prospective encircled, yet my mother is, and the only time her address would turn up on the greater internet is when I make it work. However, I did send a test from my gmail account to that address, so...

[zotz]

Allegedly, like this.

There's a general problem with opting out of things: there has to be a list of people who don't want to be referred to. There will never be a way to opt out utterly, although They could perhaps be prevailed on to maintain such an opt-out list rather than expect people to have profiles.

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

Ah, nice one, thanks.

[jhaelan.livejournal.com]

It's also the only places where I can easily filter out colleagues who get confused between "I'm happy to work with you" and "I'm happy to pop down the pub with you"

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I suspect namefail will be quickly fixed and forgot.

Many of the dusty corners of the early Android deployments were marked by comparable bits of comedy, albeit on a smaller scale, and those all seem to have been lost in the mists of history by now. I think it's the Google way to determine the least possible level of (non-automated) customer service by repeated and painful experiment.