Mini RANT! From a former “fanboy” now just pissed off at Google.
They just can’t resist a chance to reach out and mess with me. Now they mutilate my perfectly content and situated data with delusions of google Plus imperialism
I had to move massive amounts of old images recently from google Picassa to Flickr because google absolutely trashed all the old linkages when they forced them under the god awful abomination known as Google Plus and the “umbrella” of that social network.
It’s a lonely hollow universe there but they seem to think that it’s 1988 and they are AOL with nowhere else for people to go. I dumped blogger years ago after Google bought them and pulled some shenanigans on my earlier blog. I also noticed that for a time you could not post comments on Youtube without a gmail address/google Plus account… seriously… I still reluctantly have my Gmail address to this site but I’m otherwise switching my online universe as far away from google as is practical/possible. Mostly (belive it or not) back to Yahoo. A big reversal for this one time google fan. so it goes.
 
Motorcycle Photo Of The Day 
I completely share your frustration with G+ ruining all the other google products.
They also made a bunch of things I had private public without consent, and merged deliberately separate personal and professional accounts.
Thanks for sharing your experience and opinion. I have a gmail account for some years now and haven´t had any trouble with it but always had a hunch that staying away from this G+ stuff as far as I can would be a good idea. You just proved me right. Thank you also for many many good bike-pics. I am working on turning my Honda CX 500 into a cafe racer and will be happy to send you a pic of the finished bike. Greetings from Germany.
AJ.G
Gmail is one thing. Having a private photo account mostly for sharing albums with family, a personal youtube account, and a hobby youtube account that is harmless but maybe something I wouldn’t want clients to see causes problems. Worse, I had a cloud storage service set to private and password protected, and saw that scans of client documents in it were being automatically shown as pictures in auto generated G+ albums. (It was very fortunate that no actual sensitive client info was in the ones that went out).
The other thing is that G+ is just terrible as a social networking thing. It is solely focussed around spamming people, and gives no actual way to communicate with individuals. Even though G+ is owned by google, which owns Gmail, it doesn’t have a messenger function. It’s basically a content aggregator for mass-marketing, not a way to socialize.
Plus, unless you turn it off, it has a default ‘feature’ called “auto awesome” which is basically lying to your ‘friends’. What this does is find paid content with shared tags to your post and viewing profile and spams your friends and your wall with the content, and makes it look as though you had done so. Very not cool. I found my page which I never used was promoting videos that I had never watched, and would actively block, in my name.
And google’s motto is “do no evil.” – I presume they penned that while twirling their mustaches and laughing sardonically.
For that period when everyone’s comments on my youtube motorcycle videos was “force shared” by google to my google+ page…… now that absolutely sucked. Before that I gave google+ an honest try. They suck… but making and sharing videos of motorcycle stuff is my second hobby, so I deal with it
They finally turned that off and now have an optional “check box”… but I still taste it. ick
Wow! Thanks for the feedback everyone. From the comments, it’s actually even worse than I thought. I didn’t realize they were flipping around privacy settings THAT randomly on personal data! Unbelievable! Talk about a breach of trust!
One thing I didn’t mention was the elimination of the I-google home page. A small thing really but it was the last straw for me. Contrary to popular belief there are still a LOT of us out here who access the internet not from a small phone but from a desktop with a big monitor who actually LIKE a nice homepage where everything is aggregated. For some reason this did not match their long range plans.
On a brighter note I’m actually pretty content with good old Yahoo (so far anyway). They don’t seem to want to control every aspect of my web experience. They’ve come a long way with their look and feel too. Flickr seem top notch too. See how it goes.
I think any company that gets big enough will be a problem. Competition helps, and when I can, I try to reward the innovator. i.e. mapquest is still nicer than google maps, but they are close. So I try to use mapquest. I still prefer google to the competition as a search engine, but I miss the pure boolean control we used to have.