'F-CK YOU GOOGLE+' ukelele missy scoops BIG WAD of $$ - for Google A futile attempt to convince Google to reverse its decision to lock its ID-tracking, data-mining Google+ product into YouTube comments has helped to generate more ad revenue on the vid-sharing site. A sweary, well-spoken young woman from Essex has had more than half a million hits on a YouTube video she posted just two days …
It's simple. Google+ has little uptake, has not really been all that interesting to most people and in order to boost uptake they are taking a swipe at the youtube community, hoping that forcing youtube users to sign in to comment and such will actually be accepted. I never really commented before, now so less likely.
"Would you like to use your real name for all your Google services?" -- No, now Foxtrot Oscar.
while you people seem to be so upset? I mean, it's a simple transaction, you want something (vent your e-pinions), they want something in return (feed you ads). Both are superfluous to life. If I value my privacy more than an orgasmic release on hitting a "submit" button, then I don't bother and stay away.
but you folks, seem to be unable to choose, you want it both, and can't let go of either. You don't grab a packet of sweets from Tesco, when your pockets are empty, do you? You give them something they want, right? Or is it that you really believe the blinking "FREE!!!" button?
"It is theft, the resources are funded through advertising therefore denying the provider revenue by blocking ads means you're stealing content from their networks."
Theft goes both ways. The other day I looked up the words to an animé song on my mobile. They appeared, I was happy. Then a "download complete" notification popped up. Bastard site linked to an advertiser which had a pop-under to feed a 350Kb APK file to me. Tried it again at home, and kept getting the same damn APK. Thankfully I can absorb 350K in my monthly allocation, however multiple attempts to push that crap isn't on (ever heard of cookies you c*nts?) and if I was on a PAYG setup, that would cost me a pile of coins.
Some advertisers are unscrupulous and think nothing of taking your bandwidth, processing power, and data allocation. The correct way to respond is to block as much as you can. It's a two way street, you know...
"It is theft, the resources are funded through advertising therefore denying the provider revenue by blocking ads means you're stealing content from their networks." -- It's not stealing, it's advert avoidance. All perfectly above board. Is sticking my fingers in my ears and shouting "La-La-La" during the adverts stealing ?
Do none of you know how to create 2 email accounts?
I have one for spam and one I share with others.
The spam one is how I post anonymous comments.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, your ISP, and countless others give you the ability to have free email accounts everywhere.
Oh no!!! That would mean remembering 2 passwords to remain anonymous on the net.
Shudder!
Anyone with a problem with Google trying to give you better service, single sign on, news you want to see, youtube videos you might be interested in, and trying to make some money while they offer free access to an index of all of mans knowledge, products and news, has a screw loose somewhere.
I guess you just can't please anyone when you give away free stuff.
It's like people who get welfare complaining about income inequality.
Talking about demanding a mobile number, I had an email from Google+ yesterday telling me that my (largely unused) Google+ account was now eligible for "a unique Google+ custom URL" along the lines of google.com/+Name
I had a look. I read the terms and conditions - and saw no mention of phone numbers. So I decided to grab my name, and told me I must first verify my phone number.
(Repeating the exercise now to get the exact wording, it's "You must verify your mobile phone number by entering a code sent in a text message (SMS), before you can claim a custom URL.")
At which stage I changed my mind.
According to Google, this is "to protect our users from abuse, we sometimes ask users to prove they’re not a robot before they're able to create or sign in to accounts. Having this additional confirmation via phone is an effective way to keep spammers from abusing our systems."
I know spammers can be stupid, but I'm sure even they understand the concept of cheap throw-away SIMs, which makes that explanation more than a little weak, IMO.
> Last time I tried to register a new Gmail account for exactly that purpose, a month or two ago, it demanded a mobile number
It will always give you the "option" of giving them a phone number, but it seems to insist on it or not depending on some sort of trust algorithm.
For the time being, please feel free to use the following account if you wish, I just registered it and did not complain about the absence of phone details (for now):
Email: bertieles@gmail.com
Name: Bertrand Lestrade (hope you like it)
DoB: 1st February 1982
Country: France
Gender: male
Password: "One account is all you need" (without quotes, watch spaces and initial cap).
Phone: None given
Other email: None given
Now for the philosophical rant: There is a slight difference between being ambitious to the point of greediness, which is fine in my book, and disregarding basic societal norms of behaviour such as minimally respecting people's privacy (this is not fine in my book). Sure as fuck I would not give my name, date of birth, phone number, etc., to the bloke I buy the newspaper from, or to anyone else I do business with, unless it's a) substantial business, and b) a very valid reason is present.
Enjoy!
"It's like people who get welfare complaining about income inequality."
I'm sure this is some reference to a nicely worked out talking point, but surely if you're on welfare (ie have very little income and wealth) then it would make sense to complain about the unfair distribution of wealth according to birthright and not merit. Sure, the people who work damn hard to be just above welfare have more right to complain, as they are the underpaid where merit gets you keeping the job, not rewarded. The trick to being wealthy is entitlement, often to tax payer funded handouts that dwarf any welfare entitlements. National Socialism, what's good for industry is what's good for the nation. Privatised profits and socialised losses.
Perhaps a better example would be it's like people earning over 100k complaining about paying high taxes. They only are able to earn over 100k because of the tax monies already spent on education (theirs and their workforce), infrastructure and social care systems (police, fire, hospitals) and indeed even for those on welfare.
Not sure about the US, but in the rest of the OECD the beneficiaries (welfare recipients) are overwhelmingly the elderly. Who are often rightly concerned that while some assets (land, property and precious metals) maintain or even gain value, cash assets (bank deposits, annuities and shares) often end up failing to keep pace with rising costs. They also may point out that they paid into this system for there whole working lives, and they turn out to vote in large numbers, but if you can get a nice us-and-them, strivers and skivers split going on, you can actually convince poor people to vote for policies that favor the rich, by bashing the poor.
Of course on the other side of the coin - those of us who actually a) use Google+ and b) don't try to use Google+ like Facebook (because it is not, never will be and never was intended to be anything like Facebook) actually like the integration - because we now see YouTube videos pop up in our stream, with a comment from the poster - and encourages a much more active discussion - for example a video from someone else who hates Google+ has gone viral on Google+ and because of this - it has gotten a lot more exposure than it would of normally. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuIRY5KFEU0
Please remember: Facebook == Social Network, Social Network != Facebook
Yea, and that's why google does it all.
Google+ is a fucking joke. A ghost town what claims to have hundreds of millions "active" users, except in reality there's barely ANY active users from all those hundreds of millions, maybe 1% maybe only 0.1%. Easily clear if you look some while "near by" and "what's hot" areas and garbage that pops up in those and then number of comments etc.
People at Google know G+ is a fucking joke, so now they try to inflate number of comments turning every youtube comment to a damn post in G+.
"those of us who actually a) use Google+ ... actually like the integration"
Speak for yourself. I have a Google+ account but don't need to be automatically signed in to Youtube.
Google also seem to have altered Chrome (e.g. on Windows and ios) recently to make it harder to sign out of your Google account.
When I post a comment on a YouTube video I don't WANT it appearing on Google+ to stimulate discussion. The discussion should be limited to the intended forum - i.e. the video on YouTube. If you want to see what is new on YouTube, that is what direct subscription is for. If you want a feed aggregator there are plenty around. It doesn't need all the baggage that having a G+ account brings with it.
There is one reason, and one reason alone why Google have done this. To FORCE users to interact through G+, to add them to their relationship and identity database and stimulate data generation for same.
Yup. When I tried to watch the video on YouTube for the fu***ing umpteenth time in a row it asked me if I wanted to sign in as my YouTube username or my gmail username. And for the umpteen f***ing time I clicked NO. KEEP THE F***ING THINGS SEPARATE. Because that's what I want to do, so get the F***ING message will you. Jeesh!
I've given up on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Flickr etc etc. Email is creeping slowly and inexorably towards Outlook only rather than standard POP or IMAP that just about everything supports.
Someone take me back to the 80s, please!
Oh you're in for a treat: after asking you a dozen times or so, it just links the accounts, because fuck you.
When that happens, whatever you do don't do what I did, and click "make my channel private". I thought that would, you know, make my channel private. No. It is functionally identical to "delete my account": all your lists, all your comments, all your up/downvotes, are permanently and irreversibly deleted.
I hated Youtube before it was cool.
I have a Google account I use at work, for the drive and calendar, and Youtube kept pestering me to link it with my youtube account. When I declined it asked why I didn't want to link them. This happened every 2-3 videos I viewed. Eventually, after asking me a dozen or so times, it just linked them anyway.
I then made a huge mistake: I clicked "Make My Channel Private", in the mistaken belief that this would make my viewing history and favorite video lists private. No. "Make My Channel Private" is functionally identical to "Delete My Account". All my lists, all my comments, everything: irreversibly gone. A big, hearty, FU from Google, all because I didn't want my Youtube viewing history of kitten videos and death metal linked to my work calendar.
That's when I realized that Google's approach to customer service and privacy is "it rubs the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again".
Yeah, Fuck You Right Back, Google.
OMFG Phandom Wank Socks that must sound so weird to people who don't know what that means XD
YouTube is more than just stupid 30 second videos of cats now, it's a wide community of film makers, musicians and vloggers who ear money and make a living off of it, so any changes made to the site directly affect peoples lives.
I suggest you watch the online series 'Becoming YouTube' in order to learn what YouTube really is, (Emma is featured) then you will have a better understanding of why this is a big deal to a lot of people
Phandom Wank Socks you are my hero <3
What I find surprising is that anyone could be bothered to write a song about it.
And I think I spotted her problem in the first few lines of the song "We just want our website back". It's not your website, its Google's. They can do with it what they will and equally you are at liberty to not use it. Get on with your life.
I think internet companies and organisations like Youtube and Twitter are massively overplaying their hands, and I wouldn't be surprised one bit if that is going to haunt them.
The problem should be obvious: they want or need to generate more revenue, but being a service provider there's only so much one can do to make that happen. The main problem is that you'll reach a point where your 'free' service is going to apply changes which will make it harder or less appealing for the people to use it. Think about the commercials on Youtube or the annoying banners on Twitter.
You may get away with small changes, but if the intrusion becomes to great then you're going to lose interest, especially if you're operating on a market which is shared by others. And once that process sets into motion then it can go downhill really quick.
I think the same will apply here. At one time I let it slide when Google wanted to merge my Youtube account into a Google account, but that was as far as I went. I never provided my real name. Now I'm confronted with this Google+ thingie and it's just too much for me. I thought Microsoft's Soc.ial site (or whatever it was called) was bad, but this looks even worse.
SO I basically removed my google+ profile (after 1 day of non-usage) and now only use Youtube to look at some videos without the option to comment on them. Hardly something I'll be missing out on.
Something tells me I'm not the only one who did.
So how is Google going to make more revenue when people start paying less attention to their service?
Same will apply to Twitter I think. They need to up their revenue so what other options are there but advertising? But if you become too intrusive with that then people will most likely start using other stuff, and once your usage amounts drop so will your revenue.
I think this could make for some very interesting times.
For whatever reason I can no longer post any comments, which I rarely did anyway, so that's fine.
But what's more weird is when I try to, it asks me to sign in, then says my account is blocked. Yet as long as I just use the site as normal, I am not blocked. I can see my subs, my favourites, upload videos, the works.
But I can no longer comment at all. Oh well.
Basically, they broke the shit out of it. Then again, it seems to be Google's way these days - look at Google Maps on android, version 7 is a fucking disaster, thank christ someone had the newest version 6 APK. Does my head in when they change things and remove features for no end-user gain whatsoever.
The writing style of quite a few of the supportive Google commentators is similar to the point of being suspicious?
@ ShelLuser interesting what you have to say and I agree with you, I think many of the companies that provide so much of our internet content have become so overrun with corporate management, they have lost all semblance of the innovation and the innate sense of freedom that the web used to generate in people, and are now just looking to maintain ever increasing growth to keep their shareholders happy.
Sooner or later the bubble will burst for the current set of internet giants and they will be overtaken by new young upstarts with fresher approaches.
If the right new companies came along tomorrow and were able to provide the right kind of service, people would desert all of the old internet dinosaurs almost overnight.
As for phone numbers and names they have several of my old no longer existing numbers and names I thought up on the spur of the moment .
Keep up the good work Emma, just because something is free does not mean it has to be considered good and if it is not good there is no reason why something should not be said and listened to.
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