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So even Mark Zuckerberg has jumped ship, then?
Mark Zuckerberg, Google founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and a whole raft of Google's top brass have suddenly activated the privacy settings on their Google+ profiles. Even though they want you to expose your entire life to world+dog over the interwebs, they would rather not. The newly activated privacy settings has made it …
But isn't that supposedly one of its big points? And as privacy *is* a big feature that is being currently tested, should we be surprised that certain people wanna see if it works as advertised?
Who would follow Zuckerfuck, anyhow? I don't even believe he's a real person anyway.
And where did you hear that? If it was here, then you need to read the entire article and the comments to understand.
In case that's too difficult: If you created a gmail account in the past, you had the option to create a profile containing all sorts of personal information about yourself (but only if you added it - you could create a profile calling yourself "Santa Claus", "Master Toy Maker", "Number 1, Pole street, North Pole"). You further had the option to make this profile Public or Private. In the latter case, you were the only person who could read that info, which made it rather pointless.
This week, Google announced that they would soon delete all that data uploaded by users who won't let other users see it. This has no effect on anyone who never pointlessly created such a profile. You are still free to use Google services as before. If you have no profile, there is no change. If you have a public profile, there is no change. Only if you have a Google account, and spent long hours deciding how your private profile should look, despite the fact that only you can see it, then you need to do something.
I'd wager they are making the non-profiles public. As you so cleverly pointed out, an empty profile is currently a dis-positive or null, depending on your burden of proof choice. It only seems reasonable that the GOOG can make a null profile public without saying shit to anyone and if you then happen to populate your particular null, as it is a personal null after all, that it is now public. No, I don't know why one would choose to lick it at the pub but hey, it's their choice and if they aren't totally hot, I know another pub.
@nyelvmark, which completely misses the point. It appears that all these big-wigs are setting their profiles private and it was announced recently that private profiles would be deleted. So please explain what's going on (some of us aren't on Google+ yet and can't look at settings to see if you can have a "public" profile that gives no info (and then what's the difference between that and a private profile?)).
Google profile != Google+ profile
I for one haven't even bothered to create a google profile for my gmail account. If I understand it correctly, Google+ is a different service that is meant to be like Facebook, while you Google profile was just that, a profile attached to your google account.
don't take my word on it, I most likely am wrong.
Google mandates that you expose your full name and gender. Given that many people use their full name as their email address, this is spammers heaven. I, for one, will not join Google+ until I can limit the visibility of my profile to something smaller than 'world and dog'.
And I totally understand that having your profile deleted doesn't mean your Email etc gets deleted.
Yet it seems clear that google+ requires a profile to work and that said profile has to be public, hence my sarcasm.
In case that's too hard for you to understand, I'm pointing out the blatant hypocrisy.of requiring users google+ profiles be public under the pain of deletion while Google top brass sets theirs to private, YFM.
actually, according to another commenter (scroll down), this was glitch. If you access the links provided in this article, you will find those top brasses back in the list again.
so this might be a bug and not double standard
sadly.... none of them have any "friends".... hehehehheeeee
World-class cynic that I am, I cannot help but see this as an overt attempt by Google to lure the SEC (stock watchdogs) into a turf war with the FTC (anti-trust issues).
"We just can't be bothered with anti-trust right now because some rogue engineer only told insiders that the privacy of Google+ was shit when she should have told everybody, and that was wrong and our stock might plunge a dime or more any day now and for god's sakes won't someone think of the children, etc. etc. etc." or something like that.
Maybe it's just me.
"Yes - this was glitch that affected small number of people - those with very high followers and few people in their circles."
The above comment posted by +Vic Gundoltra in response to the post below by Danny Sullivan...
Danny Sullivan - 4:21 AM - Public
+Mark Zuckerberg is back, baby, top Google+ user with 166,000 followers. And +Vic Gundotra is back in the listings. So's +Larry Page, +Sergey Brin & +Matt Cutts. Was it just a glitch that caused all those profiles not to show followers? C'mon gang, none of you going to tell us what was going on?
...the old days when a mobile phone was a tool for important brief communication about business deals, meetings and people finding out what time you'd be back in the office?
Now it is largely a tool for lazy people on trains and buses to waste hours jabbering inane, boring chit-chat about what some mutual acquaintance is up to.
And now thanks to Facebook et al, the internet has gone the same way - from being largely useful to being largely used to waste time by bored people with no lives.
In a few years, they'll be able to waste hours of their meaningless lives with the same mind-numbing chit chat on super holographic 3d touchscreens.
Isn't technology grand.
Uh, what? Do you really, genuinely believe that the internet was all serious business before the current batch of social networks popped up? Like the iPhone did with smartphones, all they did was make it popular amongst non-techies. For reams of endless inane drivel, take a look at Livejournal. Even that is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it predates FB by years.
If I recall correctly, the wheelbarrow is a relative late-comer: wheels were originally used on carts, which require at least two of the things.
Don't quote me on it though: this is just my recollections from my school days.
(Incidentally, I remember a fellow pupil complaining about all the long and complicated words that we had to learn, and that we didn't nee them to be so big. The teacher replied, "Words like wheelbarrow, then?". I Still find it faintly amusing, but maybe that's just me.)
GK
You know that feeling you get when you go back to an old unsecured version of windows. It's slow, bits are broken, you don't quite understand why things are so unintuitive?
G+ feels like a new beginning, it is based on a strong security model, everything is shared via groups, when you loose the mindset of Facebook and understand that you know who will see your post the prospect of posting to FB is scary.