Good that I wasn't stupid enough...
...to sign up for Plus then, isn't it?
Google is continuing its efforts to make anonymous posts on its services a thing of the past by forcing customers wishing to leave product reviews on its recently overhauled Android Marketplace online shop - now dubbed Play - to do so with their real name. When punters attempt to leave reviews for individual products on the …
I have not left any reviews yet, now I know I never will. I don't have Google+ and got no need for Google+. i know that Google want more people to use Google+, but the way they are going about it may get less people using other services.
The only reason i have a Gmail account is so I can sync my contacts to my phone, but if I go for a different Os in my phone next year I will cancel all my google accounts.
Not sure what you mean about you tube mind you, I use You Tube and got a you tube account, but I still don't have a google+ account.
While they do have Game Center and iMessage, neither are full social networks. They did have Ping, which was a full social network, but this did not succeed and was shut down. However, in all three cases, signing up for them is optional.
You do not have to sign up for any of those services to be able to write reviews (or access other Apple services). You do need an Apple ID, and while this does need an email address, you do not have to sign up for an Apple email address.
So, in short, yes, they do considerably less of this sort of thing than Google.
Microsoft is also trying from time to time to persuade you to use your real name in their Live services (now "Microsoft ID") but are much less intrusive.
So far the major change is that you can no longer have single word names, you need 2. So instead of being ShelLuser I'm now ShelLuser on MSN. Simple and to the point ;-)
Apart from that MS only sends you an email sometimes. Google otoh... Every once in a while they come up with annoying popup banners the very moment I try to comment on a video.. "ARE you sure you don't rather want to use your own name?". time and time again.
Google is much more oppressive and intrusive here.
Microsoft will only let you comment on stuff in the Microsoft store using your live credentials. I just installed windows 8 and wanted to comment/rate/slam some of the TIFKAM apps. As soon as it wanted me to log in I stopped.
By the way, TIFKAM sucks, but it was easy to bypass all that. After a few hours of tweaking, I am starting to like 8.
Youtube are pestering users to use their real name instead of screenname in certain areas.
You can still tell them to sod off for a number of reasons, such as your channel representing an organisation or being known primarily by your screenname (your tobuscuses, pewdiepies - shudder - and such). There is an option to decline but I'm not sure how long this'll remain a choice given this news.
"I think that, at least for now, I managed to click the right places to keep it."
You want the button labelled "I don't want to use my full name". It appears on a large dialog which asks you (not Google) to decide if you want to be anonymous or use your real name. There are only 2 buttons to press, so they could hardly be accused of making it difficult for you.
It seems that more and more Google products are trying to push people into Google+
Every time I login to Youtube it bugs me about setting up a Google+ account and it seems like the same for the play store and who knows what else.
Google are not good at making services. They're good at buying existing well-performing services and giving them away for free with ads pushed on people. Google+ sucks.
Bit of ironic isn't it ?
In the beginning Microsoft also weren't very good at doing stuff themselves, instead they used their money to purchase other firms and incorporated them into their own products. Sometimes these others were competitors which also provided commercial based solutions, so the 'damage' for the public was minimal. Other times they ended firms which did provide stuff for free, that used to suck pretty bad.
Google claimed to do "no evil" and somewhat show how it "should be done". Now look where we are....
Personally I'd rather have Microsoft in comparison to Google. Not because they're less evil or such than Google, but because they never made it a secret about it how they operated. Google otoh...
"perceived" improvement being the important difference. The more organisations like Google insist of sucking data off me that is none of their business, the more I will oblige them with crap data. The skill is in making the data plausible enough for it not to attract attention, or be worth ferreting out.
So all Google are doing here is making sure what decent data they have is bulked up with garbage, and they'll never be able to separate the two.
This requires a concerted trolling effort.
"John Smith" is a real name, right? Quite a popular name in the UK, too.
I think it could be rather amusing to see Google kicking people out for calling themself "John Smith" when their real name is, err, "John Smith".
That is unless anybody else has any better trolls?
But even if you use a fake nonsensical name Google can link your real name, address etc from the payment card you use when you buy an app. If Google decide to force user's linked real names to reviews to screw more profit out of its user base I will delete all of my google accounts and either go direct to the dev or do without.
Not sure about other countries, but in the UK it's very easy to visit the gift card section of Tesco or similar and buy either a Visa or Mastercard. You're then prompted to activate the card via a site like this, or via an 0870 number, and they don't seem to be too particular about what details you give them.
"http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2651410
Smart ass poster busted by reality."
From that link:
"If you’re having trouble making a purchase on Google Play with a gift/prepaid card, contact the entity that issued the card to ensure that it’s enabled for use to purchase digital goods."
So there are prepaid cards that you can use, but not necessarily all of them. If his card is enabled to purchase digital goods that link says he could very well have used it to buy stuff on google play.
Might be a good idea to prevent google linking to your real details (too late for me unfortunately).
Hopefully you are right. Unfortunately I think it is more likely they transparantly sign you up somehow.
(All it will do for me is just I won't write any reviews.)
They are getting more and more annoying by the day. (Needing a credit card to get Google Music was the last irritation prior to this).
On the other hand, people leaving fake bad/good reviews for whatever reason is also important. In some cases (say Tripadvisor) it could potentially sink your business if a few people decided you were their target for the week.
A real review of a real product by a real person is not too bad IMO - reviews are not the same as YouTube comments.
So now app authors that get negative reviews can attack the people who left the reviews? How in any way is this a good idea? There have been numerous occasions where organisations that have had negative reviews go after the reviewers. This just encourages the practice, and will decrease the quality of the reviews as people are going to be less likely to be critical.
Um, that's a pretty silly point. The whole point is that software people are good at making software, not good at making business decisions or doing marketing or customer service or UX design...
Software created only by software people with no input from anyone else is one of the reasons open-source retains a bad reputation... applications which are tremendously powerful but entirely unintuitive!
@jdk - i think the point being made is that marketing people are generally clueless in any domain. I can attest from personal experience that marketing people have an almost pathalogical desire to collect information on customers/users irrespective of any plausible use and in defiance of common sense. On the occasions where I have challenged this, the reponse is that they want to build a relationship with the customer - this is (in our specific case) almost certainly a desire not shared by the customer.
"Yes, Google now require you need a Plus account, to leave an app review."
Not in Australia (at this point anyhow) - I left a review after I read your comment to test it...
I hope it stays that way, otherwise google are gonna have a G+ profile full of utter garbage!
Bad news for people employed by Microsoft and Apple to write shit reviews hiding under anonymous cloaks.
Surely ALL reviews should have real names against them (be it Hotel, Movie or App) , as you woud have to be a fuckin idiot to believe what some random anonymous person on the internet said.
Anonymous bloggers in certain circumstances (e.g. political) may depend upon Google to maintain their anonymity to avoid being rounded up by the local Gestapo, tortured, and their mutilated body dumped into a shallow grave. Making links from one Google service to another, EXACTLY AS CAN HAPPEN WITH Google+ (*), may be a life and death matter for some. And at least an unwanted connection.
(* For example, images posted to an anonymous blog being suddenly featured prominently on the hapless user's public-facing Google+ page.)
I sense a multi-billion dollar lawsuit coming out of this sooner or later, by those affected or perhaps the families of the deceased.
The solution to the problem you propose is not to use Google services when blogging, maintain mulitple accounts or, and I realise the Google men will track me down, torture me, and dump my mutilated body in shallow grave for even suggesting it, use a pseudonym?
What Google is doing is not great for a number of reasons, but aiding the torture and mutilation of of these anonymous bloggers is not one of them as anyone in that situation is going to be using a modicum of common sense to avoid detection in the first place and signing up for a service using your real name when you intend to piss off the shadowy powers that be is, well, asking for trouble.
Problem being is that they (Google) are changing the rules as they go. One might have a lengthy blog with many embedded images. It's a bit late, years later, to go back in time and do things differently.
Transfer to the whole fricken blog to Wordpress I guess. Problem being is that the transfer process tends to crap out after a few hundred posts. It'll still take weeks of effort to scrub the images. Bloody fiasco.
I figure this is all part of Google's official "Make Apple Look Good For A Change" Policy.
Google are becoming increasingly aggressive about sucking personal data out of people using their services. I'm locked out of my YouTube account because they insist on me coughing up a mobile number in order to access the account. I don't own a mobile and they can fuck off on general principles anyway.
Of more concern is the Google app store...it just won't talk to you unless you register your Android device with the store and disturbingly often that is the only place you can get an app. I don't want to register a device with the app store because Google have a long track record of abusing personal info...I just don't want to play that game.
Yeah, it's their money and their bat and ball...but I really don't like the idea of dependence upon what is essentially a hostile power.
Android Pit.
IIRC, you don't even have to trust them with your credit card details like Google. Being owned by Google is the downside of Android, The trouble is we need Maps and the Google basics. The one non-G android device I had I hacked until it would run the stupidly named play.