I'd like to think that Google Plus/Hangouts/etc will go down as one of the biggest bungles social networking, but thankfully we have things like Digg and MySpace to point to for worse.
If any start-up or other smaller business had screwed up this badly, they would be bankrupt. Google survives this only because it's not their main revenue source.
I used to be a big Google fanboy, and I still buy Android stuff because it's the biggest OSS platform in its space.
But Google has fallen. Not because they're spying on us, not because they're "evil" or something, but because they suck at the big moves. They're scatterbrained and clumsy and they screw up incessantly. And then defend the obviously-bad decisions as "user error" when their platform is obviously inscrutable for users.
I just set up my wife with a fresh android phone and the process was miserable. There were days of it asking her to register for Plus ("I thought I already had a Plus account") or install some Maps support gadget ("I thought I already had Maps") and tedious errors. It all worked out in the end, but it was not a good user experience.
Google never planned to "out" this woman. That's the thing to remember. Google never sat down and said "we want to expose every transperson". They just screwed up. Because they suck. They ask repeatedly permission for dumb things that don't need permission, and then they wander over and make clumsy, grotesque changes without considering the consequences.
The whole "Social Layer" thing was a great idea, really. Google needed a Disqus-like platform to integrate across all their services.
But they completely dropped the ball on implementation. It's too opinionated about things it shouldn't be. If you're running a single site, you can be opinionated and say "Real Names Please". If you're running a framework you need to let the users and page-owners set the agenda.
If any start-up or other smaller business had screwed up this badly, they would be bankrupt. Google survives this only because it's not their main revenue source.
I used to be a big Google fanboy, and I still buy Android stuff because it's the biggest OSS platform in its space.
But Google has fallen. Not because they're spying on us, not because they're "evil" or something, but because they suck at the big moves. They're scatterbrained and clumsy and they screw up incessantly. And then defend the obviously-bad decisions as "user error" when their platform is obviously inscrutable for users.
I just set up my wife with a fresh android phone and the process was miserable. There were days of it asking her to register for Plus ("I thought I already had a Plus account") or install some Maps support gadget ("I thought I already had Maps") and tedious errors. It all worked out in the end, but it was not a good user experience.
Google never planned to "out" this woman. That's the thing to remember. Google never sat down and said "we want to expose every transperson". They just screwed up. Because they suck. They ask repeatedly permission for dumb things that don't need permission, and then they wander over and make clumsy, grotesque changes without considering the consequences.
The whole "Social Layer" thing was a great idea, really. Google needed a Disqus-like platform to integrate across all their services.
But they completely dropped the ball on implementation. It's too opinionated about things it shouldn't be. If you're running a single site, you can be opinionated and say "Real Names Please". If you're running a framework you need to let the users and page-owners set the agenda.