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Thursday, April 18, 2013

What Google Giveth, Common Sense Taketh Away

This afternoon I jumped on the opportunity to integrate G+ comments with my blog's comments. It was like peanut butter and chocolate, or so I thought.

My impression was that it allowed comments to the blog and to G+ to be mutually accessible. What I didn't realize it really made both sides G+ commenting only - no G+ profile, no comments can be left.

The idea was good in theory, but the implementation is horrid. I have a blog so that people can share their thoughts about my thoughts. I allow comments from everyone but "anonymous posters", because those fuckers are either spammers or worse, and I have no desire to be constantly weeding my blog garden of such.

G+ integration of comments has been turned off.

I need to thank +Dyson Logos for bringing this to my attention. Maybe later on down the line, Google will get it right and we'll try this all over again.

In the meantime, feel free to comment to your heart's content ;)

5 comments:


  1. Isn't everyone supposed to end up on G+ anyway. I know I used to get a notice when you started up G+ and posted something, but that seems to have gone away. Something is still working because my email was buried under posts from the G+ swords and wizardry forum.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Erik, for pointing this out. Agreed this is not what I thought - a consolidation rather than replacement.

      Delete
  2. Good call. Rereading the wording of the email, it's fairly ambiguous about that downside. It's just lucky people can turn it off again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank goodness.

    Jason's probably right that Google is trying to wall of its part of the internet; these sorts of integrations across services are going to become more prevalent. Killing off Google Reader is obviously a push to get more people to join Google+ and keep track of stuff by Circles.

    The problem, of course, is that eventually Google+ will be like Facebook, where the majority of content is locked behind an account. What't the point of a blog if this happens? Google+ turns into IM with profiles, that's all.

    It's a smart business move on Google's part, but as long as we have choices we should exercise those choices. I'm a Mac user, but I'm not slavish in my devotion to the point that I ONLY use Apple products. Getting locked in to a particular format or a particular service traps your stuff behind a wall that is almost impossible to emerge from.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I tried it for less than a day; it seemed like comments made in G+ migrated to the blog and disappeared from the G+ post. no good.

    ReplyDelete

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