Ok so you hate google+. Well you don't hate it, you just don't use it very often. Like very often at all. More like, never at all. In fact, the only reason you have a google+ profile page is because google saddled your YouTube account with a linked google+ profile. A required google+ profile really. Bam! Just like that. 50 million more google+ profiles than there were the day before. Actually, it took a few months for google to flip all those Youtubers into nominal G-plussers too. But behold Wall Street, 50,000,000 new, verified, computer savvy, content providing, sharing, +1ing, social networking immigrants come to inhabit google+. 50 million goes a long ways towards making g+ More than just a weak FB done bitey style.
So you're saying to yourself, what do I care if I have a google+ profile? I'll never use it anyways...
Here's where the trouble starts. If your YouTube username was an alias, as countless millions were, your linked new google+ profile used a different name. Mainly your real life one. The name you may have provided google when they asked you to update your account info with your real identity in order to protect it. But that's not the half of it. A new YouTube channel is also created for you. With the same name as your brand new google+ profile. Why? Because google is auto-awesome?
So who are the plus plus pissed!?
Let's say there's a YouTube channel called 'titansibid' and you're a subscriber. But google knows John Tibidoe is the man who produces and films and uploads as 'titansibid' on YouTube. Google first creates a John Tibidoe google+ Profile page. It does this completely unsolicited by 'titansibid' of course. Next it creates the John Tibidoe YouTube channel. Mind you, all of this is being done inside the 'titansibid' account. So the John Tibidoe YouTube channel becomes the primary channel and public YouTube face for John instead of 'titansibid'. When poor John signs into YouTube with the titansibid account login he has used for years, he finds himself being asked if he wants to keep the 'titansibid' name or just change over to use his real name for all of google. Google of course, wants him to drop titansibid. But why? Just to prop up google +? What if John wants to keep the titansibid channel and use the name everyone knows him by? Easy. Simply create another google+ profile with the 'titansibid' name.
Confusing you I am? Imagine living through it. I'm still not sure why I have my real name on both sites since my gmail address reflects my original YouTube account/username. MazzyD626. But that's about to change. I'm cleaning up Google's mess. Sort of. But not right this second and maybe not even tomorrow either. But soon. Soon...
Google+ new 'Auto-Awesome' feature seen above.
(But only when viewed on google+)
A positive outcome of the plus plus pissed! morass...
In a desperate attempt to get people talking on google+, 'twas decided that YouTube comments on videos would be google+ comments. For awhile posters were given the choice whether to post the comments to google+ At all with the caveat that coming soon! One could not comment without a google+ profile. This change did produce some good in/for humanity in the digital age. YouTube comments used to be... Well, let's call them childish. I am not trying to insult children with this comparison. They were worse than childish. The problem? Anyone could create a username and post virtually anonymously anywhere on the entire YouTube website. The comments were ignorant, willfully and gleefully so. They were hateful, racist and mysoginistic. They were unintelligent, random, and dangerous too... Scammers and thieves proliferated, along with get rich quick schemes...links to viruses, even praise for 3 doors down could be found! if one comment out of ten was actually germane to the video that was a very very good ratio. If a thing could be misspelled, grammar free, hateful, offensive and try to rob you, it would be the quintessential YouTube comment of before. But By requiring a google plus profile to comment, people could not remain anons and most of the anons didn't have any desire to post with a public face. it is a 180° change for the better, most visibly by reducing the sheer number of new comments by tenfold. So kudos on that big G...But enough for one day about google plus. I'm fixing it.
