On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sunday 12 Aug 2012 19:52:26 Michael Mol wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Frank Steinmetzger <war...@gmx.de>
> wrote:
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > > PS @Michael Mol: it is nice for you that you joined Google+ recently,
> but
> > > are
> > > you aware that they scanned your address book and spammed around about
> > > it? There are some of us who don’t want to be part of any social
> moloch.
> >
> > No, they didn't crawl my address book, or do anything of the sort.
> >
> > On Google+, I follow people who I believe (or at least suspect) to be
> > intelligent or knowledgeable in technical fields. That includes everyone
> on
> > the gentoo-user and gentoo-dev mailing lists; you folks are among the
> > highest grade of computer and software geeks I've come across.
> >
> > In the GMail web interface, there's a pane on the right which shows
> people
> > involved in the conversation. While reading Gentoo-related threads, if I
> > see people listed there that I haven't added to my 'Technical folk'
> circle,
> > I add them. I _thought_ it was only showing people who already had Google
> > accounts.
> >
> > Apparently, that last presumption isn't true...and as a consequence,
> when I
> > add people to my list-of-people-to-watch, Google sends them an invite if
> > they don't already have Google accounts. Apologies for any spam, but
> > understand that I have no clear way of knowing whether or not someone
> has a
> > Google+ account before I add them; people who don't have them simply show
> > up as 'this person hasn't shared anything with you.'
>
> When I received your Google+ invite I thought that Google was taking
> liberties
> with your actual intentions and spamming your contacts perhaps.
>
> I do have and use a gmail account for this list, but I do not (knowingly)
> partake in social websites like Google+, Buzz,  Facebook & Twitter.  I also
> use Gtalk for IM, but as far as I know by using Gmail and Gtalk I am not
> automatically subscribed to Google+ and the like.
>

The whole situation is muddy, and I'm not always sure I understand it
myself.

If you have an account with any Google service, you have a 'Google Account'
which you can use to sign into any other Google service. At one point,
simply having this account meant you were also on Google+, Google Docs,
etc. More recently, though, it seems that a first visit to any of these
services is required in order to activate that service on your Google
account. (This only became clear to me recently, as a new client uses
Google Apps for Domains, which means I now have a Google account for
personal use, and a Google account tied to that client. It's strange.)

It used to be, you only had a Google account if you had a GMail
account...but they've since enabled tying Google accounts to other email
addresses.


>
> PS.  What does "people to watch" do?  It sounds rather voyeuristic ...  O_o
>

Here's how I understand it, currently:

If you have Google+ enabled on your Google account, just about anything you
might do that involves Google becomes eligible for sharing. By default,
almost nothing you do is visible to anybody; you have to explicitly make
things visible to people, or otherwise modify defaults in settings
somewhere. AFAIK, the only things that are public by default are the '+1'
buttons sprinkled everywhere, and the 'Like' buttons associated with
Youtube videos.

Places I frequently see 'share this' options associated with Google are:
* Youtube videos
* Google Reader (+1 and 'share this' replaced 'like' and 'share with
friends')
* The "+ Share" box at the top right corner of all Google pages.

In short, I only see stuff you guys do if you explicitly choose to make it
public. (Or if you create a 'circle' of whitelisted individuals you can
make specific things viewable to.)

-- 
:wq

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