“Social networking service Google+ will be adding several much-requested new features by the end of the year, starting with the ability to integrate an existing Google Apps account into the service,” MacNN reports. “Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin explained that the rapid growth of the service, now at 40 million, had exceeded expectations with regards to their feature-rollout timetable, but the company was catching up to users’ demands.”
“The pair said that they thought they would have more time to integrate Google Apps accounts into the service, but that the fix would be live in ‘a matter of days,’ during their presentation earlier today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco,” MacNN reports. “Another such feature that Google is working on is a method of allowing pseudonyms, often called ‘handles’ or nicknames, within the service. Although the service has acquired a large userbase, activity levels appear to be far below that of rivals Facebook and Twitter proportionally speaking, perhaps due in part to the unpopular and selectively-enforced “real names” policy the company has adopted for user identification.”
Read more in the full article here.
Why are they even bothering?
Beware, they haven’t backed off on their “real name” requirements, they’re just going to let you use a pseudonym to the public.
Google still wants to be able to correlate your online and offline activities.
Worlds largest advertising company wants to advertise to you, and marketize your details to sell to others.
Who’d a thunk it?
The sillier thing is people who think *free* services like FaceBook and MySpace don’t record and mine their activities for profit. Just how did that Zuckerberg fella make his millions anyway?? Say what you will about Apple’s policies, but as a premium hardware seller, data mining for revenue is thankfully not one of their interests.
40 million people, and I wonder how many are actually talking to people they know. I have a G account, and not only do I only know one person on there, but I have no idea how you’re supposed to use it. Its functionality is so convoluted to me I just can’t figure it out.
Most everyone I know is on the thing.
It seems to have just exploded overnight.
I find it pretty straight forward to use myself.
BS. Next.
Did not Schmidt say that G+ is not a social network, but an identity service?
Why all of sudden pseudonyms?