Google+, Facebook-, Tumblr0

Where I am on the web these days:

Still posting like dokken to Twitter, but find myself warming to Google+ as well. In many ways it does everything that LiveJournal was doing a decade ago, but with a far friendlier UI. Most everyone I know seems to be piling on in, too. It seems the best candidate for carrying LJ's torch forward.

Here's me on Google+. Feel free to encircle me as you will.

I have all but abandoned my Facebook account, and am likely to delete it later this year. I actively dislike Facebook for a number of reasons, privacy perhaps the least of them -- I find their attitude towards both their users and the rest of the internet cynical, exploitative and exasperating. Even if we don't wish to hang a halo on Google, their own new social network has already demonstrated their willingness and ability to be far better than Facebook in all these ways. I believe they want to deliver a service that's attractive and good for both Google and their users, and not just themselves.

I discovered last month that I created a tumblr four years ago and forgot about it. I started warming to it again, going so far as to make a long, experimental post to it. But with Google+ on the scene, I'll probably let it lie fallow again.

Google+-

As mmcirvin and hrafn note in comments on my previous post, Google has been acting capriciously about perceived TOS violations involving names. If they happen to see a name they find fishy -- or that fails a regex, or that gets tattled on by another user -- they immediately lock that user out of their account with no way to get at their data until Google wills them back in.

(I'm alarmed to wonder how deep this lockout goes, thinking of the case of this 10-year-old who permanently lost access to all his Gmail after filling in a Google+ sign-up form with his honest age -- to the shock of his parents, who approved of his joining them online. But I expect there'd be an even louder freakout if lots of people were losing their email archives en masse, so I read this as a tangential issue.)

Weak-willed and prone to distraction, I'm not the sort to leave a service I'm enjoying in protest (at least not very quickly). But I find the argument that real-name use is a privilege of those with privilege both novel and compelling, and Google's position against it troubling. It also makes me belatedly realize that Google's celebrated decision to let Plus users make their "Gender" field private is less helpful to those whose truenames -- which, according to Google, they are required to use and make public -- signify their gender.

Bleh. We'll see. I really am going to have egg on my face if I end up disgusted with Google+; this'll be the Nth stupid social thing I've allowed myself to flip out over and spam my friends about, only to wonder weeks later where all the shiny went. The only social networks I haven't felt this way over are Twitter and LiveJournal, and I note that in both cases I very gradually figured out why they were cool and how they could work for me.