Boingers on Google+

If you're using Google+, you can find a number of Boing Boing contributors there. Maggie Koerth-Baker, Rob Beschizza, Dean Putney, Mark Frauenfelder, and Xeni Jardin, for starters. When Google+ rolls out support for businesses and organizations, you'll be able to find Boing Boing there, too.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: G+ • google • google plus • googleplus

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

http://clarinerd617.myopenid.com/ Henry Goodwin

aaaand of course, I’m sharing this to facebook…
Nnaemeka Nwosu

Great! Where’s Senor Doctorow?
- http://pineappledonut.org Lachlan Musicman
  
  You really expected him on g+? Do you read his posts? Listen to his podcasts? I couldn’t imagine him with a gmail account, let alone a g+ account…
http://twitter.com/chris23 chris arkenberg

The enigmatic David Pescovitz remaining resolutely, um, enigmatic. ;)
Cowicide

Is Google+ better than Facebook? If so, how so? Just wondering.
- Alvis
  
  Nope, it’s also one of these “social” sites where the idea is to make yourself look cool. It’s a lot of work to keep up with.
Webbie Webbster

There’s no Doctorow…? Nonplussed…
- Cowicide
  
  Now here comes the data….
  
  http://www.singlegrain.com/wp-content//2011/07/FacebookvsGoogleplus-lg.jpg
Maggie Koerth-Baker

Cowcide, I’m liking it because it allows me to form more coherent thoughts on some subjects than Twitter, but allows me to control who I’m sharing what with better than Facebook. It doesn’t necessarily do anything new, but it does do some old things in a nicer way.
Antinous / Moderator

Wow. Rob has more hair than all the Weasleys combined.
- PlutoniumX
  
  It’s like a magnificent protective ginger helmet!
Mark LaPete

I’m very surprised Google is engaging in social media in such a lame, mild-mannered “toe-in-the-water” way: Not Bold, not entrepreneurial. I’ve been an early adopter of all things Google, and maybe I am a bit miffed at not getting an invitation yet, but like Groucho perhaps I would never join a club that would have me as a member anyway! Google corporate culture’s too cautious to succeed at this. They need to loosen up, become risk-takers again.
- Brainspore
  
  When Google first jumped into the search engine wars part of what made them stand out was that they had a pretty simple, slimmed-down aesthetic compared to the competitors. I think this follows their pattern: they start by getting really good at the simple stuff before piling on a bunch of features people may not use anyway.
invictus

There seems to be a rather active debate going on (at least in my corner of the interwebs) about pseudonymity and privacy, and how Google does and does not support these on G+. Would the Boingers (who, unsurprisingly, are using their real names as far as we know) be willing to weigh in on the subject?
petsounds

It’s amazing to me how many techies have fallen over themselves getting Google+ accounts. Some sort of reality distortion field has been activated. I can’t otherwise explain why a group of people who are pretty savvy in terms of privacy and Bad Things would gladly give a company, who already knows a ton about their web habits and sometimes their e-mail correspondences, all of their family and friend relationship structure and interactions. Google even got them to classify these social relationships into discrete buckets! And the Faithful argue, “But petsounds, Google+ has such better privacy controls! And Google Does No Evil!”

…Right. And the reason Google is forcing you to use a real name is because they value your privacy? Your boss seeing photos of your Norse Mythology Dance Party should be the least of your concerns. The prospect of Google having its eyes in almost every aspect of your web exploits, and their ability to link that with other databases, is frankly frightening. I’m sure a few three-letter agencies would love to get their hands on this data. IMO this is a new kind of monopoly we’re witnessing. A data monopoly.

somewhat OT: BoingBoing staff still haven’t responded to their violation of the privacy policy here, in which they handed over all of our e-mail addresses to a third-party.
- http://twitter.com/ycleptShawn Shawn Thompson
  
  Wait, you mean handing over our email to Disqus? If so, come on…you’re calling foul on that? Stop it.
  - petsounds
    
    Read the privacy policy (you’ll have to go to archive.org). In summary, they stated they wouldn’t give any identifiable info to third parties. Disqus is a third party. E-mail addresses are personally identifiable. So, the policy was violated, without any opt-out mechanism. What Disqus, or whoever buys them, does with the info is beside the point.
thebelgianpanda

I am already following Xeni (loved the cat gifs), but the real question is why isn’t she following me?! :D

on the whole G+ vs. FB: in my opinion google wins by way of the extreeeemely important point that they are not trying to create a second, walled off internet like FB. Yes, I have concerns, but when it comes down to it if google can’t make FB irrelevant, we will all suffer in the future.
David Pescovitz

Wait, what’s Facebook?
Andy Austin

Hmm, what happened to the ‘intern’ account? Disappeared.
- http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin
  
  Andy, keep up, dude! That’s like so 5 days ago. I wrote about it extensively on G+. We decided it was silly to keep it up and took it down.
- anahole
  
  And thankfully so! I had set Jackhammer Jill to follow and every other post made by everyone else in my circles was dwarfed by Boing Boing reposts, sometimes a minute to two minutes apart.
  
  The “intern” could have been so much more than just a Facebook or Twitter knockoff of news reposts (which I had to stop following those as well because of constant spam and little response from Boing Boing about how they are the only one I followed who had those issues).
Jeremy Wilson

Too bad those of us using Google Apps can’t play in the sandbox. I got tons of invites but my two main email addresses are Gmail for Business accounts, which aren’t supported.

Kind of bad planning on Google’s part I think.
Cowicide

Wow… Google+ -Privacy

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/wham-bam-google-ban-no-pseudonyms-google-plus

Surprised Boing Boing wants to support this thing. Sounds pretty draconian to me. Reminds me of what the EFF said about google…

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy
http://profiles.google.com/eaglescout1984 Ivan Herndon

I don’t have a smart phone and this is another new thing I don’t have. I guess I’m just dead to the technologically connected masses.