

Google+ opens to teens, launches youth safety features - turing
https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/hvXAqqHTkZe

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munchor
Finally. Google+ without teenagers made it very weak against other social
networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Teenagers love social networks, they are their most avid users, Google+ should
have accepted teenagers much sooner.

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joshuahedlund
So now instead of college kids complaining about an influx of teenagers
(Facebook), we can have technology enthusiasts complaining about an influx of
teenagers! The "what's hot" section has less of a tech bias than it used to
already, but I wonder what it will look like in a month.

~~~
karpathy
The what's hot section is just as lazy and useless as Twitter trending topics.
I almost never find globally hot topics hot. Twitter occasionally has some
semi-relevant content there, but Google+ hot topics are dominated by funny
pictures and gifs. I can only see this problem growing further as a result of
these changes.

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itcmcgrath
This seems like a problem that is just asking to be solved. I've thought of
this before: Just like you can use Location to affect what topics are hot for
you, if they could determine a way to select area of interest to filter them
it might prove useful once again.

I'm sure it isn't a trivial thing to solve; but not impossible.

~~~
kalleboo
Google may already have determined your interests via their Ad profiling. They
got me pretty spot-on, you can see what they've pinned you down as liking at
<http://www.google.com/ads/preferences>

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aestetix
Yeah, because teens would never lie about their age to get around stupid
restrictions.

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jrockway
It's a legal wording of an implicit social contract. When Google says, "you
can't use our service if you are under 18", they mean, "you can't blame us for
showing your kid porn".

It's the same reason illegal drugs are illegal. When you overdose, the
government doesn't have to spend any money investigating why you got
contaminated drugs.

~~~
batista
Actually, that's not the case at all.

Illegal drugs are huge money makers for lots of people, countries and
organizations (both selling them AND fighting against them).

Although, the initial historical reason they got illegal in the first places
is because of some moral-style campaigns and a lot of ill-informed medical
opinions (along with a few correct ones).

~~~
DanBC
Please ignore drug related thread de-railings. Thank you.

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tzs
If Google wants Google+ to actually become a serious contender, they need to
make it friendly for mobile.

1\. Make it compatible with iPad. I generally don't even try to follow links
to Google+ when I'm on my iPad, as if the page has anything more than a
handful of comments, it will almost surely run the browser out of memory and
cause it to exit.

2\. Make their mobile app understand Google+ URLs. I wanted to read a Google+
link that was submitted to HN yesterday, so I actually clicked it in the hope
it hadn't gotten too big. It had. After pointlessly trying four times, I
copied the link, and then I went and downloaded their Google+ app, opened
it...and discovered it had no way that I could find to give it a link to a
Google+ page and have it display it!

~~~
laconian
Re: point #2, IIRC on iOS devices this isn't possible. I believe that Apple
allows third parties to register pseudo-protocols ("myapp://<content-id>"),
but doesn't allow apps to receive links for certain patterns of HTTP URLs.

~~~
tzs
I was a bit unclear. I wasn't complaining that the Google+ app could not
somehow intercept my attempt to open a Google+ URL.

My complaint is that I had copied the URL, and wanted to paste it into the
Google+ app, and have it display the content. That is something under the
control of the app.

~~~
ajross
Sorry, but any requirement of the form "copy X and paste it into Y" cannot
reasonably be considered as a "required to be a serious contender" feature for
a mobile OS. Only the most serious of users have any clue how to do editing at
the level of clipboard functionality.

And regardless: can you do that with Facebook app? I don't see how with the
Android app in front of me.

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kalleboo
More importantly, this finally means that Google+'s Big Push into Japan -
their collaboration with J-pop megagroup AKB48 - can be completed, as before
most of the members were too young for their own accounts (man, giving over
100 girls Nexus Ss can't be that cheap...)

<https://plus.google.com/117147321771860727748>

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magicofpi
I wonder what this could mean for using Google+ in the classroom – perhaps
teachers could post links in a circle exclusively for the students in their
class, and allow students to comment and discuss those links. Also, on a
hangout, students could more easily collaborate on group projects, especially
if they use Google Docs.

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benjlang
Most teens don't care about privacy, what they want is to be wherever all of
their friends are (i.e. Facebook.) G+ probably isn't that place yet, but maybe
one day...

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webwanderings
They are so totally afraid of Facebook-World taking over the Internet. It is
as if nothing else exist on the Internet besides Google and Facebook. What a
terrible days these are to be on the net.

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ergo14
But you do understand that this fear is legitimate? Facebook is the only
company that currently can challenge Google in ad serving and knows EVERYTHING
about it's users ? There is nothing weird in fact that google wants to fight
back.

~~~
webwanderings
Well, they have all the rights to fight-back, but is that good for the users?

Between Google, Facebook and Apple, our lives on the Internet is pretty much
owned by these corporations, and then you have government getting
uncomfortable.

~~~
ergo14
I believe it is - Seeing that I completly ditched facebook for g+, it was with
benefit for me. I don't know anything about you, but I have all my android
phone contacts backed up in separate file, I use gmail, but I'm not really
mail dependant - I would run my own mailbox if the need would arise. Except
search I don't really think I would notice if Google or Facebook or any other
Internet giant disappear tommorow(ok, i know long term effects - but short
term my life would go on)- social sites are just a nice addition, but I would
do perfectly fine without them - just as I did before they appeared ;-) But if
you are concerned about your life being owned by corporation think about
improving your ways so you don't have to worry about issues like this. I would
hate to live in a world and use internet where one company has monopoly to
everything, best way to archive that is just not getting yourself too
dependant on it.

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laconian
The September that never ended.

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brudgers
Google now encouraging teens to share personal information online - trajectory
officially becomes asymptotic to the creepy line.

~~~
MBlume
Teens are humans. Iff encouraging humans to share personal information online
was creepy before, it's creepy now. All this changes is that they're not
unfairly discriminating.

Well, they're still unfairly discriminating against those under 13, but
congress is forcing their hand on that one.

