Google Plus and YouTube

I guess because I was on vacation I sort of missed the big hullabaloo about Google moving to require YouTube users to sign on with a Google+ profile in order to leave comments. Either that or my mental filter saw that as non-news. I mean, it has been pretty obvious that there simply isn’t a tool that Google owns that won’t eventually require you to use a Google+ profile to access. They’ve made it abundantly clear that growing their own social network, at any cost, is the goal number 1 for Google right now, haven’t they?

Of course, now that I’ve seen some of the articles pointing out how much people hate it, and how Google actually made the comments section on Youtube worse (Wow, now that’s a feat!), I must say that I am surprised both by the people who didn’t see this coming, and Google’s own ignorance about their own social network.

It’s all well and good to assume that making people sign in using their Google+ profile would stem the tide of rude behavior and spam, since you can’t post anonymously any more, but Google apparently forgot to notice that Plus doesn’t actually police profiles that don’t use a real name. So creating a fake Plus profile, logging into it, and leaving ridiculous YouTube comments galore, is actually simple. Anyone can do it!

I suspect Google will correct this problem, especially in light of it’s desire to own your online identity and use all of the information gathered about you across all of it’s properties, to sell more targeting advertising. Of course, the correction might just eventually require us to prove our identity in order to use any of Google’s products. 😉

That will be fun to watch.

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