On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday 12 Aug 2012 19:52:26 Michael Mol wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > PS @Michael Mol: it is nice for you that you joined Google+ recently, but
> > are
> > you aware that they scanned your address book and spammed around about
> > it? There are some of us who don’t want to be part of any social moloch.
>
> No, they didn't crawl my address book, or do anything of the sort.
>
> On Google+, I follow people who I believe (or at least suspect) to be
> intelligent or knowledgeable in technical fields. That includes everyone on
> the gentoo-user and gentoo-dev mailing lists; you folks are among the
> highest grade of computer and software geeks I've come across.
>
> In the GMail web interface, there's a pane on the right which shows people
> involved in the conversation. While reading Gentoo-related threads, if I
> see people listed there that I haven't added to my 'Technical folk' circle,
> I add them. I _thought_ it was only showing people who already had Google
> accounts.
>
> Apparently, that last presumption isn't true...and as a consequence, when I
> add people to my list-of-people-to-watch, Google sends them an invite if
> they don't already have Google accounts. Apologies for any spam, but
> understand that I have no clear way of knowing whether or not someone has a
> Google+ account before I add them; people who don't have them simply show
> up as 'this person hasn't shared anything with you.'

When I received your Google+ invite I thought that Google was taking liberties
with your actual intentions and spamming your contacts perhaps.

I do have and use a gmail account for this list, but I do not (knowingly)
partake in social websites like Google+, Buzz, Facebook & Twitter. I also
use Gtalk for IM, but as far as I know by using Gmail and Gtalk I am not
automatically subscribed to Google+ and the like.

The whole situation is muddy, and I'm not always sure I understand it myself.

If you have an account with any Google service, you have a 'Google Account' which you can use to sign into any other Google service. At one point, simply having this account meant you were also on Google+, Google Docs, etc. More recently, though, it seems that a first visit to any of these services is required in order to activate that service on your Google account. (This only became clear to me recently, as a new client uses Google Apps for Domains, which means I now have a Google account for personal use, and a Google account tied to that client. It's strange.)

It used to be, you only had a Google account if you had a GMail account...but they've since enabled tying Google accounts to other email addresses.

PS. What does "people to watch" do? It sounds rather voyeuristic ... O_o

Here's how I understand it, currently:

If you have Google+ enabled on your Google account, just about anything you might do that involves Google becomes eligible for sharing. By default, almost nothing you do is visible to anybody; you have to explicitly make things visible to people, or otherwise modify defaults in settings somewhere. AFAIK, the only things that are public by default are the '+1' buttons sprinkled everywhere, and the 'Like' buttons associated with Youtube videos.

Places I frequently see 'share this' options associated with Google are:

* Youtube videos

* Google Reader (+1 and 'share this' replaced 'like' and 'share with friends')

* The "+ Share" box at the top right corner of all Google pages.

In short, I only see stuff you guys do if you explicitly choose to make it public. (Or if you create a 'circle' of whitelisted individuals you can make specific things viewable to.)