No, it wasn't. It was very simple. You want an account for youtube, sign up on youtube, you want an account for something else - sign up there. You want your accounts to be the same login across all the services? Use the same login across all the services.
It wasn't confusing, it wasn't complex, it didn't present any problems to anyone of even moderate intelligence.
> Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself?
It's not really optional when they start tying everything together. I don't want my real name tied to any of my online activities - but if my google accounts were stuck together through google+ it would be, because I use my real name on my phone.
It's possible to lie of course, and tell a different lie with a different email address for every time you want to limit the degree to which different portions of your data contaminate other things. But it's a pain in the arse and only realistically possible because they're not enforcing their single sign on policy that strongly yet.
They're made it far more complicated to keep your privacy than it was before.
If you want an anonymous Google account, simply create one, which is what everyone has been doing for a long time, even for gmail prior to G+, people would create multiple accounts.
The model isn't K identities and N services, you need O(K*N) credentials in the worse case. It's K identities and N services is O(K) credentials.
I did. I had to sign up with a "backup" email address though, for which I entered my primary email address. Now, whenever Gmail users send an email to my primary email address, they see the bogus name that I created the anonymous Google account with. Crap.
And Youtube, please stop asking me to use my "real" name. Is it that hard to remember my preferences?
I said it wasn't complicated, that's not the same thing as saying it's simpler.
What's simpler is going to depend to a high degree on your use of the system.
For instance, I do some work with disadvantaged people - charity/volunteer stuff - and some of the people who haven't touched a computer before cannot understand that the government won't be able to track them through their Universal Jobmatch accounts if they use other websites that don't use that sign on. For them, it probably is simpler to have one log on.
Taking myself as another example though, I'm obviously going to find it more complicated to manage alternate identities, that have to at least passingly sound real, to ensure my privacy than I did just not having my real name online at all and reusing some of the assorted user-names I used on other sites while using different email addresses to stop it all getting tied together.
It's a trade off - at least from a user perspective - what are you optimising for?
As I see it, you gain some small ease of understanding for people who have just never used a computer before, (and increase the penalty when they mess up and leave themselves signed in on a public computer, which they do .) And you get some small benefit if you want to change your email address across all the service (though how often does that happen - and how many services do you really use?) However, you make it more difficult for people to remain anonymous.
There's also the fact that a similar thing could have been done without tying everything through G+. Which of course they're not going to do because they want to force you to use it.
We're talking about marginal gains, in return for making things much harder for those of us who don't want our names floating about associated with all we do.
(That and I question whether it's a good idea to make people have one sign in for so many things anyway. Nanny-state-me is like 'That's a terrible idea, the only thing worse than a crap password is the same crap password for everything.' )
As it is now, you add your account to your Android phone, or Chrome single-sign-on and you're done.
G+ is Google's centralized system for single-sign-on and account profiles. It used to be confusingly distributed over multiple services, now it is unified. Oh, and it has a news feed associated on it at plus.google.com that you can totally ignore if you want.
Some of the reactions to this are way over the top. I guess I'm burning karma points by posting this, but it is an annoying trend.
The defense that you can only half-participate in g+ is not much of a defense because 1) people may not want to support changes of that sort with their patronage lest it continue as a trend, and/or 2) the thing being objected to was a forced escalation of participation - why would a user assume this would be the last and that half-participation in g+ will remain an option?
Edit: for comparison and openness's sake, my profile: https://plus.google.com/116103902550362700148/about
I have few qualms about sharing that, given that I know exactly what I've shared from there.
This seems to be a bit of an inverted perspective. The trend in Google's behavior seems to indicate its own "I'm taking my toys and going home" mindset. This is almost literally true: Google is telling people who are using their "toys" "either come to my house and play under my rules, or you don't get to play with that anymore."
> having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem.
How is this a "problem"? What about the many users who want to choose specific services a-la-carte, and not be forced into compromising their preferences with one type of service just to have access to their preferred solution for another?
"Unification" of services in this heavy-handed way is like Comcast telling its customers that if they want cable service, they have to get phone service from Comcast too, whether they want it or not.
As an example, there were cases of people losing access to Gmail after signing up for Google+ with a birthday that was too young to comply with the G+ TOS. Another example - it is fairly trivial to get an Adsense account suspended by using a script to commit click fraud against the target account. Similar things can be done to an ad-enabled Youtube channel. It's not outside the realm of possibility at all that a third party could cause you to lose access to your email account through one of these methods if your accounts are linked.
Google used to have a separate profile system just like profiles.yahoo.com, and like Yahoo, having lots of disparate services with weak unification was a problem. G+ is that unifying profile layer. Is it really beyond the pale for a service to prompt you to enter some optional information about yourself? Yes, optional, as in, I have hundreds of followers on G+ with obviously bogus profiles. You don't have to use G+'s social feed, you don't have to friend anyone.
I personally barely use Twitter or Facebook, mostly as single-sign-on to forums and other sites.