Personally, I went with "Yes", to see what the service is like, after first checking that I could back-out later if I wanted.
But it did make me think; what sort of response would you get from a girl if you asked her out for a date - but only allowed her to answer "yes" or "maybe"? Probably something resembling "never" :)
I imagine the eventual response would be a legally enforceable restraining order and/or a harassment lawsuit, and if you continued to hassle her after that, it would be jail time.
Someone at Google might want to consider how poorly unwanted intrusions into people's lives are generally regarded in other contexts, and therefore how likely this approach is to work a long-term business strategy. After all, no-one has to do anything as dramatic as filing suit or calling the police to remove Google from their lives.
But lots of forums (from the original "Joel on Software" and many others) have encouraged use of real names as a way to keep things civil. Same reason newspapers require "letters to the editor" to be signed. And YouTube comments could stand a little cleansing.
All that said, their "one account for all of Google" thing is really a PITA. I have several Google accounts that I use for entirely different purposes. One is for a project at work. One is for a non-profit that I help manage. One is my personal gmail. I don't want to mingle those, and I want a way to tell Google to stop asking me to do it. For now I try to remember to launch a new incognito/private browser session any time I access these services. At this point I'm NOT going to use Google services for any new projects/organizational purposes, and I am on the lookout for alternatives that provide what I need (mainly online docs, email, and listserv-like email groups) without all the annoyances.
Integrated Google identity is harder to spoof if you use real id in any other part of the systen
Usually I wouldn't mind unified application, but I've lost trust in Google. I expect them to use dirty tricks to make me accidentally send Google+ messages instead of SMS.
Hangouts is cool, it lacks some features of the old SMS app like notification bar options. That's annoying, features shouldn't be stripped like that.
The Messaging app has always dealt with SMSs, Hangouts replaced the google talk app, which never did SMS integration because it was supposed to be a chat client for google's network. The strategy's changed, and so there's this transition period.
http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1qtk69/
http://web.archive.org/web/20131114164356/http://www.zdnet.c...
The trick I used to 'liberate' people who were fed-up with the Google sync was to change the account password from a PC using the web interface when the phone was turned-off.
Then boot the phone and the account sync will error-out; at this point you should be able to delete the account from the phone.
Just today I received a message from Google Hangouts on my Android, asking me if I want Hangouts to manage my SMS messages. The 2 available answers were:
For everything they ask these days, those are the only 2 available answers. And you just know that if you won't accept willingly, they'll just shove it down your throat sooner or later.Right now my trust in them is being eroded and fast. I'm already thinking of completely deleting my entire Google account and switching to alternatives. Google, if you're listening to this, just stop it.