Google+ (And, no, I can't invite you... yet)

Dateline: "This link might upset you"

Or maybe I just don't know how to do an invite? I've read they opened up the gates again sometime last night, but I only read that this morning.

Some sources are calling it the "stealth roll-out." Not sure I buy that, but it's what they're saying. Three paragraphs and I haven't gotten to the point? What's this world coming to?

We're talking about Google+, or I am.

Most of my real-world friends and acquaintances aren't quite on it yet, unless they work for or work with Google in some heavy way. On the other hand, in a sense they are, at least those whose e-mail addresses I've managed to add to my various circles, circles whose names and contents are none of your business, but I half-expect to find you'll some day wind up with full access to them anyway.

Then again, who am I kidding? A lot fewer people are stalking me than would be good for my bank balance.

And I hate to be so cynical, but one has to wonder how much of the enthusiasm (among the Googlers most excited about this) is real and how much is tied to knowing that bonuses this year are heavily tied to the social media revolution that Larry Page apparently considers essential to Google maintaining its status and leadership on the web, or the net, or the cloud or whatever this mess is that we're using to distract ourselves from much that is real and important.

I'm actually hoping this will make some sorts of work easier...after all, in its present state it does allow me to contact anyone I want, as long as I know their email address, and many people I may not know except by way of their Google+ profile. This could be of use, since Facebook only allows me to contact those people who agree that they are my friends, and for many people, friend has many and varied definitions. Where Google+ is different, it seems, is in realizing that you and only you can define your circle of contacts, and that not all of them are necessarily friends, nor should they be.

It will be interesting to see how this all hashes out.

In the meanwhile, here's some hyperbole, I hope.

CrunchBase Information

Google+

Information provided by CrunchBase

This is a test - YouTube's Unlisted Videos...

Can they or can't they be embedded? This post is an attempt to test whether such videos can be embedded.



This second video is embedded from a different channel, one that is no longer tied into the Google account that handles this blog. I'm starting to suspect that problems with embedding may be related to the settings that the owner might have chosen. After all, the YouTube EDIT pages include separate modules for Privacy (where the Unlisted option appears) and another section for "Embedding."


I may leave this at that, unless something else comes up to contradict my first impressions.

YouTube users should probably still exercise caution when embedding Unlisted videos, since they're likely to become more visible if the embedding happens on any site or blog (unlike this one) where traffic is high. In fact, if you are concerned about keeping Unlisted videos at least somewhat hard to find, disabling embedding is probably not a bad idea.

Here will be my comments on whether this worked or not. Some YouTube users are reporting that these videos cannot be embedded, which is probably a good thing and an intended feature. I just don't want to make a statement about it in the Help Forum without checking things out.

There's another question about embedding, but I think it refers to links... testing it three ways here:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcStMHeMvN0

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v=UcStMHeMvN0

Where I am, only that last link is faulty. If it worked in the past I wasn't aware of it.