Links to Google+ accounts

[nikon]

Title:
Links to Google+ accounts

Area:
entries

Summary:
It would be nice to be able to link to google plus accounts like one can link to twitter accounts.

Description:
It would be nice to be able to link to google plus accounts like one can link to twitter accounts. For example, linking to https://plus.google.com/112394564474166843151 which is my own google+ account.

Poll #7728 Links to Google+ accounts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58

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This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
21 (36.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (3.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
10 (17.2%)

(I have no opinion)
22 (37.9%)

(Other: please comment)
3 (5.2%)

Comments

[florentinescot]

ONLY if it is opt-in/opt-out at the journal wide level.

[denise]

I think you may be confused about what the suggestion is covering: this is to add G+ as an external site parameter in the <user name=foo site=bar> tag, so, like, <user name=112394564474166843151 site=plus.google.com> or whatever.

[florentinescot]

*blush* wouldn't be the first time! *sigh*

feel free to delete the comment.

[eleanorjane]

The trouble I see is that the existing user tags are all for services where the user name is part of the link - eg my twitter username is Eleanor, and the tag comes out as Eleanor. But G+ accounts are entirely numeric, so you'd be linking to [user name="112394564474166843151" site="plus.google.com"] or something similar, which would then give you a visual result of [icon for G+ tag] [112394564474166843151]. Unless you want to give the user tag an optional argument where you can specify the visible name while what it links to is the alpha-numeric G+ account -- but then you're making the user tag more like a real HTML tag, which defeats the point of it being simple for people who don't know HTML.

That may have been entirely incoherent, I'm not sure. :/

[azurelunatic]

Coherent to me!

The thing I might think of is, if G+ has an API that returns names when given the user number, and at crosspost/entry load time, if DW should call that API, and ask for the name given the number, and put that in?

[denise]

I think a lot of G+'s APIs are in flux, and certainly not well documented when I went looking.

[ursamajor]

Oh my god, I would never userlink to anybody's G+ if I had to remember the number *wry grin* Doesn't mean I don't think it should be enabled if that's the information we're able to work with, but given the length of those numbers, it would be SO easy to link to an incorrect or nonexistent G+ profile.

[matgb]

Hopefully, they'll sort out prettylinking back, they redirected all Google Profiles to Plus, but my old Profile pretty link works, so that'll make it usable
http://profiles.google.com/matbowles will take you to my + profile, so hopefully that'll become possible again just as it is on, say, Facebook, which was a heavily requested feature.

[azurelunatic]

Ooo, yay, profile to link to as well as the ... plus page. (Someone somewhere recently called that page something very witty, but heck if I can think of it right now.)

[voldsom]

This makes sense to me. I think as said elsewhere, if G+ want to be viable, they're going to have to look at prettynames, because nobody is going to want to remember those numbers.

I liked the additional suggestion of giving the user tag an additional optional argument for a title/display name until I started thinking of all the ways I could abuse it. Now I'm not so sure, and my brain is going off at complicated tangents that I probably shouldn't follow right now. :)

[ciaan]

Yeah, if there were a way to make +User Name be a link, that would be useful, but a string of numbers, not so much.

[montuos]

How do you envision that actually displaying as a recognizable username, nikon?

That's kind of the sticking point for me. All the other services I know, there's a reasonably mnemonic/recognizable username, but G+ just has a jumble of digits, making it worthless as a human-accessible identifier.

I think this is an idea before its time; G+ is still very beta. Once it settles down a good bit more and they start documenting things better, if they have or make an API that returns a useful name, as azurelunatic suggests, or if anybody comes up with a better solution to that problem, then I think it'd be great idea.

[cesy]

+1

[turlough]

+1

[montuos]

I should probably also add that a consideration could be the mutable nature of the display names; Google users can change those anytime they want. Just because Google wants you to display your real name doesn't mean everybody does, especially not on their "vanity" accounts...

[azurelunatic]

Having read their names policy again (for unrelated reasons) apparently there's a ~month waiting period before someone may change their displayed name on Google+ after changing it the once. So it's not infinitely mutable, at least not by those current rules.

[arethinn]

I think this is an idea before its time; G+ is still very beta.

+1