Google Plus | Vanity Url

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ doesn’t offer vanity URLs for user profiles, making it more difficult to share your Google+ Profile with your friends. Instead, Google uses a long string of numbers to denote users (e.g. 117691391504351341685).

The reason Google+ doesn’t use vanity URLs is because those could lead to spammers figuring out the email addresses of millions of Google+ users (since many Google Accounts are linked to Gmail accounts).

Of course, this leads to a problem: you don’t want to be telling people to type in a long string of numbers to find your Google+ Profile. That’s where Gplus.to comes in. This simple little app lets you create a short URL for your Google+ page, making it easy to share with your friends. Mine, for example, is Gplus.to/benparr, which is much easier to remember than a random strong of numbers.

Gplus.to fills a gap that Google+ doesn’t currently address. Should Google give users the ability to create vanity URLs, or is it too much of a privacy concern because of its connection to Gmail? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

Google Plus | Retireing private profiles on july 31

As Google expands its Google+ social network to more people, the final outlines of the program begin to take shape. Here’s one important detail, disclosed on the Google Plus help page: there will be no private Google+ profiles. If you choose to keep your profile private, Google will simply delete it after July 31, 2011.

From the Google+ help section:

The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.

Keep in mind that your full name and gender are the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you’ll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don’t want to share.

If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.

This makes for a crucial difference between Google+ and Facebook; on Facebook, you can have a completely private profile, which won’t even come up in Google’s search results or even Facebook search results (for people who aren’t your friends). On the other hand, to use Google+, you will at least need to make your full name and gender public, meaning people will be able to find you via Google+.

First Post