I find public facing popular G+ accounts suffer much the same, loads of useless comments. 140 comments that you can't be bothered to read. If you do ever read them, you'll notice no one else can be bothered to read so it's just a long reel of repetition in the main.
The Youtube comments used to just be weird as comments would refer to other comments, and then they'd get promoted and end up completely disjointed. At least now there is threading.
I got freaked out by Facebook because I signed up there using a work email.
I think Facebook's recommendation system was using the data from other users' address books. As in I'd get a list of various people that I'd done business with in the past as suggested friends on Facebook. Those people had my address in their address book and I can only assume they'd uploaded their contacts to Facebook. Facebook retains that data. Here I am a new user. Wow how does it know I know such and such? I can only assume that it also works the other way: I join and I pop up in their account.
Google got into a mess with Buzz and the address book leaks, and email address leaks.
So there's a fine line here between privacy and helpfulness.
Actually I sympathise with the poster here. I just tried to get back to the personalised vanity chooser thing in G+, and ended up clicking on Settings then to Account, which got me to a google account page. On the right handside there is a link to a profile, and there's a nickname listed. I can't even remember what that's for or what that profile belongs to. There's even some reference to Buzz that I thought I'd killed. I go around in circles. And don't even get the whole Youtube integration thing. So I just back away from it and try and ignore it. You get overloaded. I'm not at the point of deleting my account, but not far off - mainly out of confusion.
I agree with most of your moans here, apart from your first. I haven't any issue with the random (probably uuids) strings and url length.
I do find G+ difficult to scan though. To the point that it's pointless for me to even bother with. I haven't loaded my circles up either, but I find the streams can get easily saturated by one individual, pretty quickly.
Another issue I have is the crappy comments - especially on public posts from popular accounts as opposed to friends' content. You open them up, start scrolling realise there is nothing of value, then wonder how you can shut them back up without scrolling back up etc.
In fact the whole thing would be far more useful if it was just one big atom-feed.
I'm following a friend's wordpress blog (an online hosted account on wordpress.com), and that's a hideous up front. I discovered RSS feeds of posts and comments hidden in the source code - and that makes for a far easier interface! Less is more and all that...
My only concern would be the link rot that might occur if your urls are later rewritten to the new username. Which makes a mockery of having the vanity urls in the first place. Having said that I can't even work out if a single Google+ post has it's own URI, or how I find it even.
Perhaps that's a new requirement. Some of us don't bother with mobile phones. I signed up for an account, at one time it asked, another it didn't. Try and empty your browser cache and try again.
Yeah, it's inevitable that the Jennifer Smiths are going to get miffed. I preferred the Facebook era without vanity URLs. It seemed sensible.
You could for a time (not sure if it still works) email users on facebook by using vanity_handle@facebook.com from any email address. Which is quite useful to get back in touch with people, now that people avoid listing their email addreses in email directories (people stopped doing that because they were fed up of spam). Having said that a non-vanity identifier could probably be used in the same way, so there isn't much point.
The author of this post, wants to make a land grab for his named handle all over the web. Well that's not much better.
I worked with a client yesterday that had bought 33 alternative domain names that were similarish to their company name. Why even bother! There were many obvious name / term combinations that they had missed anyway. What a waste of money and time!
I liked his resolution of just advertising his web address, and from there people could discover other handles for other services.
It's only made things more complex with the myriad of compnay handles on different services. Adverts on TV (in the UK) now don't even list their domain name, they just advertise Facebook and Twitter handles. I personally prefer loose identifiers: 'Lucy who does ITV's weather'. Even the presenters have their Twitter handles displayed on screen now!
It is not like you are likely to remember most of these handles anyway. Even if you tried to guess one, do you use camel case, underscores, spaces etc?
There is a little UI value in having recognisable identifiers, but at the end of the day vanity URLs are about as twatty as personalised number plates.
What I'd like to see is a report of keys I need to work on. Or the game could just emphasize them in challenge rounds. Even after twenty years of touch typing and a hacked keyboard [0], I still have trouble with the 'xcvb' cluster. So yeah, I guess I know my problem area.
Update, it was the 'j' that did me in. I couldn't decide if it was an 'i' or an 'l'. Impact culpa.
No, it's for everything, though it might sound that way. Add a user on the settings page, it'll open up the switching UI, no sign-in required. (unless they changed that recently, of course. but that would suck.)
The Youtube comments used to just be weird as comments would refer to other comments, and then they'd get promoted and end up completely disjointed. At least now there is threading.