Todd Mintz: Brain Serial Blog

So, out of the blue, my friend Scott Hendison sends me the following tweet:

Had my email been hacked again? It already happened once before.

A little investigation did not show evidence of a new hack…in my Gmail spam filter, there were only a couple spam emails similar to what Scott received, meaning what Scott received either had some connection to the last hack or perhaps somebody we both knew was hacked & my name was used to send a email to him (since my email address wasn’t in the email he received).

Anyway, the reason my former hack was such a disaster was because I had 3,000+ email addresses listed in the contacts of my Gmail account. After the hack, I deleted all these email addresses so that if I were to be hacked again, the hacker wouldn’t email everyone I know. I never use Gmail contacts to find anyone, so when I saw this:

I deleted all the contacts (even though most of them had no email address associated with them).

Big mistake.

The next day I went into Google Plus and all my circles were gone. Why? Because when I deleted the contacts, I deleted the circles associated with them.

Now, once you delete your contacts in Gmail, you can restore them quite easily. However, doing so doesn’t restore your Google Plus circles. You have to recreate them yourself.

The easiest way I got back some semblance of my former Google Plus circles was to ad back the folks who had already added me.

.

Google seems to allow roughly 850 “Friend” adds per day so it took me 3 days to restore all the friends that previously added me. From there, I’ve added a bunch more people that Google Plus sees are “relevant” to my account, so I’m currently mostly back to where I was before but I know that I’ve lost some folks that I wish were in my friends stream and it is much too cumbersome to try to bring them back.

Under no circumstances should somebody be able to inadvertently delete all their friends in Google Plus. This is a pretty significant flaw in the process and Google really needs to put a safeguard in place to prevent this from happening.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 6:01 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.