I am now on Google+, because men of my ilk are required to join new services such as this. But it is not solving a problem I have. It’s just creating more problems.
I left Twitter some months ago, because my workflow was like this:
1. post to Twitter.
2. have the post automatically mirrored to Facebook.
3. flip over to Facebook to make sure that the post replicated.
4. if it took more than a minute to replicate, refresh a few times before giving up with an odd, low-level form of nervousness.
I was connected to all the same people on Twitter that I was connected to on Facebook. Granted, there were others on Twitter who were not on Facebook, like famous people or, to put it another way, people with whom the interaction was expected to be more one-way. I followed Chris Onstad, author of Achewood, for instance. It was fun. His Twitter feed is hilarious. I followed the author of a book I really loved, and to my great surprise and pleasure he connected me with the [newspaper: Boston Globe] to write a piece for them. So I can definitely say that Twitter was good for my wallet.
But it was also really distracting, for reasons I laid out in that piece. And I don’t have the self-control to be connected to two social networks and yet only check them occasionally. Nor do I have the self-control to prevent myself from refreshing email dozens of times a day. Email by now is in fact a reflex. But at least email isn’t getting new updates constantly. And the fun of Twitter is following lots of interesting people saying lots of interesting things. It was *too* fun, honestly. Sad to say. It’s taken me until age 33 to realize that I actually have to talk myself down from unhealthy habits; I literally have to say to myself, “Yes, you want a milkshake from Toscanini’s made with burnt-caramel ice cream and a shot of espresso. But 1) those are empty calories, 2) you can use that $5 for something better, 3) you’re trying to cut down on your caffeine intake, aren’t you?” I probably should have been doing this throughout my life. In any case, I’m starting now, and it seems to be working.
So I ended up thinking that it was better to concentrate on one social network, namely Facebook, and ditch the rest. Really, it’s probably best to go with zero social networks, but Facebook is essentially inevitable now. Many websites require you to use a single-sign-on platform, and OpenID is dead; Facebook is the only one left. Google, as I recall, tried OpenID. OpenID sucked. So a Facebook account is … well, “necessary” isn’t the word, but it would certainly be annoying to go without one.
Also, though, Google+ isn’t solving a problem that I have. Its main innovation, so far as I can tell, is that it makes the concept of a “circle” fundamental: circles for friends, circles for acquaintances, circles for colleagues, etc. Others have the problem that they need their messages to go to specific circles; I do not. The problem is supposed to be that, say, you want to write naughty words, but don’t want your grandmother to read them; or that you want to bust on your coworkers but don’t want your coworkers to read it; or some such. First of all, Facebook offers enough in this direction that Google+ is not really solving a real problem. For instance, I was connected on Facebook to my girlfriend’s son, and I set up permissions such that he couldn’t see a lot of what I posted. Problem solved. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of those blocks, too: coworkers have clearly put me on a “don’t share your Wall with coworkers” rule set. Facebook also offers a nice preview feature, which allows you to see how your profile looks when visited by a specific Friendster of yours.
More fundamentally, having to figure out who should read a given post and who shouldn’t is the kind of psychic weight that I try very hard to cast off. “Should this go to Acquaintances, or only to Friends?” is a question which, when asked often enough, will eventually rub my mind raw.
I’d much prefer to just post whatever comes to my mind to Facebook or Twitter, and let people decide whether they want to read it. On the receiving side, I’m sure Facebook has enough intelligent algorithms to decide whether you find my posts interesting; if it doesn’t think you do, they won’t show up in your feed. If you think I swear too much, you can ignore my posts. If you really hate me, you can defriend me.
Mark Zuckerberg, I’m told, said at one point that people should have just one persona, which is on display at all times. At some level this is wrong: I make dirty jokes with some people but not with my mother; I have one side of my personality that really likes discussing policy and theory, but that side will quickly put itself into hiding if it senses that the people around it just don’t care about those things.
But the costs of having different personalities on the web — one for Acquaintances, one for Friends, one for Policy Wonks — exceed the gains, for me anyway. I’d much prefer to put all those personalities together into one feed. I suspect the audience finds this more interesting, in any case: much better to get the occasional notional pornography title (a category of Facebook post that I very much enjoy writing) amidst links about health insurance, I think, than to get a steady diet of one or the other. I could be wrong about this, in which case my audience would prefer that I put different ideas in different channels. Not my problem. I guess Google+ is designed for people who think that *is* their problem.
Google+, I gather, came out of watching people’s occasional paroxysms of anger against Facebook’s privacy problems. But people don’t really care about their privacy; if they did, Twitter wouldn’t be popular. In Twitter, everything you write is visible to the world. Had Facebook decreed from early on that everything you post is public, people would have nothing to be angry about. It’s the perception of a bait-and-switch that angers people about Facebook; it is manifestly *not* that people care about their privacy. So inasmuch as Google+ gives people more privacy than Facebook, it’s not offering the world a solution to any problem that the world actually suffers from.
Neither Google nor Facebook actually cares about privacy. What they want is to sell ads, or to otherwise monetize their social networks. That means, as the saying goes, that “if you’re not paying for a product, *you’re* the product.” They’re selling *you* to advertisers. So at a fundamental level — the level of what keeps the lights on in Google’s and Facebook’s datacenters — neither of them is actually interested in your privacy. Neither of them *could* be interested in your privacy. If Google+ has any actual appeal, it’s the perception that it won’t bait-and-switch you. But that’s just responding to an accident of Facebook’s history. If Facebook were born now, it would be Twitter, and everything would be public. Not baiting-and-switching on privacy is not the basis for a network that people should care about.
What I get with Google+, then, is the solution to a privacy non-problem and the creation of groups of acquaintances that cause me stress without solving any problem I have. Can someone point me to some really killer feature that I should know about?
I am often a curmudgeon about new technology, but it’s not out of reflexive hostility toward new things. It’s that I really need people to prove to me why I need something. I was this way with the iPhone and the Mac, but eventually the tipping point came where it was obvious that the iPhone and the Mac were just better than every one of their competitors, and that there was no legitimate reason to avoid buying one. So I’m more than open to being convinced that I should use Google+. I just need to be convinced that it a) solves a problem I have and b) is better than Facebook. Thus far I’ve not been convinced.
Is there any value in Google+ simply for the competition it brings to an otherwise limited market?
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Agreed, all around. I too am sort of waiting, biding my time, to see what happens with Google+, but in the mean time just going along interacting with my social networks as I normally do. If I start seeing something cool about G+ that makes it necessary or better, I am more than happy to switch over, or at least use it. But that hasn’t happened yet.
Also, this is mostly dead on, I believe:
This, oddly enough, reminds me of a bathroom at work. We have combination locks on our large bathrooms in the suburban office building hallway. I was told that at some point the women’s bathroom lock broke. Someone left a note that said, “This must be fixed. It is unsafe!” Had there never been a lock in the first place, she would have used that bathroom every day with no concerns.
If Facebook had never put locks on their bathrooms, people wouldn’t be angry when they broke.
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It’s interesting that you say if Facebook were invented today it would be Twitter. Google+ is an interesting combination of Facebook and Twitter features,plus a few of its own, of course. It’s like Twitter in that relationships needn’t be reciprocal. It’s like Facebook in the richness of the medium and ability to prevent anyone outside your group from seeing what you write. It handles both of these core features better than Twitter and Facebook, in my opinion.
I do hope they eventually add something like #tags so that the reader can filter based on what the other says the content contains though.
Regarding spending mental energy deciding who to post to each time: don’t do it if you don’t want to. Just post to “Your Circles” all the time. But on that rare occasion where you want to say something to a few specific people, or just one person, you can do that too.
For me, it is also about tight integration with other Google products. This will only get better over time.
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other says the content contains -> AUTHOR says the content IS ABOUT
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Privacy control is simply Google+’s catch. Every social network needs some sort of hook to gain initial momentum and to be explainable to the average person:
Myspace – where you can talk to your favorite bands
Facebook – where you can connect with all of your college classmates
Twitter – social networking using simple text messaging
Google+ – Like Facebook but with effective group controls
(Usenet – gather the small dispersed population of internet geeks together using mostly local bandwidth)
It doesn’t matter that most of these “hook” features are only used by a few percent of the user base as time goes by. What’s important is getting a strong start and being able to be pitched in 15 seconds.
Google’s primary interest is not monetizing its social network–it’s not their business. Their business is search and search ads. Facebook presented a threat because it had the potential to create a AOL-like walled garden, where for many people “the internet” would simply look completely like Facebook along with a few links that people get to from Facebook (AOL failed at this, but thanks to Moore’s law and advancements in web standards, a company like FB could create a completely walled internet environment that many would be happy with)–and it would be unsearchable by Google except for the parts which Facebook decided to make available.
By showing that Facebook’s network effects monopoly is limited and can be broken, Google has greatly diminished FB’s chances of creating this sort of completely walled environment, and should open the way up for more large scale competitors. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc should all be trying to do the same. Simply by being more open and forcing FB to be open, Google gets a big win.
Google+ has these main advantages over facebook for me:
– Much better for casual use–on Facebook I can only read through the last three days of posts, on G+ I can go back forever
– Circles are much faster and easier to manage than Facebook lists
– Not built as a platform for college hookups – it has a culture that is more around discussion than games and parties
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You can follow Twitter feeds without a Twitter account. Just use RSS.
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I know I can load Twitter feeds via RSS. I think that’s actually not a good solution: my model for RSS is that I read every post, or at least skim the headlines. Tweets aren’t meant to be read that way. They’re more like a wave of stuff that washes over you. If it’s a day-old tweet, you shouldn’t bother reading it. (Or so I feel.) If it’s important and has any longevity, you’ll hear about it again in a week or a month.
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Just group together all Tweet-RSS feeds and skim it as you would Twitter. Grouping RSS feeds is as useful as grouping Podcasts.
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