Guest Post by Amrit Pal
[Ed: I know we’ve had a LOT of posts on Google+ here recently. But I wanted to give my bloggers a voice. This is an interesting viewpoint from India, so I hope you will read it.]
The first reaction to all the talk around Google+ and it’s Facebook-killing armor was, “Oh God, not another one.”
Keeping the early adopter community in context, there isn’t a desire to connect more, or even connect better. Unless, of course, you are another Guru, pushed compulsively to opine on recycling and rehashing “content.”
Anyway.
Let’s take a moment to talk about the very premise of “friending” on Facebook. We agree mutually to allow someone to consume our feed of information, while consenting to consume theirs. That is, assuming we haven’t hidden/blocked them from News Feeds. Fair enough?
(By the way, the argument of pitching Facebook against Twitter, that the former could be made asymmetric by hiding feeds is rather pointless. One doesn’t really marry a random person just because there’s an option for divorce, do they?)
Google+ cuts out the noise by adopting the “follow/unfollow” conundrum, very similar to Twitter. The need for a social network that automatically aggregates all my “friends” and then cuts off the irrelevant noise.
A viral (forgive the cliche) spin out was evident with Google+. After the dust settled, it’s getting better over time. Tell me you aren’t tempted to check out your G+ stream. Feel the same urge with Facebook stream?
Or are we in an infinite loop of growing out of social networks every five years?
It’s still too premature to speculate, maybe, but it seems Google has got it spot on. The thoroughness of it all did not imply the need to mindlessly obsess over “integrating” all other social channels with Google+. More than any factor, what we are looking at is one word.
Ubiquity.
One more time. Ubiquity.
In a few ways, it is doing what Helvetica did to the cluttered typography in the 70s.
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The experimentation has been going on for over a year at Google, with features that felt meaningless at their launch. +1, Buzz, +1 in search, the little black search bar at the top of Google search. Haven’t we all cracked jokes at Google’s moronic, bland attempts at social?
Now, one can all see it coming together.
It’s been a patient yet progressive process, not entirely intended to make us “share more.” Think of it, Facebook’s catchment is constrained to just social, isn’t it?
How about a network that hovers around you as you search, browse articles, flip through photo albums, translate languages and even while you manage enterprise mail? Behind that little black bar lies a curated stream; not a lounge with 750 million open-mic nights.
It’s not shouting. It just lies there, nestled and understated, reassured that it’s powered by the sheer scale of Google’s operational areas.
It understands that there’s a life beyond status updates (amazing how few posts without links are there on G+!) and we need a more productive network … not something unnecessarily more social.
And that is the reason I absolutely adore it.
Image: OZinOH via Flickr, CC 2.0
Amrit Pal is an engineering undergrad at BITS Pilani in Goa, India. A staunch Seth Godin disciple, he is engaged with social enterprise development and its coitus with the web. When not building startups across various sectors, he lovebickering about typography and design. His ramblings that occasionally matter can be read here.
@Ari Herzog It has taken me away from both to some degree.
Great post Amrit! What I love most about this post is your description of G+ as hovering, accompanying us almost seamlessly through our search activity. You’re 100% right when you describe Facebook as shouting. Sure, conversations and dialogue do happen here, but just as @HowieSPM outlined, my Facebook stream too feels like a lot of people shouting at me with music videos and photos. Call me crazy, but that’s not what I ideally want from my social experience online. I do follow a number of brands on Facebook that I think share and engage exceptionally well- rather than shouting at me- but they are in the minority. If G+ can continue to integrate into that search function to increase productivity (and avoid shouting at me) then again I agree with @HowieSPM – we may just have underestimated Google.
Since I STILL can’t tag people as a Page, I should mention this post has been authored by Amrit Pal.
G+ has taken me away from Twitter, not Facebook. Am I in the minority?
@HowieSPM Yup, still very much in Beta stage. Interesting, however, to observe Google+’s life cycle. Remember the days when we loved Facebook’s niche? Then it went on steroids fueled by super high-return VC. Maybe, G+’s fate will finally give us an answer that it’s a rather vicious circle of loving, growing and hating a social network. Thanks, as always, for sharing your thoughts.Interesting that you point out the funding pattern in FB, critical to its demonstrated desperation.
@AmritPa1 @KenMueller Ken you can block people from viewing by never making a public post. Something you can’t do on twitter. This is like a merging of Path and Facebook in my opinion.
But I really agree with you much needs to be fixed. Once a post passes you by good luck finding it again. There is no search for info.
Where I see Google excelling is based on what you fear which is they collect our info. To date it has been benign. We are all jaded after how Facebook has done things to us unethically. But where I see power for google is advertising. Facebook has failed with Facebook Ads which is 70% of its revenue. Failed by the fact the click rates (and paying only for clicks vs impressions has been the one ethical thing Facebook has done) are only 50% of the click rate for Digital ads not on Facebook. Maybe Google can do a better job with this?
If I was google I would lock out brands 100% except for advertising. And if they can show just double the internet average of 20 clicks per 10000 page views (facebook gets 10 per 10k) they could charge a premium and make bank.
Also I think Google doesn’t have the pressure to exploit us like Facebook does. Facebook a $15bil valued company (my finance degreed opinion) took money from really powerful people (Russian and Chinese Mafia linked investors, Goldman Sachs) and now are pressured to meet expectations when they go IPO of possibly Zuckerberg winds up buried next to Hoffa.
I love this post Amrit.
We share a lot of links of Twitter. We don’t share many links on Facebook. Most of my facebook stream are friends status updates/thoughts, music videos no one ever clicks on, events coming up and photos. I can not remember the last time a Brand Page post was shared. The only links I see for business are from Waxing Unlyrical, Spin Sucks and somethings Danny Brown.
But it always was the clutter and the user interface that made Facebook so sucky. But here is the catch. It was so amazing compared to what came before! And it wasn’t until it stagnated over 3 years offering no better usability vs just adding to the clutter that we started feeling it is so sucky.
Google still has a lot to fix. But the frame work is there. And I really liked your connection for how things evolved and string together. I think we underestimated Google?
@jamie247 Glad you enjoyed it. Google has the platform– and scale to consolidate it, particularly G+ for Google Apps. We’ll have to wait :)
Ken, concur with you about the constant hovering feeling a bit like stalked by a black-robed man, but I believe Google is always more transparent/sensitive than Facebook when it comes to owning our data. There’s also a revolutionary new option of Google TakeOut, liberating your data from Google.
I’m still not convinced. I think the idea of a social network that hovers around you as you search, is what people WOULD fear if they knew. We worry about privacy issues on Facebook, but for some reason we aren’t worried about privacy from Google? A company whose main goal is to collect information about us?
I also see a lot of flaws in the circles system. Plus, unlike on Facebook, you can NOT completely block someone out on Plus. You can block them,. but they can still see your public postings. What if I have people who I dont want seeing anything from me?
@AmritPa1 great post. I think ubiquity is the right way to put it. Facebook wants to be your Internet browser but fails. Google..?