Dillon Deliberating

Firstly, Google Plus  is not a Facebook killer. Neither was Google Wave an email killer.  Indeed people should stop defining G+ against Facebook.  This is not a social media Cold War between Facebook and Google +  that is a far to simplistic view.  We live in a multi-polar social media landscape rather than one defined by bi-polarity. The founder of MySpace Tom Anderson now affectionately know as MySpaceTom put it succinctly:

“most services are’t killed by competitors, they kill themselves”.  

Rest assured readers so long as Twitter keeps its service simple and does what it does best 140 characters at a time it will remain relevant and widely used.  Twitter retains a vast amount of cultural power combined with a large user base, decline if it occurs will be relative. 

A new service arrives and the question that is asked is this;  What problem does Google + solve?  The problem it addresses revolves around how we share information on social networks.  So G+ puts what are known as Circles at the centre of the service.  Basically when you follow a person  on G+ you allocate them to a Circle of interest.  These Circle’s are segmented according to interests like News or you allocate people to a Circle based on your relationship with them.  So for example you can have a Circle for work colleagues or one based on an interest like Foreign Policy. In some respects you are creating an interest graph not a social graph.  So when you share something on G+ the default is not to share widely but to share narrowly. The question you are asked, is who do you want to share this update with? Maybe you just want to share it one person, maybe five or just the people in your Foreign Policy Circle. The choice is yours.  Google + is about how you share and gather information.  So in much the same way  I use Twitter lists, clicking on my Twitter list marked news I get tweets about breaking news. Likewise on G+ I click my Circle called UK Tech I get information updates from people working in that sector.  

The Circle concept is hardly original, on Facebook you can share updates and photos with a limited number of people but they obscure this feature.  What Google + does is put it at the centre of the service rather than hide it from the user.  Indeed the idea of managing and sharing information and the Circle concept itself is not original.  The experiment that is Disapora offered a service not greatly dissimilar to Circles. In the UK the Knowledge Hub had similar ideas two years ago. 

The difference is Google have successfully addressed the problem and offers a solution that far from being ignored has so far garnered 20 million users in under three weeks. Though statistics can misrepresent.  Lets take one statistic being bandied about;  G+ reached the 10 million user mark much faster than Twitter and Facebook.  Though this ignores that these services were built from the ground up were as Google has an existing user base for all its others services ranging from Gmail to YouTube.  

These users are within easy reach to convert them over to G+. In addition Android mobile phone adoption combined with the G+ app has the potential for G+ to ramp up the user base even further.   The question is this;  once converted will they attend the G+ church on a regular basis or become lapsed? The jury is out.  

In terms of users, a weary yes to those who ask;  they are for the most part the tech crowd.  You may already have met them on Twitter. Oh and before I forget we are all supposedly suffering from “social media fatigue” and a new network is just to much to bear.  Are we just reproducing our social graph on G+? Actually you are  expanding your social graph, meeting new people and best of all having a chance to engage with them beyond 140 characters. Indeed you might even want to chat with them using video in what are know as Hangout’s. This feature though again not original is for me the standout feature of G+. Using your webcam and mic you can hangout with up to ten people but this much more than just a stilted workplace video conference it’s actually fun.  The best hangout for me so far was one with Steve Rubel, assorted journalists and tech people.

Google + is having an extended honeymoon and like a hoodlum in a Woody Allen short story, we should not be ‘mollified by shiny objects’. So rather than abandon your social media family in favour of G+ let them co-exist.  The web is no stranger to the coast of utopia and some have wildly proclaimed that they will abandon their blog ships and surf the Wave that is G+.  Google + is not a blogging platform, the simplicity of Twitter is a joy to behold and Facebook is still the biggest beast in the room.  So unlike Mike Elgan I will not be going on a Google + diet by shifting all my activities to what is still a field test social network.