Google+ and the Social Network
Google+ is not Facebook.
It’s confusing because it looks almost exactly like Facebook, but Google has created it for a very different purpose. And my guess is you will use it differently than you use Facebook.
Facebook started as a private friend network. It may be hard to remember what the internet was even a few years ago, but there were a number of things that made Facebook different than other sites. A real email was part of your profile. Existing Yahoo and Gmail contacts were used to invite friends. And you didn’t become Facebook friends until you friended someone and they friended you back. This was unique because a friend on Facebook was not like a MySpace friend or a blog subscriber, but an actual “two-way authenticated,” real life friend. And it was awesome, because with a group of real life friends, you were free to talk and share on the internet as an extension of what you shared outside of the internet.
Prior to that, we deluded ourselves with the awkward practice of journalling our deepest thoughts on blogs to 1) everyone in the world, and simultaneously, 2) no one except two good friends that actually went out of the way to visit your blog and your own mom. The internet was different then. Even if we were on the internet a lot, we generally did not share our whole life. We were not constantly connected like we are now- at work, in the car, standing in line for coffee, at the restaurant.
Facebook grew in popularity, but as the growth stalled, they started to move in the direction they felt the majority of users wanted, which was to open up and make things more public. But users revolted, and privacy has proved to be an impossibly tricky line to move. Users apparently hate having anything change, but also because changing privacy betrays one of the fundamental features of Facebook- private conversations with real life friends. And as groups of Facebook friends grew to include acquaintances, aunts and uncles, and then bands and local restaurants, the line became more and more confused.
And even as Facebook moved users in a more public direction, they were pretty happy not making everything completely public, instead retaining everyone behind Facebook’s login wall. Things that happen on Facebook are for the most part not linkable or searchable from the outside world. If you are not logged in, Facebook’s front page does not have a search field. You need to login or signup to see anything. And even if you are logged in, you need to friend someone to see everything in their profile. This makes sense, though, because otherwise what is the point of friending people?
For Google, it is a different story.
Making everything linkable, indexable, and searchable is very important to Google. While Facebook started as a private site and became more and more public, Google is creating a public place which also allows private conversations. Google+ makes much more sense when you consider it like that. The layout of the page looks like Facebook- but think Twitter, Blogger, or Tumblr. You are sharing to the world (like every other site on the internet).
And what if you don’t want your business all over the internet? That’s where circles come in. Some conversations are meant to be private, and they can be kept private. But circles are not what makes Google different from Facebook; they are the exception that makes Google+ more like Facebook. I think circles will closely mirror the groups of people you want to keep in close contact with. I plan on having a circle to share work related things, one for my close friends, maybe one for the guys I talk stocks with, etc. If I have something to say that’s more specific or private, I will have a conversation in a circle.
By default, though, posting on Google+ is public. I’m not talking about privacy settings or the actual page defaults; you could set everything to private, and share only to your circles. Or share to no one at all! But I think that’s missing the point. This is the profile that will appear when someone searches for your name. It will become a part of your online life, your online persona. Maybe even the front door to your online life. When you meet someone and exchange emails, they’ll get your Gmail address, and with it, your Google+ profile. On Facebook, we were a little blindsided when we realized that potential future employers could see our “hanging out at the bar” pics. If you consider Google+ your default public profile, you have an opportunity to gain more control over what happens when someone searches for you by putting the things you want on the Google profile that is found.
Commenting on Google+ is also sort of public by default. In fact, when you comment on someone else’s post, there’s no indication at all who will see your comment. It could be two people, it could be everyone you’ve ever met and more. Again, this is strange coming from Facebook, but in fact, that’s how the rest of the internet works. If you comment on a blog or a website, your comments are in effect totally public and the “ownership” of the comment becomes shared with the site owner. They can moderate and delete your comment if they choose. Your words are in the comment, but the people who will read the comment are the ones that visit that site. You are responding to the audience the website has built, not your own audience. When you comment on Google+, it will be seen by the audience belonging to the original poster, not your own.
Is moving towards a more public social network a step in the right direction?
I think there will be a place for smaller, truly private interactions. That’s what Beluga and so many similar group messaging apps get right. And there will probably be more startups that do private social networking like Minigroup. But there are already ways to do small, private interactions without a website. Like email. Or a phone call. The power of the internet, though, is being able to reach the whole world. And the opportunity created by the internet is for online social interactions to go far beyond what happens offline. Google is going to be involved at this large, public end of the spectrum that has the biggest scale (and biggest opportunity for profit). It looks like Facebook is heading in that direction as well.
Google’s strength here is that everyone has a Gmail address and many people already have a Google profile created, even before Google+. And Google will make sure profiles feature prominently in searches. Buzz and Wave were flops for Google in part because they pushed the idea of interactions on the internet too far, creating something that was too new and different (and complicated). That’s why Google+ looks just like Facebook, even though it is not at all like Facebook. It’s a step towards the future of the internet, but not a step too far.
Social networking as we have known it is dead. It’s not gone, it’s just that social networking is no longer a website you login to when you want to connect to friends. The reality is it has become everything we do on the web. Social networking used to be what you did on Facebook. Now, we connect to people when we listen to music, try a new restaurant, or look for a job. We’re on Turntable.fm, Yelp, and LinkedIn. We connect to people on our phones with Instagram, Twitter, Uniwar, and Beluga.
The future will allow us to connect in even more ways to even more people. Google+ will become another component of our online lives. The people who will be the most comfortable in the online world are the ones that know how to create and build their public presence, their personal brand, on the social internet.
