I have been waiting on tenterhooks to receive my Google+ invitation. It’s been the talk of the social media town. What I realized today however was that I already have a thriving community in my Google Reader and through it’s commenting system. It sounds like Google+ will be the natrual extension of this (and includes my original Google Circles thoughts!) The comments my friends have added to Kellygo‘s original share about Google+ have kept me entertained for the past two days. The first half is us entertaining ourselves, the second half is google friends/aquaintances being brilliant and insightful.
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Shared by Kelly Osborn |
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But google+ adds some interesting things. Some are clearly designed to excite the “screw facebook” crowd. Like the circles thing. Basically g+ wants to make it easy for you to divide up your social graph into meaningful groups. And it is easy. You get a list of people and a bunch of circles. I took Kelly Osborn and dragged her onto my “Friends” circle. Boom, now everything I share with Friends, she can see. And you can add a person to multiple circles. I also added Kelly to “iFriends” which is the circle where I share random internet links.
And this allows g+ to pay great attention to privacy too. One nice thing is that people cannot see what circles you put them in. Also, whenever you post you have to specify who you want to see it. You can list a particular circle, multiple circles, and even individual people (by searching their name or email). Only those people will see the post and only those people can comment.
It’s also seems to be integrated with Buzz. Kelly showed up and I was able to add her to a circle even though she’s technically not on google+ yet. When I send posts, Kelly should get an email and I think she should be able to reply via email and it’ll show up as a comment in g+. So people can contribute even without fully drinking the kool-aid. I think this is a big deal.
Finally there are some other things that google is hoping will be real innovations. There is the idea of a Hangout. Which is basically realtime video chat with your friends. I haven’t tried it yet. But seems cool. And Sparks which is basically the easy to share interesting links with your circles and have real conversations around them. Basically what we do here on Buzz right now.
One prediction I will make is that diaspora will die quietly. It always felt mostly like a backlash to to facebook. It was for people who wanted a) more control over their privacy and b) more freedom with their own data. Google+ is trying to provide a) and probably going to do better than diaspora. b) will certainly be better than facebook, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. Google is still running a business and it’s not harder to be more open than facebook. But g+ also adds c) which is a real competitor to facebook. It is much more likely to get uptake because they are upselling it through all other google products. It has the real potential to be attractive to the mainstream because their friends might actually show up.
But it’s not gonna be easy. Facebook is literally the first internet phenomenon since AOL. It’s a juggernaut and unfortunately, most people that are hooked on it don’t care about it’s many shortcomings. But at least they will have competition. That’s always good for us users because competitors try to one up each other by giving us bigger and better products. The best case scenario in my mind is that both fb and google+ will flourish. With the added benefit that facebook can’t just do whatever it wants anymore because “who’s gonna stop them”.
Whew, I didn’t expect this to be so long. 2:34 PM
I actually do forsee FB waning, in part because (1) smart, savvy people can still get click-jacked; (2) there are so many brands on FB that people’s feeds get junked up if they “like” too many; and (3) it’s really hard to say something to a limited group (like through aspects or circles), so you’re speaking to your coworkers and mom and friends and super-hot boyfriend all at the same time.
But, yes, totally, I see this as probably killing Diaspora, mostly because so many people are already on gmail or other google products. 3:13 PM