Me, +1

I’ve been lucky enough to get into Google’s “Facebook Killer” (someone else’s words, not mine) before the doors slammed shut on the Greater Internet, and I’ve been using it in various forms for the past week: Web, Mobile and dedicated Android App. I am happy to admit that I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook. I have an account A) because there are some people there that I want to stay in touch with, but with whom I’m not actively in touch with, and B) my daughter is 10, and will be eventually of the age where she’ll want to be socially networked, and where I will have to start watching her like a hawk (disguised as a lamp post, mailbox or elm tree for secrecy, of course). So on the surface I have to wonder why I’d want a “Facebook Killer” for any other reason then to wipe the planet clean of the FB stain.

The problem with social networking now is that it’s either FB, or a whole Swiss Army Knife of other stuff. Twitter has been my platform of choice, but it relies on a lot of other services to make a rough analog for FB. There’s desktop software, mobile apps and other third party things that need to be tied into the API, unlike FB which has everything right there…including ads and spam. And let’s not get into the privacy concerns with FB. Having an alternative to FB is welcome, and even if it doesn’t actually kill FB, G+ is looking to be that viable alternative.

Circle Of Friends

The “core” of G+ is the idea of a “circle”, which is basically what you expect it to be: a themed group of people. The touted power of G+ is that circles are independent of each other so that what you post to the Friends circle doesn’t get posted to the Co-Workers circle unless you specify that it should. You can also view posts made only by people in a specific circle. If you’ve ever spammed the Mute button on your FB wall, you’ll appreciate the powerful filtering abilities that circles gives you. You’re no longer inundated with everyone’s pithy updates. Now you can choose which pithy updates you want to see!

+1

You may have seen the Google +1 button around. This is The G’s answer to the Like button that no one seems to really like. This is kind of a hit or miss feature. G+ has to have it, since the idea of the throw-away comment is now ubiquitous in social networking and is therefor expected, but the Like button has become meaningless for that exact reason. It doesn’t mean anything to “Like” something on FB. Mainly it means that you agree to get spam from whatever product or service you Liked.

So far, the +1 action on the G+ service is like a chin-thrust acknowledgement across a room; you like the post or comment, but don’t really have anything useful to say. Outside of the service, however, anything you +1 shows up on your profile. Wait…privacy? Yeah, you can turn it off so it doesn’t display, but then you’re kind of missing out on what makes the +1 different from the Like. When you +1 something, it drops into your profile bucket. It becomes part of your profile. It’s like bookmark sharing in a way, and is a quick and passive way of collecting and informing those in your spheres of things you’d otherwise have to do by manually copying the URL and pasting it into a status update.

Bring It Together

Taking a 10,000 foot view of Google, you can see how their seemingly disjointed offerings fit into a G+ style service. You can upload unlimited photos, and 15 minute videos which are deposited into Picasa and YouTube automatically for you. Just today, a story dropped that Picasa and Blogger were going to be re-branded (and hopefully updated) pretty much alongside the public release of G+. Coincidence? Obviously not. I don’t know whether to be impressed with Google’s long-term vision, or be afraid that they had such a far reaching vision of this scale.

Goliath Verses Other Goliath

We wait with baited breath for the results: Will G+ kill Facebook? The nerds and geeks emphatically say yes.The pragmatists say they can exist side by side. Sadly, neither of these two will actually play a part in whether Facebook becomes the new MySpace. That honor goes to the moms and pops who picked up a FB account to view pictures of their grand-kids.

A new service like G+ will certainly attract the gadget freaks and those who have some kind of genetic hatred of FB, but the real power behind FB is the legions of people who really don’t give a shit what platform they use. They wouldn’t know a G+ from a FB if they just stepped out of the stone-age this morning. Instead, they’d pick the service that their friends and family use. They cede the decision to their social graph, and sadly, many graphs are deeply rooted to FB. In the absence of any monumental reason to leave FB (it’s shutting down, they have a horrendous security breach, their data centers simultaneously burn down, etc.), these people who helped FB bury MySpace aren’t going to migrate to G+. We nerds and geeks may bully friends and relatives to set aside their inspirational quotes and “I’m begging you to engage me” status updates long enough to sit through a presentation on why G+ is “better” then FB, but in the end, they won’t care unless Aunt Alice, Uncle Joe, Cousin Mike and his three kids that everyone secretly dislikes but won’t actually admit to decide to unilaterally leave their years of status updates, photos and game-progress to claim a plot in the untamed wilderness of G+.

Good luck with that.

Out With The Old

Is this really bashing G+? Hell no. People maintain a FB, Twitter, Tumblr and blog, all at the same time. The problem is, if you want to network socially, you really only had a few options. If you wanted the features of FB, but didn’t want the actual service, you were SOL. G+ offers an alternative to FB for those who want to vomit when they see the blue and white “f”.

Because Google has made some crafty acquisitions over the years that seemed rather head-scratchable, they’re coalescing into some kind of social networking Devastator. They’ve got petabytes of family photos on Picasa. There’s millions of blog posts written on Blogger. They own YouTube, which even FB has to accommodate (oh gawd…what if Google blocks FB access to YouTube?!). Google has the power to bring all of their resources to bear on this segment, which, had it been done in a vacuum, would take over the social networking world so fast it would make your head explode, but which now gives Google a sure and steady path to make something far greater then the sum of it’s parts.

I’m really itching to get out of Twitter for G+, to be honest. Most of the people I follow on Twitter are on G+, and those who aren’t yet will be soon. Those who do want to move from FB to G+ will find a comforting (and less cluttered) UI, which will make their transition easier then it would be to something like Twitter or full-on-blogging. And over time, G+ seems on track to aggregate a lot of the disparate services that I have to manage manually with Twitter. Plus, there’s no limit (or there’s a large limit) on the status updates available with G+.