Google+ isn’t friend lists, Facebookers
Like most geeks, over the past few days I’ve been playing quite a bit with Google+. It’s been an interesting experience - for once, Google have actually built something social that is pretty good. That doesn’t mean it will really catch on, but unlike Buzz and Wave it’s actually been executed well and properly thought through.
I initially wanted to blast out a blog post in response to some of the ‘OMG Google+ has easy data liberation it’s so amazing everyone will love it, Facebook’s gonna die’ type tweets and blog posts going around the tech-sphere. The vast, vast majority of users do not care about data liberation at all. No consumer tech product has ever won by being the best at data liberation. Even if journalists and bloggers write about it more, because they love the data liberation, users won’t really care. Google+ will win or lose by how much value it adds day to day to the most people. And to most people, data liberation adds absolutely no day to day value. So, anyone who thinks Facebook will suddenly die screaming to be replaced by a more data liberal Google+ can forget it.
However since then, I’ve started to see a lot of defensive remarks, mainly from current and former Facebook staffers, who essentially claim that Google+ is stupid because it’s basically just Facebook friend lists, which are better, and either way no-one apart from nerds will use them so just forget it already and go home. Yishan Wong wrote a long post on Quora saying this in great length. He talks about how in Facebook, even stuff you say in public can only be commented on by your friends; and that this is the only sensible way for it to be. He compares saying something in ‘public’ online to talking to your friends privately outside. Other people may overhear you, but they shouldn’t get involved in the conversation. What rubbish. Saying something on Facebook is very much like saying something private to your friends; and if you happen to have a public setting, it is very much like saying something to your friend whilst standing outside. Others butting in would be weird and strange. But on Twitter, if you say something publicly, you *expect* other people who you don’t know to get involved in the conversation. It’s a public conversation, not a private conversation that happens to be taking place in public. It’s a different setting.
Google+ isn’t Twitter. But it’s not Facebook either. It’s something very different. It has an asynchronous follow model like Twitter, but matched with an asynchronous push model (which you can achieve with Facebook, but not quite so simply). The circles of friends and people you want to push to and pull from are centre stage. So saying ‘Facebook tried something like this and it didn’t work’ is pointless - it’s a very different setting. Facebook also had status updates - but this is very different from it being Twitter, despite them technically being pretty much the same thing. Fred Wilson wrote a good argument rooting for Google+ and describing its different use cases here; it’s worth a read.
So will Google+ succeed? No-one can know. I don’t know the exact type of user it might attract. I’m sure Google think they know, but I’m also sure that they’ll be wrong. They’ve created something new and interesting, and executed it well, which is pretty much the best they could have hoped for. The deep integration of Google+ with their email and search products, with the ever present notifications bar, and chance to integrate deeply into Chrome and Android could make this an interesting proposition. I don’t think it poses any real risk to Facebook; it could make more privacy conscious people turn to it rather than Twitter for semi-public, professional focused information sharing though. Once the buzz and hype and blog posts die down, it will be interesting to see what happens with the usage of Google+ over the next 6-12 months. That will give an initial indicator of whether it will stay around or not. If it does, Google may have just got that foot in the door of social they’ve been so desperately clawing for.
