Is Google+ doomed to failure or will it be a Facebook killer? These are the observations from an active user of both social networks:
Nerds vs. Non-Nerds / Men vs. Women
If I compare my Google+ circles with my Facebook friends however, there is a striking difference: Most of my college friends from computer science and IT colleagues are on Google+. And many of them have have abandoned or even deleted their Facebook account, or they had none in the first place. On the other hand, none of my family and few others are on Google+. I have only two women in my circles and none of them are active. My Facebook friends, on the other side, contain a broad range of different people and gender is balanced. Interesting. Let’s see whether we can find a cause for this observation!
Circling vs. Friending
Facebook friendships are always mutual, confirmed by both sides. Managing lists etc. to group one’s friends is optional, a featured tucked on and rarely used by the majority. When adding a person on Google+, though, I have to decide which circles to put them in and circling is a one-way connection, with no obligation for the other person to follow me back. This does not only make it easier to connect with strangers due to the lightweight, less binding nature of circling, it is also an important psychological difference. My theory is that especially girls may find one-way relationships creepy and “stalkerish” and even if they search for an entourage, this is no replacement for the mutually-verified friendship. Geeks (both male and female) may be attracted by the idea of grouping relationships into circles. Men in general will see the opportunities for networking (Psychology professor Roy F. Baumeister has a talk worth reading called “Is there anything good about men?” that explores differences between men and women without judgement and he basically says something similar).
Quality vs. Quantity
Google’s Vic Gundotra says a write access to Google+ for external applications is “not coming anytime soon” as he’s afraid of “polluting” the stream. So far, Google+ is no secondary usage place, there’s only original content. This leads to less, but more meaningful content. A focus on quality. Facebook, on the other hand, has focussed on quantity with their launch of Timeline and Open Graph. Even if I’m not visiting Facebook for days, my timeline will fill itself with music from spotify, foursquare checkins, Tumblr postings or even just content generated about me by other users through “frictionless sharing”. This way, they achieve a true ambient intimacy for some, while others will just go “meh I’m not interested what my friends eat for breakfast”.
Professional vs. Personal
I think Google+ looks like the typical Google product: A clean, well-thought interface but not as creative and simple as many others. And to me it looks much more professional, but not in a LinkedIn-this-is-my-CV-kinda way. It looks like a place for conversations with peers, both known and unknown, and many early users said that it’s much better than Facebook for this purpose; also because the stream is really focussed on original content and no secondary usage. Google+ has games but they made sure they’re separated from the main feed of updates. Users who have been bombarded by FarmVille, CityVille and “WhateverVille” requests in Facebook may sigh in relief when using Google+.
Conclusion
Being able to write a long blog post about the differences of Facebook and Google+ proves the fact that one is not merely a clone of the other (and I haven’t even written about the largest unique feature of Google+, the Hangouts). They seem to serve different needs for different people. Some need one, some the other, and social media pros will use both, propably with a third party aggregation tool. Maybe Google and Facebook, while obviously being competitors in this space, will hurt themselves more when trying to copy the other instead of focussing what they can do best.
What do you think?!
Google recently announced support for Google+ in Apps accounts. For me, this was good news, because it meant I could consolidate my two Google accounts into one. I’m Google Apps user with lukasrosenstock.net and I really appreciate Google Apps and how Google made these Apps accounts first-class Google Accounts while at the same time baking features such as sharing within the domain into their products (even if they are pretty pointless for a single user domain like mine).
Previously, some products were unavailable for Apps Accounts, but now with Google+ they have really become first-class Google Accounts.
Do you remember Google+? One of the “Facebook killers” where now everybody’s joking about it being a graveyard. My experience is the opposite, Google+ is well and alive. I see a lot of interesting content in my Google+ stream, but admittedly this comes from a few users only. The question remains: How my of the people in my circles are actually still active users?
To find this out for myself, I ran a little experiment. As I was too impatient to wait for the announced “Migration Tool” anyway, I just created the profile in my Apps account, but didn’t add anyone. Instead, I posted a link to my new account into my old account’s stream, indicating that people should add my new account. I posted this twice with some delay, so that it wouldn’t be buried in the stream.
So here’s the numbers: I had 42 people who added me to their circles in the old account. After my two postings, 10 of them added my new account. In other words, the postings had a ~25% response rate. Of course I don’t know if the other 75% really haven’t seen it, are lazy or don’t like me anymore ;-)
I have collected few thoughts about Google+ and other social networks and how they’re used. I’ll keep that for the next post.
On 18th July, there was the Federated Social Web Summit taking place in Portland. This was an invite-only event for tech geeks involved in a lot of open technologies that I still owe you to explain. While I haven’t been there, I would like to link the coverage of this event on the blogs for you to read, if you are as curious as myself about it:
Did I miss anything interesting?!
Chris Messina is writing about the work of Mozilla Labs for an Online Identity Concept Series. The idea is to convert the browser into a tool that connects all social online services while keeping the user in control. Read the vision; and be sure to check out the mockups, it looks really great! Do you think we’ll all be using browsers like this in the future?! If so, how distant is that future?
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