The Big Plus Of Google+

by Kashmir Hill
I finally got an invite to Google+. (Squeaky wheel gets the Circles!) Circles are after all what are first and foremost about the new social network. You don’t just “friend” people; you place them in a particular circle when you add them to your network, meaning you immediately sort your friends from your colleagues from your family — so you can easily give different groups different access to information about you.

That wasn’t initially the model with Facebook. At the start, Facebook saw all contacts as equal. That was because it was designed for college students, who didn’t imagine that their parents, professors, and pre-teen cousins would eventually wade in. It now has built sorting tools but they’re not necessarily intuitive, and most of us don’t want to go back and sort our hundreds or thousands of friends to place them in the appropriate category.

That may be one of the biggest things Google+ has going for it. This was a point made not by a tech journo but by a political reporter. Ezra Klein says in the Washington Post:

That’s where I could imagine Google+ coming in. It’s not that any of its features are so revolutionary. It’s not that it’s better at doing social networking than Facebook. It’s that it’s an opportunity to start over, to build your social network with years of Facebook experience in mind, rather than having to face the accretion of mistakes and miscalculations you made over almost a decade of trial-and-error with a new technology. It’s not Facebook’s fault that “what it means” to have a Facebook account has changed four or five times over the last few years, even as most of us have only had one profile over that period. But it is an opportunity for Google.

As my colleague Tomio Geron notes, the Google+ architecture more closely resembles how we connect and socialize in real life. Of course, there’s always going to be a plasticity to our real world connections that techno-simulations can’t capture.

In the real world, a colleague may over time move into your “friend” circle – mentally, you’ll re-designate them, but you may forget to “formally” do it online. Or a close friendship may fade over time leading someone in your Google+ “friend” circle to drop out of your real world social circle. Thankfully, we’re not as locked into categories IRL as we are online, but as we spend more and more time in front of computers and smartphones, with our experiences increasingly mediated by tech tools, the challenge is to capture the nuance of real life in our digital ones. Google appears to have done a highly decent job of that with +.