Obligatory Post Speculating on Google+

I love product launches. It's the perfect time to speculate with no inconvenient research or history to get in the way.

This goes for everything on this blog, but it's probably worth highlighting in this instance that these opinions are my own. They do not represent the thoughts and opinions of Google, the Google+ team, or anyone else who works at Google.

My history of speculating on products tends to be bullish on Google and cynical of social. I thought Android and Wave were going to change the world, and that Twitter was a waste of time.

Twitter with conversations

Despite my initial reservations I'm a big user of Twitter, but I find that most of my interaction there is effectively anonymous - I'm either reading things by interesting people I don't know, or sharing things I think are interesting with people I've never met.

I've found that half my use of Google+ works similarly - by posting publicly and creating a "My Stream" circle full of interesting folks who I don't know personally.

Where I think Google+ adds value is with threaded conversations. By attaching the conversation that emerges from each post, anonymity is reduced and the process of sharing and reading are suddenly more social.

Facebook with sharing controls

I remember quite clearly the moment my use of Facebook went from regular to sporadic. My manager's passing comment on my most recent status update (something along the lines of "I'm so bored I'm considering setting myself on fire just to liven up my day") prompted this blog post.

I've always maintained a policy of only adding people I know and would recognize in person as Facebook friends. Nonetheless, when your extended family, school friends, and current / former work colleagues are all reading the same stream, and seeing the same pictures, the intersection of "appropriate material" rapidly tends towards zero.

Using circles to fragment my audience has been an elegant solution for me.

I've created the obvious circles like "friends", "family", and "Googlers" but I've found smaller adhoc circles particularly useful when socializing

Socializing+

In the paleolithic age we used email to arrange social events and share the photos afterwards, but it never really worked.

Facebook is a good alternative, but it requires adding people you don't necessarily know to your "friends" list.

Being able to create an adhoc circle (or just add individual people to a post) - makes it easy to work out the details for a 4th July BBQ - and then post the photos - all in one place.

I've not spent a lot of time with Huddles or Hangouts yet, but they seem a natural extension. I can see using Huddle instead of SMS to let folks know you're running late, to get parking advice, or confirm the orders for a lunch-run. I've used similar products (most notably Beluga and GroupMe) to coordinate amongst a large group at conferences or events like MWC or Google I/O.

Social photo sharing without wanting to punch your screen

Photos are probably the reason most folks joined Facebook to begin with. It's also the reason many people hate Facebook.

I'll happily rave about the Google+ photo experience which is awesome. It's easy to share photos with just a small group, or post your best amateur photography for the world to critique.

I don't want to be social at work

For all the good uses, let me highlight a couple that I don't see catching on.

I admit to having been a little skeptical of Google+ during the dogfooding stage. With 20/20 hindsight, I think a lot of that had to do with it being effectively a corporate social network. My email inbox is full enough as it is; I really don't need another stream to monitor in order to be involved in work conversations.

This is not a blog

You'll note that I haven't posted this directly on Google+.

I don't want to read your essay in my social stream, just give me an abstract and link to your blog. For added bonus points, make sure your blog links back to your Google+ profile.

In Conclusion

Twitter is entirely public and as a result my interactions there are regular but tend towards the impersonal. Facebook is limited to people I know so the interactions are more personal, but (increasingly) less frequent.

Google+  lets me choose which group of people I'm comfortable sharing something with to a degree that lets me have regular, personal conversations.

As many of you have no doubt noticed - that makes for an addictive combination.

Google Goes Open Social

John Battelle appears to have scooped Google by releasing a draft of Google's Open Social press release. Google Operating System gives a pretty good rundown of what it's all about so I won't rehash that here. What I do think is interesting is the defacto social network that Google's just created.

The launch partners (Orkut, Hi5, Ning, Friendster, LinkedIn, ...) are an impressive collection of social networks that aren't Facebook or MySpace, but the biggest launch partner hasn't been listed.

Google already has a massive social graph, it's all your contacts in GMail and friends in GoogleTalk. Google already uses this social graph to show you a news feed created by your 'friends' in Shared Stuff. Google have said that the GMail contact manager is going to be migrated into Google's other services, and your Shared Stuff profile has already been re-used in Google Maps.

Now we have Open Social, and it doesn't take too much imagination to see iGoogle supporting Open Social widgets. Suddenly you can create an iGoogle tab that displays Shared Stuff feeds and Facebook style social apps that use your GMail contacts as friends. Want to know more about a friend? Just view their 'social profile', and with Open Social you've got a world of 3rd party developers ready to go.

Without having to release a 'new' social network Google already have. Friends, profiles, social apps, picture albums, news feeds, IM, inbox messaging -- just by adding a social layer on top of their existing properties, Google has scooped Facebook.

Could Facebook Hitting Critical Mass Lead to a Meltdown?

Having your siblings friend you on Facebook is one thing, getting poked by your parents is something else.

Then your boss comments on your weekend activities and Facebook's ubiquity gets a little creepy. It's not a new observation, people have been bemoaning Facebook's lack of domain separation ever since the platform expanded from college kids to the general public. It was then that the aforementioned co-eds realised their booze fueled girls-gone-wild party-pics might not play so well when they got friended by the CTO at their graduating 'first choice' investment bank.

Clearly just not friending these people won't work -- the solution, of course, is silos -- an invisible barrier that lets you put each friend in the right bucket. Friend. Family. Workmate. Then each posting / app / status update only gets pushed to the people who should be seeing it. It's perfect but it also adds complexity. Facebookers rarely go to the trouble of rotating portrait photos in their photo albums, you think they're going to think through the implications of each status update and photo post?

But what's worse than information leakage? Your mother uses Facebook. That's not just an insult my friends, that's death for any online application that values 'cool'. Trendy stores keep unwelcome adults out by playing loud obnoxious music and strobing their lights in a way sure to induce seizures in anyone over 30. MySpace works pretty much the same way. Part of Facebook's problem is its elegant design, the same feature that has helped its monumental growth may now be encouraging too many people to join.

How long before the sheer uncoolness of a social network your parents are part of and your boss reads daily leads hipsters to seek out a less 'parent friendly' alternative? Then again, the propagation of vampire-werewolf-ninja-pirate 'apps' might be enough to distract nosy parents and employers from the incriminating kegger photos.

Facebook wants to win market share from LinkedIn, but maybe we'd all be better off if our social networks and professional networks kept their distance.

It's hard to argue that a social network's astronomic growth is a bad thing. But how Zuckerberg and his increasingly talented team are going to deal with these issues should be of supreme interest to those looking to invest in Facebook's estimated 15b valuation.

Google 'Shared Stuff' Social Bookmarking Service

Google is quietly launching a new service today called 'Shared Stuff'.

It's a service that lets you bookmark pages, add comments and add tags in a similar way to how Google Notebook works, but with an emphasis firmly on sharing. As well as a 'shared stuff' page, your friends can add your Shared Stuff as a Google Homepage module, or subscribe to your RSS feed.

Once you've 'shared' an item, Google will tell you how many times it's been shared (like every social bookmarking site ever) but also how many times it's been viewed.

It looks like they'll be building this in to all the Google services that allow sharing (Maps, Video, YouTube, Reader, Picasaweb, Blogger, ...), but at the moment it's only supported in Google Video and via a browser (Share This) button. This suggests this is the mysterious Mocka-Mocka social service suggested in the Google Reader training video that was leaked earlier this month.

It's still not properly launched, so I expect we'll see a 'home' page for the service, similar to the Digg or Del.icio.us front pages that show us what's getting shared and viewed the most, before too long. but you can still see the 'most popular' items, or you can see the most popular items by tag.

As it is, it's a very workable replacement for sending emails of cool stuff you've found online (or having a blog for the same).

For those playing at home, this accounts for the mysterious Google service 'S2'.