I've been playing around with Google+ a little today. Farhad Manjoo no like, More Like Google Minus:
... First, I don't know whom the company thinks it's kidding; Google+ is obviously a direct competitor to Facebook. Given the large overlap in functionality, I can't imagine that many people will use Google+ and Facebook simultaneously. For most of us, it will be one or the other. Google+'s success, then, will rest in large part on Google's ability to convince people to ditch Facebook for the new site. For that, Google+ will have to offer some compelling view of social networking that's substantially different from what's available on Facebook. And that's where Google+ baffles me. What is so compelling about Google+ that I can't currently get on Facebook or Twitter? Or Gmail, for that matter? At the moment, I can't tell.... ... But circles are nothing new. Facebook has offered several ways to break your network into smaller chunks for many years now, and it has worked constantly to refine them. And you know what? Almost no one uses those features. Only 5 percent of Facebookers keep "Lists," Facebook's first attempt for people to categorize their friends. Recognizing that "Lists" weren't great, last year the site unveiled a new way to manage your friends, called "Groups." I was optimistic that "Groups" would help to compartmentalize Facebook, but from what I can tell, few people use that feature, either.
Since Google+ is not "prime time" I'm not going to judge it too much. The interface feels a lot zippier and more fluid than Facebook's, but that might just be because there are hundreds of millions of people using Facebook. Unlike Manjoo I do think that the idea of "circles" is not without merit. I tried Facebook's Lists, and it just plain didn't work the way it was supposed to work, so I gave up. Right now I, along with others, slice and dice my online voice across different platforms. twitter for public interaction, Facebook for semi-public interaction. When you have friends you know through science blogging, transhumanism, right-wing politics, high school, not to mention cousins who were raised in the Tablighi subculture, Facebook's one-size-fits-all tendency of throwing them into a big pot has been kind of suboptimal. Then again, most people probably don't manifest as much dilettantism as I do, leading them to have a much more well "sorted" social set. I will say though that Google+ doesn't seem as patently useless as Wave and Buzz were. But if you haven't gotten an invite, you aren't missing out on much. There is no way this should warrant the hysteria which was the norm when Gmail first rolled out and required invites.
