Phew, looks like I’m the first person to have an opinion on Google+
Just like the rest of the internet, I’ve watched with some interest as Google+ has been unveiled. Before getting my invite I was trying to determine what its angle was to really differentiate itself from Facebook (or even Twitter, if you believe that’s the real competition). After all, while ‘it’s not Facebook!’ might be enough to convert a few (including Randall Munroe 
), we all know that’s not enough for it to achieve critical mass.
After being graciously invited to cross the velvet rope and enter the club of one, I was stunned by just how familiar it all was. How peripheral the headline ‘Hangouts’ and ‘Sparks’ features were, and the sense that this was a red herring – that there’s more to come beyond Yet Another Social Networking Website – was inescapable, perhaps something deeply integrated into search results (after all, it’s a completely captive audience Google already sits on). Most depressing was how much of a wasted opportunity ‘circles’ are – a little bit of UI polish over friend lists and little else. Yes, dig a little deeper and you see where Google+ subtly takes a different view to content sharing – ostensibly nestling itself somewhere between Facebook and Twitter. On the one hand, we lose the mutual and well-understood ‘friendship’ connection of Facebook, and adopt a Twitter-style ‘follow’ dynamic, enhanced perhaps by a little more social context. My immediate concern though, is one of transparency about how content is published and shared. It’s a problem Facebook still hasn’t solved, and yet Twitter has cracked elegantly by sidestepping entirely. This one’s for you too Zuck: ‘social by default’ is fine but only when you’re building a platform which assumes the world is watching, like Twitter. Despite a number of privacy scares over the years, at least Facebook has now incubated the idea that ultimately what happens within its walls is a ‘place for friends’. Google+, in merging the social ideals of Facebook with the inherently open attitude of Twitter, has created a monster. I +1 this and it’s ‘public to the web’, but now you’re urging me to carefully pick ‘circles’ to target this other content to? It’s a confusing message, one which I hope becomes clearer as Google+ matures and uncovers its true identity. I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that yet another website can be the cornerstone of any competitor’s strategy.
But I didn’t come here just to witter on about Google+. Last year, for my final year uni project, I developed a little prototypica
l social networking website called iglu. iglu explored the contribution algorithms can make to improving the social networking experience – and was built on top of the Facebook API as a really quick way of seeding it with a social graph and real-world interaction patterns. With iglu, users didn’t have a single friends list – instead ‘social circles’ were inferred based on the mutual connections between clusters of friends, as a way of targeting different types of content to different friends or family or colleagues and so on… (Sound familiar?) There was a lot of other constant data crunching going on, including attempts to infer interests and dislikes based on posting/commenting/liking habits etc. but in the wake of Google+’s deeply disappointing ‘circles’ functionality, I thought this might be a nice time to revisit the project. No, I have no interest in launching a competing social network(!) – but instead I’ve decided to work on abstracting out (and open sourcing) the social circles algorithm from iglu into a form which can automatically create friends lists for your Facebook account based on the mutual connections in your friends list. It’ll be a nice chance to see if there’s other interesting variables that can be drawn in to better cluster friends and automatically label lists (something the current implementation lacks) – ie. based on shared workplaces, universities, cities etc. Imaginatively titled ‘iglu circles’, hopefully I’ll have something to share soon! 
After all, as Mark Zuckerberg says: “Nobody wants to make lists.” Right.
Posted: July 15, 2011 at 8:28 pm
July 27th, 2011 at 9:37 am
iglu didn’t make me have to put people in groups either. It did it for me. So Ha to Google. And yes, I’ve tried to make myself private, however got told about the +1 feature……pointless to have a private profile/not visible on search thing then….at least that’s what it feels like to me. It feels a bit, well, empty there too. It doesn’t flow like Twitter does and at least with Facebook I can speak to individual people. I can only do this if I make a circle for all of you (phew!). I really don’t think it’s going to be sooo popular as other sites. I mean maybe it’s like a more targeted Tumblr too.
January 20th, 2012 at 12:51 am
Greetings, Young Luke! I am Yoda. No, I’m not Yoda, but I’m feeling silly and noticed that you are a graduate students of @tnhh. I’m pleased that you found the CMU paper on location-sharing preferences of interest today. It was via @cyu … is this opaque enough?
Sorry, I don’t intend it to be.
I don’t know if you designed and coded this website or if it is a St. Andrews template. If it is yours, I commend you on the exceptional clarity and superb UX. I have some accessibility challenges, but I don’t feel them at all on this site. Good job!
Anyway, to get to the point here: You wrote this post in mid-July 2011. Needless to say, Google+ has changed significantly since then. That hasn’t been so wonderful for users.
Google should have seriously considered a 3 to 6 month private beta. If there were one already, it needed to be extended! Many of the features you took issue with have been addressed e.g. the ability to communicate with just one person, yet not make a circle for every contact. Some of the matters you mentioned are unchanged, most notably the fact that the entire thing has a sort of empty feel to it even now. I find it very difficult to believe that there are 50million active users, or whatever the latest count is.
For my purposes, Google+ works adequately, and I’ve even met a few new people. I’ve also learned more about some of my Twitter acquaintances, and that hasn’t necessarily been a good thing. Twitter is unique and amazing. On Twitter, I can be friendly with people who only want small does of me (and vice versa). Google HAS relaxed the “only real, complete full first and names” policy, though that isn’t widely discussed, and one can’t be blatant (there were at least 15 fake Muamar Khaddaffi profiles for a few weeks). I don’t use Facebook, never was good with it, and don’t truly believe that they have their privacy policies ironed out even now. I think there have been several incidents since your wrote this. However, Facebook hasn’t been hacked, unlike nearly ever other public and private company, government and law enforcement agency, financial institution and news media site… globally! So they’re doing something right!
Yes, your Iglu circles concept has many similarities to Google+, though you developed it prior to G+. The same could be said about Diaspora. I think your Iglu is quite a bit closer to G+ than Diaspora though. Well, I’ve rambled on long enough. Are you friends with (a colleague of) the @ShadowHost? I initially found @tnhh on CiteULike (I’m uncertain, it’s been awhile). CiteULike is great, particularly if one just wants to interact a little, not too much (like me sometimes)!
Regards, @EllieAsksWhy
January 20th, 2012 at 10:16 am
Hello! I’ve just had my first caffeine injection of the day so, I too, am at my silly zenith at the moment – therefore any gratuitous SW reference is welcome!
Glad you like the template – I threw it together a while ago, but it still needs a bit of tweaking “one day”! Re: Google+, I’ve kept an eye on how it’s being used, and it does look like it’s better defined as a “Twitter on steroids” than a Facebook-killer. Despite the circles UI, it seems like the emphasis on sharing and allowing blog-style posts/comment threads has attracted the attention of ‘personalities’ (mainly journalists and such) where it seems to be a much nicer way of engaging with their audience, while still letting them do some segmentation of their content, rather than Twitter alone or Facebook pages. This still feels like a sandbox that Google are playing around in, and that’s fine, but I would’ve waited until they could’ve really leveraged their search/range of products to actually meaningfully integrate G+ from the beginning, rather than this slow dribble of functionality. The recent launch of their integrated social search seems to be the first serious attempt at this, although I’m a little baffled as to how exactly they started integrating my Twitter account to push results based on things I, or my Twitter friends, have shared.
My biggest ongoing issue though is that G+ is still arguably ‘dumber’ than Facebook when it comes to privacy, albeit a little nicer in UX (http://www.citeulike.org/user/lukehutton/article/10031715) but I still think this isn’t going as nuanced and easy-to-use (a major tension right there!) as it should be. The beauty of Twitter is really in its simplicity – because it’s inherently open (I fail to understand using Twitter but locking down your tweets) the level of discourse is well defined. I use my Twitter to share cool things I find, or to talk about the things I’m doing, because I know that’s unlikely to bite me 5 years down the line, whereas there’s a whole layer of interaction I’d rather take offline, or grudgingly to Facebook! However, there’s still this collective expectation that Facebook/Google+ are somehow trusted environments because there’s some sort of privacy model, and that gets potentially much more dangerous, but good fun for people like me to find about!
Oh dear, I appear to be rambling a little bit (initial caffeine injection….wearing off!) but I too adore CiteULike, where I can be found as the imaginatively named lukehutton. It’s a bit like endlessly clicking through ‘related videos’ on YouTube, I find myself endlessly wandering down a garden path, tagging cool papers all over the place!