One of the most fascinating parts about Google+ so far, from my perspective (i.e., outside looking in, not having an invite m’self, yet) is the absolute flood of commentary on the project. Following on my very early reads-and-reactions post, there’s been more discussion and commentary, just within my immediate network, than I can properly summarize. A few of the keener insights:
- Paul Jones asks “Do Keynes’ Animal Spirits http://tinyurl.com/3l6yjon explain the jump onto G+ ?” and offers that “Skype sold at just the right time. G+ Hangout woulda caused Skype to hang it up. Hangout on lappy is very nice”
- Zeynep Tufekci offers a key insight into the opportunity space filled by Google+ in noting “Let me clarify re:Google+. I know other such platforms exist but there is platform fatigue. Many already use gmail so it is an opportunity.”
- Jillian York provides a comparison of community standards between Google+ and Facebook.
- Fred Stutzman has been providing some invaluable criticism on Twitter, including noting that Google+ has “No meaningful support for pseudonymity. If you choose a pseudonym, Google updates all other services with it.” and “Can’t use without creating a public profile. Even Facebook allows you to opt out of a public profile.” Fred also delves in greater depth to the question of “What problem does Google+ solve,” and I’d like to explore that at greater length, here.
Fred offers that “Google’s definition of success, I believe, is the creation of a technology that enables the enumeration and active maintenance of each user’s weighted social network going forward,” and I agree. Seen in this light, I’d argue that Google+ is, rather than a totally new thing, merely an evolution (albeit a large leap in punctuated equilibrium) of Google’s long-term move away from being a search engine and toward being a holistic information manager. gMail was a huge step in that evolution, and with each addition of services like Calendar and Maps, Google has expanded its reach across our informational lives.
Key in this evolution has also been an understanding that any effective social software does not replace “real” life or face-to-face interaction but rather helps facilitate it. Each incremental piece of the Googlesphere has worked toward these ends, and Google+ seems positioned to continue this movement toward holistic management of social information.
Fred further makes the distinction between social networks based on social objects, latent value and those that are ego-driven, placing Google+ in the latter category. I don’t think that that’s wrong, but given the range of uses where users currently find their value in the Googlesphere, I’d argue that Google+ will variously work as a social network based on social objects, latent value and ego-centricity for different users or for the same user at different times.
This is the opportunity of the Circles feature and implementation based on an understanding of multiply existant social networks. There do seem to be hiccups in implementing the privacy/publicity aspects of Circles and Google Profile pages, which Fred, Zeynep and Jackson Fox have been discussing. And Fred points to an excellent Farhad Manjoo piece that’s highly skeptical of the whole endeavor, but ends with this clunker: “Most people are OK with one giant, chaotic circle, and spending a lot of time worrying about the consequences of sharing your stuff there is totally square.” I don’t think that’s right, and it’s a huge overgeneralization from a position of privilege that allows anyone to say so.
But it also points to what really distinguishes Google+, which is the criticism at Twitter speed that’s accompanying the (field-test, not available to many yet) rollout. The news cycle has been accelerated, the hype machine amplified, and long-term context removed in so many aspects of contemporary discourse – especially as relates to technology – that actually allowing room for evolution seems like some far-off memory. And yet Facebook would not exist had it not evolved substantially several times since its inception, nor Twitter, nor most of the technology tools that now comprise indispensable elements of our digital lives. Google are smart folks – they knew this, but this is an important enough evolution that they needed to do it in the bright light and heat of a thousand critics blooming every second. And indeed, they have positioned themselves as not just tolerant of such criticism but wanting and needing it to perfect their product.
If this is really true – if Google has developed a promising, half-finished suite of social tools and released them to the unflinching and unsympathetic (well, partially) gaze of the online world’s macroscope, with the explicit goal of harnessing such criticism and engagement to answer real needs and problems – then that will be the truly revolutionary contribution of Google+.
Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks 
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