Happy Birthday Google+
2 years but still waiting to realise potential
Two years ago there was a lot of concern about Facebook’s privacy policy (not much change there) and there were multiple stories of people getting sacked from their jobs or otherwise experiencing severe embarrassment as a result of an inappropriately shared post- not so much that the post was intentionally inappropriate but that it was shared with too broad an audience. In the context of Chris Poole’s comments about the Prismatic Self and other literature I’ve found from danah boyd on what she called the Faceted ID/Entity, a new sharing solution was needed. — Enter Google+.
Introducing Google+: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web
Now, I am a big fan of Google+. I am adamant in my belief that it is the most powerful social platform on the web, but it has had to deal with it’s fair share of issues - some related directly to the Prismatic Self.
The most obvious problem to me is that the network is person-centric, not topic-centric. This is teh defining difference between Facebook and Twitter and, in my opinion is one of the great unseen dividing lines of online identity. Originally it was all about people and circles, then pages - all of which made it easy to group things but not to create context. This was a fundamental problem of Google+’s handling of the Prismatic Self. If you chose to put someone in a Arts & Culture circle and they start talking about their other pet subject, moto-cross, all context is lost. Multiply that out by everyone you have in you circles (which can quickly reach the thousands) and everything becomes chaos. Google+ circles were communities without context.
So, it made sense that they eventually created “Communities” - shared topic-related circles - and also hashtags (although this has had a lot of criticism for established users). This was not a fix, but a return to the original problem - have to be in the right community to have a conversation. It must be a technical thing but the Communities actually do circling better than Circles do- whatever they’re called, the only difference is a control on public, personal & private groups.
Among all the fantastic tools that Google+ has, by far the most underrated and under-utilised is search. In the early days there was this function called “Sparks” - not well-conceived and never resonated with users. Sparks were topic-related posts that were generated from Google’s algorithm, in short, spam posts. While they are (happily) long gone now, I always thought that Sparks would integrate really with with Saved Searches (a bit like Google Alerts). There is current no way to get Saved Searches in your Stream. Using Sparks would make it easy to start new conversations on shared interests without the need for formal Communities.
My biggest frustration from day one was the poor integration between Google+ and the rest of the internet. The so called corporate champions of open innovation have been painfully slow with any APIs or access to the account other than via the front-end interface. The Prismatic Self is about the entirety of the person experience (online and off) and, try as they might, you can not lock that down to one site. If I workout using UP Band or RunKeeper, I want to share it with my fitness friends. If I see a good movie, I’ll want to share with my film-loving friends. Google+ currently has no mechanism to make this form of sharing easier, even though they already have the technology to do so - the Knowledge Graph. Freebase was bought by Google in 2010 and has been developed into Knowledge Graph seemingly along side Google+. A number of function are starting to be released through Google Search, Google Now, and (I imagine Google Glass). It would seem that something like Knowledge Graph would be perfect for tying the chaos of Google+ together, and (with an Open API) connecting with the rest of our online information. If done correctly Google+ even has the potential as an engine for blog comments, like Disqus and Facebook.
Finally, is the issue of anonymity and real names. So much has been said about this and the issue has become so divisive that I don’t want to going too deeply into this now.
At the start of 2012 Google allowed nicknames and aliases;
For a service that specialised in niche group communications I honestly can’t see why it isn't possible to at least customise your identity for different cohorts. Use the analogy of masks - while the account may always be in your name, when posting about wrestling you can be the Masked Camaro and when working on your thesis you can include all the post-nominals you need.
If there is a place for the Prismatic Self exists online, Google+ has to be the closest, but it still has a long way to go.
