Today post comes from Kane Murphy.
So everyone’s raving about Google+ Circles of late. But being the social media junkies that we are, haven’t we all ordered our facebook friends and the people we follow on twitter in to a dozen lists, giving us the exact same solution to our first world problems?
I know people associate circles with simplicity and usability; but I most certainly don’t. Venn diagrams, the Olympic rings, light discs, Captain Planet’s Planeteer rings, crop circles and all those metal rings that link and unlink through magical prowess… Circles kind of scare me, they’re never ending, literally. With Google+ I feel like I’m dragging my friends into a bull rink against their will to faceoff with likeminded individuals. Facebook and Twitter lists work pretty damn well if you ask me, I don’t need an bordered enclosure for my friends, surely I’m charming enough that they won’t run away.
As our Circles begin to feed and grow and contain more and more friends we have never actually (and never will have) met (but who we’d start an all out cyber war at the drop of a disrespectful tweet for **respect**), users will be looking for order, and what has more order than a list (apart from the Order of the Phoenix of course)? If we introduce Parent-Circles and Sub-Circles as Google+ users are already calling for, you’ll end up having to play a game of Connect 4 just to share a montage of your latest killcams with your Call of Duty circle.
Whoever said change was a good thing obviously wasn’t a compulsive social media friend sorter.
Kane Murphy hails from Melbourne Australia, mashing up social media, marketing, web and shoe polish in to a big ball of mush your dog wouldn’t eat… and selling it by the pound for outrageous prices. @kanemurphy
HI Kane!
Yeah I don’t really care about lists or circles or ‘top friends’ or anything. I feel that’s one main reason Myspace went down, was because of the “hierarchy” of friends. It just became a popularity contest and it was annoying. That’s one reason I enjoy Facebook, you have the option to have ‘featured’ friends, but you’re not forced to have it if you don’t want to. I want it all mixed together. I don’t need someone know whether they’re an acquaintance or a true friend. It doesn’t matter to them.
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely jump on the bandwagon of new social networks, but that doesn’t mean I’ll accept them and love them. Most new social networks are extremely flawed.
Good stuff!
Hi Morgan,
Thanks for your comment.
I think facebook does it best at the moment (as they should!). I would expect that Google won’t rest on their heels for too long, adding additional features to make G+ a force to be reckoned with.
Do you think Google will be able to keep up? After all, social networks is 100% of what facebook does, and maybe 2% for Google.
That’s just it, Google is a search engine, period. Who knows if they’ll be able to keep up. They’ve been trying to get into the social game for so long now, that it’s almost a joke at this point. No matter how “cool” Google+ looks, I just don’t see the value in it yet, and I know I’m not alone in that thought.