Tag Archives: Google

It is all about “Privacy”. How Google+ is doing to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace.

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So people like me (Social Media Nerds) think that when a network comes up with new ways to share content and interact with “friends” they’re going to be the next big thing.  Turns out, that is just what we want in a kick ass Social Network.  The rest of 499 million people of Facebook aren’t as interested in that when choosing a primary social network.

In the days since Google+ has launched and my non-social media nerd friends have been joining I’ve notice a trend.  They are in love with the concept of Google+ Circles, the feature that allows you to tag your friends so when you post content you can easily decide who to send what to.  A feature that somewhat exists on Facebook but has never been a focus of the site.  Circles looks to be the privacy Facebook users were craving.  Google found an unmet need and nailed it.  Of course this makes sense, this is exactly how Facebook exploded in the first place.  It was all about privacy.

Back in the day,  (I was young, I’m not a kid any more.) the big social network was MySpace.  A site that allowed you to build a killer profile, share content, and become friends with people.  Then came along “the facebook”, which was a solution to the biggest complaint about MySpace.  On MySpace there were all kinds of people, and any of them could read your profile for the most part, and worse talk to you.  (Basically it was getting a rep for having too many pervs on the site.)  Facebook exploded because it was private, you controlled your community.  Someone had to accept you as a friend to get access to their profile, and you couldn’t even get on the site without an .edu email address in the beginning.  Now obviously Facebook has evolved a lot since then… but at the end of the day, the strength of the site was in its original user controlled privacy.

So that brings us to Google+.  What the Circles feature offers is all the basic functionality of Facebook’s content sharing but with a layer of privacy, because now a days people have all kinds of people in their networks.  And honestly sometimes you want to post pictures from the party last night… but odds are good you want to pick and choose who you show those to.  This is where Google+ has a mass appeal.

Plus, keep in mind Google+ isn’t really a social network, but rather a Relationship Management tool.  It is a layer over your email, search, and much more.  Just like MySpace wasn’t a blog but rather a blogging network, and Facebook wasn’t a blogging network but rather a Social Network.  I like to think of Google+ as my personal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.  Its purpose isn’t to make my world more social, but rather to help me better manage my world.  There is too much data in our lives, why shouldn’t each person get a tool to manage/simplify all that data?

Thanks for listening,

Zach West

Feel free to join me on Google+ +Zach West

Google+ won’t kill Facebook, but it will give them problems (Google+ will have 50 million active users before 2012)

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A more effiecient social experience.On June 29th, I received an invite to join Google+.  The day prior they had announced the site and I’ll be the first to say I thought it looked cool and then just wrote it off as another soon to be #fail by Google.  But I have to say I was rather impressed.

Enough so to predict that Google+ will have 50 million active users before 2012.  Here’s why:

There is a user base on Facebook that doesn’t really like it any more.  These are the people who have had Facebook long enough to have gone through a life change.  (Think of this as getting married, moving to a new town, graduating college and so on.)  In my case since becoming a user on Facebook in 2005 I’m not exactly the same guy any more.  Today I am a professional, no longer a college student.  And I feel there are a lot more out there like me, who don’t see Facebook as an exciting representation of my world anymore.  (I use the word exciting because in the virtual world you get to be who you want to be. Also in my case I created my profile on Facebook when I was just becoming a freshman in college, a great time to be who you want to be.)  Also now that I’ve graduated the word “friend” need no longer apply to almost 80% of the 650+ “friends” I have on Facebook.  I haven’t seen most of them in a few years.  Not to mention our parents are joining Facebook.  (Not cool)  So all of those things have made me less engaged with Facebook.  (I feel I spend more time thinking about who is going to see what I post than thinking about what to post.)

So with that said, I think Google+ may have figured it out.  Their “News Feed” can be everyone, or you can segment it by circles of contacts.  Meaning you can see the content from just your close friends, your family, and coworkers instead of having to scroll down a mile to see them.  Even more importantly Google+ does a much better job of letting you control your privacy, every time you publish content you choose which circles get to see the content.  This is the very feature that is going to get me to actually use my Google+ account.  (Assuming I can get enough of the people I like to interact with to also use there’s.)

There are two other solutions that Google+ has that Facebook lacks.  Google+’s sparks takes value of iPad apps like Flipbook and Pulse and brings them right into your social network.  Instead of having to go find pages on Facebook to Like, so you can get good content from them.  Google+ just has you put in the keyword you want to see content about and then populates it with relevant articles and blog posts.

So will I switch?  No.  I’ll add this to my social network presences.  I can’t leave Facebook, the contacts and world I’ve built there still has value.  That said, the new Google+ might be where I go first when checking on what’s happening out in my world.

(And I have a feeling a lot of people will do the same.  Between the Tech nerds who are all about Google everything, to the people who’s Facebook worlds aren’t the same as they used to be.)