Credit: XKCD
It’s been less than a week since the launch of Google+ and like most in the industry, I’ve been tinkering with it creating (too many?) Circles and at every stage comparing it to Facebook, Twitter and even Tumblr.
And so far, I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to use it in the long term.
It’s not that I don’t ‘get’ the product itself. I’ve read enough this past week, and spent enough time on it now to feel pretty confident about the ins and outs. But rather, I haven’t settled on what place Plus have in my online life? How am I actually going to use Google+?
I use this blog as an aggregated presence for other venues, and the odd post. Tumblr is for nonsense and lulz. I use Posterous to curate social data and visualisations. Delicious I use (still) as my online memory and as a retrieval system for mostly professional information. Twitter is for networking and discovery. I’ve kept Facebook a completely secluded island for family and ‘actual’ friends, whereas LinkedIn is my online Rolodex. And I take far more than I give on Digg, Fark, Reddit or StumbleUpon but generally speaking they all serve the exact same role, that of continuous discovery of online content.
The point being is that I have over the years carved out some pretty clear roles on what I use certain social networks/platforms for. And though my online attention is quite literally scattered across the web, it all actually seems to work for me.
So back to Google+ then. Is it meant to replace Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter? Or complement them?
The main advantage as I see it for Google+ in their long term adoption is that there are more Google users than Facebook users, and people still spend an awful lot of time using their products in a given day (though more on Facebook). So it’s not the case that people are going to leave other networks completely, though some might, but as All Facebook pointed out:
The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus.
Google already has more users than Facebook, over one billion. They aren’t going to suddenly leave Facebook in droves, they’re just going to spend more time on all the sites in Google’s network. That big notifications box in the top right of all Google sites is the reason why.
On reflection, I easily spend far more time on using Google products (watching clips on YouTube or reading Google News alone) than I do on Facebook in a given week. And that doesn’t even take into account my complete and utter reliance on Google for search or Gmail as my primary personal address since 2004. Add to that my more recent conversion to Reader and long overdue defection from Firefox to Chrome and on paper, I’m pretty heavily entrenched in Google. I’m far more reliant on Google products than I am on Facebook and if the revolution were to come tomorrow and I had to chose sides, I’d be team Google all the way.
Which is why I’m all the more perplexed as to why I’m not more fussed about using Google+ right now. Were there such a thing as a Google fanboy, I’d probably be one based on my description above, and by extension, I should be all over Google+.
But I’m just not.
Maybe time will tell on this one. As TechCrunch pointed out, “Google+ is more than a social product, or even a social strategy, it’s an extension of Google itself.” So eventually, I may just find myself using Google+, and so will everyone else.
But I haven’t seen nearly enough useful sharing of content from asymmetrical relationships for it to be as professionally useful as Twitter or LinkedIn. I primarily share things on Twitter over Facebook, and that will be a hard habit to break with the +1 button. And frankly, there aren’t enough of my actual friends on Google+ for it to be anything near ‘a new Facebook’ for quite some time.
Elsewhere, Sparks isn’t yet delivering on the potential for serving up interesting content to make me use it over Digg, Fark or Google News. But the idea behind this feature remains one of the things that interested me the most about Plus.
Part of me really wants to like and use Google+ . But at this stage it almost feels like I’m rooting for the underdog, even though that underdog just happens to be the second most valuable company on the planet.
So getting back to my original point, I am still a bit unsure of how I will be using Google+. I won’t give up on it just yet. But I’m going to be a bit more casual in my approach in the coming weeks and work it out as I go along. I trust in time it’s utility will become evident, or in my mind at least, it will fail.
But if anyone out there sees a big potential, or already has it figured out, please comment below!
