On the count of three, everybody I know needs to stop updating Facebook and start posting and reading that stuff on Google+. I’ll do the same. Alright? Everybody ready? Here we go.
One…
Two…
Three…
Hey! You didn’t go! What? Well, yeah, I didn’t either, but I was just making sure that the rest of you went first. I was was gonna stop posting as soon as everybody else was gone. Yeah, but it doesn’t work if everybody does that. No, but if it’s just me it doesn’t matter. Okay, fine. We’ll all go at the same time. For real this time. On three.
One…
Two…
This is just never going to work, is it? Facebook is too entrenched, and the gravitational force of its massive user base is too great to let any more than a small satellite group escape. I doubt Plus will go the way of Wave; some population will make it their thing (like the Brazilians did with Orkut). But I just don’t see a wholesale migration happening, and eventually most of us are going to get tired of reading and writing double posts.
On the other hand, maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. Based on first impressions, I think I’d be pretty happy if we all switched to Google+ from Facebook. I’m only three days in, I’ll acknowledge that most of my reasons are pretty superficial. Novelty for novelty’s sake scores G+ some points right of the bat. I’ve always liked Google’s clean and minimalist page styles. And while I don’t really think of Facebook as an evil empire, I still (perhaps naively) have a little more trust in Google’s corporate ethics.
But the real reason I’d like to see G+ become the new center of gravity is that it’s a chance to rebuild my relationship to social media from the ground up. That sounds awful I know, like I’m The Rock’s third cousin trying to “build my brand”, but gimme a sec. The way I use Facebook now – who I friend, what I post, how I post – is a result of dozens of decisions I made on the fly that turned into habits before I really had any idea what they meant. G+ offers an opportunity to revisit those decisions more intentionally. Of course I could, in theory, change my habits on Facebook, but as my prologue suggests, those kinds of changes are often easier to make in a social arena if everyone’s making them at the same time. In particular, I’d like to see people embrace the “Circles” idea for targeted sharing. That option is available on Facebook too, but it’s not part of the culture there. It seems to be part of the DNA for Google Plus. And I think it’s a mutation for the better.
Who knows how this is all going to shake out? Facebook has Big Mo’ on its side. Google gets to put a +1 button next to every search result you see. The real winner is likely to be the guy who designs the aggregator that puts them both on one page. I do hope that the competition pushes the state of the art for social media forward, and that the majority agree with me (a guy can hope) that forward is towards more deliberate, thoughtful use of the technology in service of (as long as I’m hoping) deliberate, thoughtful relationships. Or at least less with the effing Farmville.
